Larry J. Plato put this into my mailbox:

My first thought was this would be a disadvantage, since most users have no clue about the working of the net, but they know that application <bandwidth hog> 'runs faster' than application <net friendly>.

Speaking of such people, does anyone know if there's any sort of campaign to educate the general masses on how the net works, in laymans' terms? In an attempt to explain why Internet connectivity hasn't been great and why connections around DALnet are lagged, I put together an explanation that analogizes the Internet to a series of roads, trying to include what happens when it jams up, how traffic transfers across the 'net, etc. For most people, this was their first real explanation of 'the information superhighway'. I still get reports of people passing it around to their friends. It strikes me that if one wants a campaign to get developers to make bandwidth-friendly applications to succeed, there must also be another campaign to inform users exactly *why* bandwidth must be conserved. I've also found that, if given a reasonable explanation as to why something should be a certain way, most people will comply instead of doing their own thing. It helps to explain what's going on. -dalvenjah Dalvenjah FoxFire, the Teddy Dragon (also known as Sven Nielsen to some :) dalvenjah@dal.net --- dalvenjah on IRC Remember: if you're not on DALnet, you're on the wrong IRC server!! (/serv irc.dal.net 7000 or telnet telnet.dal.net to try it out) -- ____ _ _ _ "I had the dagger in my hand, and he has | _ \ __ _| |_ _____ _ _ (_)__ _| |_the indecency to start dying on his own!" | |_) / _` | \ V / -_) ' \ | / _` | ' \ --Ambassador G'kar, Babylon 5 |____/\__,_|_|\_/\___|_||_|/ \__,_|_||_| FoxFire -- dalvenjah@dal.net -- (SN90) |__/

Hmm... ping -f, spray, they already exist. While they are occassionally used maliciously, surely they aren't evidence of the death of the net.... I feel that the irresponsible users will be taken care of by natural forces of nature. We can't 'not build' bad tools, someone else will. We can 'build' good tools, and make them the tools of choice for the majority. -alan ps build/not build implies all attributable influence towards the development of said tools..... ......... Dick St.Peters is rumored to have said: ] ] Paul Ferguson writes: ] > >How would you feel if Pointcast slowly backed off and increased the time ] > >period between updates, but at the touch of a key or movement of the mouse ] > >it would go back to the "knob" setting? Obviously a low volume data feed ] > >like Pointcast may not be that big a load on the net but the heuristics ] > >(which do involve human factors) could probably be applied to a lot of ] > >other things like video feeds that will be bigger bandwidth consumers. ] ] > I think this sounds fine, but I don't think you need an RFC to dictate ] > it. This would be a competitive advantage for an application, methinks. ] ] This comment got me wondering, and I don't like where I wound up ... ] ] Would it be a competitive advantage? As far as responsible users go, ] it probably would. ] ] That brings up irresponsible users - users who don't care about their ] impact, and even worse hacker-type users who would deliberately bring ] down the net if they could ... how long before someone figures out how ] to make a server direct a Real Audio stream (or whatever) at someone ] else? The leverage for hackers could be enormous. ] ] -- ] Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY ] stpeters@NetHeaven.com Owner, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/800-910-6671 ] Internet for Albany/Saratoga, Glens Falls, North Creek, & Lake Placid ] First Internet service based in the 518 area code ]