Monthly Archive for February, 2005

The real problem with the Internet

As we continue to develop technologies such as Peercasting and PublishSubscribe, the real problem we are trying to solve is one that should have been solved years ago. The issue at hand is Multicasting.

Unlike broadcasting, wherein everyone gets hit up by the broadcast, multicasting only goes to those interested. The trick here is that the routers handle the multicast in the most efficient way so that there is no redundant bandwidth being wasted.

Problem is, most internet connections don’t seem to support Multicast. Sure, there is the Mbone, but I’ve yet to see an ISP support it. Thus, we have to do all this crazy stuff with stream relays and crap, just to do something that the Internet was supposed to do in the first place.

As it stands today, all we really have on the internet is Unicasting, connections from one person to one person. When you want to send something to two people, you have to waste bandwidth by sending the same data out twice.

Peercasting is only a temporary solution. What we are doing is esentially some P2P relaying of streams, which may help distribute the bandwidth waste, but that waste is still there. It should not be the end user’s responsability for Multicasting, it should be the routers’.

There is so much potential in Multicasting. With it, we could build entire new media distribution systems cheaply and efficiantly. As stated before, anyone with a webcam and a DSL connection could Multicast to millions.

Tabs Redux

Instead of requiring every application to implement their own form of tabs, why not instead support tabs at the window manager level? Imagine being able to combine tabs from different applications.

Perhaps a better metaphor is the one of Window Groups. Windows can be grouped together, such that their title bars are combined into tabs and their position and size are all synchronized.

For an example of what I mean, see Fluxbox’s Tabs.

Mac OS X’s Aqua Windows should natively support tabs, wherein windows from different applications could even be grouped.

The tab code in Adium and Colloquy is really nice; perhaps Apple should be inspired by that.

Looking for ETech Sponsor

Unfortunately, my press credentials to attend the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference were denied. Back in October I probably should have attempted to propose the nuWeb Project and do a Conference Presentation, however I failed to do that.

I’m still interested in attending the ETech conference, and will probably be able to get a discount for being a full time student. However, that still leaves a balance that I may need assistance in fulfilling.

I really want to go to this conference, both to promote the nuWeb Project and to learn more about what others are doing today in the technology field. I see so much potential here with the nuWeb Project and I consider the ETech conference a significant opportunity to get it developed further.