From the San Francisco Examiner
I take the California street cable car to work or back nearly every day. Unlike the more touristic Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines, this line is used mostly by locals and commuters. It is also celebrating its 125th year of service (not bad for a city that is barely a century and a half old).
An excellent article in The Guardian summarizes the current attacks on politically inconvenient science in the US. It is instructive to compare this with Stalin’s USSR. The parallel is unfortunately too close for comfort.
Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who devised a method to improve the yield of winter wheat, an important achievement in a country suffering from famine due in large part to criminally incompetent mismanagement by Communist central planners. He believed in a form of Lamarck’s theories, that basically species evolve by transmitting inherited characteristics, rather than by natural selection and survival of the fittest.
Lysenko led a series of attacks on genetics, beginning in the mid thirties and culminating with the purge of of the father of Soviet genetics, Nikolai Vavilov in 1940 (initially sentenced to death, he died in 1943 while in solitary confinement). Lysenko then assumed complete control over Soviet agronomical “science”, all modern genetics starting with Mendel’s laws were banned (some of Vavilov’s vital work on biodiversity survived, but is endangered today), and the most outlandish theories (like spontaneous generation of germs) promulgated.
The Communist regime found Lysenko’s theories congenial, as they offered the perspective of genetically improving homo sovieticus using the same brutal tactics applied to Russian arts, religion and history.
Vavilov was rehabilitated when Nikita Khrushchev came to power, but Lysenko managed to hold on, in part with flattery, in part with outright fraud to cover up his lack of results. He was finally sacked in 1965, when the damage he had done in thirty years became impossible to ignore.
One of the holy grails of networking is “always-on” connectivity, whether wired broadband or wireless (some telcos even thought there was a market for ultra-narrowband always-on at below 16kbps using ISDN signaling D channels). With the quiet but inexorable progression of broadband, this is coming closer to reality. All sorts of interesting applications become possible when you have such connectivity:
Home automation: remote monitoring of alarms and thermostats, programming your ReplayTV/TiVo remotely
Automated unattended network backup
Self-hosted weblogs
IP telephony and videoconferencing
One key enabler remains unaddressed: quiet PCs. Most PCs make too much noise (usually around 60-70 dB) to be left running all day (and all night).
Some vendors like Dell hide this information deep inside their websites, when they even bother to measure it. Some, like HP/Compaq list unrealistic figures (I have a Compaq Evo D315 rated at 26 dB (point of measurement unspecified but probably from an “operator position”), which I measured at 55 dB using a Radio Shack sound meter). Apple is the only mainstream vendor that has paid some attention to this problem, but even they have backtracked: the iMac G4, while relatively quiet, is still significantly noisier than the PowerMac G4 Cube it replaced.
Always-on connectivity will not realize its potential until computer makers seriously tackle this issue and make computers that are quiet enough to be left running all night in a bedroom.
This would require a change of emphasis from bleeding-edge processors, that are highly profitable, but also power-hungry (and thus require big noisy fans to cool down) when their power is almost always untapped. Just as many more ultra-thin laptops are sold in Japan than in the US because US consumers are not clamoring for them, the situation won’t change until users demand quiet PCs.
Most of the work on quiet PCs is done in more environmentally conscious Northern Europe and Japan. Some resources:
The Silent PC Review has some interesting articles.
A number of quiet PCs using the mini-ITX form factor and the low-power VIA EPIA-M chipset can be found at www.mini-itx.com.
USB enabled flash memory drives have become popular as a floppy replacement (Dell actually offers them as such). They come in all sizes and capacities, most often 64 or 128MB, are usually shaped like keychain fobs. One model, the Intelligent Stick from PQI is particularly compact as they got rid of the USB connector metal shield to make it merely as thick as two stacked quarters. I keep mine in my wallet, with a basic toolkit of Windows debugging utilities and important scanned documents (passport, e.g.).
There’s not much to say about it – these gizmos are pretty much commodities nowadays. The remarkably thin design is very convenient, of course, although it also means the intelligent stick can’t be used on a keychain. The ferrule-free connector design mostly works, but in some rare cases it can lack traction and have problems staying put in a USB socket. In spite of the compact size, PQI managed to put a tiny write-protect switch (you can see it at the right of the stick on the picture) and an activity indicator LED, both nice touches.
Update (2003-11-07):
They are now also available in 256MB and reportedly 512MB sizes, and now ship with a USB adapter that has a complete metal ferrule for those rare situations where the simplified connector does not stay put.
Update (2004-12-07):
The Intelligent Stick is now available in 1GB capacity, and supports USB 2.0.
I received my QR plate from Kirk Enterprises yesterday. It is very well made, with a U-shaped ridge the cradles the bottom left of the camera for optimum stability, and cutouts that leave the battery compartments accessible. This is a fairly long plate.
rear view, bottom left view (showing the U-shaped ridge), bottom view
