I read recently that a tech vendor had "the largest market share in financial services", which seemed really impressive if it wasn't for the superscript number indicating there was a qualifier in the footnotes.  "Ranking applies only to pure-play EAI vendors," it read.  Oh, of course, EAI.  Whoops, I mean, what exactly is EAI?

According to whatis.com:

EAI (enterprise application integration) is a business computing term for the plans, methods, and tools aimed at modernizing, consolidating, and coordinating the computer applications in an enterprise. Typically, an enterprise has existing legacy applications and databases and wants to continue to use them while adding or migrating to a new set of applications that exploit the Internet, e-commerce, extranet, and other new technologies. EAI may involve developing a new total view of an enterprise's business and its applications, seeing how existing applications fit into the new view, and then devising ways to efficiently reuse what already exists while adding new applications and data.

Translation:  it's middleware.  And I know middleware isn't the easiest thing to understand, so let's just say EAI is the way you get data in and out of mainfranes (legacy systems) when you want to do something cool with those legacy systems like get them connected to the Internet.

"Pure-play middleware vendor" is an interesting concept though, since most middleware has grown as an extension of one of the connected systems.  I suppose this term is used to keep Oracle and Microsoft out of the comparisons with this firm, since Oracle dabbles in ERP and Microsoft meddles in everything.

Tags: EAI, middleware, you learn something new everyday

No, this is not a comment on English-only legislation for the United States (this is /tech...), just a link to a great little rant by Joel about which programming language to use for your software development project.

In the midst of my network design work, an application challenge has presented itself, and I'm diving back into Python to develop a solution.  So I was particularly interested to see Joel identify Python as the fourth "half"-alternative that might be appropriate for developing web-based apps "(C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python)".  I turned to Python because with my limited experience, I knew I could use it to expose some COM objects and crypto libraries that I needed for this task.  And basically because I'm still in the "if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" stage, and I'm confident with Python I can bang away at a problem and eventually get it into place.  I know this is antithetical to good programming practices, but as I've repeated over and over, "I'm not a developer, I'm a hack."

Tags: programming, languages, Python, hack

Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and co-founder of Broadcast.com and HDnet, confirmed what I said many moons ago about Internet TV.

our telecommunications infrastructure is woefully unprepared for widespread delivery of advanced services, especially video, over the Internet. Downloading a single half hour TV show on the web consumes more bandwidth than does receiving 200 emails a day for a full year. [blogmaverick.com]

I wrote about this at great length back in January (in another forum -- I was going to repost it here but, after re-reading it, realized it was not very well written and about 1000 words too long).

The main point was that the Internet was built on the concept of best-effort delivery of packets, and packets not received are simply resent -- basically it was built for downloading and not for streaming or other real-time delivery.  Email and newsgroups -- the earliest 'interactive' applications -- were still store-and-forward systems.  The fact that the Internet supports voice and video as well as it does would probably astound the researchers that developed it.

Tags: internet, TV, IPTV

You can sleep soundly for now, but apparently researchers are working on the technology to ads in your dreams. [via AdPulp]

All in-sleep subjects have a procedure to implant a nanobot (a tiny robot about the size of a blood cell) into that part of the brain where dreams originate — the pons in the brainstem. Once the chip is in place, it acts something like a wireless base-station, sending and receiving signals from other nanobots.

Before an in-sleep subject goes to bed they put a small device in their ear, not dissimilar to a cochlear implant. When the subject moves into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the implant is triggered (by the increase in delta waves) and a nanobot containing the appropriate advertising message is released into the spiral artery of the ear and down through to the cochlear canal. Once it reaches the blood brain barrier, it is programmed to wirelessly send an electrical signal (the advertisement) to the nanobot located in the pons. That nanobot receives the signal, sources the appropriate neuroreceptor and implants the ad. [eMarketer]

Releasing a secondary nanobot to travel down the cochlear canal to deliver the message seems like an unnecessary step -- once the primary nanobot is implanted in the pons couldn't the tranmission come from something outside the body, like maybe your alarm clock?  I guess we're talking about very low power transmissions, and maybe body tissue would interfere -- but just the fact that someone is already trying to do this is a scary/cool thing.  I'll sign up for the BMW Test Drive Dream every night... heck, I'll take a nap every afternoon if this really works.

Tags: nanobots, nanotechnology, advertising, dreams

You can sleep soundly for now, but apparently researchers are working on the technology to ads in your dreams.

