Apple Offers Support For Thread Networking (macrumors.com) 20
ttyler writes: As MacRumors reports, Apple's new HomePod Mini supports Thread networking technology. "Thread is a low-power IP-based networking technology for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering a secure, mesh-based system that makes it easy to build an ecosystem of devices," reports MacRumors. "While Thread is essentially agnostic to the application layers that run on top of it, it can support multiple layers and may play a role in Project Connected Home over IP, the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant." In a footprint on the specs page, Apple says that HomePod mini's Thread support is limited to HomeKit devices, "so the technology can't yet be leveraged cross-platform and it remains to be seen how Apple will embrace Thread going forward," adds MacRumors.
Is "Thread" Thread-safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF is the point of using a common name that already has a well-known distinct meaning?
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WTF is the point of using a common name that already has a well-known distinct meaning?
Yea, those seamstresses are going to be so damn confused!
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WTF is the point of using a common name that already has a well-known distinct meaning
Just the other night, I overheard two SAP folks complaining that their software product quality was suffering because of race conditions.
I wanted to break my beer bottle and threaten them by calling them racists, but then, I realized that I was drinking a Club-Mate in a returnable bottle.
For those of you that don't know, you could pound a Club-Mate bottle all day with a Lenovo ThinkPad W500, without leaving a scratch on the bottle.
And you could hammer in railroad spikes all day with an old ThinkPad, and
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I seem to recall it being a play on words with whatever the preceding technology was, though I may well be mistaken. Something like “weave” or “warp” (as in “warp and woof”, which are weaving terms referring to threads going perpendicular to each other) was the preceding tech, I think, though I also remember a research paper from 10ish years ago that used a lot of these same terms (it was an alternative approach for large-scale parallelization in GPUs, if memory serves),
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Yeah, I can't wait for all the ThreadThreadFactory classes...
They could have used any other "net" related name like trawl, fyke, trammel etc. It really isn't that hard.
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All the good names are taken. You're going to see more and more of this as time goes by, as well as more and more horrible names that are just stupid in every way but which are pronounceable and therefore acceptable when you can't get any good names. Chinese brands are already dominated by this tendency.
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I thought "Thread Networking " was little old ladies meeting for tea while illegally exchanging trademarked Mickey Mouse, Nike and other Logo files for their computerized embroidery machines.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wash, Riinse, Repeat? (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
"Apple is a noted supporter of the Thread project, with longtime Apple engineer Stuart Cheshire, who developed the Rendezvous/Bonjour zero-configuration standard nearly 20 years ago."
So why didn't "Rendezvous/Bonjour" solve all our problems 20 years ago?
Without question, the most complex aspect of my home networking is dealing with these friggin' "Zero-Configuration Standards".
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From TFA:
"Apple is a noted supporter of the Thread project, with longtime Apple engineer Stuart Cheshire, who developed the Rendezvous/Bonjour zero-configuration standard nearly 20 years ago."
So why didn't "Rendezvous/Bonjour" solve all our problems 20 years ago?
Without question, the most complex aspect of my home networking is dealing with these friggin' "Zero-Configuration Standards".
Nothing will ever solve all our problems, partly because not everyone will choose to go along with it or we will find ways to create new problems. Then again, sometimes a technology will take that long before everyone decides that maybe it is worth using and get budgets to implement it. Examples that come to mind are the compact disc and IPv6.
Rendezvous/Bonjour zero-configuration still exists today, but is better known via the term 'mDNS'. On Linux it is provided via Avahi and it is finally a standard offer [ctrl.blog]
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Yes, I remember that "Rendezvous/Bonjour zero-configuration" new "standard". I had used .local as a TLD for various intranets. Then I had to update all my intranet DNS zones, DHCP configs and rename all my internal hosts from example.local, other.local, etc. to use a different TLD.
I used .lan instead of .local. And I guess one of these days, .lan will suddenly also be an official TLD...
Re: Wash, Riinse, Repeat? (Score:2)
"So why didn't "Rendezvous/Bonjour" solve all our problems 20 years ago?"
It solved the problems it set out to solve, and we're still using it today.
"Without question, the most complex aspect of my home networking is dealing with these friggin' "Zero-Configuration Standards"."
Without question, the most complex aspect of my dog is picking a brand of food. There is a special place in hell for network engineers that resist change. They manually assign names and addresses to every lightbulb in their house, on
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> So why didn't "Rendezvous/Bonjour" solve all our problems 20 years ago?
Terror about multicast. Humans will accept multicast again some day and we will stop having to go to extremes with IGMP snooping configurations and various firewall proxies, just to be able to keep untrustable Chinese widgets off our private network. There's no technical reason to give up either security or convenience on this one.
Imagine how much energy goes into unicast of Netflix and YouTube streams. It would be nearly seamles
To (Score:1)
>"the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices [...]"
to spy on with the intent of manipulating or controlling you.
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>"the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices [...]"
to spy on with the intent of manipulating or controlling you.
Some people just have paranoid partners for that already, so another insecure manipulative partner does not seem that bad ;)