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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Just A Matter Of Scale.
Listen to this
Issue.
Quote of the Week.
Forecasting The
Future Is Tricky Business.
Storage Update.
DVD, Times-2.
Why Not?
Just A Matter Of
Scale.
All Those CPU Cycles
-- Yum! Schedule Update.
The next issue of "The Harrow Technology Report" will publish on Feb. 23, 2004.
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, M-P-3 version. If you have an M-P-3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), 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 use the right-hand mouse button on the link, and choose "Save Target As..." Also, find out how you can listen at whatever speed is most comfortable for you through the FAQ at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/help.htm . Here's where to listen to this week's issue! http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20040126/20040126.mp3
Quote of the Week.
"Perhaps the easiest way to envision the inner workings of a nanofactory is to picture a large city, with all the streets laid out on a grid. Imagine that in this city everyone works together to build gigantic products - ocean liners, for instance. To build something that big, you have to start with small parts and put them together. In this imaginary city, all the workers stand along the streets and pass the parts along to each other. The smallest parts are assembled on the narrowest side streets, and then handed up to the end of the block. Other small parts from other side streets are joined together to make medium-sized parts, which are joined together to make large parts. At the end, the largest parts converge in one place, where they are joined together to make the finished product. A nanofactory performs in this way, with multiple assembly lines operating simultaneously, and steadily feeding into each other."
Excerpt from "Molecular Nanotechnology Fully
Loaded With Benefits and Risks"
Forecasting The Future Is Tricky Business.
Actually, I'd only be surprised if you DIDN'T believe that, since as a reader of The Harrow Technology Report you're all too aware of how quickly exponential technology growth 'changes all the rules.' So it's always valuable to get a fresh perspective on just HOW silly it would be to attempt to forecast our society 100 years from now. Or, to a lesser extent, how forecasts of even five or ten years into the future must be taken with a large grain of salt, and with constant monitoring and reevaluation. Thanks to the insightful eye of reader Avi Burstein, we now find that medical doctor and popular novelist Michael Crichton has weighed-in on just this subject during a Caltech lecture in January -- "Aliens Cause Global Warming" (http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html) . In part, Crichton opines: "Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the [horse droppings]? Horse pollution was BAD in 1900; think how much worse it would be a century later with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% of its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, Prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you were talking about. Now -- you tell me [that] you can predict the world of 2100? Tell me [if] it's even worth thinking about! [Because] our models just carry our present into the future. They're BOUND to be wrong! Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it." Not to mention that the changes that we'll see during this century will be FAR more dramatic than those of the last century. (Crichton's entire speech is well worth reading - http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html .) Of course it is imperative for the shorter term, say for a five to ten year rolling window, that we do our absolute best to keep ourselves abreast of the many changes to come. Because as imperfect as our foresight may be, it's MUCH better to have the knowledge, and be in a position to integrate all the possibilities, BEFORE someone else -- say, your competitors -- do so. Remember the story about the 1900 company that made the absolutely best, most cost effective buggy whips...? Don't Blink!
Storage Update.
It's a disk drive.
It's sitting next to a Japanese 500 yen coin (essentially the size of a U.S. quarter.)
The platter is 0.85 inches in diameter. It holds as much as 3 gigabytes. And it's due out in 2005 from Toshiba, according to the Jan. 6 Mike's List (http://www.mikeslist.com/75.htm). Enough said about near-term storage? (And this is just EVOLUTIONARY storage, not to mention the various untraditional (molecular, atomic, etc.) storage potentials that we explore which are now in the labs...)
DVD, Times-2.
Speaking of "storage," there's
more. Have you joined the writeable DVD revolution
yet? You know - these "super CDs" that allow you to
record, not a mere 700 megabytes of data on a disk,
but 4,700 megabytes (4.7 gigabytes)? I know -- that seems absurd, but given the realities of some databases, and the volume of music and video that many people now store on their computers (and wish to back up), it's amazing just how fast the DVD's 6.7-times increased space, compared to a CD, fills up. Well, consumer DVDs are about to get twice as big!
First, A Look At TODAY'S DVDs.
Yet even a dual-layer DVD still only provides half the capacity of what a DVD can hold. The "other" 8.5 gigabytes of a completely full DVD reside in two MORE layers on the OTHER side of the DVD. But with most players (which only read from one side of the disk), you do have to turn the disk over to access the second 8.5 gigabytes on the flip side... Nevertheless, that's a LOT of data on one disk.
