There actually is no Moore’s Law in the strict sense of the word. It
doesn’t attempt to describe an immutable fact about the progression of
technology. Nevertheless, it has achieved a level of fame tantamount to
invincible prophecy by axiomatically predicting that the number of circuits on a
silicon chip would double every 12 - 18 months. As the number of circuits
increases so does the functionality of the chip while the cost remains
approximately constant. And that is what has been happening for the last
40+ years.
It all started back in 1965 during the transition from single transistors on a
chip to whole circuits and then multiple circuits. Gordon Moore, then
working for Fairchild Semiconductors believed that a major improvement in the
manufacturing processes would take place about every 18 months and this would be
accompanied by the ability to place more devices on the chip. On a more
frequent level other design improvements would permit additional incremental
improvements yielding a 12 month generational cycle. He was so convinced
that the future lay on this path that a few years later he and Robert Noyce
joined forces to create a company dedicated to this concept.
It is the Intel we know today.
We can follow the trail of the improvements by looking at the microprocessor
generations that have been so critical for the PC market. First the
4004 in 1071 with 2,250 transistors for use in hand calculators, then the 8080
in 1975 which became the engine for the first PC with 4,500 circuits to the 286,
386, 486, Pentium and now the Duo 2 and latest Itanium. The Duo 2 with
about 700,000,000 and the Itanium with 1.9 billion transistors. Each
generation was achieved by shrinking the size of the transistor and
interconnecting lines. Intel has just started shipping the latest
technology level known as the 45 nm level. That is the resolution of the
features on the chip are 45 billionths of a meter wide. Already in the lab
work is going on at the 32 nm level with research under way at the 18 nm level.
So doesn’t it keep on going? The answer is no and that is what prompted
Gordon Moore to declare that the end of this particular technology journey is
coming to an end. Already the technologists are dealing with thicknesses
of just a few atoms and the material is becoming very difficult to
control.
So where will we go from here? We are probably good for another 10 to 15
years before another technology will be required to continue the parade.
That technology will most certainly be quite different from what we are using
today. That doesn’t mean everything comes to a screeching halt. The
factories will be producing the chips we have today and derivatives thereof for
decades. It means that we will need other solutions in order to make
faster and more powerful computers. We have, in fact, already started down
this path with the dual and quad processors on a chip that are in the latest
machines. Our hand was forced because simply trying to run the circuits
faster as had been the case for so long was just not working any more.
Faster meant more heat and the heat was growing faster than our ability to
remove it. This is deadly because heat is the enemy of transistor devices.
Some believe that the Nano technology now in the research laboratories will
provide the answer. We shall see…
There actually is no Moore’s Law in the strict sense of the word. It
doesn’t attempt to describe an immutable fact about the progression of
technology. Nevertheless, it has achieved a level of fame tantamount to
invincible prophecy by axiomatically predicting that the number of circuits on a
silicon chip would double every 12 - 18 months. As the number of circuits
increases so does the functionality of the chip while the cost remains
approximately constant. And that is what has been happening for the last
40+ years.
It all started back in 1965 during the transition from single transistors on a
chip to whole circuits and then multiple circuits. Gordon Moore, then
working for Fairchild Semiconductors believed that a major improvement in the
manufacturing processes would take place about every 18 months and this would be
accompanied by the ability to place more devices on the chip. On a more
frequent level other design improvements would permit additional incremental
improvements yielding a 12 month generational cycle. He was so convinced
that the future lay on this path that a few years later he and Robert Noyce
joined forces to create a company dedicated to this concept.
It is the Intel we know today.
We can follow the trail of the improvements by looking at the microprocessor
generations that have been so critical for the PC market. First the
4004 in 1071 with 2,250 transistors for use in hand calculators, then the 8080
in 1975 which became the engine for the first PC with 4,500 circuits to the 286,
386, 486, Pentium and now the Duo 2 and latest Itanium. The Duo 2 with
about 700,000,000 and the Itanium with 1.9 billion transistors. Each
generation was achieved by shrinking the size of the transistor and
interconnecting lines. Intel has just started shipping the latest
technology level known as the 45 nm level. That is the resolution of the
features on the chip are 45 billionths of a meter wide. Already in the lab
work is going on at the 32 nm level with research under way at the 18 nm level.
So doesn’t it keep on going? The answer is no and that is what prompted
Gordon Moore to declare that the end of this particular technology journey is
coming to an end. Already the technologists are dealing with thicknesses
of just a few atoms and the material is becoming very difficult to
control.
So where will we go from here? We are probably good for another 10 to 15
years before another technology will be required to continue the parade.
