Aaaand We're Live! AoT Volume 2 Now on Kindle

At last! My latest ebook, "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2," is now live on Amazon. As with Volume 1, you'll find well over 50,000 words of in-depth Q&A with some of the most influential figures from the world of computing technology. The lineup for Volume 2 spans:

Nolan Bushnell, Founder Of Atari

David “Dadi” Perlmutter, Godfather Of The Modern Processor

Shari Steele, Executive Director & President Of The EFF

Jon S. von Tetzchner, Co-Founder & CEO Of Opera Software

Gordon Bell: Inventor, Minicomputer Designer & Microsoft Researcher

Peter Rojas, Co-Founder Of Gizmodo & Engadget

Mark Re, Seagate’s Senior Vice President of Research

Tim Westergren, Founder Of Pandora

Jaron Lanier, Virtual Reality Pioneer

Noel Lee, Founder Of Monster Cable

Ken Huang, Father Of The Small Form Factor PC

Professor Kevin Warwick, The World’s First Cyborg

Available exclusively on Amazon's Kindle platform -- and only $1.99! At that price, why not gift a couple as stocking stuffers? We're just in time! :-)

Architects 2 -- Uploading to Amazon Now!

At last! It's been a bit of a slog getting final editorial sign-off, but at last, "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2" is now converting into Amazon's Kindle system. I'll be double-checking the formatting this morning and return soon with the published link. Also, for the next couple of days, I'll be leaving the pricing for Volume 1 at $2.99, but then I'll raise it to $3.99 until further notice. So if you've been on the fence about picking up Volume 1 or gifting it for the holidays, don't wait!

Glowing Review From Down Under

I'd like to offer a great "thank you!" to Isobelle Clare, a nominee for the Sydney Writers' Centre's Best Australian Blogs 2011. I just found her recent review of "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1," and would like to share it with you:

Back when my family first encountered the excitement of dial-up internet, I took up knitting. This was back when loading a single website could take five full minutes or more. Starting at the little eggtimer was just as frustrating then as it is now, so knitting at least kept me busy in those interminable pauses.

I was thinking those early days as I read Architects of Tomorrow by William Van Winkle. Some of the interviews collected in the book date back to that period, while others are more recent. The thing that they have in common is that all of the interviewees are in one way or another, pioneers in the technology field. From gaming to processors to personal computers to services such as Smashwords, these were people with a vision of where technology would take us. One thing I particularly like in the book is that Van Winkle has gone back to the interviewees in the past year, asking them which of their predictions have come true and what their new vision for the future is, given the exponential speed at which technology is now developing. While it’s a form of guessing game, it is made up of educated guesses by some of the smartest minds in the business, so all of their comments are well worth reading.

As a book, I think the collection holds up well. I’m not a reader of CPU Magazine, where the articles originally appeared, and I’m fairly sure I don’t fall into the target readership either. Some of the interviews were a little heavy on the technical details or of limited interest to the general reader. However, Van Winkle’s interviewing style is full of enthusiasm and he doesn’t presume a great deal of technical knowledge. I do think that there were perhaps too many interviews in the collection – as a book, I think it may have been more satisfying if some of the weaker interviews were cut out.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book, and I’ll probably buy Volume 2 as it comes out – perhaps not to read cover to cover as a whole, but to dip into now and again. Many people ask “What’ll they think of next?” and it’s the interviewees in Architects of Tomorrow who are most likely to have the answers.

Bring On the Bushnell!

It's official. "Architechts of Tomorrow, Volume 2" just went off to my editors at "CPU" magazine for their feedback and (hopefully) approval. Only a little bit of formatting left to go, and then almost 55,000 words of amazing, new interviews with a dozen of computing's brightest minds will be available for the ridiculously low price of 99 cents. More on that later.


For now, I leave you with this tidbit from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell:

CPU: I spent probably one-quarter of my grade school years connected to [an Atari] 2600. So being a parent and having seen an entire generation of kids like me intoxicated with consoles, do you feel there’s such a thing as excessive or counterproductive gaming?

Bushnell: Absolutely. In fact, there’s some pretty good evidence that excessive game play is not good for kids, but moderate game playing is extremely good for kids. You find kids are much better problem solvers. They’ve shown some actual jumps in measured IQ for game players. But if they start exceeding two hours a day, then you see a serious drop off in other knowledge acquisition. I think that it may in fact drop kids’ curiosity factors and their patience. I try very hard to limit my kids to two hours.

CPU: Do you succeed?

Bushnell: Intermittently.

Amazon Reviewer Arth Denton Strikes Again

I just wanted to give a shout out to top-ranking Amazon review Arth Denton, who voluntarily plugged "Architects of Tomorrow" in a recent press interview. Check out his other eclectic selections. I'm gonna have to jump on those Twain titles soon. And off the record, a humble extra thanks to Mr. Denton for allowing me to see my book mentioned in the same sentence with a national bestseller ("The Hunger Games"). That really made my day.

Stay tuned for some blog overhaul within the next couple of weeks. I finished "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2" over the weekend and will be providing plenty of new content here soon!

