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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
OK so let's hear your explaination. And NO geekspeak.
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"
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
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
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!
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."]
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.
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
... 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!