> i worked on a project for years that used a format equivalent > to XML or ASN.1, but we thought simplier. > > naming the entities presented no efficiency problems for us. > i spent 6 months in several stints profiling that system > and for a 10k result set, the tcp overhead was greater than > the packing and unpacking overhead, but neither represented > 1% of the runtime of any end-to-end process that i looked at. > Thing is, the ITU-T could not put a simpler design into their recommendations: as Geoff correctly points out, that is not how PTTs operate, they have long before anyone else been the leaders in globalisation. The Internet has shaken those foundations, but we'll be paying a price for that before long, when ISP consolidate into a monopolistic mass. In case you want to know where I'm coming from, my belief is that the cooperative nature of the Internet will be lost to econmies of scale that will quickly suffer from diminishing returns and escalating costs. The role played by the small participant is already insignificant, soon it will become unwanted.
As an indicator, I use the metric that twenty years ago, without much financial backing, I could engineer adapters for the PC that were in demand and could be built by a small team at a reasonable price. Since the advent of PCI, the entry bar has been raised considerably. > with the exception of word processors, web browsers, and maybe gcc > i do not agree with your corollary to moore's law. 15 years ago > i was stuck with sun 160s and vaxen. 10 years ago i had a > ibm rs/6000 41t and a 66mhz pentium II. i'm still not up-to-date, > but by all my performance metrics, the 997mhz system i > use now is *way* faster. i've even got a better internet > connection via dialup than the sun/vax setup did in the late 80s. > Sure, but are you more productive? And are your personal opportunities any greater? Consider the equipment that NASA needed to put Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969. It ought to cost peanuts to reproduce those items using today's technology, instead, the cost of a space mission seems to be beyond the reach of any modern entrepreneur. ++L
