It seems like every day, we come across articles announcing a new technology or method that will revolutionize the way things work. The claims are bold (and usually vague), make a small splash in the headlines, and are never heard from again. Very rarely is there ever any critical thought or in-depth analysis into whether or not the technology/method does what it claims to do (or whether the supposed claims match the actual claims, for that matter). That’s why this article from ars technica is so fascinating. The first two paragraphs read like any other article of the aforementioned type:
In a recent article for the IEEE’s Spectrum magazine, Dr. Lawrence Roberts explains how the large routers that power the core of today’s Internet are doing it all wrong. They spend too much time processing each packet individually, then storing packets in a queue for during peak loads. This buffering makes VoIP calls and video streams stutter, and these routers use lots of hot-running and expensive memory, and they’re stuffed with specially-created chips.
Roberts’ company Anagran has a different approach: only do the expensive work for the first packet in a flow, then treat subsequent packets in the same flow just like that first packet, doing away with queues and specially-designed chips in lieu of simple processors and cheap DRAM. (In the late 1960s, Roberts led the team that created the ARPANET, which would morph into the Internet that we know today in the following two decades.) As an added benefit, slowing down flows that go too fast can now be done with precision, rather than bluntly as in today’s routers.
But the article doesn’t stop there.
Upon reading Roberts’ article, the claims look rather extraordinary. Could it be that Cisco, Juniper and the other router vendors have been barking up the wrong tree for decades? In a word, no.
Unlike most popular news nowadays, a bulk of the ars article focuses on the actual body of Roberts’ article and the claims made therein; not just the abstract. Granted, they are a tech blog, and a certain level of elevated understanding is expected in their articles. If anything, this only goes to show what’s missing from modern journalism, and how much conventional news sources would benefit from better science and technology journalism.
Conventional journalism might be on its way out, but there’s still hope.
