Metcalfes "imminent death of the internet" prediction
George Michaelson
Well here we are, Australia is taking a massive pounding and collecting
enough bronze to start a cannon foundry and I don't see any massive change
in my RTT/drop. Since Poland and Turkey now outrank OZ in the medal stakes,
maybe all the traffic is coming from Europe, but I'd have expected melt-down
to be visible all over (not)
So what happened to the "Olympics gonna kill the net" claim? do we now
see some kind of retraction?
Maybe its all part of the grand conspiracy: lull us into a false sense
of security and then BAM! the weathermen are going to click on the URL
all at once, while the Chinese simultaneously leap into the water and
cause a tidal wave to swamp FIX-WEST...
This prediction never made much sense to me anyway. Maybe the man was
mis-quoted.
-George
--
George Michaelson | connect.com.au pty/ltd
Email: g...@connect.com.au | c/o AAPT,
Phone: +61 7 3834 9976 | level 8, the Riverside Centre,
Fax: +61 7 3834 9908 | 123 Eagle St, Brisbane QLD 4000
Noel Chiappa
From: Tim Bass <ba...@linux.silkroad.com>
Let's don't worry about "what Dr. Metcalfe" says, how-bout-it?
and think what is pragmatic and useful.
Too bad you didn't take you own advice and focus on the issue at hand, and not
attacking other peoples' technical abilities.
I find it amusing that we need Dr. Metcalfe to formula opinions of the
future of IP internetworking based on his substantial and significant
contributions to IEEE 802. This is not to take away from the important
contribution of Dr. Metcalfe ... Certainly a noted contribution to the
engineering field with regard to networking does not make an omnipotent
oracle for internetworking....
I'm puzzled about how to reconcile your assertions with the facts that i) Bob
Metcalfe was one of the chief designers of Xerox's PUP, which was the first
operational internetworking protocol, and thus has some useful experience in
this field, and ii) based on his work there, was involved in the early work on
what became TCP and IP (since at that point, they were not separate protocols).
Sure, I don't exactly bow down in his direction three times daily, but he's not
totally ignorant.
Now, can we stick to the issue at hand, please, and enough dumping on people
(lest the list of targets of similar behaviour get expanded, eh?)
Noel
Tim Bass
>
> Now, can we stick to the issue at hand, please, and enough dumping on people
> (lest the list of targets of similar behaviour get expanded, eh?)
>
Noel, Hi!
I simple am stating the 'creation of icons and superheros is
completely base and a waste of time, IMO'.... others are certainly
welcome to create superheros and legends as they find appropriate,
but true heros need no such activity.
If we examine both scientific and academic history, Noel, as you
surely have; we find that most people who are well known were
self-promoting egoists ( read the critiques of Mandlebrot, Newton,
etc. to infinity ). I am not saying that anyone in the IP world
is that way :-) :-) :-) however....
( if you do not put words in my mouth as you often do ;-)
... I am saying is that the success of the Internet is not based
on a collection of singularities but on the double integral
of the collective will and efforts of countless thousand of people;
including the non-college graduates sitting at NOCs handling customer
calls every day, citizens funding NSF and DARPA initiatives,
experimentalists playing with protocols and paradigms, as well a
design engineers and theorists, not to mention the end users
need for information exchange.
Anyone is welcome to find fault in this logic. But this is not
a 'new world view' on my part, and if I remember correctly, the
original thread was something about 'an Internet Hall of Fame'.
There is an old saying: " it is amazing the amount of progess that
can occur when no one worries about getting credit for it "
As I see it, the Internet is sinking to a new 'low' as there
is now a need to iconify individuals.... mostly with a commercial
end goal, or to give the press and media something to feed to
their consumers.
How, Noel my dear friend, I ask you:
"What is the issue at hand, in your opinion?"
Do you want to create icons out of individuals and "Halls of Fames"
as suggested? Would you feel good to see you name in lights as well?
If so, then my all means, don't let my worldview stop the 'wheels
of human progress' (whatever that is, today).
Best Regards,
Tim
> Noel
--
We're just two lost souls
swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
-Roger Waters
Dave Crocker
At 7:50 AM -0700 7/25/96, Per Gregers Bilse wrote:
>No, don't forget Dr. Metcalfe's definition of a collapse: "... when
>more than 50,000 people are denied their Internet access for more
>than an hour, let's call it an Internet collapse, ...". By that
>definition the Internet has died when 100k people get no response
>from IBM's WWW servers.
That, of course, is the problem with overly simplistic definitions.
In this case it feeds a verious serious failure to distinguish between
"failures of the net" and "failures of the information providers".
Bob has been on a long-term campaign to raise people's awareness of
the limitations to the current system. The issue is a valid one. Bob's
style has been very consistent and always of the chicken-little variety.
That, I'm afraid, is highly counter-productive.
Good message. Bad tone.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker +1 408 246 8253
Brandenburg Consulting fax: +1 408 249 6205
675 Spruce Dr. dcro...@brandenburg.com
Sunnyvale CA 94086 USA http://www.brandenburg.com
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Randy Bush
Jack Ricard's response to Metcalfe's imminent demise prediction:
> Having survived the 327 deaths of FidoNet, I don't doubt it. I just don't
> think anyone will be able to tell without test instruments."
There is an interesting analog between the folk trying to set up 'fake' root
name servers and the FidoNet schismic nodelists. Unless the masses believe
in your namespace, it is vaccuous.
randy
Dave Crocker
At 5:23 PM -0700 7/25/96, Michael Dillon wrote:
>I certainly agree with Bob that it is a good idea to have a simple metric
>I think that a major Internet disaster has to be defined so that it is of
>a similar scale as a hurricane or the Mississippi river floods of a few
>years ago. On that scale the Netcom outages were more like a regional
>snowstorm that clogs the roads for a day.
