OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t • Hacker News Board

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#61

Post by dlitz » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 7:35 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #37

The danger of committees is that it's easy for a few members to add tremendous complexity. Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement" always a goal of everyone working on tech standards? Not if you're a big company competing with small companies. Adding 10 man-years of implementation effort is a small thing for IBM- or Cisco-sized companies, but a giant barrier to entry for upstart c…

> Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement" always a goal of everyone working on tech standards?

Patents and "competitive advantage".

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#62

Post by bandy » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:09 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #52

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the best job candidates are the ones that scoff at the prospect of learning something more than is absolutely necessary.

Straw man. Curiosity is good, but it's foolish to rule people out because an obsolete network model hasn't caught their interest or made it to the top of their research queue yet.

It's not just obsolete, it was proven to be unworkable. What's worth knowing about it isn't the details of the model, it's why the model should be ridiculed. The fact that the model keeps getting brought up as something that one should know because it's good is an example of why we have problems.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#63

Post by bandy » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #47

npsimons wrote: post #3

As usual, /usr/games/fortune provides some insightful commentary: "On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works be…

Because, of course, TCP/IP doesn't have any bloody stupid, boneheaded decisions that it continues to perpetuate through multiple revisions (hey, isn't it great we have to read a whole header to work out the address information!)

Yet, here you are, using TCP/IP to criticize it and to read my response.

Say, you're not a LISPer, are you?

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#64

Post by bandy » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 3:13 PM UTC

shirro wrote: post #53

bandy wrote: post #2

…but we're going to keep asking questions about the 7 layer model in interviews as if it were useful in the real world because that's what we learned about in school.

Came here looking for 7 layer model. It seems to be the only surviving legacy of OSI. From memory Computer Networks by Tanenbaum mapped every protocol into that damn model. Typical of committees to have 3 more layers than needed.

X.500 was tried and deemed too complex/unworkable and has since been mostly abandoned. (Who remembers X.500 DNs leaking out as e-mail addresses some twenty years ago?)

The idea of a directory service is a good one, so we ended up with LDAP and AD.