Posted by
Roger Critchlow-2 on
Mar 28, 2008; 3:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Wed-Blender-Stereo-and-Computational-Photography-Videography-for-Cultural-Preservation-tp525972p525981.html
Back to the original question, and taking "bus" in a more general way,
ethernet has the properties that Phil is looking for: the resource is
limited, the users allocate and share by each pursuing a local rule, and the
whole thing melts down when it gets overloaded. The solutions proposed to
solve the melt down, such as token ring and ATM, mostly involve a less
anarchic sharing algorithm. Yet the most successful solution to the melt
down has been to increase the size of the shared resource.
So the history of shared wire networking, the last 30 years, gives you a
case study in engineering design responding to a particular resource
contention problem and how the economics of it all worked out.
-- rec --
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:54 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:
> Phil Henshaw wrote:
> > That's sort of a central control mechanism for dealing with independent
> > users that were not smart enough to share the limited resource on their
> own.
> > If the independent users were to learn enough about each other's needs
> they
> > might learn ways to cooperate and make better use of the limited shared
> > resource.
> It's not that they are not smart enough to figure out what the resource
> is and how to share it. It's that in this case the real failure would
> be ongoing haphazard negotiation by users, which is clumsy and poorly
> informed and its realization is usually not the primary problem they are
> interested in solving. Better to design an automated load balancing
> algorithm and leave that work to a fast and patient computer. The
> identification of general principles of what constitutes fair use (e.g.
> equal access to memory and cycles and known turnaround time), is the
> social/organizational question, and it's separate from the implementation.
>
> So my question in response to yours, in the context of the subject
> line, was: "Is there really a resource under contention?"
> Or is it just a venue for someone to interleave themselves as a
> controller and make themselves more important than they ought to be.
> Lots of people have vested interests in existing inefficiencies, the
> management of conflict, and the facilitation of people who would rather
> not think.
>
> Marcus
>
>
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