Dullroar

Gizmodo mentions a Steve Gillmor article talking about the ipod and its potential as a sort of hub device. To take things in a slightly different direction, what if someone built an ipod-sized dumb storage device with large capacity (120 GB or so) and a high-bandwidth version of bluetooth. Let's assume (big stretch here, I admit), that bluetooth becomes part of every device (headphones, car and home stereos, video and still cameras, even the tv). The result is that you've got all your files, music, pictures, and movies available anytime, anywhere.

When you get into your car, your whole music collection is available. When you take a picture or record video, it gets stored on the ipod-thing (and as a bonus, no more needing to find a new tape or an empty compact flash). Stand near a tv and you can view your movies and pics on a big screen. And while we're at it, use the ipod as storage for your laptop as well. When you get home, the ipod syncs with your home computer, so everything's backed up in case you drop it or it gets stolen. The ipod becomes a unified storage infrastructure. All the other devices that store stuff today could become simpler and smaller. And accessing all your data would be easier than ever.

Hey, it could happen.

Posted by Andy at 09:52 PM | Permalink

Haven't been near a computer too much lately as I've been hanging out with the family for winter break/Chanukah. Now heading off to do a whole New England thing for the weekend. Over the next few days I'll be hitting Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

Posted by Andy at 10:43 AM | Permalink

Christina saw some great Christmas lights in Bloomfield (Pittsburgh neighborhood), and they're as good as advertised. And now I know what a Moravian Star is.

Posted by Andy at 08:27 PM | Permalink

In this article, CNN claims that there will be 26% fewer software engineers employed 11 years from now than there are today. I suppose this means that I (and my colleagues) could be in big trouble, since there will be more and more eligible applicants for each job, and that could drive salaries down. That could hurt, especially now that I've decided to spend the next 3 years in grad school rather than out raking in the big bucks while I can.

I'll ignore the issue of whether or not this study is believable. I'm more interested in who cares about it. Is there someone out there picking careers based on these sorts of projections? Frightening.

Btw, this is the first post of my second week of blogging. To link to yet another well-known url, this white paper from Perseus says that about 40% of the blogs they studied only lasted a day before being abandoned, and of the remaining blogs, the average lifetime was 5 and a half months. So my next challenge: keep this blog going until at least May '04.

Posted by Andy at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today was the last day of finals. CMU's campus is emptying out for winter break. It felt more like spring break though, because the temperature was hovering at 55 F and it was sunnier than it had been in weeks. Most people looked a little disoriented in their heavy coats, squinting at the sun.

Posted by Andy at 10:08 PM | Permalink

In this essay, Reed Hundt talks about building a 10 to 100 Mbps network for every household in the U.S. He makes a great case for why it should be done and how we can pay for it.

What's interesting about this piece is that Hundt advocates a new approach to universal service. Instead of giving away broadcast spectrum (for HDTV) and maintaining (ancient, inflexible) phone lines, we should spend money on building out a next generation fiber network to every household, and run both HDTV and phone over that network. Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars.

I think it's a great vision, because a single, public network is a huge win for the same reasons that cities decided to only keep a single set of electric lines or a single set of gas lines. After all, you know something's wrong when Verizon is able to actively screw its competitors because it owns the phone lines. Last I checked, Verizon was selling DSL to end-users for $35 per month while it was selling DSL wholesale to its competitors for $40 per month. A publicly-owned network could fix that.

Posted by Andy at 03:07 PM | Permalink

A round-up of candidate blogs:
Clark
Dean
Edwards
Gephardt
Kerry
Kucinich
Lieberman
Moseley Braun (no blog found, so here's the campaign web site)
Sharpton (no blog found, so here's the campaign web site)

I'll leave it up to you whether a blog written just for the publicity is still a blog.

Posted by Andy at 12:31 PM | Permalink

PA Route Numbering Logic is written by a guy who my girlfriend had to share a desk with. Kinda makes sense she'd wind up with me, eh?

Posted by Andy at 10:21 PM | Permalink

The 100x100 Network is a new project I'm part of at CMU. The goal is to build a network capable of delivering 100 times more bandwidth than most DSL or cable modems currently deliver. Among the challenges is figuring out what people would use all that bandwidth for.

Posted by Andy at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

TikiWiki seems like one of the best open source wikis. I do wish the docs and ui were a little cleaner, though.

Posted by Andy at 12:07 AM | Permalink

Hello world.

Posted by Andy at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)