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Connecting Devices With Wireless Grids
"The article says that applications for wireless grids fall into three classes: the ones which aggregate information from the range of input/output interfaces found in nomadic devices, those which focus on the locations and contexts in which the devices exist, and those that leverage the mesh network capabilities of collections of nomadic devices. The authors add that these grids "emerged from a combination of the proliferation of new spectrum market business models, innovative technologies deployed in diverse wireless networks, and three related computing paradigms: grid computing, P2P computing, and Web services." If you're interested in the future of wireless networks, the original article is a must-read, but check this summary if your time is limited."
...is right here.
The Army reading list
I hear some company invented the ultimate in wireless communication. Some kind of conductor cord which can be used to transmit information from point A to point B along a path of your choosing, without interference to any other transmission.
I wouldn't want to be sharing my devices CPU time without compensation
Just because it is possible doesn't mean it will have to be involuntary. Maybe instead you'd be credited small amounts of cpu time from the cell phone company, and at the end of the month see a small reduction in your bill. Maybe if you went around using everyone else's cpu, you'd see a small charge in your bill. But this is somewhat missing the point - think of what it would be like to record a concert from the viewpoint of 100 different people simultaneously, then produce a final recording from that! Or on vacation in Japan, instead of going home with just your photographs of monuments, having all the photos taken at that monument while you were there!
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Hmm. You seem to think that in this situation your handheld would be serving everyone else around you, and all of them are just leeching, and you don't get any service from anywhere, it all originates with you. Well, I should probably point out to you that that's not really how sharing models work. When you're not using your resources, they are shared among your peers who might need them. When you are using resources, if you need more than your machine possesses, your peers share with you. And the wireless grid network spreads across all the devices. You are just a link in the chain. Not the start of the chain. Everyone is not leeching off you. And you aren't paying to make everyone else's experience better. Everyone is paying. And everyone gets more than they would if they were going it alone. That's the point.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
This all reminds me of the "chinese lottery" idea. With all these devices connected, there definitely seems to be a possibility that someone could (illegitimately) harnass the power to crack strong cryptography. Especially since, unlike computers, nobody is expecting their Cellphone or whatever to get hacked. Also unlike a similar scenario with computers on the internet, there could potentially be far far more devices on a network like this.
For those unfamiliar with the idea of a Chinese Lottery, there was a paper written proposing that consumer products could be used as a method of distributed computing. The example used in the paper was that the Chinese government could equip its radios with low-power computing systems and broadcast the data they need processed. The owner of whichever radio finally cracked the key would be rewarded (like a lottery). This was just an example of the idea by the way, it wasn't proposed as a real threat.
I can't see what's new here at all. Yes, there will have to be a few more technologies for managing ad-hoc networks. But that's about it.
As for us all sharing our resources in one warm fuzzy anarcho-syndicalist wireless IT hive, dream on. (Or, more precisely, give T-Mobile your first-born).
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
You address a valid point and your attitude is probably shared by many. However, there's also the bigger picture which few people take the time to look at (and I don't mean any single person).
These wireless grid concepts (at least the more sophisticated ones) are basically scalable, distributed computing solutions. They solve a lot of problems but also suffer from some of the problems that all distributed computer networks have.
The more common wireless grid devices become (provided this idea ever takes off) we'll likely see two major changes: on the one hand, efficiency will increase dramatically (more devices = a bigger ressource pool, common protocols, less overhead). And on the other hand, we'll see a change in how we view CE and mobile computing in general. Thing about it: most of the time our PDAs, cell phones, etc. don't actually do anything, but rather just idle.
Those spare CPU cycles could, however, be used by others in the grid which would in turn require their device to be less powerful (since they can depend on the network's CPU power and need to do less computing onboard).
There are three potential big problems I see with this though:
"Hmm, if I buy this now I might get free Internet access two years down the road. In the meantime, everybody's freeloading off of me though (since there's nobody else whose device you could use). I think not."