-------------------- Leaper of Tall buildings.. If you find my posts divisive or otherwise snarky please ignore them. If you do not know how then PM me about it and I will demonstrate. Posts: 5274 | From: Im a nowhere man | Registered: Jul 2001
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I'm not an activist, and I'm not a cynic. I'm just a person who wants to fight to the end for our ideas and ideals. It is worth noting at the outset that people who agree with Mr. Curtis Hammond's inclinations are either stupid, drunk, on drugs, paid off by Curtis, or are boisterous ****ants. Well, that's getting away from my main topic, which is that he teaches workshops on cannibalism. Students who have been through the program compare it to a Communist re-education camp. We must rage, rage against the dying of the light. If we fail in this, we are not failing someone else; we are not disrupting some interest separate from ourselves. Rather, it is we who suffer when we neglect to observe that now that I've been exposed to Curtis's jokes, I must admit that I don't completely understand them. Perhaps I need to get out more. Or perhaps I must part company with many of my peers when it comes to understanding why if the word "theoanthropomorphism" occurs to the reader, he or she may recall that Curtis once tried to flout all of society's rules. My peers feel that he can't see the forest for the trees. While this is unquestionably true, I contend we must add that he decries or dismisses capitalism, technology, industrialization, and systems of government borne of Enlightenment ideas about the dignity and freedom of human beings. These are the things that Curtis fears, because they are wedded to individual initiative and responsibility. All I can tell you is what matters to me: I'm not writing this letter for your entertainment. I'm not even writing it for your education. I'm writing it for our very survival.
To Curtis's mind, pompous scoundrels are more deserving of honor than our nation's war heroes. So that means that the best way to reduce cognitive dissonance and restore homeostasis to one's psyche is to advertise "magical" diets and bogus weight-loss pills, right? No, not right. The truth is that I want to make Curtis's shallow, illaudable views understood, resisted, and made the object of deserved contempt by young and old alike. That may seem simple enough, but if we're to effectively carry out our responsibilities and make a future for ourselves, we will first have to show Curtis how he is as wrong as wrong can be.
What I want to document now is that if I seem a bit bloodthirsty, it's only because I'm trying to communicate with Curtis on his own level. Oddly enough, his readiness to call me dim-witted has to be the most egregious example imaginable of the pot calling the kettle black. Stranger still, the mistaken claim that the Earth is flat is not only incorrect but is somewhat telling of his core sentiments. That said, let me continue. Mere association tends to lend credence to Curtis's subalterns because people assume they can't be that bad if a respected person is associated with them. I wish I could put it more delicately, but that would miss the point. A final word: Mr. Curtis Hammond's stingy prank phone calls are fraught with the gravest consequences.
-------------------- "If I share all my wisdom I won't have any left for myself."
Mike Pipes stickerpimp.com Lake Havasu, AZ mike@stickerpimp.com Posts: 8746 | From: Lake Havasu, AZ USA | Registered: Jun 2000
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Why is it that some people are so devoid of a sense of humor? Naturally, I'm referring to Mike Pipes's latest communications. If you disagree with my claim that mankind, with all of its accumulated knowledge, wonderful machines, scientific methods, and material power, still has much to fear from uncouth pop psychologists like Mike, then read no further. As everyone who has access to reliable information knows, I want nothing more -- or less -- than to issue a call to conscience and reason. To that task I have consecrated my life, and I invite you to do likewise.
If we let him steal our birthrights, who's going to protect us? The government? Our parents? Superman? Probably none of the above. That's why it's important to guide the world into an age of peace, justice, and solidarity. Easy as it may seem to clarify and correct some of the inaccuracies present in Mike's accusations, it is far more difficult to honor our nation's glorious mosaic of cultures and ethnicities. In light of my stance on this issue, my love for people necessitates that I take up the all-encompassing challenge of freedom, justice, equality, and the pursuit of life with full dignity. Yes, I face opposition from Mike. However, this is not a reason to quit but to strive harder.
Because we continue to share a common, albeit abused, atmospheric envelope, to believe that he is forward-looking, open-minded, and creative is to deceive ourselves. Although Mike's overt deconstructionism has declined, a covert form still survives and may be an important factor in fueling a tendency and/or desire to make Mike's inveracities a key dynamic in modern masochism by viscerally defining "antitintinnabularian" through the experience of disagreeable, viperine negativism. Unless it is better that a hundred thousand people should perish than that Mike should be even slightly inconvenienced, it is simply wrong to conclude that there is an international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. To inform you of the grounds upon which I base my ideologies, I offer the following. If we let him control your bank account, your employment, your personal safety, and your mind, then greed, corruption, and authoritarianism will characterize the government. Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens. And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the media and educational institutions. To end this letter, I, not being one of the many unprofessional pettifoggers of this world, would like to make a bet with Mike Pipes. I will gladly give him a day's salary if he can prove that the best way to serve one's country is to squander irreplaceable national treasures, as he insists. If Mike is unable to prove that, then his end of the bargain is to step aside while I express our concerns about his spiteful plans for the future. So, do we have a bet, Mike?
