Issue 40:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
The other day at work some colleagues and I got into a rather enjoyable conversation about Moore’s Law, (I know, you’re thinking about the countless number of times this has happened to you.) The Moore from “Moore’s Law” is Gordan Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel. In 1965 he observed that the number of transistors, (tiny electronic on/off switches), that could inexpensively be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every year. This has held true for the last 40 years but we may be approaching the physical limits of what is possible with our current technology.
Scientists are working on technology that may power the computers of the future. These are all currently at very early stages in their research and if you were to see one of these future “computers” it would probably just look like some random lab equipment strung out across a laboratory work bench.
Quantum computers would operate based on certain qualities of quantum mechanical phenomena. In a transitor-based computer, information is stored in a two-state bit, (0 or 1), but in a quantum computer, information is stored in a qubit, (quantum bit) which can be a 0 or a 1 or any value in between. It’s complicated but, in essence, a quantum computer could do a lot of calculations simultaneously. Quantum computing is still mostly theory but there has been some experimental success at computing by manipulating the spins of a molecule’s nuclei or using laser and filters to create and manipulate those weird quantum mechanical phenomena mention above.
Another approach is DNA computing. This approach uses enzymes and DNA molecules to do many calculations at once. A few highly specialized DNA computers have been built that were able to do certain calculations thousands of times faster than traditional computers.
Yet another computer technology that is being researched is the optical computer. A computer that operated by manipulating light could be much faster than one that depended on the movement of the much slower electron.
One question I asked my co-workers in our conversation was, do we really need faster computers? What if what we really need is better software? Niklaus Wirth, (a computer scientist that created several programming languages), made the following observation in 1995: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.” This has come to be known as “Wirth’s Law” and I think it pretty much sums up the shape of computers today. Building efficient software is hard and expensive and programmers use all kinds of tricks and tools that take care of the harder parts of the work for them. This abstraction, or moving further away from the language the hardware speaks, (ones and zeros), makes the software run slower. So far, the approach that most software companies have taken is, “well, it takes too long to write efficient software and there’s no need to anyway, because next year’s hardware will run it twice as fast anyway.” This assumption may not be true for much longer and I hope that we soon see a shift in software where programmers (or their purse-strings holders who decide how long they spend on projects) start focusing on building better, faster running software.
One positive change I see coming is Apple’s next month release of OS X 10.5 Leopard. This new operation system includes changes that help developers make use of the multiple-core 64-bit CPUs that every new Apple computer ships with. Leopard has several other advantages over Mircosoft’s new OS, Vista in that OS X 10.5 will run all the old 32-bit applications and drivers seamlessly and there is only one version of the operating system, (as opposed to Vista where if you choose to install the 64-bit version, none of your 32-bit drivers will work.)
Issue 33:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
This article was going to be about my favorite technological doodads and the way that they have changed my life. This list would have included things like my iPod, DVR, Mac Mini, cell phone and Pikepass. I sat down to write it and pretty much immediately realized that, because of something I’d read recently, I honestly couldn’t say that I liked the way that I’ve let certain pieces of technology change my life.
I recently finished reading Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Work Week and to quickly sum it up, in 2002 Ferriss was a twenty-something entrepreneur in Silicon Valley working 80 hour weeks. He realized that he was working for work’s sake and that he could cut down his work schedule massively by automating as much as possible and empowering the people that work for him to make decisions without his acting as a bottleneck. He lays out how he accomplished this in thorough, but not boring, detail and describes how he now spends nearly all his time doing the things he really wants to do- like break-dance in Taiwan, race motorcycles in Europe and scuba dive in Panama. It’s a really incredible read and while on the surface it may seem like one of those cheesy “get rich quick” infomercials you see on very early-morning television, it’s not. You will not regret reading this book.
While I usually only have to work 40-hour weeks at my job, after reading Ferriss’s book I realized that over the last few years I’ve picked up the habit of forcing myself to experience certain forms of entertainment whether I really wanted to or not. I was “working” close to an extra 50 or 60 hours a week trying to keep up with all the hours of entertainment my technology was diligently serving up for me to enjoy.
