On Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:00:55 EST, Jay Ashworth said:
Wow. $ANONYMOUS_COMMENTER was right: end-to-end isn't an engineering principle, it's a religion.
No, I was commenting on the "FTP is peer-to-peer as both ends initiate connections" (which is true as far as it goes) - but when you look at the bigger context of "what protocols besides VoIP and p2p" it's important. First off, VoIP is merely one special case of peer-to-peer. The second, and more important, point is that if end-to-end is a religion, there is another, even more sizeable religion called "The Internet As A Whole Doesn't Need Any More Than The Small Subset of Protocols I Need For *MY* Network". Seems there's a lot of engineers out there that only want to make sure last year's protocols work, and are willing to totally ignore next year's.