Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [90]
You will literally sprinkle sensors in the dirt of your garden, and they will relay information through each other to a little powered hub that will forward information to your home network about soil conditions.
Your car will have its own lifebits, complete with location, health, and record of the environment it was in. It will know that on Tuesday it was driven up a 15 percent grade in the snow, carrying a load of 470 pounds and averaging 3,100 rpm. That, too, will start as a repair diagnostic and will eventually be used to supplement your own history with the story of all your driving.
NETWORKS OF UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
Network capacity and speed are ever growing, allowing us to move around bigger files and watch better quality video. I’m frustrated the television/telephone duopoly in the United States is so slow to get us high-speed fiber-optic networks to every home. Sometimes I wish that networking was considered part of the nation’s infrastructure, like highways, so that we could mandate fiber everywhere as in other countries. Still, the trend is in the right direction, and we already have a pretty good start.
Total Recall will come about within the context of networks within networks, interconnecting everything from in-body networks to home networks to global networks and finally to networks that include satellites and space vehicles. Dust-size sensors will automatically form wireless networks and connect to everything that can be sensed. In-body implants will communicate with each other to form a “body-area” network. The body network will connect to the car network while you’re driving. The garden network will connect to the home network. The car and home network will connect to the worldwide Internet.
This vast network of networks will host huge farms of servers with millions of processors and many petabytes of storage space. These farms will offer up computing and storage service to those who need it—and, amazingly, you will need it, even though your cell phone will boast more power and storage than your PC does today. From the microscopic to the heavens, all will be sensed, networked, and stored. This is not a forty-year-out wild guess. This is a decade-out sure bet. And I don’t lose many bets.
Microsoft has pretty good communications for its employees. If you phone my work number and leave a voice mail, I get it as an audio attachment in my e-mail. Actually, if you call when I am out of the office, I may well answer because the call is forwarded to my notebook PC wherever I am, to answer using my notebook’s microphone and speaker. From e-mail I can launch chat; from chat I can launch e-mail. All my chats are logged into a folder in my e-mail. All the RSS news feeds that I want to read appear in my e-mail client. I can set up my e-mail client to manage all my different e-mail accounts. I can also phone in to check my e-mail and hear it read to me.
This is called unified communications. Instead of telephone, chat, RSS, and my several e-mail accounts being completely independent, they are unified. I don’t have to go around checking in different places for messages, and it’s not a big hassle to switch to some other form of sending a message. Unfortunately, it seems that every new networking application out there wants to fragment my communications. My doctor makes me visit his Web site to check for messages from him. My bank sends me messages to tell me I have a message to read and reply to at their Web site. Facebook sends me an e-mail with an actual message from a friend, but makes me use their site to reply. I get a steady stream of messages from LinkedIn demanding I go over to their site to follow up. And there is a steady stream of new “must-have” communication channels. Frankly, no matter how wonderful they are, I am simply running out of time to keep up with all these virtual post office boxes.
If it is clear that communication ought to be unified rather than fragmented, it is equally clear that storage should