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Protocol Wars

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Re: Protocol Wars

#11

Post by samwillis »

vmfunction wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

I propose the Willis law (are you allowed to name a law after yourself?):

The spread and reach of TCP/IP will accelerate at a pace faster than that of the transition to IPv6 indefinitely, therefore we are saddled with IPv4 until the end of time.

Re: Protocol Wars

#13

Post by pjmlp »

moomin wrote: post #2

This was still raging when I was a student. From my recollection I _heard_ a lot more about OSI, but everything I used had something proprietary (e.g. NetWare, Token Ring) or TCP/IP. The people supporting TCP/IP had a head start and out-executed the OSI committees and it wasn’t even funny.

Same here, highschool student during 80/90's, technical magazines were full of this stuff.

Re: Protocol Wars

#14

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

vmfunction wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

People wanted to change bitfield with version from 4 to 6 and increase amount of bytes in IP address filed. Simple KISS.

Instead of that we got fragile, backward incompatible, unnecessarily complex, jack of all trades protocol. And people are surprised that even after decades since the release of IPv6, it is being avoided like a plague.

Re: Protocol Wars

#15

Post by lordnacho »

This explains my childhood video game woes in the 90s.

I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against.

Curiously despite being a network with only two computers, you couldn't just assign any IP address you wanted. The mask was also an interesting thing, examples would have a bunch of 255s but sometimes a smaller number like 248, and then zeros. I never figured this out until I grew up.

So then we'd goof around a bit more and set it to IPX, which sounded related. Somehow we got that to work eventually.

Nowadays if you just understand IP, you're mostly fine. It's probably easier to learn as well without competing protocols with similar jargon.

Re: Protocol Wars

#16

Post by greyface- »

samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

TCP becomes unusable under interplanetary latencies; leaving the planet will force us to transition off of it.

Re: Protocol Wars

#17

Post by klabb3 »

samwillis wrote: post #11
vmfunction wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

I propose the Willis law (are you allowed to name a law after yourself?): The spread and reach of TCP/IP will accelerate at a pace faster than that of the transition to IPv6 indefinitely, therefore we are saddled with IPv4 until the end of time.

In fact, we know that IPv4 lives in the observable universe. You can travel at the speed of light towards IPv6, but the expansion rate of space time-itself (you can think of space-time as a series of tubes) is not limited by the speed of light. Thus, IPv6 is only theorized to exist, in order to explain other physical phenomena. Worse, even if it was proven to exist by a distant observer, there no way for them to relay that information back to us because our routers here at earth would drop the packets.

Re: Protocol Wars

#18

Post by zekica »

vmfunction wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

The main issue with IPv6 adoption is people who didn't learn IPv4 before NAT, and want to use the hammer (IPv4 NAT) for everything.

Re: Protocol Wars

#19

Post by PinguTS »

samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

Actually, even TCP is going to be replaced. I just want to remind the initial work of Google on QUIC, which now has become some standard. It is based on UDP and re-defining TCP features based on UDP together with cryptography and by allowing IP changes to allow moving clients.

Re: Protocol Wars

#20

Post by talideon »

greyface- wrote: post #16
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

TCP becomes unusable under interplanetary latencies; leaving the planet will force us to transition off of it.

Nah. The main impetus to achieve FTL communication will be because it'll be easier than shifting people off of TCP.
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