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Interviews: Ask Technologist Kevin Kelly About Everything
Kevin Kelly has for decades been involved in some of the most interesting projects I know about, and in his roles as founding editor (and now editor at large) of Wired Magazine and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has helped spread the word about many others. Kelly is probably as close to a Rennaisance man as it's possible to be in the 21st century, having more-than-passing interest and knowledge in a range of topics from genetic sequencing and other ways that we can use measurement in pursuit of improved health to how technology is used and reused in real life. Among other projects, he's also the founder of CoolTools, which I consider to be (unsurprisingly) the closest current equivalent to the old Whole Earth Catalogs. (Disclaimer: I've had a few reviews published there, too.) (He's also one of the founders of The WELL, now part of Salon.) Kelly is also Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Long Now Foundation, the group which for years has been designing a clock to ring on 10,000 years in the future. Below, ask questions of Kelly, bearing in mind please the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. He'll get back soon with his answers.
now combine that with low power cooling that google's using, hook it up to a nearby solar power plant utilizing a salt silo as heat storage, and now we're talkin!
the SeaMicro servers handled the load with no difficultiesd
Hmm... now there's a daemon you really don't want to see running...
The SeaMicro production servers used just 0.02 watts of electricity per browser request, Fitzhugh said, compared to 0.17 watts per request for the HP C7000 blade servers they replaced.
Augh ... seems about what it should be (in joules).
I was looking at my DEC Alpha today and this story came up, and I pondered on how Digital could have ever been replaced by Intel and AMD after being aquired and stifled by not one but two aquisitors in the likes of Compaq and HP. Here was 1997, and Digital already had a 64-bit 1GHz DEC/Alpha on the EV6 line of lab test and despite being an American-fabricated semiconductor from an all-American company then how was it that now the industry is destitute to ever again fabricate it's own semiconductors ever since The United States brushed udner the rug all the property theft and anti-Trust activities of primarily Intel and HP? Intel was the most un-original chip manufacture, most of it's technology bought since it was founded as an investor-startup to muscle it's way into the market like how Microsoft used XBox at a loss to enter an unrelated market.
My point being is that the heavy hitters of the industry are all prime examples of when superior American work was destroyed, and in the occasion of the DEC/Alpha it was so-far advanced that Intel slowed-down the industry using Moor's Law so they can reap the profit of every chip revision that is nothing more than the re-implementation of a crippled inferior design.
Digital was responsible for many of the ARM embedded chipsets, the greatest of Ethernet LAN chipsets, multi-processor scalability, was first to have a retail 64-bit 1GHz processor for sale in 1999 despite being in the rounds since 1997 to developing engineers, and we get stuck with foreign-made non-American monopolies. Do I need to remind everyone that Intel puts STATE OF ISRAEL on the map like what the musical-band U2 does to put Ireland on the map? Who is destroying America supremacy to push our technology into foreign countries that have never done any good to mankind? It stinks of pay-offs.
And now that The United States is in charge, America is being liquidated.
We have quite a few machines in the server room, and we have constant problems keeping the room cool. But ultimately many of the boxes really don't need that much CPU power - they have a fairly simple job that they need to do. We have speculated about using an old laptop on AC power for some of the jobs that don't require a lot of CPU and don't require a lot of disk space.
These servers sound like they would work quite a bit better for this purpose however..
512 atoms in 10U doesn't compare that favourable to 480 opteron cores in 10U (standard 1U, 4 socket 6100s). The atoms draw (apparently) 2.5Kw. That sounds a little low: that's about 4W each. That's plausible for just the chips themselves, but what about the RAM, etc?
By contrast, the opterons will have a 1kW PSU each for a maximum power draw of less than 10kW, which is 4x as much.
So, is a 2.3GHz opteron core 4x faster than whatever atom cores they use? Quite probably. Though they might use dual core atoms, in which case there are 1024 cores which swings it in favour of the atoms again.
Basically, the article is far too light on details.
But as always, vast arrays of weak processors is likely to be popular in some applications and be massively overhyped in others.
The atom isn't an especially efficient CPU. It's low power for x86, but the high end processors have to be very efficient to fit within the thermal envelope.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Last I looked at Tilera's offerings, their core count to memory controller ratio was really high. It seemed to be really focused on purely streaming data applications, like packet inspection or video conversion.
Anybody know if how Facebook is using them is actually memory-constrained, or it's just low power enough not to matter when 80 quadjillion requests are eventually handled quickly enough, regardless of actual latency?
Also, lack of ARM is disappointing.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3027/2503059877_76dc4a82e0.jpg
The above image shows a Tandy 20MHz 386 computer for over $8k dollars U.S. Sure, many will say that DEC was the $10k Unix system, just consider that Intel was built on the success of a Fairchild employee Federico Faggin that created the 4004 micro-processor and this is where the ZiLOG Z80 was spun-off from while Intel went and made the 8008. So there you have it: American companies, outsourced over time, and then when these companies are in their greatest phase they outsource yet again.
