[LONG] Comments about broadband, need for speed, and cutting-edge processors.
Amy J. writes:
"I have hit the limits on my DSL line at home. "
First, let me clear about something: when I said essentially nothng one person "needs" to do at home requires broadband, I meant that 98% or so of what is considered usual business work (writing reports and memos, reading e-mail, building PowerPoint presentations, accessing data bases, etc.) is do-able with dial-up. I know many examples. Even for downloading software updates and other very large file transfers, dial-up is do-able, given the relative infrequency of such downloads.
(Maybe other people have less stable systems. I do a Software Update of my OS X about every 2-4 months, when Apple releases a new minor upgrade...what you folks would call a "service pack," I think is the name. This ties up my modem for about 20-60 minutes, though I can interleave other things, as any modern OS will allow. I usually set such updates to happen when I go to bed or go do other things. Not a biggie, in other words. Ditto for updates to Explorer, Microsoft Office, etc.)
Second, I'm sure I'll be happy to have either cablemodem or DSL. Or Starband. I've tried to get all three, but one thing or another stands in the way. No sense of urgency, so I haven't committed $$$ to solving this issue.
But, apropos of my point above, I doubt it will change my life much. I clearly do a lot of writing, and each episode of writing (this article, for example) takes vastly more time than the upload/download time, which is essentially invisible to me even on a dial-up.
(I may have mentioned this already...I forget where I say things. Let me give an example. In the past couple of months I've downloaded several dozen papers from the LANL technical paper arXhive site, xxx.lanl.gov. Mostly on quantum theory, category theory, etc. The download of PDF papers takes on the order of a minute for most of these papers. However, printing them out to my laser printer, then hole-punching them, not to mention _reading_ them!, takes much longer. I typically find a paper on the arXhive site (several minutes of searching and reading the abstracts), download it (one minute), print it (several minutes, up to tens of minutes for a complex/long document), punch it or bind it (minutes), file it, and maybe take it to bed to read (hours). So, dial-up accounts for one minute in this process. Would I really be more effective if all of the 2000+ pages I have downloaded squirted down my line in 18 seconds?)
Third, the real use of broadband is in delivering precisely the kind of content you talk about here:
"Admittedly, it's the not high-speed DSL version. There are many ways bandwidth is eaten, and I'm hitting up against these. And no, I don't even have video turned on here. Any type of plain data transfer will fill up 187,500 bytes per second (a T1 line). File transfers, exchanging MP3s, swapping pictures, newsfeeds, communicating. @Home said that at its peak, about 25% of @Home's capacity was being used by Napster folks exchanging MP3s. "
These are the real consumers of broadband, not surprisingly. Things one can _read_ (like e-books or papers) download over a dial-up vastly faster than one can read. And even "more vastly" faster than one can _write_. Another data point: I have downloaded nearly every text by Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, etc. The full text of a massive novel, "Dune," downloaded in just a minute or so. I queued up a download of 50 novels and went off and made lunch. Now that's a _lot_ of reading, a summer's worth, downloaded while I ate lunch. What would be gained by having them all download in, say, 30 seconds?
Ah, but start downloading music, videos, DivX, and the jig is up. Some friends of mine exactly this. They trade DivX copies of DVDs with other traders, Napster-style. They have DivX versions of movies still in the theaters. And, yes, they are bandwidth-limited, even with their broadband (which is cablemodem, I think).
Fourth, the real limit on a lot of these uses, at least the legal ones, is _money_.
I'll give an example using my satellite t.v. system, but the same principles carry over to broadband (in fact, "500 channels" and "set top boxes" and "broadband, especially fiber" all intersect in this regime).
My satellite system is DirecTV. It is the canonical "500 channels." There are roughly 20 channels of subscription movies (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Movie Channel, Flix, Sundance, etc.)...well, I could list all of the channels. I won't. Call it 100 channels of named channels. Then there are about 100 channels devoted to PPV. And music. And about 50 sports channels ("Channel 234: Major League Baseball, Atlanta"). And so on. The total is somewhere around 400-500 individual channels.
How many of these are bought by subscribers? A tiny fraction.
The "firehose" is constrained by economics...legally, at least. $70 a month for the basic package (including HBO, etc.), another $40 a month for sports packages, then $4 a movie for PPV.
Fiber in the home will not likely change this much. The basic rate will be something like $50-60 a month, as it is with Starband, and then the "goodies" will cost more.
(Which is why my friends swap and stream DivX rip-offs to each other.)
Bottom Line: Jack Valenti and Hollywood are not looking to give up their cash cows just because broadband makes sending and receiving data a lot easier.
Meanwhile, so long as I am not trying to send and receive movies (DV or DivX) or songs (Napster), I can download vastly more stuff than I have time to read....just with my dial-up. Which is what I meant by saying that an ordinary dial-up works. And it's only $20 a month.
Paying $100 a month for fiber...and then having to pay the kinds of fees I cited above...well, it just isn't going to "compute" for most Americans. This is a very big part of why fiber into the home hasn't happened.
"Unrelated to the above, I know of an NCG that's waiting to buy a 2.5Mhz PC (with correspondingly high-end memory, etc.) But up to what max PC speed will a DSL line handle? "
We already know the math on this. A 900 MHz Celeron is more than capable of handling _any_ signal a DSL line can deliver. The math on this is very simple.
That 2.5 GHz PC may have more "quakemarks," in terms of being able to produce 60 1200x1024 frames per second, but it is utterly unneeded to handle anything arriving over a DSL or cablemodem!
My final example:
I edit high-resolution DV movies, with better than NTSC resolution of course, on my 400 MHz Mac. Only a few of the high-end Photoshop-like special effects are CPU constrained with this set-up. Yeah, I expect to replace my 400 MHz machine with something a lot faster, but I'm clearly not constrained in any practical way by what I have now. This is something Intel and AMD are clearly facing with their customers: a lot of them are very happy, thank you, with their 600 MHz and 1 GHz machines from a couple of years ago.
Fact is, even extremely advanced video editing apps don't need gigaflops of processing power, which is what cutting-edge processors offer. And it's not clear what _will_ need this kind of processing power, at least for single users on home or small business machines. There's the rub.
Shoppers at Best Buy will obviously buy the fastest machine for a similar amount of money, to be sure. But they don't feel a _need_ for such power that will make them pay a _lot_ more. Which is why these cutting-edge processors are selling for such extraordinarly low prices. There's the _real_ rub for Intel and AMD. Amazing times.
--Tim May |
