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Grand Challenges in Networks for the Next 15 Years

jameshowison writes "Some of the researchers responsible for the Internet, including Bob Branden of ISI and David D Clark from MIT, have outlined what they see as the grand challenges for internetworking and computation in the next 10-15 years (PDF). The report from the IRTF's 'End-to-End Research Group' discussed the question, 'How might the computing and communications world be materially different in 10 to 15 years' and how do we get there? From a universal system for location, to small-area networks, to operation in time of crisis, software radio and an agenda to reduce the energy required for communications this document tries to imagine what will be like packet-switching was for the past 15 years."

90 comments

  1. The Devil is in the Details by suso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Appearently, using HTML for documents is still a major challenge.

    It only takes one person or company to implement things wrong, break protocol and then you have a mess. That is the grand challenge.

    1. Re:The Devil is in the Details by myukew · · Score: 1

      html for webpages and latex for documents...

    2. Re:The Devil is in the Details by cdcarter · · Score: 1

      But therein lies the problem. You are using html, which no-one correctly renders everything.

      --
      "Love is like a trampoline, first it's like "SWEET!!" then it's like *BLAMM!*"
    3. Re:The Devil is in the Details by sp3tt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "using HTML for documents is still a major challenge" Yeah, Microsofts helps making that a problem with IE.

    4. Re:The Devil is in the Details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because html was intended to be used for structure, not layout. Use css.

    5. Re:The Devil is in the Details by theTerribleRobbo · · Score: 1

      It's the same with any standard, though. The only difference between HTML and the other standards is that there is a single "popular" implementation of it, implemented by a company that doesn't appear to have terribly high moral standards (see DR-DOS, Lotus, etc).

      If, say, Microsoft had decided to munge the TCP protocol (ignore the whole BSD thing for a moment, this is hypothetical), we'd have the same problems, and likely two versions of TCP: the Microsoft one, the other the "Standards Compliant" one. Instead of web developers working around the differences between the standards, we'd instead have the developers of the different Operating Systems working around them instead.

  2. Transport Protocol w/ KeepAlive by uberleet · · Score: 1

    DOWN WITH TCP!

    1. Re:Transport Protocol w/ KeepAlive by NoRemorse · · Score: 0

      DOWN WITH IPX!

    2. Re:Transport Protocol w/ KeepAlive by badhack · · Score: 1

      Actually, TCP rocks. It's IP that sucks.

      DOWN WITH IP!

    3. Re:Transport Protocol w/ KeepAlive by NateTech · · Score: 1

      And of course, many of the IPv4 complaints are already addressed with IPv6, but the "market" has genuinely refused to implement it.

      --
      +++OK ATH
  3. No flying cars !!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Duh ...

    1. Re:No flying cars !!! by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      I have mine, what is your problem?

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  4. Are you sure by elid · · Score: 4, Funny

    that this isn't one of those randomly generated MIT papers?

    1. Re:Are you sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, those are actually relevent.

    2. Re:Are you sure by spac3manspiff · · Score: 2

      haha, 200 years of credibility just got flushed down the drain.

    3. Re:Are you sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      About as sure that was not a randomly generated comment.

    4. Re:Are you sure by squozebrain · · Score: 1

      I thought the same thing. The language is at least fluffy, if not bizarre. The document is peppered with odd sentences like this:

      "The older members of the data communications research community spent some of their formative years in the time when data communications was being revolutionized by the creation of a new paradigm: packet switching."

      I am a research professional in the areas of data communication and semiconductors, and I find this document very confusing and, well, wierd and perhaps even silly.

      Compare this document against the ITRS Semiconductor Technology Roadmap:

      http://www.itrs.net/Common/2004Update/2004Update.h tm

      When juxtaposed against a thorough document such as the ITRS report, the e2e-vision does look a little bit randomized.

  5. The article is a great example by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    of what NOT to do.

    Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 14, 2003:
    PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

    In this case, the article IS a big, linear text blob.

