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The Internet Is 'Built Wrong'
An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."
Does that translate to "owned by the big media cartels"?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
404 ERROR ...
PAGE NOT FOUND
Secure information stolen
Have a nice day.
SHIT! This internet is not secure!
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
If it's better, surely everyone will migrate?
Okay, so a guy who works for Twitter a crash prone, non-scaling application, says that the internet is "built wrong", where one of the examples of wrong is scaling. He goes on to list a few specific apps that he thinks are good example of "wrong" like IP4 and SMTP, which won out against better designed (but strangely unmentioned) alternatives because of wacky market stuff, which, again, not described.
No one who knows anything about the Internet would say that it was perfect. It's not even close. There are a lot of places where unholy cludges exist and are perpetuated because it's a lot easier to live with them than it is to try and change everything that depends on them. Things like, for example, Twitter.
Sure there were alternatives, but they were all either patent-encumbered, or hard to deploy, or too complex to easily develop for. They died. It's called competition. TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time. No, not perfect, but pretty damn good none-the-less.
It's very easy to sit back today and say, "Wow it could have been so much better!" But that is armchair crap at the best of times...I'd sneer if Vint Cerf said it. Coming from someone who demonstrably can't do better, and can't even be bothered to champion a specific alternative...That's as pointless and lacking in content as most of the crap that comes through his crappily coded service.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Van Jacobson, an award-winning specialist in networking to whom the Internet owes its continued existence, gave a talk at Google in 2006 outlining a content-centric approach to networking. Jacobsonâ(TM)s approach leverages wide distribution of data across a variety of devices and media, while baking in security and simplifying the development model for networked applications.
If the majority of Internet usage continues to be about content, an approach like Jacobsonâ(TM)s would be not just prudent, but necessary. You neednâ(TM)t do more than attempt to watch a streaming video on a busy office LAN or oversubscribed DSL circuit to understand that even the best-served markets for Internet connectivity are struggling to keep up with demand for networked content. Add to this that providing adequate security models for such content is a virtual impossibility on todayâ(TM)s Internet, and the need for a better approach is even clearer.
When Jacobson says things should be focused on content, I think all he means is that you should ask for content and the internet should be able to find it using many different ways (IP, VPN, zeroconf, proxies, you name it). That's what he means by that stupid buzzword "content-centric." And that's not going to solve anything! Everything else he preaches sounds like disseminating content once from New York to Seattle so that when an Oregon resident wants to read the Wall Street Journal they don't make 8 hops across the country for every article. You move the data once closer to the consumer and then you have less network usage.
I may be misinformed but how is this any different than a Content Delivery Network (CDN)? I believe these were all the rage years ago (look at the commercial list at the bottom of the article). They are nothing new. So are you proposing that the internet have these built into them to increase efficiency and network usage? Wouldn't it just be easier to let people pay for these services like we've been doing? Oh no, my bandwidth is being ate up and people on the other side of the country are experiencing huge latency! Time to fork out a monthly fee to a CDN, I guess. It'll be more expensive to host a large site but nothing some ads couldn't take care of--free market to the rescue.
I'm sick of people that get up on a soapbox and rip apart a good idea because it's not perfect. Bitch bitch bitch IPv4 has been broken from the start. Well, duh, do you think IPv6 is any less flawed? There's still a limit, who cares if it's 10 or 10,000 years in the future because it's going to have to be dealt with at some point!
This article really is a piece of work. A man who works on the API of something that thrives on "a broken internet" bashing said internet and pointing at others to dream up ideas to fix what he thinks is wrong. All I see is griping, not a single original solution to these problems. Yeah, I'm sorry consumers don't have the same priorities and requirements that you do but, well, that's why you're going to see a technology like Windows 98 triumph over Linux. Align yourself with your user or consumer and you'll start to understand things.
My work here is dung.
So was a 1932 Ford. So were the highways in 1932. So was an analog computer in 1959.
The only thing wrong about the internet is that it has become obsessed with money rather than information. Technical issues will be worked out over time.
Free Martian Whores!
Film at 11!
The internet wasn't designed to be used the way it is being used today anyway. So, you keep finding shortcomings and try to work your way around. SMTP has problems? Well here use some PGP and *some* of the problems are taken care of. Most things work in an evolutionary way anyway.
This is very ironic coming from a web-2.0 junkie who captains a site that is *constantly* having outages.
I think this may be semantics, but the Internet was not built wrong, it was *used* wrong. The original design perfectly met the needs of the time. Expectations change, and all we are seeing is that under our *present* needs the system can bend in some areas, and break in others. If we could go back and "fix" it we would do it a lot differently, of course. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
I, for one, think it was put together pretty well. It's up to us to keep it working, the internet is always ready for re-invention.
HTTP and JavaScript on TCP/IP over IPV4 is "not the best it could be"?
Wow, I'm fascinated by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Does he, pray tell, offer a practical means to fix the problem?
No? I'm shocked. And I didn't even need to RTFA to figure that one out.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The only thing wrong with Twitter is that it has too many users. The way to fix it is to stop using it.
I have found nothing useful in twitter. This is not the revelation that will change my mind.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I work for Twitter and now somebody other than my mom may listen to me! Twitter is important damnit!
The Internet is just a big packet-switched network. What does he want? Circuit switched networks? Even the telephone networks are switching over to packet core.
let me get this straight
twitter?! twitter redefined Fail when it comes to how to run large sites/service
they should be the last people to listen on this subject
Because at 2^32-1 addresses it simply stops. We are running out of ipv4 and there is only one real solution. Adopt ipv6. Unfortunately there is some extreme prejudice again ipv6 especially here at Slashdot. And if somehow a contingent of techies is against it, the spread of ipv6 will be slowed down due to non-adoption.
Wake up people, we are running out of addresses and time. Don't settle for half-baked NAT, adopt ipv6. Whine to your ISP and to your boss that it is absolutely neccesairy to ipv6.
