On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:14 AM, mike <[email protected]> wrote: > I had just never heard anyone saying they wanted to give up their esata HD > for a wireless one. Just last weekend I helped a friend run 3 cat 5 cables > throughout his house...not sure wired is really going anywhere. I have a > hard enough time dealing with my USB2 drives.
The other day I was looking through a 2001 edition "Discover" magazine (remember that mag?) and came across an article where a number of computer experts of the day were chiming in on the future of computing. They were zeroing in on how wireless was going to supplant wired external devices in the future, and those folks were going round and round about what benefits there would be versus the drawbacks. One was saying that he did not want his refrigerator to automatically wirelessly contact the repairman if it was going on the blink, that he would prefer to handle such things himself. Major efforts today to improve on wireless speeds are focusing on moving to the terahertz band, That means going up to the hyper-microwaves, basically where no man has gone before except in medical and security imagery testing. These are frequencies of less than a millimeter in wavelength. These wavelengths cannot penetrate metal, so moves to all plastic devices that are prevalent today gives rise to the viability of this frequency range. This is also line-of-sight propagation of very short range compared to microwave emissions currently employed for most communications use. Safety? Who really knows at this point. These frequencies are at or about the frequencies that lasers operate at and thus there are legitimate thermal concerns that need to be looked at. So, for wireless with speeds that may come close to what we have become used to, the future is still not here by any means. But, if you want hard drives or flash memory to be wireless you can get it right now, albeit at only a fraction of the speeds you have gotten used to. Just the other day I read allusions on this list about how great it would be to wirelessly move photos from a camera to a computer. I would say that at the speeds currently available, only in an emergency or if I was trying to impress someone, and even then I would probably hear, "Why is it taking so long?" Steve ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
