A few days ago I described a laptop for "end-of-year 2009."

Closed it's impossibly thin - maybe a quarter inch thick. You open it up and the upper half is entirely screen. The lower half is keyboard and touchpad...

Ten days later it now looks like I was describing the MacBook Air:

This really is a thing of beauty. But to make the device this thin a couple of compromises were made. It has no optical drive. They argue, somewhat convincingly, that you won't miss it. You can get an external drive if you like, but they are pushing the idea that you can use the optical drive of other computers wirelessly.

The other compromise is that there are no built-in stereo speakers. There's a mono speaker. But Apple really envisions you using earbuds or plugging into a stereo.

In a way, this is what I'm already doing with my latest laptop. The stereo quality of my new machine is less than my last because the thinner profile meant smaller speakers. The MacBook Air just takes this compromise to the ultimate end. Why bother with built-in stereo if the quality is bad?

Maybe the next generation MacBook Air will incorporate stereo into the screen with SurfaceSound technology.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got a new laptop a couple of days ago. It's thinner, lighter, and probably 3X the computer that I was using before.

It's better in all ways except one. The built-in stereo speakers are not as good. Like my last laptop, the speakers are mounted on the bottom front. But they had to go with smaller speakers to make a thinner laptop.

It's an understandable compromise. Most consumers - me included - like thinner laptops. And, frankly, I don't expect Bose quality sound out of my laptop speakers. If I want to listen to music or a podcast I plug into my stereo or put on headphones if its at all possible to do so.

Of course I'm not always sitting next to a stereo. The point of a laptop, afterall, is to be mobile. So, imagine the ultimate mobile laptop for, say, end-of-year 2009.

Closed it's impossibly thin - maybe a quarter inch thick. You open it up and the upper half is entirely screen. The lower half is keyboard and touchpad - input/output neatly divided.

It would be considerably thinner than the Toshiba pictured above and the black space around the screen would disappear almost completely. Maybe there would be just a thin black line framing the screen for aesthetic reasons.

That would be a great laptop, but where would you put the speakers?

A failed effort to soften the noise from British military helicopters led to a breakthrough enabling surfaces from mobile telephone screens to car roof liners to be turned into stereo speakers.

The technology was sold to Cambridge-based NXT, which christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more.

The screen could be the speakers! Now, just put the webcam behind the screen too so that we can actually look at the person we are video conferencing with.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Looks like a fun place to spend the day:

I find it interesting that this museum is an actual physical place, not just a a website. They even talk about the distinction between the physical museum and the cyber-museum.

Lots more information here.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night (Friday, October 26^th), at Phil's kind invitation, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Boulder Future Salon's monthly meeting and participating in a lively and far-flung consideration of the month's selected topic: "Moore's Law"

Continue reading "Boulder Future Salon Considers "Moore's Law"" »

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big news from Kurzweil and from Stephen Wolfram's blog:

University of Birmingham Alex Smith has won a $25,000 prize for proving that the simplest possible Turing machine is in fact universal, Stephen Wolfram has announced.

It has only two states and three colors, yet it can do any calculation that the computer with which you're reading this blog entry can do. In fact, it can do any calculation that could be performed by a megacomputer consisting of your machine networked to every other machine on the planet.

Wolfram expounds:

We've come a long way since Alan Turing's original 1936 universal Turing machine--taking four pages of dense notation to describe.

There were some simpler universal Turing machines constructed in the mid-1900s--the record being a 7-state, 4-color machine from 1962.

That record stood for 40 years--until in 2002 I gave a 2,5 universal machine in A New Kind of Science.

We know that no 2,2 machine can be universal. So the simplest possibility is 2,3.

And from searching the 2,985,984 possible 2,3 machines, I found a candidate. Which as of today we know actually is universal.

From our everyday experience with computers, this seems pretty surprising. After all, we're used to computers whose CPUs have been carefully engineered, with millions of gates.

It seems bizarre that we should be able to achieve universal computation with a machine as simple as the one above--that we can find just by doing a little searching in the space of possible machines.

But that's the new intuition that we get from NKS. That in the computational universe, phenomena like universality are actually quite common--even among systems with very simple rules.

So what's the big deal about a two-state, three-color computer? What can you do with it? Well, that's the point. It's a universal machine, so technically you can do anything on it. Anything.

Run Microsoft Excel?

