Essential Guide to Home Networking Technologies, The

SUMMARY

The opportunity created by the steep price drops in networking and computing power of recent years is enormous. New technologies will combine information and processing power seamlessly, presenting customers with the right information at the right time and place. In many ways these new technologies hark back to the original promise of mechanical computing devices—devices that would serve to augment our abilities and intelligence and free us from burdensome tasks, just as the steam engine augmented humans'physical strength during the Industrial Age.

The transition from a world of stand-alone devices to networked devices, from appliance users to information users, will not happen overnight. It will certainly not happen any time soon if ...