Inventions – Page 15 – Auxiliary Memory

PickensPlan.com

If you haven’t been to PickensPlan.com yet, please stop by and view the short video. T. Boone Pickens, the big oil man has big plans for wind power. This video should make you feel better about the current oil crisis. Just the thinking is a step in the right direction.

Mr. Pickens’ plan is pretty straight forward and sounds both practical and doable. It’s not a complete solution, but it would dramatically reduce the demand for oil and in a reasonable amount of time. We need more billionaires out there thinking up ideas like this one.

What’s amazing is there is so many people coming up with great ideas that I wonder why people do not feel more positive about the future. Just look at what the last two days of piddling good news has done for the stock market. It only takes positive thinking to create a bull market. Sure, we shouldn’t live in fantasy land and ignore our problems and failures. I can’t see why the nightly news can’t present at least a 50-50 mix of good and bad news, instead of a long stream of negatives with a token upbeat story at the end.

If the middle of America could be made into a giant wind farm, why can’t the deserts be turned into giant solar energy farms? I expect the next twenty-five years to be exciting and transformational. If every oil billionaire comes up with a substitute for oil we should be energy independent in no time.

Jim

Beyond the iPod

Because the iPod and iTunes has had such a fantastic impact on the music industry, I have to wonder if another industry shaking revolution like it is possible? I’m reading The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, where he praises the U.S. for economic innovation, so I assume for us to stay ahead of the pack we’ll have to keep inventing new tech to market. We’ve seen a lot of technological change in the last 50 years, but does that mean we’ll see constant growth in the next 50 years?

And will other emerging capitalistic markets start beating us at our own game? Zakaria claims that America is not declining but the rest of the world is rising. That means both new markets and new competitors. But will anyone anywhere create another product like the MP3 player to change the marketing of music again?

I remember the days before video recorders – where few people saw the advent of the VHS revolution coming, but once it was underway it was very easy to accept a steady stream of new tech acronyms like CD, PC and DVD. The MP3 was even more revolutionary and economically disturbing because music moved from physical objects to bits, bytes and electrons. There was no need for any of these inventions other than convenience, which shoots down that old theory about necessity being the mother of invention. We’re now into the HD and Blu-Ray upheavals.

I originally started collecting music by buying 45s and LPs. Then I had to start over with CDs. And for a short while a few years ago I had started moving to SACDs. I’m hesitant to make another move, but I’ve finally committed to the MP3 format. The question is, will I have buy my favorite songs all over again in another format in the future?

But back to my questions about iPods. Assuming that the iPhone is really an iPod merged with two other revolutionary technologies, a cell phone and a computer, is there theoretically room for a new paradigm shifting music device? If Steve Jobs sanctioned subscription music there would be a slight bump in the iPod road, but not much. People would still be listening to music with white plastic buds in their ears. Once you get rid of the physical media where is there room to invent? Sure, we could talk science fiction and imagine ESP delivered music, but we have to stay somewhat realistic.

Maybe I’m not imaginative enough, but no matter how much I rack my brains I can’t imagine a new gadget for music. I can imagine variations on the current iPod, lots of them in fact, but they’re all just improvements: larger hard drive, larger flash memory, better sounding headphones, tiny built-in Hi-Fi speakers, SACD quality files, better filing systems, but nothing that offers drastic change. I feel the same about personal computers and televisions. Once you go beyond the physical medium of DVDs like DVRs, improvements are more of a matter of storage space and video quality.

Gadget junkies are going to need to look elsewhere for big society-changing technology. Before long I think the geekiest of geeks will be buying home solar power generators. If you can generate a significant portion of your own power, getting into a plug-in hybrid cars is the next gizmo that’s going to change society. Now those two technologies are going to be huge game changers. It will be like the iPod – you won’t need to buy that much gas to run your car – or at least not much compared to how things are now, and the secondary fuel may not even be gasoline. See the trend – away from the physical. Think 1950s movie science fiction where all the aliens did everything with glowing balls.

Mechanical evolution is moving towards fewer moving parts (hard drive to flash drive) and away from the physical (CD to MP3). Electric cars have a lot fewer moving parts, and fewer parts in general. Solar energy panels, LCD TVs, iPhones don’ have any moving parts. If computers move to flash memory storage and became completely net oriented, they could even jettison the optical drive, and the only moving parts would be in the keyboard.