All in-sleep subjects have a procedure to implant a nanobot (a tiny robot about the size of a blood cell) into that part of the brain where dreams originate — the pons in the brainstem. Once the chip is in place, it acts something like a wireless base-station, sending and receiving signals from other nanobots.

Before an in-sleep subject goes to bed they put a small device in their ear, not dissimilar to a cochlear implant. When the subject moves into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the implant is triggered (by the increase in delta waves) and a nanobot containing the appropriate advertising message is released into the spiral artery of the ear and down through to the cochlear canal. Once it reaches the blood brain barrier, it is programmed to wirelessly send an electrical signal (the advertisement) to the nanobot located in the pons. That nanobot receives the signal, sources the appropriate neuroreceptor and implants the ad.

Releasing a secondary nanobot to travel down the cochlear canal to deliver the message seems like an unnecessary step -- once the primary nanobot is implanted in the pons couldn't the tranmission come from something outside the body, like maybe your alarm clock?  I guess we're talking about very low power transmissions, and maybe body tissue would interfere -- but just the fact that someone is already trying to do this is a scary/cool thing.  I'll sign up for the BMW Test Drive Dream every night... heck, I'll take a nap every afternoon if this really works.

Tags: nanobots, nanotechnology, advertising, dreams

My coworker alerted me to this the other day, so I understand that I'm already behind.

Cisco has announced Linksys wireless devices that adhere to the new 802.11n draft standard.  Cisco mentioned 12 times the throughput of 802.11g (54 Mbps).  Wikipedia is stating "These might more accurately be called pre-.11n routers, with speeds in excess of 300 Mbps."  Either way, that's pretty impressive.

The thing I don't understand so far (and I've read a good deal, but certainly not everything) is how 802.11n will be backward compatible with both 802.11b/g (2.4 GHz) and 802.11a (5 GHz), since they are not compatible with each other.  Nothing I've read so far talks about the frequencies that 802.11n will use, and the frequency has a direct correlation to coverage and signal propagation.  Of course, 802.11n promises better range -- Cisco proposes 4 times the range.

That's probably the part that is most exciting to me.  If these devices work as advertised and coverage is increased 4-fold, it would take far fewer private citizens to blanket an area in truly free wireless coverage.  That's when things get interesting.

More coverage: Gizmodo, ExtremeTech, Deviceforge, Intel.

Tags: wireless, 802.11n, WiFi

NOTE: My book reviews would normally be filed under /pmba, since they are generally business books, but this book was very technology oriented so I decided it belongs here. Regular items on /tech will focus on networking and information technologies, but this was too good to pass up.

The basic premise of Nanofuture by J. Storrs Hall (2005) is that nanotechnology has the potential to change everything - everything we think we know about everything in our world. The author did an excellent job of providing a basic understanding of what nanotechnology is, how mature the technology is today and where it is going, and how some of these changes will impact society.

Nanotechnology refers to creating and manipulating matter at the atomic level. Not just miniturizing systems and components that we already have, but creating new structures and systems from the atom up. The book makes an excellent comparison to living cells, which are naturally created nano-sized components and systems that perform incredibly complex tasks extremely fast and very efficiently.

We can’t create machines with that level of precision, yet. The tools and processes do so are being created, and right now we can push atoms around in a very crude manner - much like “pushing peas around a table with a stick from a distance of 10 feet”. The author calls that Stage 1. The next step to better precision will be to get the nanostructures to assemble themselves, and scientists are currently using biological processes like protein-folding and DNA to make this work. This is Stage 2, and the subcomponents that are being built are simple motors and pumps, nothing as sophisticated as a non-bulldozer.

Stage 3 will be achieved when we have nano-machines that can go on to create more nano-machines. Then we will no longer be dependent on using biological processes to create the ‘builders’. But the basic materials that the builders manipulate will still be relatively large and complex molecules. Stage 4 will go a step beyond and use individual atoms as the basic components, building the more complex molecules needed to assemble larger components. Stage 5 seems to be when this process is widely available and atom-by-atom creation and atomicly exact duplicates of just about any physical thing will be possible.

Sounds far-fetched, right? The author lends credibility to the claims by comparing it to the technological advances throughout the course of human history. From simple tools, to mechanization, to computerization, the rate of technological change has continued to increase. The technological advances of the last 50 years easily outpaced the techonology of the previous 50 years, and it’s unlikely that we have somehow reached a “technology plateau” that will keep somehow keep technolgy stalled near our current levels. Everything points to the probability that we will have the pace of technological improvement will continue to increase.

