I don’t see the tablet vanishing but I don’t see it making much of an in-road into the traditional PC and notebook areas either. If you need to carry two then given the notebook can do both jobs why also carry the tablet? If all you want to do is play chess on the bus ride home or watch that TV show then the tablet will be perfect. If the tablet makers come up with more creative input mechanisms or some specialised application s/w is developed for them to keep people interested then once the new toy interest wanes I expect to see tablet sales drop. Going forward then I see a round or two of new devices, then a drop in pricing levels until either a new paradigm is revealed or interest wanes and the tablet returns to a niche or vertical position in the marketplace.
According to Steve Perlman the new DIDO wireless technology promises to give us infinite and endless capacity. You will need to start here http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf which is the White Paper on the technology.
The Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output approach actually states that it is “a breakthrough approach that allows each wireless user to use the full data rate1 of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users, by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum.” Or in simpler terms it claims that you can use the full bandwidth without any sharing issues. Yes, the paper reads like a car salesman advertising brochure, even if it isn’t. The paper, possibly for patent reasons, is fairly short on how this is all supposed to happen.
What is does tell us is that there is a central data centre of some kind. This centre will check for a shared channel and modulate accordingly. This will somehow bypass Shannon’s Law. To save you looking this up says that the maximum possible data speed that can be obtained in a data channel, the highest obtainable error-free data speed, expressed in bits per second (bps), is a function of the bandwidth and the signal-to-noise ratio. Or the fastest you can get from a data channel after noise is taken into account.
While I, and many others, would love to see such a technology implemented there are a lot of questions unanswered after reading the paper. The first and rather obvious question is how are all those data centres going to be created to service the system? Actually strike that how about the issue that all of your communications will be given over to one organisation to pre-process. The hacking implementations are enormous.
Of course Shannon’s Law applies. The paper writer is simply playing with one of the parameters in the rule. In this case the available channel capacity for a given state. For any given channel however the rules still apply. They claim tiny millisecond latency but what about the processing time in the data centre, that must be taken into account. So air transmission latency may decrease but in centre processing increases giving, probably, a larger total. “More power” as the actor in the well know TV program used to say. Power is limited in the WiFi network so it won’t interfere with things like your cordless phone and other reasons.
Of course as soon as the technology announcement hit Australia it was used as a rather blunt club against the NBN. Ignoring the limitations it at the very least highlighted that spending huge sums of money on an end to end fibre network is unnecessary, especially in a world where most people under 30 use their mobile phones, their tablets and their other mobile devices to communicate either by voice or digitally.
Industry News
If you are going to have optical (photonic) computers you need a linear optical diode rather than a non-linear one. Well that at least is what the boys over at Caltech are saying since they just came up with one. It isn’t really a diode like you know one but the equivalent component for light based computing. Diodes are used to isolate signals from each other. The ability to allow light to move in a single direction is one scientists have been trying to construct for over 20 years. The result is again not really a diode as we know it but one that sends light out in one form and it comes back in another so the two do not interact. The next step is to build something that will connect to existing integrated circuit technology.
Readers will be pleased, and I use this term in a very ironic sense, that the Anonymous hacker group is developing a new tool to better facilitate DDoS, or denial of service, attacks. It will be better than their current LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS utility. LOIC does not hide the user’s identity; the new version Refref will. It uses a different and more sophisticated approach by launching from behind targeted Websites. This is another response to the recent arrests of some Anonymous members.
In a related story Anonymous has also hacked the website of the Syrian Minister of Defence. They embedded their logo in the middle of the Syrian flag. They also added a massage attacking the regime of Bashar Al-Assad with a number of links to video examples of injustice, violence and civil unrest in the country. According to one of the group’s members “(Anonymous) is against oppressive regimes, corruption, police brutality, government cover-ups, the arrest and murder of people in any nation.”
As a follow-up to last week as expected Anonymous has released a 10GB data dump including personal information, email addresses, social security numbers, and credit card details swiped from an online sheriff's store. The batch also covered data on informants. The scope was 76 law enforcement websites in 11 states
You have heard of Facebook, how about Shagbook? You can do your own research on the contents of this site the issue I want to cover here is Faceboo0k’s ‘trademark’ attack on the site name, i.e. anything ending with the word “book” appears to be a no-no as far as Facebook is concerned. One immediate defence is that the term ”facebook” was in general use before Zuckerberg used it as a site name, it even appears in the American Heritage Dictionary as originating in 1983. This makes it a generic term that cannot be claimed as a solo trademark.
The other line of defence in this particular case is definitive. Facebook has publicly stated that facebook.com is not a dating site and in fact has removed individuals from the site upon discovering that said individuals had been using the site as a 'dating site' to meet new people for sexual encounters. In this sense Facebook does in no way provide the same services as Shagbook. Others like Teachbook, Placebook and others have faced and beaten similar claims from the heavy handed Facebook group. All in all the whole issue is somewhat silly. Phacebook.com if it existed might legitimately be targeted by Facebook but Phacébook, with a different pronunciation could be a different matter. As I have pointed out in the past, this whole issue of copyrights and trademarks passed well beyond sensible a while back.
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