That or pray for best. And stack some canned soup and shotguns.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Many systems that have grown in an organic or semi-organic fashion are non-optimal (like, for example, most people you know and every decision ever rendered by a committee).
With something as complex and "live" as the Internet, process is more important than paradigm: the real question is how to optimize from the current live state, rather than mumbling pointlessly about how it should've had better roots.
Shoulda but didna. So, let's move on.
Also, I tried to send this guy a tweet but all I got was a message saying, "I'm sorry, a problem has occured; please reload the page."
Wanker.
These stories are free but worth money.
He quotes Alan Kay:
"HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that understands its formats... You don't need a browser, if you followed what this Staff Sergeant in the Air Force knew how to do in 1961. You just read [data] in. It should travel with all the things that it needs, and you don't need anything more complex than something like X Windows."
Whoa.
I'm not sure which is worse; the idea of every screen being rendered on a server and then piped over to the user, or every interaction is an object being sent with its data, which seems like a security nightmare.
besides don't most of us download, say, the browser anyway? Kind of a boot strap thing.
It's kind of like those "enhanced" DVDs then, put in a PC, offer to install some weird ass player...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
This can basically be summarised as "Hindsight is a wonderful thing.....if only we knew then what we know now..."
This spurious argument also equally applies to:
amongst countless other things...
(Oh noes, someone is wrong on the internet)
This article reads like a Ron Paul supporter griping about the evils of government given the efficacy of the invisible hand.
Isn't that cute, programmers pretending they are real engineers, by doing little studies on large systems, while ignoring the failings of their own smaller programs.
IPv6 is an interesting case study. Theoretically better, but largely unadopted. The net benefits cannot be large.
Too many projects have been killed by over-optimizing. And people who say something is impossible should get out of the way of those actually doing it!
Oh, yeah, the way the internet has absolutely nothing to do with cost and technological limitations decades ago and when the internet was born it was a military network and later was generally a tool used between schools, then businesses, and much later just anyone who wanted to use it.
Nothing at all.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
baby steps there alex payne, baby steps. first focus and fix twitter, THEN look to larger projects.
until then, leave it to the big boys. why is this even news on /.?? Must be a slow day.
Thank you for that. It's exactly right.
What he fails to realize is, everything is an incremental, transitional technology. Nobody planned out this current hideous jumble of technologies we call teh intertubez, it started with a simple message protocol on top of a network protocol and evolved, and evolved, and evolved further from its inferior predecessors; at each state incremental improvements happened as necessary.
Web 1.0 was "good enough" for some tasks. But when it wasn't, the technology adapted. It remains is as good as the need requires and the market demands at this moment. Mistakes are culled, successes survive. A giant, electronic petri dish, if you will.
Flash
We all know Flash sucks. But alternatives to it require hiring an engineer.
invisibility
You can draw a picture in PostScript by typing to the interpreter. Then Fontographer came along and that was followed by FreeHand and Illustrator and then Quark and InDesign. The code became invisible. Where is the Quark and InDesign tool for the web? Cuz Dreamweaver sure ain't it, especially with how CSS dominates graphic dicussion.
Proprietary Browsing.
Every browser is different and they all suck in different ways. MS has been especially egregious with IE.
TLD
is US centric. Is insufficient. Is a mess.
Squatting
Personally, I would cheerfully put a bullet in the head of every sitename squatter on the planet.
Code
It's code centric. It shouldn't be. It should be design centric. Then we could dump all these expensive programmers and get some work done.
Scalability
covered in the article, still true.
Argh. with the advent of CSS, AJAX, and Web2.0 everything is getting this creepy sameness. It's getting boring. Something's gotta give. Soon.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If I'm to understand you properly, you want the internet to be more trucklike, because the tubes are too long.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
SMTP is a terrible example. Ultimately the users are the ones opening e-mails, getting browser-jacked and their passwords stolen because they don't know what is in front of them. Sure clients were the problem for a while but that "phase" has passed, developers have learned how to mitigate most attacks.
The only thing that is "wrong" fundamentally with the internet is the separation of DNS and the routing protocol.
For all intents and purposes a DNS failure causes a network outage. It also dramatically increases client latency when it is not configured correctly which look like network issues, but are not.
I'm sure when IPv4 was created the notion of mixing both services was unthinkable due to the additional amount of data needed to move names around at layer 2/3. This is no longer the case and we should really try to move away from a central naming system.
On the shoulders of giants we stand.
Any of these ideas of improvement are not new. But neither are they working. And the internet as we know it is working quite well. Far beyond what anyone would have predicted.
Are there things to be fixed? Sure, around every corner. But I'm not going to listen to some guy from some wicked kewl startup in SFO tell me how to do it.
"We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." - David D. Clark, former chair of the IAB
You get to say the internet was "built wrong" as soon as we see your "better" idea run.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
http://www.istwitterdown.com
It's hardly going out on a limb criticizing IPv4 -- it has proven an easy target for going on two decades now, with its weakness apparent to all.
And the switch to IPv6 is happening. Many backbone providers are rolling it out, and it is gaining wider support among mainstream operating systems and applications. The only reason it hasn't been a hastier migration is that NAT really did undermine the necessity for expediency.
ruby and mysql were built wrong. ok, next person blame something else and how these 2 things weren't built wrong.
The original purpose of what was to become the Internet was to survive a nuclear war that disabled large parts of the network.
Of course, things changed over time, notably the size and the commercialization of it. With size, the architecture of the base protocols and the higher-level protocols changed several times, entire applications came and went (USENET is dying in a morass of spam, Gopher was all but killed by the web).
Even its original purpose is no longer served thanks to the disappearance of the "everyone will carry all traffic on request" that came about with commercialization.
The Internet has grown pretty much organically, without direction from a central authority since the 1980s and possibly since the beginning, and it will continue to grow organically in the near future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's all the various internets and their tubes are clogged. Call roto-router.
TFA reminded me of a particular daily WTF.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
Make room for fail whale!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Fuck! The blueprints we used were being held upside down... Alright guys, gut 'er and lets try again! This time someone put like an up arrow on the damned prints so we know if we're doing this right...