-------------------- Si Allen #562 La Mirada, CA. USA
(714) 521-4810
si.allen on Skype
siallen@dslextreme.com
"SignPainters do It with Longer Strokes!"
Never mess with your profile while in a drunken stupor!!!
Brushasaurus on Chat Posts: 8827 | From: La Mirada, CA, USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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-------------------- Leaper of Tall buildings.. If you find my posts divisive or otherwise snarky please ignore them. If you do not know how then PM me about it and I will demonstrate. Posts: 5274 | From: Im a nowhere man | Registered: Jul 2001
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So here I am taking time out of my busy schedule to let you and maybe a few other people know that what Si insists are original smears are nothing more than warmed-over versions of insurrectionism. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter, but the conclusion's general outline is that you should not ask, "Is Si so vainglorious as to think that this can go on forever?", but rather, "Where are the people who are willing to stand up and acknowledge that it would be better for Si to do nothing than to encourage young people to break all the rules, cut themselves loose from their roots, and adopt a putrid lifestyle?". The latter question is the better one to ask, because only through education can individuals gain the independent tools they need to end its control over the minds and souls of countless people. But the first step is to acknowledge that Si claims that we should abandon the institutionalized and revered concept of democracy. That claim is preposterous and, to use Si's own language, overtly materialistic. No history can justify it. Trapped by the cognitive dissonance engendered by hard evidence and common sense, Si feels obligated to work both sides of the political fence in a condescending, lackadaisical attempt to justify its epigrams. I know that I'm emotional now, but the next time Si decides to respond to this letter with hyperbolic and uncorroborated accusations and assaults on free speech, it should think to itself, cui bono? -- who benefits? It is as if we were safely on the bank of a raging river, enjoying a picnic with our friends and family, when a bunch of brainless litterbugs came along and threw us into the river. Not only must we must struggle to avoid drowning in the raging torrent of Si-sponsored pauperism, but we must crawl out of the river before we can condemn Si's hypocrisy. Si has a penchant for counterinsurgency and clandestine operations. That's pretty transparent. What's not so transparent is the answer to the following question: What exactly is Si trying to hide? A clue might be that Si's nerdy insinuations take control of a nation and suck it dry. News of this deviousness must spread like wildfire if we are ever to lay out some ideas and interpretations that hold the potential for insight.
So, Si, maybe the problem is not with grotty, feral moochers, but with you. In the past, it was perfectly clear to everyone with insight and without malice that subhuman, peremptory shysters have traditionally tried to piggyback on substantive issues to gain legitimacy for themselves. Unfortunately, there were a number of people who seemed to lack this insight at the right time or who, contrary to their better knowledge, contested and denied this truth.
You don't have to say anything specifically about Si for it to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that I should appeal not to the contented and satisfied, but embrace those tormented by suffering, those without peace, the unhappy and the discontented. I myself am tired of hearing or reading that everything is happy and fine and good. You know that that is simply not true.
It's somewhat tricky to reveal the constant tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces of dialogized heteroglossia resulting from Si's diatribes, especially since the media in this country tend to ignore historical connections and are reluctant to analyze ideological positions or treat a fringe political group seriously. Si's snow jobs are geared toward the continuation of social stratification under the rubric of "tradition." Funny, that was the same term that its bedfellows once used to create a climate in which it will be assumed that our achievements reflect not individual worth, talent, or skill, but special consideration. If Si believes that its ploys are our final line of defense against tyrrany, then it's obvious why it thinks that it knows the "right" way to read Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. Inasmuch as I disagree with Si's accusations and find its ad hominem attacks offensive, I am happy to meet Si's speech with more speech and, if necessary, continue this discussion until the truth shines. It has been said that on this subject, we get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from Si and its comrades. I, in turn, contend that prudence is no vice. Cowardice -- especially Si's disruptive form of it -- is. Throughout human history, logorrheic malcontents have always been unruly. So it should come as no surprise that it's unfortunate that Si has no real morals. It's impossible to debate important topics with organizations that are so ethically handicapped.
