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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).
I 'browsed' some of this video and book marked it for later: Van Jacobson's background is awesome.
A bit off topic, but there are two things that I want to see happen: a complete upgrade to IPv6 and the creation of an alternative 'public Internet' based on emerging long distance wifi and software that lets people volunteer to be part of this new open grid, and optionally share some bandwidth bridging the 'real' Internet.
It may seem pointless to want both higher performance (multi-casting UDP, essentially infinite IP address space) and low performance and ad-hoc systems, but please consider: the UK and USA seem to be going down the wrong path of surveillance and citizen control, the Internet may someday be viewed as something that the public just should not have because it is too free a source of information. I hope that I am wrong about this, but this unpleasant possible repressive future is a possibility.
Just because he says broadcast would be more efficient, doesn't mean that he thinks we should go back to television. Believe it or not, Van Jacobson isn't a 20th century throwback shill for Big Media, or a bloody idiot.
Based on all the measurements I'm aware of, Linux has the fastest & most complete stack of any OS (source)
You are totally right that the recipients will want those bytes at different times, BUT this is not like current television or radio broadcasts, where once broad casted they no longer exist. The data which is intended to be broad casted (in the example, an Olympic event) is stored at the same time it is broad casted and not only by the producer or creator of the data, but by every other party (or at least the proxy-like ones) who is receiving the data. It's a bit like BitTorrent: the more interested in getting the data, the more available sources to get from as the transfer progresses in time. It's kind of like cashing today: for some amount of time the data chunks will get cashed on multiple locations (where they go trough) and this way the data itself "lives" longer. The more clients request the data, the data itself will be available from multiple locations, and you get it faster when you ask for it.
And if you're thinking that this way there will be stored redundant information on a horrible amount of locations and this means an even more horrible quantity of stored data, then you're wrong. This way the cached data remains in cache only if there is interest for it, and if there isn't then after some time it gets replaced by something new, which has a much more interest for.
This whole idea is very similar to what BitTorrent is, just even more decentralized, and in order to work the needed protocols and tools need to be implemented.
And the good thing is this whole stuff could run on the back of existing TCP/IP architecture.