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The Computer of 2010
nostriluu writes "
With the assistance of award-winning firm frogdesign (the geniuses behind the look of the early Apple and many of today's supercomputers and workstations), Forbes ASAP has designed and built (virtually, of course) the computer of 2010."
If memory serves correctly. Didn't someone have an input device that connected to your fingers? Moving your fingers around in certain ways to communicate.
After all, who else makes a computer's looks its main selling point?
Aside from the design of a pretty box to put the computer in, this article might have gotten 3rd place in a local Junior Highschool science fair.
It's a set of extrapolative predictions that could have been put together by a layman in a couple of hours of seaching the internet. This falls short of what most of us here could probably just sit down and type out without doing any research at all.
For example, there are no guesses about what specialized coprocessors will be the rage in 2010. Will 3D be the big thing, like now, or will acceleration for certain AI functions be the cool off-CPU gadget? Will we still think a big specialized FPU is a big deal, or will we just have a whole pile of small, parallel integer units?
This is the interesting kind of question about future computers. We know they'll go faster, use less power, and store more data, and we can put them in any damn box we please - that kind of speculation is as bootless as it gets.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I don't know why everyone thinks we want to talk to computers. I want to talk to my computer about as bleeping much as I want to talk to my television. I can't talk 100WPM but I can get close to that on a keyboard - and I don't know why you'd want to change that. Even thought recognition would be a pain in the ass. I can type almost without thinking about it - which might explain some of my posts, ha ha, but surely you must know what I mean; Thoughts flow easily to keyboards that might not to voice. Maybe that's conditioning, but writing down thoughts is something that goes back for all of recorded history and I think it's more than just me.
Computers of the future will be optical. They'll run at 100's of Ghz. They'll have stupid huge hard drives. Hell, they might even think. But you won't be talking to them - because it's plain not efficient compared to other input techniques, like computers. Do you know how sore your vocal chords would be after dictating all day?
Arrggh. That's my rant for the day.
..don't panic
While some of the "details" appear to be semi-plausible extensions of current technology-in-progress (there's some holographic storage in there, and it sounds like there's a bit of work being done on optical connections), most come across as partially fanciful, attention-grabbing fictions with a vague or shortsighted basing in reality, but with no real reason for being there apart from they're different to what we have now.
For instance, a lack of keyboard is a ridiculous idea. Perhaps it might work for simple dictation processes, but that assumes that there will be some device/method that will be faster for navigation (I probably use my keyboard more than my mouse to get around screen) and for non-dictionary input.
Other "advancements" are more in tune with the author's desire for the PC to become a fashion accessory, rather than a practical tool. "Digital Butler"? Come on... While there is certainly a (growing) market for this, the majority of sales will still (yes, even in the future...) be for the purposes of functionality. And for functionality, one needs... practicality!
Further, while it may look good, it's also been designed to be very general purpose - plug it into this wall/that desk/an eyepiece. Surely the author could see that separate appliances (PDAs, desktop terminals, servers) is the way things are going, rather than having a single versatile unit acting as all things?
Wildly inaccurate. I would hope.
And adding to that, this hallucination isn't exactly mindblowing: If I am stuck with a single terabyte of storage in 2010 that will be a true showstopper. Even simple extrapolation gets us 100 TB ten years from now. And there are more insufficiencies: Why is it that I have to plug my computer into the wall at home to make my house come to life? If there's anything obvious about the future then it's networks everywhere connecting computers everywhere. RAM doesn't match harddisk capacity. 256 GB of holographic RAM and only 1 TB of harddisk space?
Why wouldn't this thing be a wearable stereo-optic widget instead?
Also, I don't want my whole house on one computer, I wan't lots of embedded devices that talk to each other using _very_ simple easy to secure protocols. That way viruses don't crank my thermostat up to ultra bake, close all windows, and flick the lights on and off until I have a dang seizure.
I don't know if I'd be inclined towards speech recognition even then. I -like- typing. (except when my wrists decide they're pissed about having been fractured years ago. Then I'd surrender half my organs for high quality speech recognition)
Intolerant people should be shot.
