Category: Technology

The Demise of Spinning Disks and Other Technology Verges

It’s very clear that memory devices that use spinning platters and disks are all headed to obsolescence soon. This means Hard drives, CD players, DVD’s and DVD players. So what will the replacement be?

The most likely replacement is streaming digital mixed with the SD-MMC card in some form or another. Since manufacturers are making 128 GB versions of these chips, it’s likely that the lower GB versions will become dirt cheap soon, and when that happens 16 GB chips might become the media that movies get sold on. (The typical HD or Blu ray movie takes less than 8GB on average on DVD’s now.) There are also solid state devices using similar memory technology for capacity right now, while solid devices like the Ipod touch are relatively expensive for the average consumer for the memory (64 GB), they will improve.

Disk based industries have a vested interest in keeping spinning platter formats alive, but engineering and physics really demand that the switch be made. CD’s and DVD’s can skip when you hit bumps in cars or when you bounce while walking, while the solid state chips require zero moving parts to play. You can also plug SD-MMC chips into any player device with an SD slot, they are low energy, and the minimal storage space required makes these portable – all are media properties that consumers would desire if manufacturers only provided them. At Best Buy and other stores you could place that entire row of bins of CD’s and DVD’s on a couple of spinning racks of cards with MMC’s on them. Manufacturers already see this coming and are starting to bridge technologies – e.g. if you have an elder Sony Blu ray player, you can get a chip that enables BD-Live.

When this will happen is probably in a span of under ten years but more than a couple, however do keep in mind that many early adopters have already switched to all digital, all streaming for media purchases. The average consumer will still want physical media, but the savings for industry are clear (how much fuel and space do you save shipping MMC’s over CD’s and DVDs?)

I haven’t bought a CD in years, and the past two it’s been the same story for blu ray and DVD formats — why would you when you can just get what you want digitally?

What does this mean for car stereos? Will the MMC slot replace the CD player, and how soon? Will built-in GPS units come solid state and update via SD? Will car stereos come with memory and wi-fi — will you be able to share your full ITUNES or other player library with them? What about DVD players? Will the blue ray player be replaced by a slot in the TV pretty quickly, if not why not?

Meanwhile it’s still expensive for storage on spinning disks once you get to terabyte or better hard drives, and there is a shortage due to flooding in Thailand a while back so the prices will remain high for the short-term, but once SSD’s start dropping in price & raising in capacity the switch is going to happen fast.

So your Blu ray player and that 2 terabyte hard disk drive will become quaintly humorous examples of old tech like an 8 track tape player is now. The changes to storage, shipping, sales, players, and the refresh of technology and network in nodes to support streaming and some form of solid state media will drive industry for years. These are the types of changes that keep the economy growing and the world spinning, so help push back against the recidivist and entrenched industries fighting against change — I mean isn’t it past time that you should be able to stream your entire music library into your car’s stereo player? Isn’t it past time that you should be able to safely archive your photos and media for at least the length of your remaining life span?

What I’ve been doing

I spent much of the past two weeks ripping all of my CD”s back into ITunes again & then nuking the old copies. The old format was a lossy 128 kbps .wav file, and the new format is a lossless version using “ALAC” (Apple Lossless Audio Compression.) The sound quality difference is noticeably improved except on some antique hi-fi Kingston Trio and Merseybeat tunes I have so better quality alone really made the effort worth it, but I also subscribed to “Match” so that all of my tunes are now in the cloud.

The big bonus at the end was also being able to see all the dupes by clicking on the “match status” Icon and nuking them. I can now also pull them down to devices that I authorize from the cloud, and Apple sends down a 256 KBPS or better version. With the nuking of the dupes accumulated over the last decade I actually ended up improving the quality of all the songs, while reducing the size by a third.

Every flat surface looked like this as I started sorting the CD's into artist piles.