There’s a chance that Blu-Ray won’t even catch on because we’ve already gone beyond the physical with online movies and DVRs. I would buy a Blu-Ray player now if it was $99.95 and get discs from Netflix, but if they don’t bring down the price soon they will have competing products that distribute HD video over the web, or cable companies will figure out a way to distribute HD programs on demand. Cable companies are already teamed up with Rhapsody and other subscription music services to provide songs on demand.

My guess is the end is near for revolutionary gadgets for music, movies, television, audio books, e-books and other media that can be digitized. What we will see is refinement in software. Putting a cell phone, GPS, camera, computer into an iPod styled package isn’t revolutionary, just evolutionary. What makes the new iPhone 3G so exciting is the software. Now that the iPhone is opened up to developers it becomes very promising for endless speculation of what it could be, but it’s still the same old gadget. That’s why Google saw the Android phone as such a big deal – open development – build it and they will come.

If a person could ask his iPod to play the ten most played songs on iPods in America during the last 24 hours, that would effect the music industry. If she could ask for the top iPod songs from Russia, India or Dubai, that could have a new kind of impact too. Or if you’re on a road trip and could ask your iPod to play the most popular songs of the towns you are passing, that would be another interesting variation. The Zune song sharing feature is very cool and Apple and others should copy it.

All those features effect the distribution of music, making music more global and making it more social. Sheet music was the technology for spreading music in the early days. The first gadget to change the world of music was the phonograph. Then came the radio, creating the mass audience. To understand the impact of radio watch Ken Burn’s Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, which you can buy from Amazon or rent from Netflix, but if you want even more details, track down the out-of-print book by the same title written by Tom Lewis. The phonograph went through many refinements including the CD, but ultimately, the ethereal MP3 player replaced it.

At first the MP3 file technology, combined with technology to play the file set music free. Bad for the industry. The goal of the music industry is to sell music as widely as possible. Illegally free MP3 music has a wide distribution, but it’s not necessarily the best way to promote music. Kid’s pretty much stole what they already liked. Radio has always been the best medium to educate people about new music, and it’s always been free too, because it came with programming and promotion.

What will be the next big revolution in the music industry won’t be a gadget but software. The networked computer part of the iPhone and iPod Touch has the ability to promote music in ways never possible before. Whether you buy songs 99 cents at a time, or subscribe to them at $15 a month, getting you to commit ear time to a song is the dream of all musical artists. People have complained about the stale rotation of Top 40 music for decades, but with a world of hundreds of countries and thousands of cultures, and all their musical history, there’s a lot of music to discover and play.

Let’s say you want to get into music history, wouldn’t it be fun to tell your iPod to start with 1950 and begin playing the Top 100 Hits of that year and move forward in time, and then use your click wheel to rate the songs. Or buy a future edition of “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” from the Teaching Company and have it play full pieces while it instructs you about the history of music? Or buy a special edition of Richie Unterberger‘s history of folk rock and whenever you hear the narrative mention a song, it pauses to play the song.

Just remember, it’s not about the iPod stupid, it’s about music. What we want is great music. What we want is for as many composers, performers, producers and publishers to become wealthy or at least make a good living as possible. We want music to stimulate the economy. We want it to be a driving force in culture and art. Every decade needs their own Beatles, Springsteen, Madonna and Prince. Modern pop music is produced like candy and not art. It needs more new waves like Rap and Hip-Hop before they got tired like rock, jazz and country.

I’m willing to call it quits with the development of MP3 music technology. I don’t need any more convenience. What I miss is the excitement I got from music back in the 1960s when I was growing up. What I love is discovering a new song that I’ll play over and over again for two weeks. It’s been a long time since I’ve found such a song. Susie and I are watching The Beatles Anthology, an eight part DVD documentary and it’s riveting. I don’t need or want a new generation of iPods, what I want is the new Beatles.

