The Hierarchy of Needs for the Digital World - Xairos
What's New: An interesting observation from David Mitlyng at Xairos. We agree and have said that "Of positioning, navigation, and timing, timing is the one ring that rules them all."? :)
Why It's Important: Outside the community, few understand the importance of this fundamental tech utility.
What Else to Know:
?The Hierarchy of Needs for the Digital World
How good is good enough?
When it comes to GPS, it depends on who is using it – and how it is being used. For the most people who use it only to get around, it works fine. This feeds the perception it is good enough.
But for the military and civil aviation, it most definitely is?not?good enough; check out the news section below.
These groups are working hard to develop a “GPS independent” positioning system using sensitive?sensors, AI-enabled cameras, and even?muons.
But that is not where the?real value in GPS lies. Humans care about location – our electronics do not. They care about time.
If there's a?Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?for the digital world, timing would be at the base layer, like oxygen is for humans. An accurate and reliable timing reference provides the alignment for?coordinated signal processing, buffer read/write, and time-stamping of digital events. Think of it like synchronized lights on a busy road - without it digital traffic grinds to a halt.
To keep our electronics humming smoothly lies a complex timing infrastructure consisting of stable clocks that are synchronized (see below).
But at the headwaters of this timing network is GPS, one reference clock to rule them all.
Without GPS, our?networks would grind to a halt: credit cards and ATMS would stop working, communications?would degrade and fail, and ultimately?power grids would cease to function. We would be sitting in the dark waiting for Mad Max to take over.
Fortunately, there are alternatives in development to?take the bullseye off GPS.
Blog Editor's Note: We agree with the last line of another Xairos posting from a couple years ago about the privatization of time: "The time is right for a new global timing solution."
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Navigation, Radar and Broadcast systems
5 个月Hi Dana "The time is right for a new global timing solution", this maybe true, but governments only see PNT as an expenses that and therefore they do nothing. Another thing is GPS is a public service, this puts any new system at a big disadvantage, as will also need be public service and this limits what funding options are available to develop any new PNT systems. This why I am now looking at other applications for all technology I have invented for PNT, the most likely area is in Radar. As you know your location of the transmitter and the receiver plus the time, but the targets you want to track are unknown part. So I am spending lot of my time now on converting my technology across to this application. This is just how it works, if knew this at the start I would not got involved PNT development at all and there is no way to address these issues as they keep coming up.