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For the Week of December 4, 2006
A-Clue.Com will cease in its present form at the end of the year. That does not mean it will cease, not at all.
A-Clue will become a regular weekly feature of the DanaBlankenhorn.Com blog. It's actually been that way all this year. Most of this past year's Clue essays are already archived there. The main A-Clue site will stay open with the old archives, and links to the rest of my work.
I'm doing this mainly because e-mail is a dieing e-business model, and I don't ever want to be yesterday. I'm also spending several hours each week coding and loading each week's issue, time that could be spent writing.
To celebrate this change I have five essays on the main topics this blog has covered in its decade of e-mail existence, looking mainly at their present and future. First, last week, was e-commerce, the original beat here. Today I have an essay on Moore's Law. Next week features The World of Always-On, then we go on Political Cycles, before finishing up with a big Internet Future essay.
Enjoy.
Gordon Moore doesn't agree with me about Moore's Law.
His statement from last year, that Moore's Law is dead, was narrowly drawn and true as far as it went. Fact is the closer you bring circuit lines together, the bigger the magnetic interference when you run electricity through them. Beyond that there is a theoretical limit – when lines get within 1 nanometer of one another, they cease to be separate lines.
But the Moore's Law Process is very much alive. We see it in hard drive capacity, where disk sizes double at the same price every 18 months or so like clockwork. We see it in optical drives, where every few years features a dispute between manufacturers over technology that's 10 times better than what came before. We see it in optical cable, where the use of different colors lets makers pack ever-more bits down the same pipe. We see it in wireless, where improved digital signal processors enable a 802.11n modem to run 10 times faster than an 802.11b, on the same frequency spectrum.
We even see it at Intel, in the chip sector. The company bit the bullet on its designs two years ago, and now pushes ahead with lower-power chip technologies and multiple processors on a chip. The quad chips of today are indeed four times faster than the single processor chips of three years ago, just as Moore's Law would have predicted.
Moore's Law, as I see it, means that things get faster-and-faster faster-and-faster. You double four to get 8, you double 8 to get 16, and the second doubling gives you twice as much improvement as the first. That's the way numbers work.
Best of all, these variants of Moore's original law reinforce one another. The optical improvements enable cheaper-and-cheaper backhaul for the wireless links. The improvements in flash memory chips force competition on to the makers of hard drives. The use of parallel processing enables thousands of computers to work together, solving big problems no one computer could solve alone.
The laggard remains software. Some 20 years ago we could make new software that would overtax a new generation's chips, pushing consumers to upgrade and maintaining high PC prices. Microsoft is still trying to play that game, but it's getting increasingly difficult. Because consumers don't really need the bloat Microsoft has inserted into its more recent versions of Windows, PC prices have been on a steady decline during this decade. This takes money out of the technology system.
And that is the biggest problem tech has. Balance sheets are being strained at both ends by Moore's Law today. On the one hand hardware prices, and values, continue declining in line with Moore's basic law. On the other hand the cost of producing each generation of chips goes up, in line with Moore's Second Law. This combination has helped push production offshore – offshore to where people make less, offshore to where environmental regulations are just a theory.
Software's recent price compression has a different cause from Moore's Law. Open source is creating viable competition (at a price of free) in operating systems, databases, and server applications (which use databases). This year saw the enterprise space move rapidly into Linux, for functions like resource planning and customer management, things once done by expensive mainframes. Microsoft is being foiled on the high end, and will with the launch of Vista (with its anti-privacy features) face real competition on the desktop for the first time.
Already you may, if you choose, run Linux on some old hardware, add Firefox and Open Office, and pretty much conduct business from your home at a retail cost of nearly zero. This Clue is, in fact, being written using Open Office.
This is why the 2000s have become the era of the device. Devices are priced in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands, and can be easily replaced when software changes. Game machines, cell phones, and iPods are all designed, not to wear out, but to be replaced – software and all – within just a few years. Since they cost just a few hundred dollars – the phones can be had for just the cost of a calling plan – the repair business is replaced by the recycling business.
During the 1990s it was thought that ideas such as Virtual Reality, artificial intelligence and big screen graphics would continue to soak up computing cycles. But the software wasn't any good. Instead we have spent the decade recapitulating what was done before. Most Linux applications already exist in the Windows or Unix world. Cellphones made small files cool again. Only gaming seems to be pushing the envelope, with online games like Second Life and client-based games like Madden NFL Football calling on people to increase their spending and replace old gear with new.
In the end it all comes down to software. Software, like training, does not respond to Moore's Law. It's true that C or Java is a more efficient programming environment than Assembler or Cobol was, but the improvement is not that great. Object oriented programming, in which large programs are built from simpler modules, is failing to give us the improvements we need. The whole business remains complex, requiring extensive training with no assurance (thanks to outsourcing and imported labor) that high skills will deliver high salaries going forward.
We need breakthroughs. We need breakthroughs in order to direct our computing energy toward the enormous problems facing us, the replacement of hydrocarbons with hydrogen, the absorption of vast new populations into the middle class (which will solve so many problems), the continuing effort to save life on this Earth and get us beyond it.
Will we get the breakthroughs we need? I believe we will, because I am an optimist. Studying Moore's Law forces optimism on me. It's a naturally optimistic idea.
But there is no certainty here, as there is with Moore's Law.
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Shameless Self-Promotion
You can have every entry from DanaBlankenhorn.Com, including our lead Clues, e-mailed to you from the main blog page. (It's the Feedblitz button in the corner asking for your e-mail address.) What you will receive is a daily e-mail with all of the previous day's entries, plus links.
You can also get the www.DanaBlankenhorn.Com copy in your newsreader by using its subscribe feature
I'm continuing to produce a special blog on Open Source for ZDNet. I am pleased to say it has grown into a real money-maker. This blog too has an RSS feed and e-mail subscription.
I am also the editor Voic.Us, which aims to become a political "super-site" and offer mobile marketing services. So far we have over 2,800 subscribers to its RSS feed. Please visit that blog as well.
Finally I have begun working with Connexxions at Rice University to turn my work on the Internet Political Thesis into a book and college level course.
Remember: it's journalism that keeps the Clues coming...
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Best of the Week
I'm all for shopping online. I do it often. I'm going to do it today. But I'm not going to do it on someone else's clock. I'm going to go home, get in my jammies, find a nice beverage, and then consult my list.
I think the whole progressive-populist argument is bunk. We have to find a way to get beyond it. We have to find a consensus that leads to fundamental change in our attitudes. The crisis which will force such a change in attitudes is coming. The change must be managed in the direction of creation, not destruction, or our grandchildren will have no world -- rich, poor or middle class -- to inherit.
Here is the truth. Oil is the enemy.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Both sides are against corruption, and ready to do battle with their own "side" in order to "purify" the ranks.
A team under James Tour, who now heads the Rice Carbon Nanotechnology Lab, appears to have succeeded in growing carbon nanotubes from "seed" tubes.
What if Communism had a sugar daddy? What if it became Texas?
A careful analysis of the 2006 election returns shows that it was an end, not a beginning.
I'm a Rice person.
Its assumptions include the ideas that political adversaries are enemies, that politics is a form of war, that attack is always better than defense, and that the system is always under threat from outside.
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Voic.Us
ZDNet Open Source
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Clued-in, Clueless
Clued-in is lifting weights after age 50. (Remember, low weights and high reps.) Nothing reduces the pain better. Not even aerobics. Although a nice Sunday bike ride is still the very best thing...especially when it doesn't hurt.
Clueless was Steve Ballmer's FUD attack on Linux. It boomeranged like Macaca.
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