LISTEN To This Issue.
            Give your eyes a rest.

Quote of the Week.
            Changing the rules -- using electron "spin" instead of electron "movement" 
            for faster, cooler, computing.

"Listening?"  Now, Pick Your Own Speed!
            "Listen" to The Harrow Technology Report as quickly or as slowly as you wish!

The World of the Tiny.
            Robots working at the atomic scale and test tube quantum computers -- 
            examples of the "transistor" of the 21st century!

Teaching The Old CRT Dog, New Tricks.
            CRTs don't have to be heavy and deep.

Twist 'n View?
            Work continues on displays that we can bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate.

RoboRoach!
            The roach that goes bump in the night -- but more!

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, Web-based, MP3 version. 

If you have an MP3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), clicking on the link below will either stream the file to you, or, depending on how your system is configured, it might download the file before playing it.  Alternatively, if you specifically want to download the file, simply right-click on the link, and choose "Save Target As..."

Also, find out how you can have FAR more control over how you listen, in an article later in this issue!

So, if you wish, just click on the following link to listen to this issue!  http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020107/20020107.mp3 .

 

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Quote of the Week.

 

California NanoSystems recently reported that it can now continuously control the "spin" of an electron, under electronic control. 

Great.

That might be interesting to a few scientists -- but to you and me?  Yet if we look closer, this seemingly arcane development might have a very significant effect on our future computers and electronics:

"The long-term impact [of this development] is that one can think about "spin engineering" semiconductors, in contrast to today's [semiconductors], which are "charge engineered."

One can think about extremely fast [spin-engineered] electronics that are very dense with very low heat dissipation, because only the spin of the electron changes. The heat it takes to flip the spin of an electron is infinitesimal compared to moving the charge in a wire back and forth..."

"Think of one combined unit that integrates logic, storage, and communication for computing.  We envision using a mixture of optical, electronic, and photonic techniques to prepare and manipulate spin-based information. The spin could be stored in semiconductors, run at frequencies many times faster than today's technology, and work at room temperature. And all in a single nanostructure. Then imagine millions of these nanostructures working together in a device small by human standards.

What such devices will do is up to scientists and engineers to determine. But the most exciting prospects are the revolutionary ones, rather than simple extrapolations of today's technology."

David Awschalom
Director, Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation at UCSB
NanoTech Planet.com
Dec. 10, 2001
http://www.nanotech-planet.com/features/article/0,4028,6571_937101,00.html
(With thanks to reader Kenneth LaCrosse.)

Considering that the heat generated by the millions of transistors in today's chips is one of the limiting factors in future chip designs, this may be a "cool" discovery (which could also dramatically reduce power consumption), indeed.

 

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"Listening?"  Now, Pick Your Own Speed!

 

As you're probably aware, besides being available "in print" via Email and on the Web, The Harrow Technology Report is also available as an on-demand Web-based "radio" show.  Many thousands of you use this to get your dose of technology insight while giving your eyes a rest.  (In fact, my musings represent the first and longest-running regularly scheduled technology "radio show" on the Web.)

 

The Early Days.

If you've been a listener for some years, you might recall when I used to offer the "radio show" using a technology from VOXware called ToolVOX.  This was an amazing voice-only audio codec (COmpressor/DECompressor) that reduced the half-hour radio show from a 70 megabyte WAV file, to about a half-megabyte (which is significantly smaller than the MP3 format that we use today -- MP3 compresses the 70 megabyte WAV file to about 4 megabytes).  In those bandwidth-constrained days of 9600 and 14.4 modems, this level of compression was an "enabling technology" for Web-based audio-on-demand content. 

ToolVOX performed this miracle by "modeling" the human voice, only sending the much shorter "instructions" for that model to the ToolVOX client on your PC, where it recreated the voice.  (By comparison, most other audio codecs send the actual compressed audio, which cannot compress nearly as small as just a stream of "instructions.")  This amazing compression ratio alone was what convinced me to use ToolVOX in those earliest days of the Web.  But there was more...

 

The Point?    

In today's world of relatively high bandwidth connections to businesses and to many homes, the file size and bandwidth of a half hour "radio show" is far less of an issue than was once the case, yet many of you still bemoan the fact that I finally had to retire ToolVOX since it had long been unsupported by VOXware.  You missed ToolVOX because it provided one other very useful attribute:  it allowed each listener to adjust the SPEED (the tempo) of the voice playback, faster or slower as they wished, WITHOUT turning my voice into Alvin-the-chipmunk, or into a    s   l    o     w   drawl. 

