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What The Internet Isn't
looseBits writes "Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, have put together a 10-part guide for how to stop mistaking the Internet for something it isn't. It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics of the 'world of ends' we call the Internet."
For sale Dell Computer Pentium II with the Internet
I was shocked... First thing I thought was where the hell can I fit the entire Internet on my machine.
MoFscker
"It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics"
Yes, we already know - porn...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/153223 3
This describes what they want the Internet to be, not what it is or what it will be. The characteristics of the Internet they describe will change based on who uses it, as it molds itself to suit the people to use it as a TOOL.
Anyone can make the Internet a better place to live, work and raise up kids. It takes a real blockhead with a will of iron to make it worse.
So Bill Gates is a blockhead with a will of iron now?
Indeed, and this is exactly what FreeNet is designed to do:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps the fear of every government everywhere, FreeNet allows for secure and anonymous communication.
AOL is not the internet.
Neither is that "IE" icon on your windows desktop.
The internet is also not just for pornography anymore.
OK, everyone hold hands. Yes, that means you, 63.47.108.33. Connect to 23.126.156.3. Good. Now, let's all sing/IM/VOIP call/FTP/HTTP:
We are the world
We are the Internet
We are the ones who make a better place
We are the bloggers.
(Take it away, Bob Metcalfe!)
It's a choice we're making,
We're changing our own lives...
http://www.internetisshit.org/
Thanks for listening.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
Moe: "Well, if you're so sure what it ain't, why don't you tell us what it am."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You clearly didn't read the article.
He goes on to explain what he means by those statements, and nothing in your comment has any relevance to what he wrote.
That's pretty much what the article says. Did you read it?
"The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states." - The Illuminatus! Trilogy
So these two screwed up pretty much 80% of their predictions in the Cluetrain Manifesto, and still expect people to take them serious.
I read the article in question about a year ago, and it was ripe smelling of "high on themselves" then.
Course I get tired of people telling me what the Internet is all about, yet they haven't been using it as long as I have.
> It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive
> symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP
> packet from". --Seth Breidbart
I think I got that from the nanog list a few years ago.
As far as your first two comments: If one defines the internet as "a protocal for moving bits from one computer to another" (as the authors of this article do), then the internet is simple and stupid: it's simple, because it's just a protocal; and it's stupid, because it doesn't know or care what kind of bits it's moving. Of course, in practice the internet means more than just "a protocal for moving bits from one computer to another." So your real disagreement with this article is their definition of the internet.
I find it ironic that the "Choose a style" menu at the top-right doesn't work in Safari, but works fine in Mac IE, despite the fact that:
"We don't have to worry that its basic functions are only going to work with Microsoft's, Apple's or AOL's "platform" -- because it sits beneath all of them, outside their proprietary control." (8.a.iii)
a device to prevent four Palestinians from committing suicide by talking them dowjn realtime
a device to conduct career counseling of disadvantaged global youth in europe, africa and the middle east
a device to teach myself html, php and css
a device to advance my career through spontaneous, informal networking
in fact, i basically live my business life and more and more of my personal life on the internet. and this is not a bad thing, in fact it has maximized my power and leveraged globalization for myself and millions of other members of the brown horde.
That's an opinion. Considering more and more people are logging on, and I just read an article about older people turning to the Internet, consider the following... Just because to the author, the Internet, and using it is easy, does not mean it is not complicated for a new user
They don't mean the protocols or the software, or anything like what you're suggesting. They are simply saying that the internet is something that carries information from one point to another. That's pretty simple.
No people are stupid. Personally (this is my opinion) I believe the next generation is going to be hellishly smarter than the one I grew up (growing up) with (in). Where else can you learn so many things from without leaving your home. Encyclopedia? They're limited.
Well, if by "smart" you mean "tech savvy" I might agree with you. People are still as dumb as always when you get down to it. But, again, you're missing the point, because the internet has data available (much of it false or incomplete, I might add), that doesn't refute their claim that the internet is stupid. A library is stupid, yet it is full of information.
There is no true 'value' per se as one cannot grasp anything physical. But where else can you find mega bargains, mega information...
They mean, the internet is just a mechanism for transferring information. Trying to layer something else on top of it, like "pay per view" or "content protection", runs counter to the basic principle of transferring information.
Finding "mega bargains" is in fact a transfer of information, which is what the internet is all about. Charging you $1.50 for that information? No, that's not what the internet is about.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
"Adding value to the Internet lowers its value
Sounds screwy, but it's true. If you optimize a network for one type of application, you de-optimize it for others. For example, if you let the network give priority to voice or video data on the grounds that they need to arrive faster, you are telling other applications that they will have to wait. And as soon as you do that, you have turned the Net from something simple for everybody into something complicated for just one purpose. It isn't the Internet anymore."
The way I see this, prioritizing packets also ensures that a minority of users can't abuse the network ressources the everybody else want to use.
Right in my home network I had to prioritze RTP packets (VoIP) so that other people in the house couldn't screw up my phone conversations when saturating my uplink or downlink. The same can be true on a national backbone, especially in failure conditions where you will get links that saturate.
We can't stop the Internet from evolving either, it has probably turned out to be very different than what it's creators had envisioned...
Homer: Ahh, so the internet is on computers now...
- A
This and things like the today's 'worst security flaw ever' from MS, are all topics bubbling up prior to a security conference next week in SF, where pundits are surely to roast BG, one of the speakers, to a char.
The internet isn't better off because of slackard MS. They were late to the party (just like today's patch took 200 days), and they use it for their gain, with lack of concern, as usual, for the 'customer'.
Remember, a 'headline' here is what you find yourself in when you have to take a leak at a basketball game. Just because a topic is raised, doesn't mean squat that it has value to anyone.
One day soon, the internet will become illegal to use or at least without consent of your government. Mark my words.
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
Their point seems to be that the Internet, so far as it exists, is a shared idea of how to transport things from point A to point B. And it has a Protocol that you may have heard of somewhere. Remember this - they're talking about things on a IP level.
