I recently listened to an episode of BBC Radio 4's "Peter Day's World of
Business" (A podcast series I highly recommend), about Chattanooga
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03wxx6w
Chattanooga is a US city which used to be very much a heavy industry and
transport city, and has suffered job losses and economic hard times; it
has a (not unusual for the US) public (i.e. city-owned) utility company,
which has recently installed Gigabit Fibre Internet throughout the city.
One of the items on the program discussed the benefits of Gig Internet
(as in "is it actually important ?"). The example given was a
radiographer's office; each radiographer needs to download and examine
multiple high-res images. Because it's the US, these are typically NOT
in-house or on-campus downloads, they are from separate businesses
(hospitals, clinics, ...) and hence they are downloaded and viewed over
the Internet; other countries might have different contexts :-) They
are definitely high-res, and cannot (by law) be compressed (*), so each
examination will require multiple 10-40 Mbyte images to be transferred.
The discussion of the saving from Gig-Internet (versus "ultrafast
Internet" - say 20 - 40 Mbit rates) was interesting. For a typical
examination, download times are cut from 6-7 seconds to 1/2 second; and
both image sizes and the number of images per examination are increasing
constantly.
Since a typical radiographer does 20,000 exams per year, this gives a
time saving of one man-week per year - and hence easily justifies the
cost of using / installing Gig-Internet. And the hard-to-quantify but
definitely important saving is in decreasing the distraction or
loss-of-focus from those small delays.
So - this is all sounding good, and everyone should try to get a Gig
Internet connection. As a Cisco shareholder, I like that idea :-)
However, part of me knows that this is the wrong conclusion. "It's a
software problem, Jim"
It's well known that a radiographer will examine multiple sets of images
per day or per hour - there's no reason why they shouldn't be pre-loaded
or pre-cached on site, or even on the individual PC being used - or
indeed directly within the app being used, so that they are *instantly*
available. Very, very occasionally there might be a last-minute
emergency scan to be examined - but the 99.999% case is predictable and
cachable.
So - if you are developing apps of any kind - think about whether or how
or when you can predict users' needs and actions, and make full use of
the new async features of Livecode Indy/Business to do this as needed :-)
-- Alex.
(*) they can be compressed - but they cannot be compressed with any
lossy algorithm (e.g. JPG images). The original version of the laws said
"cannot be compressed in any way"; it took a LONG time and lots of
effort to convince US lawmakers that there was a difference between
loss-free compression (e.g. ZIP, RLE encoding) and lossy compression
(e.g. JPEG, MP3).
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