Black and Decker has launched plantsense, bringing an IP address to geraniums everywhere.

Its this kind of thing that is going to drive IPv6, the need to directly connect to sensor-nets within the home.

As to whether I need to be able to ping my potted plant, i dunno just yet.


The ad suggests that "derby the world in my finger". I'm not 100% clear on why i might want to derby the world inside my finger, but I'm sure its a good thing. It seems <a href="">others </a>have <a href="">also </a>wondered in vain.

This is a raw idea in progress.

In the early days, audio was always uncompressed. During the 90's audio compression started to get reasonable, and mp3 came to be a popular format. This happened around the time people started to get broadband, and the two created an explosive mixture of bandwidth growth.


Video is going the same direction as audio. It turns out that 1080p H.264 is sufficiently close to 'uncompressed live analog' that there's not as much point in going further. Living rooms aren't getting larger, so we don't need more resolution. The gains due to compression are slowing, and bandwidth growth is again being driven by number of users only.


This could mean that the internet will eventually be 'done' when we each have a non-oversubscribed '1xhuman information rate' link to the back of our skull.

This might be approaching sooner than we think.

And lest the naysayers say "what about the collector, storing to disk only", well, the size of storage is also going to asymptotically approach molecular densities and stop growing too.



AT&T is now facing the same sort of prank.  There is a call to have everyone rev up their mobile data devices at noon on friday. Operation Chokehold is on @ noon pacific. A site called 'fake steve' is suggesting it.

What could the prank accomplish? Well, networks are highly oversubscribed. They are designed for the expected peak-normal traffic. My grade 5 classroom didn't fall to bits from pencils falling, and its unlikely AT&T will catch fire. But it could make things miserable for the people on the network for an hour or so. Its more like '@ 10 stab your neighbour with your pencil'.







No. Bandwidth is not the panacea everyone thinks it is.


  • bandwidth (speed) & size of page
  • latency of network from client to server and back
  • jitter of network from client to server and back
  • 'Think' time of server and client, javascript execution, etc.


So a typical web page will load in something like:

time = (size / bandwidth) + 
       (number DNS lookups * (latency+jitter)) + 
       (number serial TCP connections * (latency + jitter)

if we assumed that TCP instantly ramped to the full speed of the connection. TCP employs a congestion management algorithm called AIMD (additive increase, multiplicative decrease). One of the features of this algorithm is called 'slow-start'. In the slow-start mode, TCP will start linearly going faster until a packet is lost. it will then slow down and hover around that rate. If packets are lost due to congestion, it will cut in half its rate each time.


So, when upgrading that crappy old 2Mbps DSL connection to that spiffy new 100Mbps fibre, what is a user's expectation? Is it a 50x improvement? What will they think when they get a 1.0x speed on their favourite page? Will they return the product? This is the big fear of companies like Comcast spending big $$$ on DOCSIS 3.0 technologies.
