LISTEN To This Issue.
            Give your eyes a rest.

Quote of the Week.
            Changing ALL the rules!

Virtual Economies Surpass "Real" Ones!
            How many "games" beat GNPs?

The Nanotube Buzz.
            Faster than a speeding silicon transistor.

Tidbits...
            Disk Drives, past & future.
            A "storage inversion."

            CPU Update.

From Out of the Ether...
            Let your drinking glass keep you out of jail?

PC As Toilet?
            There are certain similarities...

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. 

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Quote of the Week.

 

"Biology and electronics have long existed in separate universes.  But because biological molecules, like DNA and proteins, are roughly a few nanometers in size, and because physicists and chemists are now learning how to make electronic devices on exactly that size scale, these universes are colliding.

The result is a new class of devices that combine the ability of biological molecules to selectively bind with other molecules, with the ability of nanoelectronics to instantly detect the slight electrical changes caused by such binding. 

What's really interesting about this technology is that it allows one to take the inorganic components that normally would be nestled inside an electrical chip, and combine them with biological molecules."

Paul Alivisatos, cofounder, Nanosys
May, 2002 TechnologyReview
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stikeman0502.asp

This will change ALL the rules!

 

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Virtual Economies Surpass "Real" Ones!

 

We've talked before about Sony's "EverQuest" a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).  It has an incredible user base of 450,000+ players who dutifully pay their $12.95 per month to fight and socialize in the fantasy world of Norrath (www.everquest.com).  This and similar games are a fascinating glimpse into where, I suspect, "virtual reality" will be taking us. 

But this game's tendrils also reach far into "real reality."  You see, regardless of Sony's ban on the practice, reader Sander Olson points out that the real-world (out-of-game) sale of EverQuest loot and characters (which are then used in-game) makes the fantasy world of Norrath,

"...the 77th largest economy in the [real] world!  [It] has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's economy".
(http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article/0,,10693_1107121,00.html)

It may also surprise you that the combined "console" and PC gaming industries,

"...form a multi-billion dollar industry that has already surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenues."

According to the May 23 USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/2002/5/23/e3.htm), the video game industry took in $9.3 billion in revenues in 2001, with Sony's Kaz Hirari expecting video games to eclipse the $14.3 billion of music sales and $19 billion of home video sales.  In fact, these media may converge in ways that surprise us, such as "video games" that allow us to direct and produce movies, and "movies" that reach out through interactivity, such as the forthcoming Zelda "interactive cartoon."  The day may come when this is all just "entertainment."

So it's no wonder that Sony is planning some dramatic improvements to its forthcoming PlayStation 3.  According to Sony's Chief Technical Officer, Shin'ichi Okamoto in the March 21 ZDNet News (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866388.html), the problem is that,

"Moore's Law is too slow for us."

"'We can't wait 20 years to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance."

 

Power To (And From) The People.

So what to do?  Sony is exploring the idea of using the increasing number of "always on" cable modem and DSL-connected computers and console games to implement what IBM calls "Grid Computing" (http://www-1.ibm.com/services/insights/etr_grid.html) -- conceptually the same technology that popular distributed computing solutions, such as the SETI screen saver (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html), have used.

In SETI's case, more than 3.5 million computers around the globe have provided a total of 921,190 years of CPU time, in the form of a giant, global, virtual supercomputer!  Similarly, in the context of Grid-connected video games, when kids in one part of the world are at school or asleep, their PlayStations (and possibly PCs) would donate real-time processing assistance to the gamers who were currently playing on the other side of the planet.  Sony believes that this will supplement Moore's Law to the tune of a hoped-for thousand-fold-increase(!) in effective computing power for its gamers. 

(The March issue of Scientific American, brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggart, offers a detailed look into a conceptually similar, if broader, move towards an "Internet Scale Operating System" - http://www.sciam.com/2002/0302issue/0302anderson.html).

 

One Virtual World?

Currently, the server computers that run MMORPGs can't keep up with the processing load of tens of thousands of users.  Instead, most MMORPGs are broken up into "shards," or multiple copies of the game world, each occupied by a manageable number of players.  So although there may be 75,000 players in Norrath this evening, there might be 25 separate Norraths, each independent from the others.  A player on one server could interact with all the other players on that server, but not with players on a separate server.  There isn't a "single world" with 75,000 inhabitants.

But that now seems likely to change with Sony, IBM, and Butterfly (http://www.butterfly.net/) moving to create a specialized server environment called "The Butterfly Grid," (which is separate from the notion of a grid of "users," as discussed above.) 

"[It's] the first grid system with the capability of processing online video games across a multicast network of server farms, allowing the most efficient utilization of computing resources for high-performance 3D immersive game-worlds...  It is designed to support more than one million simultaneous players from each facility with 99.999 percent uptime and automatic failover capability...

