metcalfe understands the issues only too well. only the truly blessed can blindly exploit half-truths. he is not blessed and he is not blind. unfortunately, mr. metcalfe is living in the world of suits. very expensive suits. the type worn by what we might not so affectionately call the 'marketeers'. it doesn't matter what a small group of technically saavy internet engineers might think, this is yellow journalism and it sells papers. metcalfe is the figure-head of a well-laid plan of calculated risk. no matter what the outcome of his predictions, he and his paper will claim the high road. if there are catastrophic failures in the internet, he will claim victory and will continue to report on the 'clean-up.' if not, before his rantings become tiresome, his handlers will recall him. he will again proclaim victory (remember, he was the nagging conscience of the internet for oh so many months who fortold and therefore, prevented disaster). he will move on, perhaps attacking some other large and mis-understood entity, making predictions that have reasonable probability and limited risk until the risk pays off. i have no doubt that his campaign will succeed. he is bright, has built companies, used to be a technically saavy engineer. the trick will be to bide our time, he will go away in the end. hopefully his winnings will be modest this time. Jeff Young young@mci.net
Return-Path: nanog-owner@merit.edu Received: from merit.edu (merit.edu [35.1.1.42]) by postoffice.Reston.mci.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA23992; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 21:54:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by merit.edu (8.7.5/merit-2.0) id VAA28950 for nanog-outgoing; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 21:25:42 -0400 (EDT) Received: from postman.ncube.com (postman.ncube.com [134.242.8.47]) by merit.edu (8.7.5/merit-2.0) with SMTP id VAA28945 for <nanog@merit.edu>; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 21:25:39 -0400 (EDT) Received: from butler.ncube.com by postman.ncube.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA21370; Tue, 18 Jun 96 18:26:25 PDT Received: from skynet.ncube.com by butler.ncube.com (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA01651; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 18:25:19 +0800 Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 18:25:19 +0800 From: avg@postman.ncube.com (Vadim Antonov) Message-Id: <9606190125.AA01651@butler.ncube.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re:critique of NANOG meeting Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu Precedence: bulk Content-Type: text Content-Length: 632
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> I don't know if you folks are following Metcalfe's columns...
The guy is seriously out of touch with reality. He seems to be completely unable to comprehend the fact that packet loss is not a malfunction but rather the nature's way to say "you need more bandwidth". And the fact that it was exactly suits who got Internet to that point; engineers keet screaming about inadequate facilities for as long as i could remember.
And if he thinks backbone engineers have time to prepare slides (or have secretaries to do that for them) i'd like to move to the world he's living in.
--vadim