Saturday, April 14, 2007

Scientist's New Baby

God I love getting up in the morning and booting up the computer to find an article that just blows my mind. Researchers are now saying they want to totally scrap the Internet as it exists today and start over.

Yeah, START OVER.

From scratch.

They want to rebuild the way the Internet works to provide higher security and better speed. Well that's all good and dandy, but when and if that ever happens when they want to totally change over one of two things is going to happen. They'll be completely sucessful in shutting down the existing framework and everybody will have to buy new, and quite possibly (because its new) very expensive equipment (remember back when PC's were brand new and virtually no one who wasn't a geek or scientist had one in their home? People started buying them, those slow old dinosaurs that weren't anything like what most of us have today, and they cost thousands of dollars). Lots of folks who can afford today's four or five hundred dollar computer buy scraping a bit won't be able to opt into the new system. Good way of promoting elitism once again. Or two--they won't be able to comletely shut down the behemouth that is the current world wide web and only the very elite will be able to afford to opt into the new improved system--so in effect there will be a divided cyber space.

I understand the need for improving, but once you have something as wildly successful and heavily used by probably 80 percent of the world's population I think you should work on improving the current structure, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

2 comments:

Bernita said...

They wanna reinvent the wheel?

Tami P said...

Yeah, is that crazy or what? I can see improving... making faster...making safer, but SCRAPING the whole thing and just starting over? Shakes head.