::scr Dressing up the computer

[Chris Devers]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Snorre Milde wrote:

> It's an interesting idea as you say, and impossible to pull off.

Yeah, the lag times seem to make it tremendously sensitive to network lag
times, and it severely trades transmission time for computation time. To
an extent, that makes sense -- raw horsepower is growing way faster than
bandwidth seems to be, so why not harness it? But I'm not sure that this
is a balanced tradeoff, if you're going to need to do a huge amount of
computation on either end in order to gain any benefit, and if network lag
time ends up being the bottleneck that I suspect it would be, 

It might work well for local (or at least, very near by) work, but in that
case you seem to lose the reason for using the scheme: in order to get an
adaptive compression of certain areas of a video, it would seem like you
have to have a full, uncompressed original to work against -- and in that
case you're at best duplicating effort. 

Still though, it would be fun to see a prototype. Maybe these problems can
be at least partially compensated for.

> I live in the UK, and I've been informed that a signal roundtrip from here
> to Australia will take around 0.7 seconds - which is a noticeable lag and
> enough to make X's concept a pipe dream.

Well, moving at 186k miles per second, 0.7 seconds works out to 130,200,
which makes the round trip from the UK to Australia & back a bit over 65k
miles each way. I think that's at least double the actual value, but off
the top of my head I can't remember what the circumference of the Earth
is. 

On the other hand, of the signal bounces of one or more satellites in
geosynchronous orbit, rather than using undersea lines, then a distance
and round trip time like that is entirely likely. Even if you're just
going from one of those satellites back to yourself, the round trip time
is about a quarter of a second -- and of course it only goes up from
there. 
 
 


-- 
Chris Devers                           chdevers@netscape.net
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."