April 2007 marks a full decade that I've been writing professionally about what I now call Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA).
My debut was a column called Wireless Data Development in Boardwatch Magazine's April 1997 issue shown at right. My column topic made the cover - AT&T Introduces A Wireless Local Loop. (Unfortunately, only a few remnants have survived online from Boardwatch's once-considerable online presence, and the April, 1997 issue isn't among them.)
Although I cannot find where and when he said it, some time prior to the April, 1997 issue, Boardwatch Editor Rotundus (his self-conferred title) Jack Rickard abruptly transitioned the magazine from covering both the Bulletin Board Service (BBS) industry and the fledgling Internet Service Provider industry, to just the latter. He also invited those who had ideas for new columns to submit their ideas. I submitted a writing sample and a proposal, and heard from a Boardwatch editor in approximately January-February 1997 to "start writing".
In those first few years of Wireless Data Developments, I struggled to explain to the new Internet Service Provider industry about the benefits of using wireless technology to provide the last mile between the ISP and the user.
The topic of the column and I were met with a lot of outright skepticism, not the least of which was from Editor Rickard who I never met or talked to the entire time I wrote the column, and later feature articles. Rickard only told me years later that his opinion then was "This guy [me] can't write worth crap... but let him keep trying". I don't think Rickard ever really got wireless, even though he did finally get to see the realization of what I had been talking about for all those years by attending a WISPCON - Wireless Internet Service Provider Conference where Rickard saw for himself that the small entrepreneurial ISP that was so beloved to him and Boardwatch was alive and well... just now using wireless.
Wireless Data Developments opened the door to other writing opportunities about the subject of Broadband Wireless Internet Access. I particularly enjoyed writing for Broadband Wireless Business (now also apparently defunct) in its early years.
Wireless Data Developments lasted about five years, and Boardwatch didn't survive for too much longer, a victim of two ownership turnovers, loss of passion (and Rickard), the devastating downturn in the tech industry, the movement of advertising and readership to online, and trying to cater the content to what the big advertisers wanted rather than keeping the content relevant to the core audience of smaller, entrepreneurial ISPs.
One proud moment with Boardwatch came in January, 2002 with the publication of what I submitted as my last column, but ended up being barely sandwiched into the magazine as an article called Wireless Smart Radio, Heavy Lobbying Would Bring Wireless ISP Band. I've told that story previously on this blog. As far as I'm aware, this was the first article in print that proposed what are now called Cognitive Radio Techniques that would allow Broadband Wireless Internet Access to effectively share unused television broadcast channels (now called "TV Whitespace") while protecting legacy television broadcasting. Such a proposal is now under active consideration at the FCC, backed by companies such as Microsoft and Cisco.
But my proudest achievement in ten years of writing about Broadband Wireless Internet Access was that I conveyed information of worth to readers. I taught them things, and about things, that they otherwise wouldn't have known about or understood as well. Over the years, many have told me that they've appreciated my writing, and being told that is very gratifying.
During these last ten years, especially the past seven writing full time, my wonderful wife Tina has supported me in every conceivable way. I couldn't have written at all, but especially couldn't have written as much or as well, without Tina's unflagging support. Thank You Honey!
(Within the last few days, DailyWireless.org and Wi-Fi Networking News have announced milestones of their own.)
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh
Gnomedex in Seattle, Washington, August 9-11, 2007 to learn more about the business of blogging.
WiMAX World USA in Chicago, Illinois, September 25-27, 2007 to immerse myself in all things WiMAX.
ISPCON Fall 2007 in San Jose, California, October 16-18, 2007 to catch up with the ISP industry as a whole and meet up with Wireless ISPs who are attending, and (potentially) speaking.
Apple Search (Apple Found) - Quite Plausible
One of my must-reads is I, Cringely. I've been a fan even before he "Cringley'd" me in 2002. Many Cringley posts are provocative and throught provoking, but he had a doozy yesterday - Avram Miller says Steve Jobs has one more Apple intro.
Then I read Miller's post - How Apple crushed Google in the fall of 2015 from my book "the Future History of Technology".
As I was sipping my coffee this morning and my wife Tina was rushing to leave to catch her bus, I persuaded her (just barely) to listen to me read her part of Miller's article, and then went on to explain why I thought Miller's idea was so plausible. She fixed me in a steely gaze and said "I look forward to reading your article on your blog." So, here goes. Thanks, Honey.
My first observation is another one of those things that you either get about Apple, or don't - Apple's customers just want stuff to work. They're willing to pay Apple's prices to get a product with a low hassle factor - that works reliably, repeatedly, and when it breaks, you can get help quickly and efficiently. You just have to go to the average Apple store to see just how profound this effect is - the average Apple store is packed with people. Most are buying things, but the ones that aren't buying are getting help with their existing Apple product.
So, Miller's right that there's an existing base of Apple users ready to try a search capablity that doesn't spam them like Google and Bing and Yahoo! are doing.
My second observation is the mystery of Apple building enormous data centers (and according to "CHRISGRAY", a commenter on Miller's post, buying existing data centers). Most observers on Apple's data center activity have simply asked "why so big"? You don't need that much data center to do what Apple's currently doing, even projecting forward to Apple doing something like buying Netflix (total speculation on my part) or maintaining each user's music and video collections totally in iCloud. Siri apparently isn't that compute-intensive (or, per my experiences with it overall, not compute-intensive enough). So, adding on a search capability to what Apple is already doing begins to make sense of what Apple could do with so much datacenter capability.
My third observation is a leap that as far as I am aware, unique to me. This is total speculation. The biggest factor in data centers is watts per "compute function" - how much electrical power does it take to accomplish a calculation... a search? If you look at the rack of an average data center, you'd see something that's vaguely recognizable as the successor to a desktop PC. It'll have big Intel processors that are air-cooled or even water-cooled. It will have sticks of RAM, sticks of cache memory, and lots of disks, usually spinning, but more and more, solid state. Conceptually, it's a PC.
But Apple thinks differently. Unlike Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple builds things. They're used to... comfortable... building things. Apple likes building things, and they're good at it. Apple has even built servers. So, what if... in their data centers, Apple is building their own servers around the 64-bit A7 processor that they use in their current leading-edge products? Two things immediately come to mind from that possibility. The first is the compute-density would be astonishing - they'd be able to do astonishing amounts of computation. The second is that Apple is seriously motivated to make the watts per "compute function" very high, because Apple is committed to powering their data centers from renewable energy sources like solar. So, for Apple, every watt that's spent spinning a fan or pump to cool a processor is a lot of money (more renewable energy required).
So, imagine a huge data center, populated floor to ceiling with very, very dense racks of processor boards populated with cool-running A7 processors. I've been told that some of these data centers aren't even accessible by humans any more - when they (rarely) need to be serviced, they have to be disassembled to provide enough room for a human to get to it.
I can't really imagine the applications that are possible with a huge data processing capability like that. The possibilities not only boggle my imagination... let alone what I know. But Apple has an incredible number of smart people dedicated to making my experience as an Apple customer as good as possible, and I'm guessing they have some ideas on what to do with all that compute capability.
Including Search. I'll certainly use Apple Found, if it comes to pass.
The obligatory BWIA tie-in? None, really, except that if Search could get as good as Arthur C. Clarke imagines the "Minisec" to be, all the data would be kept in the cloud, not on the device, because you'd want it all to be easily searchable. In that future, we're going to need a lot of Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
By Steve Stroh
Posted by Steve Stroh on April 29, 2014 at 07:16 in Comments Regarding Other Blogs / Sites, Special Story | Permalink