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If you're thinking, "it's fast enough!" -- remember that a system's performance determines what you're able to build on top of it. If GPU designers had said "i
by panic 9y ago
If you're thinking, "it's fast enough!" -- remember that a system's performance determines what you're able to build on top of it. If GPU designers had said "it's fast enough" ten years ago, for example, modern neural-net AI may never have happened. It's easy to imagine doing the same things faster, but it's harder to picture the new things that a lower-latency Internet would make possible.
- IshKebab 9y agoI don't think anyone that has ever used Skype, VoIP, Facetime, etc has thought "this is fast enough".
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoA fair question might be whether that's an issue with the internet, or the way it's used. In particular, p2p chatting vs going through a central server comes to mind. And a point comes when speed is constrained by the speed of light (especially for latency sensitive applications).
- _jal 9y agoNo, but there are plenty of people from Comcast, Rogers, et al and, significantly more importantly, U.S. regulators who are busy telling us that everything is "fast enough" that we don't need competition.
- viraptor 9y agoActually, I think ~10mbit is fast enough. You can easily use Hangouts/Skype with good quality video on that kind of link. The problems are elsewhere: it's not stable enough, and it's not responsive enough. Anything faster is just a cherry on top. Sure, files download faster, you can stream 4k, etc. But I'd say that's luxury which you could choose. Lower speeds are "enough" for a lot of people.
- Pxtl 9y agoThis. If I had perfect QOS where I knew foreground tasks would dominate my bandwidth and connection would never be interrupted and latency would be low and packet-loss would be negligible? I would be perfectly happy with 10mbit. I'm not downloading images that often.
- closeparen 9y agoVideoconferencing is actually pretty awful on a high bandwidth link if the latency and jitter are high. I can have an effective voice conversation with terrible quality audio if it's low latency. Extremely lifelike (high bitrate) audio is just uncanny (not helpful) if the latency and jitter are high.
- manmal 9y agoThat's like saying 640K ought to be enough for everyone. Once we have stable 1GBit connections on all landlines and mobile devices, we might eg stop hoarding data on our disks altogether. Apps (if they still exist) could be downloaded on the fly when the user chooses to start them. Lifelike VR/AR communications could be enabled by this. Teleworking could become a no-brainer, from any location imaginable (perhaps with telepresence). I will be able to run a dev machine on some EC2 instance and VNC into it with an unnoticeable lag, so I won't need serious CPU horsepower in my laptop anymore. That's what I could think of off the top of my head..
- viraptor 9y agoI don't think that comparable to 640k. Things you mention are are either what I define cherry on top (VR/AR meeting? Why? Teleworking is already present and completely doable on low bandwidth, mid latency - I'm doing it every day). VNC lag issues are mostly exactly what I mentioned. You already have enough bandwidth - it's the latency that affects you. Besides, high detail remote desktop are a small, specialised segment, relatively speaking. If you're a developer, most of the time you work with text. If you're an office worker, most of the time you work with fairly static apps like office. Sure, you can't really work with remote blender at the moment, but we're getting into improvements for the long tail now - which is great. But once we're past 10mbps, improving latency will help more people than improving bandwidth.
- visarga 9y ago> If GPU designers had said "it's fast enough" ten years ago, for example, modern neural-net AI may never have happened. Right on the money. There is a deep synergy between AI and simulation. It's not just that they both run on GPUs, but simulation will become a major part of future AI. A robot needs to imagine scenarios before executing them. So they meet in the middle - gaming, VR, AI and robotics. Isn't it interesting that PacMan and other Atari games, that we used to play when we were kids, are now the playground of AI?
- Asooka 9y agoBut is the problem here with slow hardware or slow deployment of better hardware? Also aren't we closer to hitting physical limits than the GPU people are? It's easier to add cores than to make faster ones.
- bobbington 9y agoI would say that the title "it's slow" is ridiculous because 1/30th of the fastest possible speed in the universe is insanely fast. Better to say "it's fast, but I think we can make it 3 times faster".