Ironic that you should mention "government encroachment". If you don't think that the legal fiction of "intellectual property", as currently practiced throughout the western world, is a real problem for ordinary people, you haven't being paying attention.
Let's hope someone judges your life on one issue and one issue alone.
Yeah. Kinda like Stalin, who was really a good guy - don't judge him just on the purges.
Using the word "evil" to describe something like this trivializes things that are truly evil, like your attitude, where entertainment is more valuable than someone's life.
Way to trivialize what happened and show that you don't understand the issue. The issues around copyright and intellectual property are some of the worst abuses of corporations against individuals in modern civilization, which go far beyond entertainment. Valenti was guilty of exploiting a bad system for personal gain, and the gain of his cronies. Not only that, his history back to his work for Lyndon Johnson shows that he has always worked that way. This was a truly reprehensible man, and his reputation will reap what he sowed.
That's a little hypocritical there, and the "who should we believe" question is painfully one-side.
I don't know what you mean about hypocrisy. I agree about the one-sidedness, but that's because I was talking about the specific words on either side in this case, not any larger picture. I'm not suggesting Stevens is above influence or isn't just saying whatever his sponsors have told him to say. But I'm saying that the "series of tubes" criticism is a poor way to attack him, because it undermines the credibility of the people doing the criticizing.
I'm liberal and/or libertarian (the sane kind;) on many issues, but my allegiance to truth and accuracy is stronger than my allegiance to any political position. I'm not willing to suspend rationality in order to achieve my political goals, and a mob attack on someone that doesn't have a strong basis in fact is disturbing to me. It's a step down the same slippery slope near the bottom of which lie the Swift boat attacks on Kerry.
You had just claimed that you know what he was thinking and feeling at the time he said this, which I find to be a bit of a stretch.
All I'm claiming to know is (a) that it was clear that he was using a metaphor, and following from that, (b) by implication of the language he used, he assumed that it would be clear that he was using a metaphor. I can't tell what else he does or doesn't know about the Internet. He's clearly no expert, and he may very well not be a good person to be involved with legislation in that area, but in that case his positions need to be criticized more substantively.
From the whole audio file of Stevens's comments, it's pretty apparent that his attackers aren't the only ones who are deliberately obfuscating the truth, if in fact that is his attackers' intentions.
Agreed. But when faced with obfuscation from an opponent, the best defense is to make the truth known, unless the truth doesn't support what you're trying to achieve.
I mentioned the routing issue. Routing around congestion is not really relevant to Stevens' point, which has more to do with the fact that at any given time, total bandwidth limits do exist, and congestion can occur as a result, and therefore some means of allowing for prioritised traffic (QoS guarantees) can in fact be important. (See Ed Felten's analysis, which I've just discovered, for a more detailed look at what Stevens was trying to say.)
The implication of not easily being able to expand capacity is arguable - Stevens didn't actually allude to that and it's not clear that he intended to. For what he was actually trying to communicate, his metaphor seems adequate.
As for scaling up, you'd have the same problem if you tried to scale up a single Ethernet cable connection to an entire wide-area network - you need to add switching infrastructure to make it work. I'm thinking high-speed control gates at the tube interconnection points, which detect pressure in the target tubes and routes flow accordingly. Don't disrespect the intertubes!
I think the uproar came about because many people (including myself to some degree) thought that the Senator really thought the internet was some type of series of tubes.
I agree that this was what many people seem to think, but it's an error on their part which says more about the listener's assumptions or comprehension than about Stevens. Taken in context, it's quite clear that Stevens was intentionally using a metaphor. If anything, the fact that his language didn't explicitly say so (e.g. by using the word "like"), implies that he felt that the metaphorical nature of his statements were obvious and didn't need to be belabored. On this point, the facts compel me to rule in favor of Stevens.
His comments don't seem to be so confusing when you actually listen to them
Quite so. Yet many people jumped on him for the comments mainly because they saw someone else do it, on a blog or on TV. The criticism ended being a social thing, with the factual basis lost, to the point where people who ought to know better technically are ridiculing "series of tubes" as though it somehow has no merit.
but when you start to look at what he is actually saying it gets a little worse
Keep in mind that this was an unscripted statement in a bill markup discussion. Googling just now, I found that Ed Felten agrees with me:
I'll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But's let's give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, and he sounds a bit agitated. Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking in an unscripted setting? For most people, it's pretty depressing. We misspeak, drop words, repeat phrases, and mangle sentences all the time. Normally, listeners' brains edit out the errors.
