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Bob Metcalfe on Open Source, IPv6, IETF
prostoalex writes "The inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe is interviewed by AlwaysOn on current issues. Metcalfe is known for challenging commonly accepted wisdom and this time he's quite confrontational. On open source and operating systems: "If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?" On IPv6 adoption and IETF: "Back when you attended the IETF, you all looked down your noses at the ITU (or I guess it was called CCITT at the time)--the entrenched, corporately manipulated, corrupt, competent standards being embodied in IT. We were the IETF--the swashbuckling, institution-oriented, open people, the rebels. That's changed now. The Internet has arrived, and all of those people are now just like ITU: IETF has become the ITU.""
There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant. If he doesn't see the innovation, I guess he's never compared Slackware '96 to today's distros, or Windows 3.1 to WinXP. Apple certainly can't be ignored here either. Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? I'm going to take a wild guess, and say "probably from the OS's of today." They don't need to be completely rewritten every few years to count as progress. Even the emergence of UNIX itself was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
It's also interesting that he clearly shows a lack of faith in the OSS community, but then digs at the IETF for evolving into elitist and monolithic organization.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
.NET, and Mono are examples of the market attempting to find a way to combine modern technology with the tech of yesterday. Unfortunately, the results are less than stellar. For example, instead of aligning Virtual Memory along object bounds (a natural fit that could be done without hardware support), these systems must contend with the existing 4K VM implementations. Instead of running the protected code in a flat heap (which CAN'T break the memory model!) these systems must contend with the memory indirection that operating systems throw their way. The results of this poor matchup between machine and software is a performance penalty, both real and perceived.
I hate to break it to Mr. Metcalfe, but most entities lack the resources to do a ground up rewrite of a fully featured Operating System. Simply writing a functional OS isn't the hard part. It's just a platform upon which software will be built. There were hundreds of OSes written between 1960 and 1990. During the '90s, however, computing platforms began to stabalize. Software was written that had a greater than 5 year life span, Operating System began to stabalize on a few "standards" (namely Unix/Vax/CPM derivitives), and massive amounts of time and money were invested into developing these platforms. Now we're standing on the 10,000 ft high towers we call Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X(NextSTEP) and we're looking at how difficult it is to replicate the decades of work that has gone into these systems.
Building a more powerful and "correct" system would mean throwing away software such as OpenOffice, Mozilla, Quickbooks, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. Software that took decades to build! Thus any future solution based on cutting edge CompSci Technology must either bite the bullet and rewrite these complex apps (good luck) or build in a translation layer that allows them to continue working. Neither choice is very appealing.
The "third road" that is currently being explored is the road of running Virtual Machines on top of today's existing infrastructure. Java,
The Virtual Memory swaps more than it should. Object files are not shared. Memory usage is 20% greater than a native program. So on and so forth.
A lot of research has gone into mitigating these issues (with Sun producing some very impressive results!), but it doesn't change the fact that the machine and software are mismatched. That mismatch discourages companies from writing new applications in these managed environments, where they would be free from the bonds of traditional OS designs.
My gut says that a rather major shift in how we use our computer will have to happen before we can truely replace the systems we have today.
I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
In all honesty, the Internet never would have been as successful as it was if it wasn't for the freedom it provided. Many other networks offered these features, but they were eventually usurped by the Internet.
Hindsight is 20/20. Had the BSD/ARPANET folks attempted to address these issues back when it was created (which would have been ludicrous given its Military intent), their solutions would have likely been wrong. Keep It Simple Stupid. It may not be the best solution, but it's the most effective solution.
P.S. In case of Slashdotting, break glass
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
They aren't going to come until we get past "old" technology like monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Okay, while I'll agree that the technology and underlying philosophies of design are "old" in technology years, but for something to be an "old clunker" there should be a basis for comparison -- something that is NOT an old clunker. What is that something? Anyone have any examples?
