[e2e] Open the floodgate

[Cannara]

Well Theo, we agree that things need doing.  So my question remains -- how
many more decades?  By the way, I didn't mean to convey literally Public
Utility, but rather a utility for the public, which includes business, and
includes the dominant traffic now.

Alex

Theo Pagtzis wrote:
> 
>    Yet, IP
> > provides a simple way of doing exactly this.  As I implied before, ECN is a
> > late, partial admission that a problem has long existed and needs attention.
> > None of us waits as many decades to get a cavity filled -- at least I hope
> > none do.
> 
> IMHO it is all a matter of priorities what needs fixing..it all depends
> if one goes either 'preventive' or 'corrective'. To keep up with the
> medical examples..did you ever take medicine in the fear that you MAY
> get ill? don't think so...But as soon as you started feeling bad
> (actually as soon as your threshold of tolerance -
> biological/patience/other - exceeded some value) then you MUST fix it.
> (The 'SHOULD lies somewhere in between in the threshold ranges')
> 
> The reason is that sometimes one is not _aware_ of the cavity until the
> cavity either
> 
>    1) declares its presence with some signs as a potential (maybe
> future) problem (foresight hints - 'fix me or later I will bug you')
>    2) requires attention
>    3) requires IMMEDIATE attention
> 
> How would you rate the possibility of a congestion collapse as opposed
> to the possibility of a need for notification on congestion (hints)? I
> guess one should have a few things to consider:
>       a) could one afford notification signals at the time (1988?) (for
> whatever reason)
>       b) did one _want_ notification signals ?
>       c) did one _think_ of notification signals (it can happen)?
> 
>   Also it should be noted that only as an aftermath (AFTER observing the
> 'evolution' of the problem as I call it) one could have decided that it
> is better to start worrying about notifying _before_ starting to address
> a collapse..
> 
> >
> > And on: "..take something out of the environment..." -- how long do we wait to
> > do something?  We floundered for years on something as basic as addressing.
> > As others have said, the IETF wins the slowness race with other networking
> > bodies.  And, note that I'm not "denigrating" TCP, I'm raising issues that, if
> > dealt with, would prolong its overall life and improve its effectiveness.
> > Others have raised many of the same issues over the years and been rebuffed.
> > Rebuffing is what bureaucracies do, so that's the criticism.  TCP is
> > inanimate.  Only people can resist changes in it.
> > -----
> 
> eeemm here a familiar pattern crops in mind. Linux distros is an
> engineering effort that continuously reshapes the OS entity towards
> 'prolonging life and improving effectiveness' as you quite rightly put
> it. Now the next question is...if change is continuous (the rate of
> continuity is relative to size of the entity) would you TRUST that
> entity of mission critical (the definition of criticality changes for
> whoever uses it - so we have to go with the lowest common denominator)
> usage.
> 
> That is to say...if one constantly evolves TCP although long-term it
> will be ok can you afford it NOW??? I remind that the Internet as we
> know it now is not a research effort anymore. It is a commercial venture
>   and is about to become a public utility. Can you afford to be without
> water on a non-deterministic basis even if one told you that 'the pipes
> we are building will prolong usage life and improve effectiveness, given
> that we have to change ALL the pipes in the network (i.e. TCP
> implementations).
> 
>   So, as
> > I've simply said, the initial congestion-control kludge may have been
> > needed, but so was continued development of more comprehensive congestion
> > management that even nodes running, say, UDP could benefit from.
> 
> totally agree with this as I feel it from the WLAN perspective. Could it
> be that the politics of vendors driving some percentage of the force of
> the IETF cannot agree on the need to get together (not compete against
> each other) and give momentum into an effort (as per your suggestion)
> such that, its output will indeed get to be phased in??? A quick
> example: see where IPv6 has been and see the tremendous effort that
> companies/universities/the pope of Rome is putting into convincing the
> world to use it!  Do you dare (if you were the IETF) doing the same with
> a comprehensive congestion management mechanism (say TCPpro)? It would
> be a mission in life in convincing the clueless (but enterpreneurial)
> spirit of the 'user' out there..
> 
> now the funny thing is that as soon as the cavity needs immediate
> attention..you have to fix it or lose it :)
> 
> in a nutshell...TRANSITION mechanisms :)))
> 
> and presto a new discipline.... TRANSITION engineering...
>     (with the motto..'habit is a bad thing')