SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Modern-day Renaissance man Nick Szabo de-constructs the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1830. Szabo organizes his short essay around the theme of inventions improving trade routes and supply paths to mines and farms; along the way, he points out a couple analogies to the Internet age.
Horse-drawn carriages and wagons had been in use in north-western Europe since the Middle Ages. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, this mode of transportation was optimized through improvements to wheels, tires, shock absorption, and roads. It then became economically feasible to build out canals and navigate rivers to haul the cargo long distances, with horses used most heavily for "the last mile", e.g. transport of materials and goods from mines and farms.
Efficient bulk transportation is needed all the way between the iron mine, the coal mine, and the smelter. Because the cost per mile of water transport was so much smaller than the costs of land transport, this “last few miles to the mine” problem usually played a dominant role in transportation economics, somewhat analogous to the “last mile” problem in modern cable networks.
"Metcalfe's Law" - the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users - also came into play, as inventions and improvements to land transportation spurred investment in sea transport, and vice versa.
Metcalfe noticed Szabo's essay.
Bob Metcalfe @BobMetcalfe
Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law (one of my favorites) and nothing less than the Industrial Revolution
The first paragraph of the essay contains several links to past essays Szabo has written on related subjects.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Blackmoore on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:20PM
It looks like Mesh is being touted (at least in the US) as a way to provide after a disaster; (which is curious since i'd expect the power would be out) or as a drop in for places that lack infrastructure to start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking [wikipedia.org]
the http://project-byzantium.org/ [project-byzantium.org] project looks like it hasnt had an update in a year; and i dont have the time to check all of the others.
But anyway- the damn thing isnt going to be resilient to an actual attack to the network, be it through disruption of signal or some more sophisticated attack on the nodes - it wasn't designed to deal with that.
So; how to deal with it?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:36PM
There is one app on the android market (serval by speak freely) that has a grand total of under 2000 downloads.
It purports to build a wifi network so that you can communicate with something up to 200 feet away. (which is about the maximum distance for wifi on a smartphone) So the density of users needed for this to work at all is rather large. Great for a Occupy movement, or maybe Burningman, but otherwise pretty useless.
Unless a LOT of people have this downloaded and configured and played with ahead of time it will be useless.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 23 2014, @04:20PM
"after a disaster" In this case the disaster is censorship and spying. Mesh networks could become a way around it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Thursday October 23 2014, @05:19PM
well I agree on that - and the "disaster" that is the availability of access in some areas that the monopolies don't provide coverage; or provide awful coverage.
but in either case the "backbone" or the network needs to be more resilient to attack, and encrypted in the transmission process. more options on connectivity would be good too since a single wifi channel could be blocked by fairly inexpensive means.
in the end that really means creating an available distribution - or addon package that will eventually go viral in popular use; or so damn solid that corporations start using it as the base OS in devices.