Software pioneer Dan Bricklin is shown a peek at the future of medical telemetry and computation [follow link and scroll to Feb. 4 entry] Dan is one of the guys behind ur-PC-software VisiCalc, and continues to make great new useful software today. He visited the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT), one project at which is looking into ways in which sensors could be more independent, broadcasting information wirelessly to centralized systems which could perform the computationally intensive tasks that individual devices either cannot or would be prohibitively expensive to offer ubiquitously. This kind of idea could transform aspects of diagnostic and hospital medicine. Dan provides quite a lot of detail; CIMIT's own site appears to not offer the same kind of insight at present.
InfoWorld Covers WLANs and Wi-Fi
This week's InfoWorld magazine covers wireless networking in quite extensive detail in several articles.
InfoWorld picked 802.11b as one of the most important technologies of 2001: of course, the technology has been around since mid-1999 in its current form, but the utility appeared last year. The article details the improvements, momentum, and challenges.
InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, kvells about Wi-Fi's future in his and other operations: Dickerson, a clearheaded writer with a dead-on practical approach, is putting his money where his excitement is. In InfoWorld's new offices, they will go Wi-Fi everywhere for desktop machines. He doesn't offer a strict cost-benefits analysis (which I expect he's done: office wiring is expensive due to building codes and labor), but he has a key insight: On the business side, it's the ability to access key business data in real time to make critical decisions -- no waiting to get back to your desk. In our current era of tight belts, having better, faster, lower-administration methods of getting information everywhere makes us more competitive, efficient, and responsive.
Go Slow on 802.11a, many warn and urge: it's interesting to watch those in the industry try to slow a galloping horse, but the 802.11a spec (to be certified as Wi-Fi5 when WECA finalized its process for the new mark) is causing many distress. It's faster, yes, but unproven, and because of its use of 5 GHz insead of Wi-Fi's 2.4 GHz band, completely incompatible in its basic nature. In the future, dual-band radios may make headway, but a headlong rush into the new specification could certainly wait. With a raft of 802.11 improvements nearing ratification this year (e for quality of service, h for adaptive frequency respose and power response, and i for security), why buy 802.11a today when you can buy a+e+h+i in six months?