Even here in Wellington, we don't have the means to transmit significant amounts of power through fibre optic cable. So you should assume that the reporter got mixed up. All they did at that stage was improve the redundancy of the power system, an obvious thing to do, although not obvious to the folks in Auckland, city of darkness. Probably by adding more underground power cable to link up substations more redundantly.
Someone mentioned monopoly. Actually this is not, you can still get WAN services from Telecom and Telstra-Clear, formerly Telstra Saturn. So your choices for linking to other businesses in the city are three, and for other cities two. Actually there is an extra choice if you are close, you can run your own cable to the building next door these days if you want to. That used to be illegal but is not any more.
Apart from this network, Telecom has fibre to all the suburban exchanges. Cable modem is available to some areas, and ADSL is widely available too.
Richard Naylor is quite a cool guy. I was talking to his then teenage son about 6 o 7 years back about home computers, he had a PDP8 to play with.
It is better to get through slower than not at all. *I* might think that I can get through faster by not implementing some form of congestion control, but if the strategies I use cause other trafic to be unfairly penalised, someone is going to come up with ways to penalise my traffic. This sort of thing has come up in the past with queuing in routers.
It can be a bit like traffic flow in a city...not entering an intersection when my exit is not clear might slow me down a little, but if I block the intersection and cause gridlock it will cause a lot more. So if there happens to be a policeman observing, hw might penalise me if I do the impolite thing.
IP solution to traffic congestion...car crushers at all major intersections!
I seem to recall systems where you could only play a hired videotape once...it was to be mechanically interlocked so only the shop could rewind it.
Obviously a bad idea, since you would not be able to go back to see the bit you missed when the phone rang. So it died the death it richly deserved, as hopefully will some of these modern equivalents.
I have been known to use twenty rolls of film on a three week holiday. So call that 720 pictures, each 1800 by 1200 by 24 bit planes each. Can't be bothered doing the arintmetic, but I think you can see that I could use a good form of cheap write-once memory..since the film I use now is write-once anyway. (barring double exposures I guess) I could see a process where I use rewriteble memory in a digital camera, then download the ones I want to keep into permanent storage.
...But I can remember people saying things like this about the laser. It was called "a solution looking for an application."
The better we understand how the universe works, the closer we get to that hyperdrive.
Also this shows that the same physics applies here as applies many light years away. That might seem like an obvious assumption to make, but it is good to confirm these things.
A story at the Register suggests perhaps another approach. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/23377.html
A short quote from the article:
Appeal Court upholds Intel ex-staffer's email injunction
By Tony Smith
The US Third District Court of Appeal in California has ruled that ex-Intel staffer Kourosh 'Ken' Hamidi did indeed commit an act of trespass upon his former employer's computer system when he sent anti-Intel emails to 65,000 company workers.
So somone sending Spam is in fact trespasssing on your system. I'm not in the US myself, but this could be worth following up for those who are.
One idea is to run the cable you know you need now, and also leave a draw wire in place so you can pull in whatever you want when you need it. This avoids spending money now on fibre you may not use...or you may want a different type.
It's usually not too hard doing this stuff in a single story building, especially if everything is new and clean, since you can just run everything in the roof space, or sometimes the floor if it is not a concrete pad. But certainly it is much easier to provide holes down inside the walls now than to add them later. Then leave a piece of wire down it to use to draw whatever you want in later. Just keep a record of what you have where!
New Zealand is well connected to the outside wourld with both satelite and cable connections. Weta is based in Wellington which has a fibre infrastructure. They could I think get fibre where they are. Phone service is about as good as I have tried anywhere, and I have travelled in the USA and Europe.
For ordinary home users, in the main centres there is a choice between ADSL or cable modem, depending where you are.
Then there is the cost of labour, they are probably paying about half what they would have to pay in the US or in Europe. There are some countervailing advantages of course, depending on your interests. For instance there is a good surfing beach about ten minutes drive from Weta's site. Then check out the movie itself for some samples of the local scenery.
Incidently the Weta is a large fearsome looking NZ insect that you would rather not find crawling up your trouser leg, although it is mostly harmless.
Actually Arthur Clarkes proposal for Geosynchronous satellites was published in Wireless World in 1945. This was not a science fiction story, Wireless World was and probably still is a serious technical magazine with the same sort of status in its field as say "Scientific American". Clarke had worked on radar during the war and his fictionalised account "Glideslope" gives an interesting picture of the times. So he knew enough about the properties of microwaves to come up with a credible system which only required enormous bosters that we still don't have to make it work. Apart from the insight into obtaining ocean spanning range by using the Clarke orbit, he had also realised that the high frequency of microwaves permits a high bandwidth.
