9 ms·

The bandwidth in the centre of the network is way higher than the bandwidth in the access network, because to increase the bandwidth in the access network you h

by ucee054 13y ago

The bandwidth in the centre of the network is way higher than the bandwidth in the access network, because to increase the bandwidth in the access network you have to do very expensive stuff like digging up the road to lay optical fibres. Result: The internet will always be centralized. Deal with it.

jokoon 13y ago
First, you're talking about websites, which will always require bandwidth. Why ? Because websites are narcissistic, expensive, and not designed for a dynamic experience. Websites are synchronous: the server generates a 500kB text blob file each time you want to communicate, it's zipped, unzipped, and parsed again, it's totally inefficient. Why ? because a webpage is just a string blob. I live in france, and here, youtube is barely usable anymore, because everybody uses it. Streaming sucks, because video on demand is the worst pitfall of the internet architecture. Websites are great for static pages. It's also great to advertise things, because html is easy, and quickly doable. But for other things, I don't believe it's really worth it. I dare you to find a html5, lightweight internet browser that can do optimized javascript, for what, checking your gmail, and connect to the facebook server farm? Why not using a mail application instead ? And then come up with SPDY, which is not so fast anyway. Not everybody wants websites. People also like to share files, do video conferences, which are not possible with a centralized network, or really painful and expensive. Think about skype and bittorrent. Those are economic alternatives because access network are not only expensive, they're not technologically viable. Saying p2p is not viable because it is slow is a joke, because the way we use the network to make websites is already slow and require tremendous amounts of bandwidth. You're comparing airplanes and bicycles.
- jokoon 13y ago
  Also, talking about facebook, facebook is totally inefficient and not economically viable. Seriously, a mainstream website to share photos and comments, have you seen their datacenters ? And facebook is not even a search engine. So what's google then ? Barely an assisted regex search. You won't meet new people on facebook, you won't gather for new activities with strangers, it won't list available jobs opportunities or actually make relevant stats to tell people what jobs are needed, you won't find local businesses unless all of them subscribe to facebook, you won't post ads for something you neighbor could need. So what is facebook for then ? Just to tell people you know, that you're making... a party. Or to advertise about your hyped bar. Facebook is this huge device you connect to but can't use the data, because it's a trade secret. It's plain useless. That's because it use the star network pattern, instead of the mesh pattern. I guess the main, elephant-in-the-room excuse, is because people are afraid of sex offenders.
- ucee054 13y ago
  Let's say you want to send a multimedia collection from your co-lo to someone in a different continent, via a relay. You might be able to relay it via (someone like) me, because I get megabits per second download, but I get much less upload, so your target is in for a tedious wait. But, if you send it via Amazon web services, you might be able to direct connect to their hosting centre near you. From there, you could get a gigabit per second over Amazon's own network to a centre near your target where he/she can download from - instantaneous. And we're not even talking about Amazon's datacentre internal networks, where you might be able to arrange for 10 gigabits. Centralized beats decentralized by orders of magnitude. Sorry.
  - jokoon 13y ago
    > multimedia collection How many people really want to do that ? You just better send it through mail honestly. Most people care about text data, which is very small if you handle it well.
    - ucee054 13y ago
      How many? I don't know, but I do know that Grandma wants to send the photos from last night's birthday party to Aunt Tillie back in the old country. And neither is on bittorrent. I think the mistake you are making is that you think "most people" = you, whereas in reality "most people" = Grandma. If you are the guy responsible for building some internet service for Grandma to use, you will always go centralized, because that's where the bandwidth is. p2p only wins in some weird edge cases - in file sharing it's in part not to enable copyright holders to shut the system down through legal action against single points of failure.
      - jokoon 13y ago
        > I think the mistake you are making is that you think "most people" = you, whereas in reality "most people" = Grandma. I'm trying to make you understand p2p techs can go mainstream, I'm not trying to argue about making a tech only for tech aware people. Bittorrent is already used in a mainstream way. Please don't argue about a tech that appears too complex it can't suit old people. Very few people understand kernels, yet many use computers everyday without minding. With that mindset, p2p will never become mainstream. If you want innovation to suit 95% of what people want, you're screwed, because people don't know what technologies can do for them. Sometimes you should let engineers or tech-savvy marketers propose a little more that what people will always want to try. There are many people out there who like to be surprised with technologies, and that's also a market.

by ucee054 13y ago

jokoon 13y ago

First, you're talking about websites, which will always require bandwidth. Why ? Because websites are narcissistic, expensive, and not designed for a dynamic experience. Websites are synchronous: the server generates a 500kB text blob file each time you want to communicate, it's zipped, unzipped, and parsed again, it's totally inefficient. Why ? because a webpage is just a string blob. I live in france, and here, youtube is barely usable anymore, because everybody uses it. Streaming sucks, because video on demand is the worst pitfall of the internet architecture. Websites are great for static pages. It's also great to advertise things, because html is easy, and quickly doable. But for other things, I don't believe it's really worth it. I dare you to find a html5, lightweight internet browser that can do optimized javascript, for what, checking your gmail, and connect to the facebook server farm? Why not using a mail application instead ? And then come up with SPDY, which is not so fast anyway. Not everybody wants websites. People also like to share files, do video conferences, which are not possible with a centralized network, or really painful and expensive. Think about skype and bittorrent. Those are economic alternatives because access network are not only expensive, they're not technologically viable. Saying p2p is not viable because it is slow is a joke, because the way we use the network to make websites is already slow and require tremendous amounts of bandwidth. You're comparing airplanes and bicycles.

jokoon 13y ago
Also, talking about facebook, facebook is totally inefficient and not economically viable. Seriously, a mainstream website to share photos and comments, have you seen their datacenters ? And facebook is not even a search engine. So what's google then ? Barely an assisted regex search. You won't meet new people on facebook, you won't gather for new activities with strangers, it won't list available jobs opportunities or actually make relevant stats to tell people what jobs are needed, you won't find local businesses unless all of them subscribe to facebook, you won't post ads for something you neighbor could need. So what is facebook for then ? Just to tell people you know, that you're making... a party. Or to advertise about your hyped bar. Facebook is this huge device you connect to but can't use the data, because it's a trade secret. It's plain useless. That's because it use the star network pattern, instead of the mesh pattern. I guess the main, elephant-in-the-room excuse, is because people are afraid of sex offenders.
ucee054 13y ago
Let's say you want to send a multimedia collection from your co-lo to someone in a different continent, via a relay. You might be able to relay it via (someone like) me, because I get megabits per second download, but I get much less upload, so your target is in for a tedious wait. But, if you send it via Amazon web services, you might be able to direct connect to their hosting centre near you. From there, you could get a gigabit per second over Amazon's own network to a centre near your target where he/she can download from - instantaneous. And we're not even talking about Amazon's datacentre internal networks, where you might be able to arrange for 10 gigabits. Centralized beats decentralized by orders of magnitude. Sorry.
- jokoon 13y ago
  > multimedia collection How many people really want to do that ? You just better send it through mail honestly. Most people care about text data, which is very small if you handle it well.
  - ucee054 13y ago
    How many? I don't know, but I do know that Grandma wants to send the photos from last night's birthday party to Aunt Tillie back in the old country. And neither is on bittorrent. I think the mistake you are making is that you think "most people" = you, whereas in reality "most people" = Grandma. If you are the guy responsible for building some internet service for Grandma to use, you will always go centralized, because that's where the bandwidth is. p2p only wins in some weird edge cases - in file sharing it's in part not to enable copyright holders to shut the system down through legal action against single points of failure.
    - jokoon 13y ago
      > I think the mistake you are making is that you think "most people" = you, whereas in reality "most people" = Grandma. I'm trying to make you understand p2p techs can go mainstream, I'm not trying to argue about making a tech only for tech aware people. Bittorrent is already used in a mainstream way. Please don't argue about a tech that appears too complex it can't suit old people. Very few people understand kernels, yet many use computers everyday without minding. With that mindset, p2p will never become mainstream. If you want innovation to suit 95% of what people want, you're screwed, because people don't know what technologies can do for them. Sometimes you should let engineers or tech-savvy marketers propose a little more that what people will always want to try. There are many people out there who like to be surprised with technologies, and that's also a market.