Colored Backgrounds

[Bill Wood]

On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 22:42:56, David Gaskill wrote:

>On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 11:18:13 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>
>>Monday, December 13, 1999, 9:48:46 AM, David wrote:
>>> Please could you explain what you believe the limits to be ?
>>
>>    Each point along the pipe has a limit.  My cable is limited not only by
>>policy, but by physical connection.  Then, on top of that the connection from
>>my cable provider out to my ISP has a limit.  Continue on up the pipe.  Now,
>>if the routers cannot process the packets in time then there is another limit.
>>There are physical limits on the cards themselves.  They can only process so
>>much data at a time.  That relates to the limits on the electronic devices and
>>how fast they can switch on and off.  There are limits on the memory involved.
>>Routers can only hold routing tables so large before they simply don't route
>>to new networks or start dropping "old" ones.  Power in each location can
>>limit bandwidth because you can't just simply add more and more boxes into the
>>mix infinitely.
>
>Steve, 
>
>Thanks for the explanation but I'm still not convinced that there are any physical 
>limits  to capacity which cannot be overcome with appropriate funding. 
>
>I am not too concerned about the link between myself and my ISP . At the 
>moment it is a telephone line and I have not upgraded to ISDN because it seems 
>to me that in a relatively short space of time a ASDL will make this type of 
>connection obsolete.  
>
>It seems to me that there should be no difficulty in providing an adequate pipe 
>between the boxes in the exchange and my ISP. I don't see that there is any 
>theoretical limit to the number of routers my ISP can install. If he runs out of 
>space he can simply get another building - in fact my ISP has just done this. 
>
>I don't know how much juice servers,  routers and their ancillaries consume but 
>it can't be that much otherwise you your colleagues would get fried. I have a 
>suspicion that the electricity consumed by one aluminium smelter would run 
>every ISP in America if not in the world. 
>
>It seems to me that investment in Internet businesses is predicated on the 
>assumption that demand will go on rising exponentially for the foreseeable 
>future. In a previous posting you mentioned that your current employer has yet 
>to turn a profit. Unless demand and capacity keep on expanding he never will 
>and if he doesn't ... well, who is going to run the PMmail mailing list ...? 
>
>In a nutshell: 
>
>If there ain't enough processing capacity buy some more. 
>If there ain't enough storage capacity buy some more discs 
>If the pipe ain't big enough get some more fibre optic - it's dirt cheap and getting 
>cheaper. 
>If there ain't enough juice get another cable. 
>If there ain't enough room  get another building. 
>
>Or am I being hopelessly naive ... 
>
>
>David
>
=======

No, you're not being naive, but some others are. 
Arthur C Clark wrote a book titled (I think, it's been
many years), "You Can't Get There From Here". It
chronicled the people who said it couldn't be done,
that the sky was falling, that the world as we knew it
was ending next Wednesday, etc. Just like this list, or
some people on it. With remarkable uniformity,
everybody underestimated what we could do and,
particularly, how fast we could do it. Look at
Microsoft and Intel, even, with their 64K mindsets and
the 16+4 bit addressing, obsolete about as soon as it
was standardized, and boy did we pay for that -
millions of manhours totally wasted. It's a lack of
vision. It's true that there is a limit, a quantum
limit, on disk packing density, or at least the ability
to resolve it in detection. We're about an order of
magnitude away before that world ends. But what's next.
People are working on holographic models where data is
stored in 3 dimensions as light phase modulations and
the resulting interference patterns. Where I most
recently worked, people used to ask, "what is 20
cents?", the answer, a pair of dimes ... code for a
paradigm. The paradigm shifts are lined up end-to-end
into the future as far as the mind can see. But you
have to look. And, you can safely skip listening to the
'sky is falling' crowd.


w3

Bill Wood
Las Vegas, NV
wwwood@lv.rmci.net

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