Memex 1.1

Latest edition of a classic YouTube video by Karl Finch, Scott McLeod and Jeff Brennan.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.

Microsoft Research has come up with an ingenious PC application called Songsmith.

Just open up Songsmith, choose from one of thirty different musical styles, and press record. Sing whatever you like – a birthday song for Mom, a love song for that special someone (they’ll be impressed that you wrote a song for them!), or maybe just try playing with your favorite pop songs. As soon as you press “stop”, Songsmith will generate musical accompaniment to match your voice, and play back your song for you. It’s that simple.

Robert Scoble was given a demo by the developers in his Vegas hotel room.

Technology Review has an interesting photographic record of Moore’s Law. It opens with this image (from Texas Instruments).

The first working integrated circuit on germanium was demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. This prototype has a transistor (small left dot) attached to two gold wires and a capacitor (middle black dot). The germanium itself, secured on a glass slide, is divided into three resistors by the tabs at the bottom. By showing that all three types of components could work in the same slice of germanium, Kilby offered a way to improve the performance and lower the cost of electronic devices.

This morning’s Observer column.

On the web, we will see whether Twitter, geeks' beloved microblogging service, can find a viable business model. Given that Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson have just discovered, and signed up for, the service, it has clearly peaked. When boobies like that are using it, all persons of taste flee.

In the corporate world, 2009 is likely to be dominated by: speculation about Apple's ability to survive Steve Jobs's departure (yawn); Yahoo's death throes; Microsoft's struggle to erase the bad karma of Vista with shiny new Windows 7, plus its doomed attempts to seize the initiative in web services, search and online advertising; and Wall Street's disillusionment with Google, as the search giant struggles with the impact of recession on advertising. Hard times will mean fewer impulse buys of electronic toys, that upgrades will be postponed, and that companies will finally begin to examine the energy costs of their PC-based networks.

Other than that, I haven't a clue what will happen. Happy new year!

Bob Cringely has an excellent and informative piece about our future in a parallel universe. Well, a parallelized universe, anyway.

In [2002], at Intel's developer conference, chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger said, "We're on track, by 2010, for 30-gigahertz devices, 10 nanometers or less, delivering a tera-instruction of performance." That's one trillion computer instructions per second.

But Gelsinger was wrong. Intel and its competitors are still making processors that top out at less than four gigahertz, and something around five gigahertz has come to be seen, at least for now, as the maximum feasible speed for silicon technology.

It's not as if Moore's Law–the idea that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years–has been repealed. Rather, unexpected problems with heat generation and power consumption have put a practical limit on processors' clock speeds, or the rate at which they can execute instructions. New technologies, such as spintronics (which uses the spin direction of a single electron to encode data) and quantum (or tunneling) transistors, may ultimately allow computers to run many times faster than they do now, while using much less power. But those technologies are at least a decade away from reaching the market, and they would require the replacement of semiconductor manufacturing lines that have cost many tens of billions of dollars to build.

So in order to make the most of the technologies at hand, chip makers are taking a different approach. The additional transistors predicted by Moore's Law are being used not to make individual processors run faster but to increase the number of processors inside a chip. Chips with two processors–or "cores"–are now the desktop standard, and four-core chips are increasingly common. In the long term, Intel envisions hundreds of cores per device.

But here's the thing: while the hardware problem of overheating chips lends itself nicely to the hardware solution of multicore computing, that solution gives rise in turn to a tricky software problem. How do you program for multiple processors?

Answer: with great difficulty. The big limitation, in other words, may not come from physics but from our inability to write software that can make use of parallel architectures.

Here’s a heartwarming story for the festive season…

The Prius has a new use, and it does not involve driving. The Harvard Press — which serves the Massachusetts town of Harvard as opposed to the university — reported that the car’s battery helped keep the lights on for some locals during the recent ice storms.

The newspaper reports that John Sweeney, a resident who lost power, “ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas.”

Said Mr. Sweeney, in an e-mail message to The Press: “When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius.”

According to the newspaper, “the device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.”

I knew it was a great buy. Toyota are trying to persuade me to buy a new one. But then the salesman made the mistake of saying that there’s a major upgrade coming next year.

I particularly like the crack that most humans couldn’t pass a Turing Test. Also the observation that artificial intelligence makes people stupid.

Doc Searls has been thinking about what’s missing in wiki technology.

Wikis are flat. All topics are at the same level. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but lousy for, say, projects. Joint efforts such as ProjectVRM are not flat. They have topics and subtopics. These change and move around, and this is where an outliner like MORE is so handy. With a few keystrokes you can move topics up and down levels, back and forth between higher-level headings… You can hoist any single topic up and work on that as if it were a top level. You can clone a topic or a piece of text and edit it in two places at once. I could go on, but trust me: it freaking rocked. There was no faster way to think or type. Hell, I’m typing this in one of its decendents: an OPML editor, also written by Dave Winer.

Anyway, just wanted to say, here in the midst of an unrelated local conversation, that wiki that works like MORE remains on the top of my software wish list for the world. Trust me: it would make the world a much more sensible place. And make both individual and group work a helluva lot easier.

Source.

Dave Winer is interested. I’d put money on the proposition that something useful will come from this.

MORE was the most useful piece of software I’ve ever used. It ran on all the early Macs I owned. For years after OS X came out I retained the Mac Classic emulator for just one purpose — so that I could run MORE. I stopped only after Q discovered OmniOutliner, which is pretty good — and still the best tool for thinking on my machine. But it only works on my stuff: a wiki tool which would bring that kind of functionality to collaborative documents would be a killer web app.

A Pew survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major technology advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the
internet itself improves.

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Here are the key findings in a new report based on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

* The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the
internet for most people in the world in 2020.

* The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but
that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social
tolerance, or forgiveness.

* Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet
will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

* Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright
protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers”
who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

* The divisions between personal time and work time and between
physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is
connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social
relations.

* “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the
current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild
the architecture from scratch.

Full report from here.

Good summary here.

This morning’s Observer column.

'Scorpions', says Wikipedia, 'are eight-legged venomous arachnids. They have a long body with an extended tail with a sting.' Staff of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the self-appointed monitor of 'child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide' and of 'criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK', may well find themselves in rueful agreement about the sting. Except that what they've discovered is that Wikipedia also has one.

Pause for a review of recent events…