Now then:
The idea behind the internet isn't complicated, which is what they are trying to say. See, the idea is that you hook end points together. Gee, doesn't sound too complicated to me. I thought they wrote about this well, if a bit simplisticly from a technical perspective.
The seem to mean that the internet (IP) is stupid because it doesn't know about what is going on above it. That's just the point that leads to the others. It doesn't know what it is transporting. It just moves it from point A to point B. So while the internet is enabling many smart people (this generation and next), it in itself doesn't know more than "this thingy goes from here to there".
Here's where things get kind of complicated, I'll admit. The values talked about are two different kinds of values. I won't go through this, but advise people to RTFA. In summary, this point says that anything that makes the IP less stupid (so that it knows more about what it is transferring) results in some sort of restriction or impairment to transporting other things, which lowers the overall value.
So, The Real Nutshell: The internet (protocol) doesn't know what it is transporting, but just transports it. This is a good thing, but many people fail to grasp that this is the reality of the situation, which leads to many headaches. Especially for those of us who do grasp the idea, and happen to like it.
remember the commercial "you have reached the end of the Internet....please go back...........now"
"it's a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of instant messaging systems on the Net.
But if you draw the game theory table for this yo quickly realize that blocking communication between them is the dominant strategy. Especially for the market leader.
...controlled by microsoft... thats for sure
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
AOL is not the internet.
But... but.. their commercials flat out say, "AOL is the Internet"!!!!
They wouldn't lie to me, would they??
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
He's completely wrong about advertising on the internet. Once advertisers treat it as a medium similar to television, that is exactly what it will become. The process has already started, and a majority of sites have flagrant advertising. The recent idea of television commercials displayed fullscreen between pages is yet another example.
Junkbuster is a joke, like spam filters, most advertisements easily slip by. Want to subscribe to a site? How about a couple dozen. The small $5 - $15 fees can add up to well over $800 per month for an average internet user.
I didn't bother to read the rest of the article, but this guy is clearly living in a fantasy world. A world with cave trolls, elves, magic goblins, and internet users with a clue.
The only alternative at this point is to start a new internet, completely seperate from the existing network. Maybe the spammers and advertisers could be kept at bay for another decade or so.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I worked for the computing center when I was in college. When the school was first being connected to the internet, and many people were having their desktops networked for the first time, one of the really common questions from non-technical types was "Where is the Internet?"
A careful summary of world wide networking (this was before web browsers) would be met with a blank stare and "Yes, but where is it?"
We finally decided to tell them it was at a secret location in a closet in Idaho. This seemed to make people feel better.
I never really understood why the most confusing thing was.... "Where is it?"
These people had already learned how to use their email programs and 3270 emulator (virtual mainframe terminal) with no problem.
Thinking back on this.... it makes more sense that AOL had so much success. If AOL was installed you could tell the user that the internet in that little friendly icon right there on the desktop.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages -- their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read -- will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web's architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you."
I'm no fan of popups or banner-ads, but if that pays for content
that I otherwise would not be seeing, then so be it. I think
commercials have made for a rather successful business model
for television, which is as pervasive as ever, even after more
than 50 years.
I also think the slew of dot-bombs from the past few years
proves that you can't give away something for free forever.
I would much rather put up with ads than have to open an
account with every website that provides quality content.
(subjective, I know)
I use the internet very very frequently to find information that
I need. Outside of my monthly charge for internet access, this
information is all free. It's free to me for one reason alone:
Internet Advertising.
The only thing people seem to be giving away for free on the
internet is their opinions, which I'm up to my neck in!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
The Freenet Project - index
The Freenet Project - faq
Yup. It is a repost. It's been several months though. That may be within the rules.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
isn't a place for Geeks to feel superior
isn't a place to find pornography
isn't a place to talk sexually to a 50 year old man sitting half naked in his studio appartment.
These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.
The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.
But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.
My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.
the internet isn't fun now that goatse's gone...
hate titty pee colon slash slash
It's kind of interesting that the "The Real Nutshell" didn't even mention military.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Oh, they have the internet on computers now?
a dnow.ht ml
Also look at this:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~neteagle/oops/downlo
I sent that link to a friend and she thought something was actually downloading. Just perfect.
From the article:
The federal agency responsible for allocating spectrum might notice that the value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet.
I hope to god he isn't refering to the electro-magnetic spectrum.
"Yeah, we used to brodcast on 109.5 FM, but then viacom put in a transmitter with twice the power of our station."
Please, god, no. No more Cliff Stolls-ish people telling us how cool stuff is. No more libertarians checking the stock market every three minutes. Not another jack-ass with a Plan!! Please
What is this, 1997?
Just shut up. The internet is a screwdriver.
Turn shit.
...if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.
:-)
sorry don't now about others but i have another end right here on this very chair
"The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to coexist and work together. It's an inter-network. Literally. What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol -- the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together."
I was told in school internet meant INTERnational NETwork.
can someone clarify?
Another thing you guys have to realize is, that the internet is also a destroyer of many domestic jobs.
It destroys domestic jobs because it makes communication with foreigners easy. Think of how many tech support jobs and programming jobs are moving offshore, partially because the internet has made it efficient to do so.
eTrade SUCKS
This is an interesting post?
The authors are relatively well-known, and even if you didn't know them, Google and 2 clicks will show you directly to their biograpies.
Personally, I thought most of the points were fairly obvious, but the article'd be very thought-provoking for my friends who aren't as used to thinking about "the Internet" as some sort of entity.
I do take issue with that particular writeup, although it is true in many senses.
Today, many so-called internet users have their access mediated by firewalls and NAT. This reduces the set of internet services available to them.
(I'd even say, as a slight exaggeration, that their ISPs had engaged in false advertising by calling it "Internet Access")
By the original definition of the internet, anyone with access (control of one host) could send packets to any address:port combination, and open any port to inbound connections.
This means that everyone with internet access should be able to run an HTTP, FTP, or UT server. But many people are prevented by their ISP's routing policies.