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
This guy sounds like the kind of twat who joins our company, bitches about how badly everything's been written, then leaves behind a load of shitty unmaintainable code that's "really clever". And somehow he's in charge at Twitter? Christ.
Built wrong for whom? Those that demand cash for every bit or people that demand freedom of every bit?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I love how 'Anonymous Reader' can comment on how Twitter was built wrong. You show us your service handling something servicing 3 million customers 2 years after launch, then you can lay the smack down.
Not that Payne is exactly insightful or entirely correct. IPv4 is part of a stack comprising most Internet traffic, but it is not a necessary part of the Internet; nor is SMTP.
interesting how the person raising complaints about the lack of reliability in the twitter service is accused of trolling. we don't monkeys at typewriters, we have hipsters with nonfunctional web services blogging.
we were somewhere just out of Barstow when the patent trolls attacked.
It is incorrect IMHO, or at the very least misleading, to suggest that "the Internet is broken" merely because one does not like a couple of the more commonly used protocols. In any discussion of the merits or demerits of the Internet is important to recall the original design goals of the Internet, or those networks which preceded and naturally developed into what we now call the Internet. Although this information is doubtless well known to the members of the Slashdot crowd, it does bear repeating here to rebut the arguments of the "Twit" (pun intended) that the Internet is "built wrong". First and foremost the Internet was built to be redundant and decentralized in the event of failures and second, the general philosophy taken with protocol design was purposefully minimalist (i.e. the simplest thing that could possibly work) with the understanding that the network design would be stack based with increasingly complex and fully featured pieces built on top of and independent of the underlying core protocols. Although there have been minor flaws here and there the Internet as a whole has succeeded beyond perhaps even the wildest expectations of those who have labored both to create it and to perpetuate its existence, a testament to the wisdom and foresight of minimalist protocols and stack based network design which are taken for granted these days but were revolutionary at the time when the work which would become the Internet as we know it was first being done.
Internet protocols and standards were originally implemented for academic use. Decades ago, TCP/IP, SMTP, DNS, and HTTP were created with an implicit assumption of trust between client and server--indeed, between all nodes in the network. The Internet was an exercise in efficient data transfer across a network. It was not designed for spam, or DDoS, or phishing; nor was it designed for shopping, bank account management, or YouTube. That we can do these things now is a reflection of the workarounds that have been developed in the meantime.
Furthermore, hardware at the time of the development of these protocols was not what it is today.
And then, over the course of several years, the monetizing and commercialization of this academic project occurred. ISPs, in order to reach the masses, established an inherently unequal system of access that encouraged consumption of content but discouraged users from hosting it. The solution that has come about in more recent years, with blogs, social networks, and so forth, was to have users submit content and have it hosted by large, ad-revenue based corporations. This has led to serious problems concerning the nature of ownership of information.
And now, we have one of the people running such a site, complaining that the underlying model on which their company relies is "built wrong" because it doesn't suit their needs. Well, isn't that rich? It smacks of willful ignorance of not only what the Internet is, but more importantly, the original design principles (egalitarian, neutral) that the Internet embodied.
The pace of technology is rapid. History, however, is long, and the danger I see here is not that you have one idiot who hasn't learned his history lesson, but that as time goes by, more and more people and corporations and politicians will forget why the Internet was originally built. That's why we have companies against Net neutrality. They have forgotten or ignored history. They took something free and made billions off of it, and they want to milk it for all it's worth. And therein lies the real problem, because when you forget where something came from, you become disconnected from the past and blind to the future.
Of course the Internet doesn't scale to its projected size, and of course SMTP is insufficiently secure. This has nothing to do with the worse-is-better design, though. It's just that the Internet existed before any of those requirements were even conceived.
Nobody thought, "Hmm, you know, we have a requirement for electronic mail to be secure, but that's too hard, so we'll just skip it". Certainly no one thought "We're going to need more than 2^32 Internet nodes, but that's too hard, so we won't do it. Instead, the use to which IPv4 and SMTP have been put to have resulted in newly discovered requirements which were simply not there originally.
he also said
MIT approach being another name for better/lisp model of development.
This leads him to say
I intend (at some point) to learn lisp so this is not an attack on this language, as I believe learning it will make me a better programmer. As for the Alex Payne I choose the great programmers who have worked on TCP/IP etc over the past 40 years, than him.
A secretary of the internet! (http://xkcd.com/494)
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Isn't that a good thing? No Twitter, no terrorists...
What?
Nothing that dares to stand the test of time ever wins. As soon as you add a zero or three to the requirements, any tech becomes badly built.
The guy is a perfect twat for old geezers to come down hard with some hard history lessons.
A web 2.0 lesson: Shut the fuck up. ;-)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
#1 Every Email program requires the user to log in with a user ID and password before sending email. SMTP is too insecure and needs to be rewritten.
#2 The ISP will create an OpenID or some other universal account for the user, with the option of using up to 25 nicknames or handles instead of the real name for privacy concerns. Each OpenID will be assigned a number to keep track of the use.
#3 IPV6 will be used instead of IPV4, but there will be a portal for IPV4 users to use IPV6 IPs as a proxy via their ISP to get on the Internet 2.0 if they need to get on it.
#4 All domain names will still be owned but the web server and email hosting will only be on the Internet 2.0 if they meet with security guidelines to verify who is sending email via user ID and password. This will be to fight spam.
#5 Internet Use will be changed so that terrorist web sites, and web sites about building bombs or suicide or illegal activities will not be on the Internet 2.0 but instead be on another network called Dangernet that has to pay more money to access and has no privacy each user has to be identified for security reasons.
#6 CMS and Forum and Blog software has to have moderators or a karma system or some way to deal with trolls and flamewars. There needs to be a universal code of conduct for the Internet 2.0 but Dangernet will not have such rules.
