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Unfortunately, multicast basically doesn't work on the current internet, at least not for most users, because most networks don't properly forward it. The MBONE, a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 on deployment difficulties is largely still accurate, with the exception of its first sentence, "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years."

Multicast is a very tricky thing to actually implement when you're dealing with multiple networks managed by different people/companies. I'm not going to get into the details, but there are a lot of engineering problems and security risks with allowing multicast at the provider level. Generally speaking, it's only used within discreet networks.

Unfortunately, multicast basically doesn't work on the current internet, at least not for most users, because most networks don't properly forward it. The MBONE, a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 on deployment difficulties is largely still accurate, with the exception of its first sentence, "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years."

Get with the times man, Interwebz connected toasters...that is old news, like 20 years ago old even.

By 2001 toasters were already dishing out weather forecasts on bread, and in 2005 you could run Unix on one.

But alas, no IPv6 capable toasters yet :(

To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.

The original color of Band-Aids was white-person. Crayola originally had "flesh" as one of their crayon colors, but this was changed to "peach" as a result of the civil rights movement.

These seemingly innocuous household items--bandages, crayons--were already infused with cultural biases. No one sat down and said, "Ha ha! I'll get those rascally blacks and make their injuries stand out more prominently on their dark skin with these sticky, tan bandages!", but that's what ended up happening. These silly oversights (culturally insensitive problem areas) were caught and corrected (by establishing more inclusive and diverse solutions) in an effort to promote better business: why should only white people get skin-colored band-aids? There's money to be made by opening up new markets!

There's nothing insidious about pointing out biases that exist or have existed. Nobody is pointing fingers and screaming, "Racist!" We study our culture's problems, learn from our mistakes, and move on.

People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)

The way you take a dump is quite political. Squatting is how most cultures do their business, but for some reason the West looks at squatting as uncivilized or crude, despite numerous health benefits over the sitting position. This leads to a further question: why does the West seem to have a preoccupation with appearing civilized? What does that say about our culture?

While we're on waste elimination, I'm sure you could ask a feminist about what they think when a guy stands up to urinate. I'm also sure you could ask Sigmund Freud what he thinks when you ask him why a woman would want to pee standing up. It's really mind-boggling to see how many people have written about these seemingly pedestrian practices, but it's all out there.

While an individual may not know why they're doing what they're doing, they still learned it from somewhere (parents, friends, tribe, TV, Slashdot, etc.), so understanding these little daily routines can make for a fascinating cultural study.

"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.

Most of us are utterly clueless about how the world works and don't realize how much we take for granted. Just watch an old cartoon and count the number of political statements you didn't notice as a child.

For instance, Fred Flintstone is a white working-class caveman who lives in the suburbs and uses all sorts of dino-powered gadgets to power his "modern stone-age family." Of course, he gets into zany hijinks and sometimes makes a fool of himself, but all problems are resolved by the end and things return to the status quo--the happy, healthy two-parent household. In that respect, he is the ideal 1950s American living out the ideal American dream. That's a pretty bold political statement in a frikkin' cartoon.

These politics do have a real, practical impact, because millions of Americans grew up with Fred Flintstone's ideals floating around in the back of their collective minds. I hesitate

Then of course, there's that many people have broadband lines to their home where they can pull down more than they can push up. I can upload about 4-5KB a second and still be able to browse the web, send e-mail etc. without a problem. Meanwhile, I can download at about 90KB a second. So if all my p2p transfers on say Bittorrent after the first one were tit-for-tat, I could only download at 4-5KB a second. This situation is similar for most other broadband users. Anyhow, Bittorrent already includes technology where you tend to share more with people sharing with you. With the advent of Bittorrent I stopped using the ed2k network, but many of those clients have a similar concept. And Gnutella has this with partial file sharing as well, although people mostly use Gnutella for small files. But getting back to the currently important one, Bittorrent, as I said, the applications usually have this anyhow. If that's not enough, some trackers and Bittorrent websites do counts of which of their members are good and bad in an attempt to deal with people who still manage to leech.

