Adam Dunkels On the Internet of Things 27
An anonymous reader writes "Techworld is running an interview with Adam Dunkels, author of the open source Contiki operating system for the Internet of Things. The interview touches on the Internet of Things, the future of Contiki, and his newly founded startup Thingsquare."
If the whole "Internet of Things" concept still seems amorphous, FedEx CIO Rob Carter provides some concrete examples in which FedEx is using real-time tracking based on IP-enabled sensors.
Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States, it seems like more of an matter of academic study and, perhaps, seen as a possible cost-saving (as opposed to profit-producing) technology.
Oh well, I guess FedEx and UPS don't mind buying all of their IP-enabled supplies from LG & Samsung if it saves them a few pennies.
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What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States, it seems like more of an matter of academic study and, perhaps, seen as a possible cost-saving (as opposed to profit-producing) technology.
And what's wrong with the US approach? I see yet again the belief that dumping public funds on R&D in an area means getting concrete, valuable results in an area.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the companies directed by the government to initiate these industrial projects financed through government grants, externally sourced financial aid, and foreign loans were little businesses named Hyundai and Samsung. Perhaps you've heard of them. Other companies were created out of nothing to pursue this industrial strategy, such as Posco, producer of about 35 million tons of high quality steel annually.
South Korea went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest, in about 30 years. I know educated, well off Koreans who are less than 40 years old, who, as children, lived in straw-roofed huts and whose parents and grandparents slung poo in a rice paddy to survive. I'd call that concrete, valuable results.
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What does Xerox Parc (company funded), the european autodidact scientific pioneers of old (self funded or funded by weathy patrons) and NASA (government funded) have in common? They are environments that let smart people "play" with few constraints.
And it's interesting that none of those environments have that now, much less have it in common. And NASA, the only government agency on that list, never really did have that environment.
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Regarding NASA - I doubt that very much. Yes, bureaucracy develops when the creativity that spawns a project leaves and things go into "holding mode" eg. I read what Richard Feynmann had to say Re: his involvement in the whole O-ring fiasco. Creativity CANNOT exist in a bureaucracy unless it's finding ways of getting around the bureaucracy. NASAs early days achieved an awful lot though. I haven't read anything by someone who was at NASA during those days, but I did read Richard Feynmann's experience on
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What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States,
The United States is a bit bi-polar when it comes to government direction of industry.
On the one hand, businesses want the government to set goals and priorities,
as it allows them to all pull in the same direction, with the knowledge that government funds will also be along for the ride.
On the one hand, we have a vocal group of people that want no government involvement in anything business related.
The end result is a fractured public policy that prevents us from having a coherent national plan for where th
Another Thing (Score:2)
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I'm not sure if it started out as a Commodore 64 project but it has been ported to run on that system, along with a lot of other platforms [wikipedia.org].
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From the FedEx article: (Score:5, Funny)
According to FedEx CIO Rob Carter, that need to analyze events in real time has resulted in an effort to âoeradicallyâ decompose monolithic vertical applications into sets of core granular services, which the company will then mash into any number of analytics applications. The ultimate goal: a matrix of IT services that functions with the speed and flexibility of a brain, freeing FedEx from a system dependent on files strewn across any number of databases kept on disk storage systems too slow to support advanced, real-time analytic applications.
Dear God, I think this man just achieved the Buzzword Singularity. If we can harness this power ...
Re:From the FedEx article: (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah... The art of using as many words as possible to say absolutely nothing.
It would actually be funny if it wasn't a skill that, for some mysterious reason, raises people to positions of wealth and power.
He's not saying nothing. (Score:1)
He said something pretty cogent in my opinion. They're trying to develop a better algorithm for delivering packages, inspired by and utilizing teh internets.
It might be a creepy level of surveillance, but it sounds to me like a legitimately... *ahem* "innovative" move to make the business of moving packages more efficient.
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He said something pretty cogent in my opinion. They're trying to develop a better algorithm for delivering packages, inspired by and utilizing teh internets.
It might be a creepy level of surveillance, but it sounds to me like a legitimately... *ahem* "innovative" move to make the business of moving packages more efficient.
It's not what he said, it's the way he said it.
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Because YASET (Yet Another Surveillance Enabling Technology) is more concise but less pleasant...
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I saw the word "matrix" and had flashbacks to the movie Office Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2_Yi-1Ryf4&t=16s [youtube.com]
The MBAs really need to learn how to dial back the jargon when they're talking to anyone who isn't part of their clan.
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Huh? (Score:2)
"For example, when waking up a on a summer day, wouldn't it be nice to have an app that tells you what beach is sunniest?"
What about that requires the "Internet of Things"? If you wanted to implement that right now, you'd fetch the National Weather Service's XML structured weather data [weather.gov] for the points of interest. Given a latitude and longitude, the NWS server will compute their weather model for any desired point in the US on request. For beaches, there are already sites with current surf reports, and the major surf spots have webcams.
There are applications for low-powered devices that talk IPv6, but this isn't one of the
UNIX much? (Score:2)
TFA: ...an effort to “radically” decompose monolithic vertical applications into sets of core granular services, which the company will then mash into any number of analytics applications.
So they are basically going to "write programs that do one thing and do it well." [wikipedia.org]? What a concept!
And then TFA goes on to talk about how it will be faster by using in-memory databases. Well, Fscking Duh(tm)!
Also, one doesn't need Winderz Ate to "broker data between services" ... there are already plenty of message queuing systems [wikipedia.org] available that are not necessarily so OS dependent.
The PR stench is strong with this one.