Something should be done about outsourcing. Why help a bunch of thieves and murderers around the world when America can sit tight and look pretty for a couple hundred years for sake of not being on it's own island away from the world disease?
i got one of those tiny plug in servers that draw pretty mutch no power acting like a nas on a usb hdd. it does its job very well.
I've been googling around; their site is just a "Contact us" sort of sales deal, and no other hit seems to mention a price, like can sometimes be found in articles about headlining sales.
Anybody in the know here?
Please Mozilla, go back to real CPUs please. And to fixing bugs, instead of playing with fancy servers.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
(Disc: I interviewed at this company and after interviewing, decided not to work there. Yes, even in this down-economy. Their technical approach and company style just did not pass the smell-test.)
Ok, that out of the way - this is really a not-so-subtle advertisement for the atom webserver company. Why is slash taking so many blatant ads and trying to make them 'tech articles'?
Hate to say it, but atoms had a very short time when they made sense. They simply do not, now, and S.M. is trying to get as much mind-share from it as they can before they lose the little bit of advertising they can bribe from 'partners'.
Oh well... I'm not sure anyone here is really impressed by atoms in a cabinet. the intel i-series of cpus, those can do whatever you want and they are damned low power, too. Atom had such a short life/use cycle and S.M. just was late to the party. Maybe 2 years ago this would have been useful but not really today, sorry.
That's something else I'd like to know.
It's like, "We don't know anything about pricing yet. But trust us, we'll do it right."
And, then, "We know everything you need to know about the CPU so you don't need to. Trust us. We'll do it right."
Or is it, "If you have to ask about price, you needn't bother." followed by, "If you have to ask about the CPU's instruction set, register count, etc., you needn't bother."
I know, CPU is so passe, now, but I'd still like to know. (Yeah, and money is also passe.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Somebody want to explain why not just virtualize the load if processing power isn't needed, just instances of cores?
Not sure what kind of CPU load the main article is about, but I'd think that most of the replies here that suggest using a laptop instead of a server, would benefit from VMs.
Or is there some reason VMs won't work?
And just to point out a little-known fact, the recent is known as the Alpha 21464 and is not discontinued but is on stand-by when Intel and AMD to provide enough bell-ringer advertisements for their recent batch of chips.
Seriously, it's verry sad that Alpha is not being manufactured except to succeed the ES and GS servers from HP, and it's the only chip on official "stand-by" mothball status. I find it odd that the marketers can actually advertise the close of a complete superior line of processors as though it's a legend only waiting for the right environmental factors to occur for it to go back to work again like God. Who? What? Why would any company continually dispense inferior technology to consumers when this verry successor to the 21364 is on wafer-waiting manufacturing-standby? I's verry design is based on a prior design based on a prior design based on a prior design -- it's a continum of the old 21164, only adjusted and re-fab'd in a tighter package, and it's wattage is actually less than the recent chips from Intel and AMD or roughly under 100-watts.
At the moment, IBM has the chore of fabbing Alpha and the prior company that was fabbing it was Samsung, but IBM is too busy with Power5 and Samsung is doing something or other.
I wonder how would latest sandy bridge based xeons compare to these ... E3-1220L has two cores and 20W tdp, I'm trying to find it for my home server for the next 5 years or so.
Just a bit too early...
Blogging because I can...
If low-powered computers are better at sending HTTP responses, imagine what a beowulf cluster of infinite monkeys can do.
... is something that's not found st Slashdot.
I wonder if we'll see major leaps forward in computer cooling, or oil-bath server rooms, or server rooms perpetually doused in extra dense gas.
I'm pretty sure bringing liquid cooling to the server room on large scale is the next thing in this arena. Immersion in a dielectric coolant is one way to go. I've worked with Hardcore Computer and their Liquid Blades a bit, and am optimistic: http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/servers/liquid-blade/index.html
this sucks, i was planning on heating my home from the heat given off by servers.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/26/1324212/Microsoft-Suggests-Heating-Homes-With-Data-Furnaces
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
It looks like you've been involved in many projects. I've got about 10 different side projects (outside of work) going on at any given time in several different realms. How often do you decide it's time to end a project so that you can focus on a better project? Have any projects that you devoted a lot of time to result in nothing or have all come to fruition in one way or another? What is your criteria for this?
My work here is dung.
What insights can you provide to the /. crowd about building the clock?
Project management anecdotes about the clock project?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Will there be an actually clock completed (other than prototypes) before the 10,000 years are up?
and how do i become one?
Kelly is not a "technologist", he's a journalist with aspirations to being a philosopher/deep thinker. As far as I know he has no engineering education or experience.
Well Kevin, here is my question:
Everything costs money (yes, even that free lunch you had the other day, actually did cost someone some money) :)
Deconstructing the bill, you find out that, ultimately, every cost can be broken down to a) Cost (or scarcity) of raw materials, b) Labor and c) Energy.