Everybody complains about Linux and Window and all the other operaitng systems about being old an obsolete but I see only a few putting effort in building new operating systems like what Slate can become (in the long term) or what Movitz is aiming.
Pupeno
That a site called Always On has been slashdotted.
Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968.
Huh?
Since when has the Mac operating system not have a GUI or since when has Windows been more GUI like then the Mac OS.
Also the Mac operating system has a heck of a lot more in common with both Linux and Unix than is does with Windows. In fact if you want to say anything about comparing GUIs, it would be far more accurate to say that the Mac operating system is a GUI version of unix and Windows is a GUI version of DOS.
The Army reading list
Before we can ever hope to innovate the OS, we must first innovate software development, i.e. languages.
All the language techniques that we use are rooted in old technologies. Its still just as hard to code today as ever, if not harder.
I've been programming since 1980 and back then you wrote everything yourself. It was a lot of work but at least you controlled the quality of the system because you wrote it all.
Today, systems are so complex (unnecessarily so), and the technology hasn't changed enough to keep up with the demand. We still write for loops like we always have.
The spoon is a fine tool when all you dig are holes in ice cream but when you have to dig a trench in the ground, forget it.
I think what he is hinting at is computers need to be based on the wonderful new technology known as leet speak. It would make them so much more efficient.
Until then, I'm just going to go pwn sum nubs.
Actually this is bs. The majority of us OSS folk are writing ***PORTABLE*** tools that work anywhere. This is why you see firefox on mac, win32, bsd, linux, beos, etc...
... and so on ...
This is why you see GCC on mac, win32, bsd, linux, beos, qnx, etc...
This is
Only lame arrogant windows developers think that "linux using folk only write for linux".
Heck some of the places my software has and is being used doesn't even have a proper OS [e.g. PS2 and Gamecube].
On topic again, as the "inventor of ethernet"? What the fuck does that mean? It's not that impressive. I mean it's useful but so is sliced bread and we don't honour that guys name either! He did his part to make the world better. Groovy. Now step aside and stop milking something you did nearly a decade BEFORE I WAS BORN.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Quoting Bob Metcalfe: [...] Private property is a great technology [...] This is backwards thinking, sloppy thinking, boring thinking. The big problem with the "private property" myth is that over time property accumulates in the control of few. This is a huge problem in the face of the goal of economic justice. What is Bob Metcalfe's answer to that?? His remarks about big corporations knowing "motivation of customers" and "motivation of employees" are completely misguided. On the side of the customers, we're looking at mega-advertising campaigns. On the side of employees we're looking at union-busting and the like. This is not brilliant, this is crude stuff. Stuff that we can do without. The rest of the interview is just boring.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
While today's software is good I think some 'old' things from the past should be revived. We just don't make software like we used to. Large amounts of memory and CPU cycles have made us sloppy. Those people that designed software for a few kilobytes of RAM we smart.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
He's just trolling. He has a pathological need to pop up every once in a while and say "You know I invented Ethernet, don't you?"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system"
As opposed to the non-gui version of Mac's operating system....
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Not a big shock... about 15 years ago, the two power centers in BC Politics were the NDP and the Social Credit Party.. The left wing was in the NDP who had power at the time, and the Socreds had pretty much lost favour as the reigning right-wing party (( yeah that belies their name, but having been decades in power, the right wing had taken them over )). Then an upstart Liberal party maaged to worm their way into the leaders debate and caught fire, becomming the official opposition.
By the next election, the formeer Socred political machine had taken over the Liberal Party and kicked out it's leader. These are the people who now run the province.
The problem with our political/media system is that the only people who tend to end up in positions of power are those who really want it (and are willing to do whatever it takes to get that power). Unfortunately, these are precisely the people you don't want in power.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
AMEN!
As someone who has recent scars (SPF, MARID) from dealing with the IETF, it is clear to me that they are no longer an engineering organization, but rather a highly political one. No longer is there much concern about adopting patent encumbered technology into key Internet protocols (MS SenderID) like they used to object to things like the RSA patents.
