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Re: [802.3af] inadequate power PSEs



Folks-

I think I will stick to my position. Steve's arguments for the other side below only (in my opinion) prove my point.

20 AMPs in the guest bathroom is just fine. It corresponds to our full power situation. You can run an iron or an electric heater off a 20 AMP circuit. If you try to do both then you deserve to have the breaker trip. The breaker BTW, these days is a GFI in the bathroom. You don't have to go down to the basement to reset.

The cigarette lighter socket in Steve'car is the 2nd socket. There is still a high amperage socket for the lighter within reach of the driver and the car came with a lighter in that socket. When additional socket started appearing in cars it was in a mature socket situation and nobody (well, there was probably some fool somewhere) was looking to add more cigarette lighters, they were looking for a place to plug in their cell phones. The bulk of the market understood the situation quite well.

Our situation, on the other hand is somewhat different (Opinion piece).
        1) The market we are approaching is used to wall warts. The market expectation for those is that they are absolutely not interchangeable between products. Our goal is that DTE Power just works everywhere. Kill wall warts!
        2) I am of the opinion that if we had not had Auto-Negotiation for 10/100 Ethernet then 100BASE-TX would have been a bust, or at least a slug. This would have been true even if product had Auto-Negotiation but what was sold was like to not be able to find a common operating mode between the 2 ends. One of the reasons (albeit probably a minor one) that 100VG-AnyLAN failed was that you had to manually configure it to match the two ends of the wire. It wasn't plug and play.

Therefore, I am still of the opinion that we should position the front end of the market so that everything just works. When folks understand it a little better, a couple of years down the road, then we can back down.

Geoff



At 12:09 PM 1/23/2003 -0500, Steve Jackson wrote:

... pardon the tongue-in-cheek title ...

This issue really has me torn.

Mike's rationale is great, and Geoff's concerns are also 110% valid.

I'm going to speak up, since I haven't for a long time. I support the low-power-warning label "deal" for the following reasons:

1. Power-limit-at-the-socket paradigms are a fact of life in our consumer society. Having a label stating this is a bonus that isn't always offered; my car's cigarette lighter socket, which cannot source enough power to perform that function, is so labeled. The AC outlet in the guest bathroom can't source 20A, and isn't labeled. The circuit breaker is. Mike cites some .3 precedent but that isn't a concern to me. A 4 watt port is OK as long as you tell me about it, and besides, that's why they make polyfuses.

2. I didn't like the classification idea from the get-go, which, as you'll recall, started out as an optional feature. Having this 'feature' opens up (encourages) the possibility of deployment of poorly-architected .af systems, defined by me as those not capable of delivering battery-backed-up full power on all ports. Now that someone WANTS to sell such a system ON PURPOSE (even worse than the power allocation scheme) I say, go ahead. As long as it's labeled. Make sure the warning-label color is specified as bright yellow; caveat emptor. I also think that power-allocated ports ought to be so indicated by a blinking yellow port-status LED, but I never thought I'd get anywhere with such a proposal.

3. Oh, yeah: I mentioned power-allocated systems in #2. If we allow them, we have explicitly already allowed what Mike wants. I admit ignorance of the discussion-goings-on since I no longer can attend the .af meetings, but, heck. Why the fuss?

Nomex suit on.

/steve