On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Steve Richfield <steve.richfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Another pet peeve of mine. They could/should do MUCH more fault tolerance > than they now are. Present puny efforts are completely ignorant of past > developments, e.g. Tandem Nonstop computers.
Or perhaps they just figure once the mean time between failure is on the order of, say, a year, customers aren't willing to pay much for further improvement. (Note that things like financial databases which still have difficulty scaling horizontally, do get more fault tolerance than an ordinary PC. Note also that they pay a hefty premium for this, more than you or I would be willing or able to pay.) >> The power in my neighborhood fails once every few years (and that's >> from all causes, including 'the cable guys working up the street put a >> JCB through the line', not just network crashes). If you're getting >> lots of power failures in your neighborhood, your electricity supply >> company is doing something wrong. > > If you look at the failures/bandwidth, it is pretty high. So what? Nobody except you cares about that metric. Anyway, the phone system is in the same league, and the Internet is a lot closer to it than it was in the past, and those have vastly higher bandwidth. >> Yes, our repeated successes in simultaneously improving both the size >> and stability of very large scale networks (trade, > > NOT stable at all. Just look at the condition of the world's economy. Better than it was in the 1930s, despite a lot greater complexity. >> postage, telegraph, >> electricity, road, telephone, Internet) > > None of these involve feedback, the fundamental requirement to be a "network" > rather than a simple tree structure. This despite common misuse of the term > "network" to cover everything with lots of interconnections. All of them involve massive amounts of feedback. Unless you're adopting a private definition of the word feedback, in which case by your private definition, if it is to be at all consistent, neither brains nor computers running AI programs will involve feedback either, so it's immaterial. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
