A Bowl of Stupid

All of you goddamn parasites — just keep yer damn hands off!!! (Cough, cough, gollum, gollum … Gollum, gollum, cough).

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Based upon a variety of factors, my old laptop — a Dell Inspirion — is quite utterly, a disaster.

It's about 4 years old (the same age as my emotional state), it was abused as my secondary "work" computer during the last 3 years I practiced law (uggh, the mere thought of doing legal work at this point just gives me the freaking "willies"), it has been with me across several continents now, and it has been subjected to conditions that one could euphemistically describe as "harsh."

In short, it has seen better days.

Additionally, I have learned the hard way that it's not the best "traveling" computer either. It's heavy as all get-out (in the range of 8-9 pounds with battery), the screen is broken and won't even stand up without the use of books or other items propping it up (much like myself, come to think of it), the outer casing is cracked in various locations allowing me to see more of it's computer guts, and sometimes it simply refuses to cooperate at all.

Action needed to be taken. And I'm back in Singapore, which is the alleged "cheapo electronics" capital of the world. So, when in Rome … uhh, I guess you buy something, right? Riiight.

Oh, I bought something. I realllllly bought something. In fact, I am the proud new owner of this miracle of modern technology — the Sony Vaio TZ.

Holy shit, this thing is the fuckin' mac-daddy, mutha fuckas!!

The thing only weighs 1.2 pounds. It's got an 11.1 inch screen. It's got over 12 hours of battery life. It's got a fingerprint reader so I don't have to deal with any more goddamn passwords. And it's got a shock protection G-Sensor Hard Drive - which is better for traveling (I would have to do a system restore on my old one every time it would take a big bump on an Indo public bus).

Yeah, you women can have yer shoes, and yer handbags, and yer makeup, … or yer whatever — I've got my VAIO; I said I got my VAIO to keep me warm.

Well now, if y'all will excuse me, I'm gonna hole up in my room and whisper sweet nothings into its built-in microphone allllll night. Just you and me, love … just you and me.

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I'll apologize up front for completely link-napping this article, but I really wanted to pass on this post from "Inkblot Earth" concerning Quantum-computer technology. I've found the concept fascinating for many years, but I don't have a firm enough grasp of the subject to add any coherent commentary of my own. So I'll leave much of it to Raven over at Inkblot, who aptly notes that D-Wave, a privately held Canadian company, just unveiled and demonstrated the world's first commercially viable quantum computer. Wooha for science.

In their press release, D-Wave states the following:

Quantum-computer technology can solve what is known as “NP-complete” problems. These are the problems where the sheer volume of complex data and variables prevent digital computers from achieving results in a reasonable amount of time. Such problems are associated with life sciences, biometrics, logistics, parametric database search and quantitative finance, among many other commercial and scientific areas.

Quantum technology delivers precise answers to problems that can only be answered today in general terms. This creates a new and much broader dimension of computer applications,” [Executive Officer] Herb Martin said.

The image above is what's called a Bloch sphere: a representation of a qubit, the building block of quantum computers. For background, this is what Wikipedia has to say:

A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit holds either a one or a zero. The device computes by manipulating those bits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) logic gates and back. A quantum computer maintains a vector of qubits. A qubit can hold a one, or a zero, or a superposition of these. A quantum computer operates by manipulating those qubits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) quantum logic gates and back.

In laymans terms — quantum computers can compute REALLY hard problems — and potentially problems which today's supercomputers can't touch. Check out more on D-Wave's website. And again, as aptly noted by Raven — Raymond Kurzweil's evolutionary chart of computing power comes to mind (click the picture for a larger version).

Raven concludes his post by stating that he can't wait to see how A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) evolves during his lifetime.

As for me, err … not so much - I'm hoping for at least a few more years before Skynet takes over. If we can just make it to 2025 (the estimated date for Human Brain Neural Stimulation), we can simply upload ourselves into a T-1000 and everything will be status quo.

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