Posts by Terry Barnes 670 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2008
"You don't know every subject in the world to an equivalent level to that, why are computers special? Because you already know them and think everyone else should too?"
I agree. Why buy medicines from a pharmacy - that's just giving control to an elite. Everyone should learn chemistry well enough to make their own common medicines at home. Etc...
"Competition works, monopoly doesn't. Let's do this."
Rarely in the last mile though.
Your proposals would take away all the profitable revenue from those providers. No new entrant is going to want to come in and invest a fortune to compete with the incumbent when you've ensured that there's no money to be made. Two providers in a market that used to have one results in half the customers for each mile of cable laid - making the economics even worse. That's why we don't have multiple last mile electricity or gas or water or sewage networks - it would just make the cost of those networks higher, not lower.
I think you're really arguing for a regulated monopoly.
"Bottom line: This technology hasn't really been thought out thoroughly."
Bottom line: Thorough answers to all these questions exist, you've either incapable or have chosen not to find them for yourself. Your not thinking something through properly does not mean that other people haven't.
"Actually, it would be nice if they simply took a lesson from history and declared internet access services to be a public utility! Under those rules, similar to electric and telephone and such, if a private corporation wishes to make money serving an area, they are obligated to offer service to everyone in that area "
Guess what would happen if you did that. Almost certainly the opposite of what you intend.
Your figures presume zero capacity left in the batteries of cars that use the facility.
1,000 cars a day seems optimistic for the early days of this technology. It might be a good number if few petrol stations serve electric cars, it might be way too high if facilities are more widespread.
I don't generally wait for my car to be empty of fuel before filling up. It seems reasonable that the same would be the case for both battery swappers and battery rechargers.
" 400GB
Wow. That is crazy stupid fast"
It would be - but this is 400Gb. Units are important.
"Too bad my avg home speed is still between 1-7MB (depending on the moon cycles and coin flips and horse races)."
You could have 400Gbps to your home today via DWDM. You might not be too happy about the bill though.
Data traffic is more than just the sum of consumer broadband connections. Thing about the amount of data that will be flying around as the result of Big Data and Internet of Things. IBM are delightedly telling people at the moment that 90% of all the data ever created was created in the last two years - and that data wants to go places.
"It's kinda an important detail. Right?"
Yes, but in a different context. This kit is capable of generating a datastream at a very high rate but it's not a transmission device. The transceiver of this device would be connected to some kind of transmission kit to leave the building. This bitrate is easily handled today by DWDM kit - mind-boggling data rates over fibre is unexceptional in telco core kit. In terms of distance - how long is a piece of fibre?
If what you're asking about this as an access line technology - out to an end user site - no. You could put the same telco DWDM kit in someone's house but they wouldn't like the bill.
"Have you seen how stupid people are? We let them drive.
We also let people design hardware and write software that will be used to control autonomous vehicles. Could you safely say that out of all the code required someone won't introduce a few bugs here and there?"
Probably not the same people in all likelihood. I don't think safety critical programming jobs are handed out randomly to people and the testing regime is likely strenuous.
Do you every fly in a commercial airliner, or is your disdain for programmers reserved only for those involved with cars?
"Out of interest, if a gearbox failure (or other mechanical issue unrelated to driver decisions) happened on a vehicle causing loss of control and subsequent road traffic incident, who is currently considered liable? Both for a vehicle in-warranty with a full service history, and for a vehicle out of warranty being self-serviced?"
It's always the insurer of the vehicle that caused the incident.
That insurer is then free to attempt to reclaim its loss if it feels that someone else is culpable. That could be the manufacturer but it's unlikely to be the owner if the car has a valid MOT and they didn't knowingly drive the vehicle on the road with a fault. If the car was road legal at the time of the accident, the owner isn't liable for mechanical failure, even if they have never had the car serviced.
">The Docklands Light Railway?
Is it the Victoria line that has drivers only because computers can't strike?"
No. The DLR was built to allow evacuation by foot on footpaths. There's always a TFL employee on board, just not driving.
The model with the underground is that the driver is expected to be able to deal with most technical problems - usually by isolating faulty equipment. If they can't they're there to guide people off a train for a reasonably tricky walk down a tunnel with no footpath.
The models are different.
"For everyone in the UK to change to an electric car within one year, we would need to build more lithium ion batteries than have ever been made since they were invented."
So what? If we all switched to space hoppers we'd need to build more space hoppers than have ever been made since they were invented.
Your maths is kind of wonky because increased demand shifts the economics of accessing the resources required to make Li-Ion batteries. It's bizarre to do some sums on a completely different transportation model than exists today and then presume that there wouldn't be a similar shift in production of the raw materials.
"That's way beyond charging with some 'spare" energy from renewables, you're looking at major grid infrastructure."
Well, it doesn't seem intractable. Just charge overnight when demand is low. The gap between daytime peak usage and nighttime low usage in any given conurbation is plenty enough to charge some batteries. This probably isn't the right site on which to proclaim a technical challenge as being somehow beyond the wit of man to address.
"5. What would the planning folks say about a warehouse with 100+ full Tesla-style Li-Ion batteries stored? I doubt the local fire brigade would be keen to have it on their patch"
Let's hope no-one tells them about petrol stations.
"2. You've just bought a shiny new electric BMW. After you've driven it a couple of hundred miles, how happy will you be for the battery (~50% of the value of the car) to be swapped for one from a 10-year-old rust-bucket Toyota?"
Why would you care? You're buying the energy but leasing the container. If the battery doesn't perform properly, you take it back, get a refund and swap the battery. Forget about battery ownership - they're owned by the manufacturer.
You get the benefit of forced concentration too. Where there's a platform in decline you might have four boxes supporting a product, each capable of handling 1000 connections but now with just 100 or so on each box. If you're forced to replace those boxes you'll put them on a single, smaller box. If there's no fire or other disaster, why would you spend any Capex on a platform in decline when what is there works just fine?
"Apparently, the reason most Apple users run the latest iOS version has nothing to do with how easily Apple makes new versions available, it has to do with the facts that most of them will slavishly upgrade their hardware every time Apple brings out a new version."
You're rather ignoring the fact that those 'slavish upgraders' tend to sell their old devices and the new owners put the latest OS on. Or - are you suggesting that they just bin their old devices?
"There is no way that carbon dioxide is causing global warming. It is a measly 0.035% of our atmosphere. There simply is no way it can have any effect at all on global temperature at that concentration."
I look forward to reading your published, peer-reviewed paper on the subject.
Why the thumbs down? How can the addition of a user to a network create anything other than a linear increase in bandwidth requirement?
It could only be exponential if each subsequent user requires more bandwidth than the previous one, which is plainly nonsensical.How many users would you need to add before the next user requires more bandwidth than has ever existed in the world, ever, just for themselves?
"If the guys in the video were in their 40's and 50's and were all ex transport industry (rail, flight avionics etc) then okay, you'd know that those guys were well versed in their subject and had very probably followed a certifiable design process."
You don't think Google might have the money and means to employ appropriate experts? The amount of time and money they've spent on this leads me to believe that they probably did use the brightest and best people with the right skills and experience. I'd imagine the US government was quite keen on that being the case too before letting them loose on the streets.
"When these things start hitting the streets I predict insurers will cover their arses by wanting to charge sky-high premiums"
They'll set their premiums based on a statistical analysis of the risk. If they crash less frequently than cars with human drivers, the premiums will be lower. It would be in the interest of insurance companies to steer people towards automation if it lowers accident rates.
" the person who think doing 34mph in a 60mph zone is safer and more sensible, without considering drivers actually using the road responsibly arriving behind them from a corner only to find the equivalent of a jogger in the way."
You know that there might legitimately well be a jogger there? Or a horse, a cyclist, a deer or a tractor? Hell, I've come round a corner late at night on a country road to find a broken down traction engine in the road lit only with an oil lamp.
Your attitude is more dangerous than someone travelling at 34MPH.
You must be able to stop within the distance you can see to be clear. That's the most basic road safety rule of them all, pretty much.
"It will be interesting to see how the engineering and costs balance out. My gut says fuel cells but I wouldn't be suprised by batteries."
You're forgetting the model where batteries get exchanged at 'petrol' stations. In that model, refuelling is quicker than filling a conventional car. The batteries are charged overnight on cheap electricity and you just buy the energy, leasing the container in the same way as Calor's model works.
"The only way they can guarantee their own service is by taking bandwidth away from others."
No. They build a separate, private network that goes directly from their server to an appropriate point at the disant end. They're not taking bandwidth from others, they're bypassing the network those others are using.
"Does the power company talk about limiting customers to 120 or 240 Volts per month?"
No, but they might increase your bill if you exceed an agreed KWh envelope.
Amps and volts are instantaneous measurements, but they can be used to determine the amount of the resource that have been used.
"The only limit to the pipes is how many bytes you can cram down them per second. There is no limit to the number of bytes total. Therefore, pay-as-you-go is a monumentally stupid idea."
Er, what? Your ISP has to buy kit and bandwidth and the more the network is utilised, the greater the spend required on those things. A greater proportion of that spend is incurred by serving high usage customers than low usage customers.
"Paying per unit of an infinite resource. Really?"
It's not infinite, is it? The resource is limited to the amount of bandwidth the ISP has the capacity to handle. Would you make a similar argument that RAM for your computer should be free because there's a theoretically infinite amount of bits in the world?
