Staring Down a Revolution: Questions for Sid Karin 114
Mark of THE CITY writes "Mark of THE
CITY writes
"Since helping to found the San Diego Supercomputer
Center in the 1980s, Sid Karin has distinguished
himself as a national expert on digital technology and
its possibilities for scientific research. Go here for the full interview."
"Technological revolutions don't happen every day" (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we'll see fewer bells and whistles and more fundamental and substantive shifts in how the technology basically works and how and when we choose/bother to use it.
RS
Re:Latest Sony all products keygen incl mp3/mpeg p (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:His revolution: seemingly infinite storage (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a reality today!? So does that mean when I'm on the way home on the train today I'll be able to watch any movie or any episode of any TV show I can name? Cool!!!
What will we do with infinite storage? Probably just hoard more data, I think. There's only a small amount of data that is actually usable to any one person, expanding storage capacity isn't going to change that.
And I suppose you're going to be able to tell me exactly what data you need for every day for the rest of your life? Even the stuff that hasn't actually been created yet? The point of having it all there is to be able to use whatever you want or need to suite the occassion.
My movie example is a little frivolous so try this. A lawyer may need to look up all case law in a particular area for example, but doesn't know what cases he'll have to look that up in a week or a month. Or what about the scientist or medical researcher that wants to look up all articles in a particular area of research?
By those standards, even a terabyte is tiny.
If you're failing to understand these basic ideas, it's no wonder you think we don't need more storage. You remind me of the infamous quote of Bill Gates' about no one needing more than 512Kb of RAM.
Re:His revolution: seemingly infinite storage (Score:2, Interesting)
Lawyers have such a tool. Doctors have such a tool. These tools already exist. Yes, they will expand as information and knowledge grows.
But the question is not whether information will accumulate. It is whether we will have the tools to gather from that data the information that is relevant to us personally.
Yes, in a sense you can have access to any movie or TV episode you want to watch. Currently that information is out on the Internet. If your device is able to access that, download it, and decompress it in a reasonable manner, you'd be able to watch it anywhere you went. The storage medium is just not local to your device.
So what happens when it is? Well, things will be more convenient, for one. But fundamentally the things that you will do with that data is the same as what you do with it now.
But also consider this, information is always growing. So in order to have your stored data be up to date, it would need a constant uplink to some central database server to handle every change in information that happens every minute of every day. Why not just revert (Internet style) to data on demand? With sufficient bandwidth, it would be essentially the same as unlimited storage.
Yeah, sure. (Score:2, Interesting)
He seems to have noticed the problems with the record industry's current business model, but he's not saying anything new. Next!
Re:Yeah, sure. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wireless anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why waste money on wifi when you can carry it in your pocket? It doesn't matter. It's the same thing.
Ever heard of distributed clustering file systems? You download and cache everything, it's distributed. Everything you want is transparently aviable to you, you don't have to worry about wifi being aviable or terrabytes of information aviable at your finger tips.. You will have both.
And it's not just your music, or most music genre... but ALL recorded music, from ALL of human history.
Think 'personal copy of the library of congress on your persona pseudo-mp3 player'. This would be cheaper and easier then picking out songs to carry with you or stream over a network.
Think 30-40 or a hundred years from now.. not just what is going to be aviable in 5-10 years.
This sort of thing would spell the end of pop culture as we know it. When you have equal access to recordings of Mozart to videos of authentic Mongolian folk dancing, to the collective lifetime works of artists now only known for being one-hit-wonders during the 70's, to the collective recordings of your neighbor down the street he made while singing to himself in the shower on everybody's computer on every street corner of the entire world it means that the '20 twenty list' or what VH1 has to say about a subject such as music idols as about as irrelevent to you and the average person as what my thoughts were on Jan 3rd of 2003 at 2:12am in the morning on the subject of silly putty.
All information, everywere, all the time. Everything about Everything. All of human history, updated by the microsecond.
Think the hitchhiker guide to the galaxy on steroids...
All we have to do is get rid of this pesky DRM bullshit, but I can't expect it to last much into the next decade or two. Realy.
Look at it another way... A ultra-unpersonalized (Score:1, Interesting)
Say you just busted your last set of headphones. You want to get a new player and some people have a slick looking pair of headphones to come with a updated music player device.
Notice the steps:
Step 1. You buy the music player device.
Step 2. You plug in your headphones.
Step 3. You listen to your music.
You notice how there is no 'download songs' or 'copy files' step?
This is because the media player comes pre-installed with the music you like.
However it's not because of focus marketting or they tracked your records thru you by some GPS doo-dad you carry around.
It has the music you like, becuase it already has all the music anybody anywere likes. In fact it also has music that nobody likes.
This is becuase it comes pre-installed with ALL music. All music everywere.
The wifi may come into it becuase you downloaded your 'favorites' playlist, although potentionally they could have that pre-installed, too.
The _real_ questions for Sid. (Score:2, Interesting)
Karin is in a position to answer some really tough questions.
The questions that need to be answered are things like, how can peer review be improved to eliminate the cronyism that goes on? When will the National Science Foundation understand that persistent IT infrastructure for supercomputing is as critical as things like telescopes in hawaii and needs more than a 5 year vision and support structure? When will Congress recognie that cyberinfrastructure is a buzzword that no one knows how to apply? Cyberinfrastructure is a word that had no vision behind it and is headed down the path of just being a pot of money that all the science areas will divide among themselves at the _expense_ of any real infrastructure. Teragrid isn't an example either. That project was once a great concept, but everyone involved is competing with each other to stay alive, which means no one is truely working together. Teragrid has long since been forced off the path because the major centers don't want to let it succeed and most certainly don't want it to be a project through which their "partners" can be viewed as successful.
Sid and the leaders of his generation had a hand in getting the NSF to see reality once and setting the path. Now, NSF is trying to control and set a path itself instead of letting the visionaries and the scientists do it. The content of the Atkins report (http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report
Supercomputing, advanced storage, grid computing and next generation networks all are lagging behind in this country because the NSF doesn't listen to vision and can't create and sustain one of its own. They are into the playing of politics t hat they won't set up the foundation for infrastructure that could last long enough to make a difference without falling into funding battles every 3rd year. Given there isn't a 10 or 20 year vision and foundation, is it any surprise that the supercomputing centers are so busy protecting themselves from each other that serious attempts at visionary projects don't happen?
Fortunately, the Department of Energy appears to be taking up the slack for now. More power to DoE for recognizing and filling the gap, but its a sad state for NSF to be in.