I didn't think anyone remembered that movie .. it was one of my favorites as a kid.
i especially like the idea of the eff or 2600 walking to their desks and using biometrics to login to their computers... uhm, no. Talk about incredibly invasive, next they'll have those blood samplers like in Gattica.
FYI, the original Lost in Space took place in 1998. Danger Will Robinson, Danger.
--Ks9
By 2010, most "computers" will be next to invisible as they will be a natural part of the objects in the home.
The most computer like object to be seen will be a thin magazine sized color display with a touch sensitive surface. These will be dirt cheap, found everywhere and comunicate via IR or wireless IP. Somewhere in the home will be a box with disk storage and a Ip connection to the external world (via cable or phone.) CD, DVD etc players will be freestanding as now -- your TV or HIFi will access them as network devices.
All will run Linux kernels :-)
I havent read this article yet. but my guess is, it'll be just like 2001: a space odyssey. None of that shit came true!
"Delete all games that I have not played in the last 5 months and then defragment my hard drive." and all other examples in the parent post aren't really about voice recognition. Sure, you can use voice recognition to get this sentence in the computer, but then it will be just that: a sentence, nothing more. What you really need to make this work is to have the computer understand what the meaning of those sentences is, and that, imho, is way more difficult. Then you can use these kind of commands. And whether you use voice recognition or not is trivial. I'd be just as happy to type such commands in a box somewhere.
Oh yeah, and no one will catch a disease sharing a touch screen, right? Visited a public ATM recently?
Duh.
One form of the 2010 machine will be a tiny watch or pendant running Linux 4.8.16. But another will be a clunky tower, just like today, because the bigger the package, the more you can put inside. I doubt there'll be a place for their inconvenient, unstackable design.
Technologically, maybe it won't even have a hard disk. Maybe it'll use optics, maybe something else. The only thing I care about is that it'll be big (storage-wise) and fast.
As to the "swoopy" design, just check out all those 50's-era predictions of the future. Yeah, it'll look like a frisbee -- and no doubt I'll be wearing a silvery one-piece jumpsuit.
Mr. Victor Borge had this one nailed back in the '70s with his phonetic pronunciation
www.eFax.com are spammers
Look, if you are going to claim you are trying to predict the future, have some freaking content! This article had nothing about how we would get from here to there, nothing about what advances would make this machine possible (other than vague platitudes) and nothing about how this would fit into the world it lived in. To the authors of this article: Go read Heinlein, or Niven, or Asimov, or Clarke, or any other decent futurist before operating your keyboard! (because I seriously doubt any professional journalist would want to dictate his stories to a speech recognition system.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
uh...Windows 2006 or maybe even 2007?
You're using her as bait, Master!
IMHO, it is going away. When all the devices you use can talk to each other over the network (where network = Bluetooth LAN, Internet, whatever), SneakerNet becomes unnecessary.
I disagree. There are lots of good reasons why removable storage is going to be around:
- Secure file storage. Have data you need to keep private? Put it on a removable and put it in a safe deposit box or something. Or maybe you have a machine that, for security, can't be connected to a network.
- Too fat for the pipe. I've dealt with jobs that require the transfer of files totaling over 1GB to another office or service provider. Given that we don't seem to be getting close to the ability to transfer amounts of data this size quickly anytime soon, it's still faster to have someone stop by and pick up the discs/cartridges/whatever.
- Is everybody going to be l33t in the future? Will everybody who has a computer in the future have the best/fastest/wireless connection? It's not a matter of technology but more one of price and affordability for not just the well-paid programmers with the custom boxen but also those who can only afford an eMachine or some such machine.
I wouldn't mind being able to do away with removable storage but IMHO there are too many good reasons why we should keep it aroundOptoelectronics? This is one buzzword which will never catch on. I know nothin about optics or electronics, I'm just a programmer, but it seems obvious that "Optronics" is the clear choice among buzzwords for this emerging field. I say shun the (soon to be depracated) term Optoelectronics; adopt the much more advanced term, Optronics!
