291–300 of 322 posts
Wider IP address space at the beginning could have led to static IP deployment to the home, allowing for self-hosted websites and email service that would have obviated the need for ad-supported websites and web services. We still would have had the issue of asymmetrical home connections but that’s a separate issue.
The most basic problems seem to be: 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern. 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So the technical constraints probably did not force this.) I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s: https://c…
I know this is a holywar topic and many would disagree simply by seeing `blockchain` word used here. But to my mind this exactly the place where this technology is beneficial. We need automated algorithm controlled currency to have this type of smart internet subscription.
Changes I would have made in the early days: - 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill. - Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use multiple paths. - IPSEC available but initially optional. - Explicit congestion notification, so packet loss and congestion loss can be distinguished. - Everything on the wire is little-endian, byte oriented, and twos complement. - Y…
> 48-bit static IP addresses a static IP per device is google and facebook's wet dream. yeah apple, keep your IDFA for yourself. also, imagine getting banned and not being to use google anymore, at all. asking your kids to google something for you and getting them banned too.
IPv6 addresses are a major PITA, not only are they too long, they're impossible to write and get even most technically competent people to understand. They're almost as hideous and unusable as x.400 email addresses...
Javascript. Not to remove it, but to make it better from the start. Current JS feels painful to me because it feels like piling hacks on top of a poorly-designed language to make it palatable. Doing it better from the start sounds amazing.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=3b40AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT32#v=one...
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The 402 HTTP status code is "Payment Required". At one time people envisioned micropayments etc but it never went anywhere.
Transaction fees are what kill this. That and moral police / "fraud" charge-backs caused by insufficient user authentication. I also don't want to be nickle and dimed to death, given the transaction fees there's a huge push to subscriptions and other models. Where if I could instead just pay exactly what a generic ad I'd _never_ click on anyway pays to get placed (like 0.00001 dollars for all the ads on a webpage stu…
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Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich. There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.
And how do you know this. Also, you are referring to the web, not the internet. I have been using the internet since the web was opened to the public. It was already growing like crazy without ads. You make some very strange assumptions. By all means, find the silver linings, but there is no basis for making a causal connection between computer networks and advertising. Ads are not why we have conveniences. Networkin…
I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, easy to use feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level. 100% of the transaction would be transferred from the user to the service owner without a middle-man service taking a cut (payment gateway fees not withstanding). That way there wouldn't be any need to rely on advertising, app stores, or external subscriptions to run something on the internet.
Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying platform (he invented … waves vaguely … all of this)
(Even Xanadu is very arguably not a single concept - it's evolved significantly over time, and although Ted doesn't miss much, the power and development pace of personal/portable computers and smartphones seems to have surprised even him - we don't see many roadside Xanadu stands with the big flaming X...)
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It was mind blowing indeed. It was such an adventure building stuff on the web back then. We didn't have the choice we have today. I don't think Google became "evil". It just realised (or remembered) it's a business.
> It just realised (or remembered) it's a business. Exactly, it became evil!
Changes I would have made in the early days: - 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill. - Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use multiple paths. - IPSEC available but initially optional. - Explicit congestion notification, so packet loss and congestion loss can be distinguished. - Everything on the wire is little-endian, byte oriented, and twos complement. - Y…
SCTP has multi-path routing, no?