Listen to this Issue.

Quote of the Week.
      Don't economize, but squander!

"The Doubling Will Slow Down."  (Or will it...?)
      Is Moore's Law Ready To Slow Down?

The "Purple (Almost-)Brain?"
      "Think" about this -- while you're still 'king of the hill.'

The Wire IS The Circuit!
      Suppose that wires didn't just connect active elements
      together, but BECAME the active elements?

Well, Well.  I Guess It HAD To Happen...
      It really did.  It just had to.  And it will cause both
      angst and appreciation.

Some Final Killer Apps...
      Closing the list...

Playing The Game.
      It's a good thing that kids learn (at least some things)
      from playing video games, because they've become
      a part of the classroom.

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

 

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Back to Table of Contents

Quote of the Week.

 

"Storage space and computing power are dirt cheap; our task isn't to "use them efficiently," it's to "squander them creatively.""

David Gelernter
Professor, Computer Science at Yale,
Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies,
In Nov. 7 New York Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/07/technology/
circuits/07soft.html?todaysheadlines)
 

Valuable words to consider, coming from a discussion on changing our desktop metaphor away from the "1940s Steelcase file cabinets..." towards a "Narrative Information Stream." 

(A beta(!) of this new software is at http://www.scopeware.com/ for Windows 2000 and XP only.  I suggest you read the info at that site before downloading.)

 

Back to Table of Contents

"The Doubling Will Slow Down."  (Or will it...?)

 

Throughout the almost four-decades since Moore's Law came into existence, naysayers have decried that Moore's Law (the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every 18 or so months, while still selling at the same price) would just HAVE to come to an end soon.  Yet each and every time, Moore's Law had continued to be met by companies that refused to take 'no' for an answer, as they kept innovating ways to move through or around every obstacle that appeared in their path. 

"I remember we didn't think we could go beyond 1 micron [1,000 nanometers] because of optical lithography,"

said Gordon Moore, referring to one roadblock overcome in the early 1990s.

But what of Moore's newest claim, that:

"The doubling will slow down...  You really get bit by the fact that the materials are made of atoms..."

We've heard that one before of course, but THIS time it's rather, er, moore interesting, considering that these words came directly from Gordon Moore at the White House, following  his acceptance of the U.S.' highest civilian award -- the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  (From the July 10 ZDNet News (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-942688.html), brought to our attention by reader Carl Taylor.)

What's happening is this:  Current Pentium 4s are made with on-chip features as small as 130 nanometers (130 billionths of a meter), and the upcoming generation ("Prescott") will have features as small as 90 nanometers.  But when things shrink to about 30 nanometers (in less than seven years), chip "designers will hit a design wall," since nanotechnology will likely not yet be ready to carry this shrinking ball forward.  So what's a world (and an economy) used to Moore's Law, to do?

Set your mind as ease, because the reporter goes on to say that,

"Although [this] upcoming barrier looks more fundamental than the earlier one, [Moore is] confident designers will come up with a way to have "multibillion-transistor budgets."

Which means that Moore's Law is far from "off the books."  Indeed, history teaches us that we're NEVER satisfied with being stymied by an obstacle in any field, much less in the world of semiconductors.  If scientists had stopped at ANY of the then-bottlenecks that littered the semiconductor road behind us, the results that we (mostly) enjoy today would simply not have happened.  But the scientists didn't stop, and in my opinion, they won't... 

Not any one person can 'see it all.'  Even Moore, who essentially made the world of PCs (and so much more) possible, said,

"If you asked me in 1980, I would have missed the PC. I didn't see much future for it...  I thought automobiles would be a bigger market (for microprocessors)."

In fact, Mr. Moore didn't personally buy a PC until the "late 1980s..."

Even he blinked.  But, hopefully, you won't!

 

Back to Table of Contents

The "Purple (Almost-)Brain?"

 

How's that for a cryptic title?  In the past few seconds your brain has probably spent a fair amount of processing power trying to figure out what I'm talking about.  Which is -- that the day seems to be getting uncomfortably close when computers WILL be approaching the estimated computing power of the human brain.  In fact, according to some, that day will be in 2003!

 

The Specs.

As explored in the Nov. 19 Wired News (http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,56459,00.html), the processing power of your brain is about 100 trillion calculations per second,

"... based on factoring the capability of the brain's 100 billion neurons, each with over 1,000 connections to other neurons, with each connection capable of performing about 200 calculations per second,"

and your brain has a memory capacity of about 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes).  [So why can't I remember where I put something, or a random phone number?]