Jim

Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home. I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology. In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves. In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records. Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies. Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos. We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files. I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files. And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s. Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden. Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives. I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work. I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time. My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site. I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year. My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out. When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow. The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks. I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T. High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood. I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials. I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days. At work today I ran the restore to test things out. Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data. The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra. I used the free web restore method. You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading. It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download. I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs. I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour. Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work.

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it. I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters. The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set. But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want. If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once. Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods. I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things. It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files. My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive. That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive. That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.

Mozy works by creating backup sets. Each set is a snapshot of the moment. If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system. That doesn’t work with my USB system. Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup. In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets. Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service. What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money. I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations. I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business. Online backups is a fantastic concept. It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe.

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files. Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine. Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux. It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles. I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files. I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house. I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust. It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on. Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files. For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there. Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday. Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc. It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location. However, I don’t know if that’s practical. If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load? Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth. But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now.

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment. Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them. I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year. Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer. I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives. That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away. Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good. It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim

Science Fiction Overload

I’ve always loved science fiction but keeping up with the genre is a big damn job. I constantly worry I’m going to miss a breakthrough novel with the impact of Neuormancer or The Life of Pi or Replay just because I was wasn’t keeping up with the times.

As a young bookworm I read several books a week at a time when the science fiction section at the bookstore was a wire rack at the drugstore where I bought my Popular Science and Mad Magazines. There just wasn’t that many new books being published every month and the real focus was on feeding an indiscriminate reading appetite. Reading the book review sections in Amazing, Fantastic, Analog, Galaxy, If, and F&SF kept me perfectly up-to-date on the world of science fiction publishing in 1968, but it’s not enough for 2008.

Every year now Locus Magazine reports there are over 2,000 SF&F books being published as well as a large variety of magazines, graphic novels, online zines, ebooks and other outlets of SF&F storytelling. The field is long past the size that I can comprehend. I’m a small town bookworm living in a giant metropolis of fantastic fiction. Last night I was watching a documentary on Discovery HD about Miami, the town I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. My father’s family moved there in the 1920s. The show made me realize just how much of the city and its glamorous history I had never noticed even though I had lived in many places in Dade County. If I went back home I’d be just another tourist. That’s how I feel about SF&F today. I can’t believe I miss so much.

What I need is a Lonely Planet Guide to the vast hyperactive country of science fiction. For years that was Locus Magazine’s job but even it overwhelms me today. Thank God for the Internet, and a special prayer of thanks to the guys who invented RSS. This year I’ve been on a voyage of discovery to find just the right RSS feeds that are easy to read and reduce the fire-hose of SF information overload down to a water fountain burble.

Of course I added the RSS feed to my old favorite Locus Magazine but strangely enough I was disappointed with its cryptic posts in my Outlook inbox. Some RSS feeds send the entire article and others just send snack-size snippets to entice you to click on a hyperlink and jump over to their site to eat the whole whole meal. The bite-size phrases from Locus seldom get me to byte. I do click now and then and sometimes discover perfect little gems like 2007 SF/F/H Books on Year’s Best Lists, which cross-tabs several review sites to list the books that have gotten the most recommendations for best books of 2007 (first posted on 2/13/8).

This same article was written up by SF Signal on 2/20/8. SF Signal is a fantastic web site that very successfully reports on the most tasty data bits about SF&F. It serves the same function for our genre as Slashdot does for computer news. I’m now trying to decide if I can abandon my RSS feed for Locus Magazine and depend on SF Signal to keep me up-to-date about anything worthy that Locus does publish. In other words a plain RSS feed is not always perfect, so maybe a meta-feed is even better.

Of course the best solution would a single RSS feed that notified me from many sites just the stories I would likely love to read. So if I could train my feed from SF Signal for just the kinds of stories I want to read then that would really save me some major time, but that might be too science fictional of an idea. What I’m wishing for is a reading robot companion that gets to know me perfectly and then spoon feeds me just the right stories.

The trouble is I can only read maybe 7-10 science fiction and fantasy novels a year and maybe another 20-25 short stories. (OK, yes SF&F is great, but there’s actually more healthy stuff to consume too, like science and history books, so I have to limit my SF&F candy.) Logically I should ignore all books but the very best sellers and also read one SF best of the year anthology to sample the best of each year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well doing that. I can dip into several best of anthologies and only find a few real nuggets among the fool’s gold. Not that a diamond to me won’t be cut glass to someone else, or vice versa. And many best sellers are less than filling to me.

