Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Access control and notifications are similar

Access control: if you know the name, the path to an object, are you allowed to access it.

Notification: the object, a cop or a link, is pushed to people via some communication system, saying "Look at this now".

These are dual.

I want much, almost all, of what I write to be public. Like this blog.  It seldom hurts, and once in a while somebody notices, finds it in search, and replies and helps me out.

I.e. basically I am thinking out loud.  Talking to myself in public.  People walk to the other side of the Internet when they see me coming.

But I don't want to push most of what I want to do to people.  Once in a while I will - once in a while I will share something via Google+, or email it, or copy it to my wiki, or copy it to USEnet newsgroups like comp.arch.

But, these are dual.  In an ideal world almost the same concepts should control access control and notifications.

Certain posts I may want to make publicly accessible, but not push to my Google+ stream. Or push to a narrow list of friends.

Confusingly, when I post to Blogger a Google+ window pops up and asks me if I want to Share via Google+.   But this notion of "share" is notification.   It is not to be confused with access control.  AFAIK Blogger has no access control.

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It's like preschool teachers, or the leaders of the psychobabble training sessions that Intel made us take: "Do you have anything you want to share with the group?"

Maybe... I'm willing to passively share lots of my thoughts.  Give you access if you ask.  But I am reluctant to push all of my thoughts to others, to actively share.

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