> "The Internet is The Force," Metcalfe said. "The telopolies are the Empire.
> Central offices are the Death Stars. They are being attacked by the ARPA
> Knights. One of these knights now defends the Empire. Cerf Vadar [a
> reference to Vinton Cerf, creator of TCP/IP while at the Advanced Research
> Projects Agency] and the Imperial Storm Lawyers are defending their
> Empire against the ISP-woks. Tim Berners Lee-pio [inventor of the World
> Wide Web] has been captured by Java The Hut. You are Luke and Leia. I can
> feel the hate growing inside you, and now I must complete your training. Call
> me Yoda."
TB Lee-pio has been captured by Java? Great scott!
>calling for the public to "take up a class action and sue somebody"
Huh? Who are we the public supposed to sue exactly?
In addition to the Metcalfe piece, try also the "Internet telephony
services banned" article.
Ron.
------------
Internet still collapsing, Metcalfe says
Founding father regrets words
JAMES R. DUKART, Special to Telephony
Even though he was literally forced to eat his own words recently, Bob
Metcalfe still thinks the Internet is collapsing. That was the gist of a speech
Metcalfe gave last week to the MIT Enterprise Forum in Cambridge, Mass.
Metcalfe, an InfoWorld columnist, was the inventor of Ethernet and founder
and former chief executive officer of 3Com Corp. In his December 1995
column, he predicted there would be at least one gigalapse--an outage that
would cost users at least 1 billion lost Internet hours--in 1996.
On April 10, at a meeting of Internet service providers, Metcalfe gamely
admitted that no gigalapses had been documented in 1996 and proceeded to
drink shredded pieces of his column mixed into a glass of water. But two
weeks later--on April 25--Metcalfe said that the first real gigalapse
occurred when a rodent chewed through a cable near Stanford University,
causing "between zero and 40% of users to lose between zero and seven hours
of Internet access" throughout the Bay area, a figure he calculated to be well
over a billion lost hours.
Such outages are hard to document and report because users have no way of
knowing whether their problems are isolated or part of a larger pattern.
In a talk rife with colorful analogies, Metcalfe took shots at Bell regional
holding companies and carriers, a group he derisively referred to as "the
telopolies." He used the theme and characters from the movie "Star Wars'' to
illustrate today's telephony and Internet battles.
"The Internet is The Force," Metcalfe said. "The telopolies are the Empire.
Central offices are the Death Stars. They are being attacked by the ARPA
Knights. One of these knights now defends the Empire. Cerf Vadar [a
reference to Vinton Cerf, creator of TCP/IP while at the Advanced Research
Projects Agency] and the Imperial Storm Lawyers are defending their
Empire against the ISP-woks. Tim Berners Lee-pio [inventor of the World
Wide Web] has been captured by Java The Hut. You are Luke and Leia. I can
feel the hate growing inside you, and now I must complete your training. Call
me Yoda."
Finally, Metcalfe blasted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, calling for the
public to "take up a class action and sue somebody" over the act's failure to
create meaningful competition in telephony.
He also called the ISP community too "loosey goosey," saying ISPs need to
concentrate on coordinating business efforts. He also called for the creation of
"e-postage" for Internet e-mail and advocated micro-money to create
Web-based revenue streams.