KEY TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS OF THE 2000s THAT MOST OF US USE EVERY DAY:
- LCD monitors and TVs
- Solid State Drives (SSDs)
- Cloud computing
- Wireless networking (WiFi/802.11g)
- Multi-core processors
- USB flash drives
- Streaming audio / video
- Torrents
- Online game consoles
- Touch screens
- Bluetooth

KEY TECHNOLOGIES THAT DIED IN THE 2000s:
- Floppy disks
- CRT displays
- Modems
- DOS games
- VHS tapes

PREDICTED TRENDS FOR 2010s:
- Software development re-focuses on hardware limitations & performance optimization (yes, hardware is still very limited!)
- Streaming 3D - enormous worlds with terabytes of content loaded from the web in real-time on your mobile phone or gaming console
- Pen-like computers & 3D glasses - this is the next logical combination of input/output devices overtaking the old PC & monitor
- Popular novels become 3D-ified - entertainment now puts YOU in an immersive 3D world of fantasy - be on Mars battling aliens
- Enhanced vision - while you wear 3D glasses, your PC will see the real world for you in many ways: real, infrared, X-ray, and so on
- The OpenWorld3D project: a perfect online replica of the entire Earth as a 3D world (with buildings, streets, cars, weather, etc.)
- Collaborative 3D modeling online - 3D model wikis are born: allowing the online community to build 3D models collaboratively, online
- 3D will be THE buzzword of the decade, like "online" was for the last decade; expect highly immersive & realistic 3D worlds
- Flexible paperlike screens allow creation of rollable (and maybe even foldable) tablet PCs and phones - OLED will make this happen
- The data web: a computer-friendly version of the entire world wide web, allowing greater sharing of data between sites
- The Internet goes 3D: toward the end of the decade, expect more and more websites to be full-blown 3D worlds

Quick! How many times did I mention 3D?

It was about 4 years ago when I started saving money for the first time. I opened an ING Direct savings account. Didn't know what I was going to do with it all, but I knew one thing: nobody was saving their money. There had to be a reason. Not only that, but saving was frowned upon. It still is. "Live your life, man!" is what everybody would say. But no. I was saving every penny.

At times, I found it somewhat absurd. Why should I keep saving? What's the point? Why not live for today? Life is short, after all. But I kept saving. I decided to treat it like an experiment. I wanted to find out where it would take me. What advantages would I gain (if any) from saving as much as I can?

Mind you, 4 years ago I was 19 years old and was just becoming acquainted with the vastly complex world of finance. I didn't even know where exactly to put my savings. CDs? GICs? RRSPs? What does it all mean?

So 3 years ago I started researching finance, in depth. I started reading online materials on stocks, bonds, GICs, money markets, and everything else. Basically, I wanted to become aware of all the options I had.

A few months passed, it was July of 2007, and I was observing the stock market. I observed one thing: stocks had been rising since 2002. So, it had been 5 years of continuous rise. If I put my money in stocks now, I reasoned, I would probably lose a whole bunch of it when the stock market crashes (at the time I figured it was a matter of months before the next crash).

So I decided to hold off on buying stocks and keep exploring. Maybe there was something I could put my money into that wasn't just a plain vanilla savings account. I turned my eyes toward inflation. At that point, my only recollection of inflation was the disastrous hyperinflation that my parents experienced in Romania during the 1990s. I remembered clearly that there was a time when every week the price of bread would double. I wondered if something like that could happen again, in North America.

After doing a bit of research on the CPI and noticing that inflation had been going on, though at a slower pace, in the western world as well, I realized there was really no difference between Canada and Romania in terms of currency. Fundamentally, the currency system was exactly the same. So, technically, even though my savings account was CDIC ensured, the purchasing power of that money was not.

I decided to look for ways of protecting against inflation. Initially, my idea was to actually start an inflation insurance firm. Yes, I was determined to sell inflation insurance!

But there already was inflation insurance - and in October, 2007, I finally found out what it was. Gold. My research quickly took me on the path of precious metals, which had been inflation-proof for thousands of years. A good enough track record, I figured.

