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The Tech Building Blocks of City 2.0
CWmike writes "Sci-Fi writers call it Utopia, the glorious City of the Future. But short of downtown atriums being guarded by invisible walls and flying cars, City 2.0 is not as far off as you may think, writes John Brandon. Ubiquitous wireless networks are already available in Baltimore and Minneapolis, Thomson Reuters has sustainable data centers that sell power back to the local utility, the smart energy grid is well on its way, and city-provided social networks are common. While the concept of City 2.0 is monumental, these key technology advancements are already helping pave the road to the next-generation city. The next steps toward the city of tomorrow are all about integrating these services cohesively, making them widely available across the entire metropolis and managing the services more efficiently. 'The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem,' says analyst Rob Enderle."
It seems like the more we talk about this utopian city, we get ever so close to the ideal dystopian city.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
As an aside, More's novel describes a constructed society that had strived for perfection with absurd outcomes. Always makes me smile when people assume Utopia to mean an ideal society. Having said that, perhaps the hubris is typically apt. BTW, nearly 500 years old but still a highly recommended short read.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Imagine it. a quarter million devices connecting to your wireless "cloud".
None of which were spec'ed or validated by you or your group.
Tech support nightmare. Not to mention maintaining all the access points.
This is not "Utopia". This is WiFi. A means of connecting wireless devices (most of them) to services (most of the time).
Could we please have mandatory flogging for anyone who uses the term "2.0" with anything other than numbered software or documentation revisions? It has got to be more annoying by now than "paradigm".
End anonymous moderation and posting on
The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem
is just retarded, as anyone who has ever been anywhere near a city realizes that none of them are remotely resemble contained ecosystems, no matter how much solar power and internet you add.
Like all the cities of the past, media was not high on the list of necessities. In fact, it wasn't on the list because te technology didn't exist. And media won't be high on the list in the future, either.
To quote Brecht:
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching that's where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn for once the way world is run
Whatever words you twist or lies you tell
FOOD is the first thing - morals follow on.
So first make sure that those
Who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving!
What keeps mankind alive?
WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE?
The fact that millions
Are daily tortured stifled punished silenced and oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive
Thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
And for once you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
The average city of 2050 will more resemble Calcutta than Dubai.
Word.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I want my city to have a Steel Pipe Snow Melting System. And underground freight tunnels. And a Continuous Transit System with Sub-Surface Moving Platforms. And rooftop heliports. And skyscraper restaurants.
Enough with the 2.0 bullshit! This isn't City 2.0! this is City 11,050,523.6.15 RC4.
Unfortunately, this is exactly like when they used to call shit "So and So 2000" or "So and So Xtra". I guess the 2.0 will stop whenever they have a new futuristic-sounding moniker.
Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface.
Retail did that 15 years ago with the Unified POS device standards. Every barcode scanner out there has a different interface: different commands to turn it on and off, different electrical requirements, etc., but every scanner ultimately does the same task - it reads a barcode. So 15 years ago the retail industry said "we're sick of this" and developed a de facto standard that became UPOS. All a vendor has to do is wrap their device driver in a little proxy layer so it meets the common UPOS interface standard, and any cash register can use it (yes, UPOS today is limited to Windows and Java implementations.)
It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller. As long as the cities arrive at a common interface spec for what a core electric controller does, this can work.
John
Lets take it from the top:
1) They quote Rob Enderele. A "I know something about everything" 'IT consultant'. Also known for rendering his expert opinion on topics such as "Open Source and the Fools Who Use It". Thought the SCO Group had an open and shut case.
2) Okay, a few example projects for the SmartGrid stuff. However, modulating electric use during peak periods is several decades old.
3) Blogs! Chat! Wikis! Buzzword-driven crap. We already have things like Newspapers! Telephones! Websites!... the "Web 2.0-ish" stuff is hardly a revolution.
4) For a high-tech city, San Jose sure does have a primitive airport. You get to board a jetliner using a set of roller-stairs after passing through the '50s area terminal. I think a child with an Erector Set could have built their new Terminal faster.
5) We quote a product manager at Intel for information on how great WiMax is. Gee, there's an impartial source. Too bad WiMax has yet to get significant traction in the market. Clearwire is badly struggling and isn't very good.
6) After more worthless jabber from Enderele... A data center w/ backup batteries! A technological miracle! If needed, they can run the data center off the diesel generators! Morons... small diesel generators are so damn expensive to run, it would rarely, if ever, make sense to crank them except during a power outage.
7) More quotes from another Buzzword Generator, the Yankee Group. How do I become an "IT Consultant" of this type?
SirWired
I live in Minneapolis and our city wide wifi causes more problems than it solves. Once you get into the grid area reception to any access point other than the city wifi is poor. US Wireless ensured that their signals on all three non-overlapping channels are stronger anywhere inside the grid than any other source. That means Joe Bob running a personal wifi out of his home will have poorer reception than if this city wide wifi didn't exist. Oh and the wifi is both not free(actually rather expensive) and low bandwidth. I think that a city wide wireless network can have positive benefits, but I believe it needs to be better designed to not dance around fcc rules of broadcasting radio signals in a spectrum that is designed for general public use. My best suggestion would be to use a radio spectrum that had decent material penetration, one that is licensed by the FCC so no one else can use it, and uses a relatively cheap to manufacture radio in a number of general purpose packages. If we are going to use tax dollars to put together metro wireless internet grids why not simply design a technology around just that purpose. Of course I live inside a perfect world so take what I say with a grain of salt.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Cities need to grow and evolve "organically". All of this new technology is wonderful and awesome, but if imposed from above by planners, will only result in distortions and unintended consequences. City planning beyond a local neighborhood level just doesn't work well. We don't like to admit it, because we've been taught since childhood that central planners are quasi-omniscient, but it's true. Cities are just too complex.
That doesn't mean that cities don't get planned, they do. Cities are an emergent order. No one person (or committee) can possibly plan an efficient healthy city, but the voluntary interactions of a hundred thousand inhabitants can give rise to one. The information needed to run a city is extremely dispersed and constantly changing, so that it cannot be codified into a static plan. This is about Hayekian information coordination. It's something every city manager needs to understand. Only then will City 2.0 be open to us.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
1: Walkable cities; http://www.newurbanism.org/
Everything I need should be no more than 10 minutes walk. Why should I have to get in a car/bus/train to get the stuff I want. East Kilbride, Cumbernauld ... disasters.
2: PRT: http://www.atsltd.co.uk/media/
Solves much of the traffic and logistic problems for those areas you can't walk to.
3: Reform of the monetary system; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxdPIOUTd2k
Lending money into existence is the cause of a lot of our existing problems.
Don't hold your breath on any of it.
Deleted
Also known as a submarine patent: basically, patent something and try as hard as possible to keep the patent secret while encouraging the use of the technology. Then, once everyone is using it and is too locked-in to change, start charging licensing fees on the patent.
You've totally painted over the computer industry's failure on that front
TCP IP, UDP, PCI, ISA, USB, SATA, IDE, ASCII TXT.
These are some pretty big non-failures of open standards that allow any implementation of various devices and data to interact and communicate successfully. While I have no doubt that there are examples of failures, as well, the fact that I can read what you write on my computer, made by a different manufacturer, to different specs, with different architecture from yours says that intercommunication of a heterogeneous nature is not a fart in the wind.