[just_the_tip]

Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462

[blasdel]

USB's simplistic interrupt-driven host-client nature makes it unbelievably awful for mass storage or streaming data.

Those same qualities make it terrific for cheap human input devices.

[chime]

Thanks for linking to the video. I'm 10mins in and loving it.

[lamby]

We need more guys like that. "We don't have refresh buttons in the user interface, because that would just be horrible."

[stcredzero]

Natural Gas traders love interfaces like that. My former boss did a release once, where you could do all of these incredibly impressive, perfectly orthogonal mass-changes to disparate object types. But what the users were really crazy about was the "Refresh" button he put in as a request.

[lamby]

Am I understanding the story correctly - did the refresh button actually do anything?

[stcredzero]

It did what you expected. But here's the kicker -- the system already had realtime refresh over JMS!