Zero Powers wrote:
>
> I personally would have no idea what to do with a supercomputer,
> besides writing and reading...
It seems I've been having this discussion with friends for **years**,
or at least ever since the Intel 386 came out in the 80's. People say,
what do individuals need with all that computational power? Some
people seem to have a hard time, even now, imagining a use for a
home computer beyond word processing (OK, I guess most folks know
about Web surfing by now).
Well, I currently have two machines at home. One is a 300 MHz PII
Compaq downstairs, which was the first modern Windows 95 (now
Windows 98 SE) machine I bought in 1997 (I was previously using a 1990
Mac Classic accelerated with a 33MHz 68030), and which is now connected
to broadband Internet via a cable modem. Last year I bought the
pieces (case, motherboard, etc.) on-line from First Look Computers
(www.1look.com) for a second machine (433 MHz Celeron) which is
primarily used as the heart of a modest DVD home theater (with
a Sony GDM-W900 widescreen monitor, Matrox G400 video card, WinDVD
software DVD player, SB Live! soundcard feeding Dolby AC-3
to an outboard Sony decoder, etc.). The two machines are connected
with 100BaseTX Ethernet so I can surf the Web from either machine.
When idle, both machines (and my desktop machine at work) are running
SETI@home.
I've played with multimedia with these new machines --
digitizing audio and burning audio CD-Rs (with Adaptec software),
scanning pictures and printing them out (with HP 6100 scanner,
HP color inkjet and ALPS MD5000 thermal transfer color printer,
and Adobe Photoshop 5), digital video editing (with a Miro DC30
video capture card and Adobe Premiere video editing software),
and OCR via the HP scanner and Xerox TextBridge 9.0 (lineal
descendant of software originally developed by Ray Kurzweil!)
These multimedia applications (and I'm not even talking about
games here -- I'm really just an old fogey! -- and no I don't do
MP-3 either; I consider myself a serious audiophile, thank you
very much! [I did download deCSS as soon as it came out last year,
just for the anti-authoritarian thrill of it]) suck up all the
CPU cycles and disk speed and capacity you can throw at them,
especially recording and playing back digital video (I expect to
be using a computer to record HDTV broadcasts one of these days,
and a cheap, 80 gigabyte removable optical disk would be really nice).
In the Joy/Kurzweil/Turkle radio broadcast on NPR last week
(which I only got to hear yesterday via RealAudio from NPR's
Web site -- sign of the times), Bill Joy uses as an example of
a potentially dangerous technology now available at the corner
computer store to any individual with the cash, the new AMD
1-gigahertz Athlon processor (Intel now has a similar chip,
but Joy mentioned the AMD one specifically). He points out that
this processor has a 1 nanosecond cycle time, whereas the
Cray supercomputer he once worked on (safely under central control,
and far out of the reach of irresponsible individuals) only
had a 25-nanosecond cycle time. So who's rushing to buy the
new AMD 500+ MHz Athlon processors? Well, the game folks of
course, but also the folks who post to www.avsforum.com --
playing back DVDs on a computer can always take advantage of
the fastest processor available, to provide the headroom for
perfectly smooth and natural-looking deinterlacing of DVDs,
with nary a dropped frame! I expect my next computer (in a year
or two -- I'm not in any hurry) will contain a > 1 gigahertz
processor (AMD or otherwise), and will be used for just that
purpose.
By the way -- for a transhuman angle to all this -- I consider my
multimedia PCs and computer-based home theater to provide a crude
form of virtual reality (at this stage, really just a digital
replacement for earlier forms of analog media -- never mind the goggles
and body suits). I expect this sort of virtual reality (entertainment
for the masses is the supercilious way of looking at it, and notice
I didn't even mention pornography -- until now) to be:
1) capable of sucking up the most advanced information technology
available in the commercial sector for the foreseeable future and
2) the most painless and "fun" way for artificial information
processing technology (whether intelligent or not) to infiltrate
and colonize human civilization (and perhaps even the human nervous
system, as Kurzweil suggests in _The Age of Spiritual Machines_).
Medical applications, while more noble, are neither painless nor
fun (doctors give most people the willies), and the sort of
accounting applications that have been the bread-and-butter of
information technology ever since the Babylonians started
inscribing numbers on clay tablets are dull as dishwater
(that's what I do for my employer).
Jim F.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:02 MDT