Will a PC of the future integrate also a compass?

Of course, I am limiting this discussion to PCs and other Internet nodes on the face of the Earth. Building a spaceborne network has its own special considrations, as well as a network of nodes deep inside the Earth.
An inexpensive replacement to the current networks of cables, cellular operations and telephone cables is mesh networks. In those networks, a PC communicates with its nearest neighbors, and they route packets to each other in a way reminiscient of the old UUCP protocol.

There is the problem of discovery of the topology of a mesh network, especially given its dynamic nature.

My suggestion: equip each node (a PC or other) with a compass or its equivalent (such as a GPS receiver) and a way to find the directions of its neighbors relative to it.

Nodes will select their IPv6 addresses from a block of addresses, and the addresses will depend upon their latitude and longitude. Thus, from the IPv6 address of a target node, the source node will figure out how to route data packets it wants to send to the target node.

Voila, no large corporations, no expensive infrastructures will be necessary (besides the GPS satellite network, if a GPS receiver is used).

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities. View all posts by Omer Zak