The Latest From George Gilder
from the telecosm-or-bust dept
George Gilder is always good for a funny futuristic quote or two. News.com is covering a talk he gave today. He complained that too many people showed up to the talk – showing that too many people are still interested in technology. He’s still talking a lot about bandwidth, and how too much bandwidth can only be a good thing. He also was complaining that we need to “reconfigure the time-space grid for the New Economy” which certainly sounds interesting, if I only knew what it meant. Apparently, one of the quotes that people liked the best from him was that “The paperless office is as likely as the paperless bathroom.” Just think how much people pay Gilder on a regular basis to hear such pearls of wisdom.
Comments on “The Latest From George Gilder”
Reconfiguring the space time matrix
Not only is this a strange comment I’m wondering who did the calculation of a 4 second wait for Internet content. All 25 items can be “fetched” in the same millisecond and returned within milliseconds of receiving the request. All the 25 items can then be returned at the maximum possible speed. If we had a direct 2 megabit/s E1 to Europe it would take the latency (about 120ms round-trip) + 1 second for a 2 megabit page(with 600 items for that matter). The more abundant bandwidth becomes the closer Europe comes to receiving its web pages in only 120ms – each hop doesn’t even add a millisecond in ideal conditions. Granted, the Internet is far from ideal conditions but we certainly don’t need to change space-time to achieve “eye-blink” page loads even across 15,000 miles.
Circuit Switching
I wonder what he means when he says that optics will be circuit-switched. The only thing a circuit-switched network is really useful for is as a foundation for your packet-switched network. I don’t ever see this happening unless optical “circuits” become as abundant as TCP streams.