Re:Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam
by rayiner on Sunday February 23, 2014 @09:43PM
(#7288824)
> No more silly than pretending that your computer is running a Python program
Its a useful abstraction, but as physics causes CPUs to hit a performance wall on single threaded code, then you start banging up against the GIL and the failure of the abstraction to deal with parallelism. And when that happens you can't bury your head in the abstraction of a Python program. I'm not saying that abstractions aren't useful, but at the end of the day you have to concede that they are merely abstractions. When the abstraction becomes disconnected from the reality, reality wins.
> In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today.
Adapt to what? Abstractions must adapt to reality. Reality does not have to adapt to abstractions. You can of course invoke the government, to regulate the reality into conforming to the abstraction, to the benefit of certain companies and the detriment of others. But history has not been kind to regulatory regimes of that nature. The deep irony of your position is that its the same thinking that led to the current mess with cable. In the 1980s, cable was the future. People invoked the potential to distribute educational material and public access material to the masses, and decided that such an important technology should be regulated. So they created the cable monopolies, under the conditions that they have cheap basic access rates ($13/month in Phila), carry public access or educational programming, and build out even to poor and rural communities. And it was an utter disaster in retrospect.
Its a useful abstraction, but as physics causes CPUs to hit a performance wall on single threaded code, then you start banging up against the GIL and the failure of the abstraction to deal with parallelism. And when that happens you can't bury your head in the abstraction of a Python program. I'm not saying that abstractions aren't useful, but at the end of the day you have to concede that they are merely abstractions. When the abstraction becomes disconnected from the reality, reality wins.
> In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today.
Adapt to what? Abstractions must adapt to reality. Reality does not have to adapt to abstractions. You can of course invoke the government, to regulate the reality into conforming to the abstraction, to the benefit of certain companies and the detriment of others. But history has not been kind to regulatory regimes of that nature. The deep irony of your position is that its the same thinking that led to the current mess with cable. In the 1980s, cable was the future. People invoked the potential to distribute educational material and public access material to the masses, and decided that such an important technology should be regulated. So they created the cable monopolies, under the conditions that they have cheap basic access rates ($13/month in Phila), carry public access or educational programming, and build out even to poor and rural communities. And it was an utter disaster in retrospect.