Great, so I decided to move some of my savings into gold. Of course, I realized it must not be too much, because gold is extremely volatile. Not only that, but gold had been going up for 6 years - longer than the stock market. Surely it was due for a correction. I started small, and moved slowly, making sure that my bullion position never exceeded the "safe" limit that I had set for myself.

But how did we end up talking about gold? The topic was savings. In general. And why it's important to have savings.

Well, first I must make it clear that gold is the only true form of savings. Paper depreciates, and is vulnerable to political turmoil. Stocks are risky - companies go under all the time. Real estate also depreciates and is vulnerable to political turmoil. If you want something that can withstand many generations and has a track record of preserving value through time (which is what savings is), that something is gold, and silver. Precious metals.

Now we can talk about why savings is power. What does it mean to have savings? It means you have the power to readily take on adversity, for a prolonged period of time, in the hope of achieving a greater income. For the individual, it means you can go without a job longer, so you have the latitude to negotiate higher pay in full view of the risk of remaining unemployed, because that doesn't bother you, because you have savings. It means you can explore new business ideas and have no fear of failure, because you know you have savings.

But this applies not only to individuals. Savings is power for countries as well. You see, the country that is able to take on the greatest adversity for the longest period of time will come out on top. Wars are won by those countries that have accumulated the greatest savings. In World War II, the US had the most gold of any country in the world. The US won the war and continued to dominate the world for decades thereafter. Remember: gold is savings, and savings is gold.

Now, 4 years after I started saving, I think I can finally appreciate the power of savings. I see now that debt is servitude, and savings is power. For you see, those who are in debt are subservient to those who have the savings. This has always been the case for all of time. Which side are you on?

My 10 predictions for 2010:

1. Inflation will surprise everybody. Watch prices carefully. Everything will be up 10-15% by summer. Your lunch will no longer be $7, but $10, and soon $12. Your bus ticket will no longer be $3, but $4 and soon $5. All in 2010.
2. Revolution will surprise the powers that be. The US is ripe for a revolution. Especially when it becomes perfectly clear that Obama has done nothing but lie, and that the propaganda machine around Obama is more powerful and more terrifying than what Bush could've ever dreamed of.
3. The big important theme for 2010: Cost cutting. The words "budget" and "low cost" will be what keep most businesses alive. It'll be about stretching every dollar, stretching every penny, despite the growing unacknowledged inflation.
4. China will be a big story in 2010, specifically recognition that China is now the world's dominant economic superpower and that US treasuries will soon be liquidated en masse. Furthermore, China will be a story because all of the inflation we'll be seeing will be originating directly from China!
5. Not to be outdone, mobile phones will go big in 2010 (or rather, small). There will be a surprise in the mobile market that neither Google nor Apple will appear to have prepared for - and that will come from Microsoft. Google, Apple, you have been warned! Yes, we're talking about Windows 7 phones.
6. Steorn, and a few others, will surprise the oil companies. Yes, free energy will arrive in 2010, if you know where to look. Steorn will be doing a demo early in the year, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. The human race has reason to celebrate, and reason to rise up!
7. Electric cars will reach power parity with gas-powered cars. Range will be hundreds of miles on a single tank. Batteries will charge in seconds! You have been warned...
8. Government will expand to take over every aspect of our lives. Yes, this is a sad one, but as private sector jobs disappear due to income tax bracket creep caused by inflation, government will expand to take over nearly every aspect of industry. We could see 90% of jobs becoming government-run or government-backed in some way.
9. Masses will be waking up, in a surprising way. TV will have a decreasing influence in everyday life, and you will become surprised to know that your next-door neighbor knows as much about the New World Order as you do, plus a lot of other things about free energy, UFOs, and other "black-listed" knowledge.
10. Wage inflation, yes wage inflation, will begin. Your salary will probably be up 50% by the end of the year, but inflation in everything else will have been closer to 100%.
    

Overall themes for 2010: surprise, reform, and revolution! Change will come, but not because of Obama.

Is time linear?
Does every interval of time contain the same amount of information?
What does time contain anyway?

