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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Renaissance
Minds. Listen
to this Issue.
Quote of the Week.
Not In MY
Backyard!
Back To The Days
Of (Relative) Storage Scarcity!
There's MUCH More
I Can Do For You!
"Print" Your Next House?
Evening The
Odds... 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!
www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
Quote of the Week.
"Wisdom doesn't come from memorizing facts and figures, but rather from how those facts come together and relate to each other. And the only way to gain this kind of worldly wisdom is to take your life experiences and apply them across a latticework of mental models. You have to ignore ... 'intellectual jurisdictional boundaries'. ...I created an analogy for nanotechnology that captures this ethos. Consider the story of the Tower of Babel: people building towards a common goal, up towards the sky constrained by their differing languages. In nanotechnology you can see an upside-down Tower of Babel: leagues of scientists building towards a common goal, not up to the sky--but down to the molecular level, and they speak different scientific languages (material scientists speaking with biologists and electrical engineers talking with chemists). It is this thread of nanotechnology, which runs through the jurisdictional boundaries of differing disciplines, that ensures exciting research to come for years."
by Josh Wolfe,
This quote, in my opinion, further emphasizes the necessity for cross-boundary, or 'cross-historical-jurisdictions' education. This is an imperative as we educate ourselves, but also for our society as a whole, since "beyond the pale" thinking is what will move us forward into the "new convergence" of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences. The "NBIC" that is poised to change EVERYTHING about how we work, live, and play. And potentially, even changing the global balance of power. Neither education nor industry should force inquiring minds into narrower and tighter tunnels as they mature through both school and into the workplace; instead they should help those minds to diversify -- to break down historically separate scientific fields and cultures so that we can all make the most of these newly-synergistic NBIC fields. Such "Renaissance minds" will surely yield incalculable benefits to individuals, to companies, and to entire societies. Educational "Towers of Babel," neither historically nor today, serve any of us well...
Not In MY Backyard!
I have good news and bad news.
The Good. The good is that if your ire has ever been raised by a cell phone ringing while you're engrossed in a movie, a play, a concert, or some similar event, then you may want to attend such events in France. As described in Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51273,00.html), it seems that 85% of the French support the use of cell phone jammers at such events in order to curb the distractions -- and their Interior Minister has made the use of jammers legal! (In the U.S., it's generally illegal to jam any public radio spectrum or service.) By the way, the French may be doing their citizens a service, since it turns out that some people don't take such cell phone distraction lying down -- one man was beaten to death in a German beer garden when he refused to mute his phone! There are certainly other arenas that could benefit from being able to jam cell phones. For example, some educators in Ireland would like to use this technology in schools to keep students focused on their studies, rather than on planning tonight's party. Not to mention keeping students from techno-cheating (http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/005415.htm). Also businesses that have locker rooms, such as gyms, where their bans on picture phones are not always followed...
The Bad. The bad news is that while reducing interruptions in certain places seems a like laudable goal, the idea of jamming cell phone communications has some very negative and dangerous implications. The first, perhaps most obvious, is that cell phones have become many peoples' lifeline to emergency services. Just imagine if a fire broke out at a jammed public event, and nobody could report it to the authorities. Or if a family tried to contact their student in school due to a family emergency, only to find that the student couldn't receive the message. Or if someone was being accosted or he/she witnessed another crime and was unable to call for help. (Remember that radio waves generally don't follow "boundary instructions," often leaking beyond their intended area.)
And The Ugly. Yes, rude people who choose not to strangle their cell phones (or at least put them on "vibrate") in certain venues are public nuisances and should be treated as such (disorderly conduct, or some similar charge). Or, like that now-dead German, those without cell phone etiquette may find themselves at the center of an ugly mob scene of people who "just won't take it anymore." But rather than jamming everyone's phone, how about a strong campaign to firmly establish the new social norms that cell phones demand? (Without help, societal norms change far more slowly than the technologies that cause such problems.) Or for some applications (such as schools), a local ordinance that prohibits outgoing cell phone calls, along with a receive-only device that would flag outgoing calls made from within the school, could pass the identifying information on to the administrators or police for further action. (Although this might well run afoul of various U.S. radio privacy laws.) These are just a few examples of the issues and types of solutions that might be considered to address cell phone abuse, both now and in the future. But I believe that the most important thing we can learn from today's issues is that technology will continue to dramatically affect how people interact with one another. As with virtually every advance throughout history (consider the changes that had to take place after the introduction of stone knives, pistols, bombs, etc.), we have to learn to define and accept the needed changes, and integrate them into society. Given the exponential growth of technology, and the accelerating RATE of such growth(!), let's be sure that we pay as much attention to the societal impacts of the technologies we unleash, as we do to the technologies themselves. It will certainly make for quieter movies...
Back To The Days Of (Relative) Storage Scarcity!This is an article I've recently written for Future Brief (http://www.futurebrief.com/). Future Brief is published by New Global Initiatives (http://www.ngiweb.com/) and offers brief summaries, commentaries, and other resources to help people, especially those on The Hill who form national policy, to keep up on technological innovations. But Future Brief adds an important twist -- it "takes one step back and looks at the greater convergence of the accelerating changes in science and technology, with the equally rapidly accelerating changes in society and politics." (http://www.futurebrief.com/about.asp)
It's easy to take disk space for granted. These days commodity storage is capacious and inexpensive, and it gets more-so every day -- storage's rate of growth even outpaces the vaunted Moore's Law! Given disk drives' dramatically accelerating rate of price/performance improvement, it's no surprise that they have generated an entirely new class of product that is dramatically changing our established, decades-old television entertainment (and advertising) model. As such, this is an interesting example of how extremely rapid technological improvements will continue to change all the rules!
Who Needs More Disk Space? If you remember 5 MEGAbyte
commercial disk drives (which were magic in the
early 80s!), you surely marvel at today's common
160,000 MEGAbyte (160 GIGAbyte) commodity drives,
not to mention the high-end 300 and higher gigabyte
models. But even these massive drives can now seem
pretty small, considering that 400 gigabyte drives
have been on the market since March. their currently-available "Deskstar 7K400" packs almost half a terabyte of capacity with respectable performance for about $400. But now THAT'S small! Just weeks later, LaCie announced a 1-TERAbyte (1,000 GIGAbytes) external disk drive solution for $1,199 (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118)! That's about two years of continuous music, or one month of MPEG-2 video!! Incredible. Yet aside from large businesses or governments, or for specialized tasks such as video editing, who NEEDS such storage behemoths?
The Days Of (Relative) Storage Scarcity. During the '80s and early '90s it was the "computer industry" that drove storage developments. The all-too-often-true "joke" was that each time Microsoft came out with a new operating system or version of Office, it was necessary to upgrade the disk storage to accommodate it. For the past several years though, that's become a non-issue as disk drive capacities have finally outstripped the size of even Microsoft's applications. :-) Now though, it appears
increasingly likely that it will be the CONSUMER
ELECTRONICS industry that will drive our
ever-larger storage needs. As an example of this "convergence," consider how one single development -- the advent of Personal Video Recorders (PVRs, or DVRs) and NOT PCs, will return us to The Days Of (Relative) Storage Scarcity.
Taking Personal Control. Exemplified by TiVo, these hard-disk based entertainment-revolutionizing devices allow us to pause live TV, and to easily time-shift shows to our own schedules. But -- they never seem to have enough storage. The latest TiVo Series2 PVR will record 40 hours of standard TV programming (at the highest quality setting - http://www.tivo.com/1.1.1.10.asp), yet for those who have come to rely on their PVR to put them firmly in control of their TV watching, 40 hours isn't nearly enough. This had led to the availability of "mods," both in do-it-yourself and in kit forms, that allow users to add ever-larger disk drives to boost their PVR capacity (http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-644.html#lnk3). Surely, then, if we could add a
terabyte disk drive to our PVR so that we could
record around 800 hours of highest-quality standard
TV, that would surely satisfy even the hungriest PVR
user. Right? Wrong! The rub is that technology marches on, in this case in the guise of HDTV, where even a one-terabyte monster disk drive will store only 120 hours of HDTV's 6.6-times more data-intensive programming. (Capacities are extrapolated from the specs for the 250-gigabyte DirecTV "HR10-250" HDTV PVR - http://www.weaknees.com/hd_tivo.php) Since contemporary history
teaches us that that many users won't consider this
nearly enough PVR storage, terabyte HDTV PVRs may
feel like "entry level" devices when they hit the
mainstream. And that guarantees a
continuously-growing demand for ever more-serious
consumer storage, for this one application alone.
We've Only Just Begun... Indeed, I suggest that this is a pattern that will continue, over and over, and not just for storage! "Technology" will always get to a point where we "just don't seem to need any more" (does CPU performance come to mind?) Then someone, somewhere, will develop another watershed application that, like HDTV and PVRs have done for storage, makes everything before it "obsolete." I'm going to go out on a limb here and project that in ten years, PVR recording will become as standard, and as built-in, as stereo sound. And because HDTV is SO good (it really is, if you haven't tried it), the demand for ever-larger storage for this application isn't going to abate. Storage demands will also be
accelerated as other developments make it feasible,
and eventually desirable, for us to make 24x7
recordings of everything that transpires around us,
complementing the records that are already kept by
the myriad surveillance cameras that increasingly
litter our environment. (Over time, the gear to
accomplish this will get rather smaller and more
stylish than a prototype shown at
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_961376.html?menu= (Won't that alter the social and legal fabric of our societies! Even if the idea of recording every glance, meeting, and interaction is repugnant to you, once your competitors/customers/neighbors/etc. begin doing this, you may feel that you have no choice but to do so in an escalating war of "information self-defense.") Returning to the PVR issue, let's see - a seemingly reasonable 480 hours of HDTV recording would demand a four-terabyte disk drive. Yet such capacities aren't sci fi at all -- Seagate believes that its Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technique may increase storage density to 1 terabyte per 3.5-inch platter by 2010 (http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040323_201144.html). And since four platters within a disk drive are already commonplace... Will something eventually stop the ever-higher density, and increasing access and data transfer speeds of storage? For many years scientists believed that there was a minimum size to the magnetic "domains" on a disk drive that could hold and read back a one or zero -- it's called the "paramagnetic limit." Yet every time our disk drives approached that "limit," innovative scientists came out with successive ways to drive that "limit" smaller. And the process continues today through techniques such as HAMR that we discussed above. But "limits" move both ways. Now looking at the speed at which magnetic domains can be switched from a one to a zero, scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have just lowered their expectation of a "speed limit" on how fast data can be written to magnetic media -- they now feel that it's about 1,000 times slower (less than 2-picoseconds, or 2 one-trillionths (10-12) of a second), compared to the one-femtosecond, or one-quadrillionth (10-15) of a second that had previously been anticipated (http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/4/10). So does this new "limit" (still far in our disk drives' future) really cap storage performance? As has been proven time and time again, I suspect that creative innovation may well find ways through or around this new "limit" as we approach it -- assuming that we haven’t completely replaced our cumbersome and fragile disk drives with incredibly dense arrays of nano-memory cells, or similar technologies that are being researched and prototyped today.
