3 ms·

It's not distributed if it's all owned by the same corporation. If anything distributed computing has gone backwards the last decade. This switch to centralizat

It's not distributed if it's all owned by the same corporation. If anything distributed computing has gone backwards the last decade. This switch to centralization was mostly forced by people using low functionality dumb terminals (smart phones) that users don't control and that literally can't hold a TCP connection open.

cmrx64 3y ago
don’t conflate decentralized with distributed
toast0 3y ago
> This switch to centralization was mostly forced by people using low functionality dumb terminals (smart phones) that users don't control and that literally can't hold a TCP connection open. Not being able to hold a TCP connection open is an implementation choice of the OS developer (and some choices at the network level too). At WhatsApp, we would find Nokia Symbian devices with 45 day old TCP connections to our servers anytime we looked. Nokia S40 isn't a smart phone platform, but it could hold long connections too. Old versions of Android could do it, although old versions of Android had trouble switching between wifi and cellular. You can probably do it on current Android if you turn off all the Doze or whatever stuff (which isn't always easy to turn off). There's an efficiency argument for having a single long TCP connection for platform push, rather than one per app that needs it, of course. But in that case, platform push better be reliable.
- superkuh 3y ago
  I didn't mean it was infeasible. I meant holding open TCP connections are avoided by choice to save battery power because transmitting wirelessly is a power drain. But also for all wireless there's a random round trip time and so exponential backoff. The longer you hold open the more likely. Almost all smart phones and their software are gimped in this way; the outliers you mention are interesting but not significant.

3 ms·

It's not distributed if it's all owned by the same corporation. If anything distributed computing has gone backwards the last decade. This switch to centralizat

by superkuh 3y ago

cmrx64 3y ago
don’t conflate decentralized with distributed
toast0 3y ago
> This switch to centralization was mostly forced by people using low functionality dumb terminals (smart phones) that users don't control and that literally can't hold a TCP connection open. Not being able to hold a TCP connection open is an implementation choice of the OS developer (and some choices at the network level too). At WhatsApp, we would find Nokia Symbian devices with 45 day old TCP connections to our servers anytime we looked. Nokia S40 isn't a smart phone platform, but it could hold long connections too. Old versions of Android could do it, although old versions of Android had trouble switching between wifi and cellular. You can probably do it on current Android if you turn off all the Doze or whatever stuff (which isn't always easy to turn off). There's an efficiency argument for having a single long TCP connection for platform push, rather than one per app that needs it, of course. But in that case, platform push better be reliable.
- superkuh 3y ago
  I didn't mean it was infeasible. I meant holding open TCP connections are avoided by choice to save battery power because transmitting wirelessly is a power drain. But also for all wireless there's a random round trip time and so exponential backoff. The longer you hold open the more likely. Almost all smart phones and their software are gimped in this way; the outliers you mention are interesting but not significant.