Peter St. John wrote:
The one node refusing to send the doc, and the other note receiving it
anyway, cracked me the *** up! Thanks
P.S. the Google April Fool's actually got me thinking (network via
plumbing). Water conducts acoustics real well. So a free peer-to-peer
network within a city, or some counties, would be easy and require no
new infrastructure. I imagine the bandwidth would be weak and certainly
there'd be a problem getting between cities, but I don't think the water
and sewer utiltiies claim rights to the acoustic bandwidth (unlike
hijacking phone lines with stuff that would interfere with existing
telephony) so all free.
In general, water conduction requires a continuous column of water
unless you're willing to overdrive the signal to allow it to modulate an
intermediate air column. The presence of "solids" also modifies the
index of refraction and can induce standing waves and cause you to flush
your signal to noise ratio. Also, the use of lift stations to continue
a sanitary sewer system's contents toward their ultimate destination (A
water treatment plant [central routing factility?]) would require
significant effort in order to synchronize the lift station's mechanical
interfaces with the modulated waveforms in the sewer pipes. For these
reasons, use of a sanitary sewer system is likely impractical.
Of course, one DOES have a continuous column of water in city
distribution systems. This opens all sorts of possibilities for other
networking benefits. First, however, let's review some of the drawbacks:
1. Most water distribution pipes are buried at some point in their
transit from reservoir to user. This tends to dampen their movement and
that of their relatively incompressible content, by decreasing the
pipe's ability to expand and contract. Thus, dynamic range is reduced.
2. Except for those about to rupture, copper water pipe tends to be
relatively rigid, and its length tends to act as a low-pass filter.
Combined with the multitude of joints in 10-foot pipe sections, and
ignoring for the moment the potential to use longer copper tubing
extruded and packaged as 50 foot rolls, this would represent a
high-order filter with a high Q value. Calculating the resonant
frequency of such a filter is left to the student.
3. A large number of newer construction commercial and residential
structures, as well as those which have undergone plumbing renovation in
the last 10 years or so, will have internal piping of CPVC or PEX
origin. The mechanical interface to the copper transmission line... er,
piping... would require significant impedance matching to diminish an
additional standing wave introduction that could dampen audio frequency
amplitude below the threshold of detection.
4. Water mains made of virtually any material are effectively rigid
when placed in the ground. Thus, water (incompressible for the sake of
this discussion) would be required to store its acoustic energy within
the liquid matrix, or would have to transfer that energy to to velocity
modifications, thus making shaving and showing inconvenient.
5. Because we are, obviously, discussing a service oriented
architecture, the concept of widespread use and availability to a large
number of users should be obvious. In this regard, significant work
will be required to engender a new form of liquid wave division
multiplexing to allow carrying more than one signal at a time. This
ties to #2 above in that, to be efficient, the filter elements should be
dynamic and self-modifying. It's been my experience that water piping
tends to be self-modifying only during periods of extended and
significant cold weather here in Texas. However, as said pipes tend to
lose their structural integrity and contents in this event, message
reliability seems to suffer in the face of self-modifying filter elements.
On the positive side, large lakes (surface reservoirs) could be used as
capacitive elements, tending to dampen the amplitude of an
over-modulated signal. Driving the signal to saturation and beyond is a
noted problem for teenage users and network component salesmen.
Standpipes and other overhead storage containers could serve, once
modulated appropriately, as broadcasting repeaters (a switching
mechanism that takes advantage of the WWDM [water wave division
multiplexing] scheme has yet to be determined) to support multicast or
anycast operation.
Finally, complete documentation would have to be generated, and rgb or
one of his clones has not stepped forward to offer such assistance. As
he (or one of his clones) usually anticipates major innovations in
technology and pre-writes said documentation, this casts a pall on the
potential viability of the concept.
gerry
On 4/1/07, *Douglas Eadline* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
I just posted some interesting news on Cluster Monkey.
http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/192/1/
--
Doug
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
