Welome to The Grid

What if the whole world was one? What if we could do what we do in one place..anywhere else? What if sharing was limitless? what if... Welcome to The Grid!

The Internet has been around for ages now and it has changed significantly to make information sharing so easy and simple. Pushing the boundaries a lot further, we are coming to an age that is all about "being mobile" with everything located centrally, so that, what you require is always available, it doesnt matter what kind of device you will be using to access the information. The reality is not so distant. With major players like Microsoft and Google working on it, you can guarantee that life is going to change.

Microsoft LiveDrive - With their immense resources, financial backing and server farms..well..the giants will be offering huge amounts of online storage that you could use to store any kind of data.

Google Lighthouse Project - Folks at Google are always upto something and if Lighthouse is to become a reality..well..bye bye PCs with 80gig HDDs. They say that the storage will be infinite. Imagine the amount of data you could put in there!

I'm sure more will jump into the bandwagon as time goes on. There are so many other things that are coming up like the whole set of "Live ideas" from MS and all sorts of things from Google, that, aims at making you and your world totally mobile.

We were having a discussion about such things in the morning today..and..one of my friends remarked - Who knows when all this will really kick some serious dust? Net connectivity is not fast enough. There are two or three things here that I could mention:
1. Back during the 80s and 90s, we were browsing at 36KBPS. Now, we have atleast 56KBPS on dialups and much more on broadband. Its going to become faster and cheaper

2. When one thing changes, complimenting technologies always change. Once again, back during the 80s and 90s, when HTML pages ruled the roost, we didnt really need great speeds..and..once the characteristic of content changed. Speeds increased!

3. The Speed bracket is always on the increase, so it should certainly become much faster.

Well, all this seems to be a very rosy picture right now. There is a lot to be scared of:
1. Information becoming impersonal - If all your private info is located somewhere, someone else can always make use of it. It happens now. You give your email ID to Company X, you get emails from so many! The Privacy Policies need to be reframed by the company and we, as users, need to really make sure that we read and understand what we are getting into
2. Security - The type of attacks are going to evolve to become much more scary! Security always needs to be beefed up. One flaw in the whole thing may destroy data belonging to so many people.
3. File sharing - If its going to be like being on our own LAN, where, users can give rights to other users to access files? well, laws on file sharing will go to hell!

The companies who are already in it, most certainly, have a lot to think about and implement. They should be ready for it..and we should be ready to change!

Bloggin' is kewl again!

Ok, so I am back! Its almost a year since I said my "astalavista baby!" to blogging.