Slashdot Mirror
Interview with Bruce Maggs
Mihai Budiu sent in this interview with Bruce Maggs, a computer scientist who used to work at Akamai, the company which caches content for a great many popular websites. An interesting look at the combination of solving research problems and starting up a new company.
Apparantly the improvements span more than just compressing stuff. HTTP 1.1 has provision for maintaining a TCP connection for the duration of the transfer of page and page elements instead of creating a new TCP connection for each page element.
Scroll down about halfway for the tables. A quick glance shows that compression works best for low bandwidth connections (naturally) and that the other improvements also made a difference.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
Gentle readers of Slashdot, do not let yourselves be deceived by the ravings of these pathological liars in LCS, the rotting remains of a once-great department, the dregs left behind when the real talent left to form Akamai. Read the full story and decide for yourself.
I know it's been said before, but it's worth saying again -- The way to increase the market share of alternate OSes is not to persuade users to install and use Linux. The way is to persuade users to use open File Formats and Protocols/APIs. Diversification of the OS market place will follow as a natural consequence.
In the example above, when Akamai needed to deliver the open file formats and protocols of the Internet, they had several choices. They decided that Linux best suited thier needs. But when they needed to stream Windows Media, Win2000 was their only realistic choice.
I may be a pessimist... but I fear that WMF is a problem that Open Source cannot overcome. Even if we achieved the tremendous feat of catching up with a patent free CODEC and streaming protocol that is comparable to ASF/WMF, we still would not have success. Big Media thinks OSS is evil -- and MS will pander to Big Media's obsession with total IP control.
I hate to be gloomy, but I think that ASF/WMF is the first viable long-term Internet wedge for MS. I think .NET will be the second, and more are sure to follow.
The future just does'nt look bright for alternate OSes from my POV... But then thats just my opinion... I could be wrong!
Jonathan Weesner
Level D Flight Simulators using Linux from NLX Corporation. That's my idea of FUN!
As it says in the interview, Bruce Maggs is a professor at Carnegie Mellon. I was in a discrete math course that he taught about three years ago, and one of my classmates produced this comic-book-style look at what "Maggs-neto" does with his spare time (namely, plot world domination with the aid of a mind-controlled pack of Spice Girls). Bruce was a good sport about the whole thing -- images and references to the comic's story began appearing in his lecture notes & slides! Sadly, it was never finished...
Akamai shares a block with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Recently, there was a despicable, unprovoked snowball attack on innocent MIT graduate students by Akamai customer care thugs. (Well, okay, there's a little more to the story... :-) But anyway, differences will be settled in a mathematical/theoretical computer science shootout on the evening of April 3. Should be fun.
This is completely bass-ackwards. The content that becomes more popular becomes harder to get, even though many, many more copies are made available. If said server sends out these 1000 copies of a file, why can't some of the clients share those 1000 copies?
Potential solutions to this problem can be derrived from systems that have already found a way around it, such as Gnutella and any MCAST implementation.
Gnutella, although its network model has other problems, allieviates the previously mentioned problem by forcing (or suggesting that) all clients cache and share for redistribution any content they download, thus increasing the number of available copies. MCAST, and other streaming technologies, handle the problem by allowing the server to send one copy of the content that can be shared by many clients... this is why we don't have to wait for TV/Radio shows to download.
The problem with universally applying an MCAST-type solution to the internet is that the internet is not like TV and radio: the internet is supposed to be content-on-demand. If you turn on your TV five minutes before a show, you can't start watching it early; simlarily, if you tune in five minutes late you can't start back at the beginning (TVIO users aside). I think many /. readers would go into shock if they could only read slashdot on the hour, every hour. (Sidenote: one potential workaround for really busy sites is to broadcast the data every x number of seconds continuously, that way the data restarts often enough. The problem with this is that users with slower connections won't be able to keep up, and users with faster connections will be limited to whatever the server's streaming at. Also, the server will keep broadcasting regardless of what sort of traffic it gets, clogging up its bandwith).
Gnutella is a much better solution. I'm not going to try to work out the details, but stick with me for the big picture. When a user hits a webpage, even with the current model, all of the content is cached on the local hard drive, or sometimes somewhere in between the user and the server. What if everyone's browser was capable of serving requests for that cached data? This would not be efficient for sites with only a little traffic, but for /.ted sites or CNN and the like, it would work very well. The problem is finding another client that has the data you want cached, this might be resolveable using either peering groups (like routers and gnutella), or using a central server to track it all (like napster). This however gives bad users a chance to replace CNN's banner with their own ads etc, but this could perhaps be worked around with some sort of trust metric system?
Well, there's my two cents, sorry if it's incoherent.
The picture is from This page. Which describes their network tech. here is the orginal picture.
Enjoy
Trust the source!
That picture of the monitoring system is taken directly from the movie "War Games".
The article is an obvious attempt to obscure their real purpose; to establish a world wide tic-tac-toe solving distributed supercomputer.