Articles

By Stefan Sojka

Australia is planning to have Internet in 2017 that’s about as fast as Japan was five years ago – woo hoo!  Yes folks, after lagging just behind Turkey, Hungary and the Slovak Republic since the middle-ages, we are finally mustering up everything we’ve got so that by the time I’m about ready to retire, I’ll be able to upload a DVD in under an hour.  Awesome!

How much are we investing?  12 month’s beer money.  Yes, Australia is pouring less into its broadband future over 8 years than we spend on alcohol in a year.  In the end we get a system that might be just fast enough to watch one channel of HD TV in real-time – on a good day.

100mbps is being described in the National Broadband Network plan as “superfast”.  A discussion on ABC Radio National recently heard a commentator claim it was “too fast”.
Reminds me of the time I bought a 28.8K modem and all my 14.4K friends told me I was crazy.

Let’s get real – the information age is not going to go away, save for a massive global environmental meltdown (which, ironically, has the best chance of being averted by the rapid expansion of information exchange).  If we don’t aim for the absolute limits of our capacity, we are letting ourselves down.  We risk becoming nothing more than consumers – not producers or innovators – of the digital realm.  Sadly, that seems to be where we could be heading – at the blistering pace of 100 megabits per second.

The limits of information transfer are way up in the terabits/second realm – or beyond.  It’s just getting warmed up.  So let’s imagine just a few scenarios:

An Australian creates the next ‘YouTube’ or ‘FaceBook’ and can run it from his/her garage, without worrying about being shut down by Telco invoices.  Our carbon footprint gets reduced to baby steps as every DVD ever couriered is now emailed and our entire digital existence migrates to the Web.  Goodbye hard drives and LANs.  Each car in a city fitted out like the Google ‘Street View’ cars, feeding a virtual, real-time model of the city we can all ‘fly’ around.  Hologram booths parachute live HD images of ourselves into board meetings – or AA meetings.  ‘Live’ gigs, where millions of musicians and singers plug into a musical cloud.  Servers mash them into ensembles – in a style chosen by us – to rain back to our venues in real-time onto a video wall.  Computers using the Internet more than people, to optimise the world’s resources and finances – thevenusproject.com points the way.

A paper – “The Limits of Human Vision” prepared by Michael F Deering from Sun Microsysems, calculates that we need about 10 billion ‘variable resolution’ pixels per second to saturate our eyes and convince us that what we see is real.  Actual (not virtual) reality is coming and the world is not going to wait for us to catch up.

For a real stab at the digital future that is unfolding, I’ll bet my beer money, that 100 megabits per second just won’t cut it.

By Stefan Sojka

I sometimes wonder exactly what happens when I perform a single mouse click.  The camera in my optical mouse snaps 1,000 frames-a-second of my desk surface, the integrated circuit algorithm translates the difference between each frame into ones and zeros, specifying the mouse’s position and detecting the click on the injection-moulded button, triggered by pressure from my DNA-moulded finger.  The blue-tooth wireless communication protocol transmits that information to the USB receiver, and heaven knows how many processes and protocols are involved inside my computer, the pixel rendering in the graphics card and the execution of the code inside my browser to perform the action – in this case, a ‘one-click’ online purchase.

A binary burst zips from chip to chip, back out into the air and into my wireless modem, down the copper wire of my phone line, and on its way via an incalculable number of routers, switches and servers.  At every stage, the electronic Morse-code triggers the creation of system administration log files, registers bandwidth usage onto ISP accounts and careers on its way to the Web server upon which the page I clicked is hosted.  Then the fun starts!  My click executes the server-side script to send off my encrypted credit card details to a payment gateway, which in turn talks to my bank and the merchant bank’s computers.  A whole bunch more logs are created, accounts topped up and depleted, receipts and confirmation emails ‘automagically’ written and triggered, orders confirmed, processed and goods dispatched.

One click!

My digital life exists on the sea spray atop the crests of waves, surfing an unfathomable ocean of highly evolved science and technology I never see and barely comprehend.  Yet I expect it all to work perfectly.  If that click doesn’t do what it is supposed to, I react like a two-year-old who has let go of my helium balloon and watched helplessly as it ascends to the heavens.

Technology is phenomenally awesome, but it is a rather tenuous proposition.  As it matures, I need to mature as well and begin to comprehend both the complexity – and the limitations.  When my Website has a glitch, when an email doesn’t get through, when I can’t log on somewhere, when a file won’t open… before I begin pouting and stomping my feet, I need to count to a trillion, chill out and find forgiveness in my heart for all the poor tech-heads who run all this stuff.

From the Web developer to the hosting provider, ISP, computer technician and who knows who else is roped into the supply chain (the submarine cable maintenance crew?), everyone is under pressure to keep this thing switched on and humming.  They are also expected to improve it exponentially every two to three weeks.  Faster!  Easier!  More colour!  More movement!  More bells!  Louder whistles!  This month I pause and reflect on how fortunate I am to live in these times.  I marvel at the sheer magnificence of the ‘click’ and cut anyone involved in delivering that click a truckload of slack. :-)

By Stefan Sojka

Why do you want to go Bill's way?

We've all been blown away by the now patented & psyche-etched "where do you want to go today?" rhetorical question, and the exciting possibilities of running a fashion house or sushi bar, selling web-objects to a race of newbies, a generation 'coming down" from a 45 year fix of Alpha-wave TV.

We are now a switched on consumer, like the 90's mum scanning baby pictures and sending them via email to grandma in England, while her boyfriend runs a successful SOHO using nothing but a Pentium, modem and a pair of Raybans.

The paper-clip helper is certainly a lovable masochist, as we run him through the wringer upon the "print" command. This is surely just the beginning of Bill's creative teams efforts.

Are we worshiping the beast or delving into a godsend with this web thing? Is there just so much crap, porn, junk mail, hate sites and perverts, not to mention bad websites, that surfing the net will be useless. Shall we stick with TV? Infomercials, cable, passive sedation via hypnotic broadcasts?

Or can we consider the premise that this embryonic & rapid growth of what is essentially the earth's brain, it's cerebral cortex, if you will, connected with human synapses & aided by electronic nerve impulses through computers (receptors) is an opportunity to use it as much as we can, thirsting for downloads of the latest upgrade, learn all the fancy new scripts, install a few cgi bins in your web, full of surveys and feedback forms, and even when win95 crashes, it creates a talking point. Bill is helping support the ancient art of conversation.

"My windows crashed last night"

"yeah?"

"8 times!"

"wow" "Bill Gates must be the 11th child born on the 14th full moon after the rise of the pestilence in the new world, and born of the pilgrims. He must be Satan!"

"yeah, wanna see my cool evil web links?"

"uh-huh"

…stuff like that.

I mean, what else is there to talk about? Where do you want to go today? I think its more like, why should we go Bills way? If there are enough positives and few enough negatives to a system, surely we should do our darned global best to give the people everything they need to go where they want to go today. Somehow I think alternative operating systems and protocols are around the corner, waiting to be discovered/created/evolved.