[Air-l] networks

[Steve Jones]

At 10:07 AM -0400 9/18/01, Christian Nelson wrote:
>Steve Jones wrote:
>
>>  At the risk of taking this somewhat off-topic, I'd wonder whether operating
>>  in this fashion would, in fact, make an organization more vulnerable to
>>  discovery. The notion of distribution via Internetworking, to my knowledge,
>>  involves concepts like store-and-forward, copies of information 
>>shared at all
>>  nodes, etc.
>
>Certainly, my notion of "distributed network," as applied to an organization's
>personnel, didn't presume what was just described. But it seems like people do
>use the term "distributed network," at times, to refer just to networked
>computers which are simply interconnected in such a way that there is no
>centralized site of control--i.e., a network that can't go down simply because
>one site goes down. And it seems that this is, or has often been 
>claimed to be,
>the raison d'etre of the Internet (or at least its predecessor, Arpanet).
>Perhaps the meaning of the term "distributed network" has evolved, or perhaps
>the term has just developed more than one sense.

Perhaps we can separate out two things from this. One is the notion 
of a network as a means of transmission, of moving information from 
one place to another. That notion certainly allows for the use of 
"distributed network" in terms above. If one part of the network goes 
down the rest of the network can communicate. But we can also use the 
notion of a network as a means of storage and retrieval. In those 
terms, if a part of the network goes down, the other parts would have 
to have "mirrors" of content. If nothing else it's an interesting way 
to think, again, about the differences between "transmission" and 
"ritual" views of communication. If the network is considered one of 
transmission, distributed networking makes sense as a means of 
ensuring communication is maintained if parts of the network are 
vulnerable. But if the network is considered one of information 
sharing, memory, etc., a loss of a part of the network is a loss to 
the whole network unless each part is "backed up" at every other part.

>While this is tongue-in-cheek it does point to a problem with the potential
>trend of organizational distribution of personnel--more and more folks, freed
>from geographical constraint, will head toward the most scenic areas of the
>world and despoil them by overrunning them.

Although I don't discount that possibility and would be dismayed by 
its realization, I'd point out that it seems like most scenic areas 
of the world have been despoiled and overrun by the organized 
distribution of personnel for purposes of recreation.

Sj