[consume-thenet] from this evenings NTK: (fwd)

[Danny O'Brien]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 07:37:36PM +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> 
>          Last week was the closing date for comments for the
>          government's "Independent Spectrum Review". Usually we leave
>          all this radio stuff to the hams (the geeks). But from a
>          Netty point of view, the review responses say a lot about
>          how folk are responding to the cheapo wireless net
>          connections built by 802.11b hackers like Consume.Net. The
>          3G companies don't look scared (not as scared as those
>          Bluetooth guys, anyway), but, boy, would they rather it all
>          went away. "The market and value of [our] licensed spectrum
>          is distorted", insists Hutchison, if those mini-ISPs with
>          their funny beards and Apple AirPorts are allowed to
>          compete. Fortunately for Hutchison, it's illegal for them to
>          compete. In a ruling that would drive RMS nuts, 802.11a
>          users aren't allowed to share their Net connection
>          wirelessly with anyone but their own. And the authorities,
>          embarassed about bankrupting most of the big telcos with
>          that 3G auction, look likely to keep to that rule - even
>          though most other countries are more liberal. The nice
>          government's preferred compromise seems to be: shuffle all
>          the WLAN crazies off the 2.4Mhz network to 5GHz where, they
>          say, ISPs will be allowed. That sounds good to the 3G folk,
>          because the 5Ghz 802.11a hardware isn't around yet, so they
>          can beat the hackers to the wireless broadband punch.  Also,
>          802.11a's range doesn't spread as far as 802.11b, so the ISP
>          idea's doomed anyway. Meanwhile, the Starbucks-with-wireless
>          Net access springing up over the US remain verboten in
>          Britain.  Guess the UK'll have to wait for our wireless
>          bandwidth until the nice kindly corp's are ready for us.
>          http://www.interesting-people.org/200108/0190.html
>          - not as bad as the tsk-tsking free-marketeers make it sound
>          http://www.spectrumreview.radio.gov.uk/
>                - although it'd help to have a Net guy on these panels
>          http://www.smag.radio.gov.uk/index.htm
>                                            - with the other smagheads
> 
> 

I spend all that time trying to boil down REST into the NTK rendering
vat, and you fork the 802.11a stuff?

         "Open Source projects have been able to gain a foothold ...
         because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple
         protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new
         protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
         said Microsoft's Halloween document, back in '98. It's
         understandable, then, that a lot of Free programmers are
         wary of Microsoft's spanking .NET protocol, SOAP. They're
         even a bit worried about SOAP's rebellious little brother
         XML-RPC. After all, the best thing for MS to the ornate SOAP
         replacing the public web, is an extra simple protocol like
         XML-RPC which would keep "most of the value in the services
         and implementation and NOT in the wire protocol" (Halloween
         again). But there *is* one sparky alternative that's not too
         Microsoft, not too complex, and already has a big enough
         backing to have a life of its own: HTTP. Roy Fielding and a
         few others are banging on about how HTTP's GET, POST and
         other commands are already perfect for RPC: and have been
         proved to be scaleable by the success of the Web. What HTTP
         (or the REST model as it's called this week) lacks, though,
         is some real apps that treat HTTP as an API, rather than
         just that funny browser talk. Maybe it's time (for Linux
         users at least) to practice with WEBDAVFS, a new mapping of
         WebDav, the biggest HTTP application that ain't about the
         pages.  WebDav's a full remote filing system implemented
         over HTTP.  Now with Webdavfs, Linux can mount a Website as
         a drive. And the (relatively) funny thing? Before all this
         SOAP business, MS implemented it in Windows WebFolders,
         FrontPage, and IIS before letting it rust. They commoditized
         it *themselves*.
         http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi
                                               - Work, REST, and fight
         http://sourceforge.net/projects/dav/
  - of course what REST needs is a manual way to PUT freeform HTML...
         http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13383
                                        - phew. okay, funny URLs next