    1. Re:The article is a great example by grumling · · Score: 1

      I thought you were talking about the idea of setting managed goals for today's vision of tomorrow's killer app. Here you were upset that they used PDF, like everyone else doing something "big" is doing these days...

      --
      "Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
  6. My challenge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    this document tries to imagine what will be like packet-switching was for the past 15 years.

    I'm trying to imagine what this sentence means.. and it might take me 10-15 years.

    1. Re:My challenge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i.e.

      *blank* will be to the next 15 years what packet switching was to the past 15.

      Or, if you prefer:

      blank:the next 15 years::packet switching:the past 15 years

    2. Re:My challenge by kiwi_mcd · · Score: 1

      In the last 15 years there has been a huge switch from circuit based networks to packet based networks. This has been driven by TCP/IP over Ethernet largely.

  7. Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The major Internet applications, by volume, are spam, piracy, and advertising. This trend will continue. By 2020, 98% of all Internet traffic will be illegal in some way.

    1. Re:Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      i guess no one looks at porn anymore :-(

    2. Re:Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't most of the porn illegal? I mean, not the porn itself, but the copyright infringement of it.

    3. Re:Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by warkda+rrior · · Score: 1

      The best things on the Internet are either illegal (e.g. attacks), immoral (e.g. porn), or unhealthy (e.g. spam).

      --
      You need to install an RTFM interface.
    4. Re:Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by cpeterso · · Score: 1


      Porn is the killer app of the intarweb. oh, wait.. you already mentioned [porn] spam, [porn] piracy, and [porn] advertising. :)

    5. Re:Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam by schon · · Score: 1

      immoral (e.g. porn)

      Immoral by who's standards? Certainly not mine.

  8. Re:What's the state of...? by Fjornir · · Score: 1

    Quite spankable, apparently.

    --
    I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
  9. Start Small by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How about just starting small, like getting Win XP to reliably connect to hotspots?

  10. In Other News... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... Netcraft revealed today that networking is dying.

  11. Are you sure ... by PaschalNee · · Score: 1

    ... you aren't posting here just to pimp your FreePSP scheme?

    1. Re:Are you sure ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Free Paint Shop Pro is called "GimpShop".

  12. The Grand Challenge by MHobbit · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    is how to prevent pr0n from popping up while you're surfing the internet during study hall.

    ... unless you're actually surfing for pr0n in school.

    --
    Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
    1. Re:The Grand Challenge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The grand challenge is is how to prevent pr0n from popping up while you're surfing the internet during study hall.


      you know i've actually had that problem once, of course the security on that box was so bad that i just installed firefox

  13. Already there by samael · · Score: 2, Funny

    They claim there isn't an emergency broadcast system - but we have Slashdot! The second anything big goes wrong, there it is!

    1. Re:Already there by burns210 · · Score: 1

      With built-in fail-over redundancy!

  14. Are we talking about the US of A? by Beatbyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because it's still going to be the WAN from LAN network that we'll be working on forever.

    I've got a LAN setup running 200x as fast as the fastest WAN/Internet connection readily available (minus a special order and uber expensive DS3). And at the pace we're going, the US is getting slower and slower as far as the Internet connections go.

    Right now I can completely rewire my office and home for $5k with state of the art, high end network components and have it done in less than a week. I can't get close to those speeds with my net connection for 4x that price ($20k/year).

    That being said, there is still hope somewhere

    1. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The document focuses on technical challenges, not business or political ones. But you're right that technical innovation is useless unless there is a business and political climate that can foster it.

    2. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by Dun+Malg · · Score: 2, Informative
      Right now I can completely rewire my office and home for $5k with state of the art, high end network components and have it done in less than a week. I can't get close to those speeds with my net connection for 4x that price ($20k/year).

      You say that like there's no difference between a LAN and a WAN. The reason your LAN setup is so much cheaper is that none of your cable runs are THREE MILES LONG. You think teh intarweb runs over 100BTX Ethernet cable everywhere?

