I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet him.
Well deserved.
Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
151–160 of 238 posts
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#152Somewhat related: The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur. While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how wou…
We're unlikely to ever actually run out. Ethernet addresses are expected to be universally unique, but they're only required to be unique within a collision domain. If someone started reusing addresses from 3c503s, chances are high nobody would notice. If we did run out, devices would need to start generating randomized addresses, and maybe probe for collisions, which isn't unworkable; the number of nodes in a collision domain tends to be low, and the space is large, you might only barely need to to probe for collisions at all if you have a good random source.
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s
Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of those more important things when they get access to a time machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to take care of my pet peeve :)
While you're back there, convince people to do IP truncation rather than fragmentation. Truncation would probably be a lot more useful at lower cost than fragmentation, and maybe path MTU problems wouldn't still be an issue. *grumble*grumble*
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili valley.
This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day. Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.
Well.. I still want to read the book. I'm a sucker for a well crafted story about old hardware from the days when technology gods walked the earth.
I'm sure Ethernet's market domination is because the spec wasn't owned by a single company, and nothing to do with it's technical merits. After IBM's SNA, people seemed paranoid of a networking spec being owned by a single company. Do you know if Datapoint thought about that and whether they tried to build their own equivalent of the DIX consortium?
I also think about SpaceWire / IEEE-1355 / Wormhole Routing and what might have been had we adopted systems where compute power could be easily upgraded.
Oh! The good old days when everything was possible!
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem with 2.5G is that it's not enough of an upgrade over 1G to warrant buying all new switches and NICs to get it. For that matter few home users push around enough data for 10G to be a big win. IMHO this is why Ethernet has stalled out at 1G. People still don't have large enough data needs to make it worthwhile. See also: the average storage capacity of new personal computers. It has been stuck around 1TB fo…
2.5gbps is literally 2.5x times the speed of gigabit ethernet, so that's going to be very noticable even for most home users if they do any amount of LAN file sharing.
It's really just the cost that's the problem, because paying 4x to 5x or even 6x times the cost of gigabit hardware for a 2.5x times performance boost doesn't make a lot of sense.
If 2.5gbps peripheral hardware costs would come down I will happily bet they will take off.
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.
I think 2.5g is going to make it in the marketplace, because 2.5g switches are finally starting to come down in price, and 10g switches are roughly twice the price, and that might be for sfp+, so you'll likely need transceivers, unless you're close enough for DAC. (NIC prices are also pretty good now, as siblings noted. But if you go with used 10G, you can get good prices there too, I've got 4 dual 10G cards and paid between $25 and $35 shipped for each)
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, it's that cost that is the problem. If I'm paying over a hundred bucks for a switch I might as well go higher and consider 10gbps options.
2.5gbps hardware need to come down to at least the $30 to $40 dollar range if they want to make any sense. Otherwise, they'll stay as niche hardware specifically for diehard enthusiasts or specific professionals only.
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
None of those things could be implemented in the 1970 or 1980s at reasonable cost so they're not actually solutions at all. Hell even making Ethernet fully switched didn't really happen until the 1990s thanks to Moore's law making the ASICs cheap enough. Without mass adoption there's no reason to invest. Look at Token Ring, Ethernet's only real competitor at scale: it quickly started to lag behind. Ethernet shipped 1…
TDMA is an extension of TDM, which goes back to the 60's. Synchronization was already solved. Variable header size could be implemented with the same preamble concept already used by Ethernet, but used to indicate the end of the header. These were not hard problems. The technology existed, the affordability would have largely depended on adoption, so it's hard to say.
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, it's that cost that is the problem. If I'm paying over a hundred bucks for a switch I might as well go higher and consider 10gbps options. 2.5gbps hardware need to come down to at least the $30 to $40 dollar range if they want to make any sense. Otherwise, they'll stay as niche hardware specifically for diehard enthusiasts or specific professionals only.
The NICs can be had for $20 (pretty sure I saw a $11 one the other day but can't find it right now on mobile).
Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
#160I’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.
It’s just a common saying, especially after WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum