[sdiy] OT: Screw oBScurity

[Richard Wentk]

At 19:38 04/10/2005, Metrophage wrote:

>The shorter answer is that homogeniety in design paints us into
>corners. Biology and other self-organizing systems are robust because
>of the built-in redundancy, and an increasing amount of learned
>experience and general capabilities. A trend of continuous homogeny and
>streamlining is easy to get drawn into, but very dangerous. This tends
>to lobotomize cultures and wreck their gene-pools, I extrapolate.

Um, yeah, but economically speaking, building a lot of widgets that are 
identical is *much* cheaper than building a lot of widgets that are 
customisable. To make customisable widgets you either have to include 
either every possible variation, or a customisation system. Both add 
significantly to cost and complexity. And we're nowhere close to the stage 
yet where widgets can be made intelligent enough to customise themselves 
efficiently.

The other point is that business is marketing, not engineering led. Time 
and time again good engineering has lost out to systems that are 
technically better but marketed less aggressively.

In an ideal world this wouldn't be the case. But if you want to have that 
kind of ideal world, you can only get it by reinventing it economically and 
politically. And that's a slightly bigger challenge than making some minor 
changes to a Linux kernel or building a hardware modular.

Richard