Forget Smart Cities, ‘Stupid’ Infrastructure Is The Solution For Future Transportation:
In 1997, David Isenberg published the important essay, “The Rise of the Stupid Network,” in which he details how the internet took over the world by being as simple as possible. Name derives from the 1980s marketing name the telephone companies had for their new systems, “Intelligent Network” or “IN.” The IN tried to put the intelligence for new phone functionality in the network, in the infrastructure. The phone company designed, built and managed innovation in telecoms. You connected with your standard plain old phone. (Younger readers may not know it, but everybody back then had a basic phone on their desks with wires coming out of it which you used to talk to other people.)
When the smarts were in the infrastructure, we relied on the infrastructure for the innovation. And why not, the Bell Labs scientists were among the best in the world?
The internet flipped that upside-down. The core design of the network is dead-simple. In fact, it’s essentially the same design today as 40 years ago! Even so, we’ve seen the greatest period of innovation in human history on top of that stupid infrastructure, and it’s not a coincidence. On the internet, all the smarts are in the edge devices. Your phone. Your laptop. The web server that sent you this web page. Everything is there, even the negotiation of network link quality and speed which you might imagine should be in the infrastructure, which is much closer to those factors. The internet itself just delivers postcards from A to B, really fast. Its only job is to figure how to move those postcards.
When the smarts moved to the edges, they got a lot smarter. Anybody could innovate. Nobody needed the phone company’s permission, the way it used to be. A few folks in Europe wrote a program called Skype which took over most the world’s long distance business for a while. They didn’t ask the network companies to get involved or even give permission to eat their lunch, and they certainly would not have received it.
As noted above, the problem is that today, you can’t know the future. People in the computer industry have gotten used to that idea, where the capabilities of the computers and networks have been doubling in performance every 1.5 years for over 5 decades. You can’t plan for 2030 in 2021 so you don’t. Instead, you keep what you must build simple and put as much as possible into software. That’s because you can change all your software in 2030 when you learn the reality of the future, and it’s free to deploy it, even though not to write it.
The internet’s design of stupid network and smart devices comes to transportation through both the robocar and the mobile phone in the car. Stupid roads and smart cars, not smart roads.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @01:32AM (4 children)
Just give us a dumb pipe.. But does anybody listen?Noooo...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:47AM
Avoid dumb cities or "Democrat run cities" as they are better known.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:54PM (1 child)
Not just a dumb pipe. A BIG dumb pipe.
Build the biggest, bestest big dumb pipe there ever was. Charge enough to build it, maintain it, and make a healthy profit.
It's a time honored way of doing business. Stick to what you are good at. A cake baker should also go into the shoe shine business. Joe's Bakery becomes Joe's Bakery and Shoe Shine.
Similarly build the big dumb pipe. Don't try to also sell TV, streaming, home security, home control. Just build that vital infrastructure and be the best in the world at it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:24PM
Joe's Bakery and Shoe Shine's cakes have a nice shine to them though...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:48PM
Is this the latest poll results from Cosmo?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by legont on Thursday July 29 2021, @01:46AM (2 children)
There is always stupid cheap unlimited gas everywhere; all the smartness went into cars.
There is always stupid cheap unlimited grain everywhere; all the smartness went into designer foods.
There is always stupid cheap unlimited human babies future workers; all the smartness went into managers.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:55PM (1 child)
There is always stupid cheap unlimited trolls everywhere; all the smartness went into modding them.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday July 30 2021, @02:42AM
There is no shortage of morons either.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday July 29 2021, @01:55AM (7 children)
That was true then. It's not true anymore.
If you're an innovator looking to bring the next good idea to the internet, you run into innovation-stifling giants like Google, Akamai, CloudFlare, EMC and other giant big data and payment monopolies: if they don't like you, they'll bury you into oblivion faster than you can say "My company won't show up in search results", "My app got delisted from the app store" or "Visa won't process orders for my company no more".
Oh sure, superficially, you have access to the network and you're free to try what you like. But in reality, you have to play by their rules. And if they do like you, they'll steal your idea, come up with their own product and kill you just the same.
What matters isn't where stupid lies. What matters is who controls access to stupid.
And of course, let's not forget that the ultimate stupid is behind the endpoint devices...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:44AM (2 children)
This seems rather cynical and dismissive.
The best example is the one given, namely smart copper versus the internet.
Despite the mega-corps, have been a plethora of comms start ups with some like Discord/Slack becoming highly successful, especially when you expand to include all forms human-to-human communications (e.g. Twitch/Twitter/email).
Even so, the lack of effective anti-trust/pro-competition rules in the US are a separate problem which I agree needs to be addressed.
If you wanted to attack the article I would have gone for how high-level it was. His argues against tech based on gross generalisations and dismisses technologies based on false premises.
Light rail can move more total passengers, more safely and cheaper per person in the long run if you ignore the cost to lay the rails. It also does not use existing, congested roads. (no need for extra bus lanes, for example) Rail networks can be connected to inter-city services. And more.
