Thursday, October 1st, 2009
This looks pretty neat, and when I say neat it has the possibly being a gamechanger in how you can contribute and interact with web pages that you don’t have control over. You’ll need to grab the Google toolbar for Firefox to get the goods.
Friday, July 10th, 2009
I know, I know. I’m guilty of it too. My undying love for hard disk space knows no bounds. I remember filling up my first flopy disk, syQuest, zip disk, CD, DVD. The dreamy afternoons spent gazing at the sky wondering just when the next size of HD would fit snugly in my desktop tower. Eyes widened when I got my first 250GB drive, then 500GB. Space is so cheap I never needed to throw anything out. Copy, move, organize, replicate. Save, save, save. My home desk adorned with little boxes (none of them match BTW) each with a different name, each one a child of mine. Now as I amass even more data, music, video, HD video. My terrabyte drive squeels as it fills up, blue lights constantly flickering. I look to the heavens once again in search of more space that isnt located in a cloud. Tonight after I finish dinner and safely tuck my children in their cubbies, laptop under my pillow. I’ll dream fondly of having a petabyte of storage at home.
Click through to the rest of the story and see an amazing visualization of just how big a Petabyte is.
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Europe is on the eve of its first Femtocell deployment. On July 1st, Vodafone began selling home networking routers that replace home Wifi and extend the coverage of Vodafone’s cell network at the same time. Right now the router costs are too high to justify for anyone but the most dedicated technofile, but the trend has started.
What this means for the world is that cell network coverage will soon be extended incrementally by home users in an organic fashion. As a consumer, you will buy your very own base station that extends your carrier’s network while giving you wireless home networking similar to Wifi. The overall advantage is, that in this future age you will have 3G or 4G networking on your phone, laptop etc that continues to be 3G or 4G when you’re at home, but routes the calls and data ubiquitously over your home internet connection.
Eventually this will turn the phone, Wifi, wireless data, and home internet data markets into one thing that services all of those functions. Of course this will also reduce the overall costs of devices: your cell phone will no longer have to have a wifi chip, a edge/3G chip and a tri band baseband in it. Instead, one protocol will route all the different types of voice and data over the femtocell when you are at home, and the general cell network when you are out.
Cell phone/data providers will be able to leverage their client base to expand their network making big companies bigger. Consumer issues like “I don’t use mobile provider X because their coverage in my house is shaky” will be a thing of the past.
It’s yet unclear how this will play out in Canada. This is once again an case of technology moving faster than the industries that are powering it let alone the governing bodies trying to control it.