      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
    3. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not only the distance but latency. Switching 1500 byte packets locally between two computers is trivial.

      Try that with 300,000 subscribers ...

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    4. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by Beatbyte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's my point. Your excuse is distance. My point is, I don't care. I want speed. We need to quit focusing so much effort on making LAN's faster and focus on WAN/Internet connections.

      As far "teh intarweb" you speak of... nope, I don't think it runs on "100BTX Ethernet cable".. I've been in the ISP business for 10 years now and I'm pretty familiar with both ends of the Internet. The first being the provider end. The second, being the customer's end. Considering the customers pay my bills, I'm more worried about providing them with what they want.

    5. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, let's take a step back and look at what you are asking for, and what it would take to deliver it.

      Let's take the US as an example:

      It is well known that there is a glut of inter-city long haul fiber running across the US. Fine, there's one piece of the puzzle that has, to some extent, already been paid for.

      Now, lets say you are a startup network carrier, and want to buy a system to "light" that fiber -- you'll need optical networking devices, signal amplifiers spaced regularly on the route, signal regeneration sites, etc. You would be lucky to be able to pick up a system that supports, say 64 10Gbps circuits for under $100-200 million dollars. You'll also be looking at large continuing maintenance costs. You'd better be able to squeeze a lot of users on this system to recover your investment (starting to see the problem?)

      OK, say you have a way to pay for all the optical networking gear. Now you need to buy are some "core" routers. Uh oh, those routers cost over a million bucks a piece too. Want a 40 gigabit (OC-768) interface card for that new Cisco router you just bought? There's another million dollars to terminate one side of that *one single circuit*

      All that's left to figure out now is how to deliver this very high speed service to your customer's door. Diggin' up the streets to lay wires (fiber?) isn't cheap. Wireless isn't feasable at high speed / high customer count.

      The capacity of the Internet core is increasing, but the costs for these upgrades are enormous. The cost, and therefore the bandwidth, must be multiplexed across many, many customers.

      I am sure if you go to the big boys in the ISP world, they will sell you transit services in the 10 gigabit/second range, but you're going to have to pay *big bucks* for the service. Millions.

      You'll get 10 gig to your door one day, but I don't think there is anything to suggest that we'll see your home WAN connection able to keep up with your home LAN.

    6. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by serutan · · Score: 1

      The document focuses on technical challenges, not business or political ones. But you're right that technical innovation is useless unless there is a business and political climate that can foster it.

      Right. At one point the article mentions "a range of anti-social behavior, including spam, spyware and adware, and phishing." I personally think vigilante-style copyright enforcement should be at the top of the list of anti-social behaviors. DRM issues are probably going to have more impact on network design than any of the above, because the entertainment industry wants consumer hardware that is physically incapable of breaking copyright law. That requirement will have a deep impact on network design from the hardware up.

    7. Re:Are we talking about the US of A? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, you know they do have multi-gigabit connections, and for the right price you can have one yourself!

  15. IPv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The biggest challenge will be moving the entire internet onto IPv6

  16. HTML version by fat+man+with+a+monke · · Score: 1

    google cache, html version

    Would've posted anonymously, but apparently excessive bad posting has occured from my IP or Subnet.

  17. Wait a second... by bungley · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In 10 years, our communications infrastructure should be based on an architecture that provides a coherent framework for security, robust operation in the face of attack, and a trustworthy environment or services and applications.
    Wasn't that what it was designed for in the first place?
    1. Re:Wait a second... by Detritus · · Score: 1

      No. It was designed to make DARPA research more efficient by improving communication and sharing resources and tools.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    2. Re:Wait a second... by billmustdie · · Score: 0

      Not at all.

      To my memory, in the biginning... (LOL) to when I first went online (1981ish) it was for the easy exchange of digital info; security was a secondary concern due to the usual usage (by scientists, ect), oh... and ZORK. Mostly ZORK.

