Tuesday, June 29, 2004
I[diot], Cringely
If Robert Cringely's latest idea were a ploy to get him telco speaking gigs it'd be helping the telcos spend their way into extinction, and that'd be its main strength.
Cringely argues that the telcos should keep their circuit networks, because if we'd only throw a few billion at vision research we'd be able to send real-time DVD-quality video over 64 kbit/s lines. That's right; ignore here-and-now affordable gigabit technology for a pie-in-the-sky research project.
"After all," Cringely waxes naive, "what is our retina but a video encoder, our optic nerve but a network, and our visual cortex but a video decoder?" All the telcos have to do is, "build it all into an appliance packed full of DSPs and priced like a video game console." Not only that, "the algorithms have already been worked out and are running today in Matlab." It will cure blindness too.
Why isn't this miracle project rolling into the telco network today? Because the telcos aren't thinking. He got one thing right.
UPDATE: This article from Espen's blog actually takes Cringely's pop neurology seriously enough to critique it. The brain is NOT a computer, and nerves are NOT digital transmission lines.
Cringely argues that the telcos should keep their circuit networks, because if we'd only throw a few billion at vision research we'd be able to send real-time DVD-quality video over 64 kbit/s lines. That's right; ignore here-and-now affordable gigabit technology for a pie-in-the-sky research project.
"After all," Cringely waxes naive, "what is our retina but a video encoder, our optic nerve but a network, and our visual cortex but a video decoder?" All the telcos have to do is, "build it all into an appliance packed full of DSPs and priced like a video game console." Not only that, "the algorithms have already been worked out and are running today in Matlab." It will cure blindness too.
Why isn't this miracle project rolling into the telco network today? Because the telcos aren't thinking. He got one thing right.
UPDATE: This article from Espen's blog actually takes Cringely's pop neurology seriously enough to critique it. The brain is NOT a computer, and nerves are NOT digital transmission lines.
Comments:
And I thought I was crass in my comment at http://www.espen.com/weblog/archives/000106.html....
Espen (eyeballing the circuits...)
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Espen (eyeballing the circuits...)