So, ever since ToolVOX was retired, I've received a constant stream of requests that I speak both faster and slower.  And that ties my voice up into the proverbial Gordian knot.

 

Have It YOUR Way!

But help is now at hand, thanks to reader Armin Von Werner.  He points out that if you use the free WinAmp program (www.winamp.com) as your MP3 player, an also-free and very cool WinAmp plug-in called "PaceMaker," written by Olli Parviainen (http://www.iki.fi/oparviai/pacemaker), will again allow you to speed-up or slow-down this journal (or any other audio, for that matter) so you can listen at your own most-comfortable rate! 

Install WinAmp, then PaceMaker.  (During the installation process, you may wish to allow WinAmp to become your default .mp3 player, but that is not necessary.)

Then, configure WinAmp to use PaceMaker as described in the PaceMaker documentation, or follow these steps after BOTH WinAmp and PaceMaker are installed:

1)      From within WinAmp, hit CTRL-K.

2)      In the left-hand list, under "Plug-ins," select the "DSP/Effect" item.

3)      In the right-hand window select the "PaceMaker tempo controller" entry so that it is highlighted, and then close that window.  You'll notice a small window appear titled "Pacemaker" with several controls on it -- more on that in a moment.

Now, if you allowed WinAmp to become your default .mp3 player, simply clicking on the "Listen to this Issue" link in any THTR issue should automatically begin playing it in WinAmp. 

(If WinAmp is NOT your default .mp3 player, you can copy and paste the "listen" address from any THTR issue into WinAmp using the "Add URL" button in the lower-left corner.) 

Now that the THTR issue is playing in WinAmp, you can adjust the "Tempo" slider on the PaceMaker "Sound Control" panel to make the playback as fast or as slow as you wish!  (Leave the Pitch and Speed sliders in their center position.)

That's it!

(Please note that it's beyond the scope of THTR to provide any additional instructions or support for WinAmp or PaceMaker; check out their respective Web sites if you have questions.  And of course you install and use such tools at your own risk.  But it only took me a few minutes to get this combination up and running flawlessly.) 

Once again, I can zip through my quality control checks without having to listen at the same rate that I speak, and you can now pick the playback speed that suits you best.

 

Back To The Future.

In a "Back To The Futuresque" way, THTR listeners have again regained what was once lost, thanks to the increasing power of today's processors that makes it possible to perform this magic in real time, without the restrictive voice modeling of only a few years ago. 

Enjoy!

 

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The World of the Tiny.

 

One of the tenets of The Harrow Technology Report is that I never write an issue with any preconceived or scheduled notion of its content -- each issue represents my take on the most significant and interesting "computing" innovations and trends that have recently become apparent -- those which I believe will have a pragmatic effect on how we all will work, live, and play in the future. 

This editorial technique is what had us exploring the Web long before it became a household word, had us learning what made flexible displays from E-Ink tick when the idea of such displays were still firmly rooted in science fiction, and more recently, has had us taking an ever-closer look at the myriad techniques and technologies that seem poised to completely change the way we design and build things, as we consider trading in our nuts and bolts for molecules and atoms and electrons.  In short, the slowly-emerging world of the tiny, commonly referred to as "nanotechnology."

Nanotechnology isn't any one "science," it has many definitions depending on the subject, and it isn't strictly limited to inorganic things like "electronics," since living things like DNA components also seem to fit.  With "nanotechnology" being so elusive and formative, many people and businesses discount it.  But as I look back over the past couple of years of my writings, I find that "things nano" are creeping in in a pattern reminiscent of how we once discussed the potential for incredible gains in processor power, memory, storage, and the Internet, which all seemed both unimportant and improbable at the time. 

Which brings us to this week's "tiny" events.

 

Robotic Workers.

Industrial robots are nothing new -- visit an auto assembly plant or a similar facility in many other fields, and specialized robots move things, assemble them, weld and solder parts, paint things, and much more.   But if the work of MIT researcher Sylvain Martel (brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggart) is successful, a new breed of robot is going to be building things with atoms, rather than with sheet steel!

These are called "NanoWalkers," as described in the Dec. 19 SmallTimes (http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=2752&section_id=53), which can walk around on piezoelectric legs faster than a roach can scurry, or move ultra-precisely in steps only two-billionths of a meter long.  (These autonomous workers are powered through an electrical charge on their work surface.) 

