| Thursday, July 6, 2006 |
19:13 - A series of tubes
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1525
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Okay, this is probably the least well-advised thing I've ever posted, but... what precisely is so ridiculous about Ted Stevens' description of how the Internet works?
True, he's stumbling all over himself, the way a layman would who's only just received a crash course in some obscure technology and is now holding forth on the matter to a bunch of other laymen; but what's so very wrong about describing the Internet as "a series of tubes" which "can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material"? Sounds like a perfectly serviceable quick-and-dirty description of serialization delay to me.
Having spent a sizable portion of my professional life working directly with WAN optimization products and serialization reduction technologies, I can say that I've seen—and, indeed, used—far worse metaphors to describe what happens when a WAN's limited resources are consumed by large file transfers running at maximum MTU. That's what might well happen if people are planning to do a great deal of legal movie distribution over existing networks, which is what Stevens is talking about.
What am I missing? I'm sure it must be something huge.
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Brian Tiemann
