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30 Years of Ethernet
Babylon Rocker writes "An interview with one of the inventors of Ethernet." Metcalfe talks about the history of Ethernet as well as what he's been up to for the last couple years. (Not surprisingly, he's now a VC ;)
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Wait... if Ethernet has been around 30 years, that makes TCP/IP PRETTY DAMN OLD!!!!! Anyone up for re-inventing the wheel??? Maybe someone can make a protocol in which practically any piece of information can be traded, with a special way to commit a special pipeline to different medias (such as movie/music downloads getting a compressed, special set of ports used just for that purpose..).
Next thing you know, the teleco's will be bringing up charges against us for inventing a better internet... when will this end!?!
OR OR Or......... Maybe I'm delusional...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
An interesting but old article on wired about Metcalfe here: The Legend of Bob Metcalfe
On the other hand, look at what he said about Windows:
Snip out the parts about Linux, and you get This was unkind to Windows, but not totally untrue. I like ``VAX/VMS for Windows''.Second, Metcalfe defines "broadband" to mean "high bitrate" rather than "uses a broad frequency band". Nitpickers like me have been quibbling over this change in definitions, but if someone like Metcalfe has gone over, it's time to let it drop!
Okay, not originally said about ethernet... "How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness??"
/sig
If I was a telephone company I would be looking at buying only VOIP equipment and run it on private LANs with plenty of bandwidth. No SONET at all.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Bob Metcalfe once predicted that the internet would 'gigalapse' due to IP namespace exhaustion and sheer load. It didn't happen.
Bob has made a career out of making an ass of himself with idiotic predictions coupled with a humongous ego. He fancied himself quite clever when he called the free software/open source movement "the open sores movement." Har har! You may have a career with ZDNET yet, Bob.
Hey Bob we thank you for ethernet, but you're still a jerk.
He makes this rather ignorant comment:
Open source contributors who use the GPL never "give their intellectual property away". Copyrights are very strongly defended; the recent FSF vs OpenTV story is sufficient proof of this. Trademarks are very strongly defended: Linus and RedHat have both defended trademarks. Patents are a sticky mess but even then the GPL doesn't demand that you give up patents; only that you don't use them to restrict or impede licensing. The open source movement is not so stupid as to "give away" code. Strong ownership of intellectual property is at the very core of open source.
The subtle but important distinction is that open source developers want to share their intellectual property. The philosophy is "you may use my IP if I can use yours". This is not giving anything away; it's building a community of cooperation. There is an exchange of value between two parties even though the exchange is not monetary.
I suppose it's possible to argue that BSD zealots are giving their intellectual property away. Yet another reason to avoid the BSD license.
An interesting quote from your linked to story:
Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.
Name a single networking infrastructure used more commonly than the 30-year-old ethernet!
Why does this seem ironic to me?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Kind of like the Jobs-Wozniak team. One gets the glory while the other languishes in realitive obscurity. Were's the Wozniak reality-distortion field?