Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix [LWN.net]

Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

Posted Jan 18, 2022 11:14 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix by felixfix
Parent article: Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

A mesh network requires more power than something centralized. It eats more radio bandwidth, and its latency is by definition higher.

Please tell us why we'd need that, when we already have high-speed low-latency wired and/or wireless options.

(Physical) mesh networks work well for local IoT applications and similar low-bandwidth, noncritical-latency stuff; who cares whether the AC turns off now vs. in two seconds. But try telling a gamer that their network has >50msec to their favorite server without getting laughed off the stage.

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Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

Posted Jan 18, 2022 11:56 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

And even if it technically worked, I don't think it would provide decentralised control in any meaningful sense. You need an organisation to design the protocol and to update it over the years (to fix security/performance/legal problems with the original design, and to continually improve security/performance/features/etc to keep up with the proprietary competition), and a small enough number of organisations building the hardware and implementing the software so that there's a reasonable chance of interoperability between them all. I don't see any practical way to design a network where users aren't expected to put trust in and give power to someone else.

(See also "web3", which is marketed as decentralised but appears to be already heavily centralised in a handful of service providers: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html)