On any given day, I get home from work and am faced with the following:
- Google Reader has over a thousand posts for me to read
- My DVR has about 53 hours of TV for me to watch, (not to mention hundreds of channels of live TV)
- I’ve got to choose another 27 downloads from eMusic tonight or I lose them, (usually this means “discovering” new bands… no simple or quick task)
- I’ve got several Wii games I’ve barely scratched the surface on (including the 70+ hour Zelda:Twilight Princess)
About a year ago I nearly had an entertainment-overload-induced break down. I was trying to keep up with most of the things listed above and was subscribed to both Netflix and Yahoo Music Unlimited. I was paying a monthly fee for the latter services and felt a serious obligation to enjoy them to their fullest, damnit! With YMU, I had potentially millions of songs to listen to, (and of a more time-consuming nature, convert to MP3s), and a growing queue of movies on Netflix. It was too much “fun” stuff to do and not enough time and I got to where the sight of a stack of unwatched DVDs on my TV just made me uncomfortable. I trimmed off Netflix and YMU and instantly felt better and more in control.
However, since then I’ve let my technology creep back into control of my free time. What am I going to do about it? Despite my previous article raving about RSS Feed Readers, it turns out keeping up with eighty feeds for a long term is just not that fun. I recently unsubscribed to some of the worst time-consumers, (digg.com, I’m looking at you), and added Scoble’s shared items. (Robert Scoble is a tech-guy that, among other things, spends hours each day filtering the good stuff out of thousands of new blog and tech site posts.) As for my DVR I’ll choose just a few shows for it to record, probably things like Heroes, Mythbusters and The Wonder Years, (thanks a lot for this new addiction, Sydney Brown!) and watch them in marathon sittings. eMusic is the one thing I’m not going to change. I’ve found some great music there and I can do other stuff while listening to it. I’ve actually considered selling my Wii but I probably won’t because some next-generation games for it will probably be pretty incredible.
I realize that it’s pretty lame to complain about not having enough time to keep up with entertaining myself, so I’m proposing an experiment to help me get past these artificial-stress inducing, entertainment-overload hang-ups.
For the next month, I’ll only let myself turn on my computer or television one night a week, including weekends! Stay tuned for a follow up report in a future issue of Nerd City.
The thought of going “technology-free” like this actually has me nervous and I feel like I should probably think this through a bit more thoroughly before I just jump off the deep end, but, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.
I’ve got a whole shelf of books I haven’t read, friends I can hang out with and (when it’s not raining), some great weather to get out in.
Issue 31:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
Lately I’ve been reading books about technology companies and technological entrepreneurs, in particular taking in lots of early Commodore and Apple history. I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve found this to be just about the most interesting stuff I’ve ever read. As a computer programmer I think it’s a subconscious search for heroes, an attempt to get to know a little more about the giants upon whose shoulders I’m trying to climb.
These two companies, Commodore and Apple, offer some interesting comparisons. Both broke into the computing world in the late 1970’s and in the mid-eighties both released a computer they thought would change the world, (”put a dent in the universe” in Steve Job’s words), Apple with their Macintosh and Commodore with their Amiga.
The Macintosh
Apple had been working on a new computer that would sport a feature yet to be seen outside experimental computer labs, the Graphic User Interface, (GUI), driven by a mouse. This computer was called the Lisa, (besides being the name of several Apple’s employees’ daughters I haven’t tracked down a great reason for this name.) It was originally designed to be a $2000 computer, but by the time they were finished it cost an exorbitant, (especially in 1980’s dollars), $10,000.
About the time that Lisa development was cranking up, an Apple manager got the idea to build a cheap and simple computer. He put together a rag-tag group of engineers and developers and they started designing what would eventually become the Macintosh. They built it in secret for the first few months, afraid that if the higher-ups found out about it they would cancel the project. Eventually Steve Jobs discovered the secret Mac project and came in to take it over. (Jobs was one of Apple’s co-founders, but at this time he was not much more than that. He had been removed from the Lisa project and from what I’ve read, it seems like he just kind of drifted around the Apple offices looking for a promising project to take over and then take most of the credit.) He basically ran off the existing Macintosh manager and then started exerting his unique style of management which consists mostly of plowing through the office, dropping his opinion on what everyone is doing, (often something like: “That’s shit”), and then moving on. That being said, the guy gets results and lots of people that have worked for him say that they would do it again.
