OnLive Founder Claims "Impossible" Wireless Breakthrough

[Mister Linton]

Shannon's Law sounds stupid and I would be disinclined to believe that crap to begin with. If a wireless signal can be sent instantly or almost instantly to a device, then the only resriciton on how fast info can be sent is the transmitting device and the recieving device. (i.e. make modems and phones that can encode/decode info faster, and the sky is the limit)

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

If this ACTUALLY is true and works...

Then I DEMAND that any attempts to institute Usage Based Billing in Canada be LAUGHED out of court. with the throwing of tomatoes.

 

[Loboludo]

Shannon's Law sounds stupid and I would be disinclined to believe that crap to begin with. If a wireless signal can be sent instantly or almost instantly to a device, then the only resriciton on how fast info can be sent is the transmitting device and the recieving device. (i.e. make modems and phones that can encode/decode info faster, and the sky is the limit)

Its not the speed that is limited but the amount of information.
Think of it this way.
You have a clear lake in which you throw a small rock. The induced waves from the rock are your signal and each wave peak is one information.
You can clearly distinguish them if the peaks don't touch.

The next day you come back and the weather is stormy. The surface of the lake is noise and you throw the stone again. This time the noise from weather conceal your waves and you can only see them by throwing a larger stone.

This analogy might not be the perfect one to describe the mathematical model but it shows the principle behind it quite well I think.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

phone/cable companies try all the time to get you to bundle unnecessary shit together into getting you shit that you don't need

I meant stuff like charging you for receiving calls. I refuse to ever pay my provider for a received call, that shit just doesn't fly with a legitimate provider.

oh okay, i'm not positive but i think because of the wireless capabilities of how cell phones/towers work, i am pretty sure if they didn't make us pay for it it'd be insane..but i'm not saying your reason is any less legitimate because of that or is that right in any possible way.


but hey, if your satisfied as you obviously are, no big deal

 

[(LK)]

Publicity stunt. The tech fizzles and then they say to the world "hey we didn't revolutionize science but we revolutionized gaming! *wink*"

 

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

Well I hope his claims are real and that this does replace cellphone towers, but I still won't bother with OnLive.

 

[draythefingerless]

yes i was surprised by OnLive too, until i found out you need really good internet and living in a good USA city to have a good reception. OnLive right now is the equivalent of high class restaurants. Sure, theyre good and worth it, but only if you live in the big city where they are. Otherwise, taking a hundred mile trip just to eat filet mignon at 100 dollars isnt worth it. and neither is OnLive.

I live in the UAE, my internet is utter shit and I'm lucky to get about 300-400 kbs download speed. I run onlive demos flawlessly.

Your point is moot.

and i live in Europe, with over 1mb internet, and it fucking sucks and lags. YOUR point is moot too.

If you don't even understand my point, you can't call it moot.

If someone else with even shittier internet than you, and someone who's farther away than the USA because apparently "you need to be in a large US city aherpa derp" still gets a great connection to Onlive, the problem is your connection, not the service.

1. learn to read beyond literalism. i used USA cities, but its just a term. what i meant was, developed large clusters of people. HERPA DERP. and as addendum, when i say sth is shitty or fucking awful, i dont mean theyre covered in shit or that they are having sex with an adjective. really. :/

2. you didnt get my point either. i do not speak on my namesake alone. its widely known OnLive isnt well distributed because of internet connection limitations wich most people have. and sure, you live in the UAE. heres a fun fact. who else is using up your OnLive servers bandwidth in UAE, or even, in the area where you live? its not just a matter of my conection, but how many people are also trying to connect. unlike Youtube, wich is just streaming videos, OnLive is streaming GAMES. thats 10 fold the processing and bandwidth. and remember, it needs to receive constant updates by the milisecond.

my bottom line is, it works for few people. this service would need better internet accessibility in the population to work on a bigger scale. wich im bettin, is why they were researching this router business too.

 

[JMeganSnow]

So you don't carry one in case of emergencies? Like if you break down or if your family/friends need to get in contact with you ASAP because something has happened?

I don't have a car, so how am I going to break down? My family lives 2000 miles away. My friends are all online. What are they going to do "Oh, JMegan, my router's out! Teleport yourself 900 miles and come fix it please!!"? Sheesh. Whatever happened to "be prepared"?

As I tell people, either I'm at home, and you can call me at home, or I'm at work, and you can call me at work, or I'm out, and I don't want you to call me.

