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A New Way to Look at Networking
Van Jacobson gave a Google Tech Talk on some of his ideas of how a modern, global network could work more effectively, and with more trust in the data which changes many hands on its journey to its final destination.
Watch the talk on Google's site
The man is very smart and his ideas are fascinating. He has the experience and knowledge to see the big picture and what can be done to solve some of the new problems we have. He starts with the beginning of the phone networks and then goes on to briefly explain the origins of the ARPAnet and its evolution into the Internet we use today.
He explains the problems that were faced while using the phone networks for data, and how they were solved by realizing that a new problem had risen and needed a new, different solution. He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient).
There is no reason you can't multicast across a large segmented network, i.e. the internet, and get good delivery. Radio, television, audio, phone, movies are all latency sensitive but not particularly bit sensitive so you can drop some packets here and there. That also means that some things would need QoS (VoIP) while others would need intelligent caching and buffering (movies, etc.).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
"(lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient)"
The first part is true, but does not necessarily lead to the conclusion in the second. There is a huge, very important IF that belongs between them. Specifically, "if the recipients are all prepared to receive those bytes at the same time". The problem with the conclusion is that the evaluation of the "if" part is nearly always "they're not". This is yet another case of "if the internet were like television, it'd be more efficient". Yes, but it would then no longer be the internet people like. The great promise of the internet is information on demand. All this bullcrap about broadcast, push, and the like, it's all the efforts of 20th century throwbacks trying to fit the internet into their outdated worldview of "producers" and "consumers". They need to quit it. Broadcast is a square peg and the internet is a round hole. Every time anyone suggests putting the two together, they simply look like a bloody idiot.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
So, sending identical packets to everyone is somehow more bandwidth efficient than sending packets to only those who want them? Doesn't that seem backwards to anyone else? Furthermore, couldn't you define broadcasting as precisely the act of sending identical bytes to many consumers?! I'm teh confused.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
...but the more he talked, the more it reminded me of some halfbreed between akamai and freenet.
Basicly, he's speaking of named resources, that an URL would be key like KSKs in Freenet
Content would self-verify, that's basicly CHKs in Freenet
Then you need add security into it which pretty much amount to SSKs
Only in his case, it wasn't talk about making the end nodes treat information this way but rather the core of internet, and it didn't involve anonymity. But the general idea was the same, to grab content from a persistant swarm of hosts who doesn't need a connection to the original source. Unfortunately, most of the examples he gives are simply false, like the NY Times front page. If I want up-to-the-minute news everybody need to pull fresh copies off the original source all the time, reducing it down to a caching proxy. Any sort of user-specifc content, or interactive content won't work. For example take slashdot. I've got my reading preferences set up, which means my content isn't the same as yours. Also my front page contains a link to my home page, which is not the same as yours. Getting a posting form and making a comment wouldn't be possible. Making any kind of feedback like digg, youtube, article feedback etc. isn't possible. Counters wouldn't be possible. The only thing where it'd work is reasonably static fire-and-forget content, and even then there's the problem of knowing what junk to keep. Notice that when asked about BT he said that only worked for big files, so the idea is that everyone will have some datastore where they keep small files until someone needs them. The only good example is the Olympic broadcast, which is exactly the same content at exactly the same time. Oh wait, that's classic broadcast. Classic broadcast works best in a broadcast model? Who'd think that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I see one problem with his idea of ignoring where data comes from.
Corporations make money by restricting access to information.
It doesn't seem that it will be possible for them to continue to do that with this model, so I don't think any of this will come to pass any time in the near future.
8 months seems pretty new to me. I notice that many of our discussions seem to focus on 1984. Wake up people! A lot has happened since then, and now it's a brave new world.
testing out my trending skills