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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Learning From Nature. Give those tired eyes a rest. Exponential growth of computing power does have implications for our 'privacy.' If you have a Cable/DSL connection, do you REALLY need a faster Internet? Perhaps not right now, but... Nature is a patient experimenter, and teacher -- if the students want to learn! There's much more that I can do for you... Good and bad news about powering our portable "stuff." There's more than one way to 'skin a cat.' (Not that I would do so to a furry feline - derivation info of this saying is at http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-mor1.htm .) 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, to learn how you can listen at whatever speed is most comfortable to you, check out the FAQ at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/help.htm . So, if you wish, just click on the following link to listen to this issue! http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20030407/20030407.mp3 .
Quote of the Week.
"Today a company or agency with a $10 million hardware budget can buy processing power equivalent to 2,000 workstations, two petabytes of hard drive space (two million gigabytes, or 50,000 standard 40-gigabyte hard drives like those found on today’s PCs), and a two-gigabit Internet connection (more than 2,000 times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection). If current trends continue, simple arithmetic predicts that in 20 years the same purchasing power will buy the processing capability of 10 million of today’s workstations, 200 exabytes (200 million gigabytes) of storage capacity, and 200 exabits (200 million megabits) of bandwidth. Another way of saying this is that by 2023 large organizations will be able to devote the equivalent of a contemporary PC to monitoring every single one of the 330 million people who will then be living in the United States."
"Surveillance Nation" Bottom line? We will get the type of society that we allow ourselves to create. We have been warned...
Speed Demon.
A typical home cable broadband connection might allow you to download data at about 1 million bits/second. That’s dramatically faster than a dial-up modem's (theoretical) 56,000 bits/second connection. That speed difference, plus the fact that the cable connection or a DSL connection is (supposed to be) "always on," can easily change how you sip at the Internet's information straw. For example, it's been many years since I've reached for a paper phone book, a printed TV listing, or virtually any published information. A scattering of PCs plus a wireless broadband connection to each of them makes the online versions easier and faster and more flexible than searching for and consulting a printed tome. A cable (or DSL) connection is also fast enough, compared to the amount of data that I usually display or download, that I no longer have to plan modem-based downloads in the wee hours (and then hoping that something doesn't cause the phone to glitch and abort the exercise, leaving it to be re-done the next night.) For the relatively modest amounts of data that I typically download, this works fine for me, today. (It's that "relatively modest" amount of data, compared to the size of the cable's pipe, that is a key ingredient to my satisfaction -- if I were trying to move multi-gigabyte databases, or raw Digital Video (DV) files, or today's petabyte-sized research databases, a cable connection would still appear as slow (or slower) FOR THOSE NEEDS than my once dial-up modem).
But Some Do. Some people DO, of course, need to move such massive data sets. Consider, for example, the move towards digital projectors in movie theaters. Many film distributors are looking forward to the day when theaters can simply download the movies they show, saving the distributors millions of dollars each year by not printing film masters, and by not keeping their atoms moving between theaters (FedEx, etc.) This shift to digital delivery confers another benefit to the movie-goer -- the promise of excellent quality, including the death of the dirt and scratches that, today, sometimes mar a film's beauty. The problem is that over today's Internet, sending such a (heavily encrypted, of course) movie at its best quality would take far too long. Which is why, as pointed out by reader Raoul Teeuwen and the March 6 BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2822333.stm), that 200 universities and other interested parties are testing "Internet2," a VERY high-speed testbed for exploring technologies that will likely, eventually, speed-up the Internet that we all know and love today (http://www.internet2.org/). "How 'high-speed'?" you might be asking? On March 6, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) demonstrated an end-user data rate of 923 megabits/second, compared to cable's nominal 1 megabit/second, by sending 6.7 gigabytes (6,700 megabytes, or 53,000 megaBITS) between California and Amsterdam, Holland, in -- 58 seconds. Rather faster than I could hope to download it over my cable. (Additional insights into this event are at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/20030207/ .)
It's Not Impossible. This isn't an impossible future expectation, by the way. My cable company has just cut me over to their new fiber network (my coax now only reaches about 200 feet before its signals turn into light, which "should" (emphasis on that 'should') be giving me excellent TV and noise-free Internet data, although that has yet to occur. But they're scheduled to come out today -- we'll see...) My connection could have been much faster had they completely removed the coax cable from the equation, but for economic reasons they (like many/most cable companies) didn't upgrade the system to "fiber-to-the-curb," which could mean very high symmetrical bandwidth to everyone. But there are other political and entrepreneurial efforts afoot to make fiber-to-the-curb a reality (one company is offering free feasibility studies in some areas for metropolitan fiber-to-the-curb networks; they would be owned by the city/town who would rent capacity on it to any ISP or other content deliverer, such as current cable TV systems, phone companies, etc.) Such pervasive high-speed access to the Internet (and more) would open possibilities for a vast new array of information services for homes and businesses. That conversion to fiber-to-the-curb might end up being as dramatic as the switch from dial-up to 'always on' connections. Today's fiber-to-the-curb could certainly be a bandwidth bonanza -- at least until our expectations, and Internet traffic, catches up. But even this would not be a long-term panacea.