Instead, the IESG is actively working to push through this patented technology by shutting down the MARID WG so that they can advance the SenderID proposal without any public review. More over, the IESG has declared that it is ok for the SenderID spec to re-use SPF records in incompatible ways, that the SPF RFC must be held back until MS is ready ("to be fair to MS"), and the IESG is going to ignore the last 1.5 years of SPF deployment experience and start fresh with collecting data since MS has only recently started doing SenderID checking (again "to be fair to MS").
The IETF needs to take the "E" out of their name and become the Internet Political Task Force.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
You invented ethernet. Even before that, you were THERE, and helped operate, the first big ARPANet demo for Congress. You founded 3Com. You wrote more Inforworld columns than a mere human like me could read. You are the Old Master, Yoda in the swamp.
Don't spoil it now by being Dvorak. Please.
Linux is only Unix on the outside. There's scarcely little code on the inside from 1992. And I believe there is none (zero, nada) from before 1975. I know this because I've looked at the early UNIX code at http://tuhs.org/ and what little survives is not found in Linux.
Windows a copy of the Mac? In the sense that English is a copy of French, maybe [flames >/dev/null]. Some elements are the same, but how you do things with them is quite different.
Asking what the new OS will be is asking the wrong question. Ask instead what new class of devices will need an OS, and the answer would follow from that. I say "would" because I'm not sure even that question is relevant.
sigs, as if you care.
If networks were configured so that the "general rule" is NOT to be anonymous, then there is no way you can guarantee true anonymity. The reason being that if someone wantred to be "anonymous", they would have to request that privlege from some kind of "anonymity broker" or... own their own network. And even then, with the ability to track the packets, the only guarantee of anonymity is not technical, but social. The owner of the network that the message originated from would have to be the barrier. And as we all know, the current political climates around the world will be unlikely to respect that anonymity if they decide that your activities are "illegal". If someone wants to send e-mail saying they hope that a certain politician gets assainated, in some locations, that would be "illegal". Even though it's really freedom of speech. So, I don't think his suggestion works because it's not true anonymity unless you are in a very powerful position. Every citizen (from beggar to king) should have access to anonymity.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"I guess someone should tell automakers that they should reinvent a mode of transportation from scratch."
Perhaps transport engineers rather than automakers. The automakers have a huge investment in the status quo. You don't need 4 wheels an engine, brakes, throttle or even a driver.
Transport engineers have already designed and built transport systems which don't have any of the above. Starting from scratch in the 1950s they devised a transport system which optimises the mathematics of getting from A -> B. Yes there is mathematics which describe the performance of transport.
It turns out that this is about as close to optimal as you're going to get with current technologies. Computer controlled, linear induction motors, a few rollers rather than wheels and only 16 moving parts. Non stop from A->B, no congestion, no traffic lights, no changing routes, no waiting on schedules.
It's been independantly re-invented a few times over the last few decades but we've now got the computer technology to actually do it.
Deleted
How is the red swingline a symbol for IT? Cubicle farms, office bs in general i see, but how IT?
Milton was entirely ineffectual. Do IT workers sympathize with him for being victimized or is the red swingline a passive finger to the man?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Look where that got it. Until the apps demand innovation for what they want to do, we won't see innovation in the OS sphere. Dos programs were making GUIs and using the mouse before GUI operating systems became popular.
I am trolling
MECC wrote:
I guess that would be Darwin.
You do realize that Mach is 1980s technology, correct? Even stuff like today's Cocoa was mostly developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Mac OS X is a fantastic system, it is hardly "futuristic", as you incorrectly claim.
The thing with Mac OS X is that it does not have the cruft of other systems. Hardware wise, Apple is willing to force their consumers to eliminate the old (ie. floppy drives) and to proceed with the more modern (ie. FireWire). But the more modern technology is hardly futuristic. Mac OS X is still solidly based on software technology that is at least 15 to 20 years old, it not more.
