So Karl, you don't like the fact that your customers are maximising
distribution of their visual advertising while minimizing their costs
(by not paying you for some audience reached through caches), I guess.
Brand management people generally only care that a vast number of
people associate their brand with some appropriate set of feelings,
and that this in turn leads to sales.
The cost effectiveness of this approach does not have to be measured
directly (by thorough counting or extrapolating from a sample) when
other means of testing the effectiveness of a PR/marketing campaign
are available.
Your analyses of cache effectiveness is also flawed because
it is looking at merely the question of ratio of cache hits
to misses, and supposing that misses are inherently inefficient.
An intercepting proxy which runs a modern TCP stack and which
avoids the "herds of mice" problem by aggregating multiple
parallel connections into single ones, and which is well-located
to avoid frequent fifo tail-drop at the last hop, has a benefit
to the ISP that outweighs the cache hit:miss ratio.
That is, a cache which imposes decent long-haul TCP behaviour
reduces the number of packets which are delivered all the way
from the web server to the terminal server but tail-dropped there
rather than being delivered to the end user.
Where content's effectiveness can be measured by means
other than direct counting of "views", _or_ where an intercepting
cache reduces the number of retransmissions, or both, this sort of
caching is *great* for your customers, because it means they
can pay you less, because you ship fewer bits.
So I can see why you are so pissed off.
Sean.
Oh, I forgot - being stupid and twisting people's words is now considered
a protected class in the United States.
- --
Sean Doran
Copenhagen, Denmark