Massive Technological Improvements Are Disruptive -- Always! The sea-change here is that it's not the traditional "computing" industry that will now drive our storage needs, but it will be our TVs and other entertainment applications -- the Consumer Electronics industry -- that will eventually make our computers, and all the parts and subsystems that go into them, "disappear" into the common devices around us! Which is a good lesson, and good food for thought as we move further into the 21st century. Is your business and industry ready for these and forthcoming changes? Don't Blink!
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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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"Print" Your Next House?
"Stereolithography," although
actually only one technique for "printing" 3D
objects (see
www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20031124/
Although currently only viable for special purposes, the idea of having a "universal desktop printer" holds vast appeal. Imagine how our ability to "print" solid, working objects (complete with semiconductors!) from a "recipe" downloaded from the Internet would change entire economies and GNPs! Most people, when thinking about "3D printing on demand," think of today's relatively small parts. But not Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California, in conjunction with Degussa AG of Dýsseldorf, Germany. According to reader Rich Gautier and NewScientist.com (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994764), Khoshnevis is preparing a "contour crafter" that, in his words, has a goal of: "...being able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day, and without using human hands."
The crafter (the yellow "pipe" in the illustration above) wanders around on a moveable gantry (green) that is similar to the "growing cranes" you might see atop a skyscraper under construction. But this one has been set up over the-house-to-be. As the crafter scoots along under the precise direction of the architect's digital blueprints, it begins "printing" (spraying), layer-by-layer, a concrete, adobe, or other semi-liquid "feed stock" in just the right places to create walls and surfaces, literally "from the ground, up." It then trowels the materials into the precise shapes specified.
Does this remind you of today's smaller-scale stereolithographic techniques? Or of how your inkjet printer (for one layer) works? You're right on-target. In fact, not only would such a device potentially deliver housing at a vastly reduced price (there's almost no human labor involved), but according to architect Greg Lynn, "I believe that aesthetically, there's a great potential to make things that have never been seen before." This idea of "printed buildings" might well sound like sci fi (what doesn't these days?), but Khoshnevis anticipates that his crawler will build its first house in 2005 -- next year. If successful, this is another offshoot of "computer technology" that could well send shockwaves throughout yet another industry. Once again, Don't Blink!
Evening The Odds...
Finally, it seems that a neat high-tech trick may have been responsible for three Eastern Europeans winning $1.8 million at a London Ritz roulette table. According to the march 23, 2004 CNN.com (www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/03/23/ritz.casino.ap/index.html), the police believe that a laser scanner within a cell phone was used to "calculate the speed of the ball on the spinning wheel, and hence its likely resting place." Police are investigating, but apparently it worked. Either that or their luck at the table is far better than mine! But this is only the presage of things to come -- just wait until people routinely receive various "augmentation implants" as NBIC (the convergence of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information science, and Cognitive sciences) make such things feasible, and such augmentation will then quickly become a must-have "competitive advantage." How could you successfully compete with someone, for example, who might be able to think 25% faster than you? Or has been augmented to have a virtually perfect memory? Or has been augmented to be able to see far beyond the typical visual spectrum, or to hear better, and in frequencies both higher and lower than most humans? Will we begin seeing signs such as "No 'Augmenteds allowed", or "Nanotech Free Zone"?
Doubtful. I doubt that such discrimination will be feasible, since many augmentations will be medically necessary. And, as a (probably rapidly) growing segment of the population joins the cyborg generation to gain a competitive advantage in business (and perhaps in society in general as well), then businesses turning away so many customers would affect their bottom lines. I know -- this sounds like the beginnings of Star Trek's "Borg."
But current research and its initially crude prototypes, once married with our developing NBIC capabilities, will make such augmentation (hopefully more aesthetically pleasing than the Borg) almost a surety. Not to mention the desire of businesses to cash in on the cash cow that such augmentation products will generate. And cash flow is a very powerful enabler... Yet one more time, Don't Blink!
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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