On Monday 29 April 2002 13:51, you wrote: > Thank you for all these good ideas. Would anyone happen to know of an > industry analyst study on the advantages of XSL FO ? > This is to lend some credibility to my recommendation.
Well, Gates and his minions are squealing like stuck pigs. Where there's smoke there's fire. Actually, that is the crux of the matter. IMHO, Open Source is yet another manifestation of Mecalfe's Law: The utility of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes on the network. All of those Open Source developers out there have become a more efficient team than Microsoft or anyone else can ever assemble. IBM, Sun and a few others seem to have realized this. Microsoft's proprietary approach can't win in this new world, any more than steam locomotives could win against diesel-electric (the laws of thermodynamics are a bit better-known than Metcalfe's law). My other example of Metcalfe's Law in action is Sept 11th. Compare the information flows of those events with the day of the JFK Assassination and the day of the Challenger explosion. Todd Beamer and the other passengers on Flight 97 had cell phone nodes to talk to family members who had televisions which revealed the hijacker's plans. The network gave them the information to make the decision to give their lives to save people in Washington DC. Think about that. They were able to make that decision in this age of hoaxes, spam, worms and viruses.
