From: Ken Meyering (ken@define.com)
Date: Tue Nov 17 1998 - 01:35:06 MST
Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>:
> Last time I looked spectrum was still a valuable resource,
> protected by legal enforcement. There should be room for low-power
> spread-spectrum grass-routed cellular which looks indistinguishable
> from noise (remember CryptNet?), but such infrastructure needs a
> minimal coverage threshold to be interesting and its hardware be a
> commodity item to be affordable while being violently opposed by
> telco and information provider oligopolies. Also, we need something
> along the lines of ATM for a matrix, while distinctly suboptimal
> TCP/IP still reigns supreme.
Eugene, you're taking all the fun out of this! You seem to be
approaching this whole issue from the perspective of a law obiding
citizen living within the system. I'm trying to think of it from the
perspective of a "lets start over and do it right in a big way" on a
locality by locality basis.
Play it like a time travel game. 1998 rules, laws, and
infrastructure in one locality, 21st century rules, laws, and
infrastructure in a different locality. The 21st century localities
will be so technologically advanced, that they can assist in bringing
the other localities on line. *Everything* will be affected by
broadband. Transportation, education, health care, entertainment,
economy. Quite simply, the broadband community will be privately
managed by open systems, and the societies will be cashless, and
primarily electricity based rather than primarily gasoline based.
Let's say the legal system favors ecology over all other priorities,
but rather than simply exterminating the people and bulldozing the
infrastructure, it's more of a "go home, be entertained, communicate,
enjoy self-paced learning... if you need a ride, we'll handle the
transportation."
> That HDTV is very dead I certainly can agree with. As to streaming
> video, the global bandwidth is not yet adequate.
We can upgrade each locality to broadband, with all that entails. It
can be priority one, above and beyond anything else. We don't need to
make every phone company and cable tv company go bankrupt at the same
time. We'll just make them completely useless and obsolete on a
town-at-a-time basis.
Who needs 25 different video rental stores and 40 different
department stores with CD shelves, when the few thousand titles that
are redundantly available can be archived on high-capacity local
servers and streamed to local consumers using a local infrastructure
of mass produced broadband router/proxies feeding beeper sized
distribution nodes.
This is a cultural shift. The pagan communities will upgrade before
the orthodox religious communities, I'm sure, due to the relative
technological leanings of their respective citizens.
> Unless arrested at
> protocol level (pay by packet), xDSL will push further bandwidth
> clogging, and thus will require a yet another networks upgrade. And
> after streaming video there will come a yet another resource hog, I
> am certain.
The biggest resource hog is distributed scientific computing. The
computing requirements are endless. A good start, though, will be
something that can be thrown together fairly quickly using
off-the-shelf inventories of high performance low cost components.
You can't please everybody, all the time, (without direct brain
stimulation, that is), so why not do this locality by locality?
Approach it like a game. Our community is in the year 2020, your
community is in the year 1998, and their community is in the year
1893. We can't practically bring every community to 2020 at the same
time (again, without direct brain stimulation/modification), and
that's really not worth it at this point.
> DSPs don't have virtual memory, which most Linux flavours require.
Who cares? It's something to do besides commuting 2 hours a day to
sit around a develop multimedia software for Bill's OS, just so the
software company can go bankrupt because the telco switches are
still depreciating.
DSPs are cheap and fast. Couldn't there be some assembly programming
beneath the C functions that compensate for architectural defects?
We can use existing DSPs at first in the first wave of devices. The
chip-level designs can be modified for the next generation of
production. Imagine a flat memory model being used to keep RAM
proxies of media files. These things could be thrown together fairly
quickly, given the will. Linux has a cult following and a lot of
talented C programmers.
It's not really the *WHOLE* OS that's needed. Really, just enough of
a familiar set of tools for file management. (Although, in a
no-moving parts device, it will really be array management).
I say hide the complexity of chip architecture from the programmers,
and let them focus on creating games and multimedia applications
(spectragram libraries, continuous speech recognition, music
synthesis).
Preserve enough familiarity so that you can capitalize on the
available knowledge workers, including their emotional attachments to
old structures. It's more of a social transition strategy at this
point than a plan for perfect computation. It will keep the
community motivated and the skills honed.
> With a high-speed wireless modem can do that with a wearable, today.
> A receive-only unit is not flexible enough by far. Moreover,
> watching movies while crossing street does not exactly appear to be
> a healthy occupation.
Actually, I was being facetious about the one-way cellular. Really,
if I see another 20 pound casette playing ghetto blaster in my local
"Good Guys" electronics store I think I'm going to vomit. You tear
the things apart, and they're nothing but empty shells weighted down.
Just behind the front display is a little chip that handles all the
radio tuning. It's just consumerism garbage. Why not make the same
thing out of a cell phone capable of streaming a 64K audio feed? If
the consumers need to see big dials and FM style LCD tuners, just
spoof the damn things. Let the dial be a placibo, doing nothing but
sending an http query to an online streaming media provider. The
radio stations in that locality can keep all their studio equipment.
But instead of sending their signal out at 10,000 watts, they're
really just another site on the web.
Here we are moving to an age of driverless lightweight non-polluting
vehicles, and we're still training our children from the age of 2 how
to drive a car!!
See http://www.etoys.com/html/et/et_swt0075_001.shtml
-------------------
ken@define.com
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