Monday, April 12, 2010

zero cycle future

civilization can be counted as starting with the invention of the wheel (not fire - fire was discovered)

but most civilizations made do with four wheel devices for millennia

(sounds off stage left of animal farm):
Now, the civilized thing is to go on two wheels.

but the segay has made the unicycle almost practical

so what is the next step for the wheel world? clearly, no cycles - zero wheels - is the logical next step

roll on the nadabike, I say

of course, it will still be known as a bike, just like people still talk about records or phones in some places....

Friday, April 02, 2010

Compelling Application of Multicast Building Rss (or twitter) Internet Distributions of Great Expectations....CAMBRIDGE

so twitter - funny app, eh? odd stuff - why would anyone wanna use it, eh?
stalking, really - that's what its really all about.

On the other hand, the s/w "architecture" for twitter sucks bigtime - its kind of like, someone looked at SMS and went, hey, texting is so cool - lets rebuild an accidentally useful thing that is only good on mobile phones before the iPhone because there wasnt a proper keyboard and screen, and lets build it for the internet, eh?
how cool is that, like, er, not?

well anyhow, so noone relies on twitter really - its a 140 byte payload, with a 1-to-many service model, and no especial casual ordering between tweets from different sources. so it is ideally suoted to UDP/IP multicast - scales really nicely from a server perspective - 1 sender with a million followers - indeed, who needs servers - stephen fry could tweet to a billion people direct from his iPhone (assuming the 3G IP service did native multicast...) - indeed, some cellular networks implement broadcast services (for radio and tv channels in Korea and Japan for example) so one could even use the ethernet hack of mapping ip multicast groups to broadcast subnets locally, and get receiver efficiencies as well as sender side scaling improvements from O(n) to O(1)....how about that eh?

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home