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The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

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Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#51

Post by yial »

Theodores wrote: post #29

The points made in this article remind me of how CD-ROM was adopted in the early nineties. Once upon a time CD-ROM was new and with Windows for Workgroups you could share a given CD-ROM across a network. If you needed to install $SOFTWARE on machine B you could theoretically put the CD-ROM in machine A's drive and install from there. The person on machine A might even put the right disk in for you. Given that CD-ROM…

I remember being in grade school, and we networked (shared) the drive on the one computer - only because the cd-rom drives on the other ones were broken and we wanted to play/ install Warcraft.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#52

Post by TylerE »

walshemj wrote: post #36
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

why is your edit any more or less "confusing to read"

His way is actually considerably worse.

The new way is: The (singular) most expensive four words "this time is different".

The original parses as The four most expensive works (plural) "this","time","is", "different".

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#53

Post by chipuni »

jrumbut wrote: post #32
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

I don't think the author is arguing against the entire concept of P2P networks (though if I read correctly he does make an off hand comment saying they can be difficuly, which is probably true of anything), just the idea that cryptocurrency backed distributed storage is likely to be widely adopted and profitable.

I don't think the author could argue against the entire concept of P2P networks.

One of his major projects is LOCKSS -- a decentralized P2P network for preserving articles. https://www.lockss.org/news-media/blog/

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#54

Post by smolder »

xemasiv wrote: post #12
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

> I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. My argument against this is just because it's purely peer-to-peer, it doesn't always directly mean it's an overall improvement in the user experience. > You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. Yes there is definitely value in that, I even agree with there! But…

The lack of upstream bandwidth offered by cable providers almost seems deliberate. (I.e. a disinterest in improving the upstream capabilities of docsis standards, as well as offering pitiful upstream bandwidth in their plans.)

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#55

Post by smolder »

wpietri wrote: post #34
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

Aren't you just replicating the same mistake he's describing as being made over and over again? Where people express a reasonable desire but don't think through the issues before deciding it's worth pursuing? In tech we have this habit of going from, "Wouldn't it be cool if X..." to "Let's build X right now!" I think that's a fine instinct if it hasn't been tried and it's something that runs on the author's machines.…

Subtle reasons why P2P technologies are squashed likely include the difficulty of subversion by authorities and the threat that private communications represent to the copyright lobby.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#56

Post by romwell »

Theodores wrote: post #29

The points made in this article remind me of how CD-ROM was adopted in the early nineties. Once upon a time CD-ROM was new and with Windows for Workgroups you could share a given CD-ROM across a network. If you needed to install $SOFTWARE on machine B you could theoretically put the CD-ROM in machine A's drive and install from there. The person on machine A might even put the right disk in for you. Given that CD-ROM…

>Everyone was okay about sharing the same printer but not the same CD-ROM drive.

Why would I want to share my personal automatic cup holder?

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#57

Post by captain_perl »

Theodores wrote: post #29

The points made in this article remind me of how CD-ROM was adopted in the early nineties. Once upon a time CD-ROM was new and with Windows for Workgroups you could share a given CD-ROM across a network. If you needed to install $SOFTWARE on machine B you could theoretically put the CD-ROM in machine A's drive and install from there. The person on machine A might even put the right disk in for you. Given that CD-ROM…

Good story. True if you had a working network, which was rare outside of college campuses. Must have startled personal PC users!

Back then you're looking at 1 MBps in the mid 80's and $100 (IPX) - $1000 (IP or Tokenring) per network card.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

notabee wrote: post #43
akanet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your central claim is sort of refuted by history, and I think there's two parts to it. 1. How relevant "natural" ecology is to understanding longevity of modern culture: unclear, probably not very. 2. Monocultures by nature are less robust, even in the context of human society: well, you need only examine how quickly distributed hunter gatherers were exterminated by less distributed agrarian societies, who we…

Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything from food to atmosphere without it being subsidized by natural resources that are not renewable at the rate at which we're exhausting them, industrial civilization will collapse in all its complexity. To take a natural ecological example: just because a predator…

This is just moving the goalpost. What you're saying is that modern humans are too good for their own good :).

Anyway, I don't understand the religion of distribution (especially in context of finite resources). Yes, distributed systems are more robust. But they pay for this by being massively less efficient than equivalent centralized ones. It's a fair tradeoff, but a tradeoff. It's like 5 people in a (single) car vs. 5 people on bicycles. Which setup is better depends on where those people want to go.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#59

Post by zeth___ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58
notabee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything from food to atmosphere without it being subsidized by natural resources that are not renewable at the rate at which we're exhausting them, industrial civilization will collapse in all its complexity. To take a natural ecological example: just because a predator…

This is just moving the goalpost. What you're saying is that modern humans are too good for their own good :). Anyway, I don't understand the religion of distribution (especially in context of finite resources). Yes, distributed systems are more robust . But they pay for this by being massively less efficient than equivalent centralized ones. It's a fair tradeoff, but a tradeoff. It's like 5 people in a (single) car…

That is abterrible analogy.

What we have is either ten people walking or 10,000 people strapped in the space shuttle cargo bay. That it takes the ten people 30 years to walk from Lisbon to Singapore vs 45 minutes with the shuttle isn't the right comparison. It's that the shuttle explodes 2% of the time.

That you are forcing me to be with you on the shuttle because you don't understand the risks should be all the reasons we need for walking instead.

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