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OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#31

Post by nknighthb »

aidenn0 wrote: post #30
nknighthb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, invent new things, just don't get anyone else to use them. Got it. Please surrender your lightbulbs immediately.

Thanks for replying to a strawman version of what I said.

Hardly. Your argument is a caricature of itself. Success and the mere capability to engage in purely hypothetical anti-competitive behaviors suddenly means ordinary innovation practices are evil.

Presumably at this point Mozilla would like to join Microsoft in one of its various anti-trust complaints against Google for having dared to offer users better products.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#32

Post by jerf »

jamessb wrote: post #20
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…

Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge , surely?

Your question intrigued me. You are literally correct, but as it turns out the position since 1849 has been held by a physicist (at least, if we include one 10-year term of someone specializing in what Wikipedia called a "fluid mechanics" specialty "physics"), so as an imprecise conversational term it's not entirely wrong. I was unable to turn up the original source of the quote in Google, but odds are quite good it was written prior to 2009 (and almost certainly post-1979, as the timeline theoretically works for that but it would be amazing prescient in that time :) ), in which case the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge was Stephen Hawking.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#33

Post by jerf »

r4pha wrote: post #27

I had always looked to the OSI model as a _frame_ thought which a communition channel can be analysed. If I intercept my internet cable, I assume I can idealy measure the signal and fit it on the 7 layers of the OSI model. I fail (honestly) to see how that is a failure, as seems to be the starting point. Isn't the OSI model _one_ way to look at a medium?

That was not the original intention. That is the story that for some reason network professors continue to tell themselves as a reason to teach this model. The original intent was for there to be 7 clear layers, with various protocols for each.

Why the profs stick so close to this instead of teaching a more realistic model is beyond me. Why use an inaccurate theoretical model when you could use an accurate one instead? It's going to be simplified relative to reality either way, as befits a model, but it might as well be a correct simplification. I mean, it's not like the OSI 7-layer model is a mathematical truth or anything... it's just an artifact produced by a committee a long time ago.

To anyone leaping up to defend it, let me set the frame I'll be judging the defenses by in advance: If the real world was as it is today except there was no such thing as the OSI model, and someone proposed the 7-layer model today as a model for understanding the network for the very first time, would you really consider your defense as a reason to go with it, even despite the fact the model is actively inaccurate? I don't think inertia is an adequate defense to stick with something, when we aren't even using it anyhow... what real inertia does it have?

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#34

Post by derleth »

mturmon wrote: post #8
hga wrote: post #7

Not too impressed with this account, which I will admit starting to skim around halfway. E.g.: I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones). The real fatal flaw of OSI, before even getting to the point of finding out if their protocols worked---many of them did get far enough in standardization process---was their going to ISO in…

"not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol" That struck me too -- kind of undermining the simple narrative of "connection-full telecom biggies vs. connection-less insurgents". It would have been worth a note in the article, because it's in IEEE Spectrum after all. Not a networking pro, but I believe the converse is also true, that OSI has specifically connection-less protocol elements (e.g., CLNS…

Actually, it seems ARPANET was not designed to survive nuclear war:

http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...

> It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967), said:

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herz...

> The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.

Paul Baran:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran.html

> Wired: The myth of the Arpanet - which still persists - is that it was developed to withstand nuclear strikes. That's wrong, isn't it?

> Paul Baran: Yes. Bob Taylor had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different machines, and his idea was to have some way of having a terminal speak to any of them and have a network. That's really the origin of the ARPANET. The method used to connect things together was an open issue for a time.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#35

Post by tytso »

I remember reading with great amusement an article written by an X.400 proponent, sometime in the late 80's, asserting that X.400 would start to dominate SMTP once the telecoms got the price of sending an X.400 message under a dollar per e-mail. (And this was back in the 80's, when dollars were bigger back then!)

Thus proving that the OSI folks really didn't have a clue....

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#36

Post by shenberg »

hga wrote: post #7

Not too impressed with this account, which I will admit starting to skim around halfway. E.g.: I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones). The real fatal flaw of OSI, before even getting to the point of finding out if their protocols worked---many of them did get far enough in standardization process---was their going to ISO in…

TCP really isn't a virtual circuit protocol in the same sense that X.25 PLP is a virtual circuit protocol: In VC protocols you say something like "network, I want to talk to address X," establish a channel (getting a channel ID allocated) and from then on send packets to the channel (not mentioning the remote address again), knowing that they'll arrive there. This means the routers on the way are stateful. TCP theoretically doesn't care about routing, and IP is stateless.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#37

Post by tlb »

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 competitors. Also, vagueness in the spec requires extensive testing to make things interoperate reliably, which favors big incumbents.

These aren't just emergent, subconscious effects. I've been in on discussions about making a spec harder to implement to frustrate competitors. (not with any YC companies)

The dark forces of competitive advantage affect non-committee specs too. Microsoft SMB is an example. The x86 instruction set is another.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#38

Post by bandushrew »

nknighthb wrote: post #31
aidenn0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for replying to a strawman version of what I said.

Hardly. Your argument is a caricature of itself. Success and the mere capability to engage in purely hypothetical anti-competitive behaviors suddenly means ordinary innovation practices are evil. Presumably at this point Mozilla would like to join Microsoft in one of its various anti-trust complaints against Google for having dared to offer users better products.

So long as google is storing the password to my network in plain text on its servers just because I let one of my friends access my network, they do not get to boast about innovation. I cannot clearly express the loss of respect that action has engendered.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#39

Post by kisielk »

aidenn0 wrote: post #26
nknighthb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why every time Mozilla starts whining about Google playing with new things without consulting everybody else first (e.g. Dart, NaCl), I lose more respect for them (actually, at this point, they've pretty well exhausted it all). Basic advancement comes from somebody deciding to try something new, not from getting everybody to agree on what comes next.

It's slightly different because Google is in a relatively unique position of being able to unilaterally deploy new technology, as they both serve a large fraction of the traffic on the internet, and have a very popular browser. Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can only happen in chrome, which would…

Just because they can do large deployments doesn't mean it will be successful. Look at what happened with Buzz and Wave for example.

Re: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t

#40

Post by lmm »

aidenn0 wrote: post #26
nknighthb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why every time Mozilla starts whining about Google playing with new things without consulting everybody else first (e.g. Dart, NaCl), I lose more respect for them (actually, at this point, they've pretty well exhausted it all). Basic advancement comes from somebody deciding to try something new, not from getting everybody to agree on what comes next.

It's slightly different because Google is in a relatively unique position of being able to unilaterally deploy new technology, as they both serve a large fraction of the traffic on the internet, and have a very popular browser. Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can only happen in chrome, which would…

>Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can only happen in chrome, which would be quite detrimental to Mozilla.

Surely Mozilla adoption of Dart or NaCl would make this less likely, not more.

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