On Fri, 2015-06-26 at 13:39 -0500, Rafael Possamai wrote: > How does one fully utilize a gigabit link for home use? For a single person > it is overkill.
This sentiment keeps popping up. It's a failure of vision. To suggest that "single people" or "ordinary people" or any other set of presumably average and uninteresting people will never be able to fully utilise the amazing properties of X, and that they can and should be satisfied with some limited version of X or the even more limited alternative Y, is to completely miss the point. And to actually provide no more than that is to build a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at pretty much any modern technology and you can be sure that when it was first invented someone wearing the then equivalent of a brown cardigan said "yes, that's all very well, but what use will ordinary people ever have for it?". When the first little fire sputtered into life in some Neanderthal cave you can bet that some troglodyte said "no point make bigger, me warm enough, more hot waste of effort", but of course he hadn't thought of bronze, iron, steel, glass, welding or rocketry. Or the steam engine or the internal combustion engine. What luck that his kids ignored him, eh? As William Gibson wrote, "the street finds its uses for things". I can't think of anything I would or could do with a terabit Internet link - but it's not me who needs it. It's the kids now in school who will build it, and their kids will think it commonplace. And they will look back at you and me and think "how did our grandparents ever manage with only a couple of gigabits? How limiting!" And while they are thinking that, some bright young things will report that they think they've got a primitive exabit link working... Regards, K. PS: There are only three real values for network speeds, just as there are only three values for amount of personal fortune, RAM, disk space and CPU speed. The three values are "not enough", "enough" and "I don't know". Always aspire to "I don't know". -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4 Old fingerprint: EC67 61E2 C2F6 EB55 884B E129 072B 0AF0 72AA 9882