1. You show me a way to enter C code with a voice system and _then_ I'll throw out my keyboard. I could just see it: "up, up, up, left brace..." Screw that.
2. Processors don't have to spend 2/3 of their time waiting around for data. Real ones at least. I have a 533MHz alpha that does 980 MFLOPs, don't tell me it's waiting around most of the time.
3. I doubt that anyone will want to use Lithium batteries in ten years because fuel cells will have been out for 8 years.
4. If we have a quarter terabyte of main magnetic memory, what is the terabyte of optical disk for? It's the only moving part in the computer, what the hell do we need it for? Magnetic memory is static.
5. What about the network connection? OC-192? Better? I'd personally vote for some type of ATM, especially if we're going to use it for all of our communications. QOS is important, I don't want to lose frames on my movie just because someone calls..
6. They think that absolute security relies on thumbprints? Give me a break (or break-in). What we really need is to make sure that IPv8 is double-key encrypted at all levels.
7. There's nothing that they describe that is going to take a Cray to process. What does the typical secretary need with a supercomputer? A voice activated webpad is about enough. Gamers are another story entirely. Immersive VR is going to take more than they've got scheduled anyway.
In short, the forbes article is a fluff piece.
In my opinion, whether there is technical merit to this article or not, it sucks. And the reason is the way it's written. It blows in, drops hints of details like throwing candy at a crowd of children, then moves on to other things. It reads like a sales pitch, and a bad one at that.
Did I read correctly? I think it said that it had an optical hard drive and magnetic memory. Isn't that a huge step backwards? If my hard drive was as slow as my CD-ROM, and my RAM was as slow as my hard drive, I wouldn't be reading slashdot right now.
sup
It could be a handy shortcut meaning find the root partition in /etc/fstab and run
fsck /dev/whatever
in 10 years, we'll be on 70-140 ghz computers... (if my math skills are up to task :)
-moose
I have a big pile of Popular Mechanics magazines from 1990 to 1996 in my room. I always get a kick out of looking at all those funky concept car shapes that never came to be. A couple of them could have been viable in today's market filled with new Beetles and PT Cruisers.
FYI, Popular Mechanics had a feature article in 1994 on upcoming "information appliances" that would pervade our lives in just a couple years and allow us access to the "information superhighway" in just a couple years. These devices would come in the form of slimmed-down desktop computers (iPaq, iOpener), hand-held devices (Palm/Visor) and set-top boxes for the TV (TiVo, ReplayTV, WebTV).
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Actually the only real reason to do away with the keyboard is for mobility. Frankly its a pain to haul around a standard sized keyboard for data entry. For desktop I think the keyboard replacement is a tough sell.
The moble market however doesn't need voice recognition to get rid of the keyboard, Palm seems to have done a fairly good job of it with their entry system. Other companies could come up with a similar easy to use entry system, or an even better one. Indeed some alternates are already available for the Palm.
One question is do you really want to use a lot of computing/hardware power for voice recognition, or would you rather use it for something else (assuming software designers can come up with an efficient use for that power).
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I would think we could come up with something better then biometrics.
A biometric password is like using the same password everywhere, you know what it is based on and I would think of all things that could be spoofed, it would be somewhat easier. I don't know about you, but everything I touch doesn't hold evidence of my root password.
What we would really want is a system that can't be hijacked. A authentication system that proved it is me (the living, willing). A self destructive system when given the wrong password would be ok, however, you would probably be killed for using it.
Maybe a system with a flesh embedded chip (that needs blood circulation), along with a relative security level password. If you are truly being hijacked you could esentially open up a honeypot that contains very little real data but doesn't seem barren.
Perhaps this is too paranoid, but if so, you probably don't need biometrics either. Something like a fingerprint is just too likely to be damaged or non-repeatable, to be useful.
News for UW students
At least you didn't say they worked well. Hey, let's look at some input device "theory" shall we?
1. You store information in your brain. It's chemical. It's analog.
2. You want that information in your computer. It's electric. It's digital.
3. Can it possibly be that the best way to bridge these two qualitative gaps is by wiggling physical limbs over hard plastic nubbins?