Some cities already have the rails while some can build them more easily than others.
And there is also the hybrid solution where you have both for obvious reasons.
So yeah. Making an argument based on gross generalisations and a weak analogy is not a wise argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:52PM (1 child)
> This seems rather cynical and dismissive.
Yeah not really. The formation of government (oooh bad!) was essentially a response to abuses of power. When corporations and government team up, guess who is on the other team?
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Friday July 30 2021, @01:07AM
Other corporations that don't have as big a lobbying budget?
(Score: 1, Touché) by khallow on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:26AM (3 children)
Unless, of course, you don't.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen.
Funny thing. Just asserting stuff doesn't make it true.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:54PM (2 children)
Just asserting it doesn't happen (as you always do) doesn't make it false. The practices he mentions are standard procedure [wikipedia.org]. Yes, despite your silly hand waving, they do steal ideas
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:01PM (1 child)
It's good to see that you are somewhat susceptible to reason. Maybe that will be the start of a good trend.
Yes, that is indeed my point. I will continue to employ this argument every time someone thinks that merely stating something makes it true.
Which is much the point of ideas. Their value is in the pilfering. What's missing here is the realization that ideas don't have much value in themselves. So if your business can be destroyed merely by Google stealing your ideas, then you didn't have a business in the first place.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:54PM
:-) As you wish.. Non responsive hand waving dismissal of things that are true is your forte, but it just makes your butt look big
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:22AM (3 children)
If you need postcard metaphors to understand UDP/IP, you might be reading a vapid Forbes article that's probably going to end up pushing some shit-tastic start-up selling blockchain waldos so all us boosways can madly scramble to ride the bubble before the musical chairs stop and anybody left standing becomes an incel. If you need to understand TCP/IP, I recommend a metaphor involving one of USPS' signature confirmation products instead of postcards. If you want tracking with your signature confirmation, I recommend you make sure your ICMP/IP metaphor is unblocked.
A car analogy is fine too.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:42PM (2 children)
Hey, hate to break it to you, but the postcard UDP thing I remember reading in the 90s in network documentation manuals (big thick books--Microsoft office came in a box of like 30 diskettes, and few people at home actually used something more fancy than Wordstar 4.0 or Wordperfect 5.1--on which there was most certainly no electronic manual available to learn about networking from. You'd have better luck learning about any real networking stuff in that era by reading early Phrack text files or a 2600 quarterly than finding good documentation readable as an electronic document--let alone a Forbes article that probably was typeset by a human before it hit the printers).
That postcard anaology probably got reused a few times by 3com in one of their TCP/IP guides that were popular before their executives ran their company aground in a bozo explosion.
That was of course prior to Novell Netware losing out to NT 4.0 in popularity, despite it lingering on. (Which of course supported IPX/SPX just enough to work well in a mostly Microsoft Windows topology without the need of Novell servers running Novell protocols anymore...opening the door for TCP/IP, which was only available as a form of punishment to those still using Novell products when that was reluctantly supported...)
I don't think Forbes knew what a UDP packet was at that time, as they were likely still on IPX/SPX.
It's still an apt description used today in many different "why networking is harder than just enabling DHCP in Windows" books which I am guessing you haven't read any of them. A few suck; it's a very common analogy so it is hard to tell if the people using that analogy understand it or just recite it to sound cool.
And hey ICMP isn't reliable, you want TCP for your signature confirmation. Acknowledged?
(and that last sentence was a joke about tcp--I hope someone gets it!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @02:41AM
Well ok I admit I only got on the Netware wagon as the bindery was going out of style and the writing was on the wall for IPX/SPX.
I already made the signature confirmation TCP joke. I think you missed my traceroute joke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @03:14PM
I also find the post card analogy fitting from a security stand point.
On the internet, most of the time there aren't envelopes to put your packets into.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:37AM (1 child)
This article sounds like babble written by an "AI".
What is it even trying to say? I can't read the full article because the shitheads bitch about my ad blocker.
Nobody ever needed the phone companies permission to build a separate network. It's just that networks are HARD to build, and the phone company got there first. The main reason the Internet was so successful was because it was flexible and technically non-centralized.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:22AM
It says: roads with embedded sensors are stupid. Car makers with products that require smart roads are trying to socialize the cost, privatize the profits and keep the market captive, stay out of them. Instead make the roads dumb (but maintain them) and let the car manufactures compete on the smartness of their car - it will help innovation and increase the robustness.
You don't need the road to tell you how congested it is, Waze managed to do it with a simple application.
The internet was build this way and we don't want an internet (tuned) for Google, Facebook and Netflix. Keep the fuckers out of standards or else you'll be sorry. (“You don’t change to world to fix your problems.”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MostCynical on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:18AM (4 children)
we got lucky..
the telegraph network was relatively cheap to build, and worked with the existing paper/horse model - wherever the line stopped, a horse and rider could continue.