#7 Internet 2.0 will discourage the use of pop-up ads and will fine companies for having malware infected advertising that infects user's systems. They will be fined $100 for each malware infection with the funds going to pay for repair of the Internet.
#8 Proxies will require a user ID and password to use, may not always be free, but that way they can track who is using a proxy in case of abuse. Dangernet has no such rules.
#9 The Untied Nations or some other International group will create an organization that polices the Internet 2.0 to make sure that Human Rights and Civil Rights are not being violated and there is no harassment. Warnings will be given out, and each ISP will have a TOS and if the user gets too many warnings their account will be disabled until they agree to the TOS and agree to stop the harassment or hacking or spamming or malware writing.
#10 The Internet 2.0 will create new standards for file exchange using BitTorrent but for commercial software will require TrialPay or accepting Internet offers to pay for downloading commercial software or music or videos for free.
#11 Each ISP will have a virtual machine that runs either Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX that allows their users to log in via a user name and password and use a virtual machine to get on the Internet to help protect their machine from malware.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
He did invent it after all.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
correct me, if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that he thinks the internet is bad, because it isn't TV?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Yeah, we all knew the day ArpaNet was first fired up that we'd hit 4 billion connected devices (or more with NAT) so quickly that why were we even bothering with 32-bit IPv4 on our 32-bit mainframes and 8-bit home systems. We all knew we were doing it all wrong from the beginning, but did so anyway just so this person could get his 900 seconds of fame in 2008 telling us what we already knew.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...is that it's modular. Protocols can be swapped out at your leisure and replaced with others that do the same thing in a better way.
It's why we have the network architecture separated into layers. Higher layers don't care what carries them as long as they're delivered. Lower layers don't care what they're carrying, they just deliver it. If the Internet is broken, fix it.
This smells like part one of a multi-part argument in favor of eliminating net neutrality. Part of a concerted attack on best-effort and the end-to-end principle.
Fry: So you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams? ...
Leela: Of course.
Leela: Didn't you have ad's in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
1. You don't get modded up by asking.
My entire modding strategy revolves around searching for the phrase "I know I am going to be modded xxxx for this, but.." and then meeting their expectations.
he's a twatter?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Internet is built very well. It's been around for a very long time, covers most of the globe, and is able to evolve over time.
If you eliminate all of his unnecessary hyperbole and name dropping, you'll quickly find out that his is really unhappy with the current state of web applications and is frustrated that people aren't investing enough effort into improving the situation because "it works good enough."
So he is either frustrated from the lack of alternatives in web based application, or from people being too satisfied with the current offerings to try something new (and maybe his alternative).
Or maybe he trying to blame the Internet for Twitter's problem. ;)
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I hate it when people say 'we're running out of IPv4 addresses'. We have already run out of them. All the addresses left are either behind corporate bars, reserved, or too damn expensive due to rarity. Almost everyone I know is behind a sucky NAT of some sort or another. And we all hate it. It gets in the way with everything you do, especially when you want to play a network game or some such. And we're all getting that horrible shit for no good technical reason. I frankly think that at this point the law should step in, because if we're going to wait for the ISP's to get stuff done when they feel like it, it's never going to happen.
wow, and here i've conscientiously avoided those trite phrases. i know i'd be modded insightful for this, but unfortunately, ac...
Isn't it interesting with all these people stepping up saying that the internet is designed wrong. IPv4 is faulty by design. Etc. Where where they 30 years ago when the protocols where designed? Why didn't they complain then? And why aren't they leading the way to actually implement stuff that runs under IPv6 for example? No it so much easier sitting in their armchair shouting "I could have done it better!" instead of actually rolling up their sleeves and start fixing things.
The ARPANET was the logical development of having very few large and powerful research computers in the country and many researchers dispersed all over the place that wanted to use them. It was also designed to handle the decentralization - multiple architectures, latency, etc. It then grew into a full fledged communications network, where today, few people can imagine having to go to their local library to look at Books in Print rather than simply doing an Amazon search.
Nothing spells success like being called "wrong" because some peripheral task runs sub-optimally.
A content-centric networking design would pre-define the types and modes of content that would go on the network.
So, with "all" due respect, Alex, fuck you.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
security and trust models are philosophically and technologically joined at the hip with command and control models
you build a supersafe, 100% trustworthy internet, and you build the internet that beijing and tehran love
the internet is a wild and wacky and dangerous place. and it is also free. sure, there is the tragedy of the commons, but i'd much rather wade through GNA and /b/tard comments than deal with the Internet Security Office. which is what security and trust models empower
don't knock what you got until you lose it, and forever more lament the loss of the golden years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
By holding on to seemingly useless strands of proteins and harboring an entirely different life form it's been supporting for millions of years, the animal cell requires far more energy than it would if it had been developed in a leaner, meaner, more content-centric way. Oh, wait, both of these things are an example of natural composition and a tendency towards messy, gradient, whatever-works-at-the-moment steps in complexity.
"The enemy knows the system" --Claude Shannon
Thats because, on the internet, as well as everywhere else in life, an "adequate" solution is good enough if a "better" or "best" solution is more work...until that adequate solution breaks.
The pot called the kettle black.
One of the best things about blogs like this is I immediately see the avatar of a douchebag and click to the next page without reading any random drivel.
This idiot is ... well an idiot.
The internet wasn't built in its current form!
It evolved into what we see today. The equipment used to build ARPA-net and such networks that became the internet was never supposed to be the high speed, huge subscriber numbers, massive number of application, porn-delivery system that we have today. It was made to exchange simple data. That was it.
And you can't just UPGRADE the internet (pssst... its not like in southpark and its just a big Linksys WRT54G router... really... honest!) Its a lot of moving parts.
I hate it when people with ZERO knowledge and less history try to say something is broken because their little app doesn't work correctly. Here's a hint... write cleaner, more efficient networking code!!! You'd be amazed how well that works (too bad this moron seems incapable of that).
Stupid should be painful!
-Lord Shadow
Since i'm in a good mood , here you go.