"I've yet to feed the output of this thing through an oscilloscope to test DAC accuracy"
...because such a thing is impossible.
It would be like measuring the temperature of your poo to see how effective your teeth are. It rather ignores the other components in the system and, importantly, the inputs to the system.
"Fascinating, but I would still have expected 9 to have a higher incidence than 8 if the numbers are about money as ,e.g., retailers price products at 9.99 rather than 10.00"
It doesn't actually work that way. Lots of products are priced at 9.99, but not as many as cost £8.xx and there aren't as many of those as things that cost £7.xx and so on.
"Do you like Facebook, Netflix, or Google? Did you like them 15 years ago? No, because they didn't exist in their present form then, they are only here because the free nature of the Internet allowed them to experiment"
No, they're here because of billions and billions of dollars of investment. If promising startups can raise funds for salaries and buildings and servers and kit, why can't they raise them for CDNs too?
You also presume that all future startups require significant amounts of traffic. That probably isn't true. Video requires lots of bandwidth. Voice requires less, but more reliable bandwidth. Other services require tiny amounts of infrequent bandwidth without any particular delivery dependency.
"If you can tell me why a parcel company can charge for a "fast lane" depending on parcel content or why a telephone company can charge extra for a call depending on subject matter then I can understand what kind of argument your presenting."
They kind of do. Delivery of those packets is time critical. If they're late, they may as well not turn up t all. Guaranteed delivery of 'packets' because of their content absolutely exists - chilled distribution. Perishable food items require a specific delivery mechanism, one that costs more than standard packet delivery, precisely because of the content.
There's a wider point too - those 'chilled' packets tend to be delivered via a separate, private network, run by experts in that field. That's exactly what is going on now with CDNs.
I don't think they are the sole networking supplier, they're just the sole supplier for this project.
On a wider point though, this stuff is hard to make any kind of return on. If you introduce competition, you reduce the number of customers you hook in per mile of cable laid. That usually destroys the business case and you end up with no network being provided or the 'other' provider becoming the monopoly.
Worst case is new supplier 'B' hoovering up all the city customers who are cheap to serve. Old supplier 'A' was using those cheap customers to subsidise the expensive rural ones. With that subsidy gone, prices rise which means even more city customers move to supplier 'B'. Supplier 'A' is left with only expensive to serve rural customers who have to pay ever increasing prices.
Your two options, essentially, are to put prices up so that a competitive market can exist, or create a regulated monopoly.
"Telcos get paid for terminating calls - and voicemail counts as termination. If you're a minnow there's a strong incentive to keep the termination rates high (and some wnd up being bullied into high termination percentages by the incumbents or face penalties)"
But, but, but... They don't get paid for terminating calls generated on their own network by their own subscribers and carried across their own network.
No, it's not at all like that.
The same device or address (tel no in this case) can legitimately exist inside and outside your own network at different times and number portability means that any address could belong to you or could belong to another network.
There are techniques that can be employed - but simple, static address filtering isn't one.
And how many of the employees who took the business decisions to serve that customer are still working there do you think? How many of the engineers or technicians or clerks involved still work for IBM? How many of them are even alive?
Show me a business or organisation or even a person who's never done a bad thing, never made a poor decision. They can't be undone. If every bad thing resulted in a business closing, there'd not be many businesses left.
" I think it's time all utilities should be re-privatised as Thatcher's free market experiment does not work for us."
They'd become less efficient and would cost more - the difference being I guess that your service would be subsidised by the tax bills of city dwellers who cost much less to provide with utility service.
There are more city dwellers than rural dwellers and so I'm not sure a democratic vote would deliver the change you want. Equally, rural areas tend to return MPs for Team Blue and your proposal doesn't tend to fit with their world view.
"one of the few brands that doesn't need an accident to endanger its owner - it catches fire all by itself.."
Car fires are pretty common. It's incorrect to claim that Tesla is "one of the few brands" that have been afflicted by this issue. In the decade I've lived in my street, three neighbours have lost cars to fire - a Ford and a Citroen that caught fire in use, and a Volvo that caught fire parked on the street at night. That was apparently down to damaged insulation on a headlight 12v wire that made a circuit with the bodywork large enough to create sufficient heat to ignite the bonnet soundproofing.
What none of those three cars did was raise an alarm to the occupants that an incident had occurred and that evacuation should occur.
"Here's an idea: the five-year old computers that people are throwing away as junk now, why not bury them in caves far underground, so that we can use them after a solar storm fries all our computers up here"
Not many would survive an extended period out of use. Capacitors dry out, batteries leak - and what are you going to do with it anyway? Manual skills for shelter, warmth, clothing and food would be far more important. Once those basic needs are met, we need electricity, comms and healthcare.
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