That technology will most certainly be quite different from what we are using
today. That doesn’t mean everything comes to a screeching halt. The
factories will be producing the chips we have today and derivatives thereof for
decades. It means that we will need other solutions in order to make
faster and more powerful computers. We have, in fact, already started down
this path with the dual and quad processors on a chip that are in the latest
machines. Our hand was forced because simply trying to run the circuits
faster as had been the case for so long was just not working any more.
Faster meant more heat and the heat was growing faster than our ability to
remove it. This is deadly because heat is the enemy of transistor devices.
Some believe that the Nano technology now in the research laboratories will
provide the answer. We shall see…
One may think the title of this post is self-evident, but there are enough exceptions to the rule to warrant an explanation.
Today’s example comes from The New York Sun’s website where printable versions are less than print friendly.
Here is an example story from their site:
The story has 1266 words, and the NY Sun has decided that an article that long should be chopped up into 4 pages for our reading pleasure their ad impressions.
When faced with situations like there, there is generally an easy trick for people who’s rather continue scrolling as they read rather than clicking and waiting for more ads. That trick is the “Print” icon on the page. Most of the time, clicking the print button will take readers to a single-page version of the previously multi-page story with a smaller logo and no ads.
But what happens at the NY Sun:
They provide a printable version with a color logo and ads intact. Here is what it looks like once printed:
Luckily, the color ads don’t end up printing and wasting toner, but the ad’s placeholders remain intact causing the story to run 3 pages rather than two.
I get the impression that the NY Sun noticed a significant amount of their site’s traffic hitting the printable pages - probably to avoid reading stories broken up into multiple pages - and chased them with ads, defeating their reader’s interests.
If NYSun.com is convinced that advertising on printable pages is the right thing to do, why not provide relevant ads: ads for toner.
Juniper was in Minneapolis with their demo truck and we were there to capture it. I met with Juniper a couple of days before we went out to the truck for completely different reasons. Being that I am an IT super hero by day I actually activley work with networking gear. We’re an all Cisco shop here, not because we are tied to Cisco but because it’s what we know. I never knew Juniper was in the enterprise/SMB markets, I always assumed that they focused on high-end ISPs with uber fast bandwidth connections and backbone routers. Boy was I wrong, and I don’t think I’m the only one who makes this assumption. The meeting was so interesting that I took a video crew out and got an interview in their truck.
Traditionally networking gear is pretty yawn intensive. Finding a new provider that has a single unified operating system with a modular design may not excit most, but for those of us in a Cisco IOS world it’s a compelling concept. Check out this Juniper video and remember that there is a choice in the marketplace.
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I’ve been very impressed with the quality of recommendations Netflix has offered me. So much so, that it would take me three years to watch all of the movies in my queue if I maxed out my monthly DVD deliveries and online streaming.
The recommendations are so good that bad ones really jump off the page. For example, I loved the movie Lost in Translation. Based on user behavior, Netflix recommends the following films:
- Sideways
- Rushmore
- Garden State
- Syriana
- Being John Malkovich
That makes sense. But what about this?
I’d like a snowboard movie called “Lost in Transition” because I liked “Lost in Translation?”
Swing and a miss.
But the fact that this was noteworthy to me shows that Netflix is doing a lot of things right.
The Consumerist has uncovered a previously secret number: the monthly data download limit on Comcast internet connections:
Leaks: Comcast’s Download Cap Is 200 GB, But Only In Areas With Subpar Networks
Comcast even has a system ready to go where if you exceed the limit a popup will ask you to purchase additional gigabytes, our source says. The graphical user interface is completely designed and everything, but Comcast hasn’t deployed it, because they’re waiting for either another ISP to do it first, or to figure out how to do it without angering their customers, whichever comes first.
I guess the first question that comes to mind for me is, “what would you expect the limit to be on an unlimited connection?” This question has come up before regarding data connections from Verizon Wireless and will surely come up many more times before companies are forced to publish a figure stating exactly what you’re getting for your money. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
I found The Consumerists’ story over on Geoff Daily’s App-Rising blog. Geoff’s been doing a great job covering broadband growth including fiber build outs and municiple approaches to broadband. If you’re into that sort of thing, tell Geoff I said, “Hi.”
Update: Matthew Ingram points out that wireless card plans from one popular dominant wireless carrier has a 250MB cap. 250MB? My email could chew through that in a month.
TechCrunch20 (or 40) had tons of impressive companies present, but the one the really jumped off the page for me was Xobni. They have created a new email platform that creates significant value without asking anything more from users. That’s a killer combination.
VentureBeat has a great write-up where this snippet that got me interested:
The sidebar profile gives you an overview a person’s email habits (for example, when they are most likely up and doing their most correspondence, according to past usage), their phone numbers, how they rank in terms of frequency of correspondence, past conversations (in threaded form), and files exchanged.
