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"Series of Tubes" Metaphor Implemented
meisteg writes to tell us about Tubes: a beta application that uses a tube metaphor to enable users to share files over the Internet. The Windows-only app is free and the company hopes to make money on an enhanced version targeted at businesses. See this video for some details of how Tubes works. From the article: "[Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens] endured ridicule last year for his assertion that the Internet is 'a series of tubes.' But one Web startup hopes to bring that metaphor to life with a new service that makes it easy for people to share videos, songs, pictures and other big files."
writes to tell us about Tubes: a beta application that uses a tube metaphor to enable users to share files over the Internet.
Good. Because we all know that it's not a big truck.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Initially it will be a series of pringle tubes duct taped together and connected to users computers thru which they can share files.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I don't care who I've invited to do what, I really don't want my friends to be able to put stuff on my PC as they feel fit. Anyone that has ever shared a printer in a University house will know the feeling - it doesn't take long until a hundred pages of "you're gay" wake you up in the middle of the night.
OK so let's hear your explaination. And NO geekspeak.
On the contrary, there is significant overlap between PC users and Slashdot's core audience of unimaginative squares and dweebs.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
How long does it take to send an internet over it? Sometimes it takes days to receive them on the current implementation.
There are a zillion apps out there that accomplish the same thing. This is just one company riding a meme for publicity sakes. God how I hate marketers...
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
VPN does not perform automatic synchronization. Tubes is supposed to do so.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
This could actually be useful... it's sort of combining BitTorrent and RSS. You subscribe to a content channel, and as people with publishing permissions add content, it updates on your local system. Also tracks changes to existing documents, so it could be good for collaboration, although any serious use would likely want a version control system that supports conflict merges. For the average non-techie, though, this could be pretty handy.
It's a shame they're aiming for such a tech-illiterate user base, though... their site doesn't seem to mention whether they do BitTorrent-style bandwidth sharing to distribute content.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Speaking for myself, I've never owned a PC in my life, Windows or otherwise."
:)
Holy shit! You must be posting using your psychic abilities. I alway knew mutants were out there. Are you one of the X-Men?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Many slashdotters so far have commented on the brutal marketspaek going on in this presentation, but this concept has one thing going for it that torrent networks so far haven't touched on very well... the use of a private share network that is collaborative.
I think Tubes looks like it will catch on. If sites like Facebook and Technorati implement some hooks into it, there is no telling where this could go.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yes, but it uses a series of waves. many small waves from other users combine to become a tsunami of information washing over you.
This is an entirely different type of software. It uses a series of tubes coming from other users. The more tubes you have pointing to you, the more internets you can get at once!
No, VPN == Pipe. There's a big difference, you know
A metaphor that enables users to share files! I always thought we needed similes for that. How foolish of me.
No, it didn't take two days to get an email, it took two days to get "an internet." I'm downloading the internet right now, and it's been taking a lot longer than two days. That guy must have some hella tubes for it to only take two days.
... and then they built the supercollider.
So, the Linux equivalent to tubes would be, what?... pipes?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So is it a computing fruit or something like that? I can't believe you are actually being smug about vocabulary. Macs look just like PCs, act just like PCs, and dancing out on a limb here, I believe that they are in fact personal computers. That they are now Wintel compatible makes the argument even more miserable for you.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Tubes as a metaphor wouldn't be problematic in and of itself. However, after saying "it's a series of tubes" he elaborated by saying "it's not a truck". Whilst babbling in this manner he said his staff sent him "an internet" and it took 2 days to get to him because the tubes were full. He basically has no understanding of the subject and butchered what could have been an ok metaphor.
Here is why he gets mocked:
...
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
" It's a series of tubes.
"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
"Do you know why?
"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."
This quote (more fully found here; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."
Here is a tracking of the Senator's delayed "internet."
Also see, of course, the relevant Wikipedia entry.
[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]
You can get to it by clicking on the Exhibit 3 part of the 3rd floor on their flash-y map.
We, of course, made plenty of "tubes" jokes, but the funniest had to be when one of the balls accidentally popped off the conveyor belt, and the message was dropped as it entered the receiving terminal as being badly formed. Great, because their model showed what happens when you literally drop a packet. *grin*
I mean, it's a good metaphor. Regardless of the medium (electrical or optical) the internet really kind of IS a series of tubes of varying capacity, interconnecting a bunch of nodes.
what really is so wrong with thinking of the internet as tubes.
What is wrong is that it leaves out the most important thing; the thing that makes the whole shebang work.
The Internet is not a series of tubes; it is a series of agreed upon ways of delivering information.
