De verkiezingen zijn geweest, wat nu? Maand #5

▼ Vandaag is het vijf maanden geleden dat we een nieuwe tweede kamer kozen. Sindsdien zijn PVV, VVD, NSC en BBB in gesprek over het vormen van een nieuwe regering. We zijn nu halverwege de derde (in)formatieronde, waarbij het erop lijkt dat de partijen het in gezamenlijke gesprekken nergens eens over kunnen worden, dus de twee informateurs schrijven zelf vanalles op en gaan dan vooral één-op-één met de verschillende partijleiders in gesprek.

Over drie weken zou deze ronde klaar moeten zijn met een akkoord op hoofdlijnen als resultaat. Zou het kunnen dat dit gaat lukken? In dat geval zou het niet volledig onvoorstelbaar zijn dat er nog snel voor de Europese verkiezingen drie weken later een kabinet gevormd kan worden. Waarna het uitwerken van de plannen gaat beginnen en de echte pijnpunten boven tafel komen. Maar in elk geval kunnen de betrokken partijen dan met opgeheven hoofd de Europese verkiezingen in.

Maar wat als er over drie weken niet een akkoord ligt? Zullen de rechtse partijen dan vlak voor de verkiezingen willen breken? Een kleine campagne-pauze lijkt mij dan meer voor de hand te liggen.

Frans Timmermans heeft ondertussen aangegeven dat de onderhandelende partijen wat hem betreft tot 1 juni hebben. Als ze er dan nog niet uit zijn wil hij in beeld komen. Zou er iets achter die datum van 1 juni zitten? Dat is minder dan een week voor de Europese verkiezingen. Volgens mij is Timmermans geslepen genoeg om zich op deze manier van munitie te voorzien om de onderhandelende partijen na een half jaar stilstaand water hard aan te vallen en zo wellicht een goede verkiezingsuitslag te behalen.

De echte vraag is hoe de zaken er dan voor staan na die verkiezingen. Geert Wilders staat huizenhoog in de peilingen, maar het is maar de vraag of zijn kiezers in groten getale zullen opkomen bij verkiezingen voor een instituut waar zij weinig mee hebben. Wellicht kunnen we nog wat Twitter-tirades verwachten om hier wat aan te doen.

Op dit moment is de conventionele wijsheid dat niemand (behalve Wilders) wat heeft aan nieuwe verkiezingen. Maar als de overige partijen redelijk goed wegkomen bij de Europese verkiezingen zou het wel eens aantrekkelijk kunnen zijn om publiek de conclusie te trekken dat met Wilders niet samen te werken valt, en dan wel voor die nieuwe verkiezingen te gaan in de hoop dat de kiezer met een werkbaardere uitslag komt. Dat zou dan wel ergens in juni besloten moeten worden om die verkiezingen nog dit jaar te kunnen houden.

Mijn schrikbeeld is dat onderhandelingen in de zomer doorgaan en het pas daarna klapt waardoor we pas in 2025 opnieuw naar de stembus kunnen. En dan weer opnieuw formeren... Dan hebben we twee jaar verloren. Wat op zich geen probleem is voor de rechtse partijen, want die zijn vooral heel erg tegen allerlei dingen.

Permalink - posted 2024-04-22

Upgrading Fiber To The Home to terabit speeds

▼ Last week, Jaap van Till asked me if BGP would be capable of supporting the terabit class interconnectivity that he foresees we’ll need in the future, possibly due to the rise of artificial intelligence. He explains his reasoning in the blog post What Link speeds will we need for AI, where he quotes VAN TILL’s CONJECTURE:

The network connection Wide Area access speed will grow in time until it matches the internal device BUS speed of the more and more complex processors and datastores.

And then concludes that 14 Tbps external links will be required in 2039. Today I can get 4 Gbps where I live. So that means a 70% speed increase per year.

Let’s first get that BGP question out of the way: I see no problems. 25 years ago I ran BGP over 64 and 128 kbps links without trouble. Six orders of magnitude later, BGP is still fine, and there is no reason to believe that even faster speeds will be a problem, just as long as the packet loss rates remain minimal.

But what would terabit class network connectivity at home look like?

Actually, I think we have all the parts to build this today. With Wavelength Devision Multiplexing (WDM), it’s possible to transmit multiple data streams through a single fiber by using slightly different wavelengths/frequencies of infrared laser light. Coarse WDM (CWDM) is relatively cheap and appropriate over shorter distances, with 18 wavelengths standardized over high performance fiber. (Fewer over most existing fiber.) For long distances, dense WDM (DWDM) can use as many as 160 wavelengths over a single fiber pair.