    3. Re:Wait a second... by Husgaard · · Score: 1
      Actually there was some thought about malicious users in the first place. Basically they thought that malicious users could always be tracked down. This line of thought was something like:
      • If some user behaves too bad, the host operator will disable access for that user.
      • If some host behaves too bad, the local network operator will disable access for that host.
      • If some local network behaves too bad, the network operator will disable access for that local network.
      • If some network behaves too bad, the other networks will refuse to interconnect with that network.
      Unfortunately, as time has shown, there are various problems with this protection against malicious users, most noticably:
      • It does not scale to the size that the internet has today.
      • It does not stop malicious users until after they have done something malicious, which is too late.
      The old security model worked fine until the early nineties. But it is obvious to everybody that it does not work today.
  18. Advanced interconnectivity for inter-personal comm by mekkab · · Score: 3, Funny

    We need to improve interpersonal communication via computer internetworking. And until Punch You In The Face over Ethernet (PYITFoE) is widely available, we will only ever scratch the surface of the rich tapestry of human interaction.

    --
    In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
  19. I for one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I for one welcome our new visionary, low cost, ubiquitous, location aware, trustworthy, special needs supporting, quantum coherence preserving, intelligent, energy-efficient, cyber-world overlords.

  20. What internet? by towaz · · Score: 1

    By 15 years and the way the worlds going ( development of EMP bombs ect) have to fall back to (RFC2549)

    Not that I'm cynical or anything ;)

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
  21. what we need by spectrokid · · Score: 1

    -identify a person
    -identify a computer
    -move a file (yes an email can be wrapped as a file)
    -non-lossy streaming (IM, telnet,...)
    -lossy streaming (MMedia)
    Now if we could replace the thirty-elleven thingies with a "p" as last letter by the above 5...

    --

    10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then

  22. Location technology by jessecurry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The little section about location technology was very interesting. I love using my GPS, it has opened up a new sport to me and allows me to do some very interesting things, but I am bothered by the fact that it only works outdoors. Having a GPS-like systems that worked everywhere will be very cool, and integration with existing devices might bring the "smart home" I've been hearing about for the past 15 years into reality.
    The one part missing from my home automation system is the ability to autonomously process input. I have to use a remote control for events that aren't based on a repeating schedule. It would be nice to be able to walk into a room and have my wrist watch alert my automation server as to my whereabouts, then have the lighting dynamically adjust to me.

    --
    Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
    1. Re:Location technology by Deltaspectre · · Score: 0

      That's what your PSP is for :D

      --
      My UID is prime... is yours?
    2. Re:Location technology by Detritus · · Score: 1

      GPS receiver technology has improved dramatically in recent years. New receiver designs have greatly improved the sensitivity of GPS devices. The new receivers can acquire the GPS signal in many places that were hopeless with older receiver designs. Much of this research was spurred by the need to identify the location of cellular phone handsets for emergency services. It will take a few years for the new chips to show up in production hardware. When it does, you can expect GPS to work in many more places than it does today. Making it small enough and power efficient enough for your wrist watch may take a bit longer.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    3. Re:Location technology by jessecurry · · Score: 1

      I've actually been thinking quite a bit about a location tracking system since I made my original post. I've been thinking about setting up a trial system using WiFi base stations and trying to use signal strength to calculate a location.
      I've never really looked at how location tracking is typically accomplished, but I thought that by setting up a number of antennas inside a room and carrying a WiFi device that I could determine where in the room I was using variations in signal strength. I am still not sure if WiFi is sensitive enough to be able to detect small differences in signal strength, nor consistent enough to not have to constantly re-calibrate.
      By placing the receiver in known locations I should be able to calibrate the system to be fairly accurate. I'd love to be able to walk down a hallway and have the lights directly above me be set to full power, while the lights in front of and behind me faded on and off as I passed.
      I'd actually love some feedback on this from someone who is a little more knowledgeable about location tracking or WiFi. Any suggestions for an alternative to WiFi would be great, especially the cheaper ones. I only thought of using WiFi because it is available and already has some code to determine signal strength, plus I'd gain the ability for the network to be used to send the location data.

