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The OSI Deprogrammer

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Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#31

Post by kiitos »

lmm wrote: post #27
kiitos wrote: post #23

> [OSI's] negatives far outweigh its positives. OSI is not theory, it’s not a framework, it’s not helpful, it’s not a standard, it’s not anything those who use it claim it to be. Anything you teach with the OSI Model can better be taught without it. This is a naive understanding of the OSI model, whose primary virtue is not any specific detail it expresses, but instead its ubiquity. The only way to successfully repla…

It's far from ubiquitous though. It breaks down as soon as you enter the real world. It's simultaneously too vague to be useful for talking about specifics and too inaccurate to be useful for talking about generalities.

It's absolutely ubiquitous as a model. It's taught in every CS curriculum in every university in the world.

It also doesn't break down in the real world, unless you're being extremely pedantic. Many bits of software don't map cleanly to the defined layers, but we can still talk about the distinction between the network layer vs. the session layer, for example, and get value out of that discussion.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#32

Post by kiitos »

corethree wrote: post #28
kiitos wrote: post #23

> [OSI's] negatives far outweigh its positives. OSI is not theory, it’s not a framework, it’s not helpful, it’s not a standard, it’s not anything those who use it claim it to be. Anything you teach with the OSI Model can better be taught without it. This is a naive understanding of the OSI model, whose primary virtue is not any specific detail it expresses, but instead its ubiquity. The only way to successfully repla…

Ubiquity isn't a necessarily good thing. It depends on the type of person you are for this analogy to work but... Religion is ubiquitous and it is largely just inaccurate made up fantasy stories posing as truth. It's generally not good from this perspective. OSI is religion. And like religion, it is ubiquitous. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

OSI is just a model. Like all models, it's wrong. But its ubiquity, and the fact that it's survived the test of time, clearly signal that it is a useful model. And that's as good as models get.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#34

Post by clausecker »

tptacek wrote: post #5

I mean, this isn't bad or anything, and if Rob Graham is going to write about anything with authority, this is certainly it, but it's kind of beating up a straw man, isn't it? I feel like "layering violations" went out the window with HTTP, and certainly by the time we got WebSockets.

The rant is not about layering being wrong, but rather that OSI is unsuitable to describe the layering of modern computer networks.

In an earlier text, he said it's as if college taught you what the parts of a horse-drawn carriage are and what part of a modern car you need to point at when the instructor asks you where the loin straps are.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#35

Post by corethree »

kiitos wrote: post #32
corethree wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquity isn't a necessarily good thing. It depends on the type of person you are for this analogy to work but... Religion is ubiquitous and it is largely just inaccurate made up fantasy stories posing as truth. It's generally not good from this perspective. OSI is religion. And like religion, it is ubiquitous. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

OSI is just a model. Like all models, it's wrong. But its ubiquity, and the fact that it's survived the test of time, clearly signal that it is a useful model. And that's as good as models get.

Not all models are truly wrong. But I get your point. I think though the author isn't just arguing that the OSI is like your typical "wrong" model. I think he's saying it's a shitty model. It's crap. It's like using Hippocrates four humors to model human health.

Yeah that model is wrong just like every model. But unlike every model it's a garbage model.

Religion has ALSO survived the test of time, but Jesus Christ coming back from the dead and walking on water is still utter bullshit. Not to get into a religious argument here, but if you're Christian let me know and I'll have to look harder for another analogy.

Anyway my point is: Surviving the test of time, Does not mean shit.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#36

Post by Joker_vD »

kiitos wrote: post #32
corethree wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquity isn't a necessarily good thing. It depends on the type of person you are for this analogy to work but... Religion is ubiquitous and it is largely just inaccurate made up fantasy stories posing as truth. It's generally not good from this perspective. OSI is religion. And like religion, it is ubiquitous. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

OSI is just a model. Like all models, it's wrong. But its ubiquity, and the fact that it's survived the test of time, clearly signal that it is a useful model. And that's as good as models get.

And this specific model is very wrong. It is not useful; it survived mostly because it's useless: slapping an "OSI level X" label on something affects pretty much nothing so sure, you can keep doing that and keep teaching it to people.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#37

Post by aidenn0 »

I'm really surprised that RFC-1122 isn't mentioned in the entire article; The IETF defines 3 layers for a TCP/IP network (link, IP, and Transport) and those layers are (IMO) much more useful for understanding the internet than the OSI model. In addition they don't pretend to be describing a platonic ideal of a network, but rather just specific parts of the network we are using today.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#38

Post by aidenn0 »

tptacek wrote: post #5

I mean, this isn't bad or anything, and if Rob Graham is going to write about anything with authority, this is certainly it, but it's kind of beating up a straw man, isn't it? I feel like "layering violations" went out the window with HTTP, and certainly by the time we got WebSockets.

This isn't a straw-man (or at least wasn't when I took an undergraduate networking class in 2003 at Purdue[1]). We were taught the mappings from the OSI model to Ethernet/IP pretty much like TFA says, along with some hand-waving for the top 3 models with too many holes for the professor to address whenever anyone raised questions about it.

1: It was an off semester and it wasn't taught by Doug Comer, but we did use his book.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#39

Post by Almondsetat »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #21

> People today can’t comprehend the original model because they have no experience with terminals and mainframes. This makes them treat OSI as a deep mystery. In fairness, I have come to think that we should teach computer science by plopping students in front of a PDP-11 and teletype (probably actually a PiDP-11 under the hood, but the students don't need to know how we realized the machine), running v6 unix, take t…

Computer science is about computers just as much as physics is about telescopes.

Computer scientists should think of computers in terms of logic, computability and complexity theory. We don’t expect physicists to learn how the first telescopes worked in detail because it’s useless. A physicist should learn optics and then understand why telescopes were build that way.

The history of something can help put it in context and make taking the pill less bitter, but the fact remains that the majority of computer engineering is a bunch of incoherent mess that stems from decades of desperate backwards compatibility and baby duck syndrome. If you taught CS students stuff from the PDP era you would simply give them a limited view of what computers can be.

Re: The OSI Deprogrammer

#40

Post by aidenn0 »

tptacek wrote: post #12
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not great. It reads like some angsty nerd who really doesn't like the idea of something and has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to explain why it's wrong and why his solution is better. Sometimes that works, if your name is Locke or Marx or something, but this writing really doesn't say "genius" to me. Moreover, I have not heard anyone but myself utter the word "OSI" out loud in 8 or 10 years. Maybe it…

I sort of agree that "OSI" is really weakening his argument, and that he could take clearer aim at the classical Internet layering model (network, transport, application) --- even that simple layering is obsolete now. But it'd still be a straw man! We even run DNS over HTTP at this point.

I don't see DoH as any more of an issue for describing the layers than PPPoE is.
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