The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. For protocols, the intentions are usually: to “make it simple” to “integrate it into the existing system” or to “allow it to work independently” Where the “hells” are, respectively: under-defined standards inconsistencies ambiguities It’s very hard to write a standard that avoids all these. In fact, if I took the time, I could prove that from the theorem “any
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | July 30th, 2008 | Filed under Development, Standardization
Jeff Atwood for Coding Horror already mentioned the better looks of Guitar Hero 3, and concluded that presentation matters. Reading it, I concluded that he has not played the game for more than half an hour, since after half an hour you hardly see the presentation, except for when it annoys you. My favorite game at the time was the first Guitar Hero, since it was easier (I actually felt abused by GH3). Then came Rock Band. This time, a
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | June 2nd, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
I have previously mentioned Joel Spolsky’s brilliant post about standards. If you’ve not read it yet, it is really worth your while. In that post he quotes Jon Postel‘s robustness principle and Marshall Rose’s critique: Counter-intuitively, Postel’s robustness principle (”be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept”) often leads to deployment problems. Why? When a new implementation is initially fielded, it is likely that it will encounter only a subset of existing implementations. If those implementations follow
(read more...)
By Ran Arad | April 7th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
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
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
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
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
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
