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| Subject: | [gislist] RE: GISList: Cartography and Data Viewer |
| Date: |
08/27/2003 09:15:01 AM |
| From: |
Pat Waggaman |
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At 08:55 PM 8/26/2003, you wrote:
>The twaddle below is Dimitri's attempt to take out of context my response to
>Pat Waggaman's comment that I lived in some "next reality" of which I am
>some type of religious officiate. Of course all these anectdotes are
>irrelevant to Dimitri's central theme of "hardware uber alles," because they
>are meant to address things that were once thought of as "next reality" to
>borrow the phrase from Pat.
>
>Like it or not web services will become a permanent part of the IT
>landscape, because at some point it makes more sense to purchase it as a
>service than to do it yourself regardless of the quality of the tools you
>have on hand. Be assured that what we see today are toys, but then
>spaceflight started out with playing with kites and gliders.
Dimitri is a Russian cynic and mathemetician, I am a seaman working in the
third (well maybe, second) world: neither of us have a whole lot of
"faith" in technology on first sight - applied maths cowboys & sailors have
to make things "work", and work perfectly. The common note you hear is
that, we also have wonderful ideas about how to move the world forward -
radically and rapidly - but that there is a concentration on making things
actually function in THIS world, and that, because of our backgrounds, we
are accustomed to system failure and intrinsically design around it - not
for elegance of design - for functioning in the real world. When we hit a
"hole in one", we get to that design elegance which is both highly
functional and simple - a la the architect's dictum "form follows function.
I like much your "kites and gliders" analogy, and spent my time happily
with Estes model rockets as a munchkin. There are those who have fun and
dream about how the future could be - long live Asimov & the spirit of
Heinlen - there are also those of us who bring that future into reality
today and explore its practical applications. Long term vs. longer term:
technological advance implementation vs. dreaming. What is the best
analysis we can make today of what will be the optimum application in the
future, and for how long is that design horizon valid?
And, if we happen to be cynical & expert observers observers of the
particular subject, we will decry irresponsible use of government R & D
funds attempting to realize fundamentally conflicting goals. In this case
of "universal data access protocols" we have a very close analogy to
<GOTTA_HAVE_A_BRILLIANT_CLOSING_LINE> the Esperanto experience of the late
19th century finding government backing in the 21st Century
</GOTTA_HAVE_A_BRILLIANT_CLOSING_LINE>.
Cheers,
Pat
>Cheers,
>
>sonny
>
>[/response]
>
> > been ordained online, I am not a priest. Here are some personal
> > anectdotal
> > experiences that "reality checks" would have put a wet blanket on.
> >
> > 1. 30 years ago an overseas phone call from relatives was an
> > expensive event
> > that we waited up for and enjoyed vicariously through my parents.
> > Today, I
> > make daily conference calls to Europe for 6 cents a minute over a
> > Voice over
> > IP router, which is much cheaper than calling friends that live 90 miles
> > away using a landline.
> >
>
>Yes, that's wonderful, but irrelevant. Modern software runs at gigahertz
>clock rates over memory busses that exchange billions of bytes per second.
>No one in their right minds would suggest running a processor to RAM
>connection through a dial up modem, nor does doing it at Voice over IP
>speeds help any since it is still hundreds of thousands of times slower.
>
> > 2. 15 years ago I would back up my imagery and analysis to 9-track because
> > there wasn't enough hard disk space to go around in the university lab. I
> > also used to get yelled at because I would transfer gigs of data
> > across the
> > university network. Today, I keep gigs and gigs of imagery on
> > spinning disk
> > and I don't even do image analysis any more. I keep them around because
> > they are pretty pictures. I transfer gigs of data across the internet all
> > the time today.
> >
>
>Yes, but no person in their right minds would run, say, PhotoShop as a web
>services application where an OGC Image Server would feed individual pixels
>to the image within PhotoShop based on Image Queries compliant with some OGC
>image server standard. Yet, what OGC proponents suggest is just as stupid,
>since the average number of inflection points within objects in a typical
>GIS editing session is about the same as the number of pixels in an average
>PhotoShop editing session.
>
>One doesn
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