Google Outage Dims OS X Tiger Debut

Before we get too excited, though, it's important to look at Dashboard's capabilities through the lens of the network's imperfections. When Sun trumpets its long use of the mantra, "The Network is the Computer," I bite back the temptation to retort that I'd never pay for a computer that behaves as badly as a network: one where any given memory address, for example, might or might not respond to a read or write operation at any given time, or where devices might come and go without warning.

By Peter Coffee

“You couldn't choreograph a more ironic pas de deux than the debut of Apple's OS X 10.4, with its Web-intensive Dashboard of data-tracking "widgets," followed just nine days later by a multihour outage of several Google services.

The first event illustrated, not just with a developer-conference demo but in an actual shipping product, the difference that results when always-on connections are designed in rather than added on to an end-user environment.

The second event was a rude reminder that "always-on connection" borders on an oxymoron, or at any rate tempts the Fates to rub our noses in technology's fallibility.…

What makes Dashboard much more interesting than I expected is the combination of Web services on the back end, at least for the widgets that I find actually useful, and Web standards-based authoring on the front end. With a user interface defined by HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, and dynamic behavior defined in JavaScript, a widget is relatively straightforward to develop--and robust in operation thanks to the fact that it runs on a real Unixoid operating system. Very cool.

Before we get too excited, though, it's important to look at Dashboard's capabilities through the lens of the network's imperfections. When Sun trumpets its long use of the mantra, "The Network is the Computer," I bite back the temptation to retort that I'd never pay for a computer that behaves as badly as a network: one where any given memory address, for example, might or might not respond to a read or write operation at any given time, or where devices might come and go without warning.

My concerns about network inconsistency and volatility are substantial even in benign environments: Things get much worse when someone actually is out to get you with, for example, a man-in-the middle attack that obtains valuable information just from knowing what questions you're asking.…”

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1813991,00.asp