Don't confuse "modern" with "futuristic". You'll never find "futuristic" items available for sale today.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
*nix is a kernel in which different underlieing designs and applications can be easily added. That is why *nix survives.
MVS, which was the original stable OS (not huge changes since the 60s) made it difficult to change out things (and very expensive).
As to the VM world, yeah, that should introduce us to a load of new changes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can't even get drivers for my 64-bit Clunker. Do you think manufacturers would want to start supporting a raft of other OSes?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
This is the second part of a four-part conversation between AlwaysOn editor-in-chief Tony Perkins, managing editor Rich Seidner, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and former CEO of 3Com who's now a general partner at Polaris Ventures. In Part 1, Mr. Metcalfe talks about the next big thing for the Internet (video); in Part 3, he tells the story behind Metcalfe's Law; and in Part 4 he tackles the blogosphere.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.18.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The *vast* majority of the software I use runs on at least 2 platforms, one of which is Windows. The exceptions are almost always Windows only.
Bob is talking about packets using faked source addresses.
/dev/null his logs on a continuing basis and both sides using encryption. As you said, this is not technical, but social.
These are useless for anything other than a (D)DoS attack. They are useless because a connection cannot be established and no data can travel.
It is easy to have personal anonymity, but still have the first upstream router check the source addresses to make sure they are legit. But it depends upon someone, somewhere being willing to
There is NO reason for the source address to not be confirmed by the upstream router.
There are LOTS of reasons for personal anonymity to be maintained. And we can have personal anonymity even if we confirm the source addresses of packets.
It's interesting how people are fixating on this comment. In context, it is certainly clear that he knows the differences and similarities between Windows and Mac. That he chose to speak sloppily in this regard is not something people seriously should be chewing on. As a point of argument, he statement does not strictly imply that MacOS is NOT a GUI. What he is stating is the Windows is a GUI, and, in his mind, an evolution of the Mac operating system.
+ Spiderfood
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
Where are the new wheels likely to come from? I mean the wheel was invented by the cave man and tires have been around since the 19th century. So who will make a better wheel?
Maybe Unix is still around because back in 1968 those engineers got it right. Maybe there aren't any revolutionary OSes around the corner -- just evolutionary changes to the ones we have.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That's first one is a horribly designed website. But it's a pretty interesting idea; it'd certainly be a good idea for cities. Perhaps it could be run like the subway or other public transit systems currently are. I'd certainly like to see how a real public trial would work out.
And hey, there's an article.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
First NeXT is not dead. It morged with the MacOS when Apple acquired NeXt (or the other way around).
NeXT orignated from a fourth strand of UNIX (not ATT, not BSD, not Linux). Carnegie Mellon wrote a highly layered version of UNIX called the Mach microkernel. Conventional UNIX was sinking under weight of trying to do to much in the kernel.
" I'd hate to get into one of those cars after some bozo has barfed"
You don't need to. The Taxi2000 system has a reject button. Reject the car and a replacement arrives a few seconds later, the soiled one heads off to the depot for cleaning.
Deleted
"And how will these wonderful trolley cars get me around to these various destinations with my cargo."
It is a network transit system, the track is laid out more like a grid than a corridor. It'd get you directly to your destinations because there would be stations nearby.
e.g.
http://www.swedetrack.com/city7.gif
Deleted
Considering suppliers to the automotive industry, the jobs they provide, the petroleum products required to make them run, and that much freight moves by trucks, the investment by society as a whole is huge.
Which is why it's going to be increasingly traumatic as the oil faucet slowly begins to close. Geopolitics surrounding petroleum is already traumatic enough now, thank you.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Indeed, Lisp does not suffer from the problems that cause the lion's share of security breaches today. At the same time, Lisp pioneered many concepts of modern programming languages (even if they weren't all invented on Lisp), and then some. Garbage collection, Lisp macros (which allow you to extend the syntax of the language), functional programming, and object-oriented programming are all common practice in Lisp, just to name a few. All of this (maybe not OO - I'm not sure if it had been invented yet) worked very nicely on Lisp machines, and I think they even had some sort of GUI, although it wasn't like the GUIs of today.