The original Macintosh, for all the ground it broke GUI-wise, had some major flaws. It had less RAM than it needed and only had one floppy drive. When you don’t have a hard-drive, these two design choices can combine for some pretty terrible user experiences. For example, to make a back-up of a floppy disk, (and the computer booted off a disk since there was no hard drive, so disks were much more important back then than they are now), you had to switch out the source and the destination disk sometimes over 30 times as the computer copied sections of the disk in and out of memory. If the computer had come with a second floppy drive or more RAM, this wouldn’t have been an issue. The original Mac also had a black and white screen and a relatively low resolution. Mostly because of these design issues and its price, (they ended up selling it for $2500, much more than the engineers that built it intended), the original Mac sales were pretty bad. Jobs more or less turned a blind eye on the poor sales, acting like everything was going great. The next year Jobs was removed from any meaningful position at Apple and soon after he and a lot of good people left to start NeXT, (which would go on to do cool things like build the operating system that OS X is based on and take some artists and engineers off George Lucas’s hands for cheap and turn them into Pixar, but that’s another set of stories…)
The Amiga
Throughout the first half of the 1980’s Commodore experienced immense success with their Commodore 64, (C64), computer. During this time Commodore was run by one of the most ruthless businessmen I’ve read about- Jack Tramiel. (I highly recommend Brian Bagnall’s “On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore” for a lot more about this.)
Tramiel was all about selling computers for impossibly low prices. He was able to do this because he built every part of his computers in-house, including the difficult-to-produce CPUs. Just a year after its launch, Tramiel was able to cut the C64’s price by two thirds, ($200, which in today’s terms is around $400 – an incredible price for what was a very capable computer.)
Tramiel had a way of burning bridges. Tramiel would do things like take out a huge order for some parts from a company, get that company to spend all its time and resources supplying the order, hold out on paying them until they were desperate and then offer to buy the whole company for a cut-throat price. Tramiel acquired more than one company this way. He was pretty shady with his retailers too. He would sell a batch of computers to a trusty retailer like ComputerLand for a certain price, and then turn around and sell the same computers to K-mart for half that price. ComputerLand would be forced to sell their lot at a loss. Needless to say, Tramiel made a lot of enemies in the computer and retail industries.
By the time the Amiga entered the Commodore picture, Tramiel had been ousted, (for no very good reason, really.) Commodore’s majority shareholder and chairman of the board, Irving Gould, believed Tramiel was receiving undue credit for the C64’s success and decided that it was time for Tramiel to be put in his place. Tramiel went on to buy one of Commodore’s biggest competitors, Atari, and from there did what he could to be a thorn in Commodore’s side.
Commodore needed a new computer and one of the hottest computers at the trade shows was built by a company called Amiga. After some intense negotiating, (which included paying off a loan that Amiga owed to none other than Atari), Commodore acquired Amiga in 1984. A year later Amiga released their first computer, what would later be known as the Amiga 1000. The Amiga had a few things in common with the Macintosh. They both used the same Motorola CPU and they both had a mouse-driven GUI.
In pretty much every other way though, the Amiga was superior to the Macintosh. It was a true multimedia computer years before the word “multimedia” took it’s current meaning. It had a high resolution monitor and special graphics chips that supported thousands of colors. It shipped with twice the amount of RAM and supported multitasking. (The Mac wouldn’t get multitasking until later versions.) And it cost $1000 less than the Mac.
