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The Crazy-Tiny Next Generation of Computers
An anonymous reader writes University of Michigan professors are about to release the design files for a one-cubic-millimeter computer, or mote. They have finally reached a goal set in 1997, when UC Berkeley professor Kristopher Pister coined the term "smart dust" and envisioned computers blanketing the Earth. Such motes are likely to play a key role in the much-ballyhooed Internet of Things. From the article: "When Prabal Dutta accidentally drops a computer, nothing breaks. There’s no crash. The only sound you might hear is a prolonged groan. That’s because these computers are just one cubic millimeter in size, and once they hit the floor, they’re gone. 'We just lose them,' Dutta says. 'It’s worse than jewelry.' To drive the point home, Dutta, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, emails me a photo of 50 of these computers. They barely fill a thimble halfway to its brim."
Great. There are some days where I forget where I've put my smartphone. So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
a [drool] beowulf cluster of these!
You knew there was one.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's *one* IoT... but how does that relate to my lightbulbs that track me around the house or my garage door opener that lets me open it remotely from my Apple Watch after seeing who's standing outside?
The IoT is about networking commodity hardware and aggregating telemetry and sensor data remotely. For some reason, it seems to have significant overlap with Cloud Computing such that we really have a CloT with access control nightmares.
Funny thing is, vending machines were on the Internet almost 20 years ago. This was useful for the parent's illustration (service tech knows what to restock and when, and if the machine's out of service / bil cartridge is full / etc). But we didn't call it the IoT back then; just the Internet. That was part of the original vision, before .com got involved and morphed it into some sort of a "display your web browser banner here" place.
In other words, the IoT is closer to the original concept of the Internet than what most people have thought of as "the Internet" for the past decade or so. A bunch of internetworked hardware talking to each other and to humans, all around the world.
God damnit Apple. Quit changing your fucking connector specs every fricking new device. I'm getting really tired of having to buy all new cables Every. Single. Time.
A desktop on your dust, though... that's new.
This is the year of the Linux Dust Top!