When I read that, I thought about Google Reader’s Trends reporting where I can learn about where my time is being spent reading RSS feeds. The Trends reporting has been extraordinarily valuable for me by pointing out feeds that were taking up a disproportionate amount of my time without providing equivalent value. After purging a few of those, I made room for some new feeds that have more than made up for the loss.
The power in Trends is I didn’t have to do anything to create the data. Simply using the application generated the trends that became actionable in aggregate.
So, how can this be done with email? First of all, why hasn’t it been done already? I can’t think of an email program to date that allows me to view reports on who’s sending me the most emails, who sends me the most email I delete without reading? Who sends me the most email that I respond to?
This is the type of reporting that would help me make better use of email. For example, if I noticed that I never bother to read frequent flier updates from airlines, maybe I’d get around to unsubscribing from them? It would probably become glaringly obvious that I should if I saw a report showing that I’ve deleted 90%+ or them without opening them.
Enter Xobni, a Boston based Y Combinator funded company that appears to be tackling this very problem. They’ve figured out a way to provide trend reporting, rank your email relationships, generate threaded conversations, pull data such as phone numbers form email signatures so you don’t have to actively update your address book, among other giant leaps in email management.
The software currently runs as a sidebar within Outlook, providing a much needed enhancement to the popular email client. I’m not an Outlook user, but for that crowd, this should be a hugely popular add-on.
My hope is that Xobni raised the bar for all email providers with the launch of this new form of email processing. Surely Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will add similar features to their web based email platforms over time.
The creative folks at CommonCraft.com have come up with a great explanation of the benefits of using web based document systems like Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and (as of today) Presentations.
They’ve focused on the collaborative benefit. While Google Docs are seriously underpowered compared to their Microsoft counterparts, being able to easily collaborate on a secure shared document is worth understanding:
However, there are other reasons one may prefer using web based documents. Data backup is a huge one worth considering. When is the last time you backed up your computer. I bet Google has a better backup routine than you have in place.
Web friendliness is another concern. Documents drafted as Google Docs repurpose as blog posts very easily since the formatting is done in HTML. Copy/paste the HTML from your Google Doc into your blog program for a nicely formatted and spelled checked post.
Speaking of spell checking, I imagine Google could learn new terms on the fly and continually improve their spell checker, unlike client software that would have to be updated with new terms.
Looking at Google’s current suite of web based Office style programs, I’d rank their importance:
1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet
While Docs will be used the most, the benefits gained from collaborative Presentation building makes it a very close second for me. I can’t remember a time when someone I know created a PowerPoint alone. It just doesn’t happen. They represent the work of groups, so allowing each member to fact check and improve the content relevant to them should lead to faster creating of better presentations.
In April 2006, I theorized that the columnists at the NY Times would push the Times drop the paid version because Select was hurting both the influence and secondary sales of columnist’s book sales and speaking rates. While I’m still attached to the frustration the columnists must have felt, I believe someone else ended up being most responsible for the NY Times switching to a free format.
The changed didn’t end up being driven by ego driven exposure but search. Search, as in the free traffic Google sends sites.
The seeds were laid for this change in February, 2005 when the NY Times acquired About.com. For those of you who haven’t followed About.com, it’s an online resource site with helpful information on a huge range of topics. Expert guides are paid to build out content in areas that interest them.
What’s interesting about About.com is their compensation model. As I understand it, guides are paid a base salary plus a percentage of the revenue generated by the content they create. This incentive motivates guides to create content that’s both great AND search engine optimized. Content that generates links and content that uses the same terms a typical search engine users would use when searching for information on that topic.
Of course, there were plenty of structural issues that had to be addressed with the content management system as well to make sure the pages were properly indexed and served up in a search engine friendly manner, but the bigger issue was creating great search engine optimized content.
The guy behind the SEO initiatives at About.com, which the NY Times noted was one of the reasons they acquired About.com, is Marshall Simmonds. The SEO policies and training of guides was the responsibility of Mr. Simmonds. Here is a quick bio for Simmonds from April 2007’s Search Engine Strategies conference:
Marshall D. Simmonds was named chief search strategist for The New York Times Company in March, 2005. Mr. Simmonds is responsible for maximizing traffic and search engine exposure by implementing strategic marketing techniques for NYTimes.com, Boston.com, IHT.com and About.com’s 500 topic sites. In addition to his work with The Times, he is also spearheading DEFINE SEARCH STRATEGIES, an enterprise search consulting service, funded by The New York Times Company.
Peter Appert, a Goldman Sachs analyst quoted in the NY Times story linked to above (that’s right, I linked to a story from 2005 on a major media site) missed the opportunity here. At least, his quote shows him focusing on the contribution the About.com property would have for the NY Times’ bottom line:
“The challenge is that About is very small versus the total scale of the NYT business,” he said, adding that About’s revenues last year were $40 million, a fraction of the Times Company’s revenues. “It represents barely over 1 percent of NYT revenue, so while it’s strategically appealing and it’s a step in the right direction, it’s financially too small to really change the growth story at the NYT,” Mr. Appert added.
However, the bigger opportunity in 2005 was for the NY Times to leverage the incredible asset that is nytimes.com. It is by far the most linked to and most respected news source from a search engine’s perspective, yet most of the content on the site was invisible to search engines.
From a search engine optimization perspective, the nytimes.com site is an SEO’s dream job. Ask any SEO if they’d rather work on a high link popularity site with structural issues of a search friendly site with link popularity issues and you’ll get the same answer. You can have a much greater impact by straightening out structural issues than solving link popularity issues since there are generally underlying business issues hurting link popularity.
However, in NY Times’ case, the real SEO problems weren’t structural but political. How do you convince the #1 media site that they should open up their entire archives to Google and stop charging a subscription for access to columnists?
Whoever managed to sell this seemingly radical change internally deserves credit for the change.
Marshall Simmonds is the man behind the curtain.
Should social networking sites make it easy to import updates from other social networking sites? Yes and no.
On the Yes side, it makes it easy to consolidate one’s social network updates from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, etc.
On the No side, it causes serious redundancy issues for online friends who happen to follow you on more than one service.
For example, I have a friend who’s a blogger, Facebook, and Twitter user.
He’s integrated the blog-to-Twitter plugin for Wordpress, so every time he posts a new post to his blog, I get a Twitter update about his latest blog entry. The tweet shows the post title, which is generally underdescriptive, along with a TinyURL I can click to see wha his 3-4 word Tweet is all about.
I’m already subscribed to his blog in Google Reader, so Twitters about new blog posts are redundant. Yet there is no way to turn off the blog-to-Twitter tweets without unfollowing him on Twitter.
In this case, I unfriended him on Twitter since he was putting out much better quality content on his blog and the majority of his tweets were reblogs.
I’m also friends with ths guy on Facebook, and guess what? He’s syndicating his Twitter posts into Facebook as well, so my Facebook news feed gets hit with his Twitters, which means it gets hit with links from his blog posts which hit his Twitter account, which end up in Facebook.
Worst case scenario:
1. He publishes a blog post
2. Causing my phone to vibe with a new Twitter message pointing to a URL.
3. I click that URL, sending me to his blog.
4. Within the hour, I get a new link in Google Reader telling me about the same blog post.
5. I then get another new new item in Google Reader from Twitter of recent Twitter posts that’s redundant to #2. I realize this one is redundant but I don’t want all of my Twitter friends coming to my phone but will take them in Google Reader.
6. I then log into Facebook to find the same Twitter message I saw back in #2 in yet another location.
7. He could also syndicate his blog into Facebook so I could see the same post yet again.
There are four solutions to this that I can think of:
1. Social networking sites and RSS reader applications could all get together and work out a solution where all but the site where an item is read first would pull the duplicate message.
2. People should stop publishing their content in a redundant manner.
3. Use Yahoo Pipes to filter out redundant content from friends.
4. Use a yet to be created Firefox Greasemonkey script to block redundant updates in Twitter or Facebook.
I’ve realized that I’ve been guilty of this too by using the Twitter application in Facebook. I removed it after coming to the realization that my Facebook friends are already following me on Twitter for the most part, so I’m creating redundant content for most of my friends.
Steve Rubel from Micropersuasion has been looking at this issue lately and described the aggregation as “lifecasting.” I think his definition of that term would be something along the lines of a aggregated look at all of the content a person generates online. If someone wants to hear every nugget from Rubel from a short Twitter through a well thought out blog post, you can follow him at www.steverubel.com. This may work well for many Rubel fans since his content tends to revolve around work with a little sports thrown in.
For people who publish to the web on a larger variety of topics, I think Rubel’s version of lifecasting will fall short. For example, I may write about technology here, things that interest me from politics to Britney Spears on my personal blog, about shoes hanging from powerlines on another blog, and about hamburgers with cheese on the inside on another blog. Consolidating all of this into a lifecast would please no one since the topics are too diverse to be of interest to anyone but me.
However, it’s possible Yahoo Pipes could come to the rescue by making it possible to filter web user’s lifecasts down to the content that interests them, or by filtering out the stuff that doesn’t.
Would this post have made any sense a year ago?
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