Bandwidth per wavelength is now 100 or 200 Gbps, and expected to increase in the future. So anything between say 10 x 100 Gbps = 1 Tbps and the 20 Tbps used by modern seacables should be possible. The catch is of course the cost.

The difficulty is with the transmitting side, as this requires a tuned laser per wavelength. On the receiving side, the wavelengths can be split using a prism and hit a set of wideband receivers. As someone who is definitely not in the business of building this equipment, it seems to me that a system with one or a small number of transmitters, a passive optical bus, and a large(r) set of receivers is definitely something that could enjoy radical performance vs cost improvements over time. And it fits perfectly with the most efficient / high speed way to connect homes to the internet that we have today: PON (passive optical network). So just add additional wavelengths to existing PON installations to gain more bandwidth in the downstream direction.

However, now we have a new challenge: TCP/IP is not a good fit for sending the massive data streams that would make good use of such a network. The problem is that TCP tries to adjust its end-to-end data transmission rate to available bandwidth. This means it needs to wait for acknowledgments from the receiving side to know it can increase its transmission rate, maintain it, or slow the transmission rate down. Downloading 100 MB over a 1 Tbps link takes less than a millisecond. But even over PON, the round-trip-time is a millisecond or two. This means that the bottleneck is the number of round trip TCP requires to reach that full terabit speed. Even if that’s an extremely unrealistic 10 RTTs, that means the total transmission time is now 11 ms, effectively only using a tenth of the available bandwidth.

So we need to overhaul TCP/IP for the super high speed stuff and instead use something more like circuit switching / time division multiplexing / token passing. Yes, everything old is new again! So for instance reserve ten 100 μs timeslots and transmit ten 10 MB “megapackets”.

So I think all of this is highly doable!

Well, there is the slight challenge of how to pipe all that bandwidth into your laptop without connecting/disconnecting that fiber all the time. Maybe use eight Thunderbolt 5 interfaces in parallel to reach 960 Gbps?

Permalink - posted 2024-04-09

How movie/TV watching has changed

▼ Back in the 1990s, for a good number of years, I would go to see the "sneak preview" every week. One show a week would be dedicated to showing a movie that hadn't been released yet. And which movie would be a surprise. This meant I ended up seeing all big ticket movies, as well as a good number of additional smaller movies. And with rare exceptions, I would be happy to sit through them.

These days, I very often find myself getting bored with a movie that I'm watching. Now obviously a lot has changed in the intermediate almost 30 years. Have movies gotten worse? I'd say they have. But not so much that this explains me happily watching pretty much any movie in the 1990s vs getting bored by about half of them in the 2020s. Do we have a shorter attention span and more distractions today than we had 30 years ago? Again, yes. But I don't think that's the full explanation.

I think the reason it's so hard to focus on any movie or TV show/episode is that we have so much more choice today. Back in the 1990s I would have a choice between maybe a handful of movies that seemed decent prospects. Or when watching TV, there were about a dozen channels with limited VCR-based time shifting. So unless something was completely terminally boring, we'd sit through it.

These days, I subscribe to three streaming services and I have around 100 movies and TV show seasons on DVD. So how much time should I give a movie or TV show before giving up and giving something else a try? Definitely not the full 90 (or 140...) minutes for movies. For TV shows, why would I give something with a poor pilot a second chance? "Slow burn", sure, have me waste hours and then decide it sucks. I don't think so.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Or is it? Should we give our content more time to grab our interest?

Back in the 1990s and before we definitely gave boring and/or slow content too much of our time. It seems obvious we went too far in the other direction these days. But where do we draw the line?

The past few days I watched "No Time to Die" and "The Age of Adeline". The former is a bond flick which was way too long. There was definitely some good stuff there, but 2 hours and 43 minutes worth. With "The Age of Adeline", everything was slow to begin with and didn't pick up speed later. The science fiction element where we ask ourselves what happens if you grow older but physically stay young forever are interesting, but handled in a boring way.

In these days where hundreds of other movies and TV shows are competing for our attention (not to mention video games), being boring is a deadly sin. I finished both these movies by ignoring the sunken cost fallacy, but in retrospect, I should have bailed out at some point.

Two things that don't help here are the increasing length of blockbusters. I recently saw Schindler's List at 3:15. It was painful. I needed a bunch of 25-minute sessions to get through it. Yes, because of the subject matter. But also the length.

Permalink - posted 2024-02-19