During conversion the only songs that gave me any problems where some old tunes purchased digitally through rhapsody and Walmart, and then converted into a version playable by my phone and other devices by Tunebite a few years back. I was able to pull down good copies for everything except a couple of Sony tunes, which I just repurchased.

I am also playing with some macro tube lens extenders for my Canon T2i, which allow me to put the camera lens bare inches away from what I am photographing. I’m pretty happy at the price, and with the results. The section of bubbled glass you see below is about the size of a normal asprin.

sea glass float
A tiny section of a sea glass float

Rescued from the Archives: My Wonderwall

Here’s a post I wrote a few years back, but it’s more relevant now that people can see the prices of large flat screen displays dropping. We really aren’t that far from a day when they are inexpensive enough to replace a section or two of 4′ X 8′ gypsum wall board in a room or three. Along with that we’ve achieved more miniaturization of computers and reductions in power consumption. So picture a world where you wear your computer, and you display on the nearest wall.

Wonderwall is a sappy, smarmy love tune by Oasis, a representative sample of the inane lyrics below:

And all the roads that lead to you were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
I don’t know how

I said maybe
You’re gonna be the one who saves me ?
And after all
You’re my wonderwall

The song was pretty popular a while back because the lyrics were reasonably well-sung, but what is a “Wonderwall” in reality?

My wonder-wall would embody things to come. Shortly deposition techniques and the new sciences advances will be perfected as companies race to create the cheapest, largest, flat panel HD screen.

A few years beyond that there will be “pixelized fabric” and the computer technology to use it. It will change billboards and movie screens, but after that it will be cheap enough to coat the walls of your home with. Maybe just one wonderful wall to start.

So what will you put on your wonder-wall? Mine will be a real-time stream from the Niagara falls internet channel (trust me someone will create this,) with a full-time close-up of the Falls along with booming bass falls-thunder-sound to match the wall.
Continue reading “Rescued from the Archives: My Wonderwall”

When your machines talk together, What will they say about you?

As the rest of the century unfolds you will see machines and artificial Artificial Intelligence units talking among themselves more and more until that chatter becomes a persistent tapestry in the background of our lives that we only rarely hear or notice. When the machine chatter becomes nearly ubiquitous, what will our machines be saying about us?

We can speculate on some of the near horizon M2M apps, but what Machine to Machine chatter will be like mid century and beyond is really impossible to predict. There’s already a lot of M2M out there but now it usually takes human request through push of button, click of app, or other trigger to initiate the conversation.

In the future it will most likely happen seamlessly and automatically. Sensors will detect our presence, temperature, vital signs, position, and everything else measurable. Timers will know when to trigger events, and meters will measure our personal context for events that unfold around us almost completely without our direction. Context will be things like: Are you standing, sitting, laying, moving, or still? What time is it? When did you last eat? What thing did you last do, choose, look at, move toward? What did you last say and what motions did your hand make?

As making machines smart and then smarter becomes a matter of pennies, and as having them talk together wirelessly and automatically also becomes cheap, most companies will open their devices and they will tart them up with artificial artificial intelligence (AAI.*) This will escalate and accelerate for the rest of century until most devices are talking incessantly to most other devices, sensors, and network devices like Chatty Cathy dolls on a loop. Initially companies will do this to leapfrog the competition but later it will be absolutely necessary if they want to stay in business.

Let’s start with a few simplex assumptions and build upon them to get to an example that’s simple, easy, and really doable tomorrow. Machines do not have artificial intelligence yet,  so what starts the conservation between them? It will likely take artificial artificial intelligence (AAI,*) or programs with contextual triggers, thresholds, or control zones that are also able to search and query databases both at home and online.

What will the conversation be about? That will be dependent on the devices talking, the context, and the amount of artificial artificial intelligence (AAI*) built in. Context might consist of time of day, location, position, weather, and data about you — like when you last ate, whether you are standing, sitting, or laying down, who else is present, what songs you like, which artists you like, who your family and friends are, what they like, etc. etc. etc.

So here’s an easy example, all the parts exist but none talk together yet. You drive up to your house – your garage is opened by you pressing a button, and you manually switch off the radio. In a fully developed M2M environment things could be different. Your car could signal ahead that you were coming once it recognized that you were near your house with it’s GPS. The Garage door opener could periodically query the camera out front and your car’s until it got short distance confirmed recognition of both your car and your face. It could then open the door, and turn on the speakers in the garage. As you exit the car after pulling into the garage the speakers in the garage play the song, station, or stream that you were listening to in the car. The Garage door opener signals the TV in your living room to turn on and tune in the news channel you usually watch this time of day, and etc. etc. etc. Everything in this example could be kludged together today with existing tech, but since M2M is definitely our future it really does behoove us to create some open standards around it.

Perhaps the FCC should investigate M2M only spectrum, and Universities should look at standards for security and protection (E.G. if our machines are going to know everything about us then they damned well better be secured with biometrics and much more.)

 

* Artificial Artificial intelligence is when masses of data regarding human or individual preferences or masses of actual crowd sourced human input is sifted to get to best choice or a range of best choices – it’s crowd sourcing, history sourcing, or both to find a few best choices: examples are Google and other search engines with their history of other people’s preferences when searching your search term. Others are the “you might also like” recommendation engines at Netflix and Itunes where they use the history of your preferences and look for like, and another is Mechanical Turk at Amazon.com where they put the question to hordes of people on the net to get best answer. This is a term I first heard from Jonathan Zittrain in a Berkman center lecture and I am stealing the term because it’s so appropriate. Bottom line it looks like the machine is thinking and possibly prescient, but it’s really neither — it’s all done through brute force or lots of human responses sifted through context.

Dawn of the Omnisensor

I’ve been talking about cheap sensors and how all things electric are getting smaller and wireless, so let’s get a little crazy and look down the road at things that will probably come.

At some point lens, camera logic and memory will become one solid state chip. At some point thermometer, barometer, GPS, altimeter, camera, humidity, RF,  motion, fire detector, and all other possible sensors will become miniaturized and then placed in various combinations on a variety of solid state chips and devices.

The potential to fit all of the above on a single chip is likely sometime within the next 20 years – what happens then? What happens when they become mass produced and dirt cheap?

Do drones carpet battlefields ahead of the fight with a carpet of smart networked omnisensors? Does all privacy everywhere in the public space become thoroughly eradicated as it will be easy to place miniature sensors anywhere?Will your house or room know when you have a temperature, will it recognize you and your friends faces and voices for security purposes? Will omnisensors be embedded in everything from your coffee maker to your lightswitch to your mailbox?

The possibilities are endless, and predicting the most important aspects of how Omni sensors will affect our lives is really impossible.

 

The Age of the Cheap Sensor and Machine to Machine Chatter

Last post we talked about home medical sensors, and how they could easily become available for use with apps tied to a PC, IPOD, or other computing device in your home. I mentioned disposable pulse oximetry leads, thermometers, and BP cuffs, but those are not the only sensors that have become inexpensive.

Sensors are becoming easier to embed on a single chip through nanotechnology and the outcome is smaller and cheaper sensors everywhere. My camera uses an imaging sensor that’s more capable than the first one that went up in Hubble — it costs less than a thousand dollars for the sensor, camera body and application and two lenses. You can now get webcams for your PC that are cheaper than fifty dollars yet they are much more capable than studio television cameras costing tens of thousands of dollars from a few decades ago.

Bundle the ability to package an application and a sensor on small chip with the ability to wirelessly network it and you can see where this is going for home networks and the potential to have your devices constantly talking to each other. One example of this is the “Eyefi” SDHC chip for cameras. Right now these cost under $50.00 and you can expect that price to drop further over the next five years.

