Re: How to brush-off Verizon?

In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Keith F. Lynch declared:
Sean O'Hara <seanohara@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There has always been more, but what are you thinking of
specifically? I thought most people no longer use Archie, Gopher,
WAIS, finger, or telnet, and never did use RARP or LATP. So I'm
very curious what you're thinking of. FTP?

BitTorrent and other P2P services, iTunes, online gaming, software
updates, podcasts, Apple TV and similar set-top boxes for
downloading video online and watching it on your television, and
the dozens of IM protocols out there. Whether any of these use
FTP under the hood, I don't know.

I thought all of those were basically just websites.

No.

P2P is a class of protocols for distributed filesharing, completely unrelated to HTTP. The BitTorrent variety requires you to download a "tracker," which tells your BitTorrent client where to look for the file you want. There are several websites that help you find trackers for specific files, but that's just for convenience -- a tracker would work just as well if you downloaded it off FTP, received it in an email, or found it in a binary newsgroup.

The iTunes Music Store uses a proprietary protocol that works like a webpage within the iTunes media player, but can't be accessed through a regular browser. ITunes URIs are prefixed "itms://".

With online gaming, you install a game, use it to connect to a server which lets you interact with other people playing the game -- no websites involved.

Software updates can work in many different ways. I believe Firefox and Thunderbird use FTP. I don't know how Windows does it since it all takes place under the hood.

Podcasts are a way of using RSS feeds to automate the downloading of media. You put the URL of the feed into your podcatching client, the client goes to that address and downloads an XML file which lists the URLs for recent episodes, and the client downloads any new ones. This is handled through HTTP, but there's no real website involved.

I don't know how Apple TV works, but I'd guess it uses a similar protocol to iTunes. With the Roku Netflix box, you use the web to choose what to watch, but the content is streamed to the box.

As for IM, every service has it's own protocol, and none of them are related to HTTP. Some systems might allow web-based chat, but that doesn't make it a web service any more than Google Groups makes Usenet a website.

--
Sean O'Hara <http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
"No, I was thinking more of one of those women who will pee all over you if you pay her enough. Isn't that what you want?"
I thought about this. I didn't want to dismiss anything out of hand.
--Nick Hornby
/A Long Way Down/
.

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