The book then goes into a great deal of detail about how we will get from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and the mechanics and processes involved. It also discusses how when things get that much smaller, they get dramatically faster. Consider moving shipping containers around a shipyard with moving items around your desk - at the smaller scale, you can repeat many more motions with much greater precision. Imagine the same order of magnitude smaller, and it’s understandable how nano-engines will be able to turn a shaft at 48 billion revolutions per minute (rpm). A device with the output of a 100,000 horsepower aircraft engine could fit in the palm of your hand.

And this is where I have the first problem with the book - it doesn’t address how the nano-structures will relate to the world on the human scale. When I hear about such a super-powered engine, I imagine it somehow turning a turbine large enough to push a large volume of air to create the kind of thrust that will propel an airplane. It is still not clear to me how a million nano-shafts can end up turning something that I can see?

The other problem I have is that the book doesn’t go far enough in some of its examples of how nanotechnology will change everyday life. An example is given that rather than toothbrushes with a motor that moves the entire bristled head, it will have tiny motors on each bristle that will polish the teeth as they are ‘brushed’. I understand that they are trying to related nanotech to everyday items, but with nanotech you wouldn’t need toothbrushes anymore - nanobots in a mouth rinse could remove food particles from the surface of your teeth and be spit into the sink (or be rendered harmless as they pass into your stomach). Or the nano-material could be applied to your teeth just once and form a protective layer more slippery than teflon, not allowing food to attach to tooth enamel in the first place.

The author sees a time when everyone has a microwave-sized ‘synthesizer’ in their house, which can create just about anything - food (raw or ‘cooked’), tools, office supplies... but why would you need to do that? If you wanted to attach several pieces of paper together would you synthesize a stapler? Or would auto-binding be a feature of your nano-enhanced paper? I’d rather have paper that automagically binds together with enough pressure, and can pull apart with equivalent pressure; “Post-It”-like technology built into paper, except it won’t be faintly sticky when not-stuck and the stickiness won’t fail over time. The last thing I would want to do is create a stapler to perform the task - a stapler seems like a stone-age solution in a nanotech world.

And with regard to food, why synthesize perfect food when nanobots living in our stomach could continuously create all the nutrients we need based on whatever we eat. I suppose there will always be a desire to create through cooking, so starting with atomically perfect food is a good way to start. The author also goes to the other extreme, claiming that clothing will be translucently thin while providing temperature maintenance and other protective benefits. But if people wish to maintain any sense of modesty, clothing with a bit more structure and thickness will continue to be the norm.

The book briefly describes how the atomic recipies for these synthesizers would come from a Web-like connection, but it doesn’t begin to explore the intellectual property (IP) issues invloved. With IP protections, whoever owns the designs might have an incredible source of wealth. But with synthesizers that can deconstruct just about any item and capture it’s exact design, how do you protect the design? Without a profit motive, where will the designs come from? There will likely be a place for open-source designs, and plenty of room for pirates and knock-offs. There may be a real danger when imperfect designs are synthesized and perform in unexpected ways.

Another thing that wasn’t addressed was the autonomy or control of nanobots and systems. Even if they have the capabilities to act autonomously, they will need to know which other nanobots they should work cooperatively with, and which ones may be hostile or have motives that conflict with their task or mission. I suppose all this communication will be done over massively-meshed wireless networks, but those network are going to eclipse anything we’ve ever seen before. Imagine a network the size of the all the communications networks currently in the world, and that probably will be the communications capacity required to maintain your bathroom. Now imagine the security requirements for these networks...

The book also gives examples of how nanotech will change transportation, space travel and colonization, and medicine and life sciences. Each one will be transformed, with the potential to extend the vitality of a 20-year-old human to a lifespan of 700 to 900 years.

I’ve listened to the book summary three times already, and each time it has triggered the same excited response. Not everything in the book was new to me; I was introduced to many of the ideas and concepts were in Neal Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age”. I guess the exitement is that there is a good basis for this technology to be developed, and that it might come to be commonplace in my lifetime. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a worldwide communciations network like the Internet would have been dismissed as a pipe dream.

This space is reserved for ‘all things technical’ as seen through the eyes of Chris Wolske.

I’ll be moving some posts over from my other blog, and new content should appear every 2 - 3 days.