Really, it's not often that anyone –
other than News Limited columnists talking climate change – can
manage to cram so much utter drivel into the space of one column as
this.
“I want to think we're too smart to
pour 40, 50, 60 billion dollars, whatever the final cost, into a
fibre-optic network system that sounds impressive now but may look
like the greatest white elephant since the attempt to turn the
stinking (literally!) Salton Sea near Palm Springs into a rich
thang's playground; that a dozen years down the track the NBN will be
the equivalent of "visionaries" 150 years ago building a
network of hundreds of thousands of stables across the country to
cope with the growth in horse transport.”
I think this individual, the founder of
a surf magazine yclept Derek Rielly, is a subscriber to the “fibre
will soon be obsolete” school of what passes for “thinking”
(even when we used entangled photons to overcome the speed of light,
fibre will be a better way to move them around than through the air.
Noise, and all that.).
“According to the projections of the
NBN Co we'll be getting a gigabyte per second once it comes into our
lives.”
Well, there's a scale thing right
there. The NBN is measured in bits (and megabits, and gigabits), not
“a gigabyte per second”. And it's not a projection, the kit is
already gigabit-capable wherever the network is, but you know, this
is a column. It's like climate change: facts are optional when you
have a dumb opinion to tout.
“Wouldn't it make more sense to just
invest 20 billion dollars into developing the world's finest
compression software?”
Well, no. Actually, no with a double
serve of clue-stick, multiplied by “what on Earth?”
“Something like America's Manhattan
Project in World War II that created a way to annihilate the world in
just six years.”
Yeah, thanks for that analogy. But
let's continue …
“All of us are familiar with today's
compression software such as jpegs and PDFs which work little
miracles every second of every day.”
At which point, head meets desk,
because this sage advice, presumably passed by an editor between
lunch and Alka-Seltzer, comes from someone who knows not the
difference between “software” and “file format”.
Oh, and (say) a PDF is already
compressed, which is why (say) PKZip ignores it.
Save me.
“Can you imagine the value in
creating compression software so good it shoves the paradigm of
computing way into left field? We'll be emailing movies, high-res
photo albums, complete TV commercials, magazines, all over our
existing networks and through our existing software.”
OK, that's enough quotation.
Compression is mathematics, and it's
very well understood. It's a problem the world has been working on
for nigh on sixty years, in the digital world.
Of course, even the ancients practiced
a form of compression: setting a fire on a signal tower to signify
invasion, for example, is a very compressed message in a specific
context.
But as for modern communications:
compression starts when Claude Shannon explained the limits of any
communication medium: channel minus noise equals bandwidth. For any
medium, you can precisely predict how much information it can carry.
So compression tries to reduce the
amount of information that has to be carried – it says “what can
I get into 'bandwidth'?” And it uses a lot of maths, and lots of
billions have gone into it over three decades, and the world has
created very good compression.
And all of the decades of compression
work have been a matter of increments. Every now and again, someone
claims a bigger breakthrough than anyone ever before.
Like the
Adams Platform.
Next time, get the surfboard to write
the column.