ThoughtBlip

So, one of the purposes of this blog, before being violently derailed by everyday life, was to capture, document, share, archive ideas that typically float in and out of my mind on a regular basis.  One of the issues I encountered with many of my ideas is that I felt that they may hold some value for me - that one of the ideas may be something that I might personally wish to pursue.  In the end, I think that in many ways I became an idea hoarder - unwilling to communicate most of my ideas publicly when an idea was interesting enough.  The ideas and thoughts that were not interesting enough fell by the wayside as not being worthy of taking the time to document.

I have to wonder if others run into this same kind of dichotomy while attempting to share thoughts and ideas, yet retain some ownership for their own pursuits.Recently, I was reflecting on the ideology of EFF versus pursuits to capture patents on novel inventions - as they relate to the ideas and thoughts that I’ve been documenting behind closed doors in my own little notebooks offline.  It seems that having too many ideas to follow up on, and keeping them to myself “just in case” I have the time or interest in following up on one or more of them in the future does much good for anyone.  In some cases, some ideas are for products that I’d personally find useful and appreciate having regardless of who develops the ideas or inventions.  In other cases, some of the ideas have become a reality through someone else independently coming up with the idea or inspiration on their own - and following through with it.

So, I’m going to try a new approach:  START GIVING IDEAS AWAY FOR FREE.

Now, I’m not sure if anyone else will agree that any of my ideas have any real intrinsic value - some of them are kind of out there, potentially unrealistic (but that’s unknown at least to me in most cases without further investigation), and/or things that may have been already thought of or done by someone else unbeknownst to me (e.g. prior art - again requiring research)…

I’ll still be struggling with what to share and what not to share - but the attempt will be to be more open than not - erring on the side of sharing information unless I’m actively working on an idea, or will be actively working on it in the near future.

Let’s see if I go another few years before posting, or if I start to publish interesting thoughts

So I’m beginning to think that my dependency on mobile is surpassing my dependency on the Internet & a desktop computer.

Utility apps, gaming, news, social networking, email… all done more on mobile than laptop.

Sure, when I get down to serious work…extensive browsing, typing, development…I use my laptop. A full computer won’t ever go away for me (or at least the semblance of one) - but that’s not the significant point.

The significant point is the extent to which I and so many others use and literally depend on mobile - in new an novel ways that are constantly evolving.

For me personally, this dependency started with the Palm Treo 600p, and literally exploded when I started to use an iPhone. I never was a Crackberry user :/

Android is very appealing as well, but isn’t quite there yet for me - even with all the great devices and alternate carriers. As a developer, I’m sure I’ll end up with both eventually (thank you Google Voice).

One form of vendor tie-in that many underestimate is the app investment…both cost-wise, as well as effort/setup-wise. I’ve invested a fair amount of $$$ in iPhone apps … many are apps I can live without, and many are not…one thing that’s certain is that my investment and app dependencies are growing over time…and to switch to any other mobile device would require replacement of all these dependencies…Many apps have proprietary / non-portable data (which has its own issues when switching apps even on the same platform).

Point is, switching to Android for me is more than just a device / OS switch - it’s all the app baggage and cost impact as well.

I’m sure this has been thought of before, or at least wished for before… but imagine if you were able to simply plug your old spare computers together on a network and configure them to join a group of other computers… as a part of the whole… (I’m stealing the “Borg” name from StarTrek for now because of the “assimilation” factor).

Users of the “virtual” computer would not need to know or care when computers are added or removed from the Borg…all they would see is more HD space and an impact to performance.

 In a simple scenario, I can imagine the following:

1. installing a “Borg” on one computer with an identity. 
2. booting, say, a spare old laptop with, say, a bootstrap CD that will simply get the laptop up and running, and ask which Borg to connect to.
3. once connected to the Borg, the laptop is assimilated.

You wouldn’t have to interact directly with any of the hardware or peripherals - you’d just connect from another computer via a remote server display… or via another Borg.  File systems would automatically be merged into logical space, and mirrored.. the Borg would be fault tolerant once enough hardware was added so that if any single machine failed, it would be able to recover by shuffling information around from the parity or redundant data storage….

A system like this on current hardware without a large hardware base would be very slow given all the above overhead… but I can imagine the system being able to grow in power as hardware is added and removed, and processing is distributed among the hardware in the Borg… and much like TCP/IP where there can be redundant routing paths for reliability, there could be redundant processing requests so that computational failures and network outages don’t impact performance as one would initially assume…

The Borg itself would not be centralized - it would have to be a virtual system that is distributed, amorphous, constantly changing as people plug their systems into the Borg, and take them away…. It could even be possible to donate part of your system to the Borg, like with the search for extra terrestrial life….or all of the system to the Borg… When you are ready to remove your computer from the Borg, the Borg could even reinstall and configure an OS for you, or restore a backup… essentially allowing you to plug in, donate HW, restore to a previous state, and then unplug.

 Just a thought…