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by cannabis_sam 1725 days ago
If computer network technology had been built on the same shortsighted business logic we would never have had the internet..

Imagine a link-layer protocol without any buffers, no retransmissions or any kind of resilience, built on the most optimistic estimates; that’s essentially what the “business world” has built with their irrational philosophy based around “the market”..
1 comments
culpable_pickle 1725 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol would like a word
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dv_dt 1725 days ago
While there are users for UDP, I would guess that TCP accounts for more traffic by choice. Of course there are sometimes problems associated with too much buffer too.
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sudosysgen 1725 days ago
UDP is almost always used with buffers, error correction codes, and other measures to deal with imperfection
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bryarsdj 1724 days ago
Yes, but I think UDP is still a good counter example for this analogy. Buffers can be detrimental to udp traffic for real-time use cases (eg VOIP). Here your trade off is quality (in voice this is jitter) versus latency. Typically you want to make this choice of buffer size at the receiving end only, and keep buffers elsewhere as small as possible - routers which store and forward, network card buffers,OS buffers etc, can add up to lots of bloat.

So for VOIP "JIT" is a good thing and your "Inventory" levels need to be tuned at the receiver.

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cannabis_sam 1725 days ago
Ouch, thanks for the pushback!

But isn’t it called tcp/ip for a reason?

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MandieD 1725 days ago
Do you use a VPN to connect your corporate laptop to your employer’s network from home? Do you use Wireguard, or its easier-to-use derivative, Tailescale, to connect any of your devices? Do you use any form of VOIP (Voice over IP)?

(Edited because I forgot the big one) Have you ever used a name and not an IP address to connect to something on the internet?

Congratulations! You’re a UDP user!

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cannabis_sam 1725 days ago
Yes! I absolutely use UDP!

I once built a prototype network stack on top of a udp library that simulated a physical network layer..

Doesn’t change the fact that tcp/ip was the network stack that enabled the internet.

But I was trying to sidestep that tangent by mentioning link layer protocols in my second paragraph.

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