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Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:24:57 -0800
________________________________________ From: Rod Van Meter [rdv () sfc wide ad jp] Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2008 5:31 PM To: David Farber; dan () lynch com Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan
________________________________________ From: Dan Lynch [dan () lynch com]
I believe 622 megabits per second from any point to any other point is what will finally satisfy the visual cortex of human beings in an arbitrary mesh.
Dan, Dave, About a decade ago, around the time of "Titanic" and "Apollo 13", my friend Wook was Director of Digital Technology at Digital Domain, the primary company that did the visual effects for those films, among many others. (Dan, you might remember Wook from his days at ISI; he has moved around, and now holds a different position at DD.) The visual effects work on both of those films was absolutely stunning. At a fantastic presentation Wook gave at a conference, I asked him if he could imagine an upper bound to the amount of computing and data he could consume, since the input bandwidth of the human eye is limited. He responded, "No, because reality is always more complex than we can model." "Titanic" won an Oscar for visual effects, and "Apollo 13" was nominated, losing to a pig with peanut butter in its mouth ("Babe") (okay, "Babe" also had some very good effects, but not of the technical complexity of "Apollo 13", and, IMHO, not as beautiful, either). Some DDers speculated at the time that they had lost because even the relatively sophisticated Academy voters believed that they had used NASA footage; anecdotally, DDers reported being asked repeatedly how NASA had managed to film the Apollo launch from such an angle. And yet, at the time, Wook and his crew had relatively concrete plans to use a million times more computing power than they had available. They used a farm of several hundred Alpha processors, most running Linux, for the final rendering -- a large and complex undertaking for a small company for the time, but probably exceeded by a large factor by now. So, if you imagine that the purpose of the Internet is to stream canned video, yes, multiplying the bandwidth of the visual cortex times the number of people on the planet is a reasonable upper bound. One type of compressed HDTV stream is 36Mbps, but we know that its resolution isn't adequate and it shows compression artifacts; a few hundred megabits a second isn't enough for uncompressed human eye-resolution material, but it's probably good enough. But if you're talking some sort of interactive activity, the you-satellite-server-satellite-you round trip time is half a second, far too much. You must move enough data and/or computation close enough to the terminal to allow interactivity. As Joe Touch is fond of saying, "Everybody complains about the speed of light, but nobody ever does anything about it." It's a good line, but not really true if you consider caching, AJAX, and various forms of speculative computing to be "doing something about it". So, there is no doubt some upper bound of "useful" bandwidth, but as you noted, we still have a long ways to go :-). --Rod ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan David Farber (Feb 23)
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- Re: Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan David Farber (Feb 24)
- Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan David Farber (Feb 24)
- Re: Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan David Farber (Feb 24)
- Re: Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan David Farber (Feb 26)