audio/video again

Thu Aug 8 03:45:37 UTC 1996

Paul Ferguson writes:
> >How would you feel if Pointcast slowly backed off and increased the time
> >period between updates, but at the touch of a key or movement of the mouse
> >it would go back to the "knob" setting? Obviously a low volume data feed
> >like Pointcast may not be that big a load on the net but the heuristics
> >(which do involve human factors) could probably be applied to a lot of
> >other things like video feeds that will be bigger bandwidth consumers.

> I think this sounds fine, but I don't think you need an RFC to dictate
> it. This would be a competitive advantage for an application, methinks.

This comment got me wondering, and I don't like where I wound up ...

Would it be a competitive advantage?  As far as responsible users go,
it probably would.

That brings up irresponsible users - users who don't care about their
impact, and even worse hacker-type users who would deliberately bring
down the net if they could ... how long before someone figures out how
to make a server direct a Real Audio stream (or whatever) at someone
else?  The leverage for hackers could be enormous.

--
Dick St.Peters,       Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY
stpeters at NetHeaven.com     Owner, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/800-910-6671
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