Re: [John Robb of Gomez] The 2X (two way) Internet

From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Thu Jan 11 2001 - 14:18:58 PST


Ten thousand blessings on you and yours, Roy.

And a personal thanks for saving me several pages of "Don't make me come
over there...." :-)

Seriously, though, crap like this bothers me. If folks adopt models
like this guy proposes, it will continue the trend of splintering "the
Internet" into lots of little free-fire zones instead of one big
playground. Metering bandwidth so far has helped a lot of folks decide
they couldn't afford to play server farm at their homes, for instance.

And I'm still trying to dissuade friends from posting their pictures to
idiot services like WebShots where you can't view the damn things
without turning a few circles to get around their asinine insistence on
taking over your computer (sorry, "using their thoughtfully provided
free client") to see them. I'm sure the ding ding who wrote up the
glorious vision has no problem running other people's downloaded
ecommerce no-QA-just-release code on his "squandered" PC, since that's
what he's really proposing everybody do, right?
...rzzfrzznsnzzfrzznmumblemumblemumble....

Sigh. Right, I'm not going to rant, I'm going to keep working. Really.

There is a two-way web out there, Roy, but the problem is that if it's
wildly successful no one's going to get filthy rich off it. Oh, some
folks will get rich, but nobody will become a Cisco or a Tibco or a
Microsoft-- at least, if it's *really* two-way, and if it's *really*
about voluntary peering. The KnowNow stuff is a great example of what
you can do if you want to create servers, and services, that folks can
use for all kinds of stuff, without having to do everything that counts
through one lockstep custom client.
There's still a lot of sharks out there, like the yingyang who wrote the
original piece, whose vision of the "two-way web" is that it's two way
through a piece of software, a server, or a fee-based service that THEY
control. "You can two-way all ya want, as long as we get a piece!"

Adam's such a nice guy that he doesn't instantly see the menace of these
kind of writeups. I'm an old cynic fossil who has spent years building
systems and analyzing flow of control, so it's the first thing that
jumps out at me. Then again, I was muttering quietly that we needed
alternate DNS root servers back in late 1994, and enough folks
pooh-poohed it that I said "fine" and let the matter drop. Now look
where we are.

_SRC

-- 
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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
 ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration **
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