I'm the author of the original article on Blackfriars Marketing, and the title of this thread is misrepresenting that article. The original title is "Why EDGE versus 3G matters less than you think.", not why EDGE is getter than 3G. I've posted a followup to the article today here. It's not nearly as inflammatory as implied here.
Clearly, this is an attempt to create a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Generators. Anyone know where I can find a RAIG controller? Cheap?
Seriously, that seems to be the key here. You will need controllers to synchronize all the generation, but once you do that, then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array. They can be inexpensive and not super reliable, thereby reducing costs.
The efficiency issues I believe are being overemphasized. Yes, you want high voltage for long distances. But the whole idea here is that you are doing mostly local generation of power, so running power to a few of your neighbor's houses doesn't incur nearly the penalty that you'd get from running the same power many miles. And people often forget that even your efficient power company puts the transformer on a local pole or box in your neighborhood. So the idea actually makes a lot of sense.
Actually, there's research and literature that examines how big an "N" you need in N-version software diversity for survivability, and it isn't thousands; in fact, many operational high-reliability systems actually only use two versions of software (the space shuttle's computers are built this way as are some aircraft systems). So the comment of needing thousands of OSes really isn't true.
I've been surprised at how much heat and how little light (as in research light) has been applied to this argument. Dan's diversity argument is on pretty solid ground in the research community. As an example, here are a set of papers nicely compiled by the City University of London's Center for Software Reliability on fault tolerance, and there are quite a few citations on the use of diversity in software. If you don't like the University's papers, you can find similar papers published by the ACM and IEEE, These might help readers with deciding which point of view is best supported by research. Diversity isn't a slam dunk (lots of nasty details to get right), but it's certainly well-examined ground for high-reliability systems, and a lot of folks are now looking how you apply these same principles to commercial, off-the-shelf systems.
A final thought: the Internet itself is one of the best examples of such a diverse system. At one point, no RFC was ever approved without two independently-developed implementations of the standard. It's one of the reasons it has worked so well and evolved so well over the last 30 years or so.
Not that it matters, but the iPod mini's apparently high price may be a market-based way to limit initial demand. After all, the Cornice storage elements used in these devices are brand new and probably are in limited supply. Apple had the alternative of pricing low and telling everyone "It's $150, but you have to wait 6 months to get one" or making a higher profit on lower volume until the bugs are ironed out (and there will be bugs) and then lowering the price.
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I'm the author of the original article on Blackfriars Marketing, and the title of this thread is misrepresenting that article. The original title is "Why EDGE versus 3G matters less than you think.", not why EDGE is getter than 3G. I've posted a followup to the article today here. It's not nearly as inflammatory as implied here.
Seriously, that seems to be the key here. You will need controllers to synchronize all the generation, but once you do that, then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array. They can be inexpensive and not super reliable, thereby reducing costs.
The efficiency issues I believe are being overemphasized. Yes, you want high voltage for long distances. But the whole idea here is that you are doing mostly local generation of power, so running power to a few of your neighbor's houses doesn't incur nearly the penalty that you'd get from running the same power many miles. And people often forget that even your efficient power company puts the transformer on a local pole or box in your neighborhood. So the idea actually makes a lot of sense.
I've been surprised at how much heat and how little light (as in research light) has been applied to this argument. Dan's diversity argument is on pretty solid ground in the research community. As an example, here are a set of papers nicely compiled by the City University of London's Center for Software Reliability on fault tolerance, and there are quite a few citations on the use of diversity in software. If you don't like the University's papers, you can find similar papers published by the ACM and IEEE, These might help readers with deciding which point of view is best supported by research. Diversity isn't a slam dunk (lots of nasty details to get right), but it's certainly well-examined ground for high-reliability systems, and a lot of folks are now looking how you apply these same principles to commercial, off-the-shelf systems.
A final thought: the Internet itself is one of the best examples of such a diverse system. At one point, no RFC was ever approved without two independently-developed implementations of the standard. It's one of the reasons it has worked so well and evolved so well over the last 30 years or so.
Not that it matters, but the iPod mini's apparently high price may be a market-based way to limit initial demand. After all, the Cornice storage elements used in these devices are brand new and probably are in limited supply. Apple had the alternative of pricing low and telling everyone "It's $150, but you have to wait 6 months to get one" or making a higher profit on lower volume until the bugs are ironed out (and there will be bugs) and then lowering the price.
Just my $0.02.