Firewalls and NATs supposedly "add value" to the internet by making it safer for some users. But it's not made a lot safer (worms get through even today), and it has "lowered value", because creating new applications is more difficult. For example, today there is a movement towards SOAP; XML-RPC. Unfortunately, one of the motivations to promote it is to allow arbitrary, application-specific traffic to travel over port 80. To work around firewalls which only permit HTTP, we're starting to see a legitimization of tunneling commands over HTTP.
(I'm not saying that was the original goal of SOAP- but sneaking around firewalls is one reason that some developers are eager to try it)
So there's an example of why "adding value to the Internet" is generally bad.
However, there are cases where it may be good. We all know that IPv6 will be a postive (someday). Multicast extensions to the internet were developed well after it was first created, and are generally accepted as a good thing, although their deployment so far is well short of universal. Multicasting is a superset of existing internet functionality (assigning a single packet to be destined to multiple recipients).
Multicasting may turn out to have downsides, depending on how it's implemented (and I haven't followed development closely enough to be sure what the direction is). If it creates an unfair environment, where large corporations (CBS, MTV, RIAA) can create multicast streams, but individual users cannot, then it will cement inequality and make internet use move closer to resembling traditional television viewing. I feel justified in hoping this won't happen, however.
And QoS (quality of service) is a debatable issue, not a flat-out bad one like the article suggests. IP, the existing internet protocol (not to be confused with Intellectual Property), makes no guarantee that packets will arrive quickly or in order. It doesn't state that packets will travel at the same speed as each other. It doesn't even state that a packet which is sent will ever arrive, only that the network make a "best effort" at getting it through someday.
Since IP makes no guarantees of transmission speed, adding an optional mechanism to request QoS efforts won't break the existing protocol definitions. Yes, it may disturb some people to consider that internet packets, which used to be fair and unbiased, may someday have preference given to them based on the sender's bank account- but look at the alternative:
I'm an 18-year old kid and 13-year computer nerd. While I have had access to the internet for only 8 of those years, I slowly become increasingly disillusioned with my inital view of the internet now.
Granted I was young, but when I first dialed with my 14.4, I was enamored by the sensible and meaningful content that dominated the internet. It was intelligent. As the internet has trickled down to the masses, we are now plagued by commercialism, ignorance and stupid people, spam, congestion, and far too much subscription-based content. The internet, IMHO, is now another outlet for the media and people who take advantage of the anonymity. Granted there are still hundreds of sites such as this and others that still offer that of value, but they are easily overwhelmed by the other garbage that's out there now. I used to come home from school every day and dial up. Now, with a few exceptions, I sit down and use the internet only when I have to, because it's just not worth it.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
Oh come on now. The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle. For one thing, people are using the internet to find information about products and services. Feeding the right information to them is very worthwhile and will be as important in the future as standard marketting. Already music labels (large and small) are employing digital street teams to seed positive feedback about their movies over the net. And it's not always as obnoxious and obvious as you might think...I was on the street team for the last Queens of the Stone Age album and think I drummed up quite a bit of support for the record on forums and such I was already a part of.
Then there's the other business uses of the internet...we use it to telesupport our software. Install PCAnywhere along with the software, give people a five minute introduction on how to start the host when we need them to, and viola! We no longer have to drive to client sites to perform support, and we can have multiple levels of support working simultaneously at the office. Then there's the company groupware server, the Citrix server which allows our remote staff to connect from home, and the massive online knowledge bases we can use to help troubleshoot problems.
Oh, and our provider makes PLENTY of money off of us using the internet for these purposes. So do the companies that made the software we use. In fact, there is so much money being made off these relatively mundane uses of the internet that I bet the "content" side can be made basically free...so long as nobody expects to be paid to generate it.
Even then, there are plenty of folks who will generate content for "free," or through pledges. Shit, I'm one of them. Shit, I've even been known to give away bandwidth to worthy causes.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I find it hard to believe you even attempted to read the article when you complain about no links to the authors, yet the sidebar contains both links to the authors and mailto:s pointing to each of them.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Holy cow, there are rules here? For the love of God, tell me where to find them!
http://milkshake.dexy.org
I still have loser friends that still think the Internet is one BIG porn movie.Their sole purpose of logging on is to get porn.I bet there are a whole lot of these guys out there.
Lord of the Binges.
I remember reading one of the Internet for Dummies a long long time ago. Anyway, the last point under "What the Internet Isn't" was
"The Internet is not a breakfast cereal. Yet."
The internet isn't a lot of things, so I purpose that we improve it.
Let's make a website where people can gather together, and quote (or misquote) various famous television shows. Such as The Simpsons, or South Park.
We can also allow a certain sense of humor, and we'll offer news along with the humor. Everything will center around a penguin that has more power than the richest person on the planet.
What? Slashdot.org, huh? Well, I for one welcome our new slashdot overlords.
Learn something new.
The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.
Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.
In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.
I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.
Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.
Thinking outside my Head
The process has not only started, but is in full swing. What percentage of major sites have you been to lately that haven't used either pop-ups, flash, moving pictures, etc. to catch your eye. Good advertising banners and methods exist, but are having trouble competing.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome.
One symptom of which is surely underlining things which aren't links...
Look out!
What's the difference between international and interstate. One is between nations and the other is between states. The confusion here probably started because people think the internet and world wide web are the same thing.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Uh...perhaps you guys haven't realized that this same article was on Slashdot about a year ago?
2 23 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/153
What was the editor thinking...
http://www.palmzone.net
Sounds like some damn rant. The bloody FCC never did nothing right. Their cahooting diffusion with ICANN and the registrars, and phone companies . . . Then the audio/video hogs woke up and attacked . . . Soon a bunch of outta-loops was doing File->Save As->Web site. Heck I got some shovels to sell any prospector foolish enough to philosophize about protocol awareness.
It's really all about the breaks. The break between content provider and audience. The wireless and wired networks. When the right people or products coalesce - will it be a monopoly? Open-Source wireless networks deployedtoday are the only way to ensure bandwidth for open-minded transmissions later. As TimeWarner if the offer Movies, VoIP and Broadband in uncompetitive markets . . . Who can stop them? Congress? Ha! Al Gore they ain't and that fool backed Howard Dean!
