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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, October 9, 2002
01:16 - First Impressions
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=makali&itemid=89607&usescheme=lynx

(top) link
Matt Robinson has been lusting after the iPod for some time now, and he's just got one. He's not using it with a Mac, but he recognizes a good piece of engineering when he sees it, and he "gets it".

I just wish more people would realize the lengths to which Apple is going in order to give people superlative products, which should be an easier concession than ever to make in the present day-- now that you don't even have to be a Mac user to benefit from Apple showing the world how technology oughtta be done.

Time for one of those tirades I'd been saving up.

One of the least satisfying things about the recent insanity at work is that I'm having to characterize the performance of one our newest features with a piece of software called Citrix ICA. Citrix is a company whose products-- and, indeed, whose entire business plan-- is founded upon compensating for a ridiculous design flaw in Windows. Citrix is a huge company, with worldwide developer conferences all its own, with an entire product line and consultancy services and everything. And it's all based on a concept that wouldn't even be relevant if a certain design decision hadn't been made back in the early 90s in Redmond.

See, the point of Citrix ICA is to run Windows programs remotely. It's terminal-server software; it lets a client Windows machine open up a window to a server, and then open up an application on the server machine and run it there-- piping the graphics and text back through to a sophisticated object renderer on the client side-- instead of downloading and installing a local copy of the application to run locally and keep track of in the license database in IT.

Fairly simple concept, right? After all, in the Windows world, you can't just network over to wherever an application lives, and run it, like you can in UNIX or on an Mac network. As anyone who has managed a Windows network-- or anyone who has run Windows software-- knows, installing Windows applications involves running big installer scripts which put dozens (or hundreds) of files all the hell over the system and embroidering the Registry throughout with inextricable little keys that interfere with one another and make it necessary to "nuke and pave" one's machine every few months, as even Microsoft recommends to this very day. You can't just find a Windows application on a network drive and double-click on it; it would try to find all the Registry entries on the local machine instead of the server where it's installed, and upon finding them absent, would choke and die; no multi-user capability is really implicit in it. Hence Citrix, which allows you to offload all your client's processing and application installation duties onto the server. It's a solution that demands the "thin-client" approach, regardless of how practical such a thing is. The company thoroughly endorses ideas like hundreds of employees in a company all simultaneously running Word completely on the server side, accessing their individual little pipes to the grunting and straining server simultaneously through a miniscule branch-office WAN; it causes both the server to groan under more CPU/RAM/disk load than any computer can reasonably be expected to shoulder, and the network link supporting it to be stressed continuously, resulting in slow network response and slow server execution. Wow, what an ideal solution!

Now, if these applications were Mac applications-- and if the computers were Macs-- running network apps would be a somewhat different monkey. You'd mount whatever network share had the app you wanted; you'd double-click on its icon, and the app would download (front-loading all its network usage, meaning you pay for it all at once in load time, instead of continuously in interactive response time) and run locally, taking advantage of the client machine's distributed processing capability. Citrix talks about "distributed computing", but their concept is the very antithesis of distributed computing; they're about centralized computing, for the purpose of bookkeeping convenience and minimization of license fees and Registry corruption, and distributed access. All because of the Registry. If it weren't for the Registry, none of this would be necessary. Macs don't have a Registry; applications are discrete objects which can run as encapsulated instances regardless of environment, regardless of installed libraries. Everything is self-contained. User preferences are created at run-time on the client computer, wherever that may be. It's modular and portable. And it would make Citrix completely unnecessary if it had become the prevailing method of handling networked application access, like it still is in the university installations where it remains in wide use (with "key servers" and other supporting structures keeping things clean). It would mean a different world.

It's a multi-billion-dollar industry these days, compensating for Microsoft's design crimes. Just like companies whose business plans are founded on helping fight spam or defend against viruses. These are entire business sectors which simply don't have to exist, or which wouldn't exist in an ideal world. It's all meta-technology, innovations to help us cope with our existing anti-innovations (or with those innovations which exist to actively harm us). I talk about "design elegance" like it's some kind of nebulous and admirable but ultimately superfluous luxury that-- like the UN-- only stands in the way of good work getting done. But I hold that elegance has real and concrete benefits. Elegant design isn't an impediment to work; it means less work has to be done in the first place. I'm sick of seeing technology that exists only to cover for other technology's incompetence. It's horribly inefficient, even if it does create jobs and stock options. Inefficiency has a real cost. It's something that I instinctively want to stamp out like a roach infestation. And it's terribly discouraging to see it embraced, just because the alternative seems too idealistic to be any good.

There is a better way out there. We don't have to have to kill that slug in our shower every morning. (Sorry, I just love that.) It doesn't have to be this banal and depressing, working with technology. Once upon a time it was all about discovery and empowerment and enjoyment, and I hate the thought that those ideals are dead now, crushed under the weight of daily drudgery. I can't stand that the Internet and the computers it runs on have gone from being the stuff of science fiction to the stuff of dreary cynical irritation in the span of twenty years. I think that's awful.

But I'm encouraged to think that some people, in the face of all this, do still "get it". The dream isn't dead yet.

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© Brian Tiemann