Drivers:
As a consultant to a major Fortune 50 company that uses several
millions of dollars in LONG DISTANCE Telephone charges each year.
I can assure you that if any system that provides auto-racing
that needs to use a dial-up circuit, it have to pay at least
.06 cents a minute. What that means, I believe, is if TEN
needs to use a telephone circuit to allow you a connection
the dead raw cost to TEN for that connection is $3.60. This does
not include PROFIT, OVERHEAD, EQUIPMENT or PERSONNEL. As I
figure it this will cost at least another .06 cents. Which
raises the cost of that service to around .12 cents a minute
or $7.20 an hour. A typical 50% race on a DIALUP race takes
around 2 hours. That means that if you race at least one
race a week that you should have a RACING BUDGET of:
8 races per week of 2 hours = 16 hours x $7.20 or $115.20
per month.
The other alternative is to race through the INTERNET and
although this might be good for around 8 racers someday
I believe it simply isnt going to work for more than
8 users. As far as the concept of coast to coast racing
as we enjoy at HAWAII. I know that there is INTERNET II
and that is at least 2 to 3 years away. Another thing
is low latency networking isnt important to anyone except
the AUTO-RACERS. The pay-off simply isnt there.. Do you
honestly think that one will make a multi-million dollar
investment for a couple of hundred racers... Our benefit
has to be a by-product of some elses need. We need to
find an application to tag along with.
PREDICTION BUG!!! I believe the biggest problem with
auto-racing software is the PREDICTION SOFTWARE. Without
saying much on this subject, if you think its hard to code
this software with a .15 ms delay. You cant even imagine
what it is like to increase this delay to 150ms.
I cannot tell you how much anger and frustration has occured
between people that race on HAWAII because of the PREDICTION
BUG. People think and have thought that people hit each
other when the SOFTWARE did the hitting and all parties where
innocent. But how many people if any ever realize this.
Instead we get a ton of upset people... Oh well its a slow
night at the IVGA and I will do another piece soon on why
the INTERNET will not work for many users and maintain
low latencies....
Don Wilshe, IVGA
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
PS. Slow night at the IVGA, all the Christmas Presents are
wrapped....
PSS. I would like some input on this aspect of auto-racing...