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Intel's 'Personal Server': The Handheld Killer?
markbaard writes "Intel is developing a wireless, pocket-sized personal server that may replace laptops and PDAs altogether. The 'personal server,' which is being developed at Intel Research by ubiquitous computing wizard Roy Want, is the size of a deck of cards, half the weight of an iPaq, and has no i/o, no screen, and no peripherals. The device never leaves its user's pocket or handbag. Pictures of the personal server and the story are at baard.com."
Good point. Maybe the user interface is separate from the device. Think of the device as being attatched to you like a watch, with a thinner client in your wallet or something.
Can someone explain how a "wireless harddrive" that you need a computer to access will replace PDAs? I mean, you can't sit on the train and organize your day with it?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
For those of you who didn't RTFA: This is essentially a little hard drive which rides around in your backpack (note: I don't carry a backpack all the time; do you?) and can connect, wirelessly, to any machine you access which recognizes wireless devices. Basically, as far as I can tell, this has the same net effect as having a home directory on an NFS server someplace and using it to save your settings as you move from machine to machine.
Again: Bo-ring.
When I saw "personal server, no IO", I was hoping this would be a manifestation of the keystone portion of my idea for a personal wireless network Your devices would all notice one another, and the width of functionality of any given device would be dependant on what you were carrying. If you we out taking pictures with your digicam and were carrying a server, the images would be transfered to the (presumably very expansive) drive in the server. If you had your cell phone, the images would be sent off to your home computer, as well.
Repeat en masse. PDAs display and do I/O, headphones play music and the real work is taken care of automagically behind the scenes in some secure fashion. You'd effectively allow the elimination of multi-use devices which don't do any job very well by allowing your devices to play their strong points, and you could customize your loadout just in what you grab in the morning when you're loading your pockets.
Anyhow, this ain't it, and that's disappointing -- somebody must have hit my verbosity flag today...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I had another take on this...
I have broadband and ssh.
Leave the server at home. There is a thing called "the internet" that does this well already.
What's to stop someone from walking by with a laptop, and gaining access to all your data?
Can you stream a DVD quality video from your home box to any place in the world and get a nice picture over VNC? At a reasonable price for the bandwidth? No. This type of device should appeal to the same kind of people who like to have an iPod. Which are, I'm told, a lot.
Of course it's inconvenient if you have to use 'another big machine' to access the device, but that's not a limitation of this device, it's a limitation of other devices if they can't access this server. Imagine having a bluetooth-enabled phone; this already has a little screen and keyboard (or touchscreen). You'll be able to attach a headset and control an MP3-player with voice commands. You'll be able to put a part of your MP3 collection in a 'shared folder', so other people on your bus can also check out your collection, while you listen to theirs and swap some files. And this is not restricted to music...
Oh dear, we'll see more people wanking in the last row of busses again, eek...
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
In and of itself, this device is worthless. Combined with devices you already use, it becomes much, much more useful. Though at the same time, this device is far from revolutionary, it's more evolutionary. A terapin mine does most of this already, albeit with a bigger form factor. Intel's goal is to make this as small as possible, so that it suddenly becomes worthwhile to work with digital media makers to develop single use, efficient devices that make transferring data easier.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
If I were using this to replace my laptop I'd want to connect to it through terminals at my clients' sites as well as public terminals. That's basically why I carry around my laptop now, the PCs on sites where I work never have all the tools and data that I need. It's a great idea, after all I don't need to carry my own monitor and keyboard around and frankly I'm sick of digging around under random desks looking for a free drop.
But the problem here is, do you trust every place that you plug your laptop in currently? Right now you don't have to since the act of plugging in doesn't give anyone access to your data. But I could imagine a situation where an unscrupulous customer or public terminal stole data from this personal server. All they'd need to do is see how you authenticate to it (say, use a keysniffer) and then they're free to grab your data whenever you're in range. I think a simple solution would be to have a button on the device that you would have to press in order to authorize access to it - the password is not enough. It's not foolproof, but it's better than just a password. Until there is some additional security you really wouldn't want to use these things at an untrusted location.