Protocol war

There are two kinds of protocol wars: one is between competing protocols, and the other is between protocol implementations. I would like to offer a glimpse into the reasons and ways in which companies implementing the same protocol compete with each other. However, I will first need to make a small disclaimer: any example I give here is not meant to imply that any company involved has any intention of malice or foul play. In fact, I am sure that (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 31st, 2008  |  Filed under Interoperability
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Standardized Human Behaviour: Baby boom

I took a break after the last time discussing standardization of human behavior, but now I’m back with a new problem: if I call someone, and I hear the call waiting tone, how long should I hold? How long must I back off before I call again? Back-off time is especially problematic here, since humans are notoriously bad random number generators. Random back-off time is critical to prevent crowding of servers, but how do you prevent parents to a new (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 24th, 2008  |  Filed under Standardization
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Follow Standards – Receive Coupon! (details inside)

Joel Spolsky wrote a brilliant post 3 days ago about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 development team declaring that IE8 will enforce standard HTML, and sites that do not confirm to the standards will not be displayed properly. Joel did not wish to take sides in the war between idealists and pragmatists, but eventually concluded that since there are so many HTML pages already written in bad HTML, the pragmatists are likely to win. That means that any web site not (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 20th, 2008  |  Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
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Multi Thread Me

In the movie “Super Size Me“, Morgan Spurlock goes from healthy to sick in one month of McDonald’s products. I’m reminded of this movie when I hear talk about adapting protocol stacks to use 64 core systems - doing that in the wrong manner, which usually means multithreading them out of their minds. Why Multi-Core? Multi-core processors are very reasonable. It’s a simple way of getting more processor power without raising the processor clock speed (generating more heat and consuming (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 10th, 2008  |  Filed under SDKs
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Pass the dogfood

Eric Sink wrote a blog post differentiating between different approaches to software development, (linked, and summarized, by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror), mainly questioning how developers are using the own products they develop. The two interesting commercial categories are “ThemWare”, software that is not used by the developers themselves, and “UsWare”, software which is used internally, and thus is far superior. Jeff writes: Consuming the software you’re creating is colloquially known as dogfooding in programming circles. Unless you’re (un)lucky enough (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 7th, 2008  |  Filed under SDKs
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Standardized Human Behaviour

I called a friend of mine the other day, and he answered and immediately (accidentally?) disconnected. I thought of calling back, but then I thought maybe he it was in the middle of something, and just wanted the phone to stop ringing by opening and closing his clam-phone; or maybe he’s trying to reach me right now, and if I call him we’ll both get a busy tone. On the other hand, he may be expecting me to call him, (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 3rd, 2008  |  Filed under Standardization
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