>> OK. Is that for legacy reasons, or because ATM is actually good at
>> something?
>
> ATM is a lot less legacy than IP is. Yes, of course it's actually good
> at something.

Well, you know, RS232 is a pretty sucky design. But it's still here. 
That *isn't* because it's good at anything. It's because it's widely 
implemented, i.e. legacy.

>> "Yeah, IP really sucks, except for being really flexible." Yes, because
>> flexibility is a really sucky thing to have.
>
> I didn't say that. I said it sacrifices other things in preference to
> being flexible. There's no resource allocation. There's no way to force
> a particular route thru the network (well, there is, but nobody actually
> implemented it in their switches), the addressing sucks for large
> networks, the address space (in IPv4 at least) is exceedingly limited,
> remote management of hardware is extremely limited, there's no access
> control, admission control, or decent rate regulation other than
> actually dropping packets, etc etc etc.

Most of this sounds like "IP is sucky for managing network hardware". 
Well, no, that's not what IP is for. It's deliberately hardware-neutral. 
The idea is that you have some infrastructure for controlling your 
hardware, and then run IP on the top. IP is for moving data from A to B.

If you asked me what was "sucky" about IP, the one I'd probably pick is 
that the entire design philosophy fundamentally assumes that everybody 
will follow the rules. That means it's trivially easy to read arbitrary 
traffic, and to screw up the network. For example, the way I heard it, 
nobody implements source routing because it makes it far too easy to 
impersonate other people, or do DDoS attacks, or whatever.

> Heck, it doesn't even do roaming, which cell phones have been managing
> for 10 years.

Cell phones do that by being controlled by a single central authority.

> See above. Every packet has the full source and destination address, and
> there's no information anywhere about the physical network.

Ooo, 64 bits, bit deal.

It sounds like you're basically complaining that IP isn't 
connection-oriented. You know, if what you're trying to do isn't 
connection-oriented, that's an advantage, right?

> And remember, tho, that IP needs an address for every interface, not for
> every endpoint.

Well, that's true though, and a bit of a pitty. Still, maybe in 20 
years' time, IPv6 will actually catch on...

>> I still don't see the problem. Then again, IP is the only thing I've seen
>> that can handle more than 100 nodes at once...
>
> You... are unfamiliar with phone lines? A *small* phone switch handles a
> half a million end users and hundreds of thousands of trunk lines.

I'm unfamiliar with the data protocols that enable this to be possible. 
(I was under the impression that everybody runs their voice data over IP 
now anyway, so they only need to maintain one big IP network for their 
voice services *and* their broadband offerings...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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