Time is a container for change. Time contains the delta between one state of the cosmos and another. Each finite interval of time contains within it the amount of change that has occurred from the beginning of that interval to the end of that interval.

In a sense, change is novelty and novelty is change. Novelty is merely a synonym for change. So when we think about novelty theory, to refer back to the work of Terence McKenna, we're really analyzing the content of time.

We know that the content of space is matter, and energy. But what is the content of time? It's a perplexing question for those who cannot see the logical conclusion that time in fact contains information. For it is information that informs change. Information is nothing other than change, and change is information. Novelty is therefore information. We're running around in circles describing the same phenomenon with different words, each word trying to out-grandiose the others.

But the fact is simple and yet stunning: Time contains information, much like how space contains matter.

Now, we know another interesting fact from basic observation of the world around us, and that is that information is cumulative. You never lose information. This has been elaborated by Terence McKenna as well. Essentially, the fabric of time itself is cumulative. At every stage in the evolution of the universe, we have gone from a state of low complexity to a state of higher complexity. We've never "devolved" into a state of lower complexity. Complexity has always increased.

Well, what is complexity? First, it helps to understand how we obtain complexity. At the start of our universe, if we accept the big bang theory, the highest level of complexity in the universe was characterized by a primordial soup of electrons and elementary particles. From that evolved the first atom, clearly a structure with an order far more advanced than what had existed prior to its emergence out of the primordial ontos.

Now, this first atom, the hydrogen atom, contained a whole lot more information than its parts, or even the sum of its parts. Because the hydrogen atom has a logical structure far more elaborate than the logical structure which represents an electron. Indeed, it is this logical structure that we must talk about when we're talking about complexity and information. The hydrogen atom is an entity which requires far more information to describe than the electron or the proton alone. So basically, the primordial soup required a very small amount of meta-data (meta-information, or logical structure) to describe, compared to what followed (i.e. the hydrogen atom). This is where we get the notion of increasing complexity. Complexity is the measure of the quantity of information required to produce the simplest possible explanation of a particular physical phenomenon.

As the universe evolved further, we got more and more complex structures. We got other atoms, molecules, organic compounds, and then biological life, and finally social life; intelligent life. Each of these complexities builds on the previous level of complexity. Molecules build on atoms. Social life (cultural or intelligent life) builds on acultural, biological life. Microbial life builds on essential organic compounds. In essence, each new level of complexity contains within it all existing levels of complexity.

Thus, complexity is conserved. We can in fact emphatically state that complexity is never destroyed. It is strictly conserved.

So what does this all imply for the nature of time? Well, time contains within it descriptions of changes within entities of varying complexity. At the beginning of the universe, each second of time contained a only a very minute description of changes, because only a minute description was needed for the level of complexity at which the universe had arrived at that time. Basically, God only needed a handful of bits of information to describe a change in the state of the universe when the universe was still in its primordial soup state.

As the universe complexified, necessarily the amount of information contained within each second of time needed to increase, in order to completely describe the more complex universe that was emerging. Basically, each level of complexity required more information about the changes within that level of complexity.

Thus, as the universe cooled and complexified, time became more and more burdened with information, so that each moment of passing time contained within it more information than the previous moment.

This process continued to this day. With every passing moment, time "expands" to contain more information than any previous moment that has ever existed. This is a profound concept to grasp, with profound consequences for our perception of time. It means that our linear time assumption, the assumption that time is isotropic and linear - that each moment is the same as every other moment, and that each interval of time is qualitatively and quantitatively the same as every other interval - is absolutely patently false and misleading.

We have to ditch the idea that time is somehow plain, linear, and uninteresting. Time is extremely interesting, and ought to be studied by science like nothing else, because we don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of the nature of time.

But the interesting implications of this "expanding time" theory are many. This theory actually validates intuitively-derived beliefs in many cultures that time is accelerating, or that time is heading towards an ultimate end. In fact, even modern science has managed to create a theory mainly involving human culture and cultural progress which indicates that there may be a point in the not too distant future where all of our knowledge, having been preserved thanks to the law of conservation of complexity, leads to a point of infinite temporal acceleration - a point of asymptotic discovery and asymptotic change, putting an end to time itself. Indeed, this very idea has been prophesied by others, including the ancient Mayans with their apocalyptic 2012 prophecy, or the Christians, or even modern-day prophets like Terence McKenna, although I'm sure he would despise being called a "prophet."

We must challenge all of our dearly-held assumptions about time or else we will not proceed to make true scientific discoveries. Today, we carry notions about time that are akin to believing that the Earth is flat or that it sits atop the backs of four turtles. For example, we believe that causal connections can only exist from the past to the future. We have established one predetermined direction for causality. Yet, we can clearly observe retrocausal effects all around us that seem to defy the laws of physics and all too often get classed as mere coincidences or worse, paranormal phenomena. In fact, such occurrences should be observed experimentally and we should try to develop a theory for explaining such retrocausal phenomena as the appearance of 9-11 as a motif in various artifacts well in advance of the actual event which occurred on 9-11-2001. Other retrocausal phenomena include such cases as the flight of animals to safety prior to a devastating tsunami or earthquake. Anything that is often classed as premonition or prophecy ought to be investigated as a potential candidate for retrocausality - events from the future having causal links to events in the past. It's crazy to think that the future could have a causal influence on the past, as it means that the past is now just as malleable or perhaps more malleable than the future!

Anyway, I hope I've been able to shed some light on the strange nature of time and why what we humans often think is obvious is really not so.

I could probably talk further here but instead I think I need to actually summarize what I described:

1. Time is a container for... change in information, also known as novelty. Necessarily, then, time has at least two dimensions.
2. Complexity is conserved. Each new level of complexity builds on lower levels. Complexity is never destroyed or reduced.
   
3. Time is non-linear and quite probably anisotropic.
4. Time is expanding, with each one-second interval containing more information than any previous one-second interval. This is subjectively perceived as an acceleration.
   
5. There may be an endpoint for time, consisting of an asymptotic acceleration of the rate of progress toward infinite complexity.
6. Causality probably works both ways, even if it seems odd to us. Retrocausality seems to explain perfectly the phenomenon of prescience in some organisms.

Bend your mind, but be careful not to break it!

Spring Solstice

‘Tis the season to be jolly, as the sun begins to dawn.
Spring hath right now just begun.

The solstice ends the sun’s decline.
Soon the snow will melt, the sun will shine.

The sun will burn, high in the sky...
Just like your love did, last July.

Dan's Gold & Silver Recommendation: Buy (with caution)

---

We've now corrected 10% in both gold and silver, from the top reached a few weeks ago.

I think it's time, given the speed and severity of the correction, to start buying again.

However, I do think that further downside is possible. So cautious buying is advised.

---

I will try to have this segment at every major turn in the market so that you can stay up to date with the latest market movements.

So stay tuned for more of "Dan's Gold & Silver Alert."

Internet Explorer 9 will be coming out soon. It is going to have hardware-accelerated rendering of web pages. In essence, it will use the video card (instead of the CPU) to render web pages. This means much faster performance, awesome effects (even 3D), and less CPU usage.

Channel 9 has posted a demo of IE 9. The video shows some of the awesomeness of this new version of IE.

So here are some highlights of what's coming:

1. Web page rendering on the GPU (instead of CPU)
2. Better standards support
3. New JavaScript engine, with performance similar to Firefox

Here is a comparison of browser performance, from Ars Technica:

As you can see, IE 9 is now on par with Firefox and Chrome.

Not good news for Firefox. Or is it?

It seems the Firefox people aren't sitting idly by. They're busy implementing hardware accelerated rendering in Firefox 3.7.

So it's certainly going to be an interesting competition between IE and Firefox. It looks like the browser wars are on again.

Not long after I posted my first topic outlining the idea of Windows 7 smart phones, I found this...

Razorfone: A Conceptual Windows 7 & WPF-powered Multi-Touch Phone Retail Experience

It looks like the idea of a Windows 7 phone is alive & well. While the "Razorfone" is a concept for retail environments (a kind of kiosk), it's nice to see others considering the idea of putting Windows 7 on phones.

