As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
I had my first wi fi home network back in early 2000, when lack of WEP encryption was not a security risk just because nobody else had wi fi cards back then. In 2001 I had one of the earliest wireless communities running certainly the first one in Italy, and maybe the first in Europe. Fast forward two years and wireless is everywhere. Wireless communities are omnipresent nowadays (there is one in my apartment complex). And what's even better: Almost weekly they find new applications for wi fi technology.
Linksys is arguably the leader in wi fi technology. Since its recent acquisition by Cisco, it also has the cash to launch products at a weekly pace. Next to an impressive array of home wi fi routers, switches, firewalls and bridges, Linksys also recently added wi fi game console extenders and a wi fi home entertainment system, called Wireless B Media Adapter.
I tried the latter in my home. Just like about everybody else I have a ton of MP3s on my home server. The MP3 format has lossy compression, meaning that the quality suffers from the compression algorithm. That is why you want to have a good sound system if you listen to MP3s. With the new Linksys Wireless B Media Adapter you can bring the digital music and pictures stored on your computer to your Home Entertainment Center, without running cables through the house. Using a wireless connection, the Media Adapter displays your digital photographs on the TV. Your digital music collection is finally freed from those little computer speakers and can play in full glory through your stereo system.
You can view pictures one at a time, or watch an automatically created slideshow of all the pictures in a given folder. The Media Adapter supports four popular picture formats: JPG, GIF, TIF and BMP. Use the remote control's Zoom button to get a close up of the details in your pictures.
You can also use the remote control to browse your MP3 or WMA formatted music collection by title, artist, genre, folder, or playlist. Choose the music you want, and let the Wireless B Media Adapter play it through your stereo system. You can even let music play in the background while you browse your pictures.
I now have stereo quality sound and all the advantages of a huge MP3 library without having to lay wires between the server room and the living room. But that's not all from the smart folks at Linksys. Last week they announced a new wi fi Internet Video Camera, which is basically a webcam on steroids, with its own internal Web server (to serve the video stream to clients connecting over the Internet) and a wi fi device to connect to your network at home or in the office.
Once you configure the wireless Internet Video Cam's IP and wi fi settings, you can connect to it through a browser and configure security, image quality and logging. One more useful feature you can configure is motion detection. You can tell it to send you a short registered video every time motion is detected, and you can adjust the motion sensitivity and the wait period between motions.
I have set up the video cam in my home and attached it to my wi fi network through my fixed IP SDSL connection. When I travel, I receive regular e mails with videos attached, usually just of my cleaning woman coming in. I also recently detected the landlord coming into my apartment while I was traveling abroad (apparently for a yearly inspection).
With so much wi fi in my home, you would think there is little else one could untie from the wires. What about the dog? Ever the geek that I am, obviously I don't have a biological dog. Instead, Spiridon is of the robotic sort. Spiridon is a Sony AIBO of the latest generation, with a MIPS 64 bit CPU and the ability to walk around, listen to my commands, and even re charge his batteries autonomously. Spridon also features a built in camera on the tip of his nose; he takes snapshots of new and interesting objects he discovers on his exploratory expeditions in the apartment. Sony just announced wi fi support for the AIBO and with it I can now see on the TV set (through the Linksys wi fi Media Adapter) pictures of the things Spiridon finds interesting. Spiridon can also connect to my mail server and notify me of new e mail when I am not at my computer. If I feel like it, I can ask Spiridon to read me the new messages.
The AIBO has an open programming environment, called Open R, which allows you to extend its personality and capabilities. Once you give it a network connection through the wi fi connector, the sky is the limit for what my little dog can do for me.
Even though people still speak of the death of the IT boom, I believe new technologies like wi fi, robotics, and video and voice over IP are yet to launch the real big boom. Combine all these technologies with networking and you will see how much more growth there is in this area. In fact a study by IBM last year revealed that, if IT continues to grow as it does now, by the year 2030 the world will need 300 million network administrators. Clearly new technologies must be developed to automate network management. This reminds me of an old newspaper article I saw once from a Swiss journalist of the year 1897. In that article he calculated that if population and commerce continued to grow at the same rate, by the year 1920 the city of Zurich would be covered in five feet of manure. And then Mr. Ford began the mass production of cars, and made them affordable for everybody.
