Sorry, I just epiphanised (don't worry, I'll clean it up later).
My "amazing thought":
One day, these things will be like Lego. You may care that your younger sister ate one, or the dog buried that part in the garden, but you won't "really care". not like a computer, or a phone!
If standards for mesh networking and cluster computing become a tiny bit better (and more widely adopted), these things are the internet of things. Almost everything else is obsolete.
Self powered, independant micro-modules that can somewhat autonomously join and depart from processing pools mean that upgrading your "home computer" means buying more Lego (or a new table, or light-bulbs, or a car) and moving it within range of the other stuff in your house. There will be no computer, just interfaces to your local compute cluster, which you probably won't personally own much of, due to shared processing power agreements with your neighbours and friends.
I know none of this is original, and I even get that this is the "big goal" of the IoT, but It's actually happening, and we get to see it happen! (along with a wonderful new bag of problems relating to super-distributed trust, cost, control etc.)
Sorry, over-excited, taking myself off to bed now.
I also think these are incredibly cool! I want to be able to play with these and pick them up at the store like an arduino. The internet of things is hardly internet connected Nest home systems, though of course those count. There are a lot of hackers (in the maker sense) who would eat these things up and come up with amazing uses that academia simply doesn't have the manpower to supply. I wish hardware wasn't so hard to bootstrap, so we could get these things out en masse quickly.
My "amazing thought":
One day, these things will be like Lego. You may care that your younger sister ate one, or the dog buried that part in the garden, but you won't "really care". not like a computer, or a phone!
If standards for mesh networking and cluster computing become a tiny bit better (and more widely adopted), these things are the internet of things. Almost everything else is obsolete.
Self powered, independant micro-modules that can somewhat autonomously join and depart from processing pools mean that upgrading your "home computer" means buying more Lego (or a new table, or light-bulbs, or a car) and moving it within range of the other stuff in your house. There will be no computer, just interfaces to your local compute cluster, which you probably won't personally own much of, due to shared processing power agreements with your neighbours and friends.
I know none of this is original, and I even get that this is the "big goal" of the IoT, but It's actually happening, and we get to see it happen! (along with a wonderful new bag of problems relating to super-distributed trust, cost, control etc.)
Sorry, over-excited, taking myself off to bed now.