And It Might, Again, Be Necessary! Consider that a 9600-baud modem
worked GREAT for instantly filling a VT-100's
(character-based terminal) screen with 1,920
characters of text almost instantaneously. "Why
then," people asked at the time, "would we ever need
anything faster?" The answer is because we 'changed
the rules' with the introduction of graphic
displays. Suddenly, those great 9600-baud modems
were, again, a huge bottleneck. And the day may
come when today's fiber, because of future content
advances (real-time holography - see
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/032603/ That kind of 'changing the rules' will certainly continue. We ALWAYS find new ideas and applications that push the edges of what we can do here-and-now. And then we've ALWAYS found ways around or through each resulting new 'bottleneck-of-the-moment.' I suspect that we always will. How will you (and your competitors) react to the next changes? Don't Blink!
Of Fiber and Spider Silk...
Speaking of bandwidth and fiber, those tiny glass "wires" have been instrumental in providing the vast amount of bandwidth that’s available between (and sometimes within) cities and continents (see http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/fiber-optic.htm/printable for an explanation of how conventional fiber is made).
Fiber is so relatively inexpensive compared to wire-based solutions, that when firms pay to bury the fiber strands they need for a given application, they almost always bury many extra fibers at the same time (the burying process is far more expensive than the fiber being buried.) In fact, most of the fiber buried in the world today is "dark" with no laser light barreling down its length; those dark fibers are just waiting for new bandwidth needs to justify lighting them up. One thing about fiber is that the diameter of its core determines the wavelength of light that it can best carry; typical fibers used for data communications have diameters of 9 microns (that's 9,000 nanometers, for single-mode fiber) or 62.5 microns (that's 62,500 nanometers, for multi-mode fiber.) For some new applications such as moving data between the elements of new nanoscale devices, these traditional fibers are far too large (consider that if we're building things at the tens of nanometers (or smaller) scale, a traditional fiber may be 9,000-times (or more) larger! Far too large. But for some nanoscale applications, it turns out that another type of fiber -- 2 nanometers in diameter and hollow (no glass core), with its internal surface mirrored -- could fit the nano-datacomm bill. The problem is that conventional fiber production can only yield hollow fibers as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. So how to get smaller?
Breaking The Barriers Of The Tiny. Yushan Yan and his team at the University of California at Riverside peered far "outside the box" and came up with a fascinating, and relatively simple way to entice Nature into doing our bidding. According to the March 3 NewScientist.com (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993522), the scientists took lengths of spider silk from a particular Madagascar orb-spinning spider and, similar to dipping a candle in molten wax to build up its diameter, they repeatedly dipped the silk strands into a special brew that built-up a glassy coating around the silk. Once this glassy tube was dry, they baked it at 420 degrees C which burned away the silk at its center. Voila -- a perfect hollow glassy fiber only 1,000 nanometers in diameter. 1,000 nanometers is impressively small, but it's still too large. So now that the technique has been validated, their next step is to use the far-thinner silk of a different spider, which they expect will yield hollow glassy fibers only 2 nanometers in diameter -- just right for the nanoscale devices that we're beginning to build today. Additionally, because these hollow fibers are about the diameter of single molecules, they offer new opportunities for exploiting the "supramolecular chemistry" that affects matter when it's confined into very tight places. Such thin fibers may also advance the field of microscopy, allowing near-field microscopes to see ever-smaller optical images of living things. (If you're interested in a more
in-depth exploration of spider silk and optical
fiber, check out
http://www.rsc.org/CFmuscat/intermediate_abstract.cfm?FURL
Manufacturing Woes. Yet what happens if this process does become commercially desirable? Unraveling silk from spider webs day after day, week after week, is not a job that most people would find challenging. Not to mention that it might upset the spiders, some of who ingest their webs after use so that the silk can be reused for future webs. And spiders are notoriously hard to "farm." But do you recall that last
year, scientists succeeded in inserting spider genes
into 150 goats who then produced spider-like silk ("BioSteel")
in their milk? Although just a preliminary working
demonstration of the concept, the process has lots
of room to evolve. (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/ These are great examples of "NBIC Convergence" (the coming together of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences), which promises to change far more about how we work, live, and play, in much the same way (only more-so), than did the original "Convergence" of Computing, Communications, Content, and Consumer Electronics. Put another way, these are early examples of our learning to make use of 400-million years of experimentation that Nature has already done for us, at ever-smaller levels. We're now dealing with things at Nature's nanoscale, and we have a LOT to learn. The good news is that Nature remains a willing teacher, and we are, clearly, good students. So again, Don't Blink!
Begin Self-Serving Advertisement There's MORE I Can Do For You!
