Subject: RE: "end-to-end" is important....Re: OPES is evil incarnate

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 10:38:04 +0200

I like it ! :-)  

Cheers, 

Jo 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:36 AM
To: Einar Stefferud
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: "end-to-end" is important....Re: OPES is evil incarnate

>And so:-)...   May the best technology win!
>
>In general, the best does win, in due course;-)...\Stef

Once upon a time.... there where three home video systems: System 2000 was
the
best technology, more information recorded, better quality....but too
expensive.
It died. Then there was the Beta system, a good technology with fine picture
definition and not so expensive equipment and tapes....but SONY didn't want
to
release the patent, so the market killed it. The last one, the worst one,
the
one keeping less information was VHS.

Has anybody seen a VCR other than VHS on the last 10 years?

Does the best win?

Remember.... The Good, The Bad and the Ugly;  Unix,Windows and MSDOS.

Does the best win?

I tent to believe that markets choose the one to win on every field, and
unfortunately most times the chosen one is not that who holds the best
technology.

Regards,
j.r.

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:04:55 -0400

> Has anybody seen a VCR other than VHS on the last 10 years?

A slightly optimistic note, although I agree with you and suggest
that Stef's "in due course" can hide a long and painful period...

Seen any of the recent "video to hard disk" systems?  Looked at
the sales curves?  Are you sure that, given the computer industry
history of gradually replacing the use of tape in various
categories of use with random-access storage, "VCR" is the right
category to look at, rather than "television recording devices"
generally?

This is still an incomplete experiment, obviously.  My personal
guess is that we won't start to know the answer until we see
integrated, plausibly consumer-priced, "set top box" units that
contain both the hard disks and something that plays, e.g.,
rented movies in DVD form.  But it will be interesting.

A possibly more interesting question is whether, had System 2000
been the winner, it would have survived any better once
random-access equipment became available and cheap than VHS seems
likely to do.   I.e., if the transition I'm guessing at occurs,
how much of it will be driven by the basic advantages of (and
increased functionality possible with) random access devices and
how much by the deficiences of VHS.

> I tent to believe that markets choose the one to win on every
> field, and unfortunately most times the chosen one is not that
> who holds the best technology.

Yes, but these choices are often very complex and for
unpredictable reasons.  And Stef's "in due course" allows a very
long time for poor technology choices in the marketplace to work
themselves out.

    john

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 10:04:42 -0600 (MDT)

> From: TOMSON ERIC <[email-masked]>

> The "best" doesn't always win.
> The "cheapest" often does.
>
> Look at VHS over Betamax.
> Look at Token Ring over Ethernet.

In fact, VHS was better than Betamax for what people wanted, and
CSMA/CD was better than 802.5 on almost any grounds you care to
name that weren't salescritter nonsense.

Yes, by all accounts Betamax had slightly prettier pictures but trailed
in recording time.  Most people still record VCR tapes at super-low
resolution.  I find the typical SLP tape is not just a waste of time but
painful to watch, but most of the rest of the world disagrees.

The 100VG-AnyLAN, FDDI, and 802.5 salescritter songs were based on
mistakes in textbooks such as confusing CSMA/CD with ALOHA and
distortions such as equating low standard deviation in latency to
bounded latency and bounded, random backoff to unbounded latency.

Worrying about whether an OPES WG would give IETF sanction to evil is
a waste of time.  Whether the old telephants and those hoping to create
new telephants succeed, it will not be because the IETF does or does not
sanction interception proxies.  Instead of nattering about whether OPES
is 50% or 90% down a slippery slope, you'd do more good for the net by
teaching your own systems about SMIME, PGP, IPSec, and STARTTLS.  Such
as those are the only hope of protecting the notion of dumb networks
and end-to-end services.

That so few people care about actually doing something by ensuring their
own traffic is invulnerable to involtary improvement by such as OPES but
so many want to argue about the virtues of OPES is not a good sign about
the IETF.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]