• From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>
• To: Ken North <kennorth@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:52:49 -0500

Ever more information ever more compactly carried accessed ever more
frequently?  It amplifies the problem of superstitious acquisition (aka, bad
WikiPedia) on one hand and increases the opportunity to vend vetted
information as part of the appliance.  Novelty becomes ever more precious
because ever more rare.  

The network is a power by virtue of connections.  If all we use the storage
for is entertainment, then this changes only the cost of having it available
locally and portably as the iPods do.  There are social opportunities to
make connections (share songs).

What will be more interesting is the impact on virtual robotics.  Physical
robotics have limits for learning from environmental cues in situated media.
If retrieval/store speed increase as well, highly dense devices can be
universes unto themselves capable of spawning novelty.

What if it turned out that the Big Bang was a local event, that in fact,
singularities of the density of matter that led to the local universe are in
fact themselves, near infinite?  While we are racing away from each other,
we are racing toward someone else?

len


From: Ken North [mailto:kennorth@s...] 
 
Len Bullard wrote:
> and density takes another quantum leap forward, or quantum computing
becomes
> practical

Bruce Cox wrote:
>>  When a patent file wrapper reaches age 40, we send it to NARA.
>> What we will do when the file wrapper is not paper, is not yet
determined,
>> but one possible scenario is that the USPTO will retain responsibility
for
>>  keeping archived file wrappers accessible indefinitely as a kind of
adjunct
>> to NARA.

This IBM breakthrough might lead to storage capacity we can hardly image,
but it
also presents a challenge. We haven't realized the goals of the Semantic Web
and
searching 40 million web sites is a challenge. Now imagine the problems of
content-addressable storage and information retrieval with the storage
capacities mentioned in this article.

"IBM has known for a long time that harnessing the "power" of magnetic
anisotropy is the key to develop structures and devices of atomic and
sub-atomic
scales, which would later become for example the building bricks of
incredibly
small, but also incredibly "generous" storage equipments. So they've focused
their attention on how to measure the magnetic anisotropy of individual
atoms,
an endeavor previously considered inaccessible.

Measuring an atom's magnetic anisotropy is vital for isolating its capacity
to
store information, thus opening insights into quantum storage. In 1959,
physics
icon Richard Feynman, in a characteristic back-of-the-envelope calculation,
predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be
contained in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide -
provided
those words were written with atoms.
...
With further work it may be possible to build structures consisting of small
clusters of atoms, or even individual atoms, that could reliably store
magnetic
information. Such a storage capability would enable nearly 30,000 feature
length
movies or the entire contents of YouTube - millions of videos estimated to
be
more than 1,000 trillion bits of data- to fit in a device the size of an
iPod.
Perhaps more importantly, the breakthrough could lead to new kinds of
structures
and devices that are so small they could be applied to entire new fields and
disciplines beyond traditional computing."

The complete article is at:
http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_IBM_Opens_New_Doors_to_Quantum_Computing_0820
9.html

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