Now, what about a refrigerator that can talk to your computer or your phone wirelessly? What if it could also read every RFID strip on every container in your kitchen to give you an inventory while you are looking up that recipe? Why doesn’t your thermostat, water heater, furnace, and oven talk to your home computer? What could you do if they did? How about a rooftop wireless weather station? Why shouldn’t your home computer be able to interrogate your car’s computer for tire pressure or stream tunes, maps, or directions into it’s memory?

Wouldn’t you like an infrared and motion sensor array around your home that could stop motion record what’s going on through inexpensive cameras when things are detected, further shouldn’t your home security array recognize your face, and voice, and retina? Shouldn’t your outdoor camera recognize you and your car and open your garage door when you drive up? Shouldn’t there be a Kinect type sensor array in every room so you can issue gestural commands anywhere?

The possibilities are nearly endless, and we are soon crossing the horizon where much of this becomes cheap and easy to do. It’s a matter now of setting some standards and making your personal computer into a home server (since your phone by now is becoming your personal computer) and turning your wireless router into a plug and play wireless communications hub. Yes, I know that home wireless routers are supposed to be that now, but they are too difficult and insecure for the average user. When my 70 year old dad can easily connect any wireless device, from phone, to IPOD, to camera then we will be there, machines will recognize you, your gestures, and will be able to chatter with each other about you.

Medical Devices coming to an IPOD or PC near you soon?

While in the hospital for my quint bypass last July one of the noteworthy things was how reliant the hospital is on moment by moment accurate measures of your vital signs to keep you healthy. The actual sensors they use are cheap and in some cases even disposable (pulse-ox leads, litmus tabs for blood sugar meters, etc.) The bulk of the monitoring is done by software periodically recording from a very simple sensor set.

It’s inevitable that home sensors and programs will be widely available in this decade, and in another decade every “Home PC” and possibly even wireless device will come with a med suite of apps, that can measure your vitals and upload it to your doctor’s office. Remote appointments might become more common, with health coaches and nurses calling to ask you to “plug in” so they can get your vitals.

Maybe the pulse ox lead will plug into a USB port along with a a blood pressure cuff and thermometer, all are relatively cheap, simple and easy to manufacture. Think that’s a stretch? Here’s the first entrant and with lots of baby boomers retiring the numbers of people monitoring their own vitals will increase significantly. So who is going to make the first “Home Med” kit for the PC, XBox etc? Will Doctor offices soon be handing out USB port pulse-ox/BP cuffs and prescribing an application download?

Back in March 2009 at the iPhone OS 3.0 debut event, Apple’s Scott Forstall pointed out medical devices specifically as one of the more interesting class of peripherals that could leverage the new custom app interface capabilities. And while it’s certainly an interesting concept — keeping tabs on your general health from the comfort of your own home — we haven’t really seen it catch on (only a couple of products come to mind). That isn’t stopping iHealth; the company’s blood pressure dock, available today from its online store (we’re told it should be filtering through Apple’s own channels later this month) ties in with a specialized iPhone / iPod touch / iPad app to monitor and track blood pressure from the comfort of your home, where theoretically there shouldn’t be a stranger in a white coat making you extra nervous.

Read the rest at Engadget

Primal Nerd Rage: Why I’m an Optimist

Predicting a technology’s future is problematic due to competing technologies, converging technologies, trailing standards bodies, and occasionally poor legislation — and those are just the minor factors. The major factors are the multitude of gaps between new technologies, some unseen as of yet. Predicting how humans will creatively bridge these gaps and which methods will then become predominant can’t be done with reliability.

