Thursday, May 16, 2002

It's beginning to look like the spectrum may be much more plentiful than we think, if we manage it well. David P. Reed is clueful... And the basic question of the limits on "spectrum capacity", as a scientific question, is slowly developing answers - surprising ones. It turns out that network cooperation increases capacity. Tim Shepard, in his MIT Ph.D. thesis, demonstrated that capacity can increase as the number of transmitters in an area increase, if they cooperate. Communications theorists have demonstrated other approaches, such as "space-time coding" that also increase capacity as the number of transceivers increase. It's beginning to look like the spectrum may be much more plentiful than we think, if we manage it well. comments? [] 10:52:56 PM     the alpha geek noosphere Andy Oram writes..." I have stared at the sun, and for the sake of my sanity, will never again look directly at the consciousness of the online ueber-geek collective." This could be one of those "miniepoch-defining posts."  (I can think of two others.  The "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" cartoon, and Tom Ray's abstract about his creation of artificial life in a computer.)   ... you've never heard of EtherPEG, its a Mac hack that's been around for a while that combines all of the modern conveniences of a packet sniffer with the good old-fashioned friendliness of a graphics rendering library, to show you whatever GIFs and JPEGs are flying around on your network. It's sort of a real-time meta browser that dynamically builds a view of other people's browsers, built up as other people look around online. The effect was staggering. As I expected, traffic was very light at the beginning (a couple of big news and blog sites were obvious, and strangely enough, the Microsoft Developer's Network.) But as the talk continued, some people were obviously letting their minds (and their fingers) wander... Early traffic showed a very wandering bent. I was impressed that when Tim O'Reilly stood up to ask about whether bloggers were building a city or living in their own ghetto, virtually all traffic stopped. Evidently, this was something that almost everybody in the room was interested in listening to. And once Tim sat down again, the pixels began to flow once more. After a little while, the atmosphere took on a bit of a dark turn. Lots of images of law enforcement agency websites, some american flags with an angry eagle bursting through, and possibly darkest of all, a Britney Spears fan site. comments? [] 10:33:13 PM

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