One more piece of good news on the mobile phone front:

WIND Mobile Takes Off - National Post

WIND Mobile - www.windmobile.ca - has finally been given the green light in Canada. No longer will we be limited to the triopoly of Rogers/Bell/Telus. Hopefully, this means no more 3-year contracts and lower prices in general. Canada is the most backward country in the world when it comes to mobile phones, largely because of Rogers & Bell's huge political influence.

I urge all who are upset about Rogers or Bell to check out WIND Mobile and consider switching over. Actually, I urge all to check out WIND Mobile. From what I can see, their plans are quite cheap and straightforward.

1. How much memory does 32-bit Windows support?

I'll try to explain this as simply as I possibly can...

You can have as much as 64 GB of RAM with 32-bit Windows, but there will be a hole between 3 GB and 4 GB.

64 GB? Yes. How is that possible? Well, Intel processors for a long time have had a feature called PAE (Physical Address Extension) that adds another 4 bits to the 32-bit limit of Windows, making it effectively 36 bit.

But...
A few caveats:
- If you have only 4 GB of RAM, you'll see just 3 GB because of the hole between 3 GB and 4 GB.

- If your CPU doesn't have PAE, you're stuck with 3 GB as the limit. Go to My Computer - Properties (in XP) to verify you have "Physical Address Extension" listed in your system information.

Also, processes in 32-bit Windows will see 2 GB of memory. But they won't see the same 2 GB. They'll be moved around by Windows so that all of your memory gets used (it's called multitasking!). So there is no "2 GB limit" as some might have you believe. The real limit is 3 GB, or even more if you have PAE.

2. What is different in 64-bit Windows?

The first thing that's different, you can access up to 16 EB (exabytes) of RAM! That's 8 million 2-TB hard drives!

But there are a few more things you need to be aware of:
- 64-bit Windows uses up 60% more memory and disk space than 32-bit Windows due to the doubling of pointer size
- You may have trouble finding 64-bit drivers for older hardware
- 32-bit software will still run perfectly on 64-bit Windows, thanks to WoW (Windows on Windows) emulation
- 64-bit Windows allows you to access all 4 GB of memory when you have 4 GB installed (not just 3 GB like 32-bit Windows)
- There is no memory hole in 64-bit Windows
- Each process can use more than 2 GB of memory
- Some CPU-intensive operations will complete faster if they take advantage of 64 bits (up to 5 times faster!)

Overall, if you have 4 GB of RAM or more, you should install 64-bit Windows to get rid of the memory hole. If you have 3 GB or less, you should stick with 32-bit Windows, because 64-bit Windows will eat up 60% more of your precious RAM.

My Experience - Going from 2 GB to 4 GB

I'm running 64-bit Windows 7 on my machine, with 4 GB RAM. It runs much more smoothly than it did on 2 GB of RAM. I installed 64-bit Windows 7 on 2 GB of RAM. Don't do it. It caused my memory usage to go up from 50% to 80%. Now, with 4 GB, my memory usage is down to 40%.

So, if you have 3 GB or less RAM and aren't planning to upgrade it right away after installing 64-bit Windows, don't install 64-bit Windows. It will eat up too much of your RAM.

Today I just discovered a neat little WPF graphing library called D3 (DynamicDataDisplay).

It's amazingly architected so that it's fast and extensible. Although it requires .NET 3.5, I was able to downgrade it to .NET 3.0 by using LinqBridge, a free library that emulates 99% of Linq without requiring .NET 3.5.

Actually, LinqBridge deserves a topic on its own - there is literally no reason for you to require .NET 3.5 in your apps, unless you use Linq-to-SQL. Linq-to-Objects is 99% emulated by LinqBridge.

To .NET library developers: start distributing .NET 3.0 versions of your libraries using LinqBridge, so that my Vista users don't have to download .NET 3.5. Saves me a boatload of headache as an ISV.

So, back to the main topic. If you're looking for a WPF line plot library that's free or simply want an example of how to build a WPF control library the right way, just take a look at D3.

Those are my findings for today. I guess it's been an exciting day!