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Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel. Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.
VoIP: Its Now
I have been experimenting with Voice over IP, and to my surprise, its just about ready for to prime time. I have been testing Vonage's VoIP service, and it comes close to the critical mix of simple, useful, and cheap. The key difference between Vonage and previous "You computer is your phone!" models is that now your phone can be your phone, thanks to Cisco's Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that takes a phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back and does pretty much exactly what you would expect a box that takes phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back would do.
The voice quality is good (though doing big file uploads in the background can make things get choppy, which takes some getting used to if you are in the habit of making calls while during long up/downloads.) Getting voice mail on the web is cool, being able to get a 415 number while living in 203 is cool, etc, but price is the killer app: $40/mo for an unlimited number of unlimited length calls in the US. Flat rate telephony at last.
The phone companies don't realize how close consumers are to treating voice as just another application on a data network.
posted by Clay Shirky at 2:13:07 PM | permalink
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