Speed

That new computer that I assembled in 2011 (read here and there) is screaming along now.

My original idea was to install the operating system on my first SSD. When I placed my order at Newegg.com, only a 40GB SSD was available in my price range. I found that the disk was almost full after installing Windows 7. Not good! I put the OS up on the 1TB mechanical hard drive so I could get the machine up and running.

But my delay and procrastination had one benefit: it gave Moore's Law time to work its magic. The size of SSDs has been going up while the prices have come down. I see rough prices of $1.50 per GB for SSDs now; I can get 120 or 240GB disks without too much trouble.

I decided to spring for a 120GB SSD and start again. I had invested in a lovely two-disk tray that makes installing a new one as easy as inserting it into the drawer and snapping it into place. Now I have two: the operating system is installed on the 120GB SSD, while the 40GB drive houses data and software projects.

It's amazing to see how responsive this machine is. I have 6 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and a Nvidia video card. I still have a 1TB internal hard drive and an external 1TB drive that connects via USB. I use the external drive as a backup.

What to do with that 1TB internal drive?

I decided to install Ubuntu on the mechanical hard drive and set it up to dual boot with Windows 7. Now I have a Unix machine with gcc available to me. I'd love to install the CUDA SDK and start writing C++ to exercise their linear algebra and FFT libraries. It's one of the projects that I have in mind for 2012.

I've installed R and Tinn-R. I've begun working my way through "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis" by John Kruschke. It's been a revelation; I'll be writing more about that soon. That's another project for 2012.

2011 was a decent year for technical learning, but I need to step things up quite a bit. This new machine will be a great platform for doing so.

A New Computer

I spent the afternoon assembling the hardware I bought three months ago. Why the delay? It was a near-fatal combination of being busy, ill, and a terrible procrastinator. But there was nothing on the schedule today, so I decided that it was time to tackle it.

It went far better than I thought it would. I would put it right up there with IKEA. The instructions were pretty good, and almost everything fit together nicely. I started just after one o'clock this afternoon, and all the pieces were assembled before four o'clock.

I was worried about the CPU and cooler, but they slid right into place.

It wasn't clear at first where the solid-state disk drive would go, but the case was as ready as promised.

Everything is in the case, ready to go. Here's a shot with the side panel removed:



I have a few questions I'd like to review with some friends who are more experienced than I am. But once I have those resolved it'll be time to power up, set up the BIOS, and install the OS and software.

It's going to be a terrific machine once it comes on line. I'll wonder why it took me so long to get around to it.

Thanks to Will, Steve, John, Karim, and Matt for their encouragement and inspiration.

Password Card

It seems like every day we see articles about personal information being compromised. Authorities like Bruce Schneier have recommendations on how often to change passwords.

I'm trying something different when it comes to computer security.

I found a site called PasswordCard.org that has a solution that flies in the face of the "don't write your passwords down" admonition.

The site is based on a simple assumption: We all know how to protect our wallets. The site provides a printable card that can be laminated and kept in a wallet. There are randomly generated strong passwords of varying length showing. The idea is to pick a password starting from any row and column, of sufficient length, and use that for a site. Go left to right, right to left, up or down, diagonally - it doesn't matter. Keep the site associated with a password safe and you're in good shape. Even if the card fell into someone else's hands, they'd have a herculean task to figure out the combination and site it applied to.

I want to be sure that Facebook, e-mail, financial accounts, etc. are safe. I won't be using a common password everywhere anymore, thanks to PasswordCard.org.

"That Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Kid...."

I work in a small-scale downtown area now. I commute to and from work on a bus. I see a lot of people every day, scurrying from place to place. Everyone seems to have earbuds jammed into their ears, with ubiquitous white cords dangling down to connect them to "their music", the soundtrack to their lives that makes them the individual they are - along with the millions of others making identical choices. So many of them are simultaneously scrolling through e-mail messages on their iPhone or Blackberry or Android, furiously tapping out a text message, or browsing something on the web.

They're completely cut off from their surroundings, any random contact with people around them, snug in a digital cocoon.

The ear buds and extreme focus make me think of that 60s rock opera "Tommy":

He ain't got no distractions
Can't hear those buzzers and bells
Don't see lights a flashin'
Plays by sense of smell
Always gets a replay
Never tilts at all
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball

It drives me crazy to see someone on a bicycle with ear buds in. Hearing what's going on around me is a key component of keeping myself safe when I ride.