These holes and valleys in our technology are where many will profit in coming years since people are going demand they be bridged one way or another, sooner or later in this coming decade. If we talk about them a bit it could be sooner. If we talk about them a lot, then the economy could turn around very quickly for each of these verges or gaps is a goldmine for willing entrepreneurs. Nerds rage against these gaps — nerds get frustrated when they think things like “Why can’t I stream my latest Itunes songlist direct to my Car and phone for my next trip? Why must I either get an Ipod adapter, or burn a CD to get them to my car? Why can’t my phone play my Itunes songs period?” After stewing the past decade lots of little things like this have been bubbling around and stirring rage in nerd town, and I can tell you right now that they’ve had it with limits…

Jonathan Zittrain worries that the future will close down a bit, moving from the generative fabric of the open PC and the “Wild West” Web to the closed proprietary devices and walled garden appliances such as Ipods and wireless phones. I think there is weight to what Jonathan says, since at minimum there’s desire from “Big Content” to keep things captive in their walled gardens. It’s important to look at potential futures across all of these gaps – and how open or closed things will be. Will they be a blend of closed and open? Which are most likely to succeed very long term? Those are subjects for the coming year here, and I’ll be examining all in  future posts here since I’m changing this to a pure tech/science blog after having moved my political blogging over to Little Green Footballs pages.

Below are some of the questions leading to potentially bright or dim futures I’ll be covering this coming year just because it’s past time for new things in all of these areas:

Wireless in the home – there are all sorts of wireless gadgets and tech out there, but none of them really intermix and play well together. I can get proprietary devices that work over wireless G, N, or bluetooth, and I can get wireless home phones in the DECT 6.0 spectrum, I can get infra-red remotes for TV’s, Ipod docks, and picture frames, and I can get bluetooth keyboards, mice and headsets. There are wireless chips for my camera, and my printer does wireless networking. There isn’t an aggregated control interface or API manager for these devices however on home PC’s and wireless routers. Should there be a standard that braids all of these multiple modes into a single home wireless space that’s transparent to consumers? Should wireless hubs be plug and play, if so what’s best strategy to secure them?

The verge here is between devices and I/O — each device is creating their own I/O button pad, keyboard, display, etc. atm, but with wireless networking and the concept of flexible pixel, printer, game, and audio space wouldn’t it be better if that weather station or remote camera could interface wirelessly with your flat panel in any room? Why can’t your keyboard and mouse downstairs direct your doorway cam upstairs, or your laptop, or your bedroom TV?

What about video cams? Sensor chips for them have dramatically dropped in price while increasing in capability – you can get  video cams, panels, projectors, and software enough to outdo any television studio from ten years ago for under 20K — what changes will that drive? Telepresence, video conferencing? Will there be a green room booth with a changeable backdrop for phone calls in some offices or homes, or will most walls be fully dedicated to pixelspace in 20 years? Will custom designers create your perfect avatar based on your enhanced body and face so you can answer the video phone while you are unshaven or having a bad hair day with a near perfect appearance and mimicry of your actual features while you talk?

Streaming media vs Proprietary channels vs on Demand – is it past time to tear down cable tiers and broadcast times for shows?

Physical media: How much longer will the DVD in whatever form live? Will it be SDRAM chips that replace them, or will it be purely streams?

Sensors: when will there be universal API and xHTML style outputs for all of them – from weather devices to cameras to motion sensors to thermostats?

What’s the future of I/O channels and human computer command systems? The obvious thing driving the question is Kinect, but what other verges need better crossing for command and control systems within your office, home, car, town, or city? Will there be facial recognition systems that replace the need for password security? Will voice recognition and gestures replace mouse and keyboard? Will every room have it’s own gesture and facial recognition sensors, wifi I/O and infra red command blaster? Where are our WALDOs?

Home PC / Home Server / Home OS — with all of this happening, shouldn’t your “personal computer” or “PC” really be an HC? Should it be a personal computer, or should it be a home computer/server/controller? Further, will HC’s or Home Computers need some pseudo AI like that featured in the Ray Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains”? Are you nerd enough that you cried when that house died?

One last thing while we are speculating wildly : where the heck is my flying car?

Let’s face it — us nerds are getting frustrated with the gaps, and there’s nothing better for making new things happen in the second decade of this new millennium than primal nerd rage against the machine.

*Primal Nerd Rage graphic copyright Bethesda Software