Rainblog

In Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel, “Snowcrash”, people can buy wearable computers that give them permanent access to the Multiverse - the gigantic shared virtual reality in which much of the novel’s action takes place. It’s something of a fringe choice: people who choose to festoon themselves with electronics just so that they can stay connected at all times are known contemptuously as ‘gargoyles’.

The novel’s protagonist (whose name is Hiro Protagonist) eventually succumbs to the lure of technology, leading to a scene in which he’s chatting with his friend Y.T. and offers to research something in the Multiverse (or, as we’d say, ‘on the web’). Y.T. hears traffic noise in the background, and realizes that he can’t be at his desk. “Oh my god, you didn’t”, she says. Poor Hiro, finally unmasked as a complete nerd, can only offer the ultimate nerd defense. “Yes”, he says weakly, “but it’s really cool …”

Enter Google Glass, which, incidentally, gives me a strong sense of déja-vu. It’s a slicker version of the wearable computers that my friend Rehmi used to build. It’s also a lot like some of the blue-sky concepts we kicked around when I was in a wearables group at Sony CSL Paris. Ten years on, miniaturization and an infrastructure that includes ubiquitous 4G mean that those ideas now have a chance of becoming a reality.

It remains to be seen whether people who are lucky enough not to have to wear glasses all the time will want to turn themselves into gargoyles just so that they can order coffee at Starbucks by blinking, or order concert tickets by twitching their nose. But even if the device never has real mass appeal, there are bound to be some people who’ll accept the inconvenience and the social humiliation because, after all, “it’s really cool” …

An office building in New York caught fire this afternoon. My friend Noel snapped a picture and tweeted it. 

With New York more than a little jumpy just now, because of the anniversary of 9/11 and a consequent elevated threat-level, this could be something of a big deal. I recognized that one of the other buildings in the photo was the Metropolitan Life Tower, which gave me the rough location of the building. Additional tweets from other New Yorkers helped me narrow it down further, and Google Earth gave me a picture. I recognize the building - it’s hard by Union Square, on Madison - but I don’t know its name.

Another tweet cites Al-Jazeera reporting that the fire was caused by a transformer explosion. And another supplies the missing name - the Credit Suisse building. Another tweet points me to an Irish newspaper that puts all the pieces together. And we’re done here. Twenty-five minutes after Noel’s initial tweet, I have what is probably the full story. In an hour or so, I might be able to read about it from the big boys like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times … if I still care to.

In the Twitter age, news can travel absurdly fast. The whole news cycle is being abbreviated: by the time the big corporate news sources have processed the story, it’ll already be old news.

Al-Jazeera and the Journal: well done for staying on top of this. The rest of you: try to keep up.

Now that more and more of our lives involve being connected to the Internet, one of the perpetual questions for anyone who travels is “How do I get online?” If you’re not too far from home (culturally as well as geographically speaking) you may drag a laptop or a netbook or an iPad with you. If you’re further afield and traveling light, you may not.

Which means that you may be forced to fall back on someone else’s computer: a PC in an office that you’re visiting, or someone’s home PC, or a cybercafe. Cybercafes are close to ubiquitous (unless you’re really off the grid). But there’s a problem: on someone else’s machine, you probably don’t have access to all ‘your stuff’, by which I mean not just documents - all your documents - but also an environment that works the way that you want it to. (There’s a second problem too: cybercafes, particularly in Asia, are like giant Petri dishes for malware).

So things like CloudUSB get my attention: a free package that puts all your files and tools on an encrypted USB stick, sync’d with your desktop via the indispensable Dropbox.

The catch is that you have to reboot the computer. While this is desirable (no nasty keyloggers can steal your passwords, unless they’re in the keyboard firmware), it’s also impossible in many cybercafes. If their billing system is a guy at the front desk with a notebook and a clock, you can probably reboot all you like. In more and more places, however, they have a sophisticated system to track how many seconds you spend online. The chances are that it’s all wired into the OS (Windows, inevitably) somehow, and so for obvious reasons everything is configured to prevent you trying to boot, let alone boot off a different device.

A few years back, there was a fad for ‘thin clients’, apparently started by people who were nostalgic for the days of mainframes and VT100 terminals. They wanted to throw away all the gains of the PC revolution and reduce the desktop machine to a not-quite-dumb machine slaved to some Central Computer. Enthusiasm for the idea was notable by its absence, and the ‘thin client’ died the death.

But the idea isn’t wholly wrong, and it’s not wholly dead. Probably what killed the thin client was that its proponents seemed to want to push processing power to the center of the network, which is a bad idea for all the reasons that we discovered when mainframes ruled the world. But one basic insight holds up: a computing system is not monolithic. It’s separable. A personal computer gives us processing power (CPU, memory), and interface (screen, keyboard), plus a place to put the stuff that matters to us - the programs we use, the environment we have set up, and all our files. For most of us, all these things are concentrated in one device: our personal (emphasis on that word ‘personal’) computer. If we want to access ‘our stuff’, we have to drag it around on a laptop: part of the point of a laptop is to guarantee us the rest of the package (processing, interface) wherever we are, but really it’s about having access to ‘our stuff’.

