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> So I think the argument was that it made economic sense for a single organization to own all the wires, so it could maintain them with a set of common specifi

by zrm 9y ago

> So I think the argument was that it made economic sense for a single organization to own all the wires, so it could maintain them with a set of common specifications and processes. But if you can reduce every wire to a single number -- its information-carrying capacity -- then this argument goes out the window. You can use all sorts of heterogeneous links made by different manufacturers and maintained by different companies. > (I'm not an electrical engineer, so I have no idea if this is all true, but it sounds plausible.) You're describing the internet. :) > Is it possible there will be a breakthrough in decentralized distributed computing? The hard problem is security. Right now you have to trust Amazon et al with your data, which is not really what you want, but even that is better than having to trust Some Guy running a host out of his garage. This isn't a real problem for static content. That you can just encrypt, throw it up on IPFS or similar and add federated authentication for access to the decryption keys. But data processing is something else. There are people trying to solve that with encryption too, but it's hard, and to a large extent equivalent to making effective DRM, which is not a desirable thing for your problem to be equivalent to. A different approach is to trust people who you actually trust. We're now at the point that a fast processor consumes a single digit number of watts. So you can run your own server at home, and so can your friends and family, which allows you to pool capacity for load sharing and higher availability. Then services become software you install on your trusted pool of servers. There is no technical reason that can't exist, people just haven't done it yet (or they have but the future is not evenly distributed).

chubot 9y ago
You quoted me before an edit -- what I meant was: Did things actually happen that way historically? That is, did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shannon's ideas? I'm talking about networks with heterogeneous physical specifications -- that happened long before the Internet. You have the same problem with just a plain analog circuit-switched phone system. No digital computers involved. Static content isn't really distributed computing; it's more like networking. The type of breakthroughs I'm thinking of are more along the lines of block chain, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. In other words, different ways of collaborating over a network. The thing that jumps out at me is that most of these technologies are fantastically expensive computationally.
- JPLeRouzic 9y ago
  You name fantastic cryptographic technologies! I was an R&D engineer in a European Telco, so maybe my understanding could be useful but my ideas may not be shared by all: >> did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shannon's ideas? I would say engineers have little to say about decisions in a huge company like ATT. In a company having hundreds of thousands employees, decisions are taken 3 or 4 levels of hierarchy above them. And those decisions are, as usual in human matters, mostly never rational from the company PoV, more than often a decision is taken between CEOs only, or because someone high in the food chain wants to go higher or gain some power on a related organisation or gain corruption money by pushing a manufacturer technology. That said I think engineers were never bothered with Shannon work. It is quite arid and when we read it now, more than 50 years later, we may read things that were not written intentionnaly in the original paper. I must confess that when I read Shannon's seminal paper out of curiosity in the 2000', I was hugely disappointed.
  - zrm 9y ago
    > I would say engineers have little to say about decisions in a huge company like ATT. The AT&T of the Bell Labs days was not like a modern telco that just takes bids for everything from Cisco et al. AT&T designed their own phones, phone switches, computers, microprocessors, programming languages, operating systems, etc. > I must confess that when I read Shannon's seminal paper out of curiosity in the 2000', I was hugely disappointed. That's always the way with seminal papers. The ideas are by now so integrated into modern society that we can't even imagine what it was like for that to be a revolutionary concept.
    - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
      >> The AT&T of the Bell Labs days ... designed their own ... True, I am old enough to have see my own employer (France Telecom) doing the same: Computers : SM80 and SM90 [0] and heavy involvement in other computers like the LCT3202. Operating system: A clone of Unix in Pascal! Phones indeed: S63 and older phones, Phone switches: E10 and software of 11F. For me the 80" were the good old time, you well describe what came after that "just takes bids for everything from Cisco et al" [0] http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/unix/sps7.htm http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/unix/sps7.htm

by zrm 9y ago

chubot 9y ago

You quoted me before an edit -- what I meant was: Did things actually happen that way historically? That is, did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shannon's ideas? I'm talking about networks with heterogeneous physical specifications -- that happened long before the Internet. You have the same problem with just a plain analog circuit-switched phone system. No digital computers involved. Static content isn't really distributed computing; it's more like networking. The type of breakthroughs I'm thinking of are more along the lines of block chain, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. In other words, different ways of collaborating over a network. The thing that jumps out at me is that most of these technologies are fantastically expensive computationally.

JPLeRouzic 9y ago
You name fantastic cryptographic technologies! I was an R&D engineer in a European Telco, so maybe my understanding could be useful but my ideas may not be shared by all: >> did engineers actually accept/design more heterogeneity in the physical network as a result of Shannon's ideas? I would say engineers have little to say about decisions in a huge company like ATT. In a company having hundreds of thousands employees, decisions are taken 3 or 4 levels of hierarchy above them. And those decisions are, as usual in human matters, mostly never rational from the company PoV, more than often a decision is taken between CEOs only, or because someone high in the food chain wants to go higher or gain some power on a related organisation or gain corruption money by pushing a manufacturer technology. That said I think engineers were never bothered with Shannon work. It is quite arid and when we read it now, more than 50 years later, we may read things that were not written intentionnaly in the original paper. I must confess that when I read Shannon's seminal paper out of curiosity in the 2000', I was hugely disappointed.
- zrm 9y ago
  > I would say engineers have little to say about decisions in a huge company like ATT. The AT&T of the Bell Labs days was not like a modern telco that just takes bids for everything from Cisco et al. AT&T designed their own phones, phone switches, computers, microprocessors, programming languages, operating systems, etc. > I must confess that when I read Shannon's seminal paper out of curiosity in the 2000', I was hugely disappointed. That's always the way with seminal papers. The ideas are by now so integrated into modern society that we can't even imagine what it was like for that to be a revolutionary concept.
  - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
    >> The AT&T of the Bell Labs days ... designed their own ... True, I am old enough to have see my own employer (France Telecom) doing the same: Computers : SM80 and SM90 [0] and heavy involvement in other computers like the LCT3202. Operating system: A clone of Unix in Pascal! Phones indeed: S63 and older phones, Phone switches: E10 and software of 11F. For me the 80" were the good old time, you well describe what came after that "just takes bids for everything from Cisco et al" [0] http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/unix/sps7.htm http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/unix/sps7.htm