economies of scale (was Re: solution to NAT...)
[PPP over TCP through NATs] doesn't provide any more global address space Why create more supply when it can be so easy to reduce demand? This reminds me of California's electricity crisis. It seems the internet administration community can easily do their part for this very fundamental aspect of fault-tolerance. For example, with this kind of a product: http://www.protonenergy.com/protonweb/html/energy.html What are the most popular such systems that take advantage of the economies of scale involved with not having a different UPS for each system or room or building or company or municipality? I ask not because I want to perpetuate the status quo, but mainly because this kind of thing makes it so much easier to introduce wind power, which costs 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, with modular turbine-powered windmills that can take less than six months to build. And although I know conservation is a better answer, I don't see people as being too predisposed towards it in most cases. If people are so fixated on growth, at least try to make sure they don't get themselves in an unsustainable bubble situation. Cheers, James
Re: economies of scale (was Re: solution to NAT...)
Keith, You are certainly correct: We are accustomed to thinking of conservation as a Good Thing, but an effective conservation plan can actually make a system less able to cope with fluctuations in load. That reminds me of another economic analogy to a contempoary internet engineering problem: multihoming's impact on the rounting table size in relation to the impact of multiple providers on the efficiency of health care. With increasing multihoming, the edge-network routing table size also increases, causing a lack of efficiency in routing which can have a significant impact on saturated network health. So, some people work towards the aggregation of routes by careful renumbering when possible. (RFC 2519) Similarly, if health care is limited and the destitute poor begin infecting the otherwise wealthy, then increasing medical costs will soon become very inefficient, overwhelming beneficial effects of unregulated free-market competition. Therefore, it is necessary to aggregate medical care to achieve the best possible economies of scale. Who is working towards this? http://www.allies-now.com Cheers, James
