Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Tuesday June 15, 2004

With network speed

Okay, so we all, at one point in time or another, get frustrated by not being able to get at something you need right away. Every once in a while, for me anyway, a nice counterexample comes along to show how quick stuff moves on the the net.

My friend and colleague, John Clingan, had an interesting exchange with Jon Udell who was somehow involved in the "Unix is Dead" article in Byte around 1990. Anyway, these two haven't ever spoken or emailed that I'm aware of, but they've been talking back and forth to the world through their blogs. This all happened in a matter of a few days.

Then, if one counterexample isn't enough, someone posted a link to my blog on the UUASC mailing list. I intentionally hadn't posted it there myself to see how long it'd take. It was about one week.

No matter how annoying it is when you can't get at something over the network, or it is taking longer than you expect, we all have to step back and admit things move much faster now than they used to. John in the past wouldn't have even had access to some way of publishing his thoughts. Now, because the software and the network, they found each other and published their differing perspectives in a couple days. I didn't expect that kind of speed at all.

I very much like Jon's comment about Analysts being part time Practitioners and vice versa...