But what would we do with robots that can move in such tiny increments?   According to Martel, they would wield their on-board scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) to push atoms around into just the configuration needed for a project.  They could also use lasers and micromachining tools to build things from the "atomic bottom," up.  And these NanoWalkers would not be working blind -- they could get the "big picture" of the area in which they're working through a built-in CCD camera, while the STM would provide the precise imaging needed at the atomic level. NanoWalkers might also be "social," with a swarm of them working as a coordinated whole using built-in infrared communications to chat among themselves.

MIT isn't alone in pursuing the idea of robots that can do work where human fingers can not tread -- another example comes from Germany's University of Karlsruhe, where they use a different type of nano robot to collect and transport individual cells to the appropriate areas within an experiment, and even to hold a single cell in place while another robot injects drugs or other compounds into that individual cell!

Yes, nanorobots are in their infancy, but as we continue to explore (and increasingly imitate) how nature builds things -- from the atoms, up -- devices like these may become the new tools of the trade.  Let's just hope they don't begin to demand nano-sized water coolers and coffee pots...

 

Test Tube Computers.

Speaking of things tiny, several of you pointed out IBM's Almaden Research Center's recent success in performing the most complicated "quantum computer" calculation yet.  IBM scientists dumped a billion-billion custom-constructed molecules into a test tube and convinced them to act as a seven-qubit (QUantum BIT) computer, which then solved a simple version of the math behind many of today's cryptographic systems (Shor's Algorithm).  The bottom line is that quantum computers can factor numbers dramatically faster than their traditional counterparts -- in fact exponentially faster.  (There's that same "exponential" word again, which so-changed the face of "traditional" computing...)

While this experiment (factoring the number 15) may seem trivial, as the number of qubits in these quantum computers grow, they're going to dramatically change the rules for what constitutes "unbreakable" encryption. (See http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20011219_quantum.shtml for additional insights.)  And that will affect governments, commerce, and eventually you and me.

 

Back To The Future.

I remember when transistors first hit the shelves.  Most electronics people (and businesses), schooled in vacuum tubes, had trouble understanding how these little silver cans worked, and so they often dismissed them since the tubes of the day were FAR more versatile and could handle FAR more power.  As the transistor matured though, it became a disruptive technology that changed all the rules, not only for the electronics industry, but also for almost every aspect of society.  Those people and businesses who stayed on the cutting edge of what these new transistors (and later integrated circuits) could do, were in the best position to reap the benefits of putting the tubes out to pasture.

Now again, as I watch the many fledgling nano efforts around the globe, I have the feeling that when we look back at today, we'll recognize that nanotechnology was the twenty-first century's transistor, similarly changing almost everything around us, but to a far greater degree! 

Can you picture just how improbable a multi-gigahertz processor with a gigabyte of memory and hundreds of gigabytes of disk space would have seemed to you only five years ago?  Yet they're on consumer shelves today.

So as we continue to explore these seemingly arcane and unconnected nano events in future issues,

Don't Blink,

because if (when?) we get really good at working with nature's basic building blocks, we'll be able to build virtually anything that we can conceive!  And we do have SUCH fertile imaginations...!

 

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I'd like to understand your interest in The Harrow Technology Report, how you make use of it, and the value you feel it provides to you, your career, and to your company.

Please send your comments to me at  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  .

I look forward to hearing from you!

 

And, if you know of other folks who might find value in “The Harrow Technology Report,” I’d appreciate your letting them know that they can subscribe at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/signup.asp .

Jeff Harrow

 

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Teaching The Old CRT Dog, New Tricks.

 

With slim LCD monitors finally dropping into the affordable range, a growing number of desktops are replacing the huge, heavy, and deep monitor cases that housed the long necks and large electromagnets of traditional Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). 

But just when we might begin to sing a eulogy to the dearly departing "picture tube," new materials, and very new ideas, might brighten the CRT's future!

Brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggart, the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/circuits/16NEXT.html) describes how two IBM scientists have thought "outside the box" to come up with a design that may prove far thinner, and far superior, to the CRTs of old.

 

The Old.

You might recall that a traditional CRT has a coating of phosphor (which glows when struck by high-speed electrons) on the inside of the front glass.  The cathode sits at the back of the long neck and is heated to the point that it glows, giving off lots of electrons.  A very high voltage attracts those electrons to the face of the tube where they strike the phosphor dots and cause them to glow, while magnetic forces applied by the electromagnets steer the beam as it rushes down the neck of the tube, causing it to "sweep" back and forth and up and down to create the images we know and love (or hate).  Of course it's a tad more involved than that, especially for color CRTs, but that's the general idea (see http://www.howstuffworks.com/tv2.htm for a more detailed explanation). 

