When everything connects当世间万物彼此相连[from the Economist]2

张俊锋@译海

The coming wireless revolution

无线革命即将来临  

When everything connects

Information technology has nothing to lose but its cables

当世间万物彼此相连

              信息技术失去的仅仅是电缆而已






--续--
Of course, plenty of work will be needed before wireless communications can realise their promise. The first obstacle is novelty. As is usual in the early days of a new industry, all kinds of proprietary systems abound, many of them built from scratch—rather as early computer hackers fiddled with their Altairs ② in the mid-1970s. Until common standards and protocols emerge for machine-to-machine and wireless sensor communications, costs will be a problem.

当然，在无线通讯兑现其诺言之前，我们还做大量工作。最大的障碍便是无线系统的多样性。通常在新兴产业发展初期，会大量存在各种各样的专用系统，其中很多前所未闻，就像上世纪 70 年代中期，早期电脑黑客改造 Altairs( 世界上第一台计算机 ) 那样。在 M2M （机器对机器通信技术）和无线传感通信的通用标准和协议建立之前，我们将面临成本问题 .



It is not yet clear who will bang heads together to set standards. Today's mobile-phone businesses may be too busy getting people to talk to bother much about talking machines. Sony Ericssonand Nokia, two giants of the mobile-phone industry, have in recent years sold their machine-to-machine divisions. Mobile operators see the new field as such a small part of their overall business that it gets relegated to the back-burner. That has left an opening for fleet-footed firms from computing, as well as industrial conglomerates, such as Samsung, Philips, Honeywell and Hitachi. Just this week, General Electric's sensing division said it wanted to use wireless sensors in industries as diverse as drugs and petrochemicals.

究竟谁能统一业界认识，制定通用标准，尚不清楚。如今，手机公司可能太过忙于拓展用户市场，而懒得在 M2M 上花心思了。近年来，两大手机巨头 ——Sony Ericsson 和 Nokia 售掉了他们的 M2M 部门。手机运营商们看到，该新兴产业在他们整体业务中只占很小份额，便视之为次要行业，不管不问。这正好给捷足先登的计算机公司和跨行业集团提供了迅速发展的良机，这些公司包括三星、飞利浦、霍尼韦尔、日立等。就在本周，通用电气公司（ General Electric ）的感测部门透漏，该公司将在药品、石油化工等多种行业使用无线传感器。



Government will play a crucial role, not least because radio spectrum will be in short supply. That makes it more important than ever that the airwaves are sensibly allocated according to the ability to pay. Special “reserves” and unlicensed spectrum could be put aside for emerging technologies that lack financial or political clout. And politicians and business people would do well to keep an eye on the health risks of electromagnetic radiation. No serious evidence yet suggests it is a danger—but the nonsense over genetically modified foods shows how much a new technology needs popular approval.

政府将扮演至关重要的角色，主要因为无线电频谱将出现短缺。因此，根据购买力适度分配波段显得比以往更为重要。特别 “ 保留 ” 的和尚未授权的频段可以专供新兴无线技术行业，因为该行业目前急需经济和政治支持。另外，政治家和商人们应关注电磁辐射对健康是否有危险。目前尚无确切证据表明电磁辐射有害。但是，有关转基因食品的无稽之谈充分表明，一项新技术要想得到人们的普遍认同绝非易事。



Change is in the air

空中的变化



A greater concern in the long term is privacy. Today's laws often assume that privacy is guaranteed by a pact between consumer and company, or citizen and state. In a world where many networks interconnect on the fly and information is widely shared, that will not work. At a minimum, wireless networks should let users know when they are being monitored.

还有一个令人关注的长远问题 —— 隐私。目前法律界通常认为：隐私可以通过消费者与公司之间或公民和政府之间的协定来确保。但在未来的无线世界，许多网络在空中纵横交错，信息广泛共享，协约将难以奏效。最起码，无线网络在监视用户时，应当他们知道。



But for the moment the danger is surely too much regulation, not too little. It is hard for anyone—politicians most of all—to picture how wireless will be used, just as it was with electric motors and microprocessors, two earlier stand-alone technologies that have been built into a plethora of devices. Wireless technology will become a part of objects in the next 50 years rather as electric motors appeared in everything from eggbeaters to elevators in the first half of the 20th century and computers colonised all kinds of machinery from cars to coffee machines in the second half. Occasionally, the results will be frightening; more often, they will be amazingly useful.

但目前确定无疑的是：危险在于规定太多，而非太少。任何人，尤其是政治家们，都难以想象无线技术将得到怎样运用，这就像电动机和微处理机这两项早期的独立技术，后来竟然装入大量的设备。在未来 50 年里，无线技术将成为物体的一部分。这就像 20 世纪上半叶，所有东西，从打蛋器到电梯，都安装了电动机，就像 20 世纪下半叶，各式各样的机器，从汽车到咖啡机，都安装了电脑。偶尔，结果会令人恐惧；然而更多的时候，无线通信的用途将让人惊奇。





注

① RFID （无线射频识别， Radio Frequency Identification ）是一种非接触式的自动识别技术。最简单的 RFID 系统由标签（ Tag ）、阅读器（ Reader ）和天线（ Antenna ）三部分组成 -- 在实际应用中还需要其他硬件和软件的支持。  　

② 1975 年 4 月，微型仪器与自动测量系统公司 (MITS) 推出了首台通用型 Altair 8800 ，售价 375 美元，带有 1KB 存储器，这是世界上第一台微型计算机。