Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
is to imagine a non-technical person - a child, say. What is the first thing they would
have done with technology? They would have used email. I noticed with my non-technic-
al friends - their first foray into my world was the connection of the email system which
occurred in 1991-1992. And then when the internet happened, the internet mail protocols
became standardized, everyone else converted and you got this explosion."
Google evangelist and TCP/IP inventor Vinton Cerf, meanwhile, stresses the import-
ance of something he calls the "Inter-Cloud." Cerf compares the current cloud situation
to the lack of communication that hobbled individual computer networks pre-Internet. "At
some point, it makes sense for somebody to say, 'I want to move my data from cloud A to
cloud B,' but the different clouds do not know each other. We don't have any inter-cloud
standards." Cerf visualizes multiple clouds interacting with each other in real time, forming
on-demand banks of such combined processing power as has never before been known or
imagined.
"People are going to want to move data around, they're going to want to ask clouds to
do things for them," says Cerf. "There's a whole raft of research work still to be done and
protocols to be designed and standards to be adopted that will allow people to manage as-
sets."
Cerf also emphasizes the importance of security and - no surprise here - predicts a
growing role for mobile devices in everyday life as well as the connections of more ap-
pliances, including home appliances and office equipment, via the Internet. "Once you do
that, the mobile [device] is potentially the remote controller for all of these things," he says.
"The mobile now replaces all those little remotes that are sitting on the table in front of
you," says Cerf. In step with this prediction, and in recognition of the wireless capacity that
will be needed, Cerf as well predicts the opening of access to "white spaces" - that unused
broadcasting spectrum which today serves as a buffer between TV channels - as a tool for
expanding broadcast access.
On another front, Cerf has "become very excited about optical switching as an efficient
way of moving huge quantities of information back and forth." He further endorses the
notion of IP-based television to support services such as on-demand programming. "A
packaged-switch system can support on-demand more easily," he insists.
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil notes that: "We're doubling the power of inform-
ation technology every year, doubling the price performance, the capacity, the bandwidth,
and it's not just electronics; it's really anything having to do with information, including,
for example, biology ... It took us 15 years to sequence HIV; we sequenced SARS in 31
days. Our knowledge of the brain, which is our information processes, is doubling every
year. The amount of data we have, the spatial resolution, our brain scanning is doubling
every year. I mean, we could list 50 or 60 different information measures which are grow-
ing in this exponential fashion. Doubling every year means multiplying by a thousand in
10 years, a billion in 30 years - it's actually 25 years. If you think about how powerful -
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