So why is it that “Macintosh” is a household name and most people have never heard of the Amiga? In a word, marketing. In the past, Commodore had a good record for marketing. One of their first spokespersons was the ever-popular William Shatner (watch this if only to hear the Shat say: “Coming soon, Gorf! The wonder arcade game in a home version!”) With the Amiga though, Commodore botched its launch in a stellar fashion. Until late in the game, the few advertisements they did run were mostly print ads and for some reason, those were printed in sepia tone. When you’re the first company to launch a really incredible color computer, don’t you think you’d run some color ads to show it off? Apple on the other hand launched the Mac with what is generally considered to be the Greatest Commercial of All Time – the Ridley Scott-directed 1984 Superbowl commercial with that girl throwing a hammer through a video screen showing a Big Brother-like dictator.
Commodore was in financial trouble after paying millions more than necessary for Amiga, (the company), and Tramiel at Atari was putting up some tough competition with their Atari ST computer. Commodore also faced problems finding distributors for the Amiga. Tramiel had so thoroughly ruined Commodore’s image in the retailer’s minds that most were hesitant to deal with Commodore, even though Tramiel had moved on. It’s sad, but it’s probably the case that Commodore simply couldn’t afford to produce the sorts of ads that their hardware deserved. The Amiga engineers, who had been recently acquired in the Commodore/Amiga merge, expressed their feelings by coding a hidden message into the Amiga: “We made the Amiga, they f*cked it up.” Here’s one of the Amiga engineer’s talking about the easter-egg:
You had to do this keystroke where it took eight fingers and both thumbs to press all the keys that you needed to get the first message to come up that said, “We made the Amiga.” Then, while you had that message up and while you continued to hold all of those keys down, if you could some how get the floppy disk inserted into the machine (for instance, if you leaned over and shoved it in with your nose) then for 1/60th of a second, the other message would show up. It would blink up and go away
This prank, hidden as deep as seemingly possible, was never-the-less discovered a few weeks after the Amiga launched and tens of thousands of units had to be recalled and modified. This didn’t help Commodore’s financial situation.
Between the lackluster ad campaigns and poor management, mostly on the part of chairman Gould who more than once fired a CEO because they were more competent than he was comfortable with, the Amiga did not have much chance for success. Commodore was on a downward spiral and would be out of the picture by the early 1990’s.
Apple generally handled things better than Commodore. They continually pushed out better versions of the Macintosh and had success selling to schools. One of the world’s first “killer apps”, PageMaker, was available only on the Mac and when paired with Apple’s LaserWriter, invented the whole desktop publishing industry that took off in a big way. So, though their machine was the lesser of the two, Apple was able to outlast Commodore. Unfortunately for both Apple and Commodore, 1985 saw the launch of another significant piece of computer history. Microsoft released version 1.0 of their GUI program, Windows. It would be years until Microsoft would build a usable version of Windows, (insert smart-ass remark here), but eventually their operating systems running on cheap IBM-clone PCs would come to dominate the computer market.
Issue 23:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
“I named my Wii Mii McGeeky.”
When Nintendo announced that they were naming their new video game system the Wii, I thought it was a really lame name. Especially compared to the code name they had been using up to that point – the Revolution. The Revolution is infinitely cooler sounding than Wii. The name is slowly growing on me though. One thing I like is that you find yourself saying ridiculous, (and potentially dangerous), sorts of things when talking about the Wii. When a friend of mine said the phrase at the beginning of this article he drew a roomful of blank stares and doubled-over laughter. Besides the obvious, (to a fifth grader), male genitalia connotations, the name implies several other things that I’m sure Nintendo had in mind: it sounds like the word “we” which implies groups of people can play it and it sounds like the word “wee” as in “Fun!.” Also, if you flip the “W” over you get the word “Mii” which is what Nintendo calls the avatars you can create for yourself (see below).
What is the Wii?
The most noticeable thing about the Wii is the controller. It’s a wireless device that looks like a fat television remote with several buttons on the front and one trigger on the back. An optional attachment called the “nun-chuck” offers another joystick and two more triggers. Both the remote and the nun-chuck are motion sensitive and in most of the games that are out now you control the game by mimicking whatever action is taking place on the screen, (swinging your arm to hit a tennis ball, flicking your hand to swing Link’s sword.) Basically what this means is that where there is a Wii, there will be much flailing of arms.