In this light, some of the ridicule of Stevens seems a bit unfair. He said the Internet is made up of "tubes". Taken literally, that's crazy. But experts talk about "pipes" all the time. Is the gap between "tubes" and "pipes" really so large? And when Stevens says that his staff sent him "an Internet" and it took several days to arrive, it sounds to me like he meant to say "an email" and just misspoke.
Felten goes on to try to interpret what Stevens was saying. I think he summarizes the whole thing well with this:
Why then the shock and ridicule from the Internet public? Partly because the recording was a perfect seed for a Net ridicule meme.
The problem is, picking on "series of tubes" specifically to ridicule ends up exposing a lack of knowledge or understanding in the person or group doing the ridiculing, and they start to appear irrational. This is a particular problem if they're using the ridicule to try to push a political agenda, like net neutrality. Who should we believe or trust - the guy who used a basically appropriate metaphor for the purpose, even if he was confused in other ways, or the people who are claiming counterfactually that the metaphor was wrong, for reasons that can only be guessed at? Incompetence is the most charitable explanation for the latter group, since otherwise the implication is that they're deliberately obfuscating the truth to undercut an opponent.
I agree that a roadway is a good analogy, but both analogies have their pros and cons. For example, tubes may be a better analogy for communicating the nature of both a hard upper limit on bandwidth, as well as limits on latency, because cars behave much more autonomously and arbitrarily than packets, whereas liquid or gas flowing through a pipe is governed much more directly by physical laws.
I know people joke about the series of tubes thing, but it seems to me that was the least wrong part of Stevens' totally confused statement.
Politics aside, I don't really see the technical problem with comparing the Internet to a series of tubes. Tubes have a predictable bandwidth, i.e. you can only pump a certain amount of liquid or gas through them in a given time; and they have predictable latency, i.e. you push something in one end, it takes some time to come out the other end. So far, a lot like a network connection.
What the "series of tubes" doesn't capture is the packetized nature of the internet, or the complexities of routing, and other such details. However, at the abstraction level at which Stevens was talking, I'm not sure any of that matters. If you're talking about things like "clogging up the Internet", it's true that that can happen, for the same reasons that tubes can get clogged: if you try to put too much stuff in, at too many entry points, your backbone tubes are going to become a bottleneck. So the metaphor holds up in this case, and predicts behavior that you can see on actual networks.
The fact that the email problem Stevens was describing had nothing to do with Internet congestion is a separate issue, which doesn't actually detract from "series of tubes" as a metaphor for the Internet at a certain level of abstraction.
I'd love to hear reasons why I'm wrong. Other than "Ignore the facts, we must excoriate politicians who are against network neutrality!" Ridiculing a perfectly good metaphor just because you don't agree with the guy using it is not the way to sensible public policy, although I admit it does seem to be how politics is often conducted.
As to running over the public Internet, been there, done that, too. As a consequence of some unscheduled maintenance, we got dumped onto the public 'net one day. What actually happens is, they decide you're a DOS attack and they block you! Surprise! Bad research project, no record!
That seems reasonable. Imagine one of those rocket cars that break speed records on salt pans, trying to do 500mph on the New Jersey Turnpike instead. The cops would pull it over in a heartbeat, if they could catch it. (I hear New Jersey Governor Corzine tried something similar.)
In any case, some tuning has to be forgiven: the bandwidth-delay product on these runs is on the order of a gigabit, and, well, your stack isn't tuned for that, out of the box.
So when you put on the brakes, you don't stop right away. Car metaphors are great! Who needs tubes?
The bandwidth is the amount of time it takes the data to travel its own length.
Wow, that makes it all so simple, thanks! Now I just have to measure how long this file I have is. I guess I have to print it out and use a ruler, but what font size should I use? This network design stuff is tricky!
One big difference is that people pay money for Microsoft or Apple stuff. No-one who uses Google has ever paid them a dime. Plus, many of their services are explicitly billed as "beta", i.e. use at your own risk.
In Microsoft's case in particular, their monopoly means that they have an extra responsibility not to screw up, because the "whole world" depends on them. Of course, Microsoft doesn't accept that, but many people believe they should. Google may have reached that point for some features, like search, but even mail is only recently out of beta and open for general signup without an invite or restrictions. But the current problem doesn't affect either search or mail.
Maybe I'll go watch Bill O'Reilly for my "Fair and Balanced."
The comparison in the parent post, ignoring salient details and jumping to conclusions without much consideration, would be right at home on Bill O'Reilly! Perhaps you've found your true home!:-P
That's what people who say that think, but it's also precisely where they're wrong: uprooting your life and moving to another country is in no way comparable to switching between software packages. Or if you see some miniscule basis for comparsion, then let's say that switching software is like clipping your toenails, whereas moving countries is like quadruple bypass open heart surgery.
It seems to me that on the buyout risk issue, MySQL would be a pretty strategic acquisition for a number of companies that could afford to buy it without really blinking, so do you really think that fast growth will protect you from that? Besides, fast growth brings its own set of problems.
I wish you luck with this, but I have to say my experience with RedHat soured me on this sort of thing. They basically did everything they legally could to make their source effectively inaccessible to users that hadn't paid quite a substantial amount for a license, offering up Fedora as a sop to the open source/free software community, Whether deliberately or not, Fedora sucked in various ways. I don't know if it still does, because I and my clients switched to Debian.
So I have to say that there's part of me that thinks I may as well start preparing to switch to PostgreSQL now. I'll be rooting for you to prove that part of me wrong!
"Write a book" is a rather suspicious bit of translation. Presumably, if the quote is real, the original would have said something like "inscribe a pile of tablets". But it makes me suspicious, since in those times not every man could write at all, let alone write a book. So was it that every man wanted to learn to write, or more likely, be wealthy enough to hire a scribe to write for him? I dunno, I'd bet this quote is fictitious.
However, I didn't. I merely provided a simple corrections to your gross misunderstanding of google's architecture and use of mysql. Even a kid could have done that.
Heh. You apparently missed the fact that my original comment was not intended seriously. Googling for "Imagine a beowulf cluster" might help you understand the context, since it is clear that you must be new here.
What are they teaching in troll school these days? If Google were running PostgreSQL, they wouldn't need such huge clusters, and then they wouldn't be as cool!
I was getting at that idea, prompted by the GP, of overloading the "computing" resources used to run the universe simulation, by paying too much attention to too many details all at once. That's operating at a whole different level than just destroying the ozone layer, cutting down the rainforest, or polluting the atmosphere. You gotta think big!
There's a correct and incorrect way to write, too. Is your use of "conscience" an example of said Ebonics? In English, we'd say "conscious".
Either way, the parent's point is that on/., using either American or English dialects is perfectly acceptable, and doesn't have much to do with the existence of Ebonics. Fo shizzle.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic that you should mention "government encroachment". If you don't think that the legal fiction of "intellectual property", as currently practiced throughout the western world, is a real problem for ordinary people, you haven't being paying attention.
I don't know what you mean about hypocrisy. I agree about the one-sidedness, but that's because I was talking about the specific words on either side in this case, not any larger picture. I'm not suggesting Stevens is above influence or isn't just saying whatever his sponsors have told him to say. But I'm saying that the "series of tubes" criticism is a poor way to attack him, because it undermines the credibility of the people doing the criticizing.
I'm liberal and/or libertarian (the sane kind ;) on many issues, but my allegiance to truth and accuracy is stronger than my allegiance to any political position. I'm not willing to suspend rationality in order to achieve my political goals, and a mob attack on someone that doesn't have a strong basis in fact is disturbing to me. It's a step down the same slippery slope near the bottom of which lie the Swift boat attacks on Kerry.
All I'm claiming to know is (a) that it was clear that he was using a metaphor, and following from that, (b) by implication of the language he used, he assumed that it would be clear that he was using a metaphor. I can't tell what else he does or doesn't know about the Internet. He's clearly no expert, and he may very well not be a good person to be involved with legislation in that area, but in that case his positions need to be criticized more substantively.
Agreed. But when faced with obfuscation from an opponent, the best defense is to make the truth known, unless the truth doesn't support what you're trying to achieve.
I mentioned the routing issue. Routing around congestion is not really relevant to Stevens' point, which has more to do with the fact that at any given time, total bandwidth limits do exist, and congestion can occur as a result, and therefore some means of allowing for prioritised traffic (QoS guarantees) can in fact be important. (See Ed Felten's analysis, which I've just discovered, for a more detailed look at what Stevens was trying to say.)
The implication of not easily being able to expand capacity is arguable - Stevens didn't actually allude to that and it's not clear that he intended to. For what he was actually trying to communicate, his metaphor seems adequate.
As for scaling up, you'd have the same problem if you tried to scale up a single Ethernet cable connection to an entire wide-area network - you need to add switching infrastructure to make it work. I'm thinking high-speed control gates at the tube interconnection points, which detect pressure in the target tubes and routes flow accordingly. Don't disrespect the intertubes!
I agree that a roadway is a good analogy, but both analogies have their pros and cons. For example, tubes may be a better analogy for communicating the nature of both a hard upper limit on bandwidth, as well as limits on latency, because cars behave much more autonomously and arbitrarily than packets, whereas liquid or gas flowing through a pipe is governed much more directly by physical laws.