I did not get much from the article at all - and think it was an esoteric sailing trip. But I too wrote a rant, so there was some stimulus. Like the style of Kurt Vonnegut my satire aims to ape: [Context] x [Subject] x [Amplitude] x [Frequency] x [Time]
Stuff that matters.
World of Ends Public Draft
Posted by Hemos on Saturday March 08, 2003@09:39PM
from the and-i-feel-fine dept.
Doc Searls sent me the link over to the newest work that he and fellow Cluetrain person David Weinberger haveput together. It's called "World of Ends" although I like the subtitle "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else" better - but that's just me. In any case, some interesting reading, particular if you like/d The Cluetrain Manifesto. Update: 03/08 14:42 GMT by CN: Yeah, this is a dupe of yesterday's story. Everyone point at Hemos and laugh.
World of Ends
Posted by michael on Saturday March 08, 2003 @01:41AM
from the it-starts-with-an-earthquake,-birds-and-snakes dept.
epeus writes "At World of Ends, Doc Searls and David Weinberger explain the End-to-End nature of the internet in terms so clear even your manager could understand them. 'The Internet isn't complicated. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement. The Internet is stupid. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.' and so forth."
Maybe the date on the linked article "Last update: 4.28.03" might have been a clue that this wasn't hot news.
No.
It pretty much reads that anything any company tries to do is stupid, and evil.
A perfectly reasonable assumption.
Internet capacity is unbounded. When usuage increases, there is insentive (economic and otherwise) to buy larger pipes. The more people use the Internet, the bigger it gets. It actually gets more useful since those bigger pipes generally improve the performance of all applications.
RF spectrum is finite. The more people use it, the more congested it gets and the less useful it becomes. No one can buy more capacity. At best, they can apply more sophisticated technology to make better use of what they have.
The Internet, of course, is more than just a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs.
- Time Magazine, 3 July 1995, In Technology/Internet
A-Fucking-Men!
Now we just have to work on getting rid of politicians and the Nation-State.
A blog about stuff.
We get our dupes with 11 months lag now.... Great... I knew I had this impression of Deja Vu.
Ha, well... it's still a great article. Might as well read it again...
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
...of the Internet
I'd liked his points especially the three virtues one. I think that internet is really important because its been the only mass technology that has allowed for such seamless participation on all fronts. Its allows for mutually-empowering users.
But what I don't think is correct is in article is the statement that Internet is free from censorship. It quotes John Gilmore, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." True, it's free from censorship for us, in the developing world, because everday people have access. They are the dominate users and we are actively making sure that it remains free.
However, if you look at a place like China, things differ. Western companies and the Chinese government are doing everything in the power to stop anything unwanted from appearing on the Internet. Basically they are building the Internet to be controlled and frankly, I think it is working.
I still believe the net can be a great tool that can beyond censorship. But I don't think it is that way by default.
fenn
"What the fuck is the internet?"
I was talking to a lady once who told me that "the owner of the internet is in town". Turns out she meant Stephen Case, CEO? of AOL. It blew my mind that anyone could think that one guy owns the entire internet.
The web is not:
In your perfect world it isn't, but it is in this one. They musta missed that banner at the top of this page. Nope, no advertising there, no sir.
...Until they get their asses sued off by the some malcontent weenie for not controlling the content. Let's file this one under "wishful thinking".
...Economics disagree with you AGAIN. Sure, it's not a bad thing for you as an end user, but then you're not the one who's absorbing the cost to develope and maintain that "free" instant messenger service are you? Nor are you the one that has to worry about where those eyeballs go when they aren't viewing the advertisements that keep that service free.
Etc, etc... They have a point here and there, but Doc Searls and David Weinberger are living in the that hippie fantasy world where the net (and information) is free, baby, free! Maybe it shouldn't be some of what they argue, but the sad fact is it's nearly everything other people are mistaking it for.
Gotta love those flower childern...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
For a strict definition of 'internet' you are correct. However, more common usage ignores the hardware and protocols and deals with what those are used for. For most people the internet _is_ Google, websites, P2P and the like.
For that definition of 'internet' a lot more of those statements in the article hold true.
The article is not pitched at the technically literate or technically literal.
I call straw man.
20. Manifesto writers need to realize their readers are often laughing. At them.
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
I was introduced to the 'net in a university, back before Netscape and popup ads. I sat around in a lab of computer geeks, we all procrastinated together and helped each other learn about how to be good netizens.
Now the vast majority of people are introduced to the Internet they see AOL, MSN or whatever corporation has paid for placement on their start screen. They barely understand email and they can only navigate a web browser by the links laid out for them. They don't understand that the 'net can be a medium of social empowerment.
Its frightening.
Right on the money about open spectrum.
Which is more valuable to you - the citizen ? The spectrum GIVEN to corporate broadcasters, or the spectrum given to the ISM bands and therefore (with some regulation) to you ?
If the FCC really wants to do something right for a change it will open up even more spectrum for use by us mere mortals.
802.11b, microFM, Ham, a competitive cellular system, and more...
Wouldn't it be great if you could hack your own RF device using whatever modulation you wanted ? What kind of cool uses would we see ? Imagine if someone clever came up with something to replace designed-by-committee bluetooth, or 802.11b for that matter.
A lot of it can be done in the ISM bands, but more is better, especially since it is MY spectrum, not the government's.
And there is still the burden of FCC approval. That really needs to be made less onerous.
Absolute statements are never true
That's what popped into my head when I was reading the list - well, skimmed near the end, it started to feel like preaching and I lost my patience.
Surprise, surprise, that paper is what they reference for "the internet is stupid."
But I think that TCP/IP, the protocol the internet is built on, is a great counter example to end-to-end arguments. TCP/IP provides the abstraction of a virtual stream of bytes. It does this by ensuring packet integrity not at the application level (the "ends"), but along the way, inside the ends. This is in contrast to the FTP example used in the paper, which says that you'll need to do data integrity checking at the application level, so doing it along the way is redundant.
