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Technology Trends How new technologies are modifying our way of life. 1- Distributed computing grid networks will put idle computing power to work -- but when? Grid computing is not a new subject in this space. But in this article, Om Malik chose to concentrate on the role of one of the leaders of this new way of computing, Ian Foster. What Linus Torvalds, cocreator of the Linux operating system, is to the open-source movement, Mr. Foster, 43, is to the world of grid computing. From his paper-infested office at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, where he is a senior scientist and head of the distributed systems lab, Mr. Foster champions grid technology. Today, he says, grids are where the Web was in 1991 or 1992 -- more academic curiosity than commercial venture. But, just as the Internet grew from a collection of small academic networks to a humongous octopus spreading its tentacles around the world, Mr. Foster predicts today's minigrids will grow into a huge global grid, a transcontinental processing pool engaged in all sorts of complex tasks, like designing and testing semiconductors and decoding the human genome. Applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) will be run from such a network. This is ambitious, but is there a market for this technology? Market research firm Grid Technology Partners estimates that the worldwide grid-computing industry will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 276 percent, topping more than $4.1 billion by 2005, when IT applications like CRM and enterprise resource planning will begin to be run on the grid. Given that the issues of security and resource sharing have to be resolved, that projection seems overly optimistic. Take, for example, CRM software. In grid computing, the software would reside on the grid, but it hasn't been determined how the data would be transmitted securely over the network. "Currently, the security is not acceptable for mission-critical and enterprise computing, but we are hoping that in the next five years, all such issues will be resolved," says Mr. Scaglia of HP. These are interesting projections. But let's look at the size of the market for industrial companies today. Ford Motor, BMW, Boeing, Motorola, Novartis, Pacific Life, Saab, and Synopsys are using minigrids, buying software and services from firms like Entropia, IBM, Platform Computing, Sun, Think Dynamics, and United Devices. Still, not much money is being made. Total sales of grid-related products and services, nearly all of it for experimental projects, will be a meager $180 million in 2002, according to Grid Technology Partners. It seems that we are far away from the $4 billion a year forecasted by the Grid Technology Partners research company. I didn't know this company, so I visited their Web site. (Here is the link.) Their latest report on the subject will cost you $2,995 for either a hard-copy or a single user PDF file. Ouch! Source: Om Malik, Red Herring Magazine, October 11, 2002 2- The robots are coming: After Roomba, CoWorker and MicroRig show up A few weeks ago, a small company named iRobot made the headlines when it introduced Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner costing less than $200. (Check "Never vacuum your house again: Here comes Roomba" for details.) The privately held 12-year-old company has three divisions: one for the military, one for the industrial sector and one for the consumer. IRobot's products include the CoWorker, a robot that can be operated via a Web browser, and MicroRig, a robot used in oil-well bores. For the military, the company created the PackBot, which saw some action in Afghanistan. Larry Dignan , from CNET News.com, recently interviewed Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot. Here are some excerpts. Q: Where do you see robotics heading, and what has to happen to get there? A: The future of robotics is the development of increasingly sophisticated products that deliver the same type of price performance and abilities. The PC started off as a curiosity, but once it became useful and had more productivity than its price tag, it took off and the rate of innovation took off. For the PC, the rate of innovation was slow until that economic hurdle was passed. The computer was doing things no one has ever done before with financial tools such as spreadsheets. With Roomba and robotics, you're replacing some kind of physical labor. The kid next door is cheap and does a pretty good job, so the challenge of a robotic appliance is one that demands a true understanding of the job at a price point that's comparable to having the kid next door do it. Q: Sounds like a glut of robotic vacuum cleaners. Are there other chores? A: The mission of our consumer group is to make housework something that is done by choice. Our mission is to look at the tasks today and see what is robotizable and then work on developing the performance required to do it -- whether it's washing your car, mowing the lawn or cleaning the bathroom. It's a huge and exciting engineering process, making the house take care of itself. Q: I imagine my bathroom will be more complicated. A: It's a different process because there's water. I would say cleaning a toilet is different than tile. To do both is a complex challenge. We have research studying geckos and wall climbing. The big question is: Do we have to clean floor and walls, and will people pay for both? That's a matter for focus groups. Right now, it's difficult to say how it'll be. Source: Larry Dignan , CNET News.com, October 8, 2002 3- A new technology recharges your laptop without a plug Yesterday, we looked at a grand project which will take years and billions of dollars to be completed. Today, we'll be less ambitious and look at a basic technology that can improve your life now. Aren't you tired to have as many power adapters as you have electrical devices? Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, cable modems, digital cameras, alarm clocks, you name it, all have their own rechargers. A new company, MobileWise, claims it has solved this problem. MobileWise has a clever solution: technology that lets a flat surface (like a desk pad, or maybe even a desk itself) transmit power to little conductive contacts on the bottom of a device (notebook computer, PDA, cell phone, etc.) when it's set down. The power flows right through an exposed grid of contacts via direct current, and yet the recharger never shorts out or presents a danger, because it doesn't turn on until it recognizes a device. (MobileWise dismissed induction and microwave as inefficient and possibly more dangerous.) Multiple devices with different power requirements can recharge all at once on a single pad (the size can vary): When equipment is placed on the pad (at any angle), it communicates its power requirements through its exposed contacts, and then the pad's hardware sends the right voltage to the right contact points. When a device moves, the pad reconfigures itself instantly. Here is a picture of this device -- for a larger one, please visit MobileWise's website.´This single pad will -- hopefully -- replace all your rechargers and greatly simplify your life when traveling. But will it deliver? Rafe Needleman tells us that MobileWise has 15 employees. But the company has one CEO, one President and CTO, 4 Vice Presidents, and even 4 Directors. It seems that the management team could handle more employees than they have. Source: Rafe Needleman, Business 2.0, October 10, 2002 4- Pushing the space elevator closer to reality I'm not sure you remember I already looked at this subject. It was on April 21 and I really enjoyed this headline: "Penthouse suite: 11,457,600th floor - lots of room - great views." Now, it's time to revisit the subject, with Ron Cowen as our guide. The space elevator "is no longer science fiction," says David Smitherman of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Physicist Bradley C. Edwards agrees. He left a job at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory to work full-time on the elevator design for a private company, Eureka Scientific in Berkeley, Calif. Edwards says that the elevator could be a reality in just 15 years. He presented his latest ideas in August at a workshop on the space elevator in Seattle. Carbon nanocubes are the strongest material known today and are easier to make than before. These scientists -- and others -- want to incorporate these nanocubes into fibers and ribbons to build the space elevator. Besides this difficult task, there are other technical challenges. For one, the ribbons would act as lightning rods, the path of least resistance between a thundercloud and Earth. The heat generated by a lightning strike could sever a ribbon. One solution, says Edwards, is to place the ground station in a zone off the coast of Ecuador that receives few lightning strikes. The floating station could move the lower end of the cable out of the path of the rare storms that do occur in that region. Micrometeors and humanmade space debris punching through a cable pose another hazard. Widening the cable in the region where space debris is most common -- between 500 and 1,700 km above Earth -- should make the elevator more tolerant of these random hits, Edwards says. Nonetheless, minor impacts from asteroid debris and damage from other hazards are inevitable. "Think of the space elevator structure as a 100,000-km-long highway that will require ongoing maintenance and repair," says Smitherman. It will stretch 2.5 times Earth's circumference. I don't know if this space elevator will ever be built, but it will take years and billions of dollars. And the round-trip ticket might cost only $20,000. Source: Ron Cowen, Science News, Week of Oct.5, 2002 5- Quantum Leaps May Solve Impossible Problems Today, please fasten your seat belts. We'll look at a paper from an Australian mathematician, Tien Kieu. Here is what he discovered. Problems that used to be considered "unsolvable" or "incomputable" may be solved using the almost mystical properties of quantum mechanics. Are you scratching your head? Wait, it's only the beginning. Computability has long been defined by the so-called "Turing-Church Thesis," named for the 20th century's two giants of computer science and mathematical logic, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, who essentially invented the modern-day computer. "Problem solvability" has been equated ever since with "Turing computability." If a computer (Turing Machine) cannot solve a problem, the problem cannot be solved, and vice-versa -- if you have an insoluble problem, a computer will not be able to solve it! "We dispute the Turing-Church thesis by showing that there exist computable functions -- computable by executing well-defined quantum mechanical procedures in a finite manner -- that are not Turing-computable," Kieu claims in a recent paper on the topic. In other words, Kieu claims to have discovered incomputable problems that are actually computable with the help of quantum mechanics. Still with me? Kieu's work may kill two mathematical birds with one stone by solving the tenth of David Hilbert's famous 23 mathematical problems, which happens to be equivalent to solving Turing's famous "halting problem." In the year 1900, Hilbert asked for a way to decide whether any algebraic equation involving only whole numbers could be solved using an algorithm or program -- a set of well-defined rules executed in a finite number of steps. This was Hilbert's famous "tenth problem" (of 23). Kieu believes he has solved both problems. With quantum mechanics, he says he can use a "quantum algorithm" to search through an infinite number of potential solutions to Hilbert's proposed equation and perform the search in a finite period of time. If there is a solution, he will see it -- and since he has seen every possible solution, he will know whether the equation can be solved using his algorithm (Hilbert's problem), and he will know whether his "quantum computer" will halt, since it is done computing (Turing's problem). You don't have enough? Tien Kieu's paper, "Quantum algorithm for the Hilbert's tenth problem," is just a click away. Here is the abstract. We propose a quantum algorithm for the classically non-computable Hilbert's tenth problem, which ultimately links to the Turing halting problem. Quantum continuous variables and quantum adiabatic evolution are employed for an implementation. Also discussed are a method for the time estimation for the adiabatic evolution, and a comparison with more the well-known quantum computation employing a finite number of qubits. Provided certain hamiltonian and its ground state can be physically constructed according to the algorithm, the notion of effective computability is extended beyond the Church-Turing thesis of classical computability. Source: Mike Martin, NewsFactor Network, October 7, 2002 6- IT advances to drive lots of job cuts, Gartner predicts I always like to read the forecasts done by IDG, Gartner, Forrester or the other market research firms. Especially when they say a particular market will increase from $10 million today to $50 billion two years from now. And I really enjoy reading these forecasts two or more years after their first publication. Anyway, with this particular report, Gartner gives almost no numbers. It's more qualitative than quantitative. So I suppose their experts cannot really go wrong with this forecast. Here is how Thomas Hoffman starts his review about the latest Gartner's analysis of the IT market. The good news, according to Gartner Inc. prognosticators, is that technology is going to continue to help companies become more efficient. The bad news is that it could cost you your job. Gartner said it expects successful companies buoyed by a stronger economy and continued advances in technology to lay off millions of employees starting within the next two years. Here are the ten predictions done by Gartner. Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers. Most major new systems will be interenterprise or cross-enterprise systems. Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies. Companies will lay off millions of employees. The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market . Moore's Law will hold true through this decade. Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007. Business activity monitoring will hit the mainstream within five years. Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions. The pendulum swings back to decentralized IT operations by 2004. Source: Thomas Hoffman, Computerworld, October 7, 2002 7- The Management Secrets of the Brain I found this story pretty interesting, but I still don't know what it is. A science story? The author, M. Mitchell Waldrop, is a science writer. A management one? It's published by Business 2.0. Or is it just entertaining? You'll judge by yourselves. Take a sip of coffee. Say hello to a colleague. Congratulations: You're a regular Jack Welch. If your brain were a gigantic corporation, its CEO would have just carried out an astonishing display of management skill. Those two simple everyday acts, neuroscientists tell us, are considerably more complicated than the supervision of a big company like General Electric which boasts more than 300,000 employees in 14 business units spread across 100 countries. That's nothing compared with the human brain, which has a staff of about 100 billion nerve cells shuffling countless messages to one another. It also has separate divisions for vision, hearing, movement, touch, and smell, at least two departments for language processing, a variety of committees for recognizing faces, and a working group for social relations. Your brain is the ultimate example of a complex, decentralized organization. And because we (usually) behave coherently, smoothly integrating new circumstances as they arise, the brain is also the epitome of an adaptive organization, a learning organization, a shared-vision organization -- in short, the ideal modern company. >From this, M. Mitchell Waldrop gives us five rules of management we should learn from how our brains are working. The first rule is: "Never try to micromanage a large, complex organization." The reality is that your conscious decisions and experiences represent only the tiniest fraction of what's actually going on in your brain. Before you can take that sip of morning coffee, for example, your motor cortex has to do a phenomenal amount of subconscious planning and coordination just to move your hand toward the cup. Before you can greet your colleague, your vision centers have to do an equally incredible amount of subconscious information processing just to recognize her face. There's not enough executive attention in the world to micromanage this level of activity. And that's why the brain has evolved to carry out such processes far below the level of consciousness, using the equivalent of "standard operating procedures." Some of these procedures are subroutines that have been hardwired into the brain since birth, like our ability to see color. Abilities such as reading and walking are so thoroughly practiced that they might as well be hardwired. Either way, they allow us to conduct most of our daily routines on autopilot. But that doesn't mean that a sprawling enterprise can actually manage itself. from Henry Rosenstock, correspondent of the Börsen Kurier