 

The New?

But now, picture (sorry) a very different type of CRT.  It still has a phosphor coating on the inside of the front glass, but the long neck and cathode are replaced with another flat plate that acts as the cathode.  It sits one-inch in back of the front plate, separated by a special stainless steel and ceramic magnet that is pierced with thousands of precise, tiny holes -- one hole for each pixel on the screen!  In effect, each pixel's magnet attracts electrons from the flat cathode and forms them into a tightly focused beam for its particular pixel.  By controlling the number of electrons that are passed through each magnet at any instant, the brightness of that particular pixel is controlled, resulting in a full-screen picture. 

(Color versions, similar to today's CRTs, would provide a smaller red, green, and blue phosphor dot for each "pixel," yielding a full-color image to the eye.)

Not only would this design, if it ever leaves the research labs, yield very thin CRTs (comparable to LCD panels), but it would also do away with one of the major headaches of conventional color CRTs -- convincing that one electron beam to sweep so precisely over every pixel on the face of the tube that it always lands on the correct color pixel.  This rarely happens perfectly, and the result is "mis-convergence" in some areas, reducing detail and leaving a colored fringe around some objects, often at the edges of the tube.  Since this new design has one virtual electron gun for each and every pixel, mis-convergence would be a thing of the past.

Of course, like most research ideas, there can be quite a trip from the lab to the corner superstore.  But whether or not this innovation "makes it," it is a good reminder that taking off our traditional blinders to use new technologies (the new type of magnet in this case), in new ways (the thin, flat CRT), holds the potential to paint a pretty (and thin) picture, indeed!

 

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Twist 'n View?

 

Sit on a PDA and you're likely to hear a "CRACK" that tells you it's time to upgrade to a newer model, because most PDA displays are made of glass that will only twist or bend one time.  Some companies, such as E-Ink and Xerox PARC, are producing signs on flexible substrates, but these technologies are currently better suited for relatively static displays; they don't yet have the pixel density or switching speed or contrast to support demanding applications such as video.   But this, according to the Dec. 5 CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/12/05/electronic.paper.race.ap/index.html) and brought to our attention by reader Michael Sweet, may well change.

Royal Philips Electronics has used their version of completely plastic transistors to produce a working 2-inch display composed of 4,096 grayscale pixels that can switch fast enough to display video, and it has a contrast ratio similar to that of a pen writing on paper!

This won't yet produce "sittable" PDAs, since even though the transistors are plastic, this initial display is still produced on a glass substrate.  But Philips feels that transferring this technology to a flexible substrate isn't that far off.

Imagine what low cost flexible displays might mean -- completely new shapes for our devices, such as wristwatches where the band itself is the display, or similar "band" variations of cell phones, MP3 players, and the like.  Or, if the technology matures enough for the display to cover the entire surface of a garment, imagine the potential for military camouflage -- the shirt could use built-in video cameras to scan what's behind you, and then display that image (appropriate resized) on the front of the shirt, making you much more difficult to see. 

On the other hand, I was recently walking through a department store and shuddered at the selection of clothing with manufacturers' names boldly emblazoned on them in four-inch (or larger) letters -- imagine the advertising opportunities for a sweatshirt with a flexible display that can be updated through a built-in pager-like receiver...   Hummm -- I think that's one technological advance where I'll pass...

 

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RoboRoach!

 

Finally, how would you like to come across THIS little beastie crawling along your kitchen counter?

This isn't a joke -- this cyborg (a combination of a living thing and a computer) is a remote controlled roach, walking the laboratories of Japan's Tsukuba University. 

Brought to our attention by reader T.W. Cook (http://www.intercorr.com/roach.htm), the roach's "backpack" contains a receiver that converts the signals from a remote control into electrical stimuli that are applied to the base of the roach's antennae.  This allows the "operator" to get the roach to stop, go forward, backup, or turn left and right, on-command.

This might sound trivial  (and hard on the roach), but the Japanese government sees the potential for controllable insects, fitted with sensors, to conduct inspection trips through tiny machine passages looking for corrosion and other problem; they're backing the research with $5 million. 

Research into electrically stimulating living systems is also a starting point for, er, getting the bugs out of more sophisticated computer-nervous system interconnections.  And that holds great potential for people with certain disabilities.

So the next time you see a creepy-crawly scurrying around when you flip on the kitchen light, look carefully before your grab the bug spray -- it might be Version 2.3b1 of your spouse's (or your kid's) latest project, and all you'll need is the remote control!

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"