Intelligent people aren't as influenced by advertising.
-I am an elective eunuch.
I'd accept your argument, except that the manifesto specifically describes the internet as networking at one point, then switches to "Tha Intarweb" at others. He knows the difference, or at least, he SHOULD. You can't clarify the issue by muddling it, as Searls does.
You, sir, are completely missing the point. The internet runs on and connects the smaller networks. Its value is based on the ease users can move bits back and forth. Its value is not based on how ph4+ of a p|p3 you have, or even how much you aren't paying for it. Information, as they say, wants to be free, and will eventually be free, because the people who fiddle with the backbones are the same ones that want to give the information a leg up on the businesses and the governments.
I have all the answers. You just ask the wrong questions.
Whaddya know, they had the interweb on computers back in March last year too!
2 23 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/153
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Routers and firewalls are part of the internet, aren't they? Otherwise the comparison makes no sense. Routers can prioritize interactive traffic over ftp. Firewalls enforce one kind of permissions.
No, the internet is not synonymous with IP. If it were, then two machines connected by a crossover cable and communicating via TCP/IP would be on the internet, even though they are completely isolated from the outside world. The internet is essentially an assemblage of routers and links.
So, some traffic has to wait. How does that lower the value of the Internet? Traffic lights make some automotive traffic wait. Does that lower the value of the road system? No, it increases the value if the correct design decisions are made.
What does that mean? Let's say we go from a router with no traffic shaping to one that prioritizes VOIP packets over HTTP. Before: Sending VOIP packets is simple (but they might show up late); sending HTTP packets is simple. After: Sending VOIP packets is simple (and they show up on time); sending HTTP packets is simple. We haven't made the Net more complex from a host perspective.
It's not looking very commoditized right now. If you're lucky, you have the choice of a local telco for DSL and a local cable company. And of course, dialup if you want. So the authors have got it backwards - what's on the internet is generally a commodity, but access to the internet is a tightly controlled and profitable bottleneck.
We're not all connected equally. Some links have higher capacity than others. And distance does matter. Overseas connections have higher latency.
AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo use their proprietary messaging protocols and server centralization as strategic pinch points. That isn't stupid, however much we may dislike it. If one of the three could gain an advantage by opening up, wouldn't it do so?
By calling these companies "stupid", the authors confuse the nebulous benefit of IM achieving its potential with the real financial benefits these companies seek.
Bart: I know a web site that shows monkeys doing it.
Lisa: Bart, the internet is more than a global pornography network it's...
Homer: (already in the car, honking the horn) Come on, Lisa - monkeys!
'Q' is for Dr. Tran
Not only technically will it likely muck things up, but in the real world, some big gorilla of a firm will find a way to take advantage for them selves, at the expense of others.
But, as I once told my ex-crush, Never Say Never baby.
As I picked up from MIT's Tech Review Planet Lab. Seems to me like a good idea, but not sure. Particularly after all the time's I've read Lessig pound the end-to-end point home. Here's a snippet from the Intel press release on Planet Lab. what do you think?
Sometimes you just have to say screw it, w
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
...quite some time. I would like to point out parts 6,7,9 which all contain elements that should be directed squarely at Verisign and their renewed push to reinstate sitefinder.
Part 6: "There's good business in providing commodities, but every attempt to add value to the Internet itself must be resisted. To be specific: Those who provide Internet connectivity inevitably will want to provide content and services also because the connectivity itself will be too low-priced"
Part 7: "Because the Internet is an agreement, it doesn't belong to any one person or group. Not the incumbent companies that provide the backbone. Not the ISPs that provide our connections. Not the hosting companies that rent us servers. Not the industry associations that believe their existence is threatened by what the rest of us do on the Net. Not any government, no matter how sincerely it believes that it's just trying to keep its people secure and complacent."
Part 9: "Nobody owns it: Businesses are defined by what they own, as governments are defined by what they control." "Anybody can improve it: Business and government cherish authorized roles. It's the job of only certain people to do certain things, to make the right changes."
Amen.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Internet: noun. A worldwide network of computers connected together to lose money.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Excellent artical. This explains why the internet is so successful, while WAP flopped.
The phone companies really killed WAP. Firstly, they made it too expensive - 30c to view just one WAP site (at least that's what it is here in Spain).
Then, they restricted access to only their own internal WAP sites and a select few external pay-per-view sites. The artical says the internet is so successfull becuase it's free and unrestricted and not controlled by anyone.
The progression of comments is a reflection of Slathdot and (in some sense) the internet itself: highly moderate (and immedeate) discussion when the article was posted showed the comments of the first in line: haughty four-eyed geeks laughing at the clowns in the back of the line/end of the thread, who happen to be posting the more reflective and summary elements of those who post in the middle.
I guess we can't say that the internet is just a time-elapsed picture of a line getting longer (the article doesn't, anwyay).
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org
It's like TV sitcoms. After three or four years they have enough episodes in the bag to sell into syndication. Meanwhile the cast (editors) are getting stale and at the same time demanding more and more money; so it's a good time to call it a day and go to reruns.
You've missed the point of the "stupidity" of the net. If you want to stop porn of some kind, you bust the people uploading it; you don't try to filter every packet passing through the Internet, (or have a nanny box mandated on every TV -- remember the V-chip?) which is clearly futile and open to massive abuse.
Spam is not a problem of the internet, it is a problem of an application which uses the internet. Even draconian changes to how we all do email to deal with spam could be made without affecting the internet per-se. Eg, all email could be signed by keys given out personally by Bill Gates, the internet would not even notice, it's all just bits.
(BTW, if configuring spam filters is a full time job, you are using the wrong kind of spam filter.)