Getting onto details I am not so sure of, I don't recall that he ever tried to patent the idea, and seem to recall that he said later that he didn't expect the technology to make it possible soon enough for a patent to be worthwhile. The equipment he was familiar with of course required high power and continuous maintenance, meaning that manned stations and frequent flights to bring up spare valves/vacuum tubes would be needed. Like three ISS, but in geostationary orbit instead of LEO. The shuttle wouldn't quite make it up there.
...It has been decided that the freedom of the users of food requires that all producers of food must give it away for free.
Sorry RMS, life is just not so simple. You can't make a programmer use the license you would like, since you can't actually make someone write a program. (Barring coercion...do you propose that all programmers should be slaves?)
So for instance, you can't actually make me do anything with the code I have just been labouring over. Not that it would actually be useful to anyone else anyway but just supposing someone did want it...I can make any sort of contract I like with them. We would both then be bound by the terms of the contract. Or I can keep it to myself.
This plan is not actually communist, since at least Marx did propose "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (OK, it didn't work out that way in practice) But this plan seems to expect the programmer to work for nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fine thing to write open soure software and give it away. But whoever has put the effort into writing it surely must have the right to decide what to do with it. Including the right to accept money for the work ifthe opportunity offers.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mentioned monopoly. Actually this is not, you can still get WAN services from Telecom and Telstra-Clear, formerly Telstra Saturn. So your choices for linking to other businesses in the city are three, and for other cities two. Actually there is an extra choice if you are close, you can run your own cable to the building next door these days if you want to. That used to be illegal but is not any more.
Apart from this network, Telecom has fibre to all the suburban exchanges. Cable modem is available to some areas, and ADSL is widely available too.
Richard Naylor is quite a cool guy. I was talking to his then teenage son about 6 o 7 years back about home computers, he had a PDP8 to play with.
It can be a bit like traffic flow in a city...not entering an intersection when my exit is not clear might slow me down a little, but if I block the intersection and cause gridlock it will cause a lot more. So if there happens to be a policeman observing, hw might penalise me if I do the impolite thing.
IP solution to traffic congestion...car crushers at all major intersections!
Obviously a bad idea, since you would not be able to go back to see the bit you missed when the phone rang. So it died the death it richly deserved, as hopefully will some of these modern equivalents.
I have been known to use twenty rolls of film on a three week holiday. So call that 720 pictures, each 1800 by 1200 by 24 bit planes each. Can't be bothered doing the arintmetic, but I think you can see that I could use a good form of cheap write-once memory..since the film I use now is write-once anyway. (barring double exposures I guess) I could see a process where I use rewriteble memory in a digital camera, then download the ones I want to keep into permanent storage.
The better we understand how the universe works, the closer we get to that hyperdrive.
Also this shows that the same physics applies here as applies many light years away. That might seem like an obvious assumption to make, but it is good to confirm these things.
So somone sending Spam is in fact trespasssing on your system. I'm not in the US myself, but this could be worth following up for those who are.
He did his PhD at Princeton
It's usually not too hard doing this stuff in a single story building, especially if everything is new and clean, since you can just run everything in the roof space, or sometimes the floor if it is not a concrete pad. But certainly it is much easier to provide holes down inside the walls now than to add them later. Then leave a piece of wire down it to use to draw whatever you want in later. Just keep a record of what you have where!
For ordinary home users, in the main centres there is a choice between ADSL or cable modem, depending where you are.
Then there is the cost of labour, they are probably paying about half what they would have to pay in the US or in Europe. There are some countervailing advantages of course, depending on your interests. For instance there is a good surfing beach about ten minutes drive from Weta's site. Then check out the movie itself for some samples of the local scenery.
Incidently the Weta is a large fearsome looking NZ insect that you would rather not find crawling up your trouser leg, although it is mostly harmless.
Getting onto details I am not so sure of, I don't recall that he ever tried to patent the idea, and seem to recall that he said later that he didn't expect the technology to make it possible soon enough for a patent to be worthwhile. The equipment he was familiar with of course required high power and continuous maintenance, meaning that manned stations and frequent flights to bring up spare valves/vacuum tubes would be needed. Like three ISS, but in geostationary orbit instead of LEO. The shuttle wouldn't quite make it up there.
Sorry RMS, life is just not so simple. You can't make a programmer use the license you would like, since you can't actually make someone write a program. (Barring coercion...do you propose that all programmers should be slaves?)
So for instance, you can't actually make me do anything with the code I have just been labouring over. Not that it would actually be useful to anyone else anyway but just supposing someone did want it...I can make any sort of contract I like with them. We would both then be bound by the terms of the contract. Or I can keep it to myself.
This plan is not actually communist, since at least Marx did propose "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (OK, it didn't work out that way in practice) But this plan seems to expect the programmer to work for nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fine thing to write open soure software and give it away. But whoever has put the effort into writing it surely must have the right to decide what to do with it. Including the right to accept money for the work ifthe opportunity offers.