You may not realize it, but there's much more to The Harrow Group than just "The Harrow Technology Report." For almost twenty years, as I've been sharing my research on the ever-faster-moving and converging technologies that are changing how we work, live, and play, I've also been working directly with businesses and organizations, large and small, to help them understand and address how these changes may affect them, their customers, and their customers' businesses, through a series of:
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Highly engaging, interactive, multimedia,
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Workshops
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discussed in The Harrow Technology Report,
and related issues. Please continue here for additional information. Then, contact me at Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com with any additional questions, to discuss fees, and to schedule a consulting event. I look forward to working with you! End Self-Serving Advertisement Portable Power, Revisited.
In the last issue
(http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ "What we know is that usage time (what consumers really care about) depends on the interplay of power demanded and power supplied. Power demanded depends on the features of the devices as well as the energy efficiency of the components. Power supply depends primarily on the energy density (assuming batteries) and the size of the device. (It's easy to make a battery that lasts longer, just make it bigger...but carrying a car battery to power our laptops kinda defeats the purpose.) Here are a few conclusions of our work that you and your readers may find interesting: * Energy density of batteries isn't likely to improve more than a few percent a year for the foreseeable future... No Moore's law is going to help us here. * Energy consumption of components has fallen rapidly and will continue to fall for the foreseeable future. However, we're talking about linear rather than exponential improvements. * Some portable electronics have become mature in terms of their basic feature set (e.g. laptops), while others are still adding features which increase their power demand significantly (e.g. PDAs and cell phones.) * Despite dire predictions by some, growth in laptop power demand has slowed significantly. Our models suggest that laptop power demand will even begin to decline gradually in the near future. The interplay of decreased power demand and marginally improving power supply suggests that usage times for laptops will more than likely double over the next 5 years. * PDAs are going through a period of increasing power demand due to new feature additions (color, brighter and larger screens, wireless-enabled). However, improvements in energy efficiency and battery energy density are expected to provide users with reasonable usage times in the near future. The exception to this is for wireless-enabled PDAs which will have very low usage times for quite a while.
* Usage times for 1 and 2G cell phones will
continue to improve, but 2.5 and 3G phones are not
likely to achieve "reasonable" usage times (2 hours
of use time) for quite a while yet -- 2007 according
to our model. Overall, for most of our portable devices, "acceptable" usage times are definitely coming. For the more power intensive applications, it will likely take some time. On the power supply side, there are some battery alternatives which may be on the horizon (fuel cells, super-capacitors, nuclear isotope "batteries", ATP, etc...). Fuel cells are the nearest possible solution, and a number of name-recognized consumer electronics companies could bring them to market in the next few years, if they choose. There seems to be some hesitation however, because of a lack of certainty about what is the right business model, and whether consumers are willing to make the changes in their behavior that the new technology requires." It's always good to hear directly from the experts. Thanks Ralph!
Who'd Have Imagined?
Finally, my son has recently gotten into vinyl records, salvaging an old turntable and digging up our record stash from decades ago. He says that the sound "has character," compared to CDs' vastly greater, and consistent, audio fidelity. Me? When I listen to vinyl records I just hear clicks, pops, and what I regard as tinny and muffled, Low-Fi sound. (Of course once, vinyl records sounded wonderful to me -- how quickly we get spoiled!) But aside from my lack of appreciation for vinyl's "character," others certainly do appreciate it; ELP Corporation has been selling non-contact laser turntables for thirteen years, and continues to improve them. (http://www.elpj.com/main.html)
I wasn't really surprised to find that a laser could read the dimensional changes as it scanned along the record groove, converting the resulting signal to audio (which they say is of far better quality than that produced with a needle). But at prices ranging from $9,500 to $13,300 you really do have to value the sound (or be in the business of reading old records in the best manner possible to archive their content in digital format - http://www.elpj.com/purchase.html). But what DID surprise me was the innovative way that Ofer Springer managed this same non-contact feat, as pointed out in the March 27 issue of the LangaList (http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-03-27.htm#10) -- he simply scanned the record on his flatbed scanner! Of course there was nothing "simple" about it. Because of the size of the record vs. that of the scanner, he had to scan each record four times (to get all four pie-wedges as he rotated the record), after which he stitched the images together into one full image of the record. Then, in Ofer's words (http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/), "Once the image was ready, writing the decoder was very simple. All it did was rotate a [virtual] "needle" around a given center at some predefined angular velocity, attempting to keep track of the groove the needle was initially positioned on. The offsets (dr) between this track and the basic radial were bunched into a sequence of samples; these were later converted into wav files." (I love the fact that he considers this "simple.") And it really works! Check out this sample of the music he recovered from his optical scan of a record - http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/sounds/b1.mp3 . (He offers more examples, as well as an interesting discussion of how and why he pursued this, at http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ .) As you'll note, the quality is far from perfect; even far from what an original record player would produce (then again, this was a home project with early code; it could probably be optimized, and he makes his source code available if you wish to do so!) But it isn't amazing how well a pig sings -- it's that the pig sings at all! To me, this is another example of Innovation, and of how some people just refuse to "follow the rules." I hope that many of us continue to be intellectually challenged by the improbable, by our curiosity, or simply because we "have a little time to waste." Remember, not all the world-changing discoveries come from huge university and corporate labs! Once again, Don't Blink!
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