BigAl Weighs In On "Architects"

BigAl's Books and Pals specializes in reviews of ebooks, and Kindle titles in particular. BigAl is also an Amazon Top 100 reviewer, and I feel very fortunate that he took the time to read my book. The fact that he gave it the following glowing review is just icing on the cake!

Author:

Oregonian William Van Winkle has over twenty years of involvement in the personal computer industry, the last fourteen as a journalist. For more, visit his blog.

Description: 

For almost ten years William Van Winkle has interviewed some of the most influential people in science and technology for CPU (Computer Power User) Magazine. This book is a collection of twenty-five of those interviews, some old and some recent. Each also has additional information that catches up on what the interviewee has done since, updates some of the things discussed, or provides predictions or further insights from the interview subject. Two additional volumes are planned.

Appraisal:

Wow. 

As someone who has been involved in technology my entire working life and who considers himself well read on many of these subjects, I was amazed at the breadth of topics covered and how much I learned. Van Winkle’s interviews even extracted new information from the interview subjects I thought I knew all about. 

The only negative I found was the propensity of some of the interviewees to use acronyms and jargon in their answers. Obviously, Van Winkle couldn’t control how his subjects answered the questions. Given the breadth of subjects discussed, many readers may find a section on a subject they’re interested in requires additional research to translate the jargon. However, most sections should be understandable to the majority of readers with a basic knowledge of computers and the internet.

There were three sections of particular interest to avid readers of e-books. The interviews with Mark Coker, the founder of the e-book distribution company Smashwords, and Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat (a software company) and (more important for us) founder of LuLu Publishing, give their thoughts on publishing and e-books. I also thought the 2003 interview with Esther Dyson (the “First Lady of the Internet”) was especially interesting when she was talking about the music industry and its difficulties at the time. Her comments seem to apply to the publishing industry today.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: **** Four stars

When Hacking Leads to War

According to the BBC, the U.S. is set to make military retaliation an option in the face of cyber-attacks. This follows the hacking last month of top-tier defense contractor Lockheed Martin. While on one hand Washington notes this being a "last resort" measure, The Wall Street Journal quoted one military official as saying, "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."

With the rise of tactical hacking against government-related interests on the rise around the world, this is no small matter. One need only recall 9/11 and the resulting Patriot Act to realize that attacks, whether real or virtual, that lead to military action can also have a direct impact on civil rights.

With eerie prescience, I touched on this matter with Amit Yoran, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division. An excerpt is below, but you can read the whole interview in Architects of Tomorrow.

CPU: So are we in a state of cyber war?

Yoran: There is a high volume of cyber threats and attacks going on, but I’m cautious to use phrases like “cyber war” and “cyber terrorism.” When you do, you not only have a strong emotional connotation, but it also brings in a certain legal frame of reference—Title 10, the Department of Defense, and other constructs that may or may not make sense for a lot of cyber activities.

CPU: You’re saying, “Don’t make the problem bigger than it is, otherwise you might wind up losing some of the liberties you currently enjoy.”

Yoran: Exactly. If everyone believes that’s the right term and frame of reference—a “cyber war”— then perhaps they will believe that the Department of Defense is the best way for the United States to protect itself.  I don’t believe that’s the best outcome for us.

Opera CEO Sings of Future Browsing

Unlike many CEOs, Jon S. von Tetzchner started at the top and bottom of his business simultaneously. While he co-founded and became the chief executive officer of Opera Software in 1995, he was also one of only two employees—specifically the one who did most of the UI coding. Ever since, Opera has fought a long and arguably futile battle against Microsoft for the desktop browser market. However, von Tetzchner and company fight on, now having shifted increasingly to the mobile arena. Slated to appear in Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2, von Tetzchner knows as few others can how we'll all be accessing our online lives.

CPU: Until now, browsers have more or less been windows onto the Web, but perhaps that role is expanding. Looking into the future, how do you think we’ll be describing browsers years from now?

von Tetzchner: Browsers will be everywhere. You will find them in all kinds of devices. The Web will come more distributed and the browsers will get server capabilities built in (like we have done with Opera Unite). You will have your home and all your devices connected. The devices will be interconnected and connected to the Web, as well.

Examples of devices being connected (many already starting to connect) include:

• Blu-ray players
• Media players
• Receivers
• TVs
• Set-top boxes
• Photo frames
• Cars
• Fridges
• Stoves
• Home surveillance
• Home automation

The browser will also extend into robotics and you will be able to  remote control devices through the Web. The opportunities in this are immense. We have ourselves played with this through Opera Unite and JavaScript plugins. As an example, a couple of the guys built a remote controlled car with a built in Web camera using those technologies. The future will be very exciting, and there will be a lot of new innovation.

Friday Freebie!

Need a little weekend reading? Of course you do. So here it is: email me at architectsoftomorrow [at] gmail [dot] com with the word FREEBIE in the subject today, Friday the 22nd, and I'll send you a Smashwords coupon good for a copy of Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 in the digital format of your choice. No strings attached. I won't even ask for a Smashwords and/or Amazon review...unless you really want to leave one, for which I'd be very grateful.

All good? Email me!

Amazon's #2 Reviewer Give "Architects, Vol. 1" FIVE Stars!

Arth Denton is Amazon's #2 ranking reviewer. The top Amazon reviewers often receive over 1,000 review solicitations each week. Yet he made the time to review Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 when I cold called him. I thought if I was lucky, he might give me three stars. I was praying for four. Instead, he posted this:


Time capsule 

For the past 10 years or so, William Van Winkle's job or one of his jobs was to engage captains of our high tech industry as well as the established or lesser known prophets, visionaries and gurus and interview them on behalf of the CPU (Computer Power User) magazine. This first volume of "Architects of Tomorrow" collects interviews from around 2002-2005 and, with one exception or two, adds a 2010-2011 follow up where the reader is given an update on the interviewee's career or path in life, some of the topics discussed way back then are revisited and new insights or predictions may be offered.

I admit that I generally do not enjoy reading/watching/listening to interviews because in many instances they are either prearranged events or the interviewer is unprepared or unable to ask intelligent or meaning questions or it all turns into a sterile cat and mouse game where the thrill is supposed to be watching he subject caught unprepared or trapped into saying something that could be viewed as ignorant, outrageous, unacceptable or subversive by the standards that the majority of the audience accepts at that time. Mr. Van Winkle's interviews are nothing but. He is not an hollowed celebrity (a good thing), he generally knows his interviewees and he is prepared to discuss the issues - the many aspects of what we can call 'the computer industry' and its impact on our daily lives and our future. His intimate knowledge and understanding of the topics discussed tend to generate intelligent and meaningful questions which in turn tend to produce interesting comments and answers from his subjects. Which is what makes most of these interviews interesting and a pleasure to read even when the featured personality is unknown or indifferent to the reader and even though the bulk of these interviews content is 'dated' - 7-8-9 years is a long, long time when the talk is 'computers and computer technology'.

The 'dated' quality of the interviews is what actually makes them a good read, at least for anyone who enjoys reading 'history'. There is very little 'new' in the initial interview but comparing the predictions and the insights offered 'then' with the realities of 'today' makes for good reading. To me, it was something to what I expect would be the thrill of opening a time capsule - not that I ever opened one myself. And I can imagine, 5 or ten years from now, re-reading this collection in 2020, staring with the 2002 original interview and its 2011 update. Well... I'll probably do that.

As for the 'who' is featured in the book, Amazon's 'product description' section has the complete list. I suspect that each reader will find 'interesting' and 'indifferent' personalities on the list and some may even skip over some. I didn't skip any myself but, I must admit that some of the people interviewed I didn't care much about while some were a treat to read. But, even when the topic or the person being interviewed weren't that interesting to me, the questions asked were good, intelligent questions, almost forcing good intelligent answers.

Reading "Architects of Tomorrow" was a pleasure and being asked by the author to review his book - yes, I received a free copy - was a privilege. 

How to Argue Like an Intel Bigwig

With "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" up and running, it's time to get "Volume 2" under way. One of the first interviewees on the roster is Intel's David "Dadi" Perlmutter, the man behind everything from the 387 co-processor to Centrino and the architectural shift away from brute gigahertz. One of the things I enjoy doing in these interviews is getting to know the personalities behind the technology. Knowing Dadi's reputation as an epic arguer during product development, we shared this:

CPU: “Forbes” described you as “a relentless arguer.” Is this accurate?

Perlmutter: My assistant nods her head [laughs]. I hope I’m not argumentative in a disruptive manner. Call it more of a debate than argument, because “argument,” at least in my understanding of the nuances of English, is more of a negative. Debate is trying to get things sorted out and understood from multiple angles. It’s the Jewish scholar way of learning, very much about debate. You have this opinion? OK, I’ll use the other opinion. When you have been convinced by me, I’ll argue the other way. That’s a very good way to make sure you don’t agree on things too soon. Sometimes in team dynamics, you get to where everybody’s happy and loves the idea, and they just move on with it—but it isn’t necessarily the right one. So you want to ask the next question to make sure that all of the angles have been understood and you bring in people that have different opinions. It can’t just be me. There has to be discussion. The culture must be a thoughtful one. The trick is to know when to get out of the room, because you can stay in that phase forever. The art is to understand where the debate becomes an argument and you’re stuck and everybody is saying the same thing again and again instead of bringing in new ideas. I regret to say that sometimes we direct the debate for too long. I will not say that I know the exact point to get out.

IBM Takes Us a Step Closer to the Singularity

IBM made history in 1989 when it devised the means to manipulate and place individual atoms. In the famous image shown here, researchers created the company logo from xenon atoms placed on a nickel substrate.


Fast forward 22 years. IBM Research today announced that it has successfully developed an antimicrobial polymer able to target and destroy drug-resistant superbugs, such as the much-dreaded MRSA. (I came down with MRSA after a nasty spider bite a few years back, and I would've paid anything to be rid of that pain.) As IBM describes it here, scientists "have now successfully developed a new biodegradable and in vivo-applicable antimicrobial polymer, which can selectively eliminate the bacteria without destroying the surrounding healthy red blood cells." The nanoscale engineering required to manipulate atoms now bears fruit as devices that operate at the sub-cellular level.