You're doing it wrong!
When IPV4 came along, it was considered way more than enough. The scope of the project changed as things grew. For the 40000 users of the internet when IPV4 came along, it was colossal, way too big, and almost a burden. As for security, there are a lot of measures that can be implemented to remain secure. Security is a constantly evolving thing. Crimminals can develop strategies to defeat any security system, as they have done continuously in the past millennia. Personally, I think twitter McBoob is all wet.
Oh, I forgot; he uses Twitter.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
When IPv4 doesn't work any more, then you will see more IPv6. Some people plan ahead, and are implementing IPv4, some people deal with network failures as they go along instead, and they will adopt IPv6 when it becomes necessary. This is largely how we got the internet as well. Things work until they don't. We change things when making them work using old ways is harder than changing to new ways.
As many people have said, unless this guy has a really nice way of improving the internet that is easy for people to do, he isn't really saying anything useful.
> API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne
Yes Newbie. He clearly has no appreciation of the history or how things came to be.
It's not like TCP/IP was the only choice, many other network technologies tried to become the Internet and failed. TCP/IP won out because it was the first to work and was open enough to work across all platforms. Novell, IBM, Microsoft all had their Networking technologies that they tried to push out TCP/IP with and almost completely did for a while with LAN's. But that all fell apart when companies want to move to WAN's and scaling up, TCP/IP was the only thing what work for both LAN and WAN. People forget the large push ATM to the desktop had, where they tried to replace TCP/IP with ATM. ATM's strength coming from preexisting telecoms switches for large voice WAN's was the only thing that supported the high bandwidth fiber for a long time. But TCP/IP just tunneled right over ATM, where ATM was too sensitive to tunnel, and was limited in what medium it can operate over. (No ATM over 2400 Baud Modems for example!)
In the end it's about Evolution, it's not some engineer or any group of humans that get to make the final decision. Call it the market, but people will choose what ever get's there job done best for them. This includes many factors that engineers never consider, legacy gear, awareness of terminology, software support, reliability, cost, platform support, open-ness of standard, multi-vendor support, cost of HW/SW. Maturity of technology, what is the TOP and and BOTTOM end.
By this I mean TCP/IP can run on a PIC Microchip and a billion Dollar super computer. It can run over radio, fiber, satellite, carrier pigeon(RFC 1149) even.
What ever takes it's place will have to be that flexible, where every light bulb can have it's own network address and still support TerraBit networks.
This is no small task, the reality is IP is flexible, so much so that you can run other protocols through it or it though other protocols. As such it will most likely be around forever and just have stuff layered over and under it. Like VPN's, PPPoE, RTP/RTSP.
Anyone is free to start creating there own IPv6 or what ever other kind of network and selling it, or running it in parallel with the internet or even over the IPv4/6 Internet.
So at this point to think your going to convince everyone to drop IPv4/6 and try something immature that is untried and untested it just unrealistic and ignorant to suggest.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
The Internet Is 'Wrong'
The 'Internet' was built in the 1960s with costly materials and for RESEARCH only. It wasn't built WRONG, it was built with no concept of what the future of computing and networking would really look like. I mean any dipshit can look back and say 'DAMN, why'd we build it like that?'. I mean, obviously TWITTER is a PERFECT piece of software and has been from the very first line of code. There has never been a need to rewrite any of it
What a tool.
Pax Vobiscum
See they should have used something more malleable, like cables, instead of these rigid tubes.
But seriously, I have used the internet since I was a Freshman in High School, back in '95. Over the last 13 years, I have noted only improvements. And given such a history of success, I think it's a bit too late to claim the design was wrong from the start.
The minute I hear that from people I stop listening. The "grass is always greener" is usually from people who just want to argue theoretical mumbo-jumbo and not actually fix anything. On the scale of the internet, starting over is not-realistic.
I work for a major telecom provider. There was a huge engineering push a few years ago to go back and make sure everything was ported to work on v6. It was just hype...ipv6 hype keeps resurging...real demand keeps not happening. Our customers, even in asia, don't give a crap about ipv6 right now. When customers start caring (with their dollars), then providers can do more.
I'll admit I didn't RTFA, just the blurb, so I'm mostly responding to the "ipv4 is wrong." What's the business case to upgrade a ton of things to v6 that don't need to be? And feeling better about the technological state of the internet isn't worth a trillian dollars btw.
We already had this argument, except back then we called it the metric system, and we are still using these totally suboptimal things called pounds and pints and yards. You'll get over it.
We're just trying to forcibly mould it into an application is wasn't designed to be; that's a network with several billion nodes. If having more nodes is essential then that will be a feature of the replacement. A feature of the current internet is that it exists. This is an important feature!
both.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I was musing about this lately. I'm in an Eastern European country, and I just got an US hosting. I don't need very fast pings, just webapps and a couple of sites. It's starting to down on me that just because yahoo is also in US doesn't mean my sites will be as responsive. Apparently it costs a lot of money to make things work like they should.
The internet was built wrong enough to host Slashdot ;-)
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -- Winston Churchill
Substitute "the Internet" for "democracy" and "networking" for "government" and you have a pretty good response to Payne...
Read my blog.
Why does everyone try to divert attention from his claim that the internet does not scale well, to attacks on his own works?
If his claims have no merit, refute the claims. Do not attempt to instead discredit the source.
"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools.
But that the lightning ain't distributed right."
I agree that Internet Email is useless but I have no idea how to fix it other than gathering up all the worlds spammers and rocketing them up into the vacuume of space. Massive trust chains and PKI don't solve the basic problem.. (Its sometimes useful for people you don't know/trust to contact you or ask permission to contact you)
So yes it could be improved but no it does not mean lots and lots of people still wouldn't be sending you crap.
I would cringe to see what kind of monstrosity the Internet would become if it were designed by the IETF today from scratch. I have a feeling some of those April 1 RFCs with the XML IP encodings may actually look sane compared to what the outcome of such an endeavour would look like.
We've seen people go off and invent their own NG protocols which get stuck trying to establish trust/QOS within the network rather than at the edges where it is now/belongs just so they can enforce nonsensical draconian bullshit they think operators need/should have.
I mean IPv6 was started how many years ago and somehow local autoconfiguration / MAC and assigning every atom in the universe with its own address was more important than the basic need for human readable IP addressing, effeciency (>50% of all Internet packets have 40byte payloads!!) and preventing excessive fragmentation of the address space by steady thoughtful pressure on allocation.
The address is structure concept was stupid nonsense from the very beginning and we all knew it.
An extra byte is all that was really needed and now look at the crap that we have. Even with string compression and any hope for reasonable header compression IPv6 still sucks.
And now that address space is scarce we have morons saying that the reserved class E block (roughly 1/16th of the Internet ~268million IPs) should be marked private because some IPv4 stacks can't route to from that network without a trivial patch.
Anyone who proclaims the Internet sucks and they can do better is welcomed to try...but it seems to be the case that most people I see saying that have ideas that suck more than the current state of the network.
It is my view the basic foundation of the network (stupid core / smart edge) is fundementally correct.
He talks about software problems, and says the internet is built wrong.
We're using the internet wrong.
Scratch that, most people are idiots, and are using the internet wrong. Every problem he lists has been solved.
The internet is BUILT wrong in the infrastructure sense (and the fact that it's a damned switching network, but that's my personal beef).
"TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time."
The lesson I see from this is that it wouldn't take that long to transition to newer/better protocols (if they were developed). I'm not sure if TCP/IP needs to be replaced, but we could certaintly use a replacement for our current http/html/browser suite that could be designed from the ground up to support web apps without any kludges.
Okay, I"ve never heard of "Worse is better". The author uses it disparagingly, saying "an inferiorly designed system or piece of software may be more successful than its better-designed competitor".
But the Wikipedia article says it means Simplicity > Correctness > Consistency > Completeness, as opposed to an alternate valuing of Correctness > Consistency > Completeness > Simplicity. In other words, doing a few things right and easy is better than doing everything consistently.
I challenge his belief that doing less is inferior to doing more. Stepping away from computers for a moment, I can't think of any device that would be improved by piling on features and would not be improved by doing its key task more efficiently. I guess he's saying that the Internet isn't complex enough and can't do enough different things.
I'll start by confessing I'm no network engineer, but as a user, some things I'd like to see (all of which, I think, IPv6 implements?):
Trivial encryption for any type of data / all network apps required to support encryption:
It bugs me just how many network apps, from Instant Messaging clients, VoIP, etc, which arguably should have encryption, don't. Recently, I was looking into online telephony providers, and I like the idea of using a standard-based provider which uses SIP (something like a Vonage, Gizmo, Fonosip, etc), but as far as I can tell, right now *none* of the SIP telephony providers support encryption (Gizmo5 does for Internet-only calls, but not Net-to-POTS), which is pretty mind-boggling to me; so, I'll probably just go with Skype, even though I'd prefer an open standard).
Granted, not every application *needs* encryption, and in some cases, the performance overhead could be bad for the intended traffic (things like video-games, live broadcast-streamed video or audio [things like TV shows, web-seminars, etc, which maybe the person streaming the data doesn't need encrypted because it's for a general audience and is not private], etc), but crypto should be much more pervasive, so that if I *want* to turn it on in any app, I can (maybe I want to run a secure Quake server and can live with the performance degradation). I think putting it into the protocol stack could make this possible?
I think IPv6 does this with the IPSec concept, doesn't it, where all the implementation of encryption is done in the protocol stack, so that applications don't have to individually link in crypto libraries, but instead, the app basically sets a flag to true or false whether the connection should be encrypted?
The end of price-gouging for multiple public addresses:
I really think it's *stupid* to have to pay $5 or $10 per month, or whatever, for a *number*. Numbers should be free. There's an infinite supply, so the law of supply and demand should make them free. I'm already paying for Internet service, so I shouldn't have to pay more for addresses. Of course, right now, because there is a limited supply of IP addresses, you do end up paying for them (after the first) because there *aren't* an infinite (or effectively so) number of addresses.
Having a public static IP address makes things like direct connections from one person to another for things like VoIP, file transfers, VNC/RDP, games, etc much easier. Yes, there are schemes to work around NAT nowadays, but almost all of them require the use of some third-party node which *does* have a public IP address.
I sometimes hear people raise as a would-be counter argument that NAT increases security, but not really more than a simple firewall on your cable/dsl modem or WAP would do. The problem with NAT is that it is a bit more difficult, if you have multiple users behind the NAT, to all receive inbound traffic on the same port (which might happen for certain applications; e.g if you are hosting a LAN-party or you just have multiple gamers living in the same house).
Secure DNS:
This, I don't think, actually requires IPv6 (but might be made easier with IPSec?); I think it can, and will eventually, be done with IPv4, but it's still an issue with the current Internet. I'd like to always use a *trusted* DNS server no matter what network I'm roaming on. That is, always use my ISP's DNS server, or my own DNS server, instead of the DNS server of whatever WiFi network I'm currently on. I could try that without secure DNS, but there's not much guarantee that a man-in-the-middle isn't intercepting the DNS requests en-route to my 'trusted' DNS server, so I can't really trust the replies.
Email origin forging:
It's entirely too easy to forge the "From:" address on emails on the current Internet. Yes, you can use signing/encryption software to get around this (PGP/GPG, or the SSL certificat
A spokesperson for Twitter made a public announcement that despite the rumors, their problems were definitely NOT due to Ruby or Rails.
Try to keep up with the news, please. Or at least try to separate the vicious false rumors from fact.
Hey, how long has Twitter's IM functionality been down, anyway?
STFU, Mr. Payne. Other people have managed to handle high-volume IM. One of them even works with Twitter, which makes you look like a dumbass.
Of course it's "built wrong". Like most software, its outgrown it's original intent and things have been bolted on to it.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I think the scale problems for the internet are more related to monopolies and anti-competitive behavior from cable + phone providers than technology issues.
Sure, we can look to change how content is being distributed to try to be more efficient. However, this is also a problem fiber to the residence would solve. As other countries push forward to get faster access to the homes, the US relies on the good will of phone + cable companies to retrofit fiber.
The problem is that they have no good reason to do so. They make money by controlling a constrained resource (your physical connection) as well as having a strong lobbying machine. They have no good incentive to compete.
It is good to see Verizion trying to make progress on this with their VIOS service but unless some of these operators get more serious about competing with each other much of the country will continue living in the dark ages in regard to network access.
What does Al Gore have to say about this? He invented that damned thing.
There are many problems with the current architecture of the internet, but if there's something that the original engineers got right was the idea of putting the cables properly in place, and letting the users worry about what's transmitted over them.
Some things could be better, of course, nobody anticipated that someday there'd be more net-enabled devices on a typical household than actual human beings, which led us to the IPv4 address problem, and in my not-very-knowledgeable opinion I think that some crypto being part of email from the beginning would've only been a good thing. But dammit, yesterday we were transmitting text and images, today it's music and movies, tomorrow we could be transmitting gzipped thoughts for all we know and it shouldn't matter one bit to the underlying architecture.
But my personal, pet change? IPv8. Two reasons, mostly: one, eight is a prettier number than six, and two, I dream of a day where even my shirt can have it's own unique IP address. And hey, if we're changing it anyways, we may as well increase our namespace by a couple extra orders of magnitude, right?
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
it's not built wrong it's used wrong. if you look at it's original intent of sharing scientific documents and papers it's perfectly suitable and appropriate.
Want to know a secret : ALL OF EARTH BIOLOGY is "built wrong"
Every cell alive today is STUCK with certain long ago 'decisions', such as the codon : amino acid pairings. There are some disadvantages to this degenerate genetic code.
It's effectively impossible for an organism to evolve away from certain ancient 'choices', whether those choices were made by random chance or by God.
I ain't so sure that it was built wrong deliberately. But certainly the Internet could have been designed a lot better from ground zero if the designers didn't have to anticipate a nuclear war.
How about they fix twitter before they try and fix the rest of the internet.
I think the problem with those "the internet is insecure" people is that they have totally wrong assumptions.
The internet is strictly as secure as any other network can we which is not secure at all. No network can guarantee you that you actually talk to the machine you want to talk to, or that any other machine is the one which it claims to be, or that your conversation will not be intercepted or modified. The phone network claims that security, but we all know that it's not true when an attacker works together with the phone company.
So essentially the Internet has tought us one very important thing: Never trust networks! You just cannot trust them, because the owner of the network can compromise all of your data.
But this isn't a problem anymore. We have cryptography. Today we can encrypt any communication. We can have virtual persons whom we can securely determine their identity. (we cannot securely connect them to real persons, but I don't see any point in doing)
People also don't see the fraud especially possible on "secure" networks. Think of the whole "premium rate" hustles. People surely loose more money that way than with hypothetical problems on the Internet.
It's in a way like the credit card system. It's secure, because it's completely insecure. There is only one simple, but powerfull security mechanism. On the Internet it's cryptography, on credit cards it's that you can call back any purchase you made. So you only need to check your credit card bills and everything is secure.
However there is no solution against human stupidity.
That's too funny! /. really needs a 'funny/insightful/ironic/ mod.
Is wonderful thing and always 20/20.
Back in the day when IPv4 was conceived I doubt any of the designers envisaged the internet growing into the behemoth it has become, SMTP and other technologies where/are fine when used correctly - the main thing the originators of those technologies are guilty of is underestimating the ability of humans to take a good thing and screw it up for the rest of us.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Actually, the funny thing is that Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 wasn't even supposed to be about technology as such. And the inventor of that buzzword still insists that it isn't, long after the Grinch... err... the marketing bulshitters stole it and ran away with it.
Web 2.0 -- and by contrast Web 1.0 -- wasn't about techno-fetishism, but about techno-utopianism. It has nothing to do with PHP or any other particular technology.
The basic idea of Web 2.0 was that if you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, they're still monkeys. But if you interconnect them and let them write and edit each other's content, now that's teh nirvana and age of enlightenment. Give the users wikis instead of writing your own content. (I'm sure you'll be thrilled to discover that your product was made from baby seals and your CEO blows goats, but, hey, if the users wrote it, it must be true. 'Cause emergent collective intelligence is never wrong;) Have forums. Let the users tag your content instead of categorizing it or any other automated way of finding it. (I'm sure the tags on Slashdot would be sooo much more useful to find an article than full-text search;) Etc.
At a basic level, none of those _really_ needs PHP or JavaScript or anything. You could make a primitive almost-wiki back in the day, by just giving the users FTP access to the site and letting them edit and re-upload the HTML files.
Anyway, in true zealot fashion, where no price is too high for his utopia if someone else pays it, this was packed in a further lie: that, see, that's also the path to making the big bucks and verily everyone will beg to give you their money if you only had a wiki. I guess you can't really preach stuff like, "why you should blow your money to give us our free, collaborative online utopia", so it had to be repacked as, "you could be the next Google if you do!"
No, seriously. If you listen to him, Tim O'Reilly looked at what companies survived the dot-com bubble and what were their defining characteristics. And somehow he managed to completely miss the fact that it's those who had a business plan, silly. E.g., that why Google thrived was because Google became the damn best ad provider. Nah, what he saw is that it was those with wikis, and bittorrent and other collaborative stuff. That's the way to the big bucks.
So he envisioned and preached a DotCom Bubble 2.0... er... Web 2.0 golden age, where everyone has those, and someone gives them money for nothing for doing it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's Payne! Whack the sucker!
Then I will continue hiding from you in stories you've already posted in!
The pure reason why the Internet is the way it is today, is simply because the current 'inferior' internet provides more economic opportunities than a utopian internet.