Systems like CloudUSB recognize the separability of ‘stuff’ from processing power. Environment-on-a-stick systems give you the environment and data that matter to you, and the ‘personal’ computer gets depersonalized to the point where it’s just a dumb workhorse, providing computing power but not acting as a repository for your digital life any more.

This is a little different from pure cloud computing. Google Docs theoretically works on a similar principle: your stuff is ‘out there’ in the cloud and the ubiquitous PC (and the ubiquitous web browser) is just a portal. That’s fine and dandy right up until the point when the network goes away. Then your documents might as well be on Mars. Sure, we’re moving towards a point where Google Docs works offline … but now your ‘stuff’ is trapped on a single machine again (unless you want to mess around with thumb drives and trying to remember exactly which version was changed when).

Here’s my vision of the future. It’s a marriage between CloudUSB, and Google Docs, and, God help us, the ‘thin client’. It consists of three parts. The bottom layer is the no-longer-personal personal computer. It’s an anonymous, utilitarian box providing raw CPU power, working memory, input and output. It might be in a desktop form factor, or a laptop … or a ‘pad’ device or a smartphone. It can be in your home, or your office, or your briefcase, or your pocket … or in someone else’s office or a cybercafe.

Then you have the cloud. The cloud is your guarantee of data ubiquity. It’s used for long-term storage of the stuff that matters to you. Everything you do ultimately gets pushed to the cloud.

But between these two lies another device. It’s a storage device, like a thumb drive, but it contains more than just documents. Like a CloudUSB stick, it contains a whole environment, set up the way you like it. It contains as many of your documents as you need. When you want to do some work, you find one of those computing boxes, and slot it in. The changes that you make get pushed to the cloud - when the cloud is available. If there’s no connection, they just get saved to the device until next time. The process is seamless and transparent: it’s not the user’s job to worry about where the latest version of their documents is located.

Why have a physical device at all? Because it decouples you from the network. Putting your whole environment in the cloud is a bad idea for two reasons. The first is that when the network goes away (or you go away from the network), you’re screwed. While people like to talk as if ubiquitous networking was already a reality, there will be places where the signal doesn’t reach or where access is subject to obscene tariffs. The second is that having your environment in the cloud limits you to a cloud environment, which is going to be a cut-down, compromised version of an ideal desktop environment. It’s limited by what you can push over the network, and it’s limited by available frameworks. Currently, that means HTML and the web browser, with all the UX horrors that implies. HTML5 promises to make web apps more powerful and attractive, but it’s still going to be a long time before they can fully measure up to the level of ease of use we’ve grown accustomed to in desktop OS’s and apps. Serious, in-your-pocket storage lets you enjoy a modern environment, configured the way you want it, with the programs you want, wherever you are, even when there’s no network.

Nevertheless, this device - this super thumb drive - will be a commodity. If you lose it, it’s a nuisance, but no more. You just go out and get another one. Then you restore the contents from the cloud, drop it in your pocket, and hit the road again. Your loss is limited to whatever you’d changed since the last time you had network access.

Ideally, there should also be a healthy dose of device agnosticism built in. If you think of it as being like a bootable hard drive (which is basically what it is), that’s already device-agnostic in the sense that it doesn’t matter whether you use it to boot a laptop or a desktop. But what if it could work with smartphones too? I may not want to take my laptop on vacation, but my smartphone could still give me a basic interface to the stuff that matters to me.

To make this work, the device needs to be not only replaceable, but portable. Ridiculously portable. No one really wants to carry an external hard drive everywhere they go, but what if it was the size of a credit card? A microSD card (including all the packaging that surrounds the minuscule memory chip inside) is about 15mm x 10mm. I have an 8GB one in my (dumb) phone. A credit card is about 85mm x 50mm. So we could probably put at least 25 microSD cards - 200-400GB of storage - in a something the size of a credit card just using today’s technology. That’s a good start, although the price will need to come down and performance will need to improve.

We’re close enough to see this version of the future - the cloud is taking off, and SSDs are getting bigger and cheaper every day - but it’s not here yet. I do think it’ll come, though.

Along with jetpacks and flying cars, one of the staples of early science-fiction was the videophone, usually in the form of a clunky desktop or wall unit. We’re still waiting for a practical jetpack, but here’s my colleague @asonnenberg talking to @jaredklett using FaceTime on iPhone 4. What you can’t see from this photo is that Jared is actually walking in the street: FaceTime - which is wi-fi only - is running over a Verizon MiFi in his pocket.

File under ‘we live in the future’ and take a moment out of your day to be quietly amazed.