About 10, maybe 15 years ago, I predicted that phones (still flip or candy-bar at the time - before the first iPhone) would become like the Palm Pilots and would evolve into an integrated system with our desktops and laptops. The communication flow would be from our phone into the "cloud" (not called that at the time) through the Internet backbones and back in through our work-place (or home) ISP and, eventually, to the computer across the room.
That does happen to some extent with current technology. I think that Microsoft is closer to that than Android and Apple is just about there. The reason I was thinking about this scenario is that I was looking at future attack paths - the necessarily convoluted communication path would provide lots of opportunity to man-in-the-middle the systems. In the context of a secure facility, this would provide the ability to enter without physically entering. At the time, the only real wireless was WiFi which was not available in phones. IRdA was just not a reliable, across-the-room, comm channel. Now, of course, it's possible but not reliably supported for the devices (phone, tablet, laptop, workstation, server) to communicate directly - WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC - and synchronize. The big issue with synchronization is coherence and consistency - the problem that has existed for decades and still exists with distributed databases. If one looks at the email, web-history, cookies, logins, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and code of a computer user as a large collection of data, then synchronization means that each of those will appear the same to the user no matter what device she's using. However, there are only two ways to ensure that happens - one device is authoritative for some subset of that data or all devices have duplicates of all the data. Both require reliable communications in human real-time (i.e. if one starts to look at an image on one device, decides a bigger screen is necessary, and turns to another device, the image should be the same in the time it takes to do that). Total redundancy means that communication does not have to be available at all times - just when something changes on one device. Partitioned data (whether based on role or point of creation) requires reliable communication at all times. We'll see if my vision and yours will arrive in the near future or be another flying car. Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Old-Timer V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Sep 9, 2015, at 8:28 AM, Jim Gattiker wrote: > > What's next for phones? Size seems settled. Screen quality is now tapped out. > Battery life is at a wall. Cameras are there. Local storage space lost to > cloud services. They're pretty powerful, for a non-gamer. What's going to > make me covet my next phone? (force touch!) > > Someone will tell me there is such a thing, but: why don't I have a > thin-client similar to a netbook (or tablet) that expands my phone when it's > in proximity? I have duplicated internals on my phone, tablet, and laptop. It > looks to me like all the pieces, hardware and software, are there to do this > today for android (and it could be prototyped: BlueStacks). The phone is just > the smallest central module in an ecosystem of UI devices, rather than one > stand-alone device of many. I'd go for that! > > --j > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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