Increa Technology |Engineer |Aviator |Educator

I came across the Slashdot posting and was introduced to two people I had not known. The inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee, the person that mixed hypertext with the internet and came up with the World Wide Web.
Mr. Berners-Lee is more aloof. The page quoted above politely says, “Don’t bother me”. I do, however, like his hard stance on email he will or won’t accept. On the other hand, Mr. Nelson’s page is reminiscient of an angry diatribe. In an 8 October 2005 BBC interview, he appears as someone who envisions something greater, but can’t quite say what that is.
As Mr. Nelson’s page dribbles on through many screenfuls of text, I realized the issue is not above capabilities or features, or intellectual purity. It’s about matching the intellectual dynamic range of your audience or your user. The concepts of transliterature.org are too much. The BBC interviewer was begging for a connection, but she couldn’t live where she is and have the dynamic range to come to where he was talking about.
As I write a patent for my Boot Puck(TM) and try to describe Laser Cookies(TM) to someone not in the industry, I’m hyper sensitive that saying too much or saying too little are both threats.
Another example. Microsoft’s Word, answered a need at the time. People knew of letters. And words, paragraphs, even footers and headers. Word covered this space. Even styles, people could follow if they thought about it. But without moving the product to a higher abstract level, people started getting scared when all the newer bloated features appeared. The product now has to handle the individual letter and punctuation level, and at the same time handle URL links, linked objects, etc. It’s not that the scope is too wide. Like Scheeline’s “ability to zoom” on an issue, Word’s problem is that it tries to be both zoomed in (change that character to a bold font), and zoomed out (document management in a network infrastructure). The result is confusing chaos to the user.
Another reason I like a la carte Linux world. Projects tend to limit themselves in scope, and plug into each other using standards that lets me build the overall infrastructure. Or, I can find tools that do the overall architecture management and do not attempt to dabble in the details. (Ponder a C compiler syntax versus the source code managment of the Gentoo Linux distribution).
People are at many intellectual levels. Very few people (none?) can survive mentally at huge dynamic ranges, where they are creative and productive at the tightest and widest zoom, simultaneously. A framer becomes a contractor becomes a township inspector, yet very few work interchangeably across the range.

Memorandum regarding Tesoro

During a pipe-line shipment project, I developed real-time control capability in spite of large satellite TCP data latencies. These latencies are not trivial problems, witnessed by the fact that the same latencies tripped up federal military satellite communication during the Katrina disaster, as reported in the September 19, 2005 issue of Federal Computer Weekly:

Navy Adm. Timothy Keating, Northern Commander’s chief, said during a Pentagon press briefing Sept. 6 that the Defense Department was using Military Satellite Communications (Milsatcom) systems to back- haul signals from Gulf Coast cell phone towers cut off from their commercial, land- line connections.

But that was a good idea that never happened amid the confusion sur ounding Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. A Northcom spokesman said the command explored the idea with several cellular carriers but dropped it when NORTHCOM officials “identified software issues within commercial switching centers that could not tolerate the net work latency resulting from satellite delay.” Maybe a lesson learned in planning for the next disaster and there will be one is to figure out how to fix those software issues so Milsatcom could link cell towers and back-end switching systems.

These are precisely the same issues our team of 4 programmers ran into when designing software to run isolated from the world at diesel powered stations, communicating over a geo stationary satellite link. We characterized the problem, mitigated the limits, and delivered a DOT compliant oil pipeline control and reporting capability to the customer.