Yep.

Guide nanobots around in your circulatory system?

Sure.

Model an uploaded version of me?

Er, I don't see why not.

Model entire worlds?

Hmmm...

Wow, that's a lot to be able to do with two states and three colors. But assuming that those latter two applications are possible at all, there's no reason why they can't be done with this machine.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The seventh generation of the video game console wars has been rough on Sony's Playstation division. Nintendo's Wii has dominated and the XBox 360 now has a Halo title.

The Playstation 3 is a machine ahead of its time. Sony felt obliged to include components that essentially priced the console out of the reach of the Playstation market. But during development Sony did a remarkable thing that may yet save the Playstation 3. Sony made it an open platform. You can install Linux on it and use it as a general purpose computer.

It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time.

I've written before about how the Playstation 3 - and its components - have been used for research purposes. But what would it cost to replace research supercomputers with Playstations?

[Astrophysicist Dr. Gaurav Khanna once] relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."

However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast...

Khanna says that his [Playstation 3 cluster - "Gravity Grid" - ] has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."

"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."

Neither Khanna nor the National Science Foundation paid for the system. Sony covered the cost... this time.

But let's say a university had to cover the cost for itself. Assume that the Playstations cost $3,200 and setup cost another $5000. That comes to a cost of about $41 per supercomputer node ($8200 / 200 nodes) - to own.

Before the Gravity Grid, Khanna had been renting computer time for $10 a node per run ($5000 / 500 nodes).

So, four runs after buying the cluster a university could break even. In fact, the cluster could become a profit center if they rented time to other universities.

Why isn't the NSF doing this everywhere?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Intel has recently demonstrated a computer chip that is expected to deliver eight-core processing to the market by the second half of next year, but the company is thinking far beyond that.

Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is looking beyond eight-core chips and into the range of terascale computing, in which machines with tens or hundreds of cores perform trillions of operations every second.

The obvious question is: what will we do with those machines? You hardly need that kind of power to run a spreadsheet or blog. Chien foresees a world where computers are everywhere and nowhere. This is an idea that's been around awhile - ubiquitous computing.

Chien: Imagine you have a phone that could be aware of when I get into a line at an airport. There's a difference about what you want to be interrupted with when you're being idle, standing in a line, [versus] when you're going through the security procedure. Imagine if the sensor detects your motion and other information from your environment, such as the Internet signal, and it has knowledge of your past behaviors, so it can actually figure out if it's crucial that the incoming phone call goes through. Is it your five-year-old who's upset, or is it a friend who you talk to all the time? Do you need to take that call right away? The intelligent system could be using sensors, analyzing speech, finding your mood, and determining your physical environment. Then it could decide how that notification came through and how it came through in that context.

Why not strong AI in your pocket? That could be useful for many things beyond call screener.

Auto-drive automobiles (or aircraft) could use powerful, cheap computation. Everything from toys to appliances to power tools would "wake up."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The origin of spam:

In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let people in the technology world know that his company, the Digital Equipment Corporation, was about to introduce a powerful new computer system. DEC operated out of an old wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, and was well known on the East Coast, but Thuerk hoped to reach the technological community in California as well. He decided that the best way to do it was through the network of government and university computers then known as the Arpanet. Only a few thousand people used it regularly, but their names were conveniently printed in a single directory. After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them?

Read further to see how spam continues to evolve. It almost killed this blog a couple of years back. It seems to be highly adaptable, and possessed of a strong will to live.

I doubt we'll be done contending with it any time soon.

(Via GeekPress.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Popular Mechanics has the scoop on Microsoft's update of that desk from Tron:

Still cool...

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Speculist has been following Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop project for awhile now.

I applaud the motivation - to close the digital divide between developing nations and the West. But, as I suggested last December, the free market is overtaking the project.

India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) certainly thinks so. They've turned down Negroponte's offer. Incredibly, because the $100 laptop is too expensive.

NEW DELHI: Having rejected Nicholas Negroponte’s offer of $100 laptops for schoolchildren, HRD ministry’s idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project.

So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labour charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops.

“The cost is encouraging and we are hopeful it would come down to $10.

When the $100 laptop project was first announced I wondered why we couldn't have a $100 laptop in this country too. They would be especially useful as semi-disposable learning tools for kids. But Negroponte's project was organized as a charity for the developing world. The project really didn't have cheap laptops for the US market in mind.

But this latest news makes me think that we'll see super-cheap laptops in this country soon. The Indian government believes they can get the price down from $47 per unit to $10 via economies of scale. Markets outside of India - including in the US - could help provide the scale.

Prediction: a $10 laptop-for-kids with the purchase of a Happy Meal.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We talk about nanofactories, but first the world will be changed by Fab Labs. One day we'll have nanobots, but on our way to that goal we'll have "speckled computing."

SCOTTISH scientists have developed a computer the size of a matchstick head, thousands of which can be sprayed onto patients to give a comprehensive analysis of their condition.

Speckled computing - some of the most advanced computing technology in the world - is currently being researched and developed by a group of Scottish experts.

The individual appliances, or 'specks', will form networks that can be programmed like ordinary computers.
Spraying them directly onto a person creates the ability to carry out different tests at the same time, for example muscle movement and pulse rate. This allows a complete picture of the patient's condition to be built up quickly.

The computing innovation, being developed by scientists at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Strathclyde universities, will be displayed at the Edinburgh International Science Festival next Friday as part of a talk by Damal Arvind, leading speckled computing professor and director of the Scottish consortium.

Arvind said: "This is the new class of computing: devices which can sense and process the data they receive. They also have a radio so they can network and there's a battery in there as well, so they are entirely self-powered.

Wife: "It's a hair spray."

Husband: "No, it's a web-enabled neural interface!"

Spokesman: "Calm down you two, it's both!"

This is one way that computing could begin to disappear into…everything.

UPDATE: In the comments Phil asks, "What happens when you're done with them...do they just wash off?"

I would guess that now at the dawn of "speckled computing" that researchers will attempt to gather these little matchhead-sized computers back up for use later.

But as these devices enter mass production and get smaller and cheaper... yeah, you'd wear them for the day and lose them the next time you shower.

You'd get a new batch in your hair spray or deodorant.

The cool thing is the promise of what these devices (even though they are less than nanobots or utility fog) could do. Instant communications via cell and Internet access. Virtual reality or enhanced reality. Health monitoring. The list goes on.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over on L2si.

It comes in a very familiar and ergonomic shape.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:16 AM | Permalink

Popular Mechanics has published an interesting year-end article entitled "10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007."

Two of the "concepts" look like they'd work particularly well together:

Data Cloud. It was the last concept listed in the article, but I think it may be the most important:

Ferrying data from one hard drive to another via e-mail, flash memory thumb drives or rewritable discs is no way to live. What if every one of your files, from skimpy documents to gigabyte-hogging music collections, were accessible from any Internet connection.

Blogs and browser-based email is just the first wave of Data Cloud technology. Phil and I tried the online word processor Writely last year before it was bought out by Google. The idea is sound, but Google will need to improve the service.

And Google will. It seems obvious that Google intends to be a major contender in the Data Cloud race:

A host of products and services let you create a data cloud right now, from Maxtor’s networked hard drives to Google’s rumored Gdrive, with “unlimited” storage on the search giant’s servers.

The biggest hurdle for Data Cloud adoption is security. As an attorney it would be nice to access my client's files at any time from any machine. But my clients have an interest in their private information remaining private. Another "concept" in the Popular Mechanic's article may help with Data Cloud security:

Body Area Network

Picture this: The cell phone in your pocket sends a tiny electrical current—a fraction of an amp—along your skin, so your car door springs open at your touch and your PC logs in when you grab the mouse.

That tiny electrical current could deliver a 1000-character password to your electronic devices. Of course the cell itself must know that it's in the hands of its owner and not an imposter - perhaps by way of a fingerprint scanner.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The low end of the computer market excites me as much as the high end. Sure $3,000 will buy a fantastic machine. But the guy with $3,000 to spare for a computer has, to some extent, already arrived finacially. What about the kid with just a few bucks? What kind of computer can he buy to help him get ahead?

A pretty good machine it turns out.

Last year I wrote about Nicholas Negroponte's effort to provide $100 WiFi enabled laptops to children in developing countries:

It has been engineered to be very tough with a rubberized exterior. It can be powered by AC or by hand crank. One minute of cranking yields ten minutes of power. It has four USB ports and is WiFi capable...

[W]hy not offer this machine in the United States? We are a wealthy nation, but I believe there would be a market for super-cheap, rugged, rechargeable-by-hand laptops right here.