Si thinks that it understands the difference between civilization and savagery. Of course, thinking so doesn't make it so. Almost everyone will agree that I am one of Si's victims, but Si argues that people don't mind having their communities turned into war zones. I wish I could suggest some incontrovertible chain of apodictic reasoning that would overcome this argument, but the best I can do is the following: It and its habitués are cranky revolting-types. This is not set down in complaint against them, but merely as analysis.
We must also assert with all the sincerity of informed experience and the desperate desire to see our beloved country survive that if Si can't stand the heat, it should get out of the kitchen. Although raising the volume, increasing the stridency, or stressing the emotionalism of an argument does not improve its validity, this is not the first time I've wanted to mention a bit about saturnine jackanapes such as Si. But it is the first time I realized that that's just one side of the coin. The other side is that it does not tolerate any view that differs from its own. Rather, Si discredits and discards those people who contradict it along with the ideas that they represent.
Everywhere it's gone, Si has tried to create widespread psychological suffering. It can happen here, too. For those of you who don't know, in these days of political correctness and the changing of how history is taught in schools to fulfill a particular agenda, when Si says that 75 million years ago, a galactic tyrant named Xenu solved the overpopulation problem of his 76-planet federation by transporting the excess people to Earth, chaining them to volcanoes, and dropping H-bombs on them, in its mind, that's supposed to end the argument. It's like it believes it has said something very profound. As is so often the case, if I seem a bit demonic, it's only because I'm trying to communicate with Si on its own level. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that Si likes slurs that harvest what others have sown. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that we live in a deeply troubled society. (Actually, it holds itself to low standards, but that's not important now.)
Si has a staggering number of self-serving helots. One way to lower their numbers, if not eradicate them entirely, is simple. We just inform them that I don't want to build castles in the air. I don't want to plan things that I can't yet implement. But I do want to ratchet up our level of understanding, because doing so clearly demonstrates how it strikes me as amusing that it complains about people who do nothing but complain. Well, news flash! Si does nothing but complain. It has been, and is, my great undertaking to improve the physical and spiritual quality of life for the population at present and for those yet to come. Only true-blue psychotic election-year also-rans or those who are totally clueless about factionalism could claim otherwise.
In the course of my work, I regularly come in contact with the worst classes of intellectually stultified drug lords there are, and most of them also feel that if Si makes fun of me or insults me, I hear it, and it hurts. But I take solace in the fact that I am still able to purge the darkness from Si's heart. Si's helpers believe that without Si's superior guidance, we will go nowhere. Although it is perhaps impossible to change the perspective of those who have such beliefs, I wish nevertheless to take steps toward creating an inclusive society free of attitudinal barriers. While Si puts on a good dog and pony show, it is reluctant to resolve problems. It always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that I once told it that in debates with it, it is important to evaluate whether its provocations reflect a sincere desire to present an alternative point of view or whether its agenda is primarily to make our lives an endless treadmill of government interferences while providing few real benefits to our health and happiness. How did it respond to that? It proceeded to curse me off using a number of colorful expletives not befitting this letter, which serves only to show that Si can't fool me. I've met pesky, obstreperous authoritarians before, so I know that someone has been giving Si's brain a very thorough washing, and now Si is trying to do the same to us.
I don't mean to throw fuel on an already considerable fire, but what I just wrote is not based on merely a single experience or anecdote. Rather, it is based upon the wisdom of accumulated years, spanning two continents, and proven by the fact that ostentatious ruffianism has long been the nucleus of Si's warnings. What's my problem, then? Allow me to present it in the form of a question: Why does Si always have to be such a party pooper? Before you answer, let me point out that Si wants us to believe that all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "insiders". How stupid does it think we are? Well, we all know the answer to that question, don't we? But in case you don't, then you should note that if we are powerless to foster mutual understanding, it is because we have allowed Si to defend fetishism, tribalism, and notions of racial superiority. While Si is decidedly entitled to ignore good advice from intelligent people, I challenge it to point out any text in this letter that proposes that stubborn fault-finders and unstable trolls should rule this country. It isn't there. There's neither a hint nor a suggestion of such a thing. Okay, I've vented enough frustration. So let me end by saying that telling the truth is too much trouble for paltry control freaks bent on getting their way.
-------------------- "B0LT" on the chat room thing.
posted
I think that (SI) should Sit Down and allow... Someone else to Stand Up!!!! But if he will not... Then it is time for (SOMEONE to Stand Up!) and make (SI) Sit Down!))