Someone has to make money out of offering you a service, or they won't offer it at all.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
At another level, I just did a run to recycle stuff. That service is provided by a not-for-profit organisation. The individuals doing the work are payed, but the organisation is not making money. In fact, from what I know of the econmomics of recycling, I presume they lose money hand over fist and get `subsidised' out of my taxes. Effectively the tax payers of Edinburgh provide that service for themselves and the non-taxpayers because they (or at least enough of them) believe it makes their lives better, not to make money.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
sidebar, boxes, headlines... all the same as ever. Tryed checking your settings?
BTW: It would be *really* helpful to have a place to post love-it/hate-it/make-it-better stuff. Or maybe a weekly "about slashdot -- from the examining-your-navel dept." headline? How about that, Taco?
PS: Gaaa! Kursor-Keys broken in Firebird -- again! This bug has ben around for soooooo long! so exuse any typos, this is just anoying.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
try getting an account... or log in, if you have one;)
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
Porn "of some kind" was just an example. There are plenty of other things -- such as viruses, or spam, or buffer overflow exploits -- where we _do_ use packet filtering right here and now.
You don't even have to take my word for why that's a good idea. See the billion posts right her on Slashdot that say "MS Windows is inferior because, unlike MacOS, it doesn't activate the firewall by default." Or "MS Internet Explorer is inferior because, unlike Mozilla and Opera, it doesn't block certain kinds of JavaScript functions." (The pop-ups.) Or the billion posts about bayesian spam filters.
Basically not only Joe Average, but even the Slashdot crowd, actually _wants_ some form of filtering. The slashdot crowd may also want some _control_ over the filter, but they _are_ using several filters nevertheless. Spam filters, virus scanners, popup blockers, firewalls, you name it. We already _want_ those packets filtered.
Basically the "it just allows bits to go from X to Y" theory is a straw man. Yes, it just allows bits to flow from X, but Y may not want those bits at all. Enter the filters, stage right.
And I'm going to go further and say: why can't the ISP do that for me?
No, seriously. Why must 600 _million_ people have to go through configuring their own firewall, and virus scanner, and spam filter, and popup blocker, and spyware detector, etc? Why? Why must their machines crawl under the burden of all that, and force them into even earlier upgrades?
For Joe Average all that is _not_ fun.
Heck, even for _me_ it isn't. If the ISPs implemented those filters at their end, _and_ gave me control over them, I'm all for it. As long as my multiplayer FPS can tell the ISP to open port ABCD when I want to host a server, but a script kiddie can't open port XYZ from the other side of the wall to exploit some buffer overflow... what's the disadvantage?
It serves the same function as a local firewall, but without the inconvenience. So why not?
So there goes the "adding value just lowers its value" stupidity too. It's an example where adding value, surprisingly enough, really _adds_ value for hundreds of millions of people who have better things to do with their time.
And so on. Basically I'll stick to what I've said. The whole whine is a smoke, mirrors and straw men exercise in missing the real point. It hides behind irrelevant details like "but it's just a protocol", and then dismisses the real issues based on that.
Well, gee. I used to think one needed a politician for that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No offense, but here you use just the kind of smoke and mirrors show that I despised in the article. He uses different meaning for the same word, and somehow draws a conclusion which doesn't fit any of those meanings.
E.g., when he says the Internet isn't for capturing eyeballs for ads, I don't think he means the TCP/IP stack. Noone yet sent ads as pure UDP packets, with no application to wait for them. When you're talking ads, you're typically talking browsers or IM clients or such. Applications.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
When he talks about censorship or about copying copyrighted bits, I don't think he means the TCP/IP protocol either. He means very speciffic applications there.
So here's an idea: if you want to make a point, don't resort to falacies and semantic tricks. Changing the meaning of a word in the middle of the "proof" is a well known fallacy. And he does just that: changes his meaning of "Internet" from one sentence to the other, to mean anything from the TCP/IP protocol, to applications running on top of it, to content providers, to everything else.
That's politics, not logic. And it's lame.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
Yes, but the NNTP server or the message board were provided by someone else. The poster of that advice doesn't pay for the bandwidth, but the forum's owner or the NNTP server owner _does_.
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
A lot of forums are supported by advertising. Or _are_ a form of advertising: helping gain some goodwill for the company hosting them, and hopefully also get some attention to the products it's selling. (E.g., when I go to Paradox's forum to talk about Hearts of Iron, I might also notice that "hey, they're also working on something called Crusader Kings. Let's read what it's about [... some 15 minutes of reading later ...] Cool! I think I'll buy it!")
Again, it seems to me like you're _not_ getting that much for free. It's easy to say "the internet isn't for advertising, now go away!" But if advertising and commercial interests went away, good luck in getting someone to pay for those servers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No, there is a fundamental and important distinction. I think you are making one of the big mistakes which should have been in the article (which I agree is poor BTW). How often have you seen articles in the mainstream (and even, shamefully, the specialist) press written as if `internet' and `web' are interchangable?
There is an issue about people asserting that the internet, not applications, needs to be modified to address various social issues. Eg putting in authentication and identification down in the fundamental levels to prevent people from doing whatever the ranter thinks is going to cause the end of civilisation as we know it. Or technalogically preventing people at the edges from providing services, in case they provide a service someone dissaproves of. (a simple-minded example of the latter is port blocking by ISPs)
That is the contrast with the phone network the article sensibly makes before wandering off into `I have a right to steal your work'. The phone network is contructed in such a way that the operator of the network makes the decisions. You can try and set up a movie review by phone service, but the phone company will only let you have N simultaneous calls down your connection, so they have ultimate control. You can't decide `I think I'll double the number of calls I can take in parallel by reducing the audio quality'.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
Yes, but then I was addressing a different point, the economic one, not the internet related one....
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
That one service is provided as a means to getting money from the user does not imply that all services are provided for that reason. I wasn't talking about the infrastructure used to provide the answers, I was talking about the service provided by the person who actually posts the answer. Again you are confusing infrastructure with a service using the infrastructure. Are you a journalist? :-)
Another example, if you get depressed at the anouncement of yet another huge Windows security hole, and decide to call the Samaritans, the phone company is providing the network you use for money (even if they let you make this call for free as a PR move). The person you talk to at the other end is providing you with a service for non-monitary reasons.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Are these "street teams" part of the new drive in advertising to advertise to people without them realising?