We're Getting There.
But Confusion Will Still Reign. This won't be without
confusion, though, since the two DVD standards
"camps," DVD+ and DVD-" (see
http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20011022/20011022.htm#dvd-abc)
each have their own (incompatible) ideas of how to
do this (sigh). But take heart -- a growing number
of DVD players and writers (such as the Sony
DRU-510A that I currently use) have the ability to
read and write both the "+" and "-" formats, which I
anticipate will continue into the dual-layer
writeable DVD world. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/
Begin Self-Serving Advertisement There's MUCH 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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engaging, interactive, multimedia,
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likely to lead us tomorrow.
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Beginning with the presentation described above (to
give all participants a common understanding and
insight), the workshop further engages attendees to
explore how this march of technology might affect
their individual businesses and organizations, and
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Individualized consulting services, available via
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and trends discussed in The Harrow Technology
Report, and related issues. Please continue at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/consulting2.htm 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 Why Not?
During our last discussion
(http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ "OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers. Any computer can join the infrastructure, contributing storage or providing local user access in exchange for economic compensation. Users need only subscribe to a single OceanStore service provider, although they may consume storage and bandwidth from many different providers. The providers automatically buy and sell capacity and coverage among themselves, transparently to the users. The utility model thus combines the resources from federated systems to provide a quality of service higher than that achievable by any single company. OceanStore caches data promiscuously; any server may create a local replica of any data object. These local replicas provide faster access and robustness to network partitions. They also reduce network congestion by localizing access traffic. We must assume that any server in the infrastructure may crash, leak information, or become compromised. Promiscuous caching therefore requires redundancy and cryptographic techniques to protect the data from the servers upon which it resides." There's more detail at that site. This project, to me, is an excellent indication of how Internet-as-we-know-it is surely destined for its own form of evolution. Don't assume that things won't change -- because they certainly will, based on projects like this one, or on others we haven't yet considered. The bottom line, yet again, is: Don't Blink!
Just A Matter Of Scale.
Moore's Law (that the number of transistors on a chip will double every eighteen months at the same price) is the culprit behind the exponential growth of the computer-related technology that has dramatically altered how we work, live, and play over the past 35+ years. MIPS - Millions of Instructions Per Second
(Click above for a larger image.
COMMODITY COMPUTING POWER HAS
increased This massive, rapid, compounding growth of computing power provides, perhaps for the first time in history, the opportunity for average people to detect, observe, and participate in the results of exponential growth. But of course, even though it's hard for us humans to perceive and appreciate even ONE exponential effect, Nature is FULL of exponential things, such as distance. For example, the diameter of the Earth is 12.76E+6 meters wide (12.76 times ten to the plus-six power), while a common plant cell is 12.76E-6 meters wide (12.76 times 10 to the minus-six power), or 12 orders of magnitude (powers of ten) smaller. And that comparison is right under our noses. But how far does this go? Is there any way for us to more viscerally perceive the concept of even greater exponential distances?? Several decades ago I ran across a movie called "The Powers of Ten" which, to this day, I remember as an entertaining and mind-expanding insight into what "exponential" really means. Although the movie itself (with its excellent soundtrack/narration) is not available online to my knowledge (it is still for sale), reader Carl Taylor points us to a very good, if silent, rendition of the concept at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html . (But do still see the film if you get the opportunity.) As explained by the site: "View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons." Indeed, you'll travel not the "mere" 12 orders of magnitude from the diameter of the Earth to the diameter of a plant cell, but you'll travel, in steps of one power of ten, from a view of 10E+23 meters, where you're sitting 10 million light years outside our Milky Way galaxy looking towards the completely invisible Earth, straight towards the quarks within a single proton inside a leaf of that oak tree in Florida, at a view of 10E-16 meters, or 100 attometers (a new word for most of us) -- while gazing at everything in-between along the journey.
Mighty Similar. Hummm... Keep an eye on the changing description just above the changing picture, as well as on the distance figures just below the picture. And as you make this journey, note the startling similarity in the pattern of vast empty space leading to dense concentrations of matter, again and again, as you travel from the astronomic to the worlds (er, I mean quarks) within individual protons. Given the similarity you'll see between the patterns and structures that we usually think of as astronomic, to those in the tiniest microscopic, who's to say what we may eventually find as we learn to see farther "out" astronomically, and farther "in" microscopically? (Both of which we're learning how to do better every year). Might our "world" be the equivalent of a quark in some vastly large proton that is part of the cell at the tip of an intelligent inconceivably-giant dog's ear who only yesterday wondered to a friend if they were the only intelligent life in the universe? It might all be -- just a matter of "scale." Food for thought...
