The 2nd lesson review

We did our presentation on Starhub's case this time. It was entertaining according to Mr. Gilbert's comment. Well, it is just crazy to have 3 absolutely fun-lovers in a group.

After the presentation, we discussed briefly about the feasibility of using Wi-Fi (or maybe more advanced techology) to completely replace the conventional fixed line(cable) connection in the future. I was not sure about whether fixed line has cost advantage. So i tried to do a research on the cost of installation and maintenance of cable. No exact statistics was found. However, I discovered that people have to use GIS just to locate a slight damage in a cable network. And to repair it, they is trying to use robots nowadays. This does not sound cheap. The cable is providing a fast data transfer rate now. However, as technology advaces, Wi-Fi may also be as fast. Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has been working on wireless data transfer protocol for more than a decade. They developed a set of standards called 802.11X. The latest 802.11n which enable a high speed of up to 320Mbps will be coming out by Jan 2008. So maybe in the near future, it will be not just Fixed Mobile Convergence. Everything can be mobile!

Then the Prof talked about the immediacy and convenience of watching a goal on the mobile phone. Starhub is going to provide this service as it won the rights to broadcast EPL. A few new terms like e-mail is loosely coupled while calling is tightly coupled were mentioned by Prof later. I think the information in the internet is also regarded as loosely coupled. Though they are being updated almost at every second, you still have to check it out by yourself. People have different needs. Both tightly coupled and loosely coupled services are required in this world. Therefore, people came out with RSS/Atom to publish the internet content. It informs the subscribers once the content is updated. To me, this service on mobile phone is regarded as a migration of RSS to the phone. It is even more tightly coupled than RSS, and therefore provide the best immediacy. This, again give me a feeling that the boundaries between the fixed line service, mobile service, and internet service are vanishing. A integrated communication network is coming really soon.

We explored the history of the internet briefly then. I am amazed by how the first connetion between two machines eventually evolves into a massive global network. It changes the way we live. The world becomes different. There is one interesting word called Usenet. For the first time, I get to know it. It is a global, distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed early in 1979. It is like a web community. Unlike forums, the way it spreads the news is through mass e-mailing. Originally, it was just a toy for college boys to chat with each other about new techonology. However, it was welcome by public and evolved into a platform for the spreading of all categories of information. All people can just subscribe the categories of their interest and receive the relevant messages from internet. So again, the key words are "own interest" and "subscribe". Personalization is the word of this era. While other websites just provide their own relevant information, google ranks them and list out the pages that the users may mostlikely find useful in front. This is one step towards personalization. As a result, google's stock shot up like a rocket. Maybe in the future, google will provide search results according to every different individuals' preference. As the IP addrss is mostlikely fixed for a region, from the key words entered in the search bar, it may be possible to deduce what kind of job the individual is doing, what is his interest and many other informaition. Knowning all your perference, they can be even sronger than the tele-comm companies. Advertisement, promotion and many other service will be brought to you and you will find them useful. Imagine about the service industry in future, whenever you just start to have a need, they provide you with a solution, a good deal. It may sound fatanstic. But imagine harder, when you are hungry, they tell you where to eat. When you are sick, they tell you where to go. Even if you are single, they may tell you who you may want to have a look(I think, for those so-called friendship networks, instead of asking people to fill in their own profiles, it may be a better idea to build a profile for them according the information gathered through tele-com or internet). Then it starts to be like you are being controlled. Maybe too much of micromarketing is not that good.

I have a little bit knowledge for HTML. And I know a bit about the internet protocols as well. Two years ago, when I was still in JC, my roommate actually made use of the IP protocol to send false packets to other computers in our hostel to cause internet disconnections. Just to defend, I learnt a bit from him. So guys if you are suddenly disconnected from internet with or without seeing "IP conflict". It must be him again. Go check your arp list in cmd mode. Add the gateway's IP and mac address back using "arp -s XXXX XXXXXX", then you will be fine.

Too be continued...