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A Mobile Home for the Wired Professional
mikael writes "The BBC is reporting that an Internet entrepeneur has given up on the high cost of housing in the city but has decided to merge his office/home lifestyles in the form of a luxury custom-built mobile home. Utilizing satellite technology, VoIP and a home cinema for video conferencing, the owner and his girlfriend are able to communicate with clients from anywhere. At the same time, the machine allows the occupants to remain self-sufficient in water, food, electricity and amenities for a whole week, allowing them to commute to the nearest national during the weekends." The price seems high even for all the amenities; a well-equipped Airstream can be had for enough less to pay for quite a few electronic upgrades.
Probably because while it is Stuff That Matters, it is not News for Nerds.
+++ATH0
A mobile home is typically carried around on a flatbed truck then mounted to the ground... This is a motor home, more usually called an RV.
No. Airstream also makes RVs.s kydeck_home.html
http://www.airstream.com/product_line/motorhomes/
Steve Roberts has been doing this kind of thing (admittedly with bikes and boats rather than RVs) for about fifteen years now...
http://www.microship.org/
Geostationary satellite distance: 45,000 miles
Speed of light: 186,000 miles per second
To get to the satellite and back to earth:
(45,000 x 2)/186,000 = 484ms
This is on top of the normal internet delays. A response from the other end will take just as long to come back so your looking at one second delay. Not good for most any use.
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Have you guys ever checked the insurance rates on a Class-A RV? My god, they approach the levels of owning a 2 bedroom house! That and maintaining the beast, where are you going to sleep when it's in the garage with a blown motor? Or worse, the bloody thing starts leaking around the seams? The service center most likely will not allow you to stay in the vehicle while it's in their garage overnight.
The air conditioning in the vehicles are not conducive to electronics while in a high humidity area, for they are glorified window AC units. All they do is cool the air and TRY to pull the moisture out of it, but not really succeeding.
Sure, they may look great but to be really a place to house your systems in, you actually have to increase your housing budget by a small factor to cover the extra things. Beefier wiring, more outlets, dehumidification, a better refrigerator than the slow and ice up like a ship in the north sea ammonia units.
By the time you get done, you'll have something like the emergency response vehicles that the larger metro poilce forces are using for mobile command posts. All electronics and few luxuries.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Because he meant so much to so many people. Because what he did was done out of his compassion for others. You can dispute his stand on certain issues, but you can't doubt his motives.
The Church ceased to be anti-science ages ago (around the turn of 19th and 20th centuries) - and certainly this Pope wasn't anti-scientific.
I appreciate that.
Its not 45,000 MILES.
Its roughly 35,900 KILOMETERS above the earths surface, or 423,000 KILOMETERS from the earths core.
For TCP/IP over satellite, it is also common to fake the acks at either end which will help with the internet induced latency at the expense of error correction for errors induced over the satellite link. The errors & error correction caused by the satelitte link can be handled better (or rather - more appropriately) by the low level radio transmission protocol than TCP/IP.
Steve.
Oh arse wipes.
That should read 42,300km from the earths core.
Steve.
Not true.
If you have enough bandwidth, you can use that to hide latency in some situations. Think of an RPC-style app: if you migrate the client to the other side of the world via a high-latency/high-bandwidth pipe, latency drops out of the time-to-completion for the rest of the computation.
That really starts to pay off after a few hundred queries (if you're going around the world, you're saving at least a quarter of a second per query).
My grad school research was in mobile agents. I think satellite networks are ideal for them.
Back before the Internet, email was sent via things like UUCP. The equivilent ping times would be hours or even days. I've IRCed when the ping times were 5-10 seconds -- it's annoying if you're trying to do more than talk, but as long as your client is local, it's perfectly usable.
Really, the main class of things that won't really work are first person shooters and similar games. Even something like Everquest ought to work, because it's not based on twitch reflexes.
Ok, I'm sorry to bitch about semantics, but this is one of my pet peeves. This thing is not a mobile home, but a motor home or RV. A mobile home is what you see in "trailer parks" and a motor home is what you can drive around. There is a difference.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
For either of those approaches, you need to be really good at getting by without accumulating lots of stuff (so it wouldn't work well for me), and at least for the boats you need to be good at keeping your place neat as well (again, not me :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks