So I'm stuck in the airport waiting to pick up my brother whose flights are always delayed (it must be some kind of karmic revenge - he must have caused a lot of people to be late in a past life). While I'm wanding around trying to fill an hour and a half with no place to sit down, I meander over to one of the ubiquitous news stands and pick up an interesting looking magazine - Technology Review - MIT's magazine of innovation. It's a really cool magazine with all kinds of articles that are really interesting; nuclear power, holographic memory, mesh networks, synthetic biologics, etc.
One of my favorite articles talked about mesh networking (this is not the article from the print version) - what I see as the future of networking for our world. The concept is fairly simple. Get a bunch of wireless access points together and let them intelligently route traffic around. Wireless = easy to install and create huge areas of coverage. Intelligent = self healing networks - when a node goes down the other nodes simple route traffic around the problem in a very fluid manner. Really cool. Check out the Microsoft Research site on mesh networks (maybe ready for use inside of 5 years?). What's really cool about this is if we get to the point where we have truely omnipresent wireless connections to the internet where ever we go, we will begin to incorporate connected technology into our lives in ways we can barely imagine now. Wireless in the car, wireless sewn into your clothes, etc. Very nifty stuff.
I'll probably end up subscribing to this magazine (I'll replace one of the other magazines I don't read with this)
-- Matt Ranlett