is a NAT device/'home router' - a router?

Bingo! Change doesn't happen without drivers. Carrot works better than stick. Markets are hard to coerce. Monopolies considerably easier.

Just look at the FCC failure on HDTV. In constrast DVD has overtaken VHS not because of convenience and production cost, but due to a surprising quality improvement. Who dreamed NTSC could look so good?

-- Robert

>

The smallest unit a CPU fetches from memory is a cacheline. These days, 64 byte cachelines are common, as are 128 byte cache lines. Some CPUs have automagic "buddy prefetch" that makes a 64 byte cache line size behave more like 128. Etc etc etc...

So, all the headers from Ethernet, through IP, TCP and even a byte or three of user data come in to the CPU when the NIC driver first looks at the ethernet header. Just a little less of the user's data comes-in with IPv6.

rick jones

Good point.

Wouldn't labels be boring syntax rather than semantics?-)

rick jones

So, we have the application message, segmented into multiple TCP segments, each contained in fragmented IP datagrams, contained in ethernet frames that get chopped-up into cells and then aw heck just say "The Vessel with the Pestle Holds the Pellet with the Poison, the Chalice with the Pallace hold the Brew that is True"

:)

rick jones

I thought a "switch" was that thing on the wall you toggle to make the lights turn on and off :-)

Nah, what your are thinking of is a layer one repeater with user-enabled firewall functionality :)

rick jones

Yes, but are GP CPUs used for routers? I doubt it. They'll need a complete redesign. BTW: has IPv6 gone Little-Endian?

-- Robert

Yes, it should, but only if there's enough direct connections. For many years, much of intraeuropean traffic (eg *.fr to *.de) was routed through MAE East or euro ISP direct links to the US. I was surprised that Brussels hadn't set up MAE Europe.

-- Robert

Failure because the US FCC desparately wants to pull the plug on VHF & UHF NTSC broadcast and auction off these great swathes of spectrum. They can't because far too many people are staying on it.

No, it is not. Had these been sufficient drivers, videodisk and later VCD would have taken over.

So? People still buy lots of these portable DVD players with 250 line screens! And listen to MP3s. The amount of money people are willing to pay for quality upgrades is definitely limited.

-- Robert

That maybe so, but from the way the Chinese are approaching the internet (Great fireWall of China), they like it that way. One IP for the whole 1.2 billion of 'em :) I think they just might run out of ports.

Easier. I still don't hear "kill app".

-- Robert

You can't expect anyone who listens to Britney Spears, to know anything about quality. ;-)

strange that it uses RIP then. Maybe just the technology was there in router operating system software. The HW just doesn't make full use of it.

I suppose since a routign protocol isn't used. They could have built a device that wasn't a router/didn't do routing. But still got it to the ISP. Just not iwth a routing protocol or routing table

(I know somebody said that a router is any layer 3 device, and it need not be running a routing protocol. But I have never even heard of any make/model of any such device.)

Actually it is not uncommon for GP CPUs to be used for routers--some Cisco models have Intel processors and PCI Buses and are basically PCs with a different OS.

Other routers are just Linux running on an embedded chip of some sort.

No real magic here.

The only "great swathes of spectrum" that will become available when analog broadcast is discontinued will be the UHF channels above 51.

Could you burn a videodisk in your PC? How many titles were available on VCD?

So let's see, on the one hand DVD succeeded because of high image quality but on the other nobody cares about image quality? Would you be kind enough to make up your mind?

Oh, fully agreed! However, the irrefutible data is that many people listen to Ms. Spears, so presumably an equivalent number care little for quality.

This is very unfortunate because economies of scale drive markets.

-- Robert

I'm appalled. Those will be able to handle a few 100 Mbit/s, not more. The PCI bus cannot handle gigabit (too much overhead).

Serious routers need backplanes & switching ASICs.

Yes, my home router is an ARM4000.

-- Robert

IIRC, the FCC originally wanted all VHF & UHF broadcast shutdown by 2006?

Respectively: few people burn DVDs; Chicken & egg.

Easy. It ain't binary. The combination of user convenience (users don't care VHS is harder to print) _and_ quality was enough to clear the hurdle. Neither alone was enough. With the law of diminishing return, it will take a huge increase in quality to get the same market push.

Look at the durability of music CD format. There is better available, but it is unlikely to succeed. Worse quality (MP3s) might.

-- Robert

They also had those huge sleeves, to protect the delicate disk surface. They also used mechanical tracking and were subject to wear.

Um, _which_ PCI bus? There are roughly 6 of them IIRC, ranging from

33x32, to 66x32, 33x64, 66x64, 133x64 and 266x26 (the latter being PCI-X). And then there is PCIe...

That may be - the definition of "serious" may be somewhat subjective. A home "router" may be just as "serious" to its end-user as a core Internet router is to a NOC.

rick jones