All Those CPU Cycles -- Yum!
Finally, in a recent issue
(http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ This issue, reader Michael Pettengill comments on this as he helps us to explore how we may well consume all these new processor cycles, yet in a rather different direction: "The Innovator's Dilemma [by Clayton M. Christensen (http://www.aaabooksearch.com/Book/0060521996.html)] is that inferior technologies sold with lower margins displace established products by creating new markets that are able to grow rapidly enough that new players are able to enter the market, refine the technology, and eventually surpass the superior technology. Faster processors of the same type merely extend the line of existing products. That's pure line extension. Maybe competition lowers prices expanding the market for the existing technology, but that's not disruptive. "What's lacking is the capability to take advantage of the processing power available in any reasonable way." Wrong! What's missing is a use for the processing power available. Here's how faster CPUs could be part of a disruptive technology: Someone writes some software that spins plots in realtime and creates the visuals. You package the CPU, a video generator, a heads-up display, and the software in a little box, and sell it as The SoapOperaBox. Now you download a bit of data, images of the characters, voice dynamics, world parameters, plot rules, and then customize the parameters to your taste: sexy, erotic, chaste, violent, etc., and off you go. You get to watch your own custom Soap when and as much as you want. You could trade the parameters you set with your friends so that all of you would watch the same basic show and discuss it. If you thought that a character should react differently, you could agree to tweak the parameters, say making Sally more assertive instead of a passive door mat. Soap operas would be just the FIRST application. As the technology got better, it could be used for more complex TV shows, but they would become less and less like TV shows. They would become like D&D, but without the hassle of socializing. You signup with a Dungeon Master to get the game parameters, etc. Eventually they could replace movies in theaters and on TV and on DVDs... Note that doing the same thing in a central place and then beaming it over the net would make no sense. While the soaps are shot with simple sets and relatively cheap actors, the majority of the cost comes in the distribution. Still, any sacrifice in quality would be annoying and you're still tied to the net and the net's schedule. If sold through video on demand, I suspect that a lot of people would consider it too expensive. Besides, using a central computer would only require that one CPU be bought. Buying a thousand CPUs, or networking together a thousand distributed CPUs would also make no sense, but would only improve the quality of an artificial soap while not providing any real advantage to the soap addict... So this is hardly a new application that would disrupt one or more existing markets while creating a new (relatively speaking) volume market. On the other hand, game computers like the PS2 or X-Box, when networked together and running Linux, ARE potentially disruptive. The reason that this would be disruptive while blades aren't ["blades" are plug-in single-board PCs designed to populate a "rack" for very physically-dense computing power], is that the game computer hardware price has a very low margin, with Sony depending on extremely high volume and complementary product sales for the real profit. If companies like HP see the virtue in pricing blades at $100 each, then the PS2 isn't disruptive. Similarly, special purpose CPUs and disk drives are disruptive to VCRs. First, DVDs changed the market for pre-recorded tapes. Initially the selection was inferior and the player more expensive than VCRs, but now the marketing of DVDs and players has created a whole new market for movies. But that didn't disrupt VCRs for time shifting -- that is now being done by the PVR [Personal Video Recorder, such as Tivo or ReplayTV]. Yet even that won't kill off the VCR until the PVR is driven down in price and stripped of functionality so that it can truly replace the VCR." Michael's comments certainly steer us in some interesting directions... In a similar vein regarding growing processor performance, reader Grieg Pendersen reminds us that there's more to overall "computing capability" then just the speed of the processor: "I've never seen [the tongue-in-cheek] "Gates' Law" ["The speed of software halves every 18 months."], but I have had one distinct understanding from Moore's Law: if processor speed doubles every 18 months and accessible memory size doubles every 16 months (it was 2 years and 18 months, respectively, when I realized this), then processor response time is SLOWING exponentially, proving the need for multiple processors, specialty processors and improved algorithms. Add to this the fact that memory speed is not keeping pace with processor speed and you have a real problem. One need only work with image processing software like Photoshop or The GIMP to see how long response times can be." Interesting things, and concerns, to keep in mind...
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 . Where To Find "The Harrow Technology Report:"
Copyright (c) 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All
rights reserved.
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