To some extent I think that the market is overtaking Negroponte's project. It is possible now to find used $100 laptops on eBay that are comparable to his charity machine. Add a $20 WiFi card to the laptop in this auction and you're set. No hand crank for power, but hopefully you can find a plug.

These low-end machines wouldn't be the greatest game platforms, but the majority of productive work done in offices can easily be performed on these lower powered machines. Drop a free copy of OpenOffice into a 400MHz machine and you'll find that you can run most spreadsheets and produce the same documents that the $3,000 machine will.

If you can afford a little more, you can buy last year's model very cheap. I just purchased an HP Compaq NC8000 for $400 on eBay. It sports a 1.5 Ghz processor, 512 MB of RAM, a 40 Gig hard drive, DVD ROM/CDRW drive, internal WiFi, Microsoft Office, and an SD card slot (a key feature for me).

Closing the digital divide removes entry barriers to the information economy. It's important not just to those clawing their way up, but to those who are already doing well. When the information economy grows, everyone benefits.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Quantum computing is closer than you may think. In fact, a type of computer memory just released takes advantage of quantum effects.

Tangible evidence of the quantum revolution hit the market in July, when Freescale Semiconductor, a Motorola spinoff, began commercial shipments of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) chips. You'll probably notice MRAM first when you buy a digital camera that doesn't take any time to store a picture. Within a matter of years, your new laptop will switch on like a light.

This is a form of rewritable memory that is stable without power.

This memory breakthrough was in large part the doing of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the same Pentagon gang that gave us the Internet. In particular, it's due to a 62-year-old physicist named Stuart Wolf, who recently left DARPA for the University of Virginia. Since 1993 the agency has invested more than $200 million in Wolf-created quantum research programs.

While MRAM is just about memory, the ability to control spin in a computational device - "spintronics" is the word Wolf has coined to describe this work - has huge implications.

Ultimately we'll be able to use quantum effects to calculate. Silicon is due to hit a heat barrier by 2015. At that point it will be impossible to increase the speed of calculation on that substrate. Is Moore's law doomed?

Well, to be technical, yes. Moore's law was specific to silicon technology. But exponential improvement in calculation technology predates the silicon chip and will outlive it as well. Silicon chips will go the way of vacuum tubes - useful perhaps for certain tasks - but largely replaced by the next paradigm.

The next step: putting spin to work in actual computation. A team at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by David Awschalom, has made big progress in this direction by controlling electron spins in semiconductors and other materials a few nanometers in size. This could mean not just an end to overheating worries but the possibility of moving computer technology into the molecular realm. With molecular-level chips, a laptop could have more computing power than trillions of today's supercomputers.

And the paradigm after that is sub-molecular computation.

In 2004, Dan Rugar of IBM performed what the American Institute of Physics dubbed the most important experiment of the year by using a magnet to control the spin of a single electron. In theory, that means we could have subatomic-scale circuitry. At that level the behavior of particles is more complicated and can - again, in theory - do even more powerful things.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Think the Linguistic User Interface is the next step forward in human-machine relations? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps we're poising ourselves to skip a step:

Sitting stone still under a skull cap fitted with a couple dozen electrodes, American scientist Peter Brunner stares at a laptop computer. Without so much as moving a nostril hair, he suddenly begins to compose a message -- letter by letter -- on a giant screen overhead.

"B-O-N-J-O-U-R" he writes with the power of his mind, much to the amazement of the largely French audience of scientists and curious onlookers gathered at the four-day European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, which opened Thursday.

All we need is a way for computers to write back to the brain and instant messaging will be replaced by electronic telepathy. On a less whimsical note, this kind of interface will eventually open up whole new worlds of capability and independence for the paralyzed and others with disabilites.

(Via Our Technological Future)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Okay, I'm speechless:

A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".

...

The new design includes a quantum trick called the Zeno effect. Repeated measurements stop the photon from entering the actual program, but allow its quantum nature to flirt with the program's components - so it can become gradually altered even though it never actually passes through.

"It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is," says team member Onur Hosten.

My question for tech support: "I don't have a quantum computer, so why can't I get it to work?"

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If BMW (among other manufacturers) have their way, the US Department of Defense may not be the only place the mantra "Every Platform a Sensor" is heard.

