Re: The Superhighway Steamroller

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Sat, 2 Jul 1994 23:35:04 +0500


Excerpts from solman@MIT.EDU
> I suppose I will speak in the minority when I state that I
> thought Mr. Hart's articles were extremelly well written
> and thought provoking, although marred by inaccuracies, poor
> comparisons and a lack of serious solutions.

Personally, I feel the Mr. Hart would benefit greatly from a few
elementary composition courses.

However, his article, while almost indecipherable due to his
stream-of-conciousness (or perhaps just rambling) style, does contain
a lot of truth hidden in the half-truths and inaccuracies.

1) Network bandwidth *is* being wasted (not only because of WWW, but
because the WWW has so much traffic, even a 1% waste is
significant).
2) FTP times are slower. Actually, I also feel telnet times are slower
too.
3) Computer programming *is* moving away from the machine. As more and
more levels of abstraction are built in to programs, more levels of
translation, and possible inefficiency are also built in.

(1) and (2) will be fixed with faster hardware, while (3) will get
worse and worse. I have fond memories of 2k and 4k machines, and the
machine language programming I did on them, but I wouldn't wish that
on anyone nowadays; it's just not cost effective.

I often wonder just how much header/message parsing costs HTTP...