I know people joke about the series of tubes thing, but it seems to me that was the least wrong part of Stevens' totally confused statement.
Politics aside, I don't really see the technical problem with comparing the Internet to a series of tubes. Tubes have a predictable bandwidth, i.e. you can only pump a certain amount of liquid or gas through them in a given time; and they have predictable latency, i.e. you push something in one end, it takes some time to come out the other end. So far, a lot like a network connection.
What the "series of tubes" doesn't capture is the packetized nature of the internet, or the complexities of routing, and other such details. However, at the abstraction level at which Stevens was talking, I'm not sure any of that matters. If you're talking about things like "clogging up the Internet", it's true that that can happen, for the same reasons that tubes can get clogged: if you try to put too much stuff in, at too many entry points, your backbone tubes are going to become a bottleneck. So the metaphor holds up in this case, and predicts behavior that you can see on actual networks.
The fact that the email problem Stevens was describing had nothing to do with Internet congestion is a separate issue, which doesn't actually detract from "series of tubes" as a metaphor for the Internet at a certain level of abstraction.
I'd love to hear reasons why I'm wrong. Other than "Ignore the facts, we must excoriate politicians who are against network neutrality!" Ridiculing a perfectly good metaphor just because you don't agree with the guy using it is not the way to sensible public policy, although I admit it does seem to be how politics is often conducted.
In Microsoft's case in particular, their monopoly means that they have an extra responsibility not to screw up, because the "whole world" depends on them. Of course, Microsoft doesn't accept that, but many people believe they should. Google may have reached that point for some features, like search, but even mail is only recently out of beta and open for general signup without an invite or restrictions. But the current problem doesn't affect either search or mail.The comparison in the parent post, ignoring salient details and jumping to conclusions without much consideration, would be right at home on Bill O'Reilly! Perhaps you've found your true home!
That's what people who say that think, but it's also precisely where they're wrong: uprooting your life and moving to another country is in no way comparable to switching between software packages. Or if you see some miniscule basis for comparsion, then let's say that switching software is like clipping your toenails, whereas moving countries is like quadruple bypass open heart surgery.
It seems to me that on the buyout risk issue, MySQL would be a pretty strategic acquisition for a number of companies that could afford to buy it without really blinking, so do you really think that fast growth will protect you from that? Besides, fast growth brings its own set of problems.
I wish you luck with this, but I have to say my experience with RedHat soured me on this sort of thing. They basically did everything they legally could to make their source effectively inaccessible to users that hadn't paid quite a substantial amount for a license, offering up Fedora as a sop to the open source/free software community, Whether deliberately or not, Fedora sucked in various ways. I don't know if it still does, because I and my clients switched to Debian.
So I have to say that there's part of me that thinks I may as well start preparing to switch to PostgreSQL now. I'll be rooting for you to prove that part of me wrong!
Now you know why the first posts so seldom say anything topical, and instead obsess about certain kinds of frosty liquids.
"Write a book" is a rather suspicious bit of translation. Presumably, if the quote is real, the original would have said something like "inscribe a pile of tablets". But it makes me suspicious, since in those times not every man could write at all, let alone write a book. So was it that every man wanted to learn to write, or more likely, be wealthy enough to hire a scribe to write for him? I dunno, I'd bet this quote is fictitious.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of pedants... Now imagine them posting on Slashdot...
What are they teaching in troll school these days? If Google were running PostgreSQL, they wouldn't need such huge clusters, and then they wouldn't be as cool!
Yes, but imagine the world's biggest Beowulf cluster of MySQL servers.
Now imagine them in Google's data centers.
Which, in fact, is where they are. Now do you see?
I was getting at that idea, prompted by the GP, of overloading the "computing" resources used to run the universe simulation, by paying too much attention to too many details all at once. That's operating at a whole different level than just destroying the ozone layer, cutting down the rainforest, or polluting the atmosphere. You gotta think big!
This means that it if the human race becomes populous enough, it may become possible to Slashdot the universe!
Yes. That's how the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies form.
If scheduling was completely fair, this would have been a frist ps0t.
I, for one, welcome our new yelling at the Soviet Russia and the overlords people overlords.
There's a correct and incorrect way to write, too. Is your use of "conscience" an example of said Ebonics? In English, we'd say "conscious". Either way, the parent's point is that on /., using either American or English dialects is perfectly acceptable, and doesn't have much to do with the existence of Ebonics. Fo shizzle.