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Vista role in Imminent Net Death overstated
Friday, September 8th, 2006
Back in the late 1980s, long before the days of "All your base are belong to us," 
there was an Internet catchphrase that was sweeping the virtual landscape. It started shortly after universities opened up Internet access to their students, swamping the fledgling network, and particularly the Usenet discussion newsgroups, with hordes of new—and to the old-timers, uncouth—users. Many predictions were made that the Internet could not withstand the influx of so many people and that the infrastructure would buckle and collapse. These dire warnings were made so often that it became a standard Usenet meme to add "Imminent death of the Net predicted. Film at 11." to every post that was even remotely connected to something bad happening.
Well, it looks like the Imminent Death of the Net craze is back, with the publication of an article with the dire title of "Will Vista stall Net traffic?" The article was based on statements by Paul Mockapetris, who was part of the original team who invented the Domain Name Server (DNS) system that translates URLs such as www.arstechnica.com into their corresponding IP addresses. Mockapetris is concerned that when Windows Vista is launched, the extra load it will put on DNS servers will overtax the system. "You’re going to see brownouts," he said in an interview. "All of a sudden, it is going to be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of slow and gooey."
Microsoft, for their part, have responded in a statement that they do not believe Vista will cause any serious problems for the Internet. Independent researcher Dan Kaminsky said that "Vista, due to its support for IPv6, will cause somewhat higher load on name servers as it checks to see which protocol to use, but this is not the stuff that blackouts are made of." Vista’s role in Imminent Net Death overstated
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