Lisp machines failed mostly because Symbolics tried too hard to make money off them. They made them very expensive, so people bought cheaper hardware and lived without Lisp. In the meantime, they protected everything with patents and copyrights, and since Symbolics folded, nobody seems to have been able to re-create the technology.
It is worth knowing that the GNU project was started pretty much as a direct reaction against the Symbolics affair. A certain hacker called Richard Stallman worked at Lisp Machines Inc., the other company that made Lisp machines, and was so upset about the abuse and destruction of this good system for the sake of commercial interests that he decided to build a system that would be Free and remain Free. Indeed, Lisp was mentioned as an official language for the GNU system (the other one being C), although few programs are written in it (Emacs and Sawfish come to mind).
Lisp still survives as a language (I think it's the second oldest programming language), and the community seems to be reviving a bit, although many lispers seem to "make do" with languages like Ruby and Python, that have a somewhat lispy feel to them. And with projects like Movitz, maybe we will have lisp machines again someday.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Um. You're aware that you will have to pay for the use of the system?
Taxi's that go to the depot for cleaning would only be unavailable until the service personnel at the depot had checked it. In the meantime there would be hundreds or thousands of other vehicles available to everyone else on the rest of the network. The only person who'd be inconvenienced is the guy who'd paid to stand and press the reject buttons on the taxis as they arrive.
Deleted
"Ever tried a bicycle?"
15 miles/day, 5 days/week. But it's really too slow for most people, the practical limit is about 10 miles. Then there's weather, traffic, sweat, clothing etc. Not exactly non stop either, certainly in UK you are expected to obey road traffic laws, that means traffic lights.
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I think that systems are complex because of bad design first and bad implementation second. If you have a bad design, no amount of good implementation is going to save you. If you have a good design that's poorly implemented, then there was no point of having a good design.
As far as languages are concerned, you could implement an object oriented approach to a C program (good design, bad implementation), but it is much easier to design a language that embodies that approach, i.e. C++.
I've spent most of my 23 years programming, designing systems. Every time that I go the extra mile to do the best design that I can with the time allotted, the programming is simplified and complexity is reduced.
Good designers see everything the same, good programmers see everything different. The best designs have their complexity in the structure not the code. Most systems have their complexity in the code.
What are the problems today in languages that cause complexity in coding? Inheritance, garbage collection, OO languages that break encapsulation (.NET, Java, any programming language that uses GC), multiple objects being "owned" by more than one other object, multi-threading locks that are defined at programming level instead of structural level, etc.
What I'm tired of seeing in "new" languages is the same old same old. Sure the syntax is different or some esoteric problem that the language designer had implementing a particular system in an existing language has been solved by their "new" language. But the basic concepts are identical to most existing languages.
The only real innovation, (if you can call it that), that's been made in a recent (10 year old language) mainstream language, viz. Java, is by making INTERFACE a language element. Granted, interfaces have been around forever, but Java is the first mainstream language to implement it at the language level.
What is needed is someone to completely throw out everything they thought they knew about languages and start from scratch using everything they know about complex system development.
You may ask yourself, "Why don't I do this?" Because there's no money in it and once I did, I'd have to convince the religious to convert. Not worth it.
You basically have to subsidise it to around about 50% in order to persuade people to use it. The UK subsidises the rail system to the tune of around £4 billion a year (approx $7 billion). This is largely because all current public transit systems are designed to carry groups of people from A->B.
All of the above mean that current public transport is a dreadfully slow and expensive method of travel. Is it any wonder at all that people don't like current public transport and would rather sit in a congested traffic jam?
