THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks. It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet. “It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle – but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so. Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds – a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said. “Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate. “The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16542805/

While we were installing the hard drive, I noticed something that I guess I had not noticed before….. Why is there no B-Drive?….. You have an A-Drive, which is usually a floppy drive, and then it skips to C-Drive, and on and on down the alphabet….. What happened to “B”?….. Computer Dummies like me want to know……

Yes, Herr Quizzenmiester, I got the hardware. Some of you slackers aren’t participating in the educational quiz. Look what you’re missing out on ! I’m going to have to build a freaking trophy case.

First of all, there are many other sites that discuss the technical differences between these two formats, so I won’t belabor them here. In fact, while an interesting discussion point, I don’t see the technical differences between the two formats having much of an effect on the eventual winner. After all, BetaMax was a better technology for video tape, but it wasn’t enough to save it.

Enough with the preliminaries: HD-DVD will be victorious! Hogwash you say? Want to know my reasoning? Read on…

Technical Merit

Many sites argue the technical merits of these two formats. Bottom line: Blu-ray has higher capacity, which is the basis for the other technical advantages it has over HD-DVD. The additional capacity allows it to store slightly higher quality motion pictures (or longer movies on a single disc).

I’m willing to concede that Blu-ray is technically superior, but I’m betting most people won’t care. Why? Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray look WAY better than standard DVD. Any slight advantage between the two will be lost on most buyers. In addition, most recent HD screens don’t have the capability to accurately display the video from HD-DVD sources, not alone Blu-ray. The output of these video players is superior to most new HD sets. As for movie playing time, it’s rare to find a title that won’t fit entirely on a single HD-DVD disc, so unless the studios make three hour movies the norm, it isn’t much of an issue.

Player Availability

HD-DVD players will be available first. Most likely, Blu-ray players will show up 5 – 6 months later. This is obviously an advantage for HD-DVD. It is a chicken-and-the-egg scenario. People need players before movie titles will be bought. Movie titles won’t be produced until people will buy them, and they won’t buy something they can’t watch.

Movie Title Availability

In the beginning, it was thought that title availability would be the pivotable issue in this war. After all, if the movies I want to watch are being released on Blu-ray, I’d better not buy an HD-DVD player. Turns out that this issue won’t be much of a factor in the format war. Yes, it will be an aggravation, but right now, it looks like the movie studios are roughly split between the two formats. It’s likely some of the movies you want to watch will only be available in the “other” format, no matter which player you choose. Slowly, some of the studios are making promises to eventually release in both formats.

Cost

HD-DVD players are estimated to cost anywhere from 30% to 50% lower, per device, than Blu-ray players at their initial release. This is due to the relative complexity of the machines. Both players will be pricey at first, but are expected to drop in price over the next year or two in a fashion typical of consumer electronics. Having a lower price is always an advantage, and remember that a 30% to 50% price difference will be magnified in terms of absolute dollars in the first months after their availability and before both their price tags start to drop. Unfortunately for Blu-ray, those first few months are the most important time in an acceptance war .

The Early Adopter

Many people will wait to buy either HD-DVD or Blu-ray, until it becomes clear which format will eventually prevail. These people are non-combatants in this war. They’ll have no effect on the result. The war will be over before they buy. It’s the early adopters who will decide the outcome. That’s why I discuss them here. My predictions aside, early adopters will be buying one of these players long before it is certain which format will prevail. Some of these buyers will be videophiles, and will choose Blu-ray, regardless of price, for the promise of the best technically possible picture. However, many other early adopters will not be video purists, but simply video enthusiasts who maintain a video library of their favorite films. They’d rather not buy more regular DVD’s (a soon to be defunct format) for the next additions to their home library. I think their thought process will be as follows:

“I want to get a new player to take advantage of my new HD screen, and I’d rather buy any new movies for my library in one of the high-definition formats, rather than continuing to invest in standard DVD formats which will soon be going the way of the dinosaurs. Which format player should I choose? Both are expensive right now, but HD-DVD is cheaper. Both players will be cheaper in a year. If I buy an HD-DVD player now, and it wins the war, I’m good. If it looses the war, I’ll have to buy a Blu-ray player down the road, but by then, it’ll have dropped in price substantially. It may even drop low enough to be had for the difference I’d have to pay today to start with Blu-ray. The best case is that I guess the correct format now, but if I happen to guess wrong, it’s better to have bought the cheaper player now. If I guess wrong, I’ll eventually come close to paying the same amount as I’d spend today on Blu-ray, but I’ll have both player types. I’ll buy an HD-DVD player today.”

This sort of behavior will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If early adopters hedge their bets by buying HD-DVD, HD-DVD will win.

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some odd reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists by putting the most frequently typed letters under control of the weakest felt-hand fingers…… The nineteenth-century machines weren’t mechanically trustworthy enough to keep up with fast typists….. Now word processors can keep-up with the fastest typist, but the old slow-down keyboard arrangement remains the same because no one wants to learn a new one…….

A person could get rich designing a faster layout for the keyboard…….. Or could they?……. I probably wouldn’t buy it….. I’m too used to the existing layout and too set in my ways…..

Tells you something about human nature and our resistance to any kind of change, which seems to make history repeat itself over and over again no matter how much techno-advancement is made…….