28 June 1999

Tonight I leave for Sao Paulo. I'll be there until Friday, speaking at the Oracle iDevelop99 Conference. From there, I'll fly to Sydney for a few days and then a few more days in Silicon Valley on the way home. I'll be on the road nearly two weeks this time. This should be my last lengthy trip until September, and frankly, I could use the break. These past three months have been grueling with travel. It's too bad we haven't invented warp speed yet, or teleportation. Wouldn't it be great to be able to instantly travel from say New York to Sydney, Australia, just in time to make a meeting? And when the meeting's over, just teleport home again, in time to resume the good nights sleep that was interrupted by a day meeting half way around the world? While we haven't mastered warp drives just yet, perhaps information technology can give us a form a digital teleportation soon -- with sufficient bandwidth, why not imagine virtual meetings taking place in real time, including participants from all over the planet? Don't we have the means?
On an orthogonal note, yesterday slashdot carried a pointer to a story from the American Computer Company about a new 90Gb "Poker Chip Sized" solid state disk drive with blindingly fast transfer speeds of 1 Mb in as little as 10 nanoseconds. The Transfer Capacitor (TCAP) based 90 Gigabyte Storage Drive is said to be an array of billions of semiconducting microswitches which operate like random access memory, replacing transistors, and operating at speeds up to 12 TeraHertz with very low voltage requirements and almost no heat generation.

If such a device is real and can be manufactured in large quantities reasonably, the "quiet revolution" in computing that took place in the 80s and 90s will get rather boisterous as truly mobile computing becomes practical reality. Imagine the possibilities of such a device. A tiny plug-in with the capacity and speed of the TCAP could provide the basis for walking web sites. Everything I see, hear, say and do can be recorded and stored easily and without intrusion. The practical entirety of my subjective life -- for days at a time -- could be stored for download or webcast or simply for posterity. And presumably, when the device fills, it can be replaced with another. And long term storage is just one of the problems such a device could solve. Imagine the hit to personal computing capabilities -- the speeds offered by the TCAP device rival and even exceed those of common DRAM in the vast majority of existing PCs. To effectively have that much online memory potentially changes everything when it comes to computing models. And when you factor in other possibilities; when a $1000 Supercomputer becomes reality, even the wildest of visions start to seem plausible.

Over the weekend I finally got started with SETI@home, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project that is utilizing the spare cycles on hundred of thousands of home and office PCs around the world. While I had signed up for the project when I first heard of it, I waited, like others, for the year or so it took to go from announcement to implementation of the project. And then for me, it was a question of finding a few spare cycles of my own at home to get things set up. But finally I did it, joining the efforts of so many others around the world, sifting through the mountains of data we're collecting, searching radio waves from space for any sign of intelligent life.

If you haven't signed up yet, do it now! The very small incremental cost to you is nothing compared to the contribution you will be making to a very worthy cause. Imagine the revolution in thinking that will occur globally when we do finally uncover evidence of intelligent life in another star system.

So -- another weekend has come and gone, I'm anticipating yet another journey on behalf of the cause, and another set of revolutionary possibilities appear just around the corner. It seems like paradigm shifting memes are becoming as common place as regional skirmishes in these most interesting times. Simply keeping us with the range of possibilities is becoming as difficult as understanding the underlying technologies themselves in most cases. We do indeed live in a complex if not magical age. And yet there is a path to simplicity that we can embrace in order to move ahead with confidence. There is a route we can go, assured that our choices today will have relevance tomorrow. The more I learn, the more I come to believe that Java really is the thing; the sanest approach to harnessing the wealth of technology's growth that I know. If there is hope for humanity, it's in software. And Java is the only software architecture that makes sense today.