Personal Rapid Transit should manage to be cheap enough to run at a profit and still attract passengers because it's way faster than the rest, including cars, there's no drivers to pay, the infrastructure is cheaper to build than a road.
Deleted
After reading the web site you sent out about the PRT I realized the prototype is in the back of parking lot 3 at raytheon's site in marlboro MA (where I worked for 3+ years) and I can tell you point blank the project died years ago.
:)
They can't even fire it up because the mice have chewed through most of the wiring. Rumor has it the last time they fired it up (5+ years ago) the PRT actually got stuck on the track and the people where left there for 2 hours while they tried to fix it.
On a side note I actually used to park my car under it
I'm not sure you answered the GP's question. This was the first thing that occured to me. I buy groceries once a week...I fill up the front seat and floorboard of my car easily...and if I buy charcoal, and a couple of other things (not counting if I'm having a party)...well, It takes me 5-6 trips to the car to the house to unload it all. I don't see how this would be practical for living if you had to haul all this stuff back and forth between the grocery store, and the station, and from the station to the house. Hell, how would most people get their Xmas tree home from the tree lots to the house? It just doesn't seem practical for everyday life. If it was in addition to cars...well, sure that would work, but, if everyone could still have a car, and the independence it gives...well, that kills the personal transport thing too.
Also, the thing that bothered me...CCTV's in every station/car? Just want we would need...another infringment on privacy, being filmed all the time...tracking your movements? Not for me thanks.
And with weather....I see the examples of how a cold snowy climate like MN would have problems with a system like this...but, was thinking about New Orleans. Would be VERY difficult to evacuate with this system in such small cars. Even if it were nationwide and would get everyone out of the city..again, the smallness and lack of storage for traveling with personal property is an issue? How would you evacuate the city, and bring your pets?All your records you need...family pictures..etc. When you leave NOLA in fear of a hurricane...you bring all you can, 'cause there is that chance the city itself will be wiped off the face of the earth.Elderly people and their walker/wheelchairs...
This also doesn't look practical for normal city emergencies. How would one of these function as an ambulance with all the equipment they need? Firetrucks? Police?
It IS a neat idea..and possibly one that needs to be kept in the working on stage, but, it just does not seem at ALL practical for daily life as we know it. And these are just issues we have for more urban areas. A great deal of the US is not in the category...you'd still need roads out there to transport things....and if you have all these roads and vehicles still...what do you need the new 'transit' system for?
Just some thoughts...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Then that malicious guy gets banned from the network, just like you would with a malicious user on your computer network. I just don't understand why people have to constantly think of any possible reason (no matter how trivial or stupid) to reject new technologies that might actually be more sustainable and efficient.
I mean, big fucking deal. How does this inconvenience of "malicious users" in any way compare in scale or intensity to the problems of drunk drivers killing kids, air pollution giving us cancers and breathing problems, massive amounts of mining needed to produce the metal and oil to make enough private cars, traffic congestion, road rage, etc?
It's not as if cars and subways don't both have massive problems. But no, let's not think of how to improve things. Lets just bitch about some new idea that might have some small potential problem.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Living in Australia, we wouldn't have that problem. You see someone doing that, you walk up and whack 'em a good one on the ear hole. Problem solved.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Way to simplify Ethernet to the point of not even being Ethernet anymore. Ethernet is more than just the physical link.
"all the system objects present themselves as named files that are manipulated by read/write operations; second, all these files may exist either locally or remotely, and respond to a standard protocol; third, the file system name space - the set of objects visible to a program - is dynamically and individually adjustable for each of the programs running on a particular machine."
The result of this is that each app or user session can run on a metacomputer. A CPU here, a CPU there, some storage over there and a display and mouse and keyboard here. SMP is automatic, your filesystem contains the entire internet (like you ask for), and "my computer" becomes a text file describing the resources you have acces to. Got a job you don't want to stop, but want to turn off the CPU by your bed?
mv /proc/job /mynetwork/livingroom/proc
(I'm making that up, but that's the idea...)
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis