27 February 2008

Into the Cloud


The Thrilla in Manila happened in Cleveland last night, the golden challenger dancing and weaving against the wily pro. All he had to do was snug into the ropes, cover up, and not make a fatal mistake. Or maybe it was the fight in Zaire. I forget.

I don't know if you were as disoriented as I was. It was a familiar enough scenario, but oddly juxtaposed. It was supposed to be the veteran who covered the face against the raw energy of The Kid, waiting for the boxer to punch into the fatigue zone, then land a good solid hit.

Didn't even have to be a knockout punch. The strategy is to win on points.

It was the exact reverse: age and experience striking out against youth. They say that old age and trickery will beat youth and good looks every time, but I have to say that it does not look like it this time.

I was in a cloud, and let the storm pass over. It will be wrapped up next week, even if it is close. A draw in either or both of the big primaries, and a clear win in the little ones, and the Crown goes to The Kid.

In the drama surrounding the debate, I almost missed the thing that is going to change your life. On Monday, the Adobe software people rolled out something called “AIR.”

You need air to live, naturally, particularly in this breathless season. I don't know what the acronym actually means, and it is not apparent even on the AIR homepage. Let's assume it is something like Adobe Internet Richness, which is one of those lifestyle concepts the marketing people come up to describe a technological breakthrough.

I had a brief stint as a telecommunications executive, which is the same thing as believing two impossible things before breakfast. Our marketing people were challenged to come up with a term for the capability to carry on an uninterrupted   conversation from home to car to place of business. The fact that other motorists and pedestrians would be terrified by your behavior enroute was not part of the equation.

That is the sort of unintended consequences of technology. The marketing people were uncomfortable with delivering a technical solution that effectively meant turning our cars into hurtling unguided missile as we yacked away. They expected us to sell the concept as a thing called “Blended Lifestyle.”

It made us shudder in the national security end of the business, and akin to “don't ask, Don't tell.”

At IBM, I was introduced to technologies that were working in parallel, a groundswell in the background none of us really understood.

The PC migration from the ancient monolithic mainframe computers had revolutionized the world by putting computer power on our desktops. That was liberation and curse, as it turned out. With all the little machines requiring their own software to run on their own hard drives, it was a bonanza for people like Bill Gates, who sold individual copies at vast profit.

The opportunity to carve into that profit is partly what caused the beginning of the Thin Client revolution. Having a box on your desk that did everything that Mr. Gates wants you to be capable of is a Fat Client.

You can't be either too thin, or too rich, as they say. The Thin Client means that the thing on your desk is just a portal to something big, somewhere else. It was the return to the Main Frame, only the big computer is not concealed behind a valut door in the Main Computer Center, it is going to be a cloud all around us.

The Thin Client architecture made all sorts of things possible. The Anti-Gates, Mr. Steven Jobs, threw the iPhone into the mix, coupled with his brand of ruthless proprietary technology. That prompted the entry of Mr. Kevin Lynch, et al, who is responsible for the AIR we are about to breath.

It is free and non-proprietary, a reaction to Mr. Jobs.

The thing about the distributed personal computer is that it is tremendously inefficient. Kevin was irritated with his inability to access the data on his home desk-top computer while he was traveling.

Under his concept, a generation of new computing devices will have a relatively small amount of solid-state disk storage capacity and will increasingly rely on data stored on Internet servers.

I ran into it the other day by accident. I was trying to figure out how to migrate my crap from one Anti-Gates box to another. Someone wrote me a question the other day about things we used to do in the Philippines years ago, innocent fun, as we thought of it then.

I recalled that I had written a letter in 1979 that directly addressed the outrage, and had later scanned scanned it digitally into a story. I cannot find anything on my hard drive; too many folders and too many layers of boxes all storied in a jumble. So I clicked on Google, and looked on the web.

There it was, in two clicks. It is easier to pull things out of the air than find then on my desk.

Kevin Lynch and his pals are about to make that all possible for all of us. It sounds ridiculous, of course, since the screen on a cell phone is too small to have a “rich internet experience.”

I had another buddy from the mad scientist world who cracked that problem. He approached me about joining a sales consortium to market a laser projector small enough to fit in a phone that cost less than a $100 and could generate the equivalent of your home computer screen on any flat surface.

I have not heard from him in a while, though I saw the prototype and know the capability is real. He disappeared into the Dominican Republic, or Bell Labs had him taken out.

The capability already exists. I'm sure the wizards will be able to turn that into holograms or something like them, and our index finger will replace the ubiquitous mouse. All this stuff is here already. It is just a question of how the marketing people will package it for us. I'm not looking for a blended lifestyle, just my stuff.

But think what will come along with it. If the cellphone brought anarchy to the public roadways, just think what it is going to be like if we can project all our data and conversations and movies and tunes all around us, all the time.

We'll be living in the cloud. Text me a message? That is so 21st century.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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