From: Anton Aylward (anton_at_the-wire.com)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 05:25:12 PDT
On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 07:18, Joost van de Griek wrote:
> On 2003-05-06 13:03, Karel Jansens wrote:
> > There is no technology to pick locks, crack safes or murder people. There is
> > technology that can be used to do all those things, but the same technology
> > can be used to save people's lives as well.
>
> You are of course right. Electric chairs were not designed to kill. :-/
Indeed.
They were designed as a marketing tool by Edison to discourage people
from using his competitor's (i.e. Telsa's) alternating current and to
use his direct current instead.
As you can see, the idea backfired. All large-scale electrical systems
use AC. Even though the logic behind running AC into your house then
low voltage DC to the baseboard outlets (for hi-fi and computers and
other 5/12 volt semiconductor devices and for the highly efficient low
voltage halogen lights) is sound, we run AC to the device and have
per-device step-down transformers.
A comparison, to refer to some of Mike Palpinsky's papers on networking,
is to use TCP/IP for all networks, even to the LAN and WLAN. The LAN
doesn't need the heavy protocols, routing and so on. Novell or simple
MAC frames is more efficient at the LAN level. Palpinsky's argument
about end-to-end applied at one time, but now we're hiding the LANs
behind NATing firewalls and routers, we don't have that. The NAT is
doing a "protocol conversion".
How much is the dominance of IP at the LAN level a triumph of marketing
over efficiency?
/anton
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