The telephone network was just cables as well- they just managed to get closer to the destination end points.
fundamentally, all the technical issues with network distribution were solved once we had unique phone numbers - IP addresses are fancy phone numbers, and DNS is a very fast version of a switchboard operator...(or a group of them, who know how to 'get through' to places, when a line has been cut)
Dumb roads are cheaper than "smart: roads (durr), but maglevs and very fast trains are better for some use cases (and the cost is in providing 'stable' infrastructure.
Smart cars also rely on stable infrastructure (if a building falls across a road or a bridge collapses, the car will (hopefully) stop). The same applies to every IoT device...
How 'dumb' can the infrastructure be?
Old fashioned trains rely on signals, so they don't run into other trains on the same lines.
Roads have signs and signals, or cars would be crashing even more than they do now.
All the networking models for data require some way of dealing with packet loss, collision, and interception.. leaving that to the end point device is fraught with danger..
Do we want Indian local roads or superhighways with no speed limits? (massive differences in infrastructure investment, including driver training, quality of vehicles, through to cleaning/sweeping regularly and moving breakdowns quickly)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:31AM (2 children)
I don't think there is an idea terrible enough that it's not better for some use cases. Protip: even full out global nuclear war, a global pandemic of air-borne ebola, or any other disaster/dystopia scenario you can dream up is better for some use cases.
This is damning with the faintest possible praise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:50PM
A +1 for you, Sir.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @03:08PM
I don't think anyone has come up with a realistic economic justification for maglev trains. Really expensive for what you get, and it can never win in a speed race against an airplane on routes where planes currently fly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:27AM
May I want neither, but somewhere decent in between, thanks?
I still want to be able to travel on a road with a decent speed limitation and in relative security even if the flash flooding destroyed part of a "smart network" 200km away from me or a bush fire is raging 50km back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:33AM (2 children)
The premise of the article is flawed to begin with. TCP/IP has all the capabilities that the whole telephone network has. If you start building on top of that, sure you get more intelligent solutions than what the telephone network offers. Also the premise that the "smarts" moved to the edge is false. Contrarily, end device degenerate more and more into terminals (the web).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @03:04PM
TCP/IP is a dumb protocol. While it is true that not all the smarts are in the ultimate end devices on the Net because there are intermediate devices that MAY distribute the traffic somewhat, these devices are not an embedded part of the Internet itself. They are not part of the standard; they are not required to be installed everywhere on the Net. Everything can be replaced by another competitor. Example: some other company could replace Akamai to carry out Content Distribution Networks with a solution of their own.
In the phone system, EVERYTHING is decided by the network because the network was designed, built, and owned by a monopoly: Bell. Of course, Bell was mandated to open it up after a court ordered Bell to break up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @10:01PM
yeah the author is actually ignorant of what happens inside the routers. I guess that helps make his argument though, in that being dumb is superior for him because he doesn't really have to understand what he's maligning and can spout a bunch of wrong stuff to people that don't know any better and still look like he has good ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @12:36PM
TFA suggests just keep the roads dumb like the Internet.
Well, that confuses simple and dumb.
Communications networks smartened quite a bit to get to the Internet.
(Think snail mail, telegraph, and voice phone)
The neat thing about the Internet is that they got just smart enough to support smarts at the edge and no more.
A hard balance to meet.
The question for roads is where is that balance?
We already have controlled access for Interstates.
Perhaps some defined, dependable, pasive lane markers for the robocar?
The system currently requires that drivers act according to a set of rules.
If they don't then blame is according to who didn't.
Robo will probably try for the same set of rules, but I suspect that 'what would a human do?' is an impossible goal and some balance will be required.
That may requires some minimal adjustments to what a road is.
Kind of like the minimum set of functions that come with Internet access.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:31PM
Some idiot with a backhoe somewhere can cause large regions of a country to lose internet service. I thought the idea was to route around the brain damage.
An internet outage can prevent auto refueling stations from accepting payment using small plastic cards.
ULA: Internet outage delays Starliner rollout to launch pad [mynews13.com] (alternate theory: Boeing Starliner nowhere near ready to fly, this is just an excuse to cover it up until some day in the future.)
One data center having a problem can affect many sites seemingly unrelated -- except by their dependency / addiction to a specific cloud provider.
Internet outages can disrupt business. Remote meetings get counseled. Businesses that subscribe to cloud based SaaS products suddenly are unable to schedule appointments or orchiectomy surgeries, operate remotely located industrial plants, control remote warning sirens or road signage, turn in homework assignments, or miss important twitter posts. Online gambling comes to a halt. Dark web sales interrupted.
Streaming TVs are now dark. Gamers in dark basements are huddled around candles.
The world needs internet to be dependable. When internet goes down, people lose hope that the next Windows Update might finally be the one that would make their computing experience less miserable.
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