The automaker's "Connected Car" concept is being shown at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (pics at CNET, after images of VW's hydrogen-powered HyMotion concept) in San Francisco this week and coming on the heels of last month's DARPA Grand Challenge success, it looks like smart cars, sharing information with each other, their drivers, and possibly the road network may be the 'tail fins' of the latter half of this decade.

(h/t Geekpress)

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

KurzweilAI had a huge news day yesterday. My "Winning A Nobel" post started with a Kurzweil link (late hattip). Kurzweil also pointed to an article on nanotech-enabled cancer therapy - and the fact that it's coming soon.

Then, side-by-side, Kurzweil reported on a project to simulate a mammalian brain, and then reported Japan's next effort to leap-frog the United States in supercomputer tech.

Japan is planning to build and have running by 2011 a computer that runs at 10 petaflops. If successful it will be 73 times faster than the current titleholder, IBM's Blue Gene.

In his new book, The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil offers a range for the computing power of the human brain. The low end of this range happens to be 10 petaflops.

If I'm calculating this correctly, 10 petaflops is ten million times as powerful as today's best desktop machines.

[If you care to check my math, 10 petaflops is 1 followed by 16 zeros...flops. Desktop computers have a current top speed of 1 billion flops.]

My brain could be a petaflop short of 10 and I'd still see the obvious link between these two stories. IBM and EPFL (and others) are working on the software of the mind, and Japan is hard at work on the hardware. Will we have the equivalent of a human mind running on silicon sometime in the next decade?

Well, obviously both things - software and hardware - have to be working. And, they have to be working together. At present it doesn't appear that Japan plans to simulate the human mind with its new machine.

The ministry wants to use the planned supercomputer for a wider use such as simulating the formation of galaxy and the interactions between a medicine and the human body.

We don't ever know all the ways proposed computers will be used until we have them. If mind simulations prove fruitful, Japan might change its plans.

The U.S. is currently planning a petaflop-level computer by 2010. That's a year earlier, but only 1/10th the power. Maybe we should raise our sights.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yeah Frank, it says here that it's the same kind of work, but closer to the ground.

KurzweilAI points this morning to an interesting article on 3D computer chip designs (a subject Phil and I spoke about in our latest edition of Fast Forward Radio).

The reason that manufacturers would be interested in 3D computer chips is that Moore's Law (which predicted the exponential improvement of the 2D integrated circuit) will soon fail. Gordon Moore himself said earlier this year that the law will soon fail as transistors reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels.

Just as civil engineers of the 1880s began building skyscrapers in crowded cities, [James] Lu is pioneering chip real estate by developing high-rise, 3-D chips to alleviate congestion in integrated circuits.

This may seem too obvious. You run out of room at the bottom of your beige box for a single layer of integrated chips, just install a second board above it, right?

Well, getting more 2D integrated circuits into your beige box by installing a second board above the first is not an answer to the problem. The key to greater and greater performance of integrated circuits has been a shrinking of the distance between transistors on the chip. The limits of the integrated circuit are not overcome by the sort of 3D computing that is really just 2D computing "folded over" to fit in a box.

What Lu is attempting to do is get the transistors on the second floor working directly with the transistors directly below them on the first floor - as well as the transistors on all sides.

In addition to keeping the computation level of Mr. Spock's chess set on its exponential track after Moore's Law has failed, 3D computing could allow other innovations, many that haven't been imagined yet.

Wafer-level stacking also allows for short connections between different types of chips. “Particularly today the industry is trying to combine memory with the processor, and more than half of the chip is taken up by memory,” Lu explains. “When we stack layers, we have a processor on the bottom and layer the memory on top, with a short access time between them.” Lu says the reduction of memory access time would be a huge advancement for large-scale computer clusters calculating nuclear reactions and weather broadcasting, for example.

And what would be a huge improvement for the big iron guys becomes a huge improvement for we PC users a cycle or two later.

“You are also creating new functionality,” says Nalamasu. “Such technology has vast implications, for example, integrating biochips with silicon chips.

If this would allow different types of computers to work well together, I wonder if this technology could also allow quantum computers to work closely with traditional computers. Quantum computers theoretically offer unimaginable power for a certain class of problems, but are, apparently, useless for other things. This might allow the best of both types of computing.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kurzweil reports this encouraging development:

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive: 230 billion bits per square inch, which would make possible a desktop computer drive capable of storing a terabyte of information.