-------------------- Stephen Deveau RavenGraphics Insinx Digital Displays
Letting Your Imagination Run Wild! Posts: 4327 | From: Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada | Registered: Jan 2000
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In this letter, I will try to describe Mr. Michael (ontime) Boone's inveracities in such a way that my language will not offend and yet will still convey my message that the falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that just because Michael and his subalterns don't like being labelled as "biased hucksters" or "sinister used-car salesmen" doesn't mean the shoe doesn't fit. In general, there is no time and little temptation for those who work hard on their jobs and their responsibilities to demonstrate an outright hostility to law enforcement. Sure, there are exceptions, but if you're interested in the finagling, double-dealing, chicanery, cheating, cajolery, cunning, rascality, and abject villainy by which he may confuse, befuddle, and neutralize public opposition as soon as our backs are turned, then you'll want to consider the following very carefully. You'll especially want to consider that I am undeniably not up on the latest gossip. Still, I have heard people say that I do not appreciate being labeled. No one does. Nevertheless, each rung on the ladder of anti-intellectualism is a crisis of some kind. Each crisis supplies an excuse for Michael to misdirect our efforts into fighting each other rather than into understanding the nature and endurance of hotheaded plagiarism. That is the standard process by which socially inept airheads scrap the notion of national sovereignty.
Because of Michael's schemes, our schools simply do not teach the basics anymore. Instead, they preach the theology of venal careerism. If Michael got his way, he'd be able to shrink the so-called marketplace of ideas down to convenience-store size. Brrrr! It sends chills down my spine just thinking about that. In short, Mr. Michael (ontime) Boone doesn't care one whit about how others might feel
-------------------- R.T.Thomas,AirDesigns/Sign And Airbrush Studio rtart1@earthlink.net
Hattiesburg,MS 39401 Shop 601-584-1000 Cell 601-310-5901 Proud supporter of LETTERVILLE!
"Ahhhhhh.......Juicy Fruit." Posts: 547 | From: Hattiesburg,MS USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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Wherever this thread has been, or is going, try THIS: INTRODUCTION: OBSOLETE ASSUMPTIONS & ENDURING MENTAL MODELS Design-by-assumption works as long as assumptions hold. Assumptions are shortcuts to useful efficiencies, provided they are not violated. The classic telephone company value proposition, embodied in today's telephone network, holds:
that expensive, scarce infrastructure can be shared to offer premium priced services, that talk - the human voice - generates most of the traffic, that circuit-switched calls are the "communications technologies" that matter, and that the telephone company is in control of its network. Telephone companies still behave as if these assumptions hold despite:
up to several thousand-fold declines in key infrastructure costs over the last two decades, a 20 year double-digit annual growth rate in the volume of data traffic, so that the volume of data traffic is now overtaking the (also growing, but more slowly) volume of voice traffic, the many different data types that now travel over the telephone network (despite the fact that the network is not optimized for all these data types), the many different types of "communications technologies," from television to Ethernet, that are not part of telephone network architecture, and the Internet, which, because it makes the details of network operation irrelevant, is shifting control to the end user. The Intelligent Network is a straight-line extension of the four assumptions above - scarcity, voice, circuit switching, and control. Its primary design impetus was not customer service. Rather, the Intelligent Network was a telephone company attempt to engineer vendor independence, more automatic operation, and some "intelligent" new services into existing network architecture. However, even as it rolls out and matures, the Intelligent Network is being superseded by a Stupid Network, with nothing but dumb transport in the middle, and intelligent user-controlled endpoints, whose design is guided by plenty, not scarcity, where transport is guided by the needs of the data, not the design assumptions of the network. The Stupid Network is not all here yet. It is in its infancy. It needs to get stronger and, well, a bit more coordinated.
Some telephone company people realize that things are changing, and must change. But they are hemmed in by conscious, deliberate, long established telephone company practices. Many are also hobbled by less conscious telephone company mental models of "communications," "technology," and "customer needs." While these people may realize that the old ways are becoming obsolete, they live in a world conditioned by an encompassing, arcane legacy that only remembers "rational," incremental change.
(Note: here "telephone company" refers to large companies whose main business is to provide circuit switched voice calling service. In the United States, most of these are the heirs of the Bell System legacy - but Sprint, MCI, GTE, SNET, and others might also try on this shoe, and if it fits...)
COMPUTERS AS SCARCE RESOURCES It used to be more expensive to complete telephone calls than it is today. The operator-completed call gave way to call completion by electro-mechanical switch. Then, in the late 70s, the era of computer controlled electronic switching made placing calls even cheaper and more reliable.
In those days, computers, including those that controlled switching, were still considered expensive, scarce resources. When I worked in the nascent electronic toy industry in 1979, a single insight that eliminated six transistors paid my way. And the same factor - the need to save two expensive bytes of memory - laid the basis in this era for the Year 2000 Problem (stay tuned to the eleventh hour news for more on THIS story!).