It's always someone else that's interesting in this cocoon: the person you could be talking to. Anyone within reach is fair game to be ignored or interrupted in favor of the next incoming packet of stimulation.

All this technology is re-wiring us and re-writing the rules of etiquette for social interaction. Sometimes it's good, but not always.

Living Moore's Law

We're reaching the limit of Moore's Law. I'm living it.

Just in case you don't know, Moore's "Law" is by no means a physical law; it's an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, who was the CEO of Intel at the time. He noticed that the number of transistors being crammed onto a silicon wafer was doubling roughly every two years. He predicted that this would continue, and he was right.

This truth means that we all get more powerful computers for less money every year.

I bought my first personal computer for home in 1994. I taught a graduate mathematics course during summer session as adjunct faculty. The two-thousand dollars I earned by working all summer to come up with notes, homework, exams and grades was earmarked from day one. I chose a Gateway 2000 - how quaint. I'm fuzzy on the details now, but I believe it was on the order of 90MHz CPU, 8MB RAM, and 500MB hard drive. It seemed like a supercomputer compared to the VAX machines I shared with the rest of my department when I started my engineering career. It ran Windows 3.1 for its operating system and a heavy monitor. I had Microsoft Office and the Borland C++ development environment. It was the machine I used when I started taking computer science classes. The memory and disk didn't make development of software very easy. I was used to Unix workstations, so the discrepancy in power made software development at home painful. The hard drive was soon full; I had to buy a 1GB slave to extend the 500 MB master. By the time I was able to replace it in 1998 I couldn't wait to get rid of it.

The successor came from Dell. It ran Windows 95 on a CPU that was 5X faster than the Gateway. The hard drive was a green field. It would be impossible to ever fill up a device that huge. The monitor was still a big tube affair, but the view was more expansive. I was able to do all sorts of things - for a while. As time went on the cruft that accumulated made the wait times interminable. My work machines were still far superior to my kit at home. I took all the usual steps: I upgraded the memory, I added a slave hard drive. The few service calls I had to make to Dell were infuriating. Never again!

After seven years I couldn't bear it anymore. I was working for an employer who gave me a bonus, so I earmarked some of that money and bought an HP. It was a dual core 2.2GHz AMD CPU with 4GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive, running Windows XP. It's the machine that I'm writing this blog on today.

Here's where Moore's Law comes in: Four years later I'm still happy with this machine. The hard drive is augmented by Passport external drives, but it's still doing fine. The memory is the most I can have without upgrading to 64 bits. The specs compare favorably in every way to the machine I use at work, so there's little drop-off when I switch between the two locations.

I could go out and buy a netbook or a laptop for a price that would have made me weep years ago. I'm sure there are blazing machines for gaming and video production that would eclipse my current setup. But the curve has flattened out. I'm not feeling too far behind after four years. I don't hate the machine. I don't have that sense that if I don't upgrade right away that I'll burst.

What happened?

Heat is the great enemy. Increased clock speeds mean more heat generated.

We're arguably running up against physical law. Decreasing the distance between transitors makes it harder to avoid unwanted interactions and is terribly expensive. Last I heard it cost Intel $1B to open a new factory with a new process; I'm sure that figure is higher now.

The marginal utility of faster CPUs is decreasing because the things we use computers for don't tax the processor very much. Most of the time it's doing nothing, waiting for something to operate on. The trend is to have more CPUs and divide the work between them. Software developers will have to become more adept at writing multi-threaded code, otherwise all those extra cores will sit idle.

Even number crunching applications like scientific computing are finding out that memory and the bus to transport data to the CPU is the bottleneck. Something fundamental will have to change.

It's bad news for the computer manufacturers out there. I think my requirements and expectations as a software developer are far beyond those of the general population that uses computers for little more than Internet access, e-mail, and doing their taxes. If my experience is typical, and other people don't have that feeling of "gotta buy or I'll explode", one of the most compelling reasons for buying computers is dead.

Corporate sales must be plummeting. My employer has decided to bypass Vista altogether and wait to see how Windows 7 turns out. Until then, we'll all be running Windows XP on the desktop. No profits, no capital investment.

Progress continues to be made, but the rate of change has declined. Where will it end?