Nowadays data is increasing and accumulating in the offices. Probably, people have changed their mindsets so that they are accepting the softcopy and willing to eliminate the hardcopy, of the documents. Take my firm as an example, our senior partners or consultants are adopting the technologies such as wireless devices, emails or remote access etc. I can say that the email system is crucial to our business. There was an experience that our email system was down for nearly two days. It was really a chaotic situation to the firm even though it happened over 6 years ago. If it happened today, it would be even worse. More users are using Outlook (i.e. email client) as their personal file system due to its mobility and availability, and they can use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to access their mailbox anytime as long as they have access to the Internet. Alternatively, they can use the mobile devices including Smart Phone and Black Berry even though those devices might not be able to view many file types.
To users, truly this is a convenient way to store and retrieve their documents. The negative impact of this is keeping multiple copies of a single document at different locations. In other words, it would consume a lot of network resources, disk space to store the files, systems to backup and retrieve the files. For our email system, we have made full efforts to attain these tasks.
The Law of Moore says computing power will roughly double every 18 months. The logic is illustrated in the graph below:
Gordon Moore's original graph from 1965
‘The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer’ (Moore 1965).
Moore’s Law is well adopted and recognised by Intel. It is claimed that now we put 1.7 billion silicon transistors on one single chip (Intel Corporation 2005). What I actually want to illustrate the growth of technologies in another aspect. Probably, I should come back to my actual application of technologies.
To be continued
References
Intel Corporation 2005, video transcript, ‘Excerpts from A Conversation with Gordon Moore: Moore’s Law’, US, <ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/VideoTranscripts/Excepts_A_Conversation_with_Gordon_Moore.pdf>.
Moore, Gordon 1965, ‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’, Electronics Magazine, vol. 38, no.8.
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