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
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
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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
On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Jeff Young wrote:
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.
He is also living in the world of the user. One who perhaps made the wrong choice in choosing an ISP. One who perhaps doesn't know how to tell the difference between local congestion at the ISP, congestion in core routers and congestion at an overloaded WWW server. So, IMHO, he has a point. Service is often quite poor. But he's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. The problem is with incompetent or greedy ISP's who grossly oversell their lines or build broken networks or sell too many virtual WWW servers on one poor 486 server. This is one of the reasons why the Internet now needs some sort of centralised performance monitoring and trouble ticketing system. If you can point the blame at an ISP's congested T1 or a company's overloaded WWW server, and make this info public, then people will soon learn that there is many, many more than just one reason for congestions and therefore we also need many, many solutions. But one thing is sure. The folks on NANOG are not good at telling their story, at marketing their successes and trumpetting their greatness to the world. If people would start doing this, then you would see more press coverage of Internet operations realities and more people, even journalists, would get an inkling of how things really are going. Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
I'll agree with Vadim's assesment. Metcalf can mock Merit and MFS folks all he wants, but they're doing damn good work. I especially liked this quote: rm] Yes, I found pettiness and bureaucratic infighting among the rm] groups I had hoped would be pulling the Internet together. Death of the net, death of the net! The network operators won't all agree, we're DOOMED!!! rm] I stand corrected, but not reassured. Back at NANOG, I was rm] surrounded by people whose lives are about "running code." I rm] twiddled as these people, unaccustomed as they are to public rm] speaking, stood up one by one in front of 350 people without rm] having ever tried their slides on GWU's projection system. We all rm] waited while Windows booted. If you have running code, it seems, rm] you don't have to respect your audience by checking your slides rm] at least once. Or by wearing a suit. Sheesh. I dunno. Does respecting your audience mean "wearing a suit" and having a flawless a/v presentation? Or does it mean presenting encompassing intelligent information? I think the latter, and I think Mr Ethernet failed in this respect in his most recent article in InfoWeek. -alan ......... Vadim Antonov is rumored to have said: ] ] ] >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 ] ]
On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Vadim Antonov wrote:
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.
As I have said before (and have gotten flamed for it), Bob Metcalfe may have been an engineer in a previous life, but has no clue for the way things are run today. Nor is he following it. He is just another trade rag columnist who is quick to jump on the bandwagon and offer his toughts on a subject he knows nothing about. He may have created ethernet, but today's technology seems to be new to him. /cah
participants (5)
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Alan Hannan -
avg＠postman.ncube.com -
Craig A. Huegen -
Jeff Young -
Michael Dillon