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.

Comments

Satellite Latency

[mpeg4codec]

To me, it would seem that the latency involved with satellite communications would really inhibit the use of VoIP. Either that or make it really, really difficult to use. Are there any /.'ers who can vouch on either side of this issue?

Re:Satellite Latency

[dougmc]

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.

Aside from web, email, irc. Even a videophone is still acceptable with a one second delay.

_Most_ Internet application are usable with 1000 ms ping times. Web, email and IRC will barely even notice. Even interactive things like ssh will work, though you'll probably find the lag to be most annoying as you find yourself counting keystrokes to move your cursor around in your editor, for example.

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.

I have been reduced to saying, "And this is news?"

[kfg]

This was done by bicycle, http://www.microship.com/, 20 years ago (complete with a binary "keyboard" on the handlebars so that the rider could type while riding and satellite uplink) and my aunt gave up her house 10 years ago to go RVing and says she doesn't understand anymore why anyone would want to own a house in the first place.

Slashdot breaking news story: Sam's Club!

KFG

It's porn!

[tyroneking]

Internet entrepeneur? Video cameras? His girlfriend?
Sounds suspiciously like a mobile porn studio.

bubble-buster

[TheHawke]

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.

Not all that new

[SJasperson]

I was doing full-time computer consulting and living full-time in an RV back in 1997-2000 (in the US), and I was hardly the only one. Even then, it wasn't that hard to stay in touch; plenty of RV parks would let you plug in a wired modem somewhere, more and more had internet hookups right at every site, and you could have a satellite modem if you were willing to pay enough for it (around $2/minute for 9600 baud access, which was plenty good enough for email and shipping code back and forth in those less bloated days). It's fun when you get to camp in the boondocks next to a hot spring for a couple of weeks and still bill a good hourly rate for the hours you care to work on your laptop while recharging from the solar panels. It's not so fun when you're stuck in the client's parking lot in Schaumburg Illinois for a week in winter because they really need to see you on site and the propane heater barely keeps up with the chill.

not a mobile home

[JeremyALogan]

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.

Big deal

[Fapestniegd]

I've been doing this for over a Year.

And for about $14k. And $5k for the pickup truck.
I'm posting this from the pod right now.
Most RV parks have WiFi, well the good ones anyway, so latency isn't a problem.