The polymers self-assemble when introduced to water, either in the body or on the skin. The post-assembly structures use electrostatic interaction to locate targeted bacteria membranes and burrow inside them. Because the cells are destroyed, there's no mutation into an evolved, potentially more virulent strain. Unlike prior attempts at similar treatments, IBM's polymers don't attack red blood cells, and they biodegrade within the body so as to be expelled as waste.

In the image to the right, you can see an untreated MRSA cell on the left and that same cell after being hit by IBM's nanoscale polymers on the right. Most people have MRSA on their skin. We're surrounded by it. Fortunately, it only rarely (although increasingly frequently) develops into an infection. Don't be surprised if these polymers end up in everyday products such as deodorant and disposable wipes.


I find it interesting to view this announcement within the context of the technological development Ray Kurzweil discussed in his "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" interview. He predicts the rise of nanoscale devices exactly like this as a key step in greatly extending human longevity and melding humans with machine intelligence. If we can instruct such self-assembling agents to go to specific cells and perform exact tasks, the potential applications are limitless.

Rewriting the Textbook Market? Smashing!

Smashwords CEO Mark Coker is on a crusade to turn the publishing world on its ear, spank it senseless, and then remake it into a force that will change the world...presumably for the better. What I didn't realize until interviewing him was that Coker isn't just trying to make affordable electronic texts for students. He's trying to make them free. For anyone who has ever spent hundreds of dollars they didn't have on 40 pounds of Chemistry and Calculus books -- each term -- the following excerpt from "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" may come as welcome news.

CPU: Textbooks seem like an ideal way to push ebooks into the mainstream. Do you see education a major catalyst for this market?

Coker: Well, I’m involved with a company called Flat World Knowledge. I’m an advisor and an investor in the company, and they’re doing open-source textbooks. They’re making high-quality textbooks available to students for free. The traditional textbook model is completely broken, and Flat World is probably one of the companies that’s going to come up with a better model and turn everything upside down. That’s starting to happen. Textbook publishing is another business where cost structures are out of control, and the business is making decisions to perpetuate practices that run counter to the interests of their customers. You’ve got publishers trying to combat the aftermarket for used textbooks by coming out with new editions of algebra or history texts every year. Come on—how often does algebra change? As a result, they’re diluting their books with all kinds of digital extras and CDs students don’t even want, and it just raises the prices. It’s created a crisis. The government is getting involved. And it’s creating an opportunity for companies to come along and better help students. Digital learning materials are the future, and there are multiple drivers for that. Cost is only one.

CPU: You mention history. In some places, history can be rewritten pretty easily. Now, you’re talking about free, open-source texts, and that makes me a little nervous. If I can change my Smashwords text half a dozen times per day, can’t I do the same with textbooks? What’s to keep us from the alleged chaos of Wikipedia, where it’s great because it’s free and still over 90% accurate?

Coker: Flat World does what is called commercial open source. They’re investing the money to produce professional, peer-reviewed textbooks from experts in their field, so the source content is solid from the beginning. Then they give the instructor the ability to modify the text to suit their needs. If the instructor wants to add five chapters or a bunch of case studies, they can do that. It’s a different use of open source than something like Wikipedia. I think there will always be value in publishers doing what publishers do best. There’s value in curation. You have a professional expert looking over the material and fact-checking it, just like your editor. That’s valuable. Curation needs to happen or else you get instances where the material is only 90% correct.

That Very First Geocaching Discovery

Perhaps my family is a bit late to the geocaching scene. Even though I first interviewed Jeremy Irish, co-founder of Groundspeak (which operates Geocaching.com), in 2005, it took six years for us to catch the wave -- probably so our kids could grow old enough to appreciate the fun of "treasure" hunting in real life. As it turns out, there's been a cache located just outside my home since last December, and I never even knew it! Literally, I can see the cache's hiding spot from my office window. Life is funny.

The three founders of Groundspeak, with Jeremy Irish at center.

Geocaching can be addictive, so perhaps you're curious about the first cache discovered by the man behind Geocaching.com. If so, enjoy this snippet from Jeremy Irish:

CPU: What was in that first cache that you found?

Irish: I found a yellow 3 x 5 card box. Inside was a Sunny Delight drink, which is one of the reasons why we say no food in caches. It wasn’t very appetizing. And it had a disposable camera in it, which I thought was a pretty novel idea. A lot of people still do that today. They go develop it at the end to see who went to the cache. And that was pretty much it, plus a log book and a pencil. It was a really straightforward kind of basic cache.

I had recently moved from Washington State to Virginia, and I didn’t really know the area that well. But I got excited, bought the GPS receiver, and found through general research the location of a place I could park and do the hike. It was probably one of the worst hikes I’ve ever done. It was a hot day, unusually warm for the Pacific Northwest. The bugs were out in droves, and I ran out of water about halfway through. We were pretty unprepared for such a long hike. We had to go down to a lake and filter some water. It was just miserable, but when we got to the location and found the container, we were so excited by it, just the possibility of finding this thing, that it made the whole hike worth it. I thought, you know, if I can have a crappy hike and have a really enthusiastic experience finding a 3 x 5 card box in the woods, then this must be something that may be popular to other people.

