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"Series of Tubes" Metaphor Implemented
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 15, 2007 08:54 PM
from the drop-here-pop-there dept.
from the drop-here-pop-there dept.
meisteg writes to tell us about Tubes: a beta application that uses a tube metaphor to enable users to share files over the Internet. The Windows-only app is free and the company hopes to make money on an enhanced version targeted at businesses. See this video for some details of how Tubes works. From the article: "[Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens] endured ridicule last year for his assertion that the Internet is 'a series of tubes.' But one Web startup hopes to bring that metaphor to life with a new service that makes it easy for people to share videos, songs, pictures and other big files."
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well (Score:5, Funny)
Good. Because we all know that it's not a big truck.
well-Planespeak. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:well-Planespeak. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. How would one explain how the internet works to someone with no clue at all? I mentioned the word "server" to my sister the other week, and she had to ask what it was. After trying to explain how it was different than her Dell laptop, I finally sent her a picture off google images of a big server rack and she finally got it.
Geeks take it for granted what we already understand. To others, it might as well be magic.
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Re:well-Planespeak. (Score:5, Interesting)
But what did she "get" by looking at the picture? Did she actually understand the server conceptually? Or did it further add to mystery, just with an added mental picture of racks of intimidating equipment?
After all, her Dell laptop could easily perform as a server. And a rack-mount machine can easily function as a workstation. The type of enclosure does not determine the function.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Explaining the difference between a client and a server is easy: the client is the thing that "asks" for stuff, and the server is the thing that fulfills the requests. It's not as if we geeks picked these words out of thin air, you know -- they were picked for their conceptual similarity to stuff in the real world. In other words, a computer "server" and a restaurant "server" (i.e., a waiter) do the same thing: ask for a glass of water, the server gets you a glass of water; ask for a web page, the server se
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"Pipes" would have been a better word than "tubes" (stuff flows along pipes, but not necessarily along tubes) and I feel roads would be a better metaphor, but "tubes" isn't a bad one.
I confess I don't understand what incorr
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There is one main thing that made this a particularly awful speech:
Mr. Stevens was trying to 'educate' his fellow Senators, assuming the condescending tone of a self-appointed 'expert' in the subject.
He was not trying to explain it in the sense of 'this is sort of how I understand it, as a simile', but more like 'you kids don't understand this interweb thing, and I do, so I'm going to extemporate here until you get it'.
This makes silly
Re:well-Planespeak. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:well-Planespeak. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here goes nothing. Stevens got it ass backwards. The internet IS more like a truck... or really a bunch of them. It's not like a tube. A tube is a continuous flow. A roadway is a bunch of independent bits of flow all moving in different directions, much like the internet.
The internet is a lot like an information superhighway... or more accurately, a highly interconnected network of roads and bridges that span the globe. Some roads are toll roads where people can pay to get somewhere faster just like you pay for a faster connection to the internet. There's nothing wrong with that. Some roads have fast speed limits, some have slower speed limits, and that all factors into how fast the truck gets to its destination. The internet works the same way. Those trucks are called packets, and the roads are called many names---pipes, trunk lines, and so on---but you can easily think of them as being like roadways.
One big difference is that in the internet, you can pay money to your home state for the right to drive in the HOV lane or on other fast roads. People who want to get there faster can do so. Every state cooperates to allow drivers from other states to use those fast lanes because they know that those drivers are bringing things that people from their states have ordered. In effect, those trucks are driving at the request of the local residents. This generally works well; it's a lot like a nationwide, flat-rate version of FasTrak.
However, some companies don't like the status quo. The non-neutral net that they propose can best be compared to Arkansas deciding that they are going to turn some of their faster roads into "special" toll roads. On those roads, they will charge $1 for trucks from Arkansas, but charge $100 for an identical truck from California. Why? Because California provides more trucks. If the truck from California doesn't pay that increased fee, they have take the slower, non-toll road. The people who ultimately are harmed, though, are the local residents who must ultimately bear the cost, either through paying those trucking companies more so that they can pay their state more or through having to wait longer to get their packages.
Network neutrality laws are designed to make sure that the Arkansas states on the internet can't play those sorts of games. Ultimately, without network neutrality, the consumer loses.
How's that?
Parent
My preferred metaphor (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the Internet is NOT like a superhighway
"Think of the Internet as a highway."
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net. . .
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
NO OFFRAMPS. None.
Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.
(author unknown)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As for the basic flow, there's basicly two kinds of tubes - those that move liquid through pressure (hydraulic), and those that move liquid through decent (drains, sewer pipes). Pressure doesn't make sense - I don't send packets and then have to sent more packets to push the first ones. Neither does the other one, that'd imply some so
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Big Truck (Score:2)
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
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I have started an OS project for this (Score:5, Funny)
No thanks (Score:2, Funny)
I don't care who I've invited to do what, I really don't want my friends to be able to put stuff on my PC as they feel fit. Anyone that has ever shared a printer in a University house will know the feeling - it doesn't take long until a hundred pages of "you're gay" wake you up i
The burning question (Score:4, Funny)
Just Marketing spin. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just Marketing spin. (Score:5, Informative)
And to the other person worried about getting his computer filled with stuff that other people send you, be aware that we implemented a feature called "On Demand" that lets you see what people are sending you before you accept. Or you can accept it all, delete your local copy, and request a local copy any time you want, on any computer.