The Wii can connect to the internet using its built-in wireless network card. (I think they will be releasing a wired network card at some point in the future). There aren’t any online games out yet, but eventually you will be able to play against your friends over the internet which is cool.
Another cool feature of the Nintendo Wii are mii’s. These are on-screen characters that you can customize to look like yourself or pretty much anyone.)
Admiral Ackbar, anyone?
Some games are mii-compatible meaning that the mii’s on your system and mii’s that are shared from your friends’ Wii will show up in your games. I was playing Wii Sports bowling the other day and saw a friend’s mom, dad and wife bowling in the lane next to mine. It’s really cool how seamlessly the whole mii integration works.
The biggest negative about the Wii is that it is terribly under-powered compared to the other new video game systems, (the Xbox 360 and the PS3.) Both of the latter systems boast much more powerful processors and push out graphics in high-def, (up to 1080p.) The Wii gimps out a meager 480p on hardware that is marginally better than the Wii’s predecessor, the Gamecube. One nice-ish side effect of the Wii being mostly a Gamecube is that it will play all the Gamecube games, (and there are a few that are worth playing.)
What are the games like?
So far I’ve only played 5 or 6 games on the Wii. One game, Wii Sports, comes bundled with the system. It’s fun, but it’s basically just a nice demo of some of the stuff you can accomplish with the motion sensing features of the Wii. The sports – tennis, baseball, boxing, golf and bowling, with the exception of bowling, are all very simplified versions of the sports. In Wii baseball, for instance, you don’t have control over the fielding or base running… you simply concern yourself with timing your swing right and the system handles everything else. It’s still actually a lot of fun, but it leaves you wanting a more complete baseball game. It was probably a really wise decision to leave the bundled game relatively simple… the last thing Nintendo wants is for people to quit because the games are just so hard they’re not fun. (And within a year or two there will probably be several baseball games offering more complete control over the action.)
Speaking of games so hard they are more like work than fun… I’ve been playing a lot of Trauma Center 2: Second Opinion. In this game you are a surgeon and the remote and nun-chuck become the tools of your trade: scalpels, forceps, syringes, bandages, etc. I was joking about this game being “work” because most of the time this game is a blast. There are a few levels, (ie: surgeries), that take a few tries and some that require what I’ll call a trick to pass, and the details of the trick are basically left up to you to pull out of thin air. On one level in particular I kept doing something wrong because after about 7 minutes of complicated procedures my patient kept dying. I finally googled for some help and found that I needed to do one particular thing at a particular time or else it was impossible to pass the level. Attempting to increase the difficulty of a game by requiring the player to perform arbitrary and mysterious actions is pretty lame. Besides this, everything about Trauma Center 2 is great.
The Wii also emulates a ton of old video game systems, (NES, SNES, N64, Master System, Genesis, Turbo Grafix 16.) You have to buy the games and they range from $5 to $10, which seems a little expensive to me. Nintendo will be releasing 4 games each Monday and there are already some pretty great games available. I have not bought any Virtual Console games yet, but I’ll probably pick up some of the old classics like Kid Icarus or Metroid. I haven’t seen this myself, but I read that you can suspend these emulated games, save this saved state to the Wii’s memory and restore them later. Most of those old games wouldn’t let you save at all, (or used passwords), so this is a huge improvement. I’m hoping that Nintendo goes through the trouble of adding some internet multi-player functionality to some of these old games. I can just imagine turning on my Wii, noticing a friend is online and challenging him to a quick race in Super Mario Kart.
The Wii is a great video game system. I was a bit skeptical about the control system, but the few games I’ve played so far have convinced me that it works really well. I can imagine future Wii games exploiting the new control system in cool and ridiculous ways – like strapping a remote to each of your arms and legs and controlling your character by running in place, jumping and just generally acting like a lunatic.
Issue 22:
By
Dr. Roger Korby
Issue 22: Coming to the internets Monday, December 11th.
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