Re: internet infrastructure investment data

[Kendall Clark <kendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 11:54:43AM -0400, ravi wrote:

> could you point me to some sources? i find it very surprising that
> technical people believe that changes to HTTP can be the sole cause of
> performance gains (especially given that caching, which indeed does, at
> great cost, distribute load, was mostly possible with early HTTP
> versions, and further modifications of HTTP were aimed, in a large
> sense, at addressing some of the technical defeciencies of a protocol
> designed by a non-protocols person, eg: persistent connections).

I've never said *sole* cause, which may be part of the problem. I think
there are many engineers (probably 'computer scientists' was a bit over the
top earlier) who believe it was a *crucial* cause. I don't know anyone who
claims it's the *sole* cause.

> so, you are talking about the web component of internet usage? and by
> that i assume you mean network usage i.e., available bandwidth and
> throughput on routers and other intermediate devices?

Yes, each time I've specified the kind of infrastructural investment I'm
interested in quantifying, I've specifically mentioned router & bandwidth
advances and capacity investments. As you know, the Web part of the internet
is still TCP/IP traffic.

> and as more and more people blindly adopt HTTP as their transport
> protocol (simply because of such technologies as "web services"),

Well, part of this argument is about the way SOAP breaks the caching
benefits of HTTP 1.1 (overuse of POST over GET, for example), so, yeah,
that's part of the issue. I would probably quibble with the "blindly adopt"
bit; I think it's more that people are misusing it rather than reflexively
using it when something else entirely should be used.

The utter market failure of BEEP suggests that HTTP has a lot of general
purpose life left in it.

> > Because it's completely off-topic? Isn't that obvious?
>
> its obvious that its off-topic, but its not obvious (at least to me)
> that that's why you wrote the above.

That's why I wrote the above. :>

> 2. i am surprised by your generalizations about the geek and computer
> science community. perhaps what you mean by geek is the high-school geek
> set while what i mean is the hacker crowd (for the general audience:
> 'hacker' does not mean what the media has wrongly used the term to
> represent i.e., someone who breaks into computers).

No, I mean "hackers". Obviously it's not a monolithic set of attitudes &
beliefs. There are obviously pockets of leftie hackers and geeks. But I
still stand by my claim that the dominant ideology is right libertarian. I'm
thinking of the Slashdot crowd, Eric Raymond and his hangers-on, and the
like. Obvious counterpoints include Richard Stallman, the IMC hacker crowd,
many anarchist groups who actively use Web tech, and so on.

> match my experiences very well. if that is because i have misunderstood
> my community, then i would appreciate any clarifications that disabuse me.

I'm not trying to convince you that you've misread your experience. Hell,
I'm jealous that the parts of the hacker world you've interacted with have
not been right libertarian. The parts I have run into frequently have been
and I still tend to think that it's it forms the dominant ideology (which is
different than saying that everyone who is a hacker is a right libertarian.
That's clearly wrong).

> while these might be peripheral to your main question, once you put
> these opinions out in a public venue, i think discussion on them is
> valid.

Of course the discussion is valid, if Michael doesn't object. That doesn't
mean I'm interested in pursuing it. :>

Kendall