Hope that helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to post them on our forum!
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Re:Just Marketing spin. (Score:4, Insightful)
All right - going through their website quickly before I hit submit I got most of my answers. It's TCP 80 and 443, it appears to use a centralized server (thereby having a 2GB limit, and logging all access), and does not work through NAT yet.
But this information should definitely have been available in the techies video. There was no technical information in that video at all.
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Re:Just Marketing spin. (Score:5, Insightful)
So if you have some "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters", by all means share it with us. We'll want to know all the gory technical details that the mainstream press gets turned off by. If we think it rocks, you'll hear no end of it. We'll be bragging to everyone about how we know about this cool new thing that's really clever and is going to be huge. I should imagine that scenario to be a marketer's wet dream.
However on a more cautionary note, if you should ever try to use or misuse us, or this site, purely as a marketing tool, we'll tear your product to pieces. It'll be mocked by us mercilessly and swiftly forgotten. The overall marketing effort would be starkly hindered by the historic mauling that we gave it in its infancy. That sounds a lot like a marketer's worst nightmare.
So please, tell your marketer friends our message. Bring us genuine, interesting news and we'll do your job for you better than you could have ever hoped. Bring us tired, overhyped, nothing new to see here slashvertisements and we'll get mad. Then we'll get even. Then we'll go back to being odd.
If you think there's something truly new or special about your product, double-check with some really hardcore geek friends. If they say things like "so it's just a file sharing app?" or "and?" then it's probably best not to bring the hype to our door. IMHO you should only bring it here if they say things like: "Holy crap - why didn't I think of that?" or "Damn that's smart. I thought I knew what I was talking about but your guys must really know their shit!" or even "You're shitting me! When did that happen?"
Good luck with selling the software.
Parent
Re:Just Marketing spin. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, just like the thrashing we gave the iPod. You suck, Apple!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting Product (Score:2)
So what's so new about this (Score:2)
Marketing vs Privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Tubes looks like it will catch on. If sites like Facebook and Technorati implement some hooks into it, there is no telling where this could go.
It doesn't send Internets (Score:2)
Linux Equivalent (Score:5, Funny)
I never understood why he got so much flack anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Series of... (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is metaphors not tubes (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that while an abstraction can be a great way to explain a technical concept to someone non-technical, it isn't a complete understanding of the concept, and when non-technical people try to make decisions based on that metaphor they are often wrong.
The internet is, in some ways, like, a series of tubes, but it is not actually a series of tubes, and when you make decisions about the internet as if it were a series of tubes instead of what it actually is, most of the time you'll get it wrong. Most of our elected officials don't have a technical background so we have a bunch of people trying to make decisions based, at best, on abstractions, or on the advice of experts(who are usually bought and paid for by someone).
Probably the best solution to all of this is to start funding independent pools of experts on technical and scientific fields and then taking their advice, but those sorts of people don't tend to tell the politicians what they're being paid to want to hear, so that'll never happen.
I don't see the big deal (Score:5, Funny)
The thing that sucks the most is when one of the internets get a hole chewed into it. The damned packets end up misrouted, on the floor, and you have to twist the innernet so that the hole is facing up to make it stop. Having a kitten who repeatedly cannonballs the array doesn't help much, either, because he uses the holes in the web to intercept the traffic.
In Ferret Internets, PACKETS SNIFF YOU!
What's New ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Two things -
(1) That p2p Networks are fringe activities, and 99% of the web users will use youtube.com to share videos is a fact these p2p networks have to realise.
(2) There can not be a viable business model for p2p based file-sharing networks which doesn't rely on some sort of Adware or (minor) spyware. Since the volumes can never justify the ad-spend by advertisers, the advertisers will increasingly push for personal information of the users - which, considering the technologies involved, is not very hard to get from the back door.
I salute the PR team of this company on having managed to get their crap of a product on slashdot.
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Holy shit! You must be posting using your psychic abilities. I alway knew mutants were out there. Are you one of the X-Men?
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Hmmmm... A poster on slashdot with access to a friend with benefits...Somehow I doubt it, unless the benefits you're referring to are access to a Segway and a D&D partner...
Re:Already done with anything P2P-based (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a shame they're aiming for such a tech-illiterate user base, though... their site doesn't seem to mention whether they do BitTorrent-style bandwidth sharing to distribute content.
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Re:Already done with anything P2P-based (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but it uses a series of waves. many small waves from other users combine to become a tsunami of information washing over you.
This is an entirely different type of software. It uses a series of tubes coming from other users. The more tubes you have pointing to you, the more internets you can get at once!
Parent
The relavent quote: (Score:5, Informative)
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
" It's a series of tubes.
"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
"Do you know why?
"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."
This quote (more fully found here [wired.com]; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."
Here is a tracking of the Senator's delayed "internet." [wired.com]
Also see, of course, the relevant Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org].
[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What is wrong is that it leaves out the most important thing; the thing that makes the whole shebang work.
The Internet is not a series of tubes; it is a series of agreed upon ways of delivering information.
Tubes are passive and what goes down them uniformly follows the path of least resistance. The Internet when it delivers information is dynamic; it is continually making decisions about the best way to get data from its source to its destinati
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Re:Windoze Only (Score:5, Funny)
That's OK. It takes quite a bit more than mere paragraph formatting to make sense out of anything GWB says.
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