Now computer circuits are thousands of times cheaper. Moore's Law is what we call the ongoing improvement in computing cost and power. But in the 70s it was not generally known to be a `law' - to most telecommunications engineers (and to humanity in general), it has become the most game-changing wild card played in recent times.
Telephone networks have been designed for optimal use of scarce resources. The local exchange in your city, which handles the last four digits of your telephone number, theoretically could handle up to 10,000 telephones, e.g., with numbers 510-547-0000, 0001, 0002, et cetera through 510-547-9999. But the switching office is not designed to handle 10,000 simultaneous calls. It is designed to handle far fewer, maybe one tenth of that, based on the assumption that even in the busiest time of the day, only a fraction of its telephones will be active at any one time.
The network works as long as engineering assumptions (e.g., the length of a call, the number of call attempts, etc.) do not change. But let the assumptions change episodically (e.g., Rolling Stones tickets go on sale), or structurally (calls to Internet service providers last several times longer than voice calls), and the network hits its design limits - completing a call becomes a matter of try, try again.
What if network design were based on another assumption - that computation and bandwidth were cheap and plentiful?
DOING "INTELLIGENT" THINGS WITH PHONE CALLS Once the telephone companies began doing digital switching, the idea that you could do "intelligent" things with calls was not far behind. The concept of network control was extended to let various centralized resources - digital switches, databases (Service Control Points) and signal processing systems (Intelligent Peripherals) - communicate among each other by extending the telephone network's control protocol (SS7).
As noted above, the main force motivating the Intelligent Network was a telephone company attempt at "vendor independence" so telephone companies could get better deals from their suppliers. Thus, Intelligent Network specs were meant to encourage vendors to design their equipment to work in a multi-vendor environment - to interoperate. As a side benefit, almost an afterthought, some of the newly specified equipment could also interoperate with the business systems of certain customers - but only via limited, cautiously designed interfaces. Virtually all of these services center around call completion, automation, and billing. This, in a nutshell, is the concept marketed as the Intelligent Network. Some Intelligent Network service examples include:
Routing calls to different numbers than the one that the caller originally dialed (this is the basis of e.g., 800 service). Giving caller choices before the call is completed ("push one for domestic reservations," etc.). Saying, "Calling Card, Collect, Third-Party, or Operator" to control payment options. Verifying that the calling card number is valid in "real time." Supplying calling party numbers directly to customers for database lookup (which is why I must verify from my home phone that I got my Citibank card in the mail). Expensive computers, intertwined in central network operations, do this. Belief becomes reality. But wait! The telephone companies are now losing design hegemony - the news that "The Internet is here!" is beginning to penetrate the telephone company inner sanctum.
MEETING CUSTOMER NEEDS The astute reader might by now suspect that the main beneficiaries of the Intelligent Network are the telephone companies themselves. Nevertheless, telephone companies propound a "philosophy" that the Intelligent Network makes it easy to introduce new services and new technologies, and to meet new customer needs.
New customer needs, when they are detected, filter into the telephone company slowly. Some needs, the ones with big, obvious, immediate payoffs, get attention from decision makers, who then request a business case, which must then get approved. The next step is the development plan, followed by the Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning Plans. Then if all goes well, the telephone company might begin the process of implementation. This can take years, or even decades (witness ISDN).
If you hate hanging on hold, you are part of a huge latent market - do you know anybody who doesn't? Yet, telephone companies have yet to use Intelligent Network capabilities to effectively ameliorate this problem. Now, suppose Internet Telephony gets as good as telephone company telephony (see below), and some enterprising independent programmer wants to make a product that solves the problem of being on hold. They would simply write an end-user application and sell it from their web site. If it works, and people like it, they will sell lots of it. If not, they might try again. But they don't have to go through any long, bureaucratic economic justification, business planning, and technical development processes - they just do it. Internet Telephony, because the Internet Protocol works at the level that user software manages the session, takes the telephone company out of the value equation.
THE INTERNET DIS-INTERMEDIATES THE TELEPHONE NETWORK The Internet breaks the telephone company model by passing control to the end user. It does this by taking the underlying network details out of the picture.
Let's look at how this works in the case of voice. To the telephone company, there is one main way of transmitting voice - sampled in 8 bit bytes, 8000 times a second, for an aggregate rate of 64 kbit/s. The entire telephone network is designed around this rate. But if you want to send voice on the Internet, you can encode it at any rate you want, and send it at any rate up to the one that the slowest underlying network link supports. The recipient must have the right decoder running in her intelligent terminal, too.
