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Scaling is not hard [May. 7th, 2008|02:09 pm]
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Here is a little quiz. The following three things are part of the fundamental fabric[A] of the internet.

1) The worlds largest distributed asynchronous best-effort one2many, many2one and one2one communication network. Solves issues of servers being down, clients being down. Works on cell phones, laptops, the web.

2) The worlds most important discovery service. The one example of a functioning hierarchical database used by everyone, maintained by many.

3) The biggest completely peer 2 peer 100% no single point of failure system that runs the internet.

What are they? Please guess. Winner get a free dinner or something.

ps. yes, this meant to be satire, but it is also true
pss. Enjoy this statement: "Design Goals: 3) Scalability - similarly to the point on Open protocols, this should be entirely distributed so as to ensure that the entire system is scalable." (emphasis added)

A) Yes, I mean fabric as in "A complex underlying structure" from http://www.answers.com/fabric&r=67 -- unlike the confusing way that the retardoconsultingenglish at http://groups.google.com/group/getpingd says "fabric".

Do they mean that it is not a complex underlying structure? Or do they not know that fabric means that, and are instead comparing it to "A cloth produced especially by knitting, weaving, or felting fibers."
LinkReply

Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]netik
2008-05-07 10:30 pm (UTC)

(Link)

1) Human Voice
2) DNS
3) BGP

Am I even close?

[User Picture]From: [info]jered
2008-05-08 12:11 am (UTC)

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1) Could be email. It's oddly worded, and I think "humans" is not a good technology answer.

2) Is totally, definitely DNS.

3) I'll go with BGP here too.
[User Picture]From: [info]crucially
2008-05-08 12:12 am (UTC)

(Link)

Yep,

email,dns,bgp

but as a friend pointed out

voice, hearing, sight is not too far off either
[User Picture]From: [info]jered
2008-05-08 12:17 am (UTC)

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Woohoo! Come visit for Dim Sum sometime. :-)
[User Picture]From: [info]crucially
2008-05-08 12:18 am (UTC)

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I will.

Or you ping me next time you hit SF.
[User Picture]From: [info]netik
2008-05-08 12:18 am (UTC)

(Link)

I guess it was all those nights I've spent talking to engineers to keep the internet working that threw me on question #1. Email is a much, much more correct answer.
[User Picture]From: [info]burr86
2008-05-08 06:57 am (UTC)

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Damn, I guessed DNS and BGP, didn't get the first one. :)

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