This gets interesting, considering that IBM has recently been awarded a $290-million contract to produce two "ASCI Purple" supercomputers.  When working together, they will operate at "500 trillion calculations per second, more than 1.5-times the combined processing power..." of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world today -- combined.  And ASCI Purple will have 50 terabytes of memory (half that of your brain.)

There's another interesting comparison:

ASCI Purple will take up almost 200 refrigerator-sized cabinets weighing one-ton each, spread across 2 basketball courts.  Your brain fits in about 56 cubic-inches and weighs about 3 pounds.

 

But Are "The Specs" ALL Of The Specs?

Even as we approach and exceed the "raw specs" of our brains (at least as we can measure and estimate them today), there are still essential differences between these silicon and carbon-based machines that we have yet to quantify.  According to Wise Young, director of the Keck Neuroscience lab at Rutgers University,

"The human brain is distinguished by its ability to think and create in addition to simply processing information quickly."

So "raw computing specs" aside, it still seems that the brain does its processing essentially differently from our digital computers. And so the ASCI Purple supercomputer is not expected to pop-up as self-aware and 'intelligent,' in the way that we define ourselves. 

Yet...

Nevertheless, as Ray Kurzweil and others predict, Moore's Law seems likely to push the raw computing specs so that supercomputers of four years from now will almost certainly exceed the raw processing capability of our brains -- "as we measure it."  But there may well still be essential attributes of how our self-aware brains "calculate" that we have yet to understand, which may still keep our machines from crosing that insubstantial line.  Or not...

 

Sci Fi -- Today.

At the moment, such powerful computers are still science fiction, just like HAL.  So far.  But as our computers do approach the raw specs of our brains, we'll be entering very uncharted territory.

"Calculate" about that!  And again,

Don't Blink!

 

Back to Table of Contents

The Wire IS The Circuit!

 

Have you ever looked at a cross-section of the wire (a "coaxial cable") that brings cable TV signals into your home to your TV?  It looks like this:

It's called "co-axial" because it has several layers around a common axis (the central solid wire.)  Moving left in the picture, the next layer out (the white cylinder) provides both insulation and spacing (both are critical) between the center conductor and the metallic braid (the third layer).  Finally, the fourth layer is the tough "outside jacket" of the cable, which is what you normally see.

"Well, that's nice," you may be thinking, "but what's the point?"

The point is an introduction to the following illustration from Harvard University, as depicted in the Nov. 13 TRN News (http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/111302/
Coax_goes_nano_111302.html), brought to our attention by reader Sander Olson:

This "coaxial semiconductor" may turn out to be a new entry in our arsenal of weapons aimed at taming electrons.  You see, this is a section of a single wire that is but 50 nanometers (that's 50-billionths of a meter) in diameter, where the various coaxial layers that make up this miniscule "coaxial wire" turn it into a Field Effect transistor, or FET!  (The paths leading away from the different active layers are marked with "S", "G", and "D" for the Source, Gate, and Drain electrodes of a transistor.)  So in this case, the wire itself is indeed the transistor!

There's even more information in the article noted above about how this may lead to smaller circuits made of carbon nanotubes (there's already competition within the field of nanotechnology to surpass its previous amazing abilities!), but it is worth taking a closer look at just how small these "coaxial semiconductors" are.

To understand just HOW closely we're "focused in" on this wire in the picture above, the small black "scale bar" is only five nanometers long.  The flat area (where the scale bar is) is the plane of silicon under the wire.  The raised area is the actual nanowire itself, running from upper-right towards lower-left. 

Now, look at the bumps all over the nanowire.  These are not imperfections.  They're individual atoms of germanium, which make up the outer layer of the coaxial wire/circuit.  Sort of like the coaxial cable in our homes, only much, much smaller.  And "active," from a circuit point of view.

Estimates are that prototypes could be available in 2-5 years.

And won't that change a lot of rules...

 

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Well, Well.  I Guess It HAD To Happen...

 

Some people will be aghast -- sometimes with good reason. 

Others will welcome the potential opportunities -- sometimes with poor reason. 

But one thing seems very clear to me: the birth of the first human clone, now due in January according to Italian fertility expert Dr. Severino Antinori (as reported in the Nov. 26 New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/
news-health-cloning-antinori.html), will change a LOT of rules (including, undoubtedly, many "rules of Law").   

