Fwd: Subject: [LINK] Considering Fibre to the Home

[kim holburn]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: kim holburn <kim.holburn at gmail.com>
Date: May 8, 2007 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: Subject: [LINK] Considering Fibre to the Home
To: Stewart Fist <stewart_fist at optusnet.com.au>


Hmmm... I was going to add to this that internet technology changes
things as it evolves.  Having uncapped broadband means sites like
youtube make sense and are radically changing television and the
internet.

I was talking to someone the other day about the huge number of photo
sites and how professional news photographers are having problems
making money because newspapers are getting free pictures of
newsworthy events off flickr and places like it for free and sometimes
before professionals can get them to the papers.  This is something
that only happens because lots of people have good, fast, cheap
internet.



On 5/9/07, Stewart Fist <stewart_fist at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> Kim reveals himself as a died-in-the-wool infinite extrapolist.
> >
> > Yeah, and the world market for computers is probably about 5 in total
> > and you will never need more the 640K of memory.  While I agree with
> > almost everything else you said I don't agree with this.  Computing
> > and networking are moving so fast it is impossible to predict even a
> > few years in the future.
>
> And every house will need stable space for 160 horses by 2010, because the
> number per household doubled between 1900 and 1910.

Yeah but that's just the Porsche.  Most new Australian McMansions in
the nappy 'burbs have space for how many cars?  Three, four?  How many
horses each?  130/140 horses?  It's already happened.

> And we'll all want to drive at 1000 kph on suburban streets, and so on, in
> cars that are 30 metres long and consume gas at a litre a kilometer, because
> that was the trend in motoring in the 1970s.

Yeah of course we do but everyone else wanting to do the same all get
in the way.  That was predicted too.

> The easiest way to establish yourself as an infallible predictor of the
> future is simply to claim that there is no end to any of man's needs.

Yeah and that's all true for physical goods, but non-scarce goods are
different and can grow at different rates.

> You can never be proved wrong, since you can always extend the horizons.
>
> But common sense says that all technology development either comes to an
> end, or it goes through a quiescent phase in its development when it
> satisfies the requirements of the society at the time.   What usually
> happens, is that the society's interest changes, and goes off in new
> directions.

I don't know.  We have seen the end of some technologies or that they
have changed so radically that the old versions are quiescent or have
died out - coopers anyone?  Wool dyers using old urine?

I don't know about proof, none of it's provable at all, just
speculation, just feelings.

> Infinite extrapolation is not prediction or analysis, it is the chanting of
> a mantra.

I wasn't postulating infinte anything, I do think the internet and
computers have a ways to go yet.  Realistically, on a geological time
scale all species die out pretty quickly and the Carter Catastrophe
says we don't have that long.

--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3342707610
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                          -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3342707610
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                          -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961