The grid also eliminates the separation of a game world into shards, through the use of "cross-server sentinels" which Butterfly said support the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players."

Consider -- between the "user grid" and the "server grid," we're talking about a global supercomputer -- for a GAME!

(You might be wondering why we're discussing "games" in a journal that typically explores more general uses of technology.  It's because history teaches me that games tend to drive the mass adoption of technologies that then become commonplace and find their way into "business."  Examples include color monitors, higher-resolution and hardware-accelerated graphics, sound cards, and more.  And in the case of these MMORPG games, I believe that they will eventually morph into effective virtual business venues for meetings, trade shows, and more.  Don't ignore what's behind (and ahead for) these "games," just because they're games...)

 

The People Part.

These MMORPG games are made up of very real people, and any time this many people come together, even if it's in a fantasy world, things take on a life of their own, sometimes evolving very differently from what its creators had anticipated.

Elizabeth Kolbert explores just that, in last year's May 28 New Yorker article titled "Pimps and Dragons" (http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?010528fa_FACT).  She looks behind the scenes in the second-largest (a quarter-million subscribers) MMORPG game, Ultima Online (http://www.uo.com/), where more than one hundred sixty million people-hours have been lived in Ultima's fantasy world of Britannia -- just last year!

In a fascinating mirror of the history of real nations, Britannia's people develop professions; build and maintain homes and shops; invent unintended new trades (such as prostitution); and participate in fads (players' avatars lined up for hours to bid for limited bottles of red hair dye -- red hair was considered a status symbol).  Britannia has also experienced severe environmental and political crises (quite unplanned) that actually came close to destroying this fantasy world -- for example a society-wide monetary collapse, and a crime wave -- all of which were "unscripted" and unplanned events that simply evolved because real people were living and interacting in this virtual reality.

If you haven't experienced a MMORPG first-hand, Kolbert's article will give you some insight into the extraordinarily addictive power that these "fantasy" environments can have over people, and how the hours that they spend in Britannia (an average of 13 hours per week) can profitably spill over into the "real world."  (Similar to what we discussed in relation to EverQuest, castles in prime Britannia locations sell on eBay to the tune of 800 real dollars -- "location, location, location" apparently applies in virtual worlds as well.)

While today's examples of virtual environments are the stuff of games and flights of fancy, our ever-increasing processing power and bandwidth, and peoples' desires, seem destined to forge far more realistic future virtual environments (see http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20010312.html#_Toc508603809).  As they arrive, they may well have a surprising impact on how we live and work -- not just on how we play!

Don't blink!

 

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The Nanotube Buzz.

 

Tiny, hollow, cylindrical superconducting constructs called carbon nanotubes are so small that they herd electrons single file, in one direction, like peppercorns through a soda straw (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020415/20020415.htm#_Toc6321551).  Not only do the electrons slip along with almost zero resistance (and hence generate almost no heat), but they travel faster than when passing through conventional wires.  Which are pretty interesting characteristics as we look towards pushing Moore's Law beyond the limits of silicon, which scientists (currently) expect to reach in ten to twenty years.

Brought to our attention by readers Bob Withers and others, IBM has just created a research lab demonstration of a carbon nanotube transistor that "outperformed silicon transistors" in certain key metrics, according to IBM's manager of nanoscale science, Phaedon Avouris (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-917412.html). 

As illustrated by this schematic from IBM's announcement (http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20020520_nanotubes.shtml), the nanotube carries the current.

According to Avouris,

"The basic science is still not totally understood.  Nature does use self-assembly, but nature had a research and development time of over 2 billion years."

Of course these are just the first fledgling (but necessary) steps towards learning how to use these nanotubes to do our computing.  But each research lab success, such as this one, spurs additional work. 

With the pot-of-gold of "self-assembling" chips in the balance ("grown" like snowflakes, instead of "carved out" of silicon as we do today), I expect to see a long line of fascinating breakthroughs coming a lot faster than by Nature's learning curve.  After all, we're following where Nature has already led...

 

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Jeff Harrow

 

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Tidbits...

 

·        The Evolution, And The Future, Of The Disk Drive -- The price/performance improvements of these amazing, gently humming and chattering souls of our machines, have caught up with and exceeded Moore's Law.  Yet who, just a few years ago, would have thought that these smaller-than-a-paperback mechanical miracles, which routinely fly tiny read/write heads as close as 10-billionths of a meter above a spinning disk (where a single smoke particle or a "boulder-sized" bacterium cell spells disaster), could hold almost a fifth of a terabyte, today?  But there's far more capacity yet to come...

An article in the May Computing Science (http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/Issues/Comsci02/Compsci2002-05.html) by Brian Hayes, brought to our attention by reader Doug Alder, offers an entertaining and very readable education into just what makes these things purr, and where disk drive science is likely to go.  For example, the first disk drive platters were painted with the same type of iron-oxide paint used on the Golden Gate Bridge; the paint was "...filtered through a silk stocking and then poured onto the spinning disk from a Dixie cup." 