I find the whole concept of a company trying affect word of mouth advertising, and grass-roots style campaigns to be distatseful. MegaCorps are basically trying to cash in on human trust. If someone appears to be offering you advixce on a product, and appears to be doing so either conversationally, or just as a favour - Oh yuh, I have one o' them, pretty cool what they can do! It plays video and matures your cheese whilst you wait! etc etc, then it is disturbing to find out afterwards that they were paid.
Corporations using this method will only succeed in making society even more insular and untrusting of each other. This will undermine communtiesd and basic human communication. Well done to whoever came up with it. It's the ultimate way to exploit human trust and openness for profit.
Advertising sucks M'kay?
I remember seeing a commercial when they thought throwing .tv at the end of a web address was going to revolutionize their websites. This guy actually said about how the multimedia on their site was going to stand out and impress their users. This was just more hype to get the internet to become like cable tv. The reason people don't want this is because if they wanted 24 hour survivor and fear factor to give them a lobotomy they'd watch tv. If they want to take a break and say read something they can go on the internet.
My point is more like the article doesn't, and it actually _uses_ that confusion as "proof" of their conclusions. E.g, yes, the "I have a right to steal your work" that you noticed too.
If they wanted to educate the masses about the differences between
1. The IP protocol,
2. The ISP,
3. The applications using TCP/IP or UDP, and
4. The content providers on the internet
I'm all for that. Indeed the world would be a far better place if more people understood the distinction between those. By all means, make people write it 100 times on the blackboard before they get an ISP account, or whatever it takes to get it into their head.
But IMHO the article is making an awful job of it. Far from dispelling that misunderstanding, it looks to me more like propagating and using the confusion.
And even for "proving" things like "I have a right to steal your work", it's still a bad article IMHO. Those I've seen better argued in other places and forms. There is a more compelling argument to be made about how the RIAA business model is obsolete and inadequate by now. Or about how copying that music is providing free advertising for concerts. Or whatever.
Mind you, I don't aggree with that anyway. But nevertheless it's a far better argument than "the Internet is all about sending bits from X to Y, so quit trying to stop me from sending _your_ bits to everyone."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe we didn't invent the internet, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, so maybe thats not for you Americans.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The Internet is a network of networks. In that way it is reasonable to consider each ISP a single node of the Internet. Which makes the claim correct, there may be censorship and filtering and blocking within each node (ISP), but not between the nodes.
Of course it makes the ISP name incorrect. They don't give you direct access to the Internet, they give you access to a local network, which itself is part of the Internet.
There was a time when people constructed modems theirselves (like using tape interfaces of Apple][, and later ZX to connect to other zx or apple).
:)
But then 150bods were astonishing speed. It still is faster then dictating HEX over phone vocally.
I think in future p2p will have to use illegal (modded or underground-made) modems and net interfaces to access another "Underground" layer of a network, or just access p2p (like direct phone connections in times of BBS and Maximus5
I seeUnderGround Network realisation strategy fair simple (on the basic idea and principles). By using multi layers in pacjkets and using various "reserved" fields and padding in everything around. Hard point is to create all that network layer specs. And creating them safe from getting scanned or spyed.
actually got some concepts on that and will try to figure out where and when to publish them to oss people for trying out.
> The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle
it seems to be working quite well as an advertising vehicle for Google adwords/adsense users (and similar schemes). It is apparently just a question of finding the right business model
i think corporate managers delay things so things go wrong to give them more work later....
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
First off, I think their point was that it's futile to try to stop packages while on the internet. You have to get packages when it reaches the "ends" of the internet. Ie the users. Now you could also put it at the ISP, it would take a lot more power for them to do the work though (since they have to do it for everyone) so I doubt it would be a free service.
Besides you are not adding anything to the internet, you are adding stuff *at your end* of the internet (which the ISP is part of naturally).
The real problem with the Internet is that there are too many articles about the problem with the Internet.
Isn't that the book I saw on the remainder table at Books for a Buck, alongside "Dow 36000" and "Become an E-Commerce Millionaire in 24 Hours"?
Its poor grammar.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
I've clicked on more banner ads since switching to tabbed browsing because if I see something that interests me I can ctrl/cmd-click or right-click & open it in a new tab without interrupting what I'm doing at the moment and read the ad-referenced page later.
However, there are a lot of Flash banner ads out there these days. When I right-click on those, all I get are options to control the Flash movie. If I ctrl/cmd-click I get the ad page in the same window, which completely disrupts what I'm doing. So anyone advertising with Flash just gets ignored.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I'm sorry, but the authors live in a world where idealistic people can out-scream lawmakers and poiliticians. Give up now, foolish mortals!
Honestly, if these guys stopped ranting, and thereby making their arguments sound like reactionary babble, they might have more sway. I happen to agree with most of when they're saying, but their delivery isn't going to win over any converts.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Even in that case, I'm not sure what their point is.
I don't think that most of the censorship proposes to stop it at the IP packets level. Noone's really proposing to shoot down the copyrighted packets in flight in the first place.
Even the most stupid DRM ideas I've seen (like enforcing the DRM in the hard drive's firmware) tend to leave the TCP/IP stack alone. They're pretty much _based_ on the idea that once on the Internet those files _will_ get to you, or from you. So they try to limit what you can do with them after that.
What they _might_ want from the internet protocol is some accountability. Like being able to find out who did what. But that happens at one end too.
Other proposed changes, such as the recurring ideas to change the SMTP protocol to deterr spammers, are also (A) at one or both ends, not in the middle, and (B) about a completely other protocol, not at the TCP/IP stack level.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A couple years back, the trolls discovered that you could widen the page by posting long strings of characters with no spaces. Widening the page by posting a comment like that would make the entire Slashdot story basically unreadable for those without the patience to continuously scroll right and then left again for each line.
Malda implemented a new feature that prevented any strings longer than 50 characters from being posted by inserting a space after the 50th character. The trolls found various ways to get around this and widen the page anyway (some of which only widened Internet Explorer), but over time they've all been disabled in various ways.