      --
      Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
    4. Re:Location technology by Detritus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You might have better luck with ranging based upon propagation delay. If you know the locations of the base stations, and the transmitted signal contains a time reference, you can measure the delay between the transmitter and receiver. This assumes that each node has an accurate clock. Another approach is for the base station to transmit a carrier modulated by a PN sequence. The mobile station takes the output of its receiver (the PN sequence) and feeds it to the modulator in its transmitter. The base station compares the transmitted PN sequence to the received PN sequence to make a delay measurement. After subtracting the known delays in the system, this gives you a round-trip delay measurement.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  23. Van Jacobson? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It appears as co-author

    Wasn't he dead?

    1. Re:Van Jacobson? by suitepotato · · Score: 1

      Looks like they've solved the Afterlife Transfer Mode problem already.

      --
      If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
  24. What we need to do... by jgold03 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Switch to IPv6

    Multimedia "over IP" will not become mainstream without virtual circuit technologies. Also, we are being lazy and letting NAT take care of the lack of addressing provided by IPv4.

    1. Re:What we need to do... by kiwi_mcd · · Score: 1

      I agree that we are being lazy and letting NAT taking care of addressing (as opposed to IPv6).

      I would think that rather than virtual circuits what we need is effective flow control (but maybe that is what you mean....).

      The big problem here in many ways is the unsuitability of UDP to cope with multimedia flows as it has no built-in congestion control and apps like Skype to some degree abuse this.

      I am working away with a protocol that is meant to help solve this (DCCP) which is at draft RFC state at present. If interested have a look at:http://www.icir.org/kohler/dcp/

    2. Re:What we need to do... by jgold03 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would think that rather than virtual circuits what we need is effective flow control (but maybe that is what you mean....). Flow control is pretty much the same thing as virtual circuits. When two end hosts need a path with a certain amount of bandwidth across the Internet, the routers have to maintain state information about that connection in order to provide it's guarantees. IPv6's proposed solution is to add a flow # to the packet header.

  25. IT differences in 10-15 years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Your server rooms will smell like curry.

  26. a single point of failure by steve_l · · Score: 1

    Do you think when skynet becomes self aware, it wouldnt acquire admin rights on ./ and lock out all postings about "killer terminator robots seen motorbiking round LA" or "help, the military grid is now sentient".

    Instead, assuming that the /. audience are the people who stand a chance of stopping it, it would probably distract them all with different postings, like "free video p0rn service", or introduce a special distro of linux which looked like a descendant of debian but turned out to be a node in the syket grid-brain.

    1. Re:a single point of failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Skynet would also reformulate tough strategic problems it faces during the conquest of the earth as puzzles, then mask them as candidate screening puzzles for jobs@Google, post them on /. and turn all the slashdotters that have forgot to put on their tin-foil hats into nodes in its beowulf cluster of nerds.

  27. politics: why no MPAA resistant networks? by steve_l · · Score: 1


    If I look five years ahead, I worry about how to design networks and protocols that are defensible against MPAA, RIAA and generic lawsuits.

    A lot of the adhoc stuff in the PDF look a bit like this something that must terrify the {MPA.RIA}A lawyers who would like to make DRM a requirement of all future network topologies and protocols.

    TCP was an implicit political statement. It said "we don't need telcos to make us pay for every second of a virtual ciruit", the way the OSI architecture was designed.

    Future networks need to think about what threats there are to their functional operation, its not just scalability, or adhoc-ness, its defending against politicians and lawyers who dont understand.

  28. End-to-End Research? As in "blondes laid" ...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The report from the IRTF's 'End-to-End Research Group' discussed the question ...

    If that new End-to-End Research Group is in any way related to the "100,000 blondes laid end to end" joke, there's going to be a lot more people applying for research positions there as soon as the word gets out! :-)

  29. Interactivity noticably absent ... by __aadkms7016 · · Score: 1

    Low-latency interactive services (VoIP, video conferencing, games, more esoteric things ...) are not on their radar. Surprising ...

