Well first of all, the biggest untapped energy source on the planet still is an increase in efficiency. Why does my laptop need take 60 Watts of power in order to heat up my lap? Why do we have displays in mobile devices that waste 5/6 of the light they generate? Why do we still have processors that take _Watts_ of power althought alternatives with milliwatts are available?
I believe that a 1 Watt laptop-like device is definitely possible. It won't have a colour screen nor Windows Vista, but it would do everything you want it to do. Just look at old Psions which ran for months.
Just think of the positive effects. If you had software beeing able to spread from access point to access point automatically, you could easily build up a meshed network of routers. Those routers would then build a gigantic network which you can use to communicate without the FBI listening into it. You could simply install that software, reconfigure your router and patch the hole.
The problem is that for that you'd need a monoculture of routers. It might work with Windows PC at one time in the future, but even there it's hard.
The problem is probably not the encoding, but just the crappy devices people have now.
There are 2 way loudspeaker systems beeing sold as HIFI-Equipment which give out certain frequencies way more directional than other frequencies. A good set of speakers will not change the colour of the sound depending of your position so much.
MP3 should have a completely flat frequency response unless you do something completely wrong.
And although 128 kBit is definitely audible, higher bitrates are a very good approximation of 1411 kBit PCM, but you always need to keep in mind that PCM and "lossless" derivatives of it also have a certain loss of quality. Just try listening to a 64 kBit PCM file (i.E. 8 kHz 8 Bit mono) and just compare it to 64 kBit MP3. In a way PCM was just the MP3 of the 70s. It was the most efficient way of digitally encoding audio in high quality. (actually there were more effient ways like G.711 which are able to give higher fidelity than PCM at 64 kBit, but those were hard to do for higher bitrates)
Anyhow unless you have decent headphones and go higher than 128 kBit you should not notice any degradiation from PCM to MP3. In fact the buildt-in speakers of many mobile phones are so bad, you cannot distinguish 32 kBit from 64 kBit.
Why did they send the movies on U-Matic tapes? That format only has a running time of up to an hour and no way to increase that by long-play. It wouldn't make sense as someone would need to exchange the tape in the middle of most movies.
The only problem with TOR is that it's currently mostly used for 'interresting' from an attacker's point, trafic. If TOR would be used for anything, nobody would evesdrop on the exit nodes anymore.
Of course those bitrates are theoretically possible with optical fibers. After all you could apply the advanced modulation schemes of DSL to them, theoretically. Actually right now for short distances the dispersion might be small enought to actually do QAM, but I don't believe it's feasible on longer lines.
Of course once we get ways to use lightways in the same way as radio waves it all would be simple, but right now, even the best lasers still actually produce band-limited noise with a bandwidth of a few hundred megahertz. A detector can only take a chunk of the spektrum and just give you the intensity of the signal. Comparing this to radio, we still are in the 1920s, perhaps earlier.
There already is B.A.T.M.A.N. a Better Approach To Mobile Adhoc Networking which can do such meshes rather reliably over WLAN for up to 2000+ nodes. To have such a project you'd only need to hook it up to propper radio hardware.
The quality is simply irrelevant what matters is the experience.
On a CD you pop in a disk into a drive, wait a bit and then have a bit-to-bit exact copy of it on your harddrive or flash. You cannot do much wrong with this process and your data well also always sound precisely the same, nomatter what you do. (unless of course you are using sub-standard D/A converters)
With vinyl on the other hand you actually have an experience. You take that disk, carefully put it into the tray or turntable of your record player and carefully play it. It actually matters if you clean your record before putting it into the player as the laser will read every particle of dust as a click.
You cannot easily copy records (although devices to cut your own records are moderately cheap) and you definitely cannot replace the experience with CDs or MP3s or whatever.
Sure, from the technical standpoint microgroove records are a thing of the past, but you have to see the whole user experience. People like them because something turns.
What do they mean by market share? The amount of money that's been paid for licenses? The number of licenses sold?
Seriously, how do you find out how many Linux installs there are? It's not like people buy Linux in a store, they either download it, or copy it from a friend. This is not much different to Windows, but with Linux it's obviously legal and even some companies do it like that.
Probably the most accurate study could be conducted by Google and Yahoo. They could count how many people actually _use_ what OS, at least among internet users. However that would still underestimate the actual share of Windows boxes as a good part of them probably is not connected to the Internet.
Every few years people cry out that the net is going to break down because it's to slow. Come on! Get over it! There are lots of simple ways to build fast networks. A single fiber can easily transport 10 Gigabits per second. And a typical cable has more than 100 of those fibers. So even with todays technologies 500 Gigabits per second on a cable is perfectly doable.
The main problems currently are this: It's hard to build a high traffic server as all the traffic will concentrate. ISPs don't want to invest in new lines.
If you'd really change something about the network, do the following: In IPv6 make an optional header which tells the router to try to cache it transparently, if it can. If it can, it will send the packet to a transparent proxy which will also send that header in it's queries.
So after a while you would automatically build a network of cascaded proxy servers. The network would automatically be in it's optimal configuration. If you choose not to use the proxies, just don't use that header. It's good enought if a few routers along the way support this new header, the others just need to pass it throught.
I have to partially disagree. Not only the Macintosh user says "this is a bug", but just about anybody else other than Windows fans. Windows users are just to used to bugs.
In the german version there is a bug for almoust a decade now.
If you type in 3.5 you will get "3. Mai". Now if you try to correct yourself by entering 3,5, the correct way to enter decimals in german, you will get "3. Januar". There just is no way for the unexperienced user to get back to normal. The bug essentially is that the system allows dates without a year.
In germany virtually all the stations carry EPG information with their DVB signal. Those stations who don't simply appear blank in the "What's on now" listings. This creates a certain pressure to implement EPG.
And in fact even in analog days there was and still is Teletext. A digital text servie allowing the station to carry information on 40x24 character pages. Those nearly almoust also carried complete programm guides. In fact some VCRs from Grundig even tried to parse those pages for "point and click" programming.
Why is it that in the US the user experience always has to be destroyed by people who want to maximize their profit?
In my opinion this is one of the good sides of censorship. If children are able to learn how to circumvent censorship they will learn an important step to beeing mature net-citicens.
The problem is not the backbone, the problem is bad routing caused by stupid company policies.
So finally stop trusting in companies. Companies, unless they are really small, don't act sensibly, they act based on the believes of their owners which is not nessesarily even maximising profit.
Build your own networks wireless networking with meshed routing is now practicable. So do the following. If you don't have a wireless card, buy one. If you have a wireless card, set it to ad-hoc mode, ESSID "freifunk". Then assign it an IP-Adress in the 10.(channelnumber+100).x.y/16-Range and start OLSRd which you can get over http://www.olsr.org/ Set the LinkQualityLevel option to 2 and start it. Obviously if you already found another ad-hoc network named "freifunk" feel lucky you can connect to that person.
What OLSRd does is it creates routing tables. This will automatically find the best routing between 2 points.
Build your own networks. The time of inefficient routing based on beancounter philosophies should finally be gone. It's a pitty when we complain about network speeds yet a packet to your neighbour is likely to travel though another city.
Set up wireless routers creating meshed networks, and route your network based on common sense and not on what contracts you have with other companies. Build large chunks of networks and then internetwork them via longer radio-links, VPN-tunnels or even dark-fiber.
Just think of it, there's 56 MBit WLAN out there which can reach about 20 MBit realistically. You have 3 channels in the b/g-Band and even more in the a one.
I mean it's not like you can make any money from advertisements, unless you are Google of course. Besides, the Firefox users would really use Internet Explorer, they would block advertisements there, too. It's trivial for any browser, just make some entries to your hosts file. (even avaliable on Windows!)
I can accept displaying advertisement banners on my computers, but I cannot accept beeing forced to.
