The Future of Computers

GrokSoup writes: "Great collection of semiconductor where-to-from-here articles in this month's MIT Technology Review. There are articles about molecular computing, quantum computing, DNA computers, and on and on. Fascinating stuff, all pointing to why the current semiconductor hegemony is by no means a "forever thing", as the kids like to say. "

Comments

Re:Predictions.. Let me guess:

[Matt2000]

You seem like the kind of person who would have laughed at the first computers and stuck to his handy mechanical calculator.

And of course having not read the articles, you add a bunch of e-commerce bashing in there for good measure.

Nice work.

Hotnutz.com - Funny

Editorial Viewpoints

[new500]

I am trying to understand this. Is this story a review of techreview.com or an endorsement or even an admission along the lines of "aha! here are some guys talking about some really interesting stuff, you should go and look".

My point is, no disrespect to 'Taco, that this story looks to be the latter, and without any additional commentary or question or review of the linked content I think this is a poor and unstructured way to create a discussion.

I mean, I now might have to read a whole other site - all of it - just to see what might be "on topic" or not :-)

In conection with "The end of Moores Law" I want to ask just how much economic value is lost in a system where what you paid for 18 months ago is now worth one quarter, 1/4, 25% of what you paid according to the simple interpretation of that dynamic?

I mean if your salary of 18 months ago were being lost to inflation at that rate, and the effect was spreading throughut the economy, we'd all be in Brazil during the 70's

for the record, Brazil inflated itself to growth on the back of vast loans, much of which originating from Citibank, and all of which collapsed in '82 leading to a massive world wide liquidity crisis.

The net effect of this was deliberately lowered interestrates post - Volker, and contributed to the junk bond (80's) and later equity (90's) booms we have become used to

As the effect of computer obsolescence and the consequent demand for capital and working capital (usually loans) permeates evermore deeply our economy (is this maybe one argument against PC vs big iron trend promoters?) this dependancy becomes more acute.

What I am saying here is that there may be *economic* reasons that bring to a halt technological phoenomena, and that a purely "geek" approach to the issues may yield diverging results from what is happening

Back to my original "complaint" I really think it would be nice is submitted stories came with something at least resembling an editorial viewpoint. Maybe /. is the only place where you can proverbially print your paper and leave the inside pages blank "for reader's notes". Maybe editors here want to avoid infered advocacy.

But surely the editorial point is "We here all have a (personal, financial) interest in the economics and technologlies developed under recent - very interesting and not necessarily fully understood conditions - is this set of linked articles a sign of things to come, or an indicator of impending (local systems) collapse?"

DO NOT CLICK THE "THIS IS MORE INFORMATIVE LINK"!

[dylan_-]

DO NOT CLICK THE "THIS IS MORE INFORMATIVE LINK"!

It's a link that sends a message from yourself to this page.....

Hmmm...I heard of this a while back, and thought it would have been fixed by now...

dylan_-


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Re:Is this statement correct?

[CausticPuppy]

First, IWAPMBHFMN (I was a physics major but have forgotten much now)

... in which an atomic nucleus can be spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time

This is really a misnomer. It's a misinterpretation of intrinsic spin. Each particle in the nucleus possesses it, but the physical spinning (clockwise/counterclockwise) of the nucleus itself is not a quantum state. If it's a hydrogen atom, the nucleus is just a proton, so you can't really define a physical spin (in the rotational sense) although it will have an intrinsic spin. I think you can have an effective spin for a multiparticle nucleus, by summing up all the spins for the constituent particles, but I just made that up and it could be wrong. Labelling this peculiar quantity "spin" doesn't actually mean anything is spinning, in simply arises from the fact that particles appear to have angular momentum.

It is a bizarre world in which matter itself dissolves into a ghostly blur of possibilities as soon as you try to look at it.

Er... the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that the error in position times the error in energy must always be greater than some minimum value. This means that the more precisely you measure ("look at") one quantity, the less precision you have in the other quantity at the same time. By that equation, if the error in one quantity approaches zero (meaning you're measuring near absolute precision), the error in the other quantity approaches infinity.

The leads to the old Quantum Physics homework excuse: "Professor, I calculated the energy in problem #3 so precisely that now I have no idea where in the universe my homework is!"