How Pixar Used Moore’s Law to Predict the Future

  • By Alvy Ray Smith
  • 04.17.13
  • 9:30 AM

Image: Pixar

Whether you call it a data-driven prediction or think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, Moore’s Law has been going strong. It’s approaching half a century despite frequent observations that it can’t continue forever (Gordon Moore himself only gave it a decade).

Moore’s formulation was that the density of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months. (He actually first said 12 months, then 24 months — but the average stuck. It’s a “law,” not a law, after all.) But here’s my way of formulating Moore’s Law: Everything good about computers gets an order of magnitude better every five years.

So why bother with the intervening steps? If we know that computers will improve by a factor of 100 in 10 years, why not go directly to the higher factor instead of just getting a factor of 10 in five years?

We know what Moore’s Law is and how it works, but not many people reflect on why it exists.

Because inventors, visionaries, engineers — whatever you want to call them — have to arrive at each level before they can even imagine a way to the next one … and then create it. That’s how Pixar and its first film Toy Story — the first feature-length computer-animated film — became a reality.

The secret was Moore’s Law, and not just in the technical way one would think. The enabling idea of our vision was computation, of course, but the idea of computation alone would not have gotten us far. Ed Catmull (who would cofound Pixar with me) and I also used the Law to anticipate the future and make good business decisions through the long years we waited for the computer animations we all envisioned to become reality.

We — Catmull (now president of Walt Disney Animation Studios), I, and our colleagues — conceived the notion of the first completely digital movie almost four decades ago. It took 20 years to realize that dream with Toy Story, but Moore’s Law is what gave us the confidence to hang on for those two decades.

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Finally: This Is How to Fix the ‘Patent Fix’ We’re All In

  • By Julie Samuels
  • 04.02.13
  • 9:30 AM

Wired has been running a special series of expert opinions on “the patent fix,“ including specific proposals for fixing the software patent problem. This is the final piece in the series, from the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

It’s become clear that the patent system is impeding, rather than incentivizing, innovation. The laundry list of what’s gone wrong is long: a standard for patentable subject matter that makes no sense, notoriously vague and hard-to-understand claim language, the rise of the patent trolls … and all of these problems disproportionately impact software.

Whether the answer is software-specific or not, one thing is clear: It’s time to recognize that a one-size-fits-all patent system does not make sense.

That the patent problem exists is not news. Also not news: The software community is particularly hard-hit. So how do we make a system that many believe generally functions in many other technological areas work for software?

We don’t.

Instead, we look for solutions that make sense for software and don’t impact other technological areas.

Why Software Is Different

The traditional patent bargain — a 20-year monopoly in exchange for a clear explanation of what the invention is and how to practice it — makes sense in some cases. Take pharmaceuticals, which often require extensive research and development costing hundreds of millions of dollars; one can understand why we might reward that kind of investment with a government-granted, two-decade-long monopoly.

But software is different. It functions uniquely as a building block: The field is characterized by constant small improvements on what came before. It does not necessitate factories and manufacturing plants and years of testing at the FDA before approval. Instead, software requires just a computer and a coder. No doubt those coders work hard, but they can do so from their homes and existing offices.

Even more importantly: There isn’t any indication that developers wouldn’t write their code if they weren’t promised a patent in return. (If anything, the opposite is true.)

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Donglegate: Why the Tech Community Hates Feminists

  • By Alice Marwick
  • 03.29.13
  • 6:30 AM

Photo: Martin Barraud/Getty Images

It was the tweet that launched a thousand trolls. When Adria Richards tweeted out a picture of two men she overheard making sexual jokes behind her during open-source conference PyCon, the internet erupted.

Much has already been discussed about the “Donglegate” incident, from how everyone lost (both were fired) and what Richards should have done instead, to the very dangers of asking what could have been done differently at all. The resulting brouhaha is the kind of zeitgeisty moment that only happens when inflammatory topics combine: sexism in tech, social shaming, and the potential of social media to generate intense and unwanted publicity.

Rather than attempting to discern whether Richards was in the right or the wrong, I’ve been thinking about why the issue blew up and what it reveals. Because it’s far from the first time this kind of thing has happened. The Richards incident and resulting backlash not only reveals the lack of diversity and presence of misogyny in tech culture, but the myth of meritocracy and the growing belief in “misandry” online.

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Don’t Just Hate CISPA — Fix It

  • By Chris Finan
  • 03.22.13
  • 6:30 AM

Photo: ChrisGoldNY / Flickr

“This bill sacrifices privacy without improving security. We deserve both.” In case you missed it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is back, and this message is now being displayed on banners atop tens of thousands of websites to push people to act against the deeply flawed bill.

Why so flawed? Because while it aims to protect Americans from malicious cyber attacks, CISPA’s sweeping, vague language creates exemptions to all privacy laws. That’s why the Obama administration threatened to veto it last year, stating “Cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive.”

Yet that is the false choice being presented by CISPA’s sponsors. They’re gearing up to push the bill through Congress without much debate by raising the specter of growing cyber threats and presenting CISPA as the “simple” solution.

Well I’m not buying what they’re selling — I say we can have both security and privacy. Because let’s face it: We do need better cybersecurity to protect Americans and our economy from harm. In fact, compared to major natural disasters, cyber attacks by a capable adversary could actually affect basic infrastructure like power and water supply for a much more prolonged period and across a much wider geographic area.

That’s why we need a constructive approach to improving information-sharing about cyber-threats. But instead of just complaining and protesting, let’s urge Congress to propose robust safeguards for privacy. While I don’t like CISPA, here are some ways we can do that.

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Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own

While Congress is working on legislation to re-legalize cellphone unlocking, let’s acknowledge the real issue: The copyright laws that made unlocking illegal in the first place. Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed.

We live in a digital age, and even the physical goods we buy are complex. Copyright is impacting more people than ever before because the line between hardware and software, physical and digital has blurred.

The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it … without asking for permission from the manufacturer.

But we really don’t own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools. Modern cars are part horsepower, part high-powered computer. Microwave ovens are a combination of plastic and microcode. Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own.

This is a property rights issue, and current copyright law gets it backwards, turning regular people — like students, researchers, and small business owners — into criminals. Fortune 500 telecom manufacturer Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That’s right: typing in a password is considered “reproducing copyrighted material.”

Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit. After years of extensions and so-called improvements, copyright has turned Mickey Mouse into a monster who can never die.

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