What I’m learning to do is search out blogs by various SF&F bookworms with the hope I’ll find a few taste-clones of myself. I’m currently reading:

These readers don’t have my exact reading habits but they read much slower than review sites and they comment about books in a low key personal manner that I identify with. This slows the pace down for finding books. I hope to add other blogs in the future. I find it very easy to keep up with their blog feeds and figure I can eventually handle maybe ten or twelve blogging friends this way. It’s a virtual book club and we chat with each other without even knowing the other is in the room, so to say.

I also find speciality sites like The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Audio to be very helpful too. They cover more stuff than I ever want to handle, but I can easily pick and choose. SF Audio has a good RSS feed with enough content in each post so I quickly click yay or nay with my mouse. IRoSF is formatted like a magazine so it’s easy to pick and choose in the TOC, however I think I would like it better if they sent out RSS feeds of their full stories. Although that might not be what they want after creating such a nice magazine format, but my desire does fit with the new reading paradigm of the RSS.

When it comes down to it we spend a lot of time reading emails, so RSS feeds simply spoon feed us reading material in email size bites. I wish my Kindle was more of a true RSS reader. I haven’t experimented with it using RSS feeds, but I will. The Kindle is even easier to read than my Outlook client. And that’s what my needs comes down to, an easy method to shovel just the right words into my head. I’m getting old, so I can’t process as many words as I want, but these futuristic times really do have the technologies to do less with more. Imagine if I could get all my reading through email sized chunks of words?

Sure, there are downsides to the emailization of reading. It’s all fast food consumption and nothing is saved for studying. What some clever programmer needs to do is marry Outlook with MediaWiki. That way we could read and digest our words into something for long term memory.

I wish I had more time to read more books. Reading reviews at least show me the myriad of ideas being explored in the world of SF&F. To get an idea of what I mean just read January 2008: Short Fiction at IRoSF – there’s a reason why the old magazines were called Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories of Super Science and Fantastic Tales. There’s a lot more to SF than spaceships and more to fantasy than hobbits.

SF&F are the genres that require their writers to think up wild ideas, and boy to they ever. And me, I’d love to explore than all, but I can’t. I just can’t. So what I want to do is find the most sense of wonder I can for my limited reading time.

Jim

Inventions Wanted #5 – Cell Phone Voting

The news is full of reports on the failures of electronic voting machines. After the 2000 election everyone expected inventors would jump on the problem and produce a full proof voting machine. That hasn’t happened. I’m wondering if there isn’t a simpler solution. Why not use the cell phone for voting.

Imagine on voting day just picking up your cell phone and dialing the number and voting. Could it get any easier? Nearly everyone has a cell phone. And if it was easier to vote maybe more Americans would participate in democracy.

One of the major concerns of voting machines is whether or not they can keep accurate tallies. Cell phone companies seem to be quite good at keep call records. Another concern with voting machines is to make them fraud proof. Now here’s the problem with cell phone voting – big brother will know how you voted because accurate registration and verification tied to a system with perfect tracking means they could look up how you voted. However, there are solutions to that too.

Cell phones have unique numbers. They are registered to you. Your phone could be registered with the voting registration system. It would be possible to invent a voting system that would take only one call from every registered number. It would also be possible to separate identity from voting at some point, maybe with an encrypted key in case of recounts. That means there would be two systems. First would be the voting system via the cell phone and second a database system collecting votes. At some point they could separate identity or make a complicated mathematical system that could reconstruct the voting if necessary.

One thing I hate about presidential elections is we have to pick one guy who wants to solve all problems in the same way we do. In other words, if there are twenty issues, we want elect the candidate that closely matches the way we think about twenty subjects. I’d much rather that have referendums and just let us vote directly. That would change things so we vote for a manager of problems rather than a decider. In the debates we always hear each candidate talk about their solution to a problem. I’m much rather that politicians research all the good options and then put them through a series of public votes until we come up with a solution that the majority wants.

Easier voting would allow for more referendums. So why invent a complicate system that is usually set up once a year and few people participate in when an easier system may already exist that would get more people voting?

JWH