> The user knows that all of his communication attempts fail. That's a > good signal that there's something wrong. If the user knows nothing > more of this, he calls helpdesk or some support, which may be able to > identify the problem and eliminate it.
Which help desk should my grandmother call when this happens? The ISP? The vendor for her Tivo-like box? The OS vendor for the laptop? I think what we want is the complexity equivalent of plugging together electrical extension cords. Looking at Ethernet we don't have the male/female distinction on the plugs hence it is a lot easier to create Ethernet loops than power extension cord loops. Combining this with wireless makes it even more likely that there will be accidental loops. > For the average user, it doesn't have to be more intuitive than that, > right? He only cares whether it works or not. In the first place > 99.9% of people wouldn't be plugging these boxes in triangles (or more > complex setups), so this is not commonplace. If the box "doesn't > work", he complains to someone, and that someone may be able to help. Given that we don't even know what such boxes will look like in 10+ years, how can we determine that people would not "plug" them together? Perhaps this ability to connect multiple wired and wireless media will be to cheap that every laptop, TV and stereo will include it. (Many things that don't run on batteries might have such functionality for all I can predict.) Erik -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
