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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#91

Post by logi2mus »

vlovich123 wrote: post #84
magic_hamster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hol…

I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due to additional advancements and technically it hasn’t yet stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to have stopped for Intel itself apparently). Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this impacted Koomey’s law which talks about performance/watt and saw a similar petering out. App…

lots of (not only european) public funding made progress to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#92

Post by retrocryptid »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading t…

I still have a soft spot in my heart for ARCNet. In the 80s it was cheaper than ethernet, but more reliable than token ring. And for the few places that prioritized determinism over throughput, it was indispensable.

But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet retreated to shop-floor niche applications.

Alas.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#93

Post by yuuho »

xbar wrote: post #87
gooroo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it was sniffing heaven. Only paralleled by the brief period of nobody using any serious encryption on their wifi.

Where "brief" was about 10 years, which at the time was about 25% of all time that networks were common.

At the time, maybe. Eventually it will be remembered as a short glitch in tech history.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#94

Post by RF_Savage »

Sporktacular wrote: post #80
nine_k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some superior competing standards, and could they be implemented in a royalty-free way?

The point was more about competing technical choices made by designers, rather than the choice of standards made by consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably more scalable, bandwidth and energy efficient than CSMA/CD and can give consistent PL, PD and PDV, so might have even allowed early business grade voice. Variable header sizes would have allowed efficient use over bandwidth constrained media like radio. But th…

TDMA needs time synchronization and thus becomes more complex.

Even in telecoms the packet switched connections are quickly replacing synchronous time division connections.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#95

Post by bombcar »

magic_hamster wrote: post #69
passwordoops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hol…

Moore's law is almost the opposite of Metcalfe's - Metcalfe's encourages you to build out the network as fast as possible to get the most value; Moore's implies you should wait as long as possible before buying processing power to get the most you can.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#96

Post by dale_glass »

lunfard000 wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #4

Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading t…

Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...

You can have 10G with eg, Mikrotik at a reasonable price.

One problem with it is that the copper tech is just power hungry. It may actually make sense to go with fiber, especially if you might want even more later (100G actually can be had at non-insane prices!)

Another problem is that it's CPU intensive. It's actually not that hard to run into situations where quite modern hardware can't actually handle the load of dealing with 10G at full speed especially if you want routing, a firewall, or bridging.

It turns out Linux bridge interfaces disable a good amount of the acceleration the hardware can provide and can enormously degrade performance, which makes virtualization with good performance a lot trickier.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#97

Post by bombcar »

xbar wrote: post #77
chasd00 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.

Practically a mantra.

It was well known when I started that you got a card that would work with that (and later for gigabit it was e1000).

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#98

Post by bombcar »

Dalewyn wrote: post #39
themoonisachees wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.5G or even 10G is not that much more expensive and companies making consumer electronics sell it as a considerable premium for what is essentially the same cost difference as making a 8gb vs 16 gb flash drive. Of course, regular internet users don't need more than 2.5G (and couldn't use it in most of the world due to ISP monopolies) so anything faster than gigabit is a target for segmentation.

Rant aside, I think there is an argument to be made that 2.5gbps switches "should" be cheaper now that 2.5gbps NICs have become fairly commonplace in the mainstream market. Case in point, I have a few recent-purchase machines with 2.5gbps networking but no 2.5gbps switch to connect them to because I personally can't justify their cost yet. I suppose I could bond two 1gbps ports together, or something, but I like to t…

You can get some basic switches that do 2.5gb but it's like $100, a bit more for a brand you might recognize.

https://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Multi-Gigabit-Unmanaged-Entert...

Personally I went with Mikrotik's 10gb switch but that needed SPF port thingies (which was fine for me, as I was connecting one old enterprise switch via fiber, direct copperering two servers, and using cabled cat7 or whatever for the Mac).

2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#99

Post by eimrine »

jonstewart wrote: post #59

I’ve got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements ends with “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Is this supposed to be an Eastern Egg? I have found the book to look for the context of the statement but I have not found anything interesting after the acknowledgements.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#100

Post by jeffbee »

magic_hamster wrote: post #69
passwordoops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hol…

Moore’s law isn’t even dead. It says that the number of transistors per dollar rises at that rate, which is still going. Commenters tend to omit the cost component of Moore’s remark.
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