CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED The California Surveyor ... - CLSA

By: Levi Cox, PLS
Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Open Source
It was 1998, the year that brought us the Unabomber, Monica
Lewinsky and the ban on smoking in bars throughout the
State of California. During that same year, in the not so ubiquitous
shadows of the technology domains, there were
acronyms being birthed like ‘XML’ (Extensible Markup
Language) and oddly coined numeric wireless networking
standards such as ‘802.11’ (original version of wireless networking
standard). Among the Internet enthusiasts and
telecommunication marketers, the word ‘broadband’ was
being used liberally. The antiquated 56k modem was insufficient
to feed the appetite for online content of the refined
Internet user. Ten years later, these once obscure technologies
have been so seamlessly integrated into our common
daily workflow, that their once significant contributions to our
productivity now go somewhat unnoticed. If you had to go a
day without any one of these technologies now, it is guaranteed
you would be found wanting.
Hopefully, the title of this column caught your eye. These
three technologies, namely virtualization, cloud computing
and open source, will significantly impact our daily workflows
of the next decade. They will change the size and capabilities
of the devices we currently use and the way our hardware and
software interact. Actually, these technologies have already
begun to be put to use in our daily lives. Using the online
resource Wikipedia, here’s a breakdown of what these technologies
mean:
Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction
of computer resources. Whoa, that’s a little heavy! What
exactly does that mean? It means that on one computer, you
can divide the resources to virtually make it do the work of
what three computers would have normally done. Multiple
operating systems can exist and operate simultaneously on
one machine. Interesting, isn’t it? Simplified, it means instead
of three servers in your back room, you may be able to get by
with one. Both software and hardware can be made to have a
virtual presence. In our profession, we have seen this happen
with the GPS base station. Multiple reference stations can be
pooled, their data combined and rebroadcasted via a broadband
wireless connection to impose a presence of a base station
to your rover known as a virtual base station.
Cloud Computing is another catch phrase that implies
computing data that is stored on the Internet. A simple example
of this is what Google and Microsoft have done with their
online business applications; Google Doc’s and Office
Workspace. The documents that you create with these applications
are stored on the Internet and can be accessed and
edited by anyone who has been assigned rights to the document
and who has an Internet connection. Cloud Computing
encompasses a whole variety of data and file types, of which
the applications for the management of this data are still
being conceived and developed.
Open source is a development methodology for writing
software and creating applications. Open source was made
popular by a Finnish gentleman by the name of Linus
Torvalds in September of 1991 when he uploaded the first
version of the operating system known as Linux. Open
source methodology made it possible for every programmer,
from anywhere in the world to view the code for Linux, modify
it, contribute to and use it, all free of charge. Today, you
can download the Linux OS for free, the most popular distributors
being Red Hat and Novell’s Suse Linux. OpenOffice
is another open source set of office applications, very similar
to the Microsoft Office suite, that is available via a free download.
Companies like IBM, Novell and Google have built upon
open source software as a part of their business model. If
you are using any of these free versions of software, you can
thank Mr. Torvalds and the army of worldwide open source
programmers that made this possible.
All this is nice and informative, and may even save you a
few bucks on software if you switch to open source. But really,
what does this mean for the land surveying profession?
Simply put, in one word – convergence. In the next decade,
we will see these current seemingly obscure technical phrases
and terms integrated, in ways we can not yet think of into
our daily lives and workflows.
Already, we are seeing the integration of broadband wireless
modems and GPS receivers, making them out-of-thebox
ready for virtual GPS networks. The abundance of lowcost
GPS chipsets within the mobile phone community has
caught the attention of the open source developers. Open
source mobile GPS applications have already been developed
and made available to the public for free. Some research estimates
have suggested that these cheap mobile GPS chipsets
will see global sales volume of more than 100 million units by
2011. Expect to see the hardware we use in the field today get
smaller, more powerful and much smarter. Anticipate a convergence
in technology that will bring the positional accuracies,
spatial data and land information available to us today,
to a more diversified user base.
As a profession, the challenges of technological proliferation
and convergence will place greater pressure on the land
surveyors of the next decade. Adapting to these new technologies
requires a greater emphasis on education and a
stronger focus on professional diversification. ❖
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