Tubes are passive and what goes down them uniformly follows the path of least resistance. The Internet when it delivers information is dynamic; it is continually making decisions about the best way to get data from its source to its destination. Those decisions are strictly fair: the network makes its best effort for every packet of data within the limits of the service the user asked for when he placed that packet on the network.
Describing the Internet as a series of tubes is self serving. Whey shouldn't companies control what flows over their "tubes"? But if you describe the Internet as a kind of agreement or compact for information interchange, things look different. Sure, it's your tubes, but you built those tubes because your customers are paying you to access the wealth of value created by a fair an impartial market for information.
What the vendors want to do is pull a bait and switch on their customers.
The customers are looking for Internet access, which is a commodity. You can only make high profits selling a commodity by dint of exceptional efficiency, foresight, and maybe a litle luck. The vendors would prefer to sell a proprietary information network, where it's easier to make money once you've locked the customer in.
The problem is that nobody wants a proprietary network (like the old AOL). Such a network would have only a fraction of the value of an Internet. A "non-neutral" Internet (which is in my opinion an oxymoron) allows them to bootstrap their proprietary offerings by freeloading off the Internet. They'll give customers unfettered access to Internet services for which they have no replacement offering. As soon as they have a replacement offering, they will place their thumbs on the routing scale to give their inferior products a leg up.
Net neutrality is good for the information market in the way that common markets are good for trade. Non-netural networks are like trading systems with high tariffs: they protect inefficient producers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and the rest of the Senate are a series of giant assholes.
No, the Internet is NOT like a superhighway
"Think of the Internet as a highway."
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net. . .
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
NO OFFRAMPS. None.
Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
(author unknown)
My bicyles
The problem is that while an abstraction can be a great way to explain a technical concept to someone non-technical, it isn't a complete understanding of the concept, and when non-technical people try to make decisions based on that metaphor they are often wrong.
The internet is, in some ways, like, a series of tubes, but it is not actually a series of tubes, and when you make decisions about the internet as if it were a series of tubes instead of what it actually is, most of the time you'll get it wrong. Most of our elected officials don't have a technical background so we have a bunch of people trying to make decisions based, at best, on abstractions, or on the advice of experts(who are usually bought and paid for by someone).
Probably the best solution to all of this is to start funding independent pools of experts on technical and scientific fields and then taking their advice, but those sorts of people don't tend to tell the politicians what they're being paid to want to hear, so that'll never happen.
... my ferrets have had internets for years! They love 'em! I even got them a router, that connects one of the 25' innernets to two of the 12' internets. The other three 25' innernets are simple PPP, however, and the routes are a tangled mess. I'm hoping to upgrade to a six port router in a few weeks, because as hard as the weasels try, the internets are DEFINITELY half duplex. They're not Cat5, either... he can stuff his head in, but that's all that'll fit without fragmentation.
The thing that sucks the most is when one of the internets get a hole chewed into it. The damned packets end up misrouted, on the floor, and you have to twist the innernet so that the hole is facing up to make it stop. Having a kitten who repeatedly cannonballs the array doesn't help much, either, because he uses the holes in the web to intercept the traffic.
In Ferret Internets, PACKETS SNIFF YOU!
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Coined by Bush - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internets_(colloquial ism)
BUSH: ...We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries and filters in public schools so if kids get on the Internet, there is not going to be pornography or violence coming in.
and
BUSH: Yes, that's a great question. Thanks. I hear there's rumors on the, uh, Internets, that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period. The all-volunteer army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well. It works when we make sure they've got housing, like we have done in the last military budgets.
Remind me what's new here - We've been seeing this in Grouper (http://www.grouper.com), iMeem (http://www.imeem.com) and Krawler (http://www.krawlerx.com - shameless plug, it uses RSS and bit-torrent for file transfers as well). Same old Media sharing. Same old Social Networking. Same old File Transfer.
Two things -
(1) That p2p Networks are fringe activities, and 99% of the web users will use youtube.com to share videos is a fact these p2p networks have to realise.
(2) There can not be a viable business model for p2p based file-sharing networks which doesn't rely on some sort of Adware or (minor) spyware. Since the volumes can never justify the ad-spend by advertisers, the advertisers will increasingly push for personal information of the users - which, considering the technologies involved, is not very hard to get from the back door.
I salute the PR team of this company on having managed to get their crap of a product on slashdot.
That's OK. It takes quite a bit more than mere paragraph formatting to make sense out of anything GWB says.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
P2P: trade / craft shows. Individuals from all around the world flood an area to swap goods. They bring goods, and share with others. The person running the show doesn't need to own anything themselves -- they rely on the users to bring the content.
VOIP: Couriers in faster (non-truck) vehicles can transport small payloads with relative ease.
This is fun! What's next?