    1. Re:Interactivity noticably absent ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think they regard this as a solved problem. DiffServ is out there; it's not their fault if it hasn't been deployed.

  30. Very Optimistic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What was Slashdot thinking posting an article/report thats 13 pages long. Did they really expect any intelligent posts. People have enough problem reading articles that are 2 pages long. I doubt less then 10% of the people who post will actually have rtfa hell 10% is probably the normal amount of posters who read the articles. Well so much for a usefull discussion.

    Back on topic I doubt quatum comuting will be around in 10 years. Sure they are making progress but not nearly enough for a full blown computer. I say in 10 years they will have developed simple logic gate like structures. Spintronics are far far away and to believe that it will be here in 10 years is definetly optimistic. Though I would say they should start considering it and look at how implementation in networks will affect the gloabl/local communities and economies but they are being overly optimistic. The current state of quatum computing is that we can change the spin in one atom and the other changes too. I say maybe 50 to 100 years we wil have full working quatum computers that will be used by the public or even universities. There is so much more that they can do with new types of transistors that electronics will not be replaced by spintronics for quite some time.

  31. WQos, .mil, trusted computing, etc. by G4from128k · · Score: 3, Insightful
    A few ideas:
    1. QoS: The wider use of quality-of-service metrics to regulate bandwidth/latency/drop-rate will spread from backbone to the backplane. QoS will be assigned not just to packets or network streams, but extended to applications, processes, and threads.
    2. authentication-intensive network: Anti-spam, anti-phish, anti-piracy initiatives will deanonymize the network. Expanding liability may force commercial providers of network infrastructure to adopt so-called trusted computing initiatives. Counterfeiting a header may become crime similar to counterfeiting money because both crimes degrade the public trust in the system.
    3. militarization of networks: When will network security become so important to the national interest that the government deploys .mil computers to DDoS offending servers. If the economy runs on the net, someone will become the defender of that infrastructure.
    4. physical layer/application layer dichotomy: Currently the value of the network is in the application, but the cost is in the physical layer. This lead to the problem of price wars among infrastructure service provider or the war over municipal wifi. Perhaps an alternate approach would more closely link the value and costs of networking.
    5. Multiple IPs per device: I wonder if the move to multiple cores will push systems toward multiple IPv6 addys per machine. Technologies such as IBM's cell architecture support the potential for multiple OSes running on a single hardware platform. With such a large IPv6 address space, it may be easier to give each running OS instance its own IP address, rather than try to share an address and try to use a meta OS to share network resources. This, in turn, may lead to a proliferation of addresses that fill the larger space.
    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
  32. 7. Assume quantum computers work... by Winckle · · Score: 1

    for me that's a pretty big assumption

  33. Re:Advanced interconnectivity for inter-personal c by khallow · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Be aware that there is prior art.

  34. Solutions without Problems by ItWasThem · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The main issue I take with this paper is that it proposes a series of solutions without talking about any relevant application or problem that it will solve except for in an occasionally very generic way "We need better security" for example.

    That and the fact that it seems to have been written with the longest most convoluted sentences possible.

    Major change happens when an intelligent person solves a very real problem in a way that seems obvious once it's completed but that few others would have come up with.

    This paper starts by dissing incremental improvements and then goes on to rehash... wait for it... incremental improvements. How can you compare "better security" to Packet Switching in terms of revolutionary technology?

    In my opinion major advances in the next 10-15 years will be driven by content-based applications. Technology is cheap and is becomming a commodity. It will not make any more major leaps until there is a content driver and industry to take it there.

    For example, when we can all print flat panels for wall paper what will we have to display on them? An entirely new content and distribution industry will emerge to fill these and other voids and THEN technology will again stride ahead.