Write a Review, Score a Free Ebook...Deal?

All right. With "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" now live on Smashwords and Amazon, I'm anxious to get some reader reviews posted on either site (or both!) So for those of you who email me at architectsoftomorrow * at* gmail.com at point out the review you left, I will hook you up with a complimentary download of my prior ebook, "Strange Horizons Retrospective." I'm not fishing for false praise. I want your honest thoughts -- good, bad, or indifferent. And as a token of my appreciation for your time, I'll knock your "Strange Horizons" price down to free-ninety-free. Do we have a deal? Email me!

Let the Tweets Begin (...Please!)

markcoker Mark Coker 

Architects of Tomorrow by @williamvw http://bit.ly/ghOiCr Interviews Ray Kurzweil, Esther Dyson, Max Levchin, Bob Young, Jimmy Wales, me(!)

Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 Now Published on Smashwords!

At last! Only 10 years in the making, Volume 1 is now live on Smashwords. Check out the free preview download, or simply grab the entire book in your choice of format.

I'll be back shortly with the link for Volume 1 on Amazon. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

- - - -

Edit: Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Architects-Tomorrow-1-ebook/dp/B004SBP98U

The Creator of the Hyperlink Says the Web's Been Done All Wrong

Imagine if, while in college, you realized how to create solar powered cars that would solve a major part of the world's oil dependency. You took the idea to Detroit, the manufacturers thanked you for your research paper, and all they did with it was use your solar energy implementation to power car stereos. That's how Ted Nelson feels about the Web and hyperlinks. His original proposal was for hyperlinks to be two-way associations, not the one-way affair we have today, and he's been fighting to get the world back on track with his Xanadu project ever since. But Nelson's opinions go way beyond hyperlinks, starting with our common use of the word "technology."

WVW: We have these ad campaigns like “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” telling us that no, really, some things do work. But do they? Has technology improved?

Nelson: My first quarrel is with the use of the word “technology.” The word “technology” is the most misunderstood concept there is. Most of what is called technology is packaging and convention. You talk about “Macintosh technology.” There is no Macintosh technology. It’s all packaging and conventions. There is no Windows technology or World Wide Web technology. The technology is TCP/IP and computer hardware displaying graphics. That all gets packaged into Facebook and email and similar things. There’s a political packaging issue whittled from the technology. Ninety percent of the use of the word “technology” refers to these packages, and because we don’t make this distinction, people are totally confused about what’s happening in the world.

WVW: So we’re paying attention to the names, not what’s underneath them.

Nelson: We’re like babies and puppy dogs. A new box is open, here comes the same thing in a different color with its head upside-down or something, and—“Oh, this is just fantastic!”—but it’s just some minor variation on what we’ve seen before. So the problem is that the public imagination is stifled. 

A Future So Bright It's Electric

Greg Nielson is the lead solar technology researcher at Sandia National Labs. His group recently announced successfully using micro-scale manufacturing to create "glitter" -- solar cells that can measure as little as one-quarter of a millimeter in diameter. The potential of glitter and other breakthroughs like it could revolutionize the solar energy market. Here's a taste of why:

WVW: I recently tested a $50 solar battery charger. It took all day in bright sunlight to charge one pair of AA batteries. That seems absurd. Given that just the charger costs $50, I found myself asking, “What are we doing here? No one is going to pay for this.” Can your technology help improve our daily electronics experience?

Nielson: A couple of things. You can buy a backpack with PV built into it to charge a cell phone or whatever. The cost of those compared to the power output is pretty high. Just for reference, I’ve examined some of those in the past, and you’re looking at about $40 per watt at peak production, under the brightest sunlight. On the other hand, with the solar systems that people put on their houses, the cost is much lower.

For portable electronics, we’re excited about that. The flexible PV [photovoltaics] that people are using on bags are about 4% to 5% efficient, so really poor. Building stuff on a flexible substrate is really hard to do in a way that’s robust, but we think we have a way to do flexible PV at much higher efficiencies. Right now, we could do flexible PV with our cells at even 15% efficiency, and silicon has been demonstrated to be over 25% efficient. If we could get into that range, we could increase the power output of those electronics—charging bags and things—by a factor of five. That’s pretty significant.

Now, on the rooftop solar power side, we also think we can have a big impact. One particular reason is the fact that we’re using much less silicon to produce the same amount of power. Silicon is, for the cells and the modules, definitely the biggest cost driver. So if we can reduce that significantly, then the biggest cost component goes down. In our case, it essentially goes away because we’re reducing the silicon by a factor of like 100. 