 

[gideonkain]

This is the technology that has been long awaited. No caps, no slowdown, no ugly towers being built downtown or on rural barns. Even if DIDO gets panned by the big communication companies, all Steve has to do is sell it privately with the proper FCC licensing that would be no different than HAM radios.
DIDO would definitely make OnLive more profitable as it would allow access to more people. Right now it is probably most usable in the same places AT&T's service is. Not counting the Alltel acquisition as I haven't heard anything of how that has changed things yet.

Is it just me or does this sound a little like a Tesla claim?

That is a good comparison. Nicola Tesla maintained that alternating current was safer and more efficient than direct current, which Thomas Edison stood in opposition to. Tesla wanted to provide to the world his practices, but Edison took many steps to suppress that. It's a shame that the guy who invented the light bulb turned out to be a big bully.
You can bet that cellular companies and other communication companies would prefer DIDO technology go away. Much as there would be money in providing such a service, there wouldn't be as much profit as what stands now with the much less efficient cellular and wireless service we have now.
I wouldn't expect the first salvo to be from Verizon. You can bet AT&T will start throwing civil litigation at Steve Perlman. Which might not be wise as right now AT&T is starting to approach its monopoly bubble it already hit before. That was quite the pop heard around the world. What would suck though is the thought that Comcast will be there ready to scoop up some of the pieces. But that's another story.

I'm so glad someone actually understood what I was saying rather than just "What?! Tesla was awesome, steampunk rulez!!"

 

[YunikoYokai5]

So you don't carry one in case of emergencies? Like if you break down or if your family/friends need to get in contact with you ASAP because something has happened?

I don't have a car, so how am I going to break down? My family lives 2000 miles away. My friends are all online. What are they going to do "Oh, JMegan, my router's out! Teleport yourself 900 miles and come fix it please!!"? Sheesh. Whatever happened to "be prepared"?

As I tell people, either I'm at home, and you can call me at home, or I'm at work, and you can call me at work, or I'm out, and I don't want you to call me.

(Holds hands up) I was just asking honestly! I don't know you, so I could only assume you (or your family if you still lived with them) had a car, your friends/family lived not too far away (like an a few minutes to an hours' drive or something) or your friends wanted to meet up with you but got a bit lost or had to cancel for some reason and you weren't in the house or something (Has happened to me a few times). No need to bite my head off.

 

[DTWolfwood]

eek gods man. Is his company publicly traded? Cause i need to throw some disposable money his way.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

Perpetual energy machines.

That limit is not something you break. I'll remain skeptical, but even if they did discover something allowing communication like they describe, it's pretty fucking unlikely to be through something that invalidates the Shannon-Hartley theorem.

A thousand people talking on a thousand celphones "break" Shannon's Law all the time.

Increased number of signals = increased bandwidth.

I'm not a skeptic of whether the technology can work; it's so obvious a solution that I'm surprised it doesn't exist yet.

Have you ever seen the theorem under discussion?

Increasing the bandwidth isn't "breaking" Shannon's law in any way. The theorem describes the relationship between bandwidth, signal power, noise, and maximum channel capacity. It just predicts that increasing the amount of bandwidth will increase the channel capacity. No part of increased bandwidth "breaks" Shannon's law. Also bear in mind that the bandwidth it's talking about is signal bandwidth, not data rate.

Imagine we're talking about the Newtonian force equation (F=ma). Assume we're talking about a scale where Newtonian physics makes sense. What you're suggesting is very much like suggesting that because objects with more mass exist and those objects have more force at the same acceleration than less massive objects, Newton's law is "being broken". In fact, if anything, it's being validated.

On a more abstract level, since the Shannon-Hartley theorem is, well, a theorem, something breaking it would have incredibly vast implications for information theory and/or mathematics. Since the theorem is in essence just a particular piece of deductive logic, then the only way it can be wrong is if the deduction used to arrive at it is flawed in some way or one of the more basic assumptions in the proof of the theorem is wrong. Both are incredibly unlikely and would require revision of deep principles of either information theory or mathematical logic.

TL;DR: When the Shannon-Hartley theorem is called a "theoretical" limit, it shouldn't be taken to mean that it's a limit that we're not sure about, some sort of estimated limit that we just haven't figured out how to break yet. It's a hard limit on information transmission that you cannot break. So long as you are transmitting information, you will not break the limit regardless of how you transmit it.

