The Internet in Honoverse

I was just thinking what the internet would be like in the honoverse.

why? because i'm analyzing analytics and need a break and i saw somebody post a fan banner of the RMN and it had "www.trmn.org"

"www, that's not correct."

www could change to be a planetary reference. if it's alpha-numeric then that's 35 (minus 0) which means that's enough for 42,875 planets, enough for the 1,784 planets that hold league membership and the 200 protectorates.

courier ships could carry periodic updates to major planetary nets net in exabyte thumbnail drives. So you could if you're on manticore, your google would be man.google.com, which would search the local planetary net. If you don't find what you're looking for, you could search your planetary net's local copy of beowulf's net or beo.google.com, which would be current as to the last thumbdrive dump whcih might be every few days, considering the frequency of traffic between the two systems.

Of course the google AI might just whisper into your ear or...

see that's what's missing from honorverse. Super AIs. A hyperheristic BOLO that serves as a google, that lives in your brain.

oyohan wrote:I was just thinking what the internet would be like in the honoverse.

why? because i'm analyzing analytics and need a break and i saw somebody post a fan banner of the RMN and it had "www.trmn.org"

"www, that's not correct."

www could change to be a planetary reference. if it's alpha-numeric then that's 35 (minus 0) which means that's enough for 42,875 planets, enough for the 1,784 planets that hold league membership and the 200 protectorates.

courier ships could carry periodic updates to major planetary nets net in exabyte thumbnail drives. So you could if you're on manticore, your google would be man.google.com, which would search the local planetary net. If you don't find what you're looking for, you could search your planetary net's local copy of beowulf's net or beo.google.com, which would be current as to the last thumbdrive dump whcih might be every few days, considering the frequency of traffic between the two systems.

Of course the google AI might just whisper into your ear or...

see that's what's missing from honorverse. Super AIs. A hyperheristic BOLO that serves as a google, that lives in your brain.

Your method with the URL's isn't very intuitive and it makes the handling of URL's inconsistent. A person in Manticore and a person in Sol should both use www.google.com and the server-framework should transparently keep track of what is a local resource and what is a remote resource (with a last update timestamp). The user would then be able to switch between local/remote/latest known versions.

Keeping everything in sync is still going to be a bitch though.

Joat42 wrote:Keeping everything in sync is still going to be a bitch though.

Maybe they will have gotten many to many replication solved?

the only thing i have to say is that HIMSELF has said that AI (a true thinking computer with a personality) is not in the honorverse.
however the automation etc is major AI (not smart) heavy. i'm ok with the handwavium there

there are some references to planatary data nets

Joat42 wrote:Your method with the URL's isn't very intuitive and it makes the handling of URL's inconsistent. A person in Manticore and a person in Sol should both use http://www.google.com and the server-framework should transparently keep track of what is a local resource and what is a remote resource (with a last update timestamp). The user would then be able to switch between local/remote/latest known versions.

Keeping everything in sync is still going to be a bitch though.

Would it matter? The "www" is optional now. And in the honoverse, URLs would be accepted as planetary specific. If somebody said http://www.google.com, everybody in the universe would know they meant earth's net.

There would not be a need for a server-framework setup to do that extra work - the user knows what planet he is on. if he does a search on http://www.google.com on manticore, he knows he's searching a copy which may be a few months out of date.

But if you're going to make references in a space the size of honoverse, the url SHOULD tell you which planetary net you're referencing, right?

And google is a poor example, not every brand, company, or resource will be extra-planetary. What if I reference a planetary blog? The guy in Spindle would need to know which planetary net I was referring to and look it up (or order a copy) if only to avoid the top level domain nightmare of trying to create intergalactic unique domain names.

