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I know just little enough to still hope for a really cool big breakthrough: unlimited decentralized wireless bandwidth everywhere. Or at least everywhere there are other people.
Ad-hoc mesh networking, in other words. Taking the telecom infrastructure that currently underlies the internet and distributing it out into end user devices. In this new model you don't just connect to the internet, you are the internet. Instead of your modem connecting to a router (say, at your ISP) your modem will also be a router. And so will everyone else's.
O.K., that's probably a bit too simple, but something like this is happening. And the key will be software, not hardware. Specifically, software defined radio, like gnu radio. This type of software allows your general purpose computer to reconfigure itself on the fly to work with any known radio format.
Here are Cory Doctorow's short notes from a talk by the gnu radio guys at ETcon.
GNU Radio is a free software toolkit for realtime signal processing things -- radio included. Works for sonar, medical imaging, etc.This flexibility will unleash a tidal wave of experimentation. Think how hard, and expensive, it is to introduce a new wireless technology. The telcoms have to roll out all new equipment (like build towers everywhere!) while the public has to buy all new wireless cards. This sort of outlay cannot happen very often, which is why we still have very poor wireless technology deployed.
Get as much stuff as we can into software, out of hardware.
Turn all the hardware problems into software problems -- all wave forms are encoded, decoded, modulated and demodded in software.
But move all the custom hardware into software, and now we can reconfigure as easily as we download patches for our software, or firmware updates for our machines. This is made possible, generally, by the incredible computational power of ordinary general purpose computing. Or, in other words, the need for building custom (expensive!) hardware to solve technical problems decreases as general purpose hardware increases in power.
What can you do with it?And this is all in software, on the computer you are using right now. Go gnu radio!
* Conventional radio
* Spectrum monitoring
* Multichannel -- one app sucks down the whole RF spectrum; AT&T could support all its legacy phones (GSM, CDMA, Analog) on one tower, without any forklift upgrade.
* Morph mode
* Morph on the fly -- a device that reconfigures itself for what you need, sat phone, cell phone, pager, etc, your 802.11b could talk 802.11g once it's invented
* Better spectrum utilization -- listen-before-talk, then choose an unused band. Accommodates legacy users and lets you move forward.
* Cognitive radio -- minimal power, shaped xmission, etc
Little network problem for the last few minutes. Anybody else notice that?
I can't get Safari to accept cookies from localhost. I dimly recall having this problem before, but I can't find any reference to it here, so maybe I'm dreaming.
Anyone?
More on my latest lust: +1 megapixel digital camera phones. Of course in Japan first. Nothing new in that article, really, but the last two paragraphs are interesting.
Some camera makers are nevertheless concerned that cell phone cameras with 3 megapixel quality would affect the markets of low-quality digital cameras of the 1 megapixel class and disposable cameras."[M]ore formal photo sessions...," huh? Yeah right. The digital camera will be completely subsumed into the phone very quickly for all but the most professional applications. Those companies better move into the +10 megapixel pro range, or strike some deals with cell makers. Who's going to want to carry two devices? Especially when the added bulk gets you less functionality (can't send your picture to someone while in the field with your regular digital camera.)
However, many of them expect that camera-equipped cell phones and regular digital cameras can coexist in the market. "Camera-equipped cell phones can be used for casual snapshots, while regular digital cameras are suitable for more formal photo sessions," an employee of a camera maker said.
Converge damn it, converge!
Dave has been loaning us DVDs from his rather extensive collection. Last night we watched The Day The Earth Stood Still. I was not expecting too much from this 1951 sci-fi picture, but I remember Paul Laffoley mentioning that this movie had a huge influence on him as a kid. Especially the spaceship whose shape holds some sort of golden mean beauty to those with mathematical eyes. So I figured what the heck. And it turned out to be a great film. It's dated, sure, except not so much as you'd think. Very interesting.
Also we've seen a lot of crap. Not from Dave of course, but from the little video store across the street. One exception to those misfires was Secretary. Fun movie.
Not sure why I'm not putting this on the movie page.