January 30, 2007
Dave
Digital Audio Video Experience. Smashing the hub and spoke model on a micro scale. Interesting, and serendipitous.
I'm working from home today since it's more conducive to writing - sitting in my lounge with gallons of tea on tap and music in the background. The only catch is that my external USB disk with all the music on is upstairs, so I was forced (forced!) to go and grab some more tunes from allofmp3.com rather than tie up the laptop with endless cables. I'm loving my Airport Express.
I'd just been thinking about splashing out on an Airport Extreme, so I can plug all my external hard drives into the network and continue to wander around the house cable-free. But DAVE suggests a new approach - how long before all external hard disks ship with WiFi? Bring them home, plug them into the mains, and boom, you're up and running. Then I could have the drives plugged into computers that need fast access to write to them (e.g. PVRs), but I wouldn't need the PVR to always be on - the hard disk would itself be a first-class citizen of the WiFi network.
I can see drawbacks - adding WiFi to every device pushes up the cost fractionally, and there's obvious security concerns. But if they could be overcome, it seems like it would decentralise resources in a useful way.
And I guess we all know what will happen in the near future: 