Saflink Corp. (ESAF) Biometric Software Provider Message Board

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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Saflink Corp. (ESAF) Biometric Software Provider

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To: Jaffo who wrote (2487)	12/6/1997 9:16:00 PM
From: John Fairbanks	Read Replies (3) of 4676

Ok... let's talk VCRs for a moment. Back in the early days of VCRs there wasn't a standard tape format. Along came VHS, and I think Sony was the one who created Beta... there may have been others. As I understand it, Beta was by far the best format of the two, but as we all know that didn't make a lot of difference. I believe that Sony was keeping Beta as a proprietary standard where VHS wasn't... if this analogy doesn't work UNIX is a great one in the computer world. An API is a lot like a language. There are a lot of languages in the world and it would make life simpler if we could agree on a single language and call it good. Right -- try to solve that one... however one standard will always rise to the top. If you could publish a book right now in only one language what language would you choose? English of course, because it is used by the most people world wide. (Ok, maybe based on that arguement Chineese would be best but you get the gist.) What NRID has done is to design a language. That doesn't mean that anyone is going to speak it. It doesn't mean that NRID will benefit monetarily if people do... if you were charged $10/month to speak english and there were other languages you could speak for free, you'd move to another language eventually. The lesson of UNIX and Beta are there... if the spec is a for profit venture then somebody else will make one thats free. If you make it free and everyone uses it, you get to be known as the company who created it. So why do it? Because Microsoft for instance, could write something that knew how to speak the language and then everybody's stuff that could speak it would work together. If somebody wrote software for a facial geometry unit using the language, NRID could use that package with their stuff just as easily. An open standard needs to happen in this industry -- maybe in partnership with the DOD NRID can pull it off but keep in mind that it still needs to be accepted and most of the benefits are to the industry as a whole rather than to NRID. Another analgous thing to what NRID has done would be the TWAIN spec for scanners, the Microsoft standard for mice, or the SoundBlaster standard for sound cards. Is anyone going to buy a non-SoundBlaster compatible sound card? No. There is too much software out there that says it will work with SoundBlaster compatible sound cards. I hope all this rambling has helped! ;-) I'll be quiet now!

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