 

[JMeganSnow]

I don't know you, so I could only assume you (or your family if you still lived with them) had a car, your friends/family lived not too far away (like an a few minutes to an hours' drive or something) or your friends wanted to meet up with you but got a bit lost or had to cancel for some reason and you weren't in the house or something (Has happened to me a few times). No need to bite my head off.

You know what they say when you assume.

My friends can also all read maps, and if something really, truly bizarre happens at the last minute, well, I can eat at the restaurant by myself and walk home. Not a disaster.

I classify emergencies as things like "my house exploded!" and "I fell down and broke my leg!" not "I think I took a wrong turn!" or "I don't know what to wear!" Any adult ought to be able to resolve the latter two by themselves, maybe even consider it a bit of an adventure. I'm not in a position where I could actually help with the first two, so they're better off calling the fire department or the paramedics.

 

[Mister Linton]

Shannon's Law sounds stupid and I would be disinclined to believe that crap to begin with. If a wireless signal can be sent instantly or almost instantly to a device, then the only resriciton on how fast info can be sent is the transmitting device and the recieving device. (i.e. make modems and phones that can encode/decode info faster, and the sky is the limit)

Its not the speed that is limited but the amount of information.
Think of it this way.
You have a clear lake in which you throw a small rock. The induced waves from the rock are your signal and each wave peak is one information.
You can clearly distinguish them if the peaks don't touch.

The next day you come back and the weather is stormy. The surface of the lake is noise and you throw the stone again. This time the noise from weather conceal your waves and you can only see them by throwing a larger stone.

This analogy might not be the perfect one to describe the mathematical model but it shows the principle behind it quite well I think.

But if your vision (recieving device technology) were improved, you could distinguish the waves no matter how close together they were or how much interference existed. Like morse code, the faster the sender and reciever are, the more info transferred faster.

 

[YunikoYokai5]

You know what they say when you assume.

My friends can also all read maps, and if something really, truly bizarre happens at the last minute, well, I can eat at the restaurant by myself and walk home. Not a disaster.

I classify emergencies as things like "my house exploded!" and "I fell down and broke my leg!" not "I think I took a wrong turn!" or "I don't know what to wear!" Any adult ought to be able to resolve the latter two by themselves, maybe even consider it a bit of an adventure. I'm not in a position where I could actually help with the first two, so they're better off calling the fire department or the paramedics.

None of my friends have asked me what they should wear XD I never assumed your friends would either, your friends and mine can decide for themselves (and they know better than to ask me anyway) . The 'lost' thing has happened to me once or twice (both getting a bit lost (mainly when I meet my friends in the city outskirts) and helping one of my friends who got a bit lost (when they first tried to locate my house) ) so phones had helped there.

Also, not everyone carries a map Sure, we look before we leave but we're human, so we can forget or get confused or something. I'll stop pestering you after this, I swear ^.^' So what would you do if (God forbid) you are out with a friend and they suddenly collapse and there is no immediate phone facilities (very unlikely, but still as an example), how would you get paramedics? (I found myself in this situation before. My mum has hypertension and collapses sometimes. A mobile probably saved her life then)). Not looking for an argument/debate. Just saying mobiles have their uses.

 

[GWarface]

Great, if this is true and gets out on the streets, we will be bathed in even stronger electro-smog..

Brain-cancer for everyone!




-.-

 

[Loboludo]

Shannon's Law sounds stupid and I would be disinclined to believe that crap to begin with. If a wireless signal can be sent instantly or almost instantly to a device, then the only resriciton on how fast info can be sent is the transmitting device and the recieving device. (i.e. make modems and phones that can encode/decode info faster, and the sky is the limit)

Its not the speed that is limited but the amount of information.
Think of it this way.
You have a clear lake in which you throw a small rock. The induced waves from the rock are your signal and each wave peak is one information.
You can clearly distinguish them if the peaks don't touch.

The next day you come back and the weather is stormy. The surface of the lake is noise and you throw the stone again. This time the noise from weather conceal your waves and you can only see them by throwing a larger stone.

This analogy might not be the perfect one to describe the mathematical model but it shows the principle behind it quite well I think.

But if your vision (recieving device technology) were improved, you could distinguish the waves no matter how close together they were or how much interference existed. Like morse code, the faster the sender and reciever are, the more info transferred faster.

Only if you are louder then the noise and that is the point behind the theorem. If you are as loud as the background the signal becomes indistinguishable. Improving the resolution doesn't make chaos less chaotic.
You have to keep in mind that the noise is a chaotic quantity and you can't see a clear interference pattern but white noise.