Intel Predicts Death Of WWW

LostCluster writes "Forbes is running a report saying that Intel's CTO claims that the WWW is 'running up on some architectural limitations' that will eventually cause its downfall. He's pushing a project called PlanetLab that has Princeton, Cambridge, Hewlett-Packard and AT&T on board, but Cisco is notably absent from that team."

Comments

Right up there with Gates

[RedShoeRider]

.....WWW is going to die, DVD's are a thing of the past....blah blah blah.

Yeah, and Beta's been "dead" for 20 years. But I still can go buy tapes for it.

Re:Right up there with Gates

[binaryDigit]

.....WWW is going to die, DVD's are a thing of the past....blah blah blah. Yeah, and Beta's been "dead" for 20 years. But I still can go buy tapes for it.

Actually the fact that you can still get your hands on Beta tapes is not relevant, heck, I can still get my hands on new 8" floppies. And actually, once hi-def dvd's start showing up, today's dvd's will be a thing of the past.

Better analogies would be doomsayers talk about "we need to develop optical technologies because magnetic media will hit a stone wall at 1GB", or "cpu's will max out about 500mhz, better use optical computing" or "ipv6 needs to be adopted to deal with the shrinking ip address pool".

In other news

[A1kmm]

Intel predicts that it will be able to convince the world to abandon the unscalable approach of following standards, including upcoming standards like XForms and IPv6, and open P2P systems, and instead invent its own propietary system.

That's not bad at all

[gustgr]

WWW may reach the same level Gopher is today, it is not so popular (mainstream) but it's contents can be very interesting if you perform some data mining (geekly speaking of course).

WWW must be maturing

[BinBoy]

The end of Usenet/NNTP has been predicted many times as well. It's a stage that every successful protocol eventually reaches. Our baby is growing up!

waste of time

[Docrates]

You know TFA is a load of crap when the excerpt is about the same size as the actual article...and half of the article's page is devoted to promoting some financial news service.

This is, by far, one of the worst news posts EVER on slashdot.

In fact, do go to the article and witness the historic event.

Very Vague

[Manip]

It strikes me that this 'new internet over the existing one' is an extremely vague idea.

At least to me, they have not said what the problems are to begin with and further more have not said how they are going to address each one.

All this tells us is 'X Corp is working on an unknown problem with an unknown solution'.

Adding a network on the existing one doesn't sound like a great solution either because it uses the apparently flied infrastructure to construct a method to make that structure more stable..? Sounds like building on sand to me..

the Internet is not the WWW

[Anonymous Coward]

Any article that confuses the Internet with the world wide web can't be taken seriously.

WWW != Internet

[lazybeam]

I thought that the HTTP protocol was going to die? But no, they are talking about the Internet switches and routers being overloaded. And it will only get worse as more people use broadband - that means ISPs will have to upgrade their equipment! (shock! horror!) The WWW is going to break with all the """ codes in the article, too.

Gelsinger's solution is to build a new network over the current Internet,

The WWW is a network over the current Internet... Oh well

Re:Well...

[KilobyteKnight]

Don't bother to RTFA this time, the article's about as low on info as the summary.

Complete lack of technical savvy is what I've come to expect from Forbes. They just don't get the SCO thing either. And in this article, they interchangably use the terms "World Wide Web" and "internet". Forbes is obviously the magazine for pointy haired bosses, I can't imagine anyone else taking it seriously.

I've got the gameplan for the new internet.

[El Camino SS]

Here is how the "trusted internet" will fail:

1. Claim that the internet, with the advent of widespread broadband, is going to crash. Cause the herd to panic. Bypass your IT manager. Put it right in Forbes and Fortune 500. Make them demand it from the top down.
2. Speak of adding a new functionality (like a new and improved clippy) and then slide in DRM to prevent "hackers" from getting into your machine. This of course, will never prevent hackers. All it will do is make the hackers get into the BIOS level of your computer when you allow a shell at that level.
3. Roll out "trusted computing." Pretty soon, your computer won't trust you to let you do what you want on it. You will feel a sudden twinge as millions of Joe Users will cry out in agony, and then suddenly, silence.
4. Geeks will find and work with corporations that are not on trusted computing. They will be fine. They will know where to get the useful mobos and processors. Their side of the internet will not change at all, ever.
5. One generation of "Joe User" will find that all of the interesting things that made owning a computer are now blocked and will become frustrated. They will blame the computer instead of the architecture. "My Dell won't let me do what I want!" Gateway, Dell, and other Windows syncophants will start going belly up in the slimmest of markets after they drove all of the profit out of the business. IBM will be fine with Linux for the business market. Comcast will hemmorage profits when people can't get to what they really want, and then suddenly turn on all of the other companies. AT&T will suck it up, those losing more traction in the real world as usual.
6. The industry will dump DRM and trusted computing while it is still hot, because basically, there won't be any purchases, and people have to sell computers to pay the bills. Word will get out to the common person, quickly, and they will sit on the shelves and rot.

Why do I think it will happen just like this?

The whole "trusted drinking" thing worked so well during prohibition. A group of Holy rollers thought that banning things or preventing them would stop bad activity. All prohibition did was make "bad" activity more expensive... and much more aggressive and organized. These "trusted computing" twits are insane. If they think that it is going to work, they're nuts. Go ahead and delay Longhorn or whatever. Simply put, it ain't going to work. Look, if geeks need to get their chips from Burma, or Morrocco, or wherever, rest assured that they will find a way.

death of TCP/IP

[peter303]

The ethernet (and mostly internet) protocol was predicted to die 30 years ago. People offered alternatives like ATM and MicroSofts early 90s protocol (failed attempted hijacking of the Net), but none really caught. A mediocre standard used by billions of computers perseveres.

If at first you think this may be evil...

[D4C5CE]

What it really amounts to is that if you do not "voluntarily" submit to Trusted Computing and turn over control of your computer you will be locked out.

Intel Outlines Strategy For Making The Internet Smarter, Safer, More Reliable And Useful
(...)
This would transform the Internet from a data transmission pipe into a vast platform for hosting a wide array of services available [add: for ________ $ / __ (+ your immortal soul where applicable)?, ed.] to the world's six billion inhabitants. Gelsinger referred to this approach as the ability to provide planetary-scale services.
(...)
we are confident that we now can begin deploying and testing revolutionary, planetary-scale commercial services that will change the way business is done on the Internet.
(...)
"A planetary-scale overlay of computational services would open the Internet up to a new era of innovation while complementing other Internet initiatives," Gelsinger added. "It would provide a platform on which Web services can run and a way to connect grid computing sites and utility data centers. It sits above the new physical infrastructure supplied by Internet 2 and above the networking layer where IPv6 functions, adding a new stratum of higher-level functionality to the Internet."

Oh, glad it's only about World Domination! ;-)
Nothing scary there, just what almost every computer company strives for.
How reassuring...
SCNR