[GB-Today] Monday Musings

[Susan Estrada]

Monday Musings
January 10, 2005

Today, I found three more applications for big bandwidth that caught my 
fancy. I hope you can see the future though some of these novel new 
contraptions/software.

One Course, Many Classrooms

Education has a new friend.  High performance networks have allowed the 
teaching in a new venue – over the net.  In December, 84 students enrolled 
in a graduate course on Information Technology & Public Policy sat down for 
their final class -- eighteen students took the class for credit at the 
University of California, San Diego (together with another dozen students 
auditing the course), with roughly 20 students each at the University of 
Washington (UW), UC Berkeley, and Microsoft Research.

I think Ed’s comments sum it up nicely:
"A distributed classroom offers enormous advantages -- diverse faculty 
perspectives, diverse student perspectives, the ability to attract 
phenomenal guest speakers," said Ed Lazowska, a professor of computer 
science at UW. "The technology is not perfect, but it's much better than 
'good enough,' and this course, while also not perfect, was far richer than 
any one institution could have provided on its own."

For more info, check out 
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/MicrosoftUCSD.asp

Ipods and X-rays

Some radiologists that obviously don’t have 1000’s of songs to download, 
have come up with a creative way to use the excess storage on their 
Ipods.  They wrote software called OsiriX which allows radiological images 
to be stored on an Ipod.  Yup, you can now carry your X-rays, cat scans, 
etc. around on your Ipod.  Imagine the bigger potential of using your Ipod 
for storing your medical records – you could snarf them up at the doctor’s 
office and forward them to other medical professionals from the comfort of 
your own home with your gigabit connection.

You can read more about the current use 
at  http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1748273,00.asp

LocationFree TV

Talk about bandwidth hogs – Sony introduced LocationFree TV at the Consumer 
Electronics show last week.  This contraption has a base station and a 
wireless screen – either 7” or 10” LCDs.  Here’s what Sony says about 
LocationFree TV:

“The LocationFreeTV is an LCD television system that embodies the 
LocationFreeTM concept­the ability to enjoy TV, videos, DVDs, Internet 
browsing, mail, and digital photos wherever you happen to be. Whether you 
use it at home through a wireless or wired LAN connection, or away from 
home with the NetAV function, the LocationFreeTV allows you to enjoy video 
images and other media from a variety of locations. At home, when you set 
up the base station in a central room, you are free to roam anywhere within 
its wireless transmission range carrying only the monitor. Away from home, 
you can access your TV, videos, and DVDs by using the system’s NetAV 
function to connect to your base station through the Internet. You can 
enjoy browsing the Internet, composing and reading mail, and viewing your 
digital albums. You can also register other monitors to a base station. 
This allows you to use NetAV from the other registered monitors.”

So basically, I can hook a gadget up in my house and you can watch San 
Diego TV from anywhere on the Internet plus access my Tivo and my DVD 
player.  Holy mackeral!  Where’s my gigabit?

Check it out 
at: 
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start;sid=Xd3NXEX_Ch3NPAQcQkTHVwrwaIfyeoVp4hw=?CategoryName=tv_LocationFreeTVs&Dept=tv

State of the State

The Governor said in his State of the State address last week “I welcome 
and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to 
match our future.”  I think he was asking all of us Gigabiters for our 
opinions, don't you?  Feel free to drop him a line about the importance of 
next generation broadband to California’s future at 
http://www.governor.ca.gov/state/govsite/gov_contacts.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1107725302.1105405369@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccccadddiejfmhmcfngcfkmdffidfof.0 
.
  Pieces of paper still work better than email.  Go figure.

Hope you are all dry and mud-free!

Susan
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