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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (2925)	2/24/2000 1:50:00 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

I love reading and rereading Gilders monthly reports. Rereading is a must, at least for me. I love his writing style. I do wish though, that he offered an "edelivery" only option. As soon as his report is available online, I download it and read it. I really have no need for the copy that comes in the mail a few days down the road. It seems to me that Mr. Gilder could offer a discount for that type of delivery, save printing and mailing costs, and save a few trees.

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (2925)	2/24/2000 6:16:00 PM
From: UUplink	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5853

Hi Scott--Let me say at the outset that I know practically nothing about NOVL's proxy/cache system, but would be quite interested in hearing more about the parallels you see with the Mirror Image system. Also, what I know about MII is based on just a few weeks of limited online research. If you have talked to the company then you likely have a more useful perspective. Re. "pure storewidth"--The crux of the MII system seems to be the so-called "injection" technology whereby a sizable, and presumably relevant, fraction of regional web traffic is directed from major ISP's to MII's very large (2 TByte) hardware cache devices. These devices are located near the edges of the web in order to reduce the number of router hops needed to convey information to local (e.g. in country) users. These CAPS (content access points) also must employ efficient search and cache purging algorithms, although I don't know to what extent these are proprietary to MII. Contrast the MII approach with the typically smaller cache sizes used by such companies as ISLD and AKAM. The larger caches permit storage of streaming media files and other large semi-temporary files that cannot be readily accomodated by smaller caches, and thus consume bandwidth each time they are accessed. For international traffic the regional caching of such files saves the ISP's data transmission costs since the large files only have to go through the carrier network once. Private networks like ISLD try to make the transmission extremely efficient wrt point-to-point routing. But as I understand things, their tradeoff between bandwidth and storewidth is strongly biased towards bandwidth. How easy would it be for ISLD and similar companies to design/implement an alternative large cache scheme that would be as effective as MII's? This is the question I would particularly like to resolve. I believe Gilder's point is that when transmission speed is limited by the speed of light (i.e. all optical switching) and the volume of traffic has expanded enormously from todays volume, then the only other way to speed things up will be to house virtually the entire web locally. Hence the term "pure" storewidth. I doubt that this has informed you beyond what you already knew. Hope to draw some more comments out.