    Just my .02

  35. Quantum's Definitely a radical assumption by billstewart · · Score: 1
    It's definitely a radical assumption, which is why it's the kind of problem for an academic "Grand Challenge" rather than incremental private-sector development, either by businesses or typical hobbyists. The issues that make it worth considering
    • Research/Development of Quantum Computers has progressed far enough that they *might* become actually possible and practical in 10-20 years.
    • If they do work, and scale up adequately, they can do amazingly different kinds of computation than conventional machines.
    • We haven't a bloody clue how to network the things together, so it's a potentially interesting Long-Range Research Topic
    • We do know that if they work, they'll totally hose the assumptions that near-NP-hard problems like factoring can be used to provide security, which trashes the public-key privacy and authentication structures that anybody who bothers with security uses today, which means we need to be ready to restructure the system if they get close to reality. Otherwise, it's the End Of The Internet Commerce World As We Know It (tm)!

    I'm personally skeptical about QC, but if it does work then things will become Very Interesting. In particular, if Quantum Computers are limited by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Planck's Constant is about 10**-47, so you can work around it by adding ~150 (or ~1500, if there are log-scaling issues) bits to your crypto keys and not worry about it, but if they can get around this by chaining individual qubit cells together, then they really can bother factoring-based crypto.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  36. Re:IPv6 isn't a big deal by billstewart · · Score: 2, Interesting
    IPv6 is useful, and at some point we'll need the address space, but basically until Cisco and Juniper make routers that perform well using IPv6, nobody feels motivated to move wholesale - almost half the IPv4 space is still unused.. Microsoft is doing a bunch of IPv6 work that'll help the chicken&egg problem in a couple of years, but without a killer app, there's no real motivation.

    The big problem I've seen with IPv6 is that its goals not only included bigger address space, which we've been able to slack off by using RFC1918 private space, firewalls, and NAT, but it also promised to do Really Cool Things to make routing infrastructures more scalable and better behaved, and that doesn't appear to have panned out yet. That means that not only do routing tables get bigger because the addresses are longer (which you fix by waiting for a couple of year's of Moore's Law to fix memory pricing), but there's likely to be a repeat of the "IPv4 Class C Address Swamp" which nobody wants, or the "Upstream-Provider Non-Portable Address Space Lock-In" features which customers don't like, and which makes multi-homing for reliability much harder. And that doesn't seem to have been done yet.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  37. Indoor GPS? by SkiifGeek · · Score: 1

    The idea of having a GPS type device which operates everywhere is a great idea, however the problem with the current system is the need for the receiver device to be able to see satellites (i.e. the signal is line of sight only), and that buildings do a fairly good job of blocking the satellite signal.

    There are three solutions to this with the current technology:

    • Pump up the power output from the satellites. Although possible, I doubt that the satellite owners will boost the transmission power.
    • Increase the size of your antenna. By increasing the size of the antenna on your unit, you have a better chance of receiving a usable signal from the satellites. In order to get a useful GPS signal indoors / underground, the size of the antenna would defeat the purpose.
    • Build something like a VOR / DME radio navaid setup. This device would be at a known GPS location, and your handheld device would take the information from the aid to determine a radial and distance from the device, providing a known position. The downside of this is that the power required for such a device to work through buildings would likely cook anything that is nearby, and the fidelity of the position would not be as high as a GPS position.
  38. Re:IPv6 isn't a big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    * rational sized route tables
    * portable ips

    pick one

    with the ipv6 policies as with current ipv4 policies they decided to pick the former.

  39. Re:IPv6 isn't a big deal by Asgard · · Score: 1

    One of the purposes of the huge address space is to divide it up so that there won't be such a glut of small class-C's that have to be kept in the routing tables, instead it'll be much more aggregateable.

  40. This is a bit personal, but by necrofluxneo · · Score: 1

    I know my grand challenge for the next 15 years is to get laid! Who's with me?

    1. Re:This is a bit personal, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who's with me?

      Sorry dude, I'm straight.

      Good luck though. :o)

  41. Re:IPv6 isn't a big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    unless you want number portability. oops.