From: Dean Tribble <tribble@e-dean.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:58:47 -0800
Subject: Re: [e-lang] Naming Capability Systems

At 05:19 AM 12/9/2002, Tyler Close wrote:

>On Sunday 08 December 2002 16:57, Dean Tribble wrote:
> > The upshot is that the discussion on Friday was much more in line with and
> > about the points that Tyler raises.  I hope this helped make that clear
> > (Tyler?).

First my question:  did my expanded message make more sense? 

>It seems like a few times now, we have not had good communication
>because you guys have a meeting and I never get to hear about it.

That seems plausible.   Generally by the time I'm done on meetings, I've 
spent all the time I can on it, so I leave it to MarkM to bring it out to 
the list.  I occasionally free enough time to engage myself, but then 
eventually get swallowed again.

>Last time around, WOMP fell off the table and I never got
>information from the meeting.

I will give a few high-order bits, but that's just to start a 
conversation.  WOMP was reviewed/discussed.   MarkM has a list a specific 
issues.  Everyone would like to start from WOMP to make an object protocol 
for interoperability.  More, we want to form an industry consortium to 
pursue said standard, as well as a few others that are related towards 
neabling capabilities as a mechanism between corporations.  Note that 
(independent of the key issues referred to above), WOMP by itself is not 
sufficient for that--entirely appropriately.  A lot of discussions since 
then (modulo occasional digressions into E details to keep them moving) are 
about what else is needed (for use of these new protocols in data 
centers.  We haven't written to the list about these things yet both 
because we are all busy, and we want to talk to you about them first (and 
invite you to join the consortium that you at least partly inspired :-).  I 
have notes and hope to write stuff up soon, but don't have anything yet.

>Since you are now using remote meeting software for these
>meetings, would you be willing to let me participate?

We are not using any such things, or we would have invited you :-)  Marcs 
happens to be in town for several weeks.   We do have a speaker phone and 
could set up a meeting at a time when you can join us, during which we can 
recap.  Normally we meet Friday's from 10-12, but this week will be 
abnormal, I think.  I suspect that is not a good time for you, but let me 
know plausible hours, and we will arrange something.

I look forward to talking with you. 

PS: a niggling technical point that I keep wanting to get around to 
mentioning to you is about the cost of persistence:  taking a disk write on  
every message interaction is not acceptable for many applications 
(performance-wise), and is also not sufficiently robust.  When a machine 
dies horribly and you need to restore from tape backup, you really do lose 
some transactions that were "committed".  There are different grades to 
durability :-)  I realize this is all out of context, but at least it lays 
the seed for a future discussion :-)

Ciao