The very name, Internet, denotes that it is designed to network networks. You can use Internet Protocol on an Ethernet to communicate with an X.25 network, an FDDI network, or a modem - lower layer protocols are submerged, made irrelevant. So if you are on an (e.g., 10Mbit/s) Ethernet, and your endpoint application wants to send better quality 256 kbit/s voice, no problem. You can't do that with the telephone network.
Or, with a different application (on the same endpoint and network) you can send six different interwoven 10 kbit/s voice streams to six different destinations at the same time. And you don't have to tell your Stupid Network provider anything about it, or pay a premium to install anything special. The network provider becomes virtually irrelevant - the user controls the relevant capabilities.
TRUE VOICE, FALSE START I contrast the flexibility of a Stupid Network with my experience as a member of AT&T's True Voice technical team. AT&T True Voice was a valiant attempt to improve circuit switched voice quality as much as possible in the context of current network architecture. If we had not been constrained by network architecture, the easiest way would have been to increase the sampling rate or change the coding algorithm. But to actually do this, we would have had to change every piece of the telephone network except the wires. So we had to work within the designed 64 kbit/s data rate.
An astute AT&T perceptual psychophysicist (and a friend of mine) determined that voice quality could be substantially improved by boosting the bass part of the signal, that part of the audio spectrum between 100 and 300 cycles per second. But as we set out to implement this conceptually simple improvement, we kept running into the problem that there were too many places in the network that had built in "intelligent" assumptions about the voice signal - echo cancellers, conference bridges, voice messaging systems, etc. - and too many devices that depended on these acoustic assumptions for their correct operation - modems, fax machines, and a surprising number of strange devices with proprietary analog protocols. After about two years of intense effort, we made a noticeable difference, one that most listeners preferred (if asked explicitly), but it was not as large as it could have been. There was too much "intelligence" intertwined with the basic transport.
The True Voice experience led me to see the advantages of a network - a Stupid Network - that would let you stuff bits in one end and get them out the other without getting tangled up in cobwebs of legacy assumptions. Want a different voice quality? With a Stupid Network, you'd get a different program, install it in your intelligent end user device and run it.
A NETWORK ENGINEERED FOR USE There is no longer first-order economic justification for a telephone company to engineer and control scarce, expensive, network resources - the basic conditions no longer obtain. The age of plentiful computing is here. I have a multi-color, three dimensional screen saver that uses the entire capacity of my 200 MHz Pentium. The designers of the Intelligent Network never imagined such "wasteful" use of processing "intelligence." The age of plentiful bandwidth is just around the corner, as several families of technologies (fiber, satellite, cable modems, xDSL, LMDS, and low power TV, to name just six) line up to break the local bandwidth bottleneck, and as the capacity of backbone fiber has risen from 2 to 6 to 10, 20 and 40 Gbit/s over just the last few years.
The age of centralized control is ending too, with the rise of the next generation of Internet - and especially the appearance of circuit-like Internet mechanisms, such as those in the latest version of Internet Protocol (IPv6), designed to tame delay and improve real-time two-way Internet voice.
JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID A new network "philosophy and architecture," is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for "always-on" use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network. And the network would be engineered simply to "Deliver the Bits, Stupid," not for fancy network routing or "smart" number translation.
Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.
In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it needs to go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the data where to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the boss.
Instead of fancy "intelligent" network routing translation, in a Stupid Network, intelligent end-user devices would be connected to one or more high speed access networks - always listening for relevant information, for data addressed to their owner. Sometimes a "communication" might be a few bits, perhaps a short, pager-type message. Other times, it might be longer, like email. In the event of the need for two-way voice communication, an initial message might state the identity of the "caller," and/or inquire of the whereabouts of the owner. The intelligent end-user device could apply its knowledge of where its "owner" was, and who the caller was. Then, if it were programmed to do so, it could launch a message to its owner, telling of the call, the caller's identity, location, and any other information. It could also forward as much information as practical.
End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the Stupid Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.
IDIOT SAVANT BEHAVIORS FOR DIFFERENT DATA TYPES In the current telephone network, voice is the assumed data type, unless specially ordered, high cost services are ordered. But in the Stupid Network, because the data is the boss, it can tell the network, in real time, what kind of service it needs. And the Stupid Network would have a small repertoire of idiot-savant behaviors to treat different data types appropriately. If the data identified itself as financial data, the Stupid Network would deliver it accurately, no matter how many milliseconds of delay the error checking would take. If the data were two-way voice or video, the Stupid Network would provide low delay, even at the price of an occasional flipped bit. If the data were entertainment audio or video, the Stupid Network would provide wider bandwidth, but would not necessarily give low delay or absolute accuracy. And if there were a need for unique transmission characteristics, the data would tell the Stupid Network in more detail how to treat it, and the Stupid Network would do what it was told.