I guess a "PLEASE_CACHE"-header might be something cool to have. In IPv6 you can add extra Information to your packets in headers. One of those could simply say "if you can cache the data from this connection, please do it". Essentially if a router gets such a packet it would try to run it thought a transparent proxy. If this should not work, it will just be passed on as it was.
The effect would be trumendous. The network of routers would become a gigantic content distribution network. Imagine a podcast, if the router closest to the server supports this header there would only be one true download. The rest would be done by the network.
Of course we _have_ to go to meshed networks. Every participant of the network should have (wireless) lines to his neighbours. The equipment must be in the hands of the users. This not only gets rid of network "hotspots" where a lot of connections combine, but also makes the network immune to censorship and business practices. A meshed network would be considerably cheaper to operate. People already have WLAN routers at home. More carefull placement and different firmware would do it.
As for phishing I'd simply say, "get a life". This is not really a problem. Sites dealing with sensitive personal information should just use HTTPS and publish their fingerprint via another means of communication. Encrypt and sign your e-mails, especially when in a company. But this is outside the scope of a "new internet", that's just normal day to day stupidity.
With Cisco and Linksys we actually have the case where the consumer brand used to have better products than the business brand.
Cisco's IOS is not really known for security. It uses a flat unprotected memory model in which even a bug in the configuration webserver gets you directly into kernel memory.
Some versions of IOS sent back any amount of data back when you pinged it. So you pinged them and got back your data, plus everything behind it in memory.
The reason why germany got so many broadband connections is rather simple. It's way cheaper to have broadband here than dial-up.
Traditionally you had to pay for every single phonecall, even local ones. So dialing-in into an ISP _really_ cost you a lot of money. In fact back then most ISPs didn't charge you for their services so you only had to pay to your local phone company. Then with DSL and cable modems you suddenly got a flat-rate for a moderately low price.
Currently the costs are about this: (all in Euro) dial-up 0.1 cents/minute => 43.2 Euro a month (wow, this suddenly even became affordable) DSL is about 50 Euros a month including an ISDN phone-line with flat-rate service for data-calls for all of germany.
Dial-up used to be even more expensive, costing as much as 3 cents per minute.
The car industry has never been an instance of morality or good management. Aguments don't count in this industry, that's why they still refuse to build more fuel-efficient cars, despite lower manufacturing costs and a relatively high demand.
I don't believe that things and people can be truely evil, but the car industry is about the closest thing to beeing evil. It just seems to harm the society with everything it does. Switching to properitary software is just one instance of it.
Well HD-DVD and Blueray will go down the road of all digital hardware-based media. Today the players cost hundreds of dollars, tomorrow the chineese will build $50 ones which will play a lot more than the expensive ones will. The picture and sound quality will be almoust the same and most people will just play pirated or at least non-hollywood content on those players.
Sony probably lost a lot of money on DVD-Players. In the past Sony (and other big brands) were able to justify charging way more for a VHS recorder than the competition as they were able to create an aura of quality. With digital media, such an aura is hard to create.
Well in my opinion daylight savings is probably one of the most stupidest ideas in the world. Just think of it. Why should someone change the timezone on 2 arbitrarily chosen dates. It disrupts many areas in public life like train-schedules. In the next workday morning offices are occupied for minutes setting their clocks to the new time.
You also get a night which is one hour shorter. Getting enought sleep is rather important. And some people who already get to little sleep might get even less which is definitely not healthy.
And what about the alleged point of daylight savings? There has not yet been any significant proof of saved energy. Even the most positive studies suggest that the savings are, at most, hardly significant.
Mainframes are not only bought for performance, but for the whole framework they have. Mainframes have great ways to execute batch-jobs which most Linux systems still lack.
Linux just seems to be more suitable for near realtime things like desktop computers or workstations, perhaps smaller servers like Google uses them.
So essentially it doesn't matter if there are clusters of smallers computers cheaper and more powerfull than mainframes, mainframes still will be sold.
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Well first of all, the biggest untapped energy source on the planet still is an increase in efficiency. Why does my laptop need take 60 Watts of power in order to heat up my lap?
Why do we have displays in mobile devices that waste 5/6 of the light they generate?
