On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Henk Smit wrote:
What worries me here is that people are developing applications that use (lots of) bandwidth, even when people are not even using their computers.
I agree. This will get worse and worse as more and more companies build products and test them on a LAN or with a local ISP at the other end of their T1 line. It would help a lot if there was an RFC because even though many developpers can be clueless when designing and implementing these products, they *DO* listen when someone points them to a standards authority like IETF. You and I may know that IETF is just a bunch of plain folks who understand networks and try to figure out the best way to build them. But it is much much easier to tell a developper that their product violates RFC2001 than it is to try to convince them that they are wrong based just on engineering grounds. The developper and their managers will dispute engineering reasons much sooner than they will dispute an official Internet standard from the IETF. Maybe we could get an RFC that requires screensaver type applications to have a standalone mode that works with stored data and require user overrides in order to initiate video or other data feeds. Maybe it could also require that video and data feeds automatically shut down if there is no user interaction within a specified time period. Kind of a higher level view of the smae kind of timing specs that make TCP work. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com