Intel's Burns Saw 7 Years Into the Future

One of the factors that has made Intel the undisputed leader of computing processors is its ability to think long-term, see the future it wants, and then make that future happen. Sometimes, things don't go according to plan. (The names "RDRAM" and "Opteron" come to mind.) But overall, the chip titan has done extraordinarily well at charting its own destiny. I was reminded of this by a particularly prescient passage from my 2004 interview with Louis Burns, then Vice President of Intel's Desktop Platform Group, in which he already knew which way the living room computing winds would blow. Keep in mind that there's an Intel processor at the heart of the first-ever Sony smart TV launched late in 2010.

CPU: We’ve argued in CPU’s pages whether the future of PVRs and convergence in general would hinge on multiple PCs in the home or one uber-PC connected to a number of clients, such as set-tops and media players. What do you think?

Burns: You’ll actually have both. On a worldwide basis, I can see a house where there’s an EPC [entertainment PC] in the living room and that’s the only PC. In a dorm room, that would be a good play, or a small apartment in Korea. In a big house, there could be a really nice PC in the office or den, and over back in the family room, there’s a smart TV which sources information from the den box, and then some of the bedrooms have their own PCs. There’s this very cool product out that we call a MyRoom PC. It’s a Gateway 610 [Gateway 610 Media Center PC; MSRP starts at $1,499.99] that we designed from the ground up inside of Intel, including the industrial design aspects of it. It looks like a 17-inch flat screen TV that’s got a great quality sound system built into it. It’s a full media center PC with wireless keyboard and mouse. This is a really cool device because it was designed with a convergence of CE stuff and PC stuff. You can visualize that living in a bedroom. So I can see the one PC and a bunch of devices or I can see lots of PCs and fewer devices, and there’ll be combinations in between.

One of the things that we’re working on really hard is that when you take these devices out of the box at home and plug them into the wall, they should self-identify themselves and say, “Hey, I’m an entertainment PC and I speak this or that standard.” Then it looks for other devices, like that smart Sony TV you bought, which is saying the same kinds of things. They start to identify themselves to each other and the network self-configures. One way of looking at this is if people have to roll a truck to do the installs or if people have to have an IT expert, whether that’s a neighbor or relative, then we’ve failed. It has to be that simple. The 610 from Gateway is a great example of out of the box, up and running, in less than five minutes. And no wires, because wires are just a pain in the ass.

Inventor Woody Norris on 100 New Periodic Tables

With the inclusion of over 4,000 words of fresh interview material this morning from ingenious inventor Woody Norris, Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 is now (I hope!) done and just waiting for final editorial approval before going live.

I'd actually given up hope on reaching Norris in time for the Volume 1 release, but he surprised me by calling my office Friday morning, apologizing for having been away working to promote the latest incarnation of his HyperSonic Sound (HSS) technology, now being developed through his new company, Parametric Sound. If you're not familiar with HSS, check it out here. I can't wait to experience this in person!

Norris and I spent a large part of our interview discussing the inventing process. He's a firm believer in the power of invention to solve humanity's problems, and he feels we've hardly begun to realize the full potential of human invention. The best and by far largest quantity of inventions still lie in our future. This is a piece of what you can look forward to reading from him:

WVW: Toward the end of our last conversation, you said that you’d had a couple of ideas for inventions just while we were talking, which just blew my mind—

Norris: And I always write those down. I’m serious. Nothing of consequence has been invented yet. This whole field of nanotechnology— When I grew up, I came to the point in school where I realized that there was the periodic table of elements, and everything in the entire world that we have done up to pretty much now has been based on combinations of the elements—refining them, making a few artificial elements. With nanotechnology, it’s like you’ve got 100 new periodic tables. Really! Every element, carbon being the most common in the world we live in, changes into about eight different elements just by making it nanoparticle-sized. It changes colors, electrical characteristics, becomes an insulator, practically a perfect conductor, stronger than steel. And this is just one element! So it’s like we have a whole bunch of new periodic tables with which to make new inventions. But if you don’t learn about that and study it, you’re a caveman. You’re looking at earth, wind, and fire being all there is. Knowledge is the key to it all. Einstein made a great comment one time. He said, “The most abundant thing in the universe is hydrogen. The only thing more abundant is stupidity.” 

Music Pioneer BT on the Intersection Between Computing and Ideas

My 2006 interview with Brian "BT" Transeau stemmed from a PR push by AMD, which wanted to position itself as the platform of choice for digital audio workstations. In this vein, I was curious about BT's views on how processing and computing might figure into his artistry now.

WVW: How do you foresee leveraging ongoing improvements in computing in your work?

Transeau: The funny thing is—and it’s one of these Murphy’s Law or...I  don’t remember whose law it is, but...as things get faster, your ideas get bigger. Some of the things I’m interested in...like, see what they’re doing with the particle accelerator at CERN. It’s pretty exciting. Cloud computing is very exciting, and the idea of crowdsourcing CPU power using other people’s computers and spreading out very computationally intensive processes across webs.


I think that things are going to continue to grow and evolve technologically and stylistically. We’re going to see incredible new ideas cropping up and this incredible proliferation of not just new ideas but software to address those ideas. The rate of change is changing. That in itself... It’s a very exciting moment to be alive. I don’t know how sustainable what we’ve created is, but it’s a very exciting moment to be a part of...anything, honestly.

Time Covers Kurzweil

Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 headliner Ray Kurzweil is under the spotlight of a new Time Health & Science story introducing readers to the idea of the Singularity and Kurzweil's thoughts on the radical extension of human longevity. It's a well-written, thoughtful piece and well worth your 10 minutes to read.

Now Who's the Sucker?

In the introduction to my interview with Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes.com, there's a passing reference to P.T. Barnum's famous saying, "There's a sucker born every minute." As it turns out, though, P.T. Barnum never said this. The line belongs to one George Hull, who crossed swords with P.T. Barnum in court over a rather exceptional hoax. A link to this tale, as told by R.J. Brown on HistoryBuff.com, is given in the interview's introduction, but feel free to check out the fascinating back story now.

PayPal Co-Founder Ready to Code Through the Revolution

I interviewed PayPal co-founder Max Levchin just as he was getting social media company Slide off the ground. Of the 75 people profiled in Architects of Tomorrow, Levchin has one of the most compelling stories in his rise to success. At first, I supposed that by the time he'd blown through PayPal, passed Yelp, and reached Slide, the entrepreneur routine would have become old hat. However, the truth turned out to be (as always) more complex.

WVW: You’re an engineer and a coder by background, but you keep turning yourself into a corporate executive. Do you have any identity crises during these conversions?

Levchin: A little bit.

WVW: But you keep remedying it by starting something new?

Levchin: Pretty much. I wrote a lot of the original code in the Slide server and a lot of the original code in PayPal. All the security code, all the crypto stuff was coded by me. And I stayed on some of the tasks over time in PayPal to make sure that my skills stayed sharp. When we started Slide, I was very happy to be back in the programming saddle. For the first half of the year, I was writing lots and lots of code and tried to move the programming needle personally. At this point, the company has 30 people in it, so I don’t get that much time for programming, but I spent most of yesterday writing something that we’re going to use in Slide.

I have an occasional fear that— Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t remember exactly how old I am. I try to think, “What’s my skill set? What can I do if everything goes to absolute crap? What can I offer to society that will provide me with food and clothing?” The thing that I generally fall back on is, “Well, I can still code really well.” Yeah, I came up with some decent ideas, and I can manage people, raise money, and I understand financial models pretty well now. But all that stuff seems very intangible. The thing that’s very tangible is I know how to code pretty good.

Red Hat's Founder on the Secret of Successful Programming

Bob Young founded Red Hat Software, built it up into a credible threat to Microsoft during the dot-com boom, and in 2002 left the company to go shake things up in another sector: book publishing. He started Lulu Press, which is now one of the world's top self-publishing services.

My discussions with Bob Young will be in the upcoming Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1. He's a fascinating, clever entrepreneur with loads of experience and wisdom to share. To give you a taste, at one point I asked him what his first experience was with a computer, and what I got was a lesson in work habits.

Young: While I define myself as a salesman, my interest in computers goes back to my second year at the University of Toronto in 1973. I was taking a computer programming course, and the practical component of our course involved sitting at the keyboard of a big desk-like machine that punched what we typed onto 8" by 3" punch cards. Of course, the University’s computer department was seriously underfunded (some things never change), so there was a real shortage of these punch card machines, which resulted in long line-ups all day.

The most frustrating part of this course was that no matter how hard I worked, there was this group of kids who scored grades that were dramatically higher than the rest of us. Having spent most of a semester with them, I was convinced that they were not genetically superior, so I was curious. One day, standing in line at the punch card machines behind one of the smart kids in my class, I started whining about what a waste of time it was. Instead of sympathy, he sarcastically mumbled, “Well, then why don't you show up after midnight like the rest of us?”

Later that day, I did, and I learned one of the important lessons about computing I’ve never forgotten: real programmers don't sleep…which, I suppose, is why I never became a real programmer.

Fatal1ty Takes Revenge

One thing that has consistently struck me when interviewing the luminaries in Architects of Tomorrow is how humble and ordinary most of them feel during the interview. Many of them might tell you they were just lucky. Not so with Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, arguably the most accomplished professional gamer in the world. His unabashed and unapologetic approach definitely set him apart in this collection.

WVW: How did you feel when showing up at your first world tournament?

Wendel: It was definitely exciting. I mean, going to a LAN event where there are 1,000 gamers or more, and all the top gamers from all around the world there, it makes it really intense! When arriving at the tournament, I knew I had what it took to win it and dominate anyone I played against. I played against tons of gamers in the BYOC [Bring Your Own Computer] area, and I was playing extremely well. I didn't lose one game the whole time in the BYOC. During the tournament, I was playing flawlessly the whole time, just winning every game with ease every time. Then I finally had a tough match against one gamer named DethStalker. I literally felt like I was playing in my very first tournament again, where my nerves were going crazy and I couldn't shoot for anything. So I had to resort to 100% strategy and no aim. Fortunately, it worked out for me, and I came away winning 11 to 9.