Why do we still have processors that take _Watts_ of power althought alternatives with milliwatts are available?
I believe that a 1 Watt laptop-like device is definitely possible. It won't have a colour screen nor Windows Vista, but it would do everything you want it to do. Just look at old Psions which ran for months.
Just think of the positive effects. If you had software beeing able to spread from access point to access point automatically, you could easily build up a meshed network of routers. Those routers would then build a gigantic network which you can use to communicate without the FBI listening into it. You could simply install that software, reconfigure your router and patch the hole.
The problem is that for that you'd need a monoculture of routers. It might work with Windows PC at one time in the future, but even there it's hard.
The problem is probably not the encoding, but just the crappy devices people have now.
There are 2 way loudspeaker systems beeing sold as HIFI-Equipment which give out certain frequencies way more directional than other frequencies. A good set of speakers will not change the colour of the sound depending of your position so much.
MP3 should have a completely flat frequency response unless you do something completely wrong.
And although 128 kBit is definitely audible, higher bitrates are a very good approximation of 1411 kBit PCM, but you always need to keep in mind that PCM and "lossless" derivatives of it also have a certain loss of quality. Just try listening to a 64 kBit PCM file (i.E. 8 kHz 8 Bit mono) and just compare it to 64 kBit MP3.
In a way PCM was just the MP3 of the 70s. It was the most efficient way of digitally encoding audio in high quality. (actually there were more effient ways like G.711 which are able to give higher fidelity than PCM at 64 kBit, but those were hard to do for higher bitrates)
Anyhow unless you have decent headphones and go higher than 128 kBit you should not notice any degradiation from PCM to MP3. In fact the buildt-in speakers of many mobile phones are so bad, you cannot distinguish 32 kBit from 64 kBit.
Why did they send the movies on U-Matic tapes? That format only has a running time of up to an hour and no way to increase that by long-play. It wouldn't make sense as someone would need to exchange the tape in the middle of most movies.
The only problem with TOR is that it's currently mostly used for 'interresting' from an attacker's point, trafic. If TOR would be used for anything, nobody would evesdrop on the exit nodes anymore.
BTW, it's not like your ISP won't spy on you.
Of course those bitrates are theoretically possible with optical fibers. After all you could apply the advanced modulation schemes of DSL to them, theoretically.
Actually right now for short distances the dispersion might be small enought to actually do QAM, but I don't believe it's feasible on longer lines.
Of course once we get ways to use lightways in the same way as radio waves it all would be simple, but right now, even the best lasers still actually produce band-limited noise with a bandwidth of a few hundred megahertz. A detector can only take a chunk of the spektrum and just give you the intensity of the signal. Comparing this to radio, we still are in the 1920s, perhaps earlier.
There already is B.A.T.M.A.N. a Better Approach To Mobile Adhoc Networking which can do such meshes rather reliably over WLAN for up to 2000+ nodes. To have such a project you'd only need to hook it up to propper radio hardware.
:)
But then Halliburton wouldn't make any profit.
The quality is simply irrelevant what matters is the experience.
On a CD you pop in a disk into a drive, wait a bit and then have a bit-to-bit exact copy of it on your harddrive or flash. You cannot do much wrong with this process and your data well also always sound precisely the same, nomatter what you do. (unless of course you are using sub-standard D/A converters)
With vinyl on the other hand you actually have an experience. You take that disk, carefully put it into the tray or turntable of your record player and carefully play it. It actually matters if you clean your record before putting it into the player as the laser will read every particle of dust as a click.
You cannot easily copy records (although devices to cut your own records are moderately cheap) and you definitely cannot replace the experience with CDs or MP3s or whatever.
Sure, from the technical standpoint microgroove records are a thing of the past, but you have to see the whole user experience. People like them because something turns.
BTW, the problem of wear has been solved a decade ago:
http://www.elpj.com/purchase/index.html
What do they mean by market share? The amount of money that's been paid for licenses?
The number of licenses sold?
