Stranger Than Fiction

On November 27, 2006, I posted this which said, among other things,

In September of 2015, Google and Apple announce the first shipping quantum computer, the Imagine . . . 

Then later in the presentation,

In April of 2019, Google and Apple announce the EyeMagine, a new version of the Imagine that utilizes a display that is projected onto the user’s retina, eliminating the need for an external display. The EyeMagine is the size of a deck of cards and wirelessly transmits data to the retinal projector mounted on eyeglass frames. The image size is controlled by the user, but can simulate up to a 56 inch display. Most users typically use it as a heads-up display supplement to “real reality”, providing a variety of information about whatever environment they are interacting with.

Last week the New York Times posted this,

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

And this week Wired reports,

On Tuesday, IBM revealed that physicists at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York have made significant advances in the creation of “superconducting qubits,” one of several research fields that could eventually lead to a quantum computer that’s exponentially more powerful than today’s classical computers.

According to Matthias Steffen — who oversees Big Blue’s experimental quantum computing group — he and his team have improved the performance of superconducting qubits by a factor of two to four. “What this means is that we can really start thinking about much larger systems,” he tells Wired, “putting several of these quantum bits together and performing much larger error correction.”

David DiVincenzo — a professor at the Jülich Research Center‘s Institute of Quantum Information in western Germany and a former colleague if Steffen — agrees that IBM’s new research is more than just a milestone. “These metrics have now — for the first time — attained the levels necessary to begin scaling up quantum computation to greater complexity,” he says. “I think that we will soon see whole quantum computing modules, rather than just two- or three-qubit experiments.”

Huh. As I said in that post,

I think this is a case of where the truth will end up being stranger than fiction.

Of course, I also had Google purchasing a controlling stake in Apple in 2013, which is clearly silly. Now that Apple has almost $100 billion in cash and a $500 billion market cap, perhaps they should consider buying Google . . .(Mr. Cook, feel free to call me for advice).

Picture several years from now combining the current versions of the eyeMAGINE, Google Goggles, Siri, Wolfram Alpha and quantum computing. We better get started writing the school policies to ban these things, 'cuz we sure wouldn't want our students to have these capabilities . . .

Yep, stranger than fiction.

Apple to Apple

I finally purchased a new computer at home and I thought it might be interesting for a few folks to do an "Apple to Apple" comparison.

First, the picture. Can you pick out which one is the old computer?

Now, the specs.

G3 All In One: Purchased in late spring of 1998 (last all-in-one before the original iMac)
233 Mhz G3 processor (PowerPC 750), 66 MHz system bus, 32 MB PC66 SDRAM, 2 MB vram, 512k backside cache, 4 GB hard drive, 24x CD Rom drive. 13.8 inch screen, 1.44 MB floppy drive, 10Base-T Ethernet, ADB Mouse and Keyboard, OS 8.0, 60 lbs

Upgraded in Summer of 2001: 500 MHz G4 PPC chip, 448 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 6 MB vram, 3 USB 1.0 ports via PCI slot, 2 Firewire 400 ports via PCI slot, OS 9.1

iMac: Purchased May 2008
Dual 2.8 GHz processor (Intel Core 2 Duo), 1066 MHz front side bus, 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 256 MB RAM on video card, 6 MB shared L2 cache, 500 GB Serial ATA 7200 rpm hard drive, Slot loading 8x SuperDrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW), 24 inch wide screen, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 mouse and keyboard, 5 USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire 400 port, one Firewire 800 port, 802.11 a/b/g/n-draft wireless, Bluetooth 2.1, built-in iSight camera, OS X v10.5, 25 lbs.

Yes, the old one still works, although there are times when I've had to hard reboot it three or four times in a row to get it to startup all the way. And I've been bringing a laptop (from grant money) home from school for the last year and a half or so as some things I just couldn't do in OS 9 anymore. But I think that's still pretty good - roughly 10 years of usable life with a little upgrade along the way. I doubt I'll make it 10 years with this new computer, but I'm trying to picture what the specs might look like in the spring of 2018 . . .