[REBOL] Email is dead....But
From: SunandaDH:aol at: 30-Dec-2004 6:06
Carl Sassenrath writes on his blog:
> I've been hearing some ramblings that the REBOL mailing list (run
> by a program called Ecartis) has been acting up again. My reply
> should be, "So what else is new? Email is dead." But, no, I'll bite
> my tongue and not say that, since I know many of you still use
> email (and, I do care about that).
http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0075
Email may be dead -- or a least coughing up blood -- I'm not going to argue
that email doesn't have serious problems and is ripe for replacing.
But the "x-internet" alternatives, though not dead, have hardly reached the
stage where they can walk -- let alone chew gum at the same time.
This is a not a snipe at IOS or Altme. They are both products with enormous
potential once they mature. Right now, they seem more trouble than they are
worth unless you (like me) happen to be in a group of enthusiastic adopters.
Some of the issues:
ACCESS
Email is ubiquitous. I can send or receive email from almost any machine
connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world. In effect, emails are delivered
to me personally where ever I am. It's like my cell phone.
X-Internet products (so far) deliver content to a specific application
installed on a specific computer.
Those specific computers are limited to a narrow range of platforms -- the
x-internet products do not run even on the full range of platforms that REBOL
itself runs on.
So, if email is like a cell phone, today's x-internet products are like fax
machines that can talk only to the same brand of fax machine.
SECURITY
Security doesn't only mean stopping the bad guys getting to the wrong data.
Equally important is ensuring the good guys have uninterrupted access to the
right data
REBOL.net has crashed a couple of times. I've no gripes with that. Machines
do.
But look at the recovery process:
With Altme worlds, we've had to go from REBOL to REBOL2 to REBOL3.
That's like having to get a whole new email address every time your ISP has
a problem.
I can understand that happening once. With immature products, things like
that happen. But for the issues not to be fixed after the first time suggests an
abandoned product rather than an actively developed one.
(If Altme had a way of resyncing a restored master world against a trusted
user's copy, that would have solved the resyncing of all public groups. A
similar mechanism could have salvaged most of the private traffic. It would also
create a sort of distributed backup mechanism -- a neat demo of what the
x-internet can do).
I attempted to follow the procedure for resyncing my copy of the REBOL.irg
IOS server (it holds all the development environment for the Library). In the
end, I simply republished everything I had on my local copy -- seemed to be the
only way to ensure that my copy and IOS were in sync. With big apologies to
the other Library Team members who will now have to suffer a complete
resync...Or recover any items they'd updated and I've overwritten.
On a larger IOS server, that could mean weeks of chaos.
-- To summarise:
Cell phones are dead because we've invented the fax machine. Any time there
is a problem at the phone company, many faxes you have already received may be
destroyed. Simply change your fax number to continue with the service
Sunanda
