Your driver owns your car

What if your driver used your car without your knowledge? Well, you would keep a check on where the driver is, or note the mileage readings or frequently peek out of your window to see that car is parked in your office parking. You may not even mind this as long as gas is not on your card. Or in this services world you would let the driver or the taxi company owns the car and you would just take the services of pick/drop.

Would you treat your personal information saved on your desktop/laptop/mobile device in the same way? Well, systems are getting complex, the line between your computer and net is fading. You won't know after sometime that the search on your computer got your information from your desktop or net. Or perhaps, what part of your information is owned by the search program you use.

You used firewall to prevent rogue programs from sending data out of computer. But now increasing number of programs work in online mode. Would a vulnerability in these compromise your data? Should you store data encrypted? Should all the programs that access your data run inside a jail, where no network access is allowed? There are browsers that are not allowed to access any folders outside their own.

I would like all the information generated on my desktop to be somehow attached to my desktop. It should be encrypted with my desktop id (nic), so that it cannot be opened on any other desktop. Before i send a file on mail i should enable it to be shared for everyone, as that is exactly the mail would. I want a firewall for my disk, for folders, files.

Instead i hear in future pervasive computing would end the misery of carrying electronic devices with you. You would go to any place, give biometrics and the system would turn into your desktop with all your personal data like email addresses. I am scared. I am more inclined to have a chip in my body that contains my personal data.

Information Product

Economist measure the economic performance by measuring the products and services that an economy produces/delivers. Earlier goods (products) were enough to be measured to provide realistic view. Then services started becoming a major component. If information economy is the next big component then we should start measuring information that an economy generates. This would be leading indicator of economies that are going to grow. Earlier to judge whether an economy was rapidly growing one could look out of window to find trucks of construction material or other goods moving. But now, the economies where people sit in home and read and generate information are going to reap benefits years later.

While it will take time before data on individual economies would be available, this discussion attempts to collate available information. It also is useful to think of various measures of information and to dream of information systems that can handle all the information.

On earth there is huge amount of data being generated. Every year between 1 and 2 exabytes(10^18) of information is added:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html

In 2003 we had 5 exabytes information :

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2003/1028amounofda.html

and if every 3 years the information doubles, soon we will have 10 exabytes.

And this is with world average of 14.6% internet usage: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

How big is that?

Recording real world objects and events in the world is an interesting study. It would show us are we nearing limits of information. Are we simply generating same information over and over again. Let us look at the number of atoms in universe, it is approximated to be 1e79:

http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/answerbook/universe.html#q70

If we store time-space data for these we would need 4e79 data items. Length of each data item would have to enable long distances and time since eternity. Well the information the world generates and handles is far below the information we would need to store to precisely say the position of each atom. Only then we could talk about processing systems capable of using laws of physics to predict the future of physical universe. And all this is without adding additional 7 dimensions given by string theory and the number and types of strings that would go in creating atoms.

Another interesting example is to look at human DNA. These are the codified programs that describe the human body, the code to create one.

One set of chromosomes have 3 billion base pairs : http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/StevenChen.shtml

Assuming 2bits for each, this amounts to 6 billion bits or 716 MB. And it is more exciting to know that this information is duplicated in 10^13 cells. If we store information about 7.2billion people in world, this means ~ 5 exa-bytes. Well just to record the information about every human, leave other flora-fauna, we need bigger systems. We perhaps can not think of the kind of redundancy that human body provides.

Till now we have only discussed about systems where real world is just represented. We will have to record all the events that are of interest to us like placing an order, shipping a good etc. We will then have to record all the creative work that humans have done in literature/science/technology etc. And once we record everything we would need systems that will process this to let us answer questions like what is the common sequence of DNA between all physicists?

Rat race to nowhere

IT promised a life where mundane work would be done by software and executives would be able to do more in less. IT did more than expectation. Office software, easy to use applications, enterprise software - all let the work that used to take hours be done in minutes, many times without human interference.

What has remained unhelped is work-life balance. Long work hours at that time have continued to exist. Infact mind has been put to greater stress due to quality decision being needed to be made every minute. Accessibility to huge and quality data has burdened the processing power of mind. Where laptops and connectivity has encouraged people to take work home, enabling applications on Pocket PC and smartphone will ensure that one is on job in shopping malls, in cinema halls... And in one softskills training we were told to not carry office monkey (work/worries) home. One is now at office the moment one wakes up, one doesn't have to dress up and go.

IT is enabler but race has been always there. The race we run is a race with no end line. It is a race where you see the person ahead of you and you always wish to run faster. And as someone says, its a rat race, even if you win it you are still a rat. Where would the rat rest? Only rats that take rest, i have seen, are the one who are either tired and drop out, or the ones who do not consider themselves to be part of race. For a healthy economy, as economist would say, we want rats to run, run for longer part of life. How could it be ensured that the race ends everyday so that rats take rest and come back next day energized. Government regulations in earlier period for labor class could be used to control work hours. But not now, IT is the disabler. It doesn't look that rats as a whole won't find a way, may be a few might. Rest of rats would pay the price. And some of them who have paid heavy price for the extra speed they maintained would push the lot for higher speed. Only if rats knew that this race has losers, but no winners. Perhaps winners ne'er run!

First posting

The first thing i intend to do is to check how the postings look.