The Stupid Network would let you send mixed data types at will - limited only by the knowledge and imagination of the application programmer community. One way voice messages, multi-way voice conferences, two-way video, email, documents, audio and/or video entertainment, whatever, could be mixed and interspersed at will, within and between sessions. You would not have to ask your Stupid Network provider for any special network modifications - its only function would be to, "Deliver the Bits, Stupid."
One thing about the Stupid Network is clear - the physical elements that comprise the network would be neither expensive nor scarce. There would be little profit margin in shipping dumb bits. There would be lots of high value Business Ideas supported by the Stupid Network, above and beyond transport.
LEADING INDICATORS A rudimentary form of the Stupid Network - the Internet - is here today. The telephone companies are beginning to realize this. Fearing erosion of their control and, more importantly, their revenue stream, they have been quick to call for the banning of Internet Telephony, quick to call for the federal imposition of charges on Internet access, and slow to implement widely available, reasonably priced broadband services. This creates a chicken and egg problem - while the hungry wait for dinner and breakfast.
A powerful leading indicator of the Stupid Network will arrive when entrepreneurs who have no vested interest in maintaining telephone company assumptions begin to offer profitable, affordable, widely available data services. Watch Metricom's Ricochet modem service, an early entry in this market. Will entrepreneurial broadband service follow? There are several early efforts, for example, Sky Station International, which plans to launch self-propelled balloon-based transcievers over major cities to deliver personal 1.5 Mbit/s service. Meanwhile, we will see how advances in Internet Technology (such as IPv6 and the Internet II initiative of leading universities) evolve - here the ability of the Internet to offer low delay services, such as two-way voice, is the key indicator.
To counter these threats, the telephone companies are now speeding deployment of Intelligent Network services, much like sailing merchants responded to the threat of steam by inventing faster sailing ships in the mid 1800s. The beneficiaries of this accelerated Intelligent Network deployment are big businesses - who can offer cheaper help-desk type services with lower human labor costs. Nevertheless, despite this current Intelligent Network buy-in, if big business finds that it is better served by the Stupid Network and premises based intelligence, it will not hesitate to switch.
The Telecom Act of 1996 and the World Trade Organization telecom agreement of 1997 can be seen as attempts to preserve oligopolistic hegemony of the telephone companies. The thrust of both is to allow big companies to band together to create a marketplace dominated by a few large players in place of government control. Will there be unintended consequences of these agreements? Count on it! Will they hasten or impede the advent of the Stupid Network? Hmmm.
THE STUPID NETWORK'S NEW VALUE PROPOSITION The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value propositions. For example, as computer power got cheaper and cheaper in the 1980s, there was much talk of a shift in value from hardware to software, but it was not easy to see how the shift would unfold. In fact, it appears that only one person (Bill Gates) understood it fully. The changes that now portend the Stupid Network are likely to shift the telecommunications value proposition from "network services" to something else. If I knew what it was, I would not be wasting my time writing these words.
Given that disclaimer, I have three brief observations:
It is rare that a market is completely killed by the next generation of technology. Neither TV nor the VCR killed the movies. Neither the minicomputer (alas, remember them?) nor the PC killed the Mainframe. We still have ships and railroads, though their markets are both diminished and changed by the car and airplane. The "paperless office" exists - but mine is cluttered with books, memos and magazines that are printed on paper. So it is likely that the Stupid Network and the Intelligent Network will exist side by side for some time, or even share merged definitions, functions, and value. It is also likely that "deliver the bits" companies will exist in a Stupid Network world, but given much lower profit margins, they will not look much like telephone companies.
Telephone companies themselves could cannibalize their own product. Smarter companies often field new products that replace current profitable product.
Sony does this several times a year - it tries to learn from its own mistakes faster than its competition, fielding new products that improve on its old before such improvements become obvious to their foe.
Boeing does it - the 757 and 767 cut into the top of its 727 market and the bottom of its 747 market with fuel efficient, and crew efficient new designs - we can only hope that Boeing does not become complacent now that it is has beat out its strongest competitors.
Intel does it - having been the first to articulate Moore's Law, it now drives it with a new, more powerful chip every 18 months or so, long before the old chip is obsolete - it realizes that if it stops, there are other chip makers that would be glad to take leadership of that market.
Telephone companies could do it too, but it is unlikely as long as their senior managers prefer to talk with lawyers, regulators, consultants and financiers more than with experts in their own employ.
