I’m typing this in Geneva International airport, I’m not actually online and I won’t post this till sometime tomorrow but that’s not the point….
Anyway had a bit of a laugh saw a REALLY old looking lady, she actually looked like Death’s grandmother warmed up it was a bit freaky, and it was after two pints of quite strong beer in Les Brasseurs 😕
I was over for a Grid and Enterprise workshop and I think I may have actually seen the future of popular computing. I say popular because I think geeks like me will either be precious about their machines or will jump head first into this. Look here it is, all the publicity we’ve being doing for The Grid has mentioned the idea of a terminal which will pretty much be THE most basic machine but will connect to an unlimited supply of processing power and storage space which will be out on the Grid. I personnally thought this was an actual possibility just a few years away … em I was wrong one of the spin off companies has designed a box which will run a non M$ operating system, Open Office, Firefox and a whole host of other open source programs but has NONE of this built in, NOTHING, no hard drive, no built in software, NOTHING. All you need is this box which has video out ports, USB ports, audio connections etc and costs around US$150(£81, â?¬177) and then you pay US$18(£10, â?¬14) a month for the basic package. That is less than $400(£215, â?¬314) for your first year and $216(£116, â?¬170) for every other year BUT, and here is the big thing, you will probably never need to upgrade. The hard disk, the processor you won’t own any of these things so you don’t need new hardware. All you need is a broadband connection and you’re sorted. I saw this working today and I was very impressed. It’s some Danish researchers and they have had a lot of interest apparently but they think the killer app might be building it into your digital set top box so you get pretty much a PC and digital TV all in your front room for a fraction of M$’s multimedia PCs. What really excites me is this idea that no matter how many people use the internet now on computers think what will happen if it is in your front room, on your TV and it’s all running open source. Will this eventually kill M$? Nah not really they’ll still have the business community by the balls but they could lose the battle for the front room. Hmmm I could see Apple trying this idea out, a properly integrated digital set top box connected to your iPoo and iTunes and running off CPUs and storage managed by Apple with Apple software would slay M$ easily. Maybe I should ring Steve (Jobs).
The OpenLab students who I was there to see were all pretty cool, three from Imperial and one from Glasgow (who I didn’t see much of). I’ll be doing a news piece on the workshop for work so It’ll probably have a picture of them with it.
Maria the postgrad I know working on CMS wasn’t here as she’s in Canada all this month but I’ll catch up with her next time I’m over in September for a EGEE conference. Hmm I also need to sort out a visit down the pits, I really want to see ATLAS and the rest before they close the whole thing up, I’ve a meeting with Sarah tomorrow(today? depends when I post this) and I’ll ask her who I should ask. Maria does tours but I THINK she only has access to CMS but if not all the better.
The flights were uneventual, well the first one was aint on the second yet but no sign on the boards of a delay … yet.
Arghh just realised my USB key is in my hold baggage so I’ll need to transfer this on to it later, it’s going to be Thursday night before I post this now probably and we’re meant to be going to Punk Science so could even be later, ah well.
I still have to review Alice In Chains and :Twin Zero, which I will get up asap.
Strange things I saw on the way home:
An old lady with a dead pigeon on a string I am NOT making that up she was dragging this pigeon body along the street on a piece of twine.
A lady of dubious driving ability, i.e. driving on the right hand side of the road and unable to pull out of a side road. “Well” thinks I “there’s a lady unable to drive and is not quite her optimum body weight” and the she pulls away and her licence plate reads “M15 FAT” Miss Fat?!? Who in their right mind would actually have this licence plate let alone a fat lady? Jeez 😕
Best definition of Wikipedia(from The Register): “the website that “anyone can edit” that’s popular with teenagers and the unemployed”
Link of the day:
Kitten in the name. Made me smile.
Later days,
Halo
“I personnally thought this was an actual possibility just a few years away”
Em, forgive me, but isn’t this essentially a step back in time? It’s what all our Dad’s used to do with mainframes and dummy terminals 🙂
On a serious note, I have a couple problems…. First, you will need seriously fast internet connection for it to truly work, which Europe has now, but we don’t, and nor does the US. Second is a question of storage. I think we NEED local storage. It’s connected with bandwidth issues momstly, but folk will want to store all their tunes for the iPod on their local machine, untill you can update the songs on it via ethernet as quick as you can with firewire…
It is very like the dunny terminals and all that but with unlimited processing power/storage in theory, a lot smaller and cheaper.
Also you need to remember that most people don’t have the music collections you and I have but there are USB ports to connect local storage if you want (I personnally would). We were discussing this after we saw it and geeks love personal storage but i’m not sure if this is a big an issue for the public.
Bandwidth is an issue they said you “only” need a half a megabit connection for it to work well but if someone has a cable internet package those connection speeds are possible in the UK and Ireland.
I think they step forward will be the integration into the front room that this would allow as this would cost a lot less than conventional technology. I think it will never replace a computer for some users but as an add on to an existing product like a set top box or the ability to surf the web on your TV it would be very successful.
But you forget that more and more people have iPods… and they have a lot of content on them (mostly illegal), and if they have to update them over ethernet, it would be very, very slow!
Unless, you combined iPods with storage… so you hook your iPod to the terminal, then rip/buy tunes etc, and aso have a documents etc partition, so you could go to any terminal, plug it in, and away you go… would work with perpendicular storage I suppose….