Seriously, how do you find out how many Linux installs there are? It's not like people buy Linux in a store, they either download it, or copy it from a friend. This is not much different to Windows, but with Linux it's obviously legal and even some companies do it like that.
Probably the most accurate study could be conducted by Google and Yahoo. They could count how many people actually _use_ what OS, at least among internet users. However that would still underestimate the actual share of Windows boxes as a good part of them probably is not connected to the Internet.
Every few years people cry out that the net is going to break down because it's to slow.
Come on! Get over it! There are lots of simple ways to build fast networks. A single fiber can easily transport 10 Gigabits per second. And a typical cable has more than 100 of those fibers. So even with todays technologies 500 Gigabits per second on a cable is perfectly doable.
The main problems currently are this:
It's hard to build a high traffic server as all the traffic will concentrate.
ISPs don't want to invest in new lines.
If you'd really change something about the network, do the following:
In IPv6 make an optional header which tells the router to try to cache it transparently, if it can. If it can, it will send the packet to a transparent proxy which will also send that header in it's queries.
So after a while you would automatically build a network of cascaded proxy servers. The network would automatically be in it's optimal configuration. If you choose not to use the proxies, just don't use that header. It's good enought if a few routers along the way support this new header, the others just need to pass it throught.
I have to partially disagree. Not only the Macintosh user says "this is a bug", but just about anybody else other than Windows fans. Windows users are just to used to bugs.
In the german version there is a bug for almoust a decade now.
If you type in 3.5 you will get "3. Mai". Now if you try to correct yourself by entering 3,5, the correct way to enter decimals in german, you will get "3. Januar". There just is no way for the unexperienced user to get back to normal.
The bug essentially is that the system allows dates without a year.
Sad times when the discussion about the media is not about picture and or sound quality, but on the limitations the studios impose on us.
In germany virtually all the stations carry EPG information with their DVB signal. Those stations who don't simply appear blank in the "What's on now" listings. This creates a certain pressure to implement EPG.
And in fact even in analog days there was and still is Teletext. A digital text servie allowing the station to carry information on 40x24 character pages. Those nearly almoust also carried complete programm guides. In fact some VCRs from Grundig even tried to parse those pages for "point and click" programming.
Why is it that in the US the user experience always has to be destroyed by people who want to maximize their profit?
In my opinion this is one of the good sides of censorship. If children are able to learn how to circumvent censorship they will learn an important step to beeing mature net-citicens.
The problem is not the backbone, the problem is bad routing caused by stupid company policies.
So finally stop trusting in companies. Companies, unless they are really small, don't act sensibly, they act based on the believes of their owners which is not nessesarily even maximising profit.
Build your own networks wireless networking with meshed routing is now practicable.
So do the following. If you don't have a wireless card, buy one.
If you have a wireless card, set it to ad-hoc mode, ESSID "freifunk". Then assign it an IP-Adress in the 10.(channelnumber+100).x.y/16-Range and start OLSRd which you can get over http://www.olsr.org/ Set the LinkQualityLevel option to 2 and start it. Obviously if you already found another ad-hoc network named "freifunk" feel lucky you can connect to that person.
What OLSRd does is it creates routing tables. This will automatically find the best routing between 2 points.
If you have any questions, ask me.
Build your own networks. The time of inefficient routing based on beancounter philosophies should finally be gone.
It's a pitty when we complain about network speeds yet a packet to your neighbour is likely to travel though another city.
Set up wireless routers creating meshed networks, and route your network based on common sense and not on what contracts you have with other companies. Build large chunks of networks and then internetwork them via longer radio-links, VPN-tunnels or even dark-fiber.
Just think of it, there's 56 MBit WLAN out there which can reach about 20 MBit realistically. You have 3 channels in the b/g-Band and even more in the a one.
I mean it's not like you can make any money from advertisements, unless you are Google of course.
Besides, the Firefox users would really use Internet Explorer, they would block advertisements there, too.
It's trivial for any browser, just make some entries to your hosts file. (even avaliable on Windows!)