Simple metrics are fine. As long as they are reasonable.
One which does not distinguish between the situation at a shopping
mall on the last shopping day before Christmas, versus a 200-car pile-up on
the local Interstate, is completely missing the distinction between
infrastructure and end-systems.
Most people can tell the difference between a fast busy and a slow
one and they know who to blame for each.
We need the same distinction if we are going to do anything useful
with metrics.
Kent W. England
At 04:50 PM 7/25/96 +0200, Per Gregers Bilse wrote:
>
>No, don't forget Dr. Metcalfe's definition of a collapse: "... when
>more than 50,000 people are denied their Internet access for more
>than an hour, let's call it an Internet collapse, ...". By that
>definition the Internet has died when 100k people get no response
>from IBM's WWW servers.
>
I liked Jack Ricard's response to Metcalfe's imminent demise prediction in
his Boardwatch editorial in the April 96 issue.
"InfoWorld columnist Bob Metcalfe notes it [the Internet] is going to crash
and burn this year anyway, after the fashion of the Hindenberg. Having
survived the 327 deaths of FidoNet, I don't doubt it. I just don't think
anyone will be able to tell without test instruments."
I love his irony. It's a shame that Jack doesn't get the press play that Bob
Metcalfe does, because Rickard has been pretty quick to understand the
Internet. You should read his monthly editorials, especially the May 96
issue where he discusses bandwidth versus capacity.
Have a look at < http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/96/may/bwm1.htm > to read the
bandwidth editorial. You may need to register at the Boardwatch site first.
He's worth a read.
--Kent
Matthew James Marnell
:>Well here we are, Australia is taking a massive pounding and collecting
:>enough bronze to start a cannon foundry and I don't see any massive change
:>in my RTT/drop. Since Poland and Turkey now outrank OZ in the medal stakes,
:>maybe all the traffic is coming from Europe, but I'd have expected melt-down
:>to be visible all over (not)
:>
:>So what happened to the "Olympics gonna kill the net" claim? do we now
:>see some kind of retraction?
I don't know. I've been trying to get through to the
www.atlanta.olympic.org that IBM has been advertising in their
Spinal Tap commercials. While I can connect fine 50% of the
time, the sales.atlanta.olympic.org machine seems to keep falling
over (So badly, that even though the one page I was accessing
said that there were still tickets available to certain events,
but after 50 timeout, connection refused's, and incomplete pages,
or otherwise eroneous pages, when I finally got to the order page,
the tickets were already gone (when I finally called the number
(which took me 15 minutes to find with the crappy responses I
got from their servers)). All in all, either the connection was
bad or the servers are undertuned. Either way, the net seems to
be performing better than it was as little as 2 weeks ago.
Matt
Tim Bass
PGB replies:
> No, don't forget Dr. Metcalfe's definition of a collapse: "... when
> more than 50,000 people are denied their Internet access for more
> than an hour, let's call it an Internet collapse, ...". By that
> definition the Internet has died when 100k people get no response
> from IBM's WWW servers.
The same standard could also be applies to voice calls and busy
signal or 'all circuits are busy' messages (which I get during
discount times to Germany daily calling my family); but this
is not the 'collapse of the PSTN' ! :-)
Let's don't worry about "what Dr. Metcalfe" says, how-bout-it?
and think what is pragmatic and useful. One of the interesting
situations of a 'technocratic paradigm' is the perception that
one who is advance in one aspect of a very broad field (such
as Ethernet and Internetworking) is an expert on all expects of
the entire field; which is humanly impossible.
This is precisely why there are "System Engineers" , "Software
Engineering", "Hardware Engineers" and subspecialists in every
one of these areas. I find it amusing that we need Dr. Metcalfe
to formula opinions of the future of IP internetworking based on
his substantial and significant contributions to IEEE 802.
This is not to take away from the important contribution of
Dr. Metcalfe; but one grain of sand does not make a beach, nor
a grain of salt make an ocean... Certainly a noted contribution
to the engineering field with regard to networking does not
make an omnipotent oracle for internetworking.... just like
doing BGP4 on a daily basis does not make one the 'expert of
all IP routing paradigms' (contrary to popular perception).
Regards and ^Z,
Tim
George Michaelson
How about Brian Carpenters metrics for inter-peer negotiation? If these
criteria establish how ISPs change money, maybe they also define how we
can measure congestion in meaningful ways? Certainly with cash attached,
people are going to be collating and archiving a *LOT* of useful data...
Jeremy Porter
In message <m0ujaYZ...@roam.psg.com>, Randy Bush writes:
>Jack Ricard's response to Metcalfe's imminent demise prediction:
>> Having survived the 327 deaths of FidoNet, I don't doubt it. I just don't
>> think anyone will be able to tell without test instruments."
>
>There is an interesting analog between the folk trying to set up 'fake' root
>name servers and the FidoNet schismic nodelists. Unless the masses believe
>in your namespace, it is vaccuous.
Actually that is more of a software problem that anything else. The
fact that the old Fido software didn't understand different authoratative
sources. The fact that the IANA didn't release more top level domains to
other registries, is going to cause the schism(s). Top down managment
of the root space one work, a cooperative root zone is needed, with
consensus by market share.
Really if Metcalfe wanted to predidict a death of the Internet,
this whole top level domain issue is more of a problem. (Routing problems
are technologically solvable, and the TLD issue is only sociologically solvable.)
But I guess this is wandering from the topic at hand somewhat, and no one
really wants to beat this dead horse again.
---
Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc. je...@fc.net
PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708 | 1-800-968-8750 | 512-458-9816
http://www.fc.net