Archive for May, 2006
What I have read since coming to Dublin:
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
Probably the most easily digestable book about economics ever, because it’s not really about economics, but rather about making stories from statistics. Individually interesting chapters, but doesn’t really have an argument beyond “it’s good to look at things in different ways”. Structurally suited to become popular via blogs (which it did), in that it’s chapters are totally modular and explainable in a single line. (2/5)
A HeartBreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
One from the pile. The passion AHWOSG was written with is contagious; I devoured this book. So often I could imagine Eggers hunched, sweating over his computer at night, belting out page after page in a frenzy. Of course it’s pretentious and self-obsessive, but unashamedly and consciously so, and not afraid to hide it’s hangups behind fiction — that’s what’s at it’s core, and Eggers has got the writing talent to pull it off in spades. Monumental. I wonder why almost all of the novels that have really blown me away are written by people in their 20’s? (5/5)
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
A wonderful book by any account, but mainly in that it instills just that: a sense of wonder. I read this in stops and starts a while back, but didn’t feel I gave it a fair run, so I reread in a couple of sittings. Through glorious prose and imagination, Marco Polo recounts descriptions of imaginary cities to Kublai Kahn, and describes what can in some form be found in any city. (5/5)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Completely different to any comic book I’ve read before. Half the action consists of people staring out the window sadly, yet on another page the story of two generations of family history is told without words. It’s surprising how gripping it remains throughout given how slowly it burns. Follows on nicely from the last book I read; Ware is to Eggers as painful family history exorcism through writing is to both of them. (4/5)
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
Actually more a book about the aesthetics of everyday objects than architecture in particular, but a good and entertaining read nonetheless, and inspired me to spend some time gaping at every ugly and beautiful building I came across. I probably read this at a good time, given that I’m not long in the city and the architecture is still new to me. I enjoy nothing more than my evening ride home on the train every day. It’s got all the good stuff: buildings, sunset, shifting perspective (rotating around an object is better, but dollying past is still pretty good), a train… this isn’t a book review any more, is it? De Botton talks around a topic nicely, but never really punctures through it with a point. (3/5)
Recommendations welcome.
Three days in Plymouth, and the end of the second year of my Masters. I presented my first draft project proposal which seemed to go over alright. Also took part in an Arduino workshop, making strange things happen with electrical circuits, breadboards and Processing. I made a game of Pong controlled by a potentiometer and a light sensor.
London for the weekend. Staying with friends in Golders Green, I woke up this morning to the sound of birds — yes, birds in London, a first for me too! Nice area, but where are all the rabbis everyone told me about? Oy vey, I’m disappointed. Inclemency notwithstanding, the city delivered again: Borough Market, the Tate, Old Street, Camden Town, and the ICA this time.
Karin’s kitten, who is so attracted to the property of movement that it must make life an unbearable endurance for the poor thing, is completely disoriented by which of my typing fingers should be his next prey. For the sake of his sanity, I’ll finish.
Some establishing observations:
- The world is running out of energy, and like all good crises, the global power crisis knows how to loom hard.
- There are over 822 million desktop computers in the world plugged in today (src).
- All your desktop apps are moving online, with your digital data storage to follow very soon.
- Sun Microsystems just released a thin desktop client with an average power consumption of 4 watts, or about 5% of the typical desktop PC.
Now to tie these statements together:
In the future, your desktop computer may well be an extremely thin client with internet connectivity and little else. That means that when you boot up your Linux box, Firefox and maybe a command line terminal will open, and that’s it. Your computer can’t do anything else, but it doesn’t need to; everything you need exists and happens on a server somewhere, and can be accessed through your web browser. You won’t have a hard drive, or any external media ports. Running applications directly on your computer will become practically obsolete. Most of the computational heavy lifting will be done on a central server, and the processing power of the average user’s desktop machine and operating system will become less and less relevant. (By the way, have you heard that there are going to be no less than seven different version of Vista to choose from?) A thinner client means less local computation, means less power consumption. Now multiply by 822 million.
Will this happen? Here’s a graph of Moore’s law in action over the past 35 years, stating that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 18 to 24 months:
In the next couple of years in the typical desktop, this trajectory will start to level off — expect a similar-looking chart on bandwidth to take up the slack. You can also look for the average efficiency of a desktop computer to be similarly up and to the right. The limit of what’s technically possible will continue to grow exponentially, but the average user will have no use for that type of processing power, in the same way that 90% of Microsoft Word users only use 10% of the features, or that not everybody drives a racecar. The Mac mini is probably an early leader here.
The story goes that the computer hardware industry was once compared to the auto industry by Bill Gates thusly: “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles per gallon.” (”Yes”, came the reply, “but the car would crash twice a day”.) Now desktop hardware is about to follow the design changes that occurred in the automobile industry around the same time that the first personal computers were becoming available. Cars *could have* gone hundreds of kilometers per hours, but they simply didn’t need to; instead of continuing to increase in power, cars that were smaller, cheaper, and more economical emerged to cater to city driving.
Will computers start to slow down soon, with more of a focus on size, efficiency and price, even at the expense of performance? If so, will we see an end to SUV-like, 100w-guzzling desktop monsters? It’s interesting to note that within the ecosystem of computing, it is sustainable software development has engendered an environment that could cater to more sustainable hardware systems, and the emergence of more efficient behavior.