Your best bet is to simply make a href link instead of trying to paste the link into the message text. Either that, or shorten the link. The link in the post you replied to would have been space-free if the http:// were stripped off.
I once had the misfortune of working in tech support,
One of my workmates told me how he hada customer on the line that thought a box shipped as "internet ready" did not need modem/fiber/wifi connections. It was just magically internet ready.
Still though, it makes sense that M$ would put that on the box - dumba$$$
You missed the most appropriate one :
Part 8c: Anyone can make the Internet a better place to live, work and raise up kids. It takes a real blockhead with a will of iron to make it worse.
Are you listening, Verisign?
False. Just because you think that everyone is greedy doesn't make it true. There are some people who are willing to give away information without bogging it down with ads. For instance, I run my own webserver with lots of documentation available for browsing. I pay for it - all of it - out of my own pocket. I have no banner ads, no corporate sponsorship, no government funding. I keep it up because it's useful to me and I like to think I'm giving back to those on the Internet who have done so much for me.
Nathan's blog
The value added of all your examples is at the end points, exactly as in the article. You seem to realise that now, but it wasn't what you said earlier.
Also, with your specific example of firewalling at the ISP level to save users the trouble you'd have to trust everyone on your side of the firewall: all the other customers. A lot of virus outbreaks in companies with firewalled LANs occur because someone plugged in an infected laptop.
This is clearly a reference to Pets.com, and he got it wrong. Their mistake wasn't that they were trying to sell high margin, high markup, cheap to ship toys on the Internet. Their problem was that they were trying to sell low margin, low markup, expensive to ship dog food. It's easy to make money selling cheap to ship high margin items on the Internet - look at Amazon, or (more relavently) PETsMART.com.
Opinion: 1. The Internet isn't complicated
That's an opinion. Considering more and more people are logging on, and I just read an article about older people turning to the Internet, consider the following... Just because to the author, the Internet, and using it is easy, does not mean it is not complicated for a new user.
Don't confuse technological iliiteracy with the author's statement. The underlying infrastructure of the internet is amazingly simple. Using a microwave oven is simple, unless you've never seen one before.
Opinion 3. The Internet is stupid.
No people are stupid. Personally (this is my opinion) I believe the next generation is going to be hellishly smarter than the one I grew up (growing up) with (in). Where else can you learn so many things from without leaving your home. Encyclopedia? They're limited
No, the Internet IS stupid. It is simply a connection to move bits from point A to point B. People have added intelligence and by extension, complexity to the Internet in order to make it convenient for Grandma to send her chocolate chip cookie recipe to her cousin somewhere. Go back to point #1, above.
One of Murphy's corollaries states: "Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it".
I think that applies here, don't you?
Excessive drinking is fine...in moderation.
Rather like the old joke about the freudian slip, where the guy meant to say "Please pass the salt", but it came out as "You fucking bitch, you ruined my life."
I don't really get why instant messaging networks need to interoperate. It seems to me, that the incentive to offer IM decreases if someone else can talk to your users. I don't even see how revenue is actually generated from IM in the first place, other than perhaps by increasing brand name value. I guess this viewpoint in unpopular, but I would think client-server systems like IM would have to be closed systems. The only parallel I see in counterpoint, is viewing IM service as http service. If I choose to publish info at google.com, anyone can read it, regardless of ISP. However, I had to pay to register google.com, whereas my AIM screenname came free. Just a thought, I'm more than willing to be convinced otherwise.
Substitute the word God for InterNet and you these same arguments are both profound and goofy.
No, if it's implemented correctly, I don't have to trust them. It doesn't take a genius to design or implement a system where I'm _not_ on the same network trunk as everyone else connected to that server.
Even if we're connected to the same router, my packets would have to (at least logically) go out through my firewall configuration and _back_ _in_ through _your_ firewall configuration. And even if I opened port ABCD for _my_ Surreal Tournament 2003 (to use a completely made up name;) FPS server, it wouldn't also be opened for packets coming towards _your_ machine. Unless you opened it for yourself too, that is.
The packets wouldn't have to physically exit the router and come back. The router would just need to select and apply _your_ set of rules before forwarding the message to you. Regardless of where the message comes from.
See? It wasn't even that hard to come up with that. It's just a 5 minute thinking exercise. It's perfectly equivalent to a firewall on your local machine, and it requires no trust at all. In fact it's _based_ on _not_ trusting anyone.
See, it just takes a bit of thinking along the lines of "_how_ can we make things better?" instead of insisting on "it's the way it is. Don't change it!!!" If having a single firewall config and a single trunk behind it is a liability, as your example aptly demonstrates, then the thing to do is change all that to something better. Just because years ago one config for everyone was all we had RAM and CPU cycles for, doesn't mean we _must_ stick for ever to that kind of a setup. We can already do _much_ better.
Just throwing our collective in a two-hands-up-salute and complaining about clueless users, that's the wrong answer.
As for my example being compliant with one of the points in the article, even while I'm arguing another sweeping generalization he _explicitly_ makes: see, that's just what annoys me about that article. It's all one big inconsistency, where they can't decide if they're talking about the IP protocol, network topology, applications, content providers, the other people on the net, or the physical wire.
It's more like a standard-run-of-the-mill political speech, full of truisms, so _something_ will sound true enough to everyone. Not the same thing for everyone, though. Network admins can nod and say "he's right" about one aspect, while programmers can nod about something else, while end users can understand (or latch onto) something completely different... and nod about it too.
That's really all that got me ticked off.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I got suckered by a disguised link once. Fun isn't the way I would describe seeing that image...
Those who would censor ideas might realize that the Internet couldn't tell a good bit from a bad bit if it bit it on its naughty bits.
Best statement ever.
(just like today's patch took 200 days)
;)
Be fair. I bet none of Microsofts coding drones has any access to the Windows source. So they constantly have to keep re-inventing the wheel. The wonder is that they manage to release anything at all.
siggy played guitar