Lunan wrote:the only thing i have to say is that HIMSELF has said that AI (a true thinking computer with a personality) is not in the honorverse.
however the automation etc is major AI (not smart) heavy. i'm ok with the handwavium there

there are some references to planatary data nets

I've heard him talk about this. It's AGI not ASI (search for waitbutwhy's article on artificial intelligence - mindblowing read)

But I think HIMSELF needs to address why... I bought it when I started reading honor when I was a sophomore in college back in '93 but a lot has happened since. My phone has more computing power than my Mac LC II did with it's 40MB hard drive. Forget my phone, I think my fridge is smarter.

But it's getting harder to skip over this gap in tech. more so when it's included in safehold and the bolo books.

oyohan wrote:

Lunan wrote:the only thing i have to say is that HIMSELF has said that AI (a true thinking computer with a personality) is not in the honorverse.
however the automation etc is major AI (not smart) heavy. i'm ok with the handwavium there

there are some references to planatary data nets

I've heard him talk about this. It's AGI not ASI (search for waitbutwhy's article on artificial intelligence - mindblowing read)

But I think HIMSELF needs to address why... I bought it when I started reading honor when I was a sophomore in college back in '93 but a lot has happened since. My phone has more computing power than my Mac LC II did with it's 40MB hard drive. Forget my phone, I think my fridge is smarter.

But it's getting harder to skip over this gap in tech. more so when it's included in safehold and the bolo books.

If there where true AI's in Honorverse the battles would become very boring, it's a conscious decision by RFC to make the story he is telling more interesting and compelling. The premise for Honorverse is in essence Horatio Hornblower in space, which means crewed ships with real people making decisions which determines the fate of the crew - not AI controlled ships fighting it out in a very clinical way.

It's very easy as a reader to experience the technological disconnect that exists in Honorverse when we start to compare it to the real world since we readily can extrapolate that if they have tech X they should also have tech Y but when we do that we disregard the intent of the world the author has created.

This is true for most SciFi stories, and especially those that have the technological element as a plot device but I guess that's why it's called SciFi.

Joat42 wrote:It's very easy as a reader to experience the technological disconnect that exists in Honorverse when we start to compare it to the real world since we readily can extrapolate that if they have tech X they should also have tech Y but when we do that we disregard the intent of the world the author has created.

This is true for most SciFi stories, and especially those that have the technological element as a plot device but I guess that's why it's called SciFi.

I understand that and appreciate the direction HE's taken the story. The human element is everything. I'm just pointing out that MWW probably started planning out the story arcs in the 80s... if things progressed linearly, no issue. But current events and current tech advances kinda impact the world the author creates... esp in the realm of science fiction. It's been a exponential increase in tech changes.

Based on what I know of the Honorverse, there would be at least localized Internets, most likely on the planetary scale, and perhaps on a system scale. An intergalactic one, even with present in-universe tech, is extremely impractical.

oyohan wrote:

Joat42 wrote:It's very easy as a reader to experience the technological disconnect that exists in Honorverse when we start to compare it to the real world since we readily can extrapolate that if they have tech X they should also have tech Y but when we do that we disregard the intent of the world the author has created.

This is true for most SciFi stories, and especially those that have the technological element as a plot device but I guess that's why it's called SciFi.

I understand that and appreciate the direction HE's taken the story. The human element is everything. I'm just pointing out that MWW probably started planning out the story arcs in the 80s... if things progressed linearly, no issue. But current events and current tech advances kinda impact the world the author creates... esp in the realm of science fiction. It's been a exponential increase in tech changes.

Which is the crux with writing a SciFi series that has a publication span bordering on 20 years now which used technology extrapolated from the late 80's and early 90's with specific limitations added by the author.

There are some really good SciFi books that has stood the test of time very well, and Vernor Vinges "True Names" is one of those stories. It was published in 1981 and it's still more or less spot on regarding the computer advances we have had since it was published. If you haven't read it I recommend that you do, actually I can recommend everything Vinge has written.

Another book that also was visionary in computer advances is Ann McCaffreys "The Ship Who Sang" published 1969 (which consisted of several novelettes written between 1961 to 1969).