One mistake Cringely makes is assuming if I'm downloading, say a video of Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz debating Israel, that someone else at my ISP will be wanting or sharing this same video. Sometimes I'm downloading files where only one person is sharing them and I download it all from them. If its several (often with people from Brazil, Australia, Germany etc.), still what are the odds one of the people sharing this file on this protocol will be from my ISP?

A lot of this could have been solved long ago with Mbone. But the ISPs didn't want it.

Anyhow, I myself was curious about if/when IPv6 would be rolled out. One of the talks was about how to deal with IPv4 space running out, and a lot of the talk revolved around such things as multiple web sites running on the same IP (which was very uncommon then) and other ways to use less address space. Some audience members gave other suggestions for conserving IP space such as ways to use Network Address Translation to limit public IP use. I would say the feeling in the hall was that this was not a problem, and that people had to go the route of IP sharing, and aside from the need for more IP sharing, everyone pretty much liked the situation as it was, which was in contrast to the prevailing attitude in the world outside the hall. One audience member rose his hand and said, "What about IPv6?" The response to this was the entire audience broke into laughter - it was the funniest thing they had heard that week. After that I began thinking about IPv6 more along the lines of projects such as MBONE (anyone remember the hooplah over that years ago?). Not that IPv6 will never be implemented, but this story that IPv6 was needed straightaway could have been written 8 years ago. I haven't seen much headway in it in the past 8 years, except for products promising they were IPv6 compatible, just in case. Not that IPv6 will never be rolled out on a large scale, but I'm not holding my breath.

At least 256KB of RAM to start with, and limited pre-emptive multitasking; or at least they would have started out with Multifinder from the get-go. Actually, the Palm Pilots were very close to the original Mac in specs (68K processor, similar amounts of RAM), and the OS looked in many ways like the Mac OS, though it was running on top of a realtime multithreaded OS (AMX), so you can look there for ideas.

A few tweaks and it would have been quite expandable and extensible. See here for a discussion of how the model can be set up to do fairly useful multitasking.

The filesystem would definitely have started out with HFS (the Hierarchical File System) instead of MFS (which didn't really have directories, though it kinda faked it).

But really, for a first try they got a whole lot right.

http://www.savetz.com/mbone/ch9.html
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/674/4.html

broadcast IP

i have a lot of macs at home. a LOT. but i don't have a mac classic. color classic, 512k, SE, SE/30... yes. but not a classic. or a 128... but that's another rant.

apparently the classic had an undocumented feature in the ROM that allowed it to boot without a floppy. if one held down Command + Option + X + O whilst turning on the computer, it would boot into a very limited system 6.0.3 shoehorned into the ROM.

considering how much room this took up in the precious ROM, and how bloody useful it would be to boot without spinning media, it's amazing it was hidden away.

http://www.savetz.com/ku/ku/byard_system_in_the_ma chine_the_january_1991.html for more.

New system driving away users? New system requires too much hardware? Where have I heard this before? It didn't kill them in '89 and I don't think it will 15 years later.

Almost as bad as Margaret Thatcher taxing BandAid

This seems like a good excuse to mention my new Web site: Kevin Savetz' Guide To Buying a Ridiculously Cheap PC delivers specs, reviews, and news about computers that cost less than $300. Nine manufacturers are listed there so far, although I haven't added the Lindows Webstations specs yet.

1. ???
2. ???
3. Profit!

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Just because we're used to something being some way doesn't mean it's supposed to only be that way. I'm mixed race black/white, but I grew up in an area where people almost never made a big thing about it. For me when band-aid advertized their invisible, ouchless bandages, I thought they were nuts. It certainly wasn't ouchless to take off, and if they thought that something pinkish was going to be even CLOSE to invisible on my skin they must have been freakin' BLIND . It wasn't until I was watching a comedy routing by a black man from Quebec (20 years later), that I remembered my thoughts about band-aids and realized that I was the one who didn't notice what the rest of the world was like -- and I was the one who was off-color.

But I still say that they lied about the 'ouchless'.

... and home machines can be servers.