Miron's Weblog

I have previously mentioned my estimator for when human scale computation power will be available. I have since realized that the bottleneck might be memory rather than computation. I’ve created a similar estimator for memory.

Although we may achieve human level compute power in 2014, it looks like memory capacity will lag by another 6 years, assuming low estimates. With high estimates, compute power is available in 2020 and memory capacity will lag by 5 years after that, to 2025.

However, if Flash memory or similar technology will do the trick, a factor of 4 in cost reduction will advanced the timeline by about 4 years.

Tags: Brain, Future // 3 Comments »

Brian Wang writes about technologies to watch for 2009, including Memristors, high speed networking, optical computing and quantum computing.

Tags: Future // Add Comment »

GitTorrent (described on Advogato) is a really distributed version control system, based on Git and BitTorrent. It seems to hold the promise of:

• Public keys (PGP) are used for authenticating changes
• No central web site for a project
• Easy forking of projects
• Package and OS distributions without a central download location
• A distributed mechanism for security and feature updates

The significance of all this is that it:

• levels the playing field for individual developers and small groups
• routes around censorship more effectively
• allows end user to choose different views of the repository based on which developers they trust

H/T: Slashdot

I would suggest a further improvement – multiple signatures on sources and on binaries. This would greatly reduce the chance of Trojan binaries being installed on hundreds of thousands of computers next time that Canonical/Debian/RedHat distribution points are subverted by a black hat hacker. Binary signatures would require a repeatable transformation from source to binary – by fully specifying the compile tools and compilation environment and using specified values for timestamps.

Tags: General // Add Comment »