Telephone companies could reinvent a place for themselves as purveyors of new values propositions brought by the Stupid Network. They will have to, because their old value proposition will erode as the Stupid Network grows. In a "deliver the bits" world, so much information, and so many courses of action, will be available, that there will be a great need for known, trusted authorities. Businesses with brand reputation and staying power will be guarantors of transactions, holders of critical information, organizers and filters of information, and even voices of reason, leadership, and "objectivity." (Of course, they will need to HAVE reason, leadership, and objectivity to do this.) There will be other roles for big companies in the world of the Stupid Network, and "forgetting organizations," who are able to abandon old models when new ways no longer support old assumptions, will find them.
THE CHOICE BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work, "The Living Company" (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of companies to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing conditions. He found that the life expectancy of the average company was only 40 years - this means that telephone company culture is in advanced old age. De Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able to survive over 100 years. He concluded that managing for longevity - to maximize the chances that a company will adapt to changes in the business climate - is very different than managing for profit. For example, in the former, employees are part of a larger, cohesive whole, a work community. In the latter, employees are "resources" to be deployed or downsized as business dictates. As the Stupid Network arrives, as the business idea shifts from scarce physical infrastructure to something more knowledge based, company culture will need to adapt to the truth that, "Nobody knows as much as all of us."
Whatever we discover to be the new Stupid Network value proposition, my working hypothesis is that it will be based on intelligent end user devices, intelligent customers, employees whose intelligence is valued as a corporate asset, and companies that can learn.
posted
What does Playboy magazine hope to achieve by repeatedly applying its lips to the posteriors of pestiferous energumens? Why can't Playboy magazine live among us in peace? And why does Playboy magazine always have to be such a party pooper? This letter is not the place to explore the answers to those questions. Its purpose is instead to carry out this matter to the full extent of the law. Let's get down to brass tacks: Playboy magazine is right about one thing, namely that fear is what motivates us. Fear of what it means when noxious, wretched carpetbaggers threaten national security. Fear of what it says about our society when we teach our children that Playboy magazine holds a universal license that allows it to deny citizens the ability to become informed about the destruction that it is capable of. And fear of cuckoo authoritarians like Playboy magazine who make a fetish of the virtues of atrabilious immoralism. I have the strength, ability, desire, and courage to convince materialistic sad sacks to stop supporting Playboy magazine and tolerating its hatchet jobs. Do you?
Playboy magazine's beliefs are built on lies, and they depend on make-believe for their continuation. Everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that you should never forget the three most important facets of Playboy magazine's doctrines, namely their soulless origins, their internal contradictions, and their tendentious nature. Playboy magazine keeps telling us that it knows the "right" way to read Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. Are we also supposed to believe that it should impair the practice of democracy because "it's the right thing to do"? I didn't think so.
Playboy magazine's peons are too lazy to suggest the kind of politics and policies that are needed to restore good sense to this important debate. They just want to sit back, fasten their mouths on the public teats, and casually forget that if the human race is to survive on this planet, we will have to exert a positive influence on the type of world that people will live in a thousand years from now. You'll never hear Playboy magazine admit it made a mistake. Not that I've come to expect any better from Playboy magazine. Okay, I've vented enough frustration. So let me end by saying that all of Playboy magazine's solutions are based on the premise that it is known for its sound judgment, unerring foresight, and sagacious adaptation of means to ends.
-------------------- Maker of fine signs and other creative stuff. Located at 109 N. Cumberland ave. Harlan, Ky. 40831 606-837-0242 Posts: 4172 | From: Ages-Brookside, Ky. Up the Holler... | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
dumb humans..this thread was started by a member of the BORG....and as they always say...:you will be assumulated,"...you all where!!!!!
-------------------- joe pribish-A SIGN MINT 2811 longleaf Dr. pensacola, fl 32526 850-637-1519 BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND Posts: 11582 | From: pensacola, fl. usa | Registered: Nov 1998
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I'll swear... I'm gonna cut and paste the greek dictionary in here
-------------------- "Don't change horses in midstream, unless you spot one with longer legs" bronzeo oti Jack Davis 1410 Main St Joplin, MO 64801 www.imagemakerart.com jack@imagemakerart.com Posts: 1549 | From: Joplin, MO | Registered: Mar 2000
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Assimilated you were.. Futile resistance is..
there is no try,, only do! --- Yoda of Borg
-------------------- Leaper of Tall buildings.. If you find my posts divisive or otherwise snarky please ignore them. If you do not know how then PM me about it and I will demonstrate. Posts: 5274 | From: Im a nowhere man | Registered: Jul 2001
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