After that match, I believe I finally lost one match, and I was in disbelief. I swore I was unbeatable. So after that match, I decided it’s all balls out now, and just play like you do at home. From there on out, I was winning every match again with ease and then I had to have a rematch with the guy who beat me earlier in the tournament. It was a very thrilling match. It actually went into overtime, and about two minutes in, I finally got the last kill while shooting him in the back with the lightning gun to win it. I remember I threw off my headphones, and I'm like, “Thank God!”

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales on School Cred

WVW: Students cite the Britannica all the time. Will teachers accept the Wikipedia as readily?

Wales: I would say not right now. But that’s our goal. Toward that end, the really fast-paced, high-activity, live-editing model means that you can go write some nonsense in an Xbox article right now and it’ll probably be reverted within five minutes. But it’s a little chaotic at the moment. What we’re working on in the community is how can we put together a review process that will let us identify stable versions of the article, versions where we say, “yeah, this one’s Britannica quality,” and flag that so that we can put out an edition either on CD or to be indicated on the Web site: approved articles that would say, “We’ll stand behind this in the way that Britannica would.” Then we’ll have live updating. It’s just a question of how to sift through things. How do we sift things and find the nuggets of gold and try to encourage more of that? Britannica’s a couple hundred years old, but we’ll catch up soon enough.

The Father of the Xbox on Console Gaming Today

Seamus Blackley, formerly of Microsoft and "father" of the Xbox...

WVW: Now that you can look down on the hardware arena as an outsider, what do you think about the current directions being taken in consoles?

Blackley: Consoles work because there’s a social pattern that involves sitting in front of the television to be entertained in your home. Games naturally appeared there as a “programming choice.” This is the same reason that video games appeared in arcades—people had a social pattern of playing coin-operated amusements that Nolan and others exploited by making machines that had the same usage pattern, but had novel content.

As we see consumer behavior change today, as we do with Facebook, for example, new places to put games emerge. There’s a moment here where we have to watch and see what this means for game-specific hardware, and it’s very interesting. On one hand, you have Kinect and its ilk, running on HD and possibly 3D televisions. On the other, we see handheld play patterns shifting to new devices such as the iPad. It is fun to see that nearly every new device that releases to consumers becomes a de facto game platform.

Snopes.com Founder Barbara Mikkelson on Why We Have Urban Legends

The second interview in "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" is with hoaxbuster extraordinaire Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder and principal author at Snopes.com. At one point in our conversation, I asked her about the root cause behind why the Internet is so replete with tall tales.

WVW: Can you generalize about whether there is a point to urban legends? Do they serve a purpose?

Mikkelson: They are often used to give voice to any number of anxieties or concerns people have. It’s like, if you were feeling anxious about something in your world and along came this story which just perfectly illustrated exactly what you were feeling uneasy about, you would turn and share it with others because you would be able to say, “See, see. This is exactly what I was saying. This is exactly what I’ve been feeling lately.” That’s why these stories get spread as much as they do.

Another reason for them is that sometimes these stories are expressions of how we would run the world if we were in charge. In other words, that good people would be rewarded; bad people would be punished. It’s a way of expressing a sense of unease with how things happen.

Ray Kurzweil Optimistic on Averting Catastrophe

With about one week until the debut of Architects of Tomorrow Volume 1, I thought I'd offer a piece from one of my favorite headliners in this collection. Ray Kurzweil was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, but he sure hasn't slowed down in the 21st. As one of the most public voices in artificial intelligence and a pioneering inventor of many common computing technologies, he contributions to society can't be underestimated. My question, though, is whether the best is yet to come.


One of Kurzweil's favored research fields is human longevity...

WVW: As we see in your books, such as Transcend and The Singularity is Near, you believe we’re close to having the technology needed to radically extend human life. Even if similar technological feats allow us to solve issues such as energy shortages, there’s no getting around the problem of aging societies and overpopulation. Unless these longevity technologies come with a built-in zero population growth switch, how can we avoid this impending risk?

Kurzweil: The idea behind radically extending human life is to stop and reverse aging so we won’t be “aging.” As for overpopulation, the same technologies that will extend longevity will also vastly extend resources. We have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100% of our energy needs. The total amount of solar energy we are producing is doubling every two years, and we are only eight doublings away from meeting all of our energy needs. The technology underlying this is the increasing application of advanced material technologies such as nanotech to solar panels. Once we have inexpensive energy, we can easily convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated water we have on the planet to usable water. We are headed towards another agriculture revolution, from horizontal agriculture to vertical agriculture where we grow very high quality food in AI-controlled buildings. These will recycle all nutrients and end the ecological disaster that constitutes contemporary factory farming. This will include hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables and in vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat—that is, meat without animals. Even PETA likes this idea.

Desktop nano factories will enable us to produce high quality modules to snap together high quality yet inexpensive housing. There is a Singularity University project devoted to this concept. Look at the cover of last week’s Economist magazine, it features a picture of a violin that was printed out using a contemporary three-dimensional printer. This spatial precision of this technology is improving exponentially. And there’s plenty of land available, just take a train trip anywhere in the world and you’ll see most of the land is not really used. We aggregate today in crowded cities because this was a good way to communicate, but the need to do this will dissipate as virtual reality becomes equal to real reality in resolution and realism.