Staring Down a Revolution: Questions for Sid Karin

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."

Comments

Dupe

[sergiorepo]

I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term "dupe".

Its the first time I see a dupe inside itself.

"Technological revolutions don't happen every day"

[Ralph Spoilsport]

But they happen a lot faster when you have cheap energy. It will be interesting to see how all this rah-rah technology thing plays out as energy accelerates in price.

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

His revolution: seemingly infinite storage

[ReformedExCon]

He likens terabyte storage to the numerous technological revolutions of the past. His opinion is that at some point storage will become so plentiful in personal devices that the concept of "having it all" will be a reality. His first example is loading all recorded media onto a personal device. His second is storing photo-realistic images in car navigation systems. This is his revolution?

Having infinite storage is interesting, but if you consider the Internet to be the same type of thing, there are already limitations. First, you need to realize that 90% of everything is garbage. The other 10% may be useful, but to whom? The tiny fraction of a percent of all information that may be useful to you personally needs to be able to find its way to you. So we have tools like search engines to help us. They are slowly getting better, but the tide of information only comes in, so though the engines are getting better, the quality of results is increasingly getting worse.

What would I do with all recorded music? I couldn't possibly listen to it all in my lifetime. I'd need some sort of intelligent agent to find things that I'd like and play those so that I don't waste time listening to things I'm not interested in.

This isn't some future revolution. It's reality now, and for the most part it works okay.

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.

Uh oh

[dirtsurfer]

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