11–20 of 158 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to see more layer 4 protocols, not stuff built on top of them, personally. That's where things get interesting.
Honestly I think there’s a lack of talent for that, not only to develop the protocol, but to support it. How many of us really understand OSI?
The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards.
Look at WebAuthN: it enables a mobile device from "any" vendor to sign on to web pages without a password. Great! Can I transfer secrets from an Apple iPhone to a Google Android phone? Yes? No? Hello? Anyone there?
I just got a new camera. It can take HDR still images, which look astonishingly good. Can I send that to an Apple device? Sure! Can I send it to a Google device? Err... not without transcoding it first... on a Microsoft Windows box. Can I send it to a mailing list of people with mixed-vendor devices? Ha-ha... no.
This is the best argument I've seen for splitting up the FAANGs + Microsoft + NVIDIA. Once they get to this behemoth trillion-dollar scale, they become nations onto themselves and no longer need to cooperate, no longer need to use any open standards at all, and can start dictating and pushing third parties around.
Another random example is HTTP/3, which is basically the "What's best for Google" protocol.
Or gRPC, which is "What Google needs in their data centre".
And now Falcon, which is "The transport Google needs for their workloads".
Does it work for anyone else? I don't know, but it's a certainty that Google doesn't care and never will, because they don't need to.
I guarantee that there will eventually be a vaguely similar (but different!) stack published by each of: NetFlix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. Just kidding, Apple won't publish anything. The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards. Look at WebAuthN: it…
This is one excellent example of the reason that increased/renewed anti-trust actions by the FTC are necessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I think there’s a lack of talent for that, not only to develop the protocol, but to support it. How many of us really understand OSI?
OSI is just a model, there’s not all that much to understand there. It’s simply a way to categorize network technologies using a common language.
For example, people sometimes refer to TCP as a "Layer 4" protocol even though (a) TCP predates the invention of Layer 4 and (b) TCP is a square peg that does not exactly fit into the round hole that is Layer 4.
I guarantee that there will eventually be a vaguely similar (but different!) stack published by each of: NetFlix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. Just kidding, Apple won't publish anything. The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards. Look at WebAuthN: it…
The industry has always been this way. Back in the day there were many many processor ISAs that are now consolidated. There was been many networking standards that consolidated (IPX/SPX anyone?) New things often diverge because of new requirements not out of spite. There is a push and pull between standardization and innovation. Doesn't make it particularly unhealthy unless you can point to specific metrics and compare trends throughout the long arc of time.
I've been working with Ethernet devices a lot lately, using the network as a communication bus, essentially. I find that there's a lot of complexity that we simply don't need: ARP, DHCP, DNS... So many points of failure. We know all the devices on our LAN and their unique MAC addresses, and could do everything we need to addressing-wise at Layer 2. But everything's built on Layer 3 and up, so we're effectively working backward to map devices to IP addresses and vice versa. It's unsatisfying.
I was confused by the reference to “lossy” networks in this page. Does this have a different meaning in this context than something like lossy compression where data is actually discarded?
I was confused by the reference to “lossy” networks in this page. Does this have a different meaning in this context than something like lossy compression where data is actually discarded?
I was confused by the reference to “lossy” networks in this page. Does this have a different meaning in this context than something like lossy compression where data is actually discarded?
For an example of what this means, try setting your MTU above the limit, and watch the raw traffic.
* - it's been years since I cared about the formal definition, my apologies if I got it wrong.