23 Nov 1998
Copyright,
1998, Max K. Goff, all rights reserved
It's always great to travel, but it's so nice to come home. I'm sure Frank Sinatra said it better, but the sentiment is pretty universal. We all like coming home. Some of us even hate to travel. Some of us can't. I'm lucky. I can and do and enjoy the process. And the best part of that process invariably is coming home.
It can be argued that life is a coming home process. Spiritually, most traditions hold that we are separated from the essence, and yet we are connected. And the end of life is indeed a coming home in a much larger sense. Home is instinctual.
In my last entry I said, "I'm not sure it matters where you begin - from the perspective of the desktop, or the perspective of the server. I think what matters much more is the philosophy behind the architecture." But upon reflection, I think it does matter. It matters very much. Actually, it's more precise to say that philosophy is architecture when it comes to software.
Microsoft started on the desktop. Unconnected. The personal computer. The operating system was small and wide open, encouraging application writers to embrace the system resources at the lowest levels, thus ensuring optimal performance. While this approach did give rise to a wealth of useful and entertaining applications, it did so at the price of security. There are always trade-offs in software. Do you optimize for performance? Do you build in security? In the case of Microsoft, the choice was performance, thus winning consumers based on the performance of video games and the market defining office products and their user interfaces. But this same architecture gave rise to these programs we call computer viruses.
UNIX, on the other hand, started as a multi-user operating system. As such, rudimentary security had to be designed in. The evolution of a fundamentally more secure system is inevitable considering the genesis of this approach when compared with Microsoft.
And then came the internet. Microsoft continues on the path that brought it market domination -- it's not hardball, it's missiles -- and continues to promote an architecture that is fundamentally flawed in this new connected world.
So it does matter. It does matter where you begin. The beginning is probably the most important part of the thing. Small differences in the beginning can have huge differences in the end. It's like the tenet from Complexity Theory -- the butterfly's wings in Beijing giving rise to the thunderstorm in New York.
But today's a beautiful day in New York. And I'm home. So I guess they found that butterfly and they killed it. :)
Today I wrote "Religion or Politics." This morning I had a callback for a television pilot....and it was the technology evangelist as much as the actor that was of interest to them. Today is indeed a sunny day.
