Dan Kaminsky

Ben Scott mailvortex at gmail.com
Wed Aug 5 23:17:02 UTC 2009


On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:06 PM, Jorge Amodio<jmamodio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Talking about the subject with a friend during the past few days, most of
> the conversation ended being around the User Interface.

  A popular idiom is "where the rubber meets the road".  It comes from
cars, of course.  The contact patch between tire and surface.  If
those 100 square inches or so don't provide what's needed, nobody
cares how elegant the rest of the car is.

  In information systems, the UI is where the rubber meets the road.

> When grandma wants to do on-line banking she does not care about
> a cryptic URL, or if it has a .bank gTLD or if by the magic of IDN she
> is able to write it in polish, she just wants to get to her bank account ...

  Exactly.

  I think it would be nice if we had some nicely designed, elegant,
centralized protocol to do all this, but I suspect that won't happen.
Instead I think we'll have a bunch of ad hoc solutions, and then ad
hoc solutions that attempt to meta the ad hoc soltions.  Someone's
already suggested this in another thread.

  So someone will log into GMyLinkedBook or whatever, which then makes
use of Facebook to find a friend, which then talks to AIM to contact
them on their iPhone via some other damn thing.  Yes, it'll be a mess.
 So's most of the rest of the world.

  Keeps us IT guys in work, I guess.

-- Ben




More information about the NANOG mailing list