audio/video again

Tue Aug 6 00:53:56 UTC 1996

On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Henk Smit wrote:

>   What worries me here is that people are developing applications that
>  use (lots of) bandwidth, even when people are not even using their
>  computers.

I agree. This will get worse and worse as more and more companies build
products and test them on a LAN or with a local ISP at the other end of
their T1 line. It would help a lot if there was an RFC because even though
many developpers can be clueless when designing and implementing these
products, they *DO* listen when someone points them to a standards
authority like IETF. You and I may know that IETF is just a bunch of plain
folks who understand networks and try to figure out the best way to build
them.

But it is much much easier to tell a developper that their product
violates RFC2001 than it is to try to convince them that they are wrong
based just on engineering grounds. The developper and their managers will
dispute engineering reasons much sooner than they will dispute an official
Internet standard from the IETF.

Maybe we could get an RFC that requires screensaver type applications to
have a standalone mode that works with stored data and require user
overrides in order to initiate video or other data feeds. Maybe it could
also require that video and data feeds automatically shut down if there is
no user interaction within a specified time period. Kind of a higher level
view of the smae kind of timing specs that make TCP work.

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com