My, how far we've come.

One way to appreciate this evolution of our disk drives, from the days of that silk-stockinged, 50-platter, 5 megabyte behemoth, to today's 120 gigabyte 3.5-inch drive, is that

"...the surface area of the disks has shrunk by a factor of almost 800, while their information capacity has increased 24,000 times; it follows that the areal density (the number of bits per square inch) has grown by a factor of about 19 million." 

A factor of 19 million, in 46 years.

So what might a disk drive be able to store in, say, ten years?  Not today's 120 gigabytes, but one hundred and twenty TERAbytes.  More than one-tenth of a petabyte.  In the palm of your hand. 

But consider -- how could you FILL UP 120 terabytes, considering that you could store seven years of 24/7 movies, or 80 years of music, or...?  The problem might not be how much we CAN store, but more practically "the cost of the content."  Want to buy 30,000 movies to transfer to your shiny new disk?

But those are questions for a later tomorrow, although a tomorrow not too far in our future.  Our disk drives are not doing badly.  Not badly at all.  And we've only just begun.

Again, Don't Blink!

·        Inverting The Storage Perspective -- Speaking of disk drives, reader Eric Werme commented on our recent discussion about the storage capacity of CDs, vs. current DVDs, vs. their much larger successors (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020429/20020429.htm#_Toc7673246), offering us an intriguing perspective on storage trends:

"When CD-ROMs came out, their 650 MB capacity dwarfed the typical home computer disk.  I think our typical disk on a mini-supercomputer [then] was about 100 MB.  This was certainly more than 10 years ago. 

In that time span, there would have been 7 doublings of storage space - 128x - so an updated CD-ROM should now hold 83 GB. 

Somewhere along the line I realized that I had missed the transition from a CD-ROM holding several hard disks worth of stuff, to our current hard disks that hold many CD-ROMs worth."

An interesting inversion to think about.  For example, could we eventually see a similar "storage inversion" between disk drives and non-volatile memory...?

 

·        CPU Update -- If memory serves, it was only two to three years ago when Intel forecast that we would see the billion-transistor chip by 2010.  Of course, when I would describe this in my speeches, many a skeptical eye was turned my way. 

The thing is, most of us find it VERY difficult to really appreciate what exponential growth means.  But reader Sander Olsen brings us a good example from the April SiliconStrategies (http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020425S0017) -- it seems that we're going to be halfway to the billion-transistor chip, not by 2010, but -- next year!

Specifically, Intel's second version of its 64-bit CPU, codenamed "Madison" and to be called "Itanium 2," will contain those half-billion transistors, double the number in its first "McKinley" 64-bit chip.  And this isn't speculation -- Intel already has "first silicon" to prove their point.

So, we'll have already hit the half-billion-transistor mark in 2003.  Which means that if Moore's Law continues to rule the roost, we should hit the billion-transistor chip in mid-2005.  Five years earlier than originally predicted by the people who make this magic!

And that implies some truly fascinating expectations for the turn of the next decade, especially since AMD has received Microsoft's endorsement for its forthcoming "Opteron" 64-bit challenger. 

Isn't competition great?

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From Out of the Ether...

 

·        "Refill" on "Of Dubious Drinking Value" -- Reader George Daszkowski reminds us of the many ways that a single innovation might be used; in this case the beer glass that constantly tells the bar how full it is so that it can be kept filled (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020513/20020513.htm#_Toc8820634):

"Think of the other side of the coin, er, end of the glass.  If you know how much is in the glass, you must know the individual glass, so it becomes simple to add up how much has gone into each glass since the client entered the establishment.  Now, the retailer can really assist the client (the drinker) in avoiding DUI charges. Have so many drinks and get a free taxi ride home, if you register your address when you enter, or for regulars. 

Everything changes when you go digital."

It certainly does.

 

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PC As Toilet?

 

Finally, the wonders that PCs have brought into our homes and offices are many, but one aspect is not what most of us bargained for. 

Few of us go around sticking our hands into toilets (we won't talk about dogs and cats...), because -- well -- they're dirty.  We know that even if we can't see the bacteria living there, they are there, and can cause all manner of problems if we ingest them or spread them around.  But if we talk on the telephone, or work with a computer, that appears to be exactly what we're doing!

According to the May 9 VNUnet (http://www.vnunet.com/News/1131608), a University of Arizona study has found that typical telephones and keyboards host "400 times more bacteria than the average loo, ... [they can] sustain millions of bacteria that could potentially cause illness." 

They get this contaminated because they're rarely cleaned or disinfected.  While I suspect that there are some differences in the types of bacteria that are found in each place, it does sound like a little peripheral cleansing is in order. 

Now -- I just have to figure out how to clean my keyboards without turning them into a soggy mess...

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"