The thing is, I'm not surprised by this announcement.  That's because, given the meteoric advances in the science and the execution of cloning, I could not imagine that someone, somewhere, would NOT try it.  That's in the, er, nature of human inquisitiveness and innovation.  I'd only be surprised if, eventually, it did not happen.  (Which is not to necessarily say that this is either a 'good' or a 'bad' thing.)

This isn't the place, and in any event I'm not 'all-seeing' enough to pass judgment on the wide range of very real concerns that this event raises, such as "tinkering with life," the specter of genetically modified and massively cloned armies (remember Lord of the Rings, or Attack of the Clones?), and more. 

Or, on the potential good that cloning might accomplish (allowing infertile couples to have their own children, preventing defects in new babies, and more).  Each person has to form his or her own opinions. 

But I do believe that this is a good example of the inevitability of scientific progress, both for good and for ill. 

As we continue to delve into the "the world of the tiny" and increasingly understand (and learn to manipulate) how things work at the molecular and atomic scales, we're finding that it's increasingly difficult to draw a hard line between "life" and inanimate objects.  Indeed, the U.S. Dept. of Energy is currently funding Dr. J. Craig Venter to develop a cell containing the minimum number of genes necessary for life! (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/science/21CELL.html)

Who would have imagined that Moore's Law's effects on semiconductors would be having such broad and significant fallout? 

Yet our ability to work at Nature's tiny level is indeed one result of the knowledge and skills we've developed while creating our ever-smaller and ever-faster chips.

Once again, Don't Blink!

 

Back to Table of Contents

Some Final Killer Apps...

 

Since the last issue's publication date, several more of your suggestions on Killer Apps that might revitalize the PC world (by consuming the vast amounts of computing power that we're likely to have at our fingertips by 2010 -http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20021118/20021118.htm#_Toc25297649) have trickled in.  Although the list had been 'closed' once published, a few particularly unique subsequent contributions have been added at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20021118/20021118.htm (I've kept most of the other additional contributions for use in future issues).

Specifically, the three that were added are:

Build A Machine That Can Learn The Way A Human Child Learns, by Larry Hartweg --

http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20021118/YourKillerApps.htm#Build    

and

It's The Database, Really, by Ed Beneville

http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20021118/YourKillerApps.htm#Database  

and

'Easy-To-Use' Common Apps Could Be The Next Killer App, by Penny Pagliaroz

http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20021118/YourKillerApps.htm#Easy
 

These additional ideas close the list, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you who participated -- fascinating ideas, all.

And if you're a developer who decides to create these Killer Apps, let us know! 

 

Back to Table of Contents

Playing The Game.

 

Finally, I remember, back in my school days, sneaking a novel below my desk to read during particularly boring classes (shush - don't tell my teachers -- or my kids!)  Well, that's now passé -- today it's video games!

It's not that they're bringing a GameBoy or similar device to class that (literally) screams "GAME," but our endlessly inventive kids (that's a good thing -- usually) have co-opted what has become an acceptable (and necessary) high school staple -- the graphing calculator.

Looking through a certain young man's calculator, what should I see but "functions" called "Baseball," "Tetris," "Race Cars," and other rather non-mathematical sounding names that I don't recall from Algebra and Calculus.  Sure enough, they're graphic games.

This doesn't much surprise me; games are a natural for portable electronic devices.  But it is a hint that teachers now have another whole world of things they have to watch out for, since an innocent-seeming calculator has a perfect right to sit on a school desk.  Although I didn't check, I'll bet the games have a built-in "panic button" that quickly puts up a class-appropriate image when the need arises.

(Come to think of it, will the next generation of calculators wirelessly track the teacher's calculator, and so automatically blank out as she gets close while wandering the room?) 

And speaking of 'wireless,' if/once common calculators reach out and touch each other, then every teacher's desk may need to be fitted with a sophisticated ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) suite!

By the way, games have also been jumping the "species gap" from PCs to other devices.  For example, reader Graham Mulholland pointed us to the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME - http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html#g01), which emulates original arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Doom on some digital cameras and on some cell phones (as well as on PCs)!

Just imagine what the NEXT generation of kids will have in THEIR pockets at school...

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

 

"The Harrow Technology Report" explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them, to help us each survive and prosper in the Knowledge Age. 

"The Harrow Technology Report" is brought to you by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal of The Harrow Group. http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com .

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