7 ms·

Obviously sentiments like "640 KB is enough for everyone" hilariously failed to predict the value of faster and more powerful computers. At the same time, most

Obviously sentiments like "640 KB is enough for everyone" hilariously failed to predict the value of faster and more powerful computers. At the same time, most people's personal use of computers hasn't kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products. Lots of people only really use a web browser, and even an ad-infested website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers. You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G".

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> most people's personal use of computers hasn't kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products Increasingly, consumers don’t even own a personal computer. (Unless we’re being pedantic and calling our phones PCs.) Asking what a PC will do with faster mobile internet will be misleading.
- liability 7y ago
  I feel that you're deliberately missing the point. Most users don't max out their '4G' connections either.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Most users don't Max out their '4G' connections either But sometimes, some do. That margin is what describes new opportunity.
    - liability 7y ago
      That margin is slim. For many users, vanishingly thin. Somebody like you or I might frequently max our our cellular connections, but I wager most users never do. And how would they? Streaming 4k YouTube videos onto a screen smaller than a postcard? It just won't make a difference for them.
      - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
        > It just won't make a difference for them This is the 640kb argument. Being able to download a move at the gate? Potentially game changing. Being able to stream video from a drone or car on the road to centralised servers? Potentially game changing. People with capital are willing to bet this technology has legs. Your not being able to figure out why is not a good reason to block the investment.
        liability 7y ago
        You are unable to convince me I should look forward to it. Since we're apparently getting rude, I'll say your argument is nothing but naive dogmatic futurist optimism. Numerous potential harms to users (relating to privacy, not EM bullshit) have been raised in this thread and all you're offering up in return is vague nonsense about cyber-chauffeurs.
        greenhatman 7y ago
        Services and products that will utilize more bandwidth aren't being built, because they're not usable without 5G. 5G needs to become ubiquitous before we'd find out what the new applications will be. G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
        pdimitar 7y ago
        But again, nobody wants to talk about how the reduced latency will empower even further the continuous surveillance we're being subjected to by our own devices. Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.
        scotty79 7y ago
        For me, if full state of each of my neurons can't be transferred in realtime to a server, we don't have enough 'surveillance'.
  - pas 7y ago
    Yet the current 4G mesh is not enough to support higher overall utilization, hence 5G.
chvid 7y ago
> You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G". Sure. But that just means that the products exploiting this technology won't be developed in your neighbourhood but instead in Korea or China.
- corodra 7y ago
  How would and how many lives will be made better with 5g? Will it help people with debt? Will it increase housing supply to lower home ownership/renting costs? Will it help people stop overdosing? Maybe cool the climate a little? No. Itll help people watch someone on youtube play Fortnite.
  - shshehe 7y ago
    Man your view couldn't be more myopic and shortsighted if it tried.
    - corodra 7y ago
      That's fine. Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        I think the point being made in this thread is that we don't know what improvement it might bring. But making it available will probably spur a lot of innovators to create something amazing and useful that could definitely make your life better.
        corodra 7y ago
        Okay, that's a very fair statement I can agree to. However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.
kontorlaore 7y ago
> website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers 20 years ago computers had 32 MB of RAM. So no, they won't run a modern website.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Ignoring the fact that memory allocations as of 1999 were somewhat more generous than that, the problem of backwards-compatibility is more induced resource wastage by current low costs than insufficiency of earlier computers. We've been at a plateau of roughly 1-2GB RAM for most of the past decade, masked by the fact that devices have been shrinking (phones replacing desktops) rather than resource allocations growing. Which is a fairly frequently-encountered trend in technology. We create some design, it proves useful, and for a time, focus is on increasing size, power and performance. Then a shift occurs and the focus is on smaller, more distributed systems. James Watt's steam engines typically produced 5-10 horsepower output, and he built 500 of these by 1800. Following expiration of his patents, and the adoption of high-pressure steam engines, a period of increasingly large and more powerful systems began ... until the realisation that mobile power was a thing, and electric generation, leading to steamships and locomotives. With electrical power distribution, whole factories were transformed from shaft-and-belt distribution from a 10-20 hp prime mover to electrical power distribution to individual motors, some of which rivaled or exceeded earlier entire steam engines, but many of which operated with fractional horsepower, delivering motive force precisely where needed. Locomotives grew more powerful and faster, until internal combustion engines allowed 10 horsepower cars to reach speeds of as much as 30 miles an hour on city streets or country roads, without rails or being bound to fixed routes. Console radios became portable became handheld became a smudge of silicone you probably don't realise still exists within your phone (virtually all are FM receivers). Warehouse-sized computers shrank to refrigerators, cabinets, towers, pizzaboxes, luggables, portables, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and phones. There's little reason for even a desktop computer to be much more than the size of a paperback beach read these days, other than port size. The IoT (the "S" stands for "Safety") is the equivalent of putting compute power where it's needed (or not, as the case may be), but it's so cheap to do, and cheaper than equivalent non-compute-based means, that it's become increasingly difficult to buy silicone-free basic appliances and components. Many of these small systems don't have huge resource allocations, but they're sufficient to the task. They're not end-user interactive devices ... except where they are, with the Twitter-enabled refrigerator (that's a Web browser running on the display). Web designers have been buidling on the assumption of ample resources, or have used "requires recently-acquired hardware" as a market-segmentation technique (the poor won't buy your dosh but can't afford the kit required to run your website, so feature-block them out and pre-slim your conversion funnel -- I don't condone this at all, but it apparently works). But there's no inherent need in transmitting a few kb worth of actual text and a few ten-thousand-word pictures to do so. 20-year-old kit should handle that fine, really.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> most people's personal use of computers hasn't kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products Increasingly, consumers don’t even own a personal computer. (Unless we’re being pedantic and calling our phones PCs.) Asking what a PC will do with faster mobile internet will be misleading.