Oh, and d) Fees for Imaginary Property and Legal fees for defending the right to said fees, but we can leave that out in this utopian story...
Ultimately, any compound raw material can be man-made through labor, lots of energy and basic chemical elements, and labor can be ultimately substituted with machines and energy.
So the final bill can be said to consist of scarcity of chemical elements and a huge energy bill.
And even chemical elements can (with some considerable effort) be turned into each-other through nuclear processes, but I deem that effort an unreasonable undertaking for man-kind.
Taking all that into consideration, I can imagine a utopian world where everything can be manufactured at low cost, if only the cost of energy production can be assumed ridiculously infinitesimally small.
Putting aside any political or social unwillingness from the powers that be, in a far future, in a world with large scale fusion energy production, man kind will at long last have an almost free lunch. For, what, if I may ask, will the cost of anything be when everything can be made from recycled chemical elements and lots of almost free energy from large scale fusion of abundant hydrogen? Gadgets can be made, food can be made (who needs cows when you can engineer your own steak from scratch? Nature makes protein by chemical processes anyhow...) Are you worried about environmental pollution? Well, we pollute *now* because it costs us money to not pollute. We don't make stuff environmentally friendly *now* because it costs more than the dirty stuff. But with free energy we have the means to do stuff right. After all, under the assumption of free energy, the cost of doing it right is not higher than the cost of doing it dirty. Overpopulation will of course restrict the amount of space available for habitation, so wars will be fought over land, but in the far end who needs a pile of expensive dirt on the earth when there is so much free space in space?
And finally my question. What are the social implications of such a thought experiment? What happens in a society when goods cost nothing? Is there any need for money anymore? And even if you needed money for some reason how would you acquire it? Remember that your salary is your compensation for your labor, and labor has long since been replaced by machines running on cheep energy.
They tell me that fusion is only 50 years away...
So in a post fusion world, where is man-kind headed in your opinion? Will my grandchildren see a reconstruction of society?
What time is it... really?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Where did everything come from ?
I feel everything is too far away, is this a common perception ?
There seems to be a lot of useless stuff around, are you happy with the composition of everything ?
If we could change the form of everything, what should we change it too ?
Does this make me a troll ?
Australia is a geologically stable (and ancient) place... does the foundation have any plans on building a similar clock downunder, and if so, when? How can one help out in the construction (if at all)?
One purpose of the Long Now Clock is to encourage long-term thinking. Aside from the Clock, though, what do you think people can do in their everyday lives to adopt or promote long-term thinking?
Will my bitcoins be worth more than they are now?
... it started sucking, with Microsoft and Intel dominating everything. Anyone who came out with a cool idea was given an offer they couldn't refuse. And if they did refuse it, they were toast.
Are we on a similar suckage curve with the Internet? Although it was arguably invented in the '70s or even before, it only came to the attention of most people in the mid '90s.
... the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I still cite Out of Control as the most readable introduction to the oft confused subject of complexity, and am right now wading through What Technology Wants but finding it far more forced (sleep inducing). While I clearly don't disagree with the idea of seeing technology as a partner with humanity, your newer book reads like you have invested too long in a world constructed from your imaginings and cut back your level of interest in looking at what is actually going on, an interest which seemed to pervade your earlier projects.
Yes, I am well past your rationalisation for abandoning "extropy", so what I really want to know is whether we are all going to be condemned to defend our business models to the death?
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Kelly is probably as close to a Rennaisance man as it's possible to be in the 21st century, having more-than-passing interest and knowledge in a range of topics from genetic sequencing...
Since when was genetic sequencing a hot topic in the Renaissance? I'd be more impressed if he was fluent in stained glass artistry, music composition, and Latin and Greek.
OK, I'll take TFA seriously and ask a serious question. I have a good idea of the answer, or parts of it anyway, but I'm interested in other viewpoints.
Q: Why don't we have fusion power yet? What are the specific technical, political, economic and social obstacles to replacing dirty fossil fuel and potentially catastrophic nuclear fission power plants with nuclear fusion plants? I know this is kind of a "where's my flying car" question, but I feel that if our society really wanted affordable, practical fusion power to replace fossil fuel driven plants, we could achieve it, but we have barely even started down that road. Why not? What would it take to make it a priority?
I can see the fnords!
I know that you did a lot of travel when you were younger (e.g. backpacking in Asia for years). How important was that for your status as a "Renaissance man"? Would you still recommended extensive travel to young people, or has globalization changed the opportunities?
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
So we now know that genetic switches exist which activate specific genes.
Can this knowledge be applied to things like cancer treatment to effectively "deactivate" a cancer by targeting a specific cancer's on/off switch?
What is your philosophy on software tools? Do you prefer to use a lot of small pieces, loosely assembled, using scripts to join things together and get things done, or do you like to find a software suite (such as Office) and work within that?