Despite the shrinking size of microchips eventually they won't get any smaller. What will we turn to then? Today computers keep getting smaller and smaller, disk space gets bigger, processors get faster and overall computers are advancing at an amazing rate. Moore’s Law says that our computing power will continue to double every two years and up till now it has been surprisingly accurate, but eventually standard electronics, silicon circuits, hard drives and flash drives will reach their limits. Someday it will be impossible to fit any more transistors on chip, impossible to make our computer run any faster, unless we rework the whole way our computers are run. That is the purpose of this article, to explore the alternate possibilities for computing and their flaws/drawbacks. Optical Computing: Optical computing is one of the first possibilities for an electronic alternative, that would allow for near boundless advances in speed and miniaturization. An optical computer is a computer that uses photons and light instead of electrons to store and work with data. With modern computers we are limited to the speed of the electron, which although is astoundingly fast just sometimes doesn’t cut it. On the other hand photons are the fastest thing in the universe, traveling almost 10 times faster than an electron. This would significantly speed up processors, and data manipulation. The other thing to consider is that photons are actually mass less and so could possibly store hundreds of times more information. Where are they? To make an optical computer, one would need to use an optical transistor, a device that could amplify or switch on and off light beams. An optical transistor has to be made out of a very special material, that can respond to the amount of light passing through it, and output a relative amount of light, similar to a transistor reacting to the amount of voltage run through it. These materials have what is called a nonlinear refractive index and are basically non-existent in nature. A refractive index is the measure of how much the speed of light is reduced inside the medium. For a normal linear refractive index this number is usually constant and so would not make a good switch; on the other hand a non-linear refractive index can change depending upon the intensity of the light entering the medium. The problem is that these materials are rare, and not easy to mass produce. There are also problems with making these materials into small enough switches to be considered, so it may be a while before you can go out and buy an optical computer. This is a simple Quantum Computer. Yeah simple Quantum Computing: The next possibility for a future computer is a quantum computer. Normal computers store their information in electron containers, where a full container would indicate a 1 and an empty container would indicate a 0. A quantum computer on the other hand stores its information in the quantum states of particles like atoms, ions, photons and electrons. Because it stores information in quantum states a Quantum computer is able to have more than just a 1 or a 0 allowing for thousands of different calculations per second. This would allow a quantum computer to run in the same way a supercomputer does, processing many different parts at the same time. A normal computer on the other hand usually only processes one thing at a time, unless you have a dual processors than you can go through 2 processes at a time. It is estimated that a quantum computer could run a milliontimes faster than computers we have today using this parallel computing. Where are they? Actually household quantum computers may not be that far away. Scientists have already built powerful working 16 bit quantum computers and some say that they could even be mass produced as early as October of this year. One of the only restrictions is that the computer would have to be completely isolated from all atoms, molecules etc. except for its reading and storage atoms. This is extremely hard to do outside of a lab because one needs a material that can keep everything out. In each strand of DNA there are billions of nucleotides which could be used to solve complex mathematical problems. DNA Computing: The final form of computing that is a possible alternate for silicon resistors is DNA Computing. A computer like this would use the millions of nucleotides in DNA to store data and do extremely complex computations in short periods of time. The core idea behind a DNA computer is the floating fragments of DNA that it will contain. The DNA can be spliced together with another piece of DNA, broken apart, split in half, etc. to make a unique possibility which can then be read and determined to either be valid or invalid. Basically DNA will use a brute force attack on any problem it has using billions of strands of DNA to try billions of possibilities at once. Because of this it can run in much the same way as a quantum computer in terms of parallel computing but it also has another set of distinct differences that make it a good choice for a future computer. For example DNA will always be plentiful as we could harness it from any organism, even our own bodies. Also it is compact, if we could fully unlock the power of DNA a pound could match the entire storage capacity of every computer made today. Where are they? Simple DNA computers have already been built, but they are still in very prototypic stages. The trouble with DNA computing, is reading the DNA computations and determining whether they are correct or incorrect and what to do with them. Also DNA computers are more built towards solving equations than running games, word processing, etc. This means that it could be a long time until a desktop DNA computers is sold in stores. There are other possibile silicon alternates, but these are the three that I found more interesting. I hope you enjoyed learning about this, and maybe something else will come along that will blow these out of the water, only time will tell. Did you like this post? Check out the others, subscribe to the RSS, take a poll, stumble it, digg it, or even just leave a comment and help me improve my blog. Thank you. Net Neutrality People across the world are coming together to protect Net Neutrality Hey, guys today I’m going to talk about an issue that could ruin the Internet as we know it if we don’t join together to stop it. I am of course talking about Net Neutrality. This is kind of a hard concept to understand and I myself have just fully comprehended it today, but I’ll try to explain it in this article. Net Neutrality is really just an argument about who can control the Internet, the government or the corporations. Right now the net is open to almost everyone, any kid with a modem can go online and they can look at blogs, sites, images, videos, or really whatever they want to look at, at the highest speed that their connection can support. This is the concept of Net Neutrality, that the cable and telephone companies can not interfere with your information or the speed that some sites reach you. Unfortunately due to our capitalistic society some of the head honchos at these cable and telephone companies realized that they could make more money from the Internet if they charge for faster speed. This would completely destroy, the ideals of equality and connection on the Internet. The big companies would be able to pay the tax, while millions of other sites would be shunned to the side and some even shut down if they couldn’t pay off the cable companies. This would create a one-way media, where only big companies could get in and turn it into something like T.V., Radio, or Newspapers, all controlled by a few big companies. This is not something we can let happen to the Internet, because it’s the multitude of views and opinions that make it such a great medium for just about everything. Please help the millions of Americans and myself in ending corporate influence on the Internet, you can go to this site http://www.savetheinternet.com, send a letter to your members of congress, or just spread the word. Together we can keep the internet from falling into corporate hands like newspapers, television, and radio, lets keep the internet in the hands of the people. Did you like this post? Check out the others, subscribe to the RSS, take a poll, stumble it, Digg it, or even just leave a comment and help me improve my blog. Thank you. Search engine optimisation, achieve high position with Google In our opinion the main purpose for having a website is often overlooked! It is all very well having a great look site but if it is not generating traffic then there is little chance it will be developing sales leads & potential business. If that is the case then what is the point in having a website & what does it achieve? As the majority of users search using the search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo & MSN) then it is imperative that a site performs well in the search engine results. Search engine optimisation is the process of building a website to achieve a high position with the search results. This involves the following:
keyword research building & optimising the web page code (HTML) correctly using the keywords correctly with the webpage submit the site to the search engines & directories monitoring search engine results keyword research Keyword research is the process of identifying the keywords that are relevant to your business & choosing the ones that are effective. Some keywords are so popular that it would be very difficult to acheive a good search engine placement due to the number of sites competing. Equally there is little point targetting obscure keywords if they are rarely searched for. web page optimisation The search engine spiders like to see well written & lean code as it makes their job of finding the all important content easier. In addition, writing well constructed code makes maintenance easier. correct use of keywords How the keywords are used in the webpage is critical to achieving a high search engine placement. This involves the frequency of use (keyword density), placement, positioning & other techniques. site submission The site should be submitted to the search engines & website directories if not already done so. website monitoring An important aspect of SEO is the monitoring of the sites ranking & position within the search engine results. The search engines often change their algorithms for determining site ranking & as a result sites can move up & down the results. Contact IPL by completing the online contact enquiry form for the appropriate person to call you.