liability 7y ago
I feel that you're deliberately missing the point. Most users don't max out their '4G' connections either.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > Most users don't Max out their '4G' connections either But sometimes, some do. That margin is what describes new opportunity.
  - liability 7y ago
    That margin is slim. For many users, vanishingly thin. Somebody like you or I might frequently max our our cellular connections, but I wager most users never do. And how would they? Streaming 4k YouTube videos onto a screen smaller than a postcard? It just won't make a difference for them.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > It just won't make a difference for them This is the 640kb argument. Being able to download a move at the gate? Potentially game changing. Being able to stream video from a drone or car on the road to centralised servers? Potentially game changing. People with capital are willing to bet this technology has legs. Your not being able to figure out why is not a good reason to block the investment.
      - liability 7y ago
        You are unable to convince me I should look forward to it. Since we're apparently getting rude, I'll say your argument is nothing but naive dogmatic futurist optimism. Numerous potential harms to users (relating to privacy, not EM bullshit) have been raised in this thread and all you're offering up in return is vague nonsense about cyber-chauffeurs.
        greenhatman 7y ago
        Services and products that will utilize more bandwidth aren't being built, because they're not usable without 5G. 5G needs to become ubiquitous before we'd find out what the new applications will be. G5 will also reduce latency a lot, which is another vector that will open new possibilities.
        pdimitar 7y ago
        But again, nobody wants to talk about how the reduced latency will empower even further the continuous surveillance we're being subjected to by our own devices. Even as a techie, at some point I want to draw the line.
        scotty79 7y ago
        For me, if full state of each of my neurons can't be transferred in realtime to a server, we don't have enough 'surveillance'.
- pas 7y ago
  Yet the current 4G mesh is not enough to support higher overall utilization, hence 5G.

chvid 7y ago

> You can say "we don't need to frantically rush to deploy 5G" without also saying "nobody will ever benefit from 5G". Sure. But that just means that the products exploiting this technology won't be developed in your neighbourhood but instead in Korea or China.

corodra 7y ago
How would and how many lives will be made better with 5g? Will it help people with debt? Will it increase housing supply to lower home ownership/renting costs? Will it help people stop overdosing? Maybe cool the climate a little? No. Itll help people watch someone on youtube play Fortnite.
- shshehe 7y ago
  Man your view couldn't be more myopic and shortsighted if it tried.
  - corodra 7y ago
    That's fine. Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      I think the point being made in this thread is that we don't know what improvement it might bring. But making it available will probably spur a lot of innovators to create something amazing and useful that could definitely make your life better.
      - corodra 7y ago
        Okay, that's a very fair statement I can agree to. However, I mostly argue that the taxpayer cost doesn't justify the gains. It's expensive and most counties and cities have to foot the bill or heavily subsidize it. If the telecom company wants to foot the bill. Good on them. No arguement here. If the city has to, go fuck yourselves. Its diminishing returns to a ridiculous level.

kontorlaore 7y ago

> website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers 20 years ago computers had 32 MB of RAM. So no, they won't run a modern website.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Ignoring the fact that memory allocations as of 1999 were somewhat more generous than that, the problem of backwards-compatibility is more induced resource wastage by current low costs than insufficiency of earlier computers. We've been at a plateau of roughly 1-2GB RAM for most of the past decade, masked by the fact that devices have been shrinking (phones replacing desktops) rather than resource allocations growing. Which is a fairly frequently-encountered trend in technology. We create some design, it proves useful, and for a time, focus is on increasing size, power and performance. Then a shift occurs and the focus is on smaller, more distributed systems. James Watt's steam engines typically produced 5-10 horsepower output, and he built 500 of these by 1800. Following expiration of his patents, and the adoption of high-pressure steam engines, a period of increasingly large and more powerful systems began ... until the realisation that mobile power was a thing, and electric generation, leading to steamships and locomotives. With electrical power distribution, whole factories were transformed from shaft-and-belt distribution from a 10-20 hp prime mover to electrical power distribution to individual motors, some of which rivaled or exceeded earlier entire steam engines, but many of which operated with fractional horsepower, delivering motive force precisely where needed. Locomotives grew more powerful and faster, until internal combustion engines allowed 10 horsepower cars to reach speeds of as much as 30 miles an hour on city streets or country roads, without rails or being bound to fixed routes. Console radios became portable became handheld became a smudge of silicone you probably don't realise still exists within your phone (virtually all are FM receivers). Warehouse-sized computers shrank to refrigerators, cabinets, towers, pizzaboxes, luggables, portables, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and phones. There's little reason for even a desktop computer to be much more than the size of a paperback beach read these days, other than port size. The IoT (the "S" stands for "Safety") is the equivalent of putting compute power where it's needed (or not, as the case may be), but it's so cheap to do, and cheaper than equivalent non-compute-based means, that it's become increasingly difficult to buy silicone-free basic appliances and components. Many of these small systems don't have huge resource allocations, but they're sufficient to the task. They're not end-user interactive devices ... except where they are, with the Twitter-enabled refrigerator (that's a Web browser running on the display). Web designers have been buidling on the assumption of ample resources, or have used "requires recently-acquired hardware" as a market-segmentation technique (the poor won't buy your dosh but can't afford the kit required to run your website, so feature-block them out and pre-slim your conversion funnel -- I don't condone this at all, but it apparently works). But there's no inherent need in transmitting a few kb worth of actual text and a few ten-thousand-word pictures to do so. 20-year-old kit should handle that fine, really.