The full-circle feeling is hitting me hard whenever someone makes a simple JS program that shows a rotating cube in the browser and everybody falls off their chairs that this is possible.
The only thing that has really changed is how we consume media (movies, music, news, books and so on) and how software is delivered. For all the rest of it we could be back in 1987 dialing into some video text service but with better graphics. 1200/75 Looks so much faster than 180/20 anyway.
The real net revolution is still waiting somewhere in the wings, when it hits we'll be remembering the days before it on the web as the pre-history and some kind of distraction from making real progress for more than two decades.
Roads have interesting properties, they enable all kinds of activities that were previously impossible because each and every idea started with 'first we have to build these roads'. Pretty soon we'll have multiple megabits upstream from just about every locality for a relatively low cost.
IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).
>IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).
We can hope. But I'm not optimistic. Legacy kludges like NAT have a habit of sticking around for a long, long time. And ISP have come to rely on NAT basically -- like you say -- as a firewall for their less technically-inclined customers.
It's too bad, IPv6 could have opened up a world of p2p apps.
The only thing that has really changed is how we consume media (movies, music, news, books and so on) and how software is delivered. For all the rest of it we could be back in 1987 dialing into some video text service but with better graphics. 1200/75 Looks so much faster than 180/20 anyway.
The real net revolution is still waiting somewhere in the wings, when it hits we'll be remembering the days before it on the web as the pre-history and some kind of distraction from making real progress for more than two decades.
Roads have interesting properties, they enable all kinds of activities that were previously impossible because each and every idea started with 'first we have to build these roads'. Pretty soon we'll have multiple megabits upstream from just about every locality for a relatively low cost.
IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).