If the internet was security aware, spammers, trojans, phishers, etc... won't exist and this would effectively kill Symantec, Network Associates, etc...
I am quite sure that if the original authors of IP knew in advance what Internet would look like in 2008, they would do some stuff differently. On the other hand, as they had no chance of predicting future, they could only assume what might happen in distant future. If they had tried to implement that, we would probably get some over-engineered system (e.g. something like X-Window) but still in year 2008 our real problems would not be solved. So I am quite ok with their work, thank you very much.
No sig today.
Now I understand why the tubes got clogged.
Dear Alex
Learn some simple facts about IPv4:
1. You more than likely need a routable IPv4 address if you're running services to client devices, but even then you can do some stuff with NAT-ing to hide multiple servers behind one real IP address.
2. If you're a client device connected through an ISP (like most devices on the Internet), then you don't need a real IP address but can make do with one in the reserved address range behind a NAT router.
3. IPv4 address shortage is nothing to do with the actual number of unique addresses but more to do with how those addresses have been allocated to large organisations that probably don't use anywhere near all of the allocation they have.
4. The only real failing of IPv4 is that there is no built-in layer 2 or 3 encryption in the IP stack - but that's like saying a Boeing 747 with jet engines flies faster than a Douglas DC-3 with turboprops and ignoring the fact that the former was built 30 years later (or so) than the latter.
So please tell us geeks something new or interesting, not the stuff we all learnt in "TCP/IP for Dummies 101".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
good designer and a bad coder: `This so called code is just "KILL ALL HUNAMS!" cut and pasted 60 million times. We'll have to redo the entire coding phase!"
bad designer and average coder: print "Kill all humans!"
bad designer and a truly excellent coder: SkyNet.
Take your pick. (Who am I kidding, SkyNet is way cool!)
There has _never_ been anything "built right the first time" with information technology.
Just about everything in existence has been started with a target audience size and feature set that got a lot bigger. If it works you try to scale and extend it as the audience grows. However when scaling/extending it usually you have to make some compromises to avoid starting over from scratch.
The result (after much expansion) is almost always less than optimal, often very soon after initial implementation, but still does the job. Once it's no longer doing the job and can't be expanded, you rebuild.
If IPv6 takes over and all the hardware gets replaced, eventually we'll stress it out and need to expand it again. If not the protocol, at least the hardware.
This is a pretty simple and self-evident fact to most of us... hindsight is always 20/20 and it's real easy to critique stuff that was designed 35 years ago for a very limited audience, just because it doesn't do the job for the entire world and all the applications that didn't exist back then.
Where was this guy in 1973? He could have saved us a lot of trouble by telling Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn what they were doing wrong ; )
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
The alternative to "worse is better" is the "MIT method". Which is to design it perfectly and implement it perfectly. He's welcome to try.
With enough help, he might have a working replacement for the current internet in about thirty years.
He should be on AOL instead.
----- :)
I hope y'all realize that was an insult albeit insightful insult
You can't handle the truth.
aaaaaah wasnt he one of the people that jumped on another buzz, 'ruby' ? and when the thing didnt scale according to their own size, they started experiencing problems ? now he is expecting us to get into that new 'buzz' -> internet is built wrong, it should be 'content centric' - whatever the f@ck that is.
he is just another of the buzzword crowd. just ignore him and youll be alright.
Read radical news here
This is quite unsual. The summary is fairly accurate, but the author of TFA apparently didn't RTFA. He has totally missed the point of Worse is Better, which one thinks he would have gotten if he'd read to the end:
The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance.
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
The idea is that you don't sweat doing the Right Thing if it is really difficult to do, as that will actually hamper acceptence. What good does Payne's perfect Internet do for anyone if nobody but him has a node on it? Over time, our old imperfect internet will get incrementally fixed so that it is almost as keen (if not moreso), and everybody will be using it. If things didn't work this way, we'd all be gaming on Amiga's today instead of PC's.
you can put C++ on assembler and run a webserver with it, you can run a C++ coded compiler (PHP) run through that C++ on assembler, but if you keep on putting sh@t on sh@t like putting grouped functions of C++ coded compiler (PHP) on top of a webserver that is coded with C++ on assembler, you will INEVITABLY get scaling issues. there is a limit of higher level you can do to do stuff. and tradeoff in between ease of development and the capability of the environment.
probably any future sh@t on more sh@t stuff (even higher level stuff), leave aside ruby, will experience same scaling issues.
Read radical news here
the fact that it is put in a funny way doesnt obscure the truth lies within it. please arrange its moderation accordingly.
Read radical news here
4. Profit ?
Great. And now we have its inventor trying to fix the environment?!?
4. Funny mods don't get you any karma
-- dnl
Somebody has to pay the electric bill...
Not necessarily.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Users will be so conditioned to accepting mediocrity that even iterative improvements will seem like miracles. Technologists are then rewarded as miracle-workers for delivering the bare minimum.
A few paragraphs earlier the author made a better point, that users are the cause of mediocrity in their own software, via their demands of software that's so easy a caveman could use it.
In a keynote speech in 1997, Alan Kay affirmed the success of Arpanet, the Internet's predecessor, on which he worked. Yet almost as an aside, he decimated our conceptions of the worth of standard Web technologies, such as HTML: "HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that understands its formats... You don't need a browser, if you followed what this Staff Sergeant in the Air Force knew how to do in 1961. You just read [data] in. It should travel with all the things that it needs, and you don't need anything more complex than something like X Windows."
All the other paragraphs of buzzwords and euphemisms like "content-centric" are just fig leaves for the fact that the less users understand about the tools they use, the more those tools have to be dumbed-down. That always includes a cost in functionality, either in versatility [only one mode of operation, or relatively narrow ranges of configurability in relatively few, narrowly defined modes] or efficiency [Windows users don't know how to restart a process or the ramifications of unloading one hardware driver in favor of another, so now every minor tweak requires a full reboot. Or so I'm told.].
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Looks like you suffered for that one!!