Re: The Spike, nanotech, and a future scenario

Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Mon, 06 Oct 1997 04:20:23 -0400

Brian Atkins wrote:
>
> Full agreement here...
>
> So how long do you think it will take for your car to become an
> extension of your home entertainment system? It is one of my
> current dreams (if I had the money) to form a company to network
> my car to a CD jukebox at home so I can listen to any of my
> CDs without having to cart them all around. Ditto for programming
> your VCR from afar... The only real limitation I see is the cost
> of wireless connections. But with companies here in Atlanta offering
> unlimited airtime until Jan 1. and companies in SF like Metricom
> offering unlimited 28.8 speed access for $40/month it seems
> possible. All of this of course is an extension of the idea in
> Negroponte's Being Digital book about moving bits not atoms...
> --
> The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
> -William Gibson

I thought CDs used a fairly high bandwidth, on the order of
44K bytes per second per channel? If so, your radio bandwidth must
get a lot cheaper to support this application. Also, it's supposed
to be illegal to build gear that delivers the raw binary from the
audio CD: only the analog waveform is delivered from your player,
I thought. This is why you have that silly extra wire connecting
your CD-rom drive to your sound card to play audio CDs. All in all
you are probably better off using a DAT tape to copy the CD.