Hyper-Connectivity

John Reese's blog on Hyper-Connectivity has a lot of thought provoking implications for the networking industry. Here were are in the world of 3G, WiFi et al, and yet don't have an ability to be continuously connected. Instead we have continual connections to the network.  4G has a lot of promises in store but how do we have a standardized ubiquitous network that provides access to people irrespective of their geographical location. The Internet is a great equalizer but for countries with poor communications infrastructure are at a big disadvantage. What is needed today is apart from <$100 laptops is a cost effective access to the network. The current dependence of the Internet in spite of its changing traffic patterns over the years  has cemented Sun's motto of "The Network is the Computer".   I wish one day I will be able to stack all my information on the network in a secure and dependable fashion, thereby reducing the burden on millions of people upgrading their Operating Systems and hardware.

Quantum Computer

Quantum Computing

A company in Canada(www.dwavesys.com) has demonstrated a successful quantum computer. Alan Turing's Universal Turing Machine has been disproved by the latest advancement of computers in the last two decades. Now with the demonstration by D-Wave Systems, the possibilities are endless for applications of QCs in which computation is based on states called qubits, which is a unique quantum state. The biggest challenge has been quantum hardware which has been a emerging field. D-Wave Systems seems to have broken the ice and have pioneered the first successful quantum computer. The prediction that quantum computers will emerge as the superior computational devices at the very least, and perhaps one day make today's modern computer obsolete is practically true now.

Quantum computation has its origins in highly specialized fields of theoretical physics, but its future undoubtedly lies in the profound effect it will have on the lives of all mankind.

I wonder if the renowned computer manufacturers like HP, IBM etc are working on these and what effects will it have on software(Is Google doing something here?).

System performance

The process of measuring system performance is hard. In communication networks, its fairly complicated to perform traffic analysis and profiling. In one of our intense performance measurement exercise we developed tons of counters for various measurements. After much thought a lot of them were too much data for analysis. That's when I found the following quote from Albert Einstein pretty apt!

Not everything that is counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein