Apparently One Too Many...

I'll just copy and paste this over, because it took me a little bit to write on xanga. Just some thought provoking stuff. You really do your best thinking in the shower.

Singularity is Near

Technology is doubling. With doubling, comes exponential increases. With exponential increase, comes rapid technological advancement. For example, the next 14 years will see as much advancement as the last 100. And 7 years after that will be another 100 years worth of advancement. The signs are everywhere if you look for them. This has major implications for our world. Before long, human advancement will exceed biological means. That's the singularity. Of course, it's only a theory and we don't know if the exponential increases will continue, but take this for example. Also take into consideration mhz is no longer the lone deciding factor in speed, as dual and quad core cpus with 64bit technology come into play.

In 1993, cpu's ran around 33-100mhz range, depending if you had a multiplier or not. Basically 100 was the max. It wasn't until 1999 that we saw a 500mhz processor. In 2000, lo and behold, 1ghz (or 1000mhz) was reached. 2002 saw 2.0ghz, then 2003 brought 3.0ghz. 2005 and 2006 brought dual core, and soon quad core processors. Basically, this means 2 or more processors running on one chip. The P4 Extreme Edition is a dual core processor running at 3.73ghz. It can be overclocked to more than 4ghz, giving a total rating of over 8ghz. 2006 8000mhz, 1999 500mhz, 1993 100mhz. And these are all consumer models. This doesn't include supercomputers, like the one that was laughed at for trying to beat a human in chess, but 5 years later dominated the best chess player in the world.

Don't like cpu's? Try hard drives. 1.2 gigs in 1982 consisting of ten 14" platters. 1995 and 2 gigs. 1997, 10 gigs. 2002, the 137 gig barrier is broken. 2005, 500 gigs, and also perpindicular recording introduced. 750 gigs already this year, look for a terabyte (1000 gigs) before the year's over. Also, 200 gig notebook drives came out. Not to mention increasingly small flash drives.

Computers are a part of almost every aspect of our society today, with electronics and chips in almost everything you use. Film to vcr to laserdisc to dvd to blu-ray. Record to 8 track to cassette to cd to mp3 and ipods. Rotary to touchtone to cordless to car phones to cell phones. Each wave is coming faster and faster. The implications will be huge in sports performance, medical treatment, transportation, and on and on. Think how much this country has changed in the last 20 years, 10 years, 5 years. What will it be like 5 years from now, 10, 20? Can you wrap your mind around the fact that we're barely 100 years into flight and automobiles, not even 50 since sputnik, the first satellite. It's exciting and scary all at once.
And on a side note, it makes me glad that Sony is already talking about upgrades with the PS3. If it's going to keep up, it'll need it.

Edit:
"The original supercomputer, the Cray-1, was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. The Cray-1 was capable of 80 MFLOPS (or, according to another source, 138–250 MFLOPS). In fewer than 30 years since then, the computational speed of supercomputers has jumped a millionfold. According to Top500.org, the fastest computer in the world as of October 2005 was the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, measuring a peak of 280.6 TFLOPS. That's more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraFLOPS, set when only half the machine was installed. Blue Gene (unveiled October 27th, 2005) contains 131,072 processor cores, yet each of these cores are quite similar to those found in many mid-performance computers (PowerPC 440)."

"The full Blue Gene/L machine was designed and built in collaboration with the Department of Energy's NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and has a peak speed of 360 Teraflops. Blue Gene systems occupy the #1 (Blue Gene/L) and #2 (Blue Gene Watson) positions in the TOP500 supercomputer list announced in November 2005, as well as 17 more of the top 100. "

Like I said, supercomputers are a whole different animal. 360 trillion operations in one second. Over a million fold increase in under 30 years. Wow.

Also: a 500 ghz cpu.

Take a deep breath...

I've been mega-stressed out the last 2 days. Perusing over hundreds of apartment listings while also trying to finalize a job and moving arrangements takes its toll. I guess this makes up for the lack of involvment by the man in the wedding. We found a really good apartment in Plano on Ohio Drive. Our lease should be faxed to us tomorrow.
I think tonight I will rent March of the Penguins. I wanted to see it in the theaters but never did. If you want to be completely frustrated followed by relief and accomplishment 16 times, rent Shadows of Colossus and don't use any guides. I really had to get creative to figure some of those parts out. I think I definitely need to play ICO now. Also, a psp is totally worth it.

Another new blog begins...

So I decided to create a blog on here. I'm graduating in less than a month and it seems this is the more "adult" thing to do when compared to xanga. This also means there are more people on here I know from Harding that are out in the real world doing the job thing, which I will soon be doing. I guess you have to start transitioning sometime.