The technology is known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end.

I remember when I was working for a computer magazine years ago getting to try out a hard disk with an almost unimaginable size of 300 megabytes. Imagine trying to get by on so little now.

I wonder how long it will be before a terabyte seems cramped?

More details here (link requires annoying registration).

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's an important development:

...(S)cientists from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have proposed a scheme to transfer the quantum state of a pulse of light onto a set of atoms and have demonstrated it experimentally.

The current experiment paves the way for new experiments in which the information contained in light can be mapped onto atomic clusters and then back into the light again. In this way, one could not only store the state of light in an atomic clusters, but also retrieve it. This process will be necessary if we want to build quantum repeaters, that is, devices which will allow the extension of quantum communication far beyond the distances (of the order of 100 km) which are achieved nowadays.

Hmmm...long-range quantum communication. That should come in quite handy. As Seth Shostak pointed out a while back, quantum communication provides the means of sending interstellar signals with caller ID turned off. Just in case, you know, some of the folks turn out to be more like their movie counterparts than we would hope they would be.

(via Kurzweil AI)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

A mere 29 days ago IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system was the world's fastest computer capable of a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion calculations per second).

Yesterday, NASA announced that its Project Columbia Beowulf cluster achieved a sustained performance of 42.7 teraflops. The $50 million dollar system will be used "to speed up spacecraft design, environmental prediction and other research."

Remarkably, this system was built in only 120 days.

This rivalry isn't over yet. Neither Blue Gene nor Project Columbia is operating at its top theoretical speed. Only 16 of Project Columbia's 20 computer units were operational at the time it was tested.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Kurzweil AI, check out this modest proposal made at the Web 2.0 conference in San Franciso:

Universal access to all human knowledge could be had for around $260m, a conference about the web's future has been told.

The idea of access for all was put forward by visionary Brewster Kahle, who suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress.

In his speech, Mr Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves.

He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (£33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf.

This is a tremendous idea; and the cost of doing it is only going to go down. The initial scanning work is the only part of the plan that's likely to present much of an expense factor. According to Moore's Law, that $60,000 price tag for storage should be somewhere around $2,000 eight years from now. If the estimate for the robot scanner is accurate, and it follows a less robust drop in price — say halving once every four years — we would be looking at a price tag of around $65 million in the same period of time. Pretty doable, I'd say.

Unfortunately, the legal concept of public domain is rapidly diminishing, while copyright terms are lengthened and controls are made more expansive. As John Bloom observed a while back in The New Republic:

In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years, then — in one of the most anti-American acts of the last century — suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.

So Kahle's observation that few of these books are still on the shelf will be beside the point. A scanned-in Library of Congress could conceivably serve as a back-up to the print archive, providing an excellent disaster recover resourse, but it would probably not be possible to distribute the whole archive. Only those parts created before 1923.

Of course, there's hope that, when the copyright issue is reviewed again by Congress (presumably in 2018) the public will be more aware of what's going on and will not stand for any more expansions of copyright controls. Failing that, maybe we could get an exception to copyright law into place. Perhaps we could make this backup of the Library of Congress exempt from all copyright restrictions as long as it's used by schools and public libraries.

By 2018, the storage for a copy of the entire Library of Congress online should cost less than $1000; even the cost of creating the archive would be $15 million or less. We could put the entire Library of Congress in every school in America.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What a comeback! Last May we reported that the United States was poised to regain the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer."

It's happened. On Tuesday IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system beat the Earth Simulator's maximum sustained speed of 35.86 teraflops with a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops.

That's a speed differential of less than one-half of one percent. But how IBM did this is more impressive:

BlueGene/ L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, IBM said...

"It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who ranks the 500 fastest computers. "For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Paul Hsieh on the new version six of the Internet Protocol:

The new IPv6 internet naming and number protocol will make it possible for every person (or device) on Earth to have their own IP address.

Well, er, yeah...and then some. The linked article repeats the same modest claim before getting to heart of the matter:

Vinton Cerf of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the next-generation protocol, IPv6, had been added to its root server systems, making it possible for every person or device to have an Internet protocol address.

Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."

I heard our friend Alex Lightman talking about this a while back. He estimates that IPv6 will provide enough IP addresses so that every atom in the known universe can have one.

Now that oughta hold us for a while.

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Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)