I can accept displaying advertisement banners on my computers, but I cannot accept beeing forced to.
I guess a "PLEASE_CACHE"-header might be something cool to have.
In IPv6 you can add extra Information to your packets in headers. One of those could simply say "if you can cache the data from this connection, please do it". Essentially if a router gets such a packet it would try to run it thought a transparent proxy. If this should not work, it will just be passed on as it was.
The effect would be trumendous. The network of routers would become a gigantic content distribution network. Imagine a podcast, if the router closest to the server supports this header there would only be one true download. The rest would be done by the network.
Of course we _have_ to go to meshed networks. Every participant of the network should have (wireless) lines to his neighbours. The equipment must be in the hands of the users. This not only gets rid of network "hotspots" where a lot of connections combine, but also makes the network immune to censorship and business practices. A meshed network would be considerably cheaper to operate. People already have WLAN routers at home. More carefull placement and different firmware would do it.
As for phishing I'd simply say, "get a life". This is not really a problem. Sites dealing with sensitive personal information should just use HTTPS and publish their fingerprint via another means of communication. Encrypt and sign your e-mails, especially when in a company. But this is outside the scope of a "new internet", that's just normal day to day stupidity.
With Cisco and Linksys we actually have the case where the consumer brand used to have better products than the business brand.
Cisco's IOS is not really known for security. It uses a flat unprotected memory model in which even a bug in the configuration webserver gets you directly into kernel memory.
Some versions of IOS sent back any amount of data back when you pinged it. So you pinged them and got back your data, plus everything behind it in memory.
The reason why germany got so many broadband connections is rather simple. It's way cheaper to have broadband here than dial-up.
Traditionally you had to pay for every single phonecall, even local ones. So dialing-in into an ISP _really_ cost you a lot of money. In fact back then most ISPs didn't charge you for their services so you only had to pay to your local phone company.
Then with DSL and cable modems you suddenly got a flat-rate for a moderately low price.
Currently the costs are about this: (all in Euro)
dial-up 0.1 cents/minute => 43.2 Euro a month (wow, this suddenly even became affordable)
DSL is about 50 Euros a month including an ISDN phone-line with flat-rate service for data-calls for all of germany.
Dial-up used to be even more expensive, costing as much as 3 cents per minute.
The car industry has never been an instance of morality or good management.
Aguments don't count in this industry, that's why they still refuse to build more fuel-efficient cars, despite lower manufacturing costs and a relatively high demand.
I don't believe that things and people can be truely evil, but the car industry is about the closest thing to beeing evil.
It just seems to harm the society with everything it does. Switching to properitary software is just one instance of it.
Well HD-DVD and Blueray will go down the road of all digital hardware-based media.
Today the players cost hundreds of dollars, tomorrow the chineese will build $50 ones which will play a lot more than the expensive ones will. The picture and sound quality will be almoust the same and most people will just play pirated or at least non-hollywood content on those players.
Sony probably lost a lot of money on DVD-Players. In the past Sony (and other big brands) were able to justify charging way more for a VHS recorder than the competition as they were able to create an aura of quality. With digital media, such an aura is hard to create.
Well in my opinion daylight savings is probably one of the most stupidest ideas in the world. Just think of it. Why should someone change the timezone on 2 arbitrarily chosen dates.
It disrupts many areas in public life like train-schedules.
In the next workday morning offices are occupied for minutes setting their clocks to the new time.
You also get a night which is one hour shorter. Getting enought sleep is rather important. And some people who already get to little sleep might get even less which is definitely not healthy.
And what about the alleged point of daylight savings? There has not yet been any significant proof of saved energy. Even the most positive studies suggest that the savings are, at most, hardly significant.
Mainframes are not only bought for performance, but for the whole framework they have.
Mainframes have great ways to execute batch-jobs which most Linux systems still lack.
Linux just seems to be more suitable for near realtime things like desktop computers or workstations, perhaps smaller servers like Google uses them.
So essentially it doesn't matter if there are clusters of smallers computers cheaper and more powerfull than mainframes, mainframes still will be sold.