How much power, how much time, how much expertise

Half a century ago the Science Fiction Author Isaac Asimov wrote of Multivac. It was a huge single computer that everyone connected to with a terminal. A terminal is a device that merely displays the information sent to it by a smart computer somewhere else and sends back key presses. Every time you search Google you effectively use your £500 iPhone as a 'dumb terminal'. Huge computers with terminals pretty much ruled computing up till the first IBM compatible PC and the Mac's and Asimov imagined a world where a single huge computer ran everything, bit like Google really! Since then there has been two main strands of computing developing side by side. Schools and office type businesses do almost no processing on their servers, the servers store but the number crunching of the data happens on the individual computer. Huge institutions and universities that have to manipulate ,karge amount of data use racks of servers and increasingly 'virtual computers'.

I have written before about the danger of having your data too far away, but lets look at the opposite approach, put EVERYTHING on the cloud, including the actual computers that are doing the thinking, and save a ton of money and hassle. This autumn Windows 8.0 will be released and the world will be locked into a cycle of upgrading. The computer that was good enough today will seem slow and the new whizzy bits and pieces will only work well if you upgrade... or so it will seem. But what if the computer was not in your school or home, but instead only the 'dumb terminal', the keyboard and mouse that interacted with a computer tens hundreds or even thousands of miles away? In fact, don't bother with a single computer you operate remotely, instead use virtualisation where many 'computers' will run on a single high powered specialist box. Each user sees their own computer as though it was under their desk, but in reality it isn't actually 'there'.

Six months ago a seemingly small company called Onlive launched a gaming service, It costs about £300 to buy a playstation or xbox with 5 of the latest games and these games very quickly lose value. Onlive offered a virtual games console with games for a low monthly fee. You saw almost the same thing you would see on your tv if the actual games console was under it, but your tv or iPad or laptop or desktop computer acted as a dumb terminal, almost all its power was ignored and it instead became a way of viewing and interacting with streaming content live, the games. I was one of many who thought it was unlikely to work well given average internet speeds but surprisingly it does. You will never match the timing precision needed to play the very best people on-line as you are dependent on your speed of internet connection, no connection no input and kabloomey to your game score, but if you have the speed, you can play games originally developed for these incredibly powerful consoles on a humble laptop that couldn't display a few 3D boxes normally.

So whats this got to do with Multivac? Well, last Thursday Onlive announced a desktop version, a virtual windows 7 computer running office. Available only in America at the moment, it allows you to use a basic speed but effective computer running Word and Excel etc but from your own computer. Onlive have already released an iPad app so users in America (There seems little chance of getting it working here in the UK at present without jailbreaking your iPad) can use a full windows 7 desktop , edit real word documents, save load etc etc from their touchscreens. The amount of data that needs to be sent over the internet for such applications is tiny compared to fast moving and high resolution games but even better, upgrades patches and security features can be applied en masse at the server side. OnLive are talking about offering higher level packages for more power intensive programs. The idea of using the 3D package Maya from an iPad is amazing, but I think the biggest difference will be with the 90% of computing that most schools and offices do already. The professional version of onLive offers full office suite, a full web browser and more running on a windows 7 virtual computer that you can access on any reasonable computer at school, and your students can access on their PS3's, iPads, internet tellys and presumably eventually xBox phones and Wii consoles at home, for $10 a user a month. Even without quantity discounts, that means no more hiring office licenses, paying for people to install it and debug your systems, training up staff and constantly constantly upgrading to the latest system and patches just so your computers don't fall behind. Of course, no internet means no functionality but for many schools they are already in that position when they're management systems, pay rolls, almost everything, communicates through the Internet...

And MultiVac? It featured in many stories by Asimov, as a way of showing that such a system would know everything about you, could predict crimes based on patterns of behaviour, offer help in times of need, and that loss of privacy was the first casualty of increasingly relying on computers. He was quite far sighted really!

Future Present?

This blog is about a future present, or even a future project! I have attended a few demonstrations of solid modelling machines. Each was rather wonderful except for the cost of materials which still, for the professional machines from Hewlett Packard and Z Corp, cost about £180 kg. True a kg will go a long way if you make something tiny, but then there's the dreaded support material. If you make a dome as a frail shape of thin spars, you end up with a huge amount of support material underneath. This support material is usually the same or a significant proportion of the actual building material and is often not recyclable so a fairly simple model costs big time if it needs a lot of support as its built to keep structural integrity.

Of course you can design with minimal support material and use clever tricks to reduce the need for it but you are going to have to be a 3D graphics expert and an expert in 3D printing first if you wish to use those skills.

This means that companies who have hot designers can make the most efficient use of such 3D printing techniques. One such is http://www.myrobotnation.com/ which has an online HTML5 web tool which lets you build a simple robot and colour it in 3D. Then if you pay a fee, they will print it in full colour and send it to you. For small models this is fairly cheap, about £12 for a 50mm high one, but for 150mm high, because of the much higher manufacturing costs and volume of printing required, the price shoots up to £120! I strongly suspect the parts you choose from are hollow, to keep the volume and therefore amount of material used to a minimum. Careful design keeps the cost low and online design software means anyone can make a jazzy robot and those who wish to do so can print it.

You can save designs but only for 2 weeks, but this might be enough time to organise a robot competition and have the winners manufactured and posted from the companies manufacturing base in America... Perhaps some English Literature Sci Fi projects could get a lot more interesting, 3d, and real!

For those who know about the cheap abs meltign machines such as the Thing o Matic, they are great for those who have unlimited time or technicians. Perhaps another two generations of development (18 months time!) and well see truly excellent high resolution results at low cost on a school bench. Till then it s going to have to be 3D printing bureaus for making those wonderful full colour robots!