4. Depressingly, the answer appears to be "yes"...
5. So now it's down to a matter of appendages, nubbins and how you wiggle them (feel free to make porn jokes now)
6. Alternate WAN (wiggling appendages over nubbins) techs have risen and fallen. The mouse is a popular WAN... but the guy who came up with the mouse idea (you know, whats-his-name who worked at SRI) also had this bizarre "chord playing" device for input as well... sorta like using an one-handed accordian.
7. Text. We want text input because we're slaves to alphabetic, pseudo-phoenetic written languages.
8. WAN techs must not only be efficient but be acceptable by people as well...
9. So, we need a WAN. It must be text-oriented, efficient and have a high acceptance rate among people.
10. You're answer to that is the keyboard. I work with a guy who turns blue under the eyes without his stylus.... the bottom line is:
We have WANs now that do the job, but we have seen new WANS (mouse, stylus) come along and there is no reason to think that WAN evolution will stop just because we like our F-keys and Num Lock. In 1983 I would never have imagined a mouse. But it happened.
2 1337 4 u!
I don't even work in cubicles, but I know I would keep my office door closed a lot more often if everyone in the hall was chanting nonsense to their computers all day.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Yeah, and the "The Desktop as Desk Top" part... Remember the evil CEO's desk?
>This should make university computer labs interesting, especially for people writing code.
Obviously it will be nearly impossible to write code without using a keyboard, but most computer users are not writing code: They're sending e-mails, writing papers and looking up information on the Web. With suitably advanced software (10 years is a long time, and in many areas we're already there), this can all be done vocally, but there will always be need for a keyboard.
My point was more along the lines of "Can you imagine trying to think about anything, especially code, in a big room where everyone is busy talking to their computer?" i.e. the noise aspect. I could actually see writing code via voice, especially if you're using higher-level languages with less bizarre syntax--which would likely start being developed once voice recognition became mainstream.
Heck, you could even write C code with voice, if you had a clever enough interpreter:
Okay, I take that back... I'd rather do C with a keyboard. (-:
How 'bout a portable with a molecular memory and a completely optical circuit, including the chips. Lumenon has the chips in question already, and you all know the quantum trip. That means that you would not only be able to communicate to your coffee machine and brother-in-law by annonymous E- mail at the speed of the dual death & life state of Schroedinger's Cat, but you could do it in the dark, typing on a transparent plastic lap-top while tripping on the play of light in the circuits.
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
Cars... I was promised flying cars. Where are my flying cars?
I hate to break their foward-looking uber-geek bubble, but isn't any one of the Apple G4 considered a "supercomputer" by today's standards? One gigaflop is the cutoff, right? The G4 met it, right? So we can buy "today's" supercomputer TODAY, right???
Mr. Ska
In the long-gone days (1980) of the 80286...
An 80286 in 1980? *snort* Right, and I had an Apple ][ in 1970.
--
begin 644
I like the two-sided laser idea, and the application of holography (which might enable you to exploit the thickness of the disk to store a few layers of bits rather than just one). But will we still be cursed with moving mechanical parts (like rotating media)??
chips that use silicon to switch but optics to communicate... Instantaneous on-chip optical communication
It sounds like they plan to replace any sufficiently long signal paths with on-chip optical waveguides, requiring an LED at one end and a phototransistor at the other. Putting LEDs on the same die with transistors is problematic today, but presumably they can solve that problem with some new LED chemistry. Next they need to be able to build optical waveguides into a die, and insulate them from one another (so they need transparent and opaque materials that can be built up using photolithography). I dunno if such stuff exists, they seem pretty confident about it.
One of the biggest advantages of photonic circuitry is an extremely low power requirement.
This is supposed to be a consequence of packing the die with LEDs and phototransistors, rather than charging up the RC delays of long signal lines? Hmm, maybe. The LEDs might not need much light to throw a bit a few microns.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
How many times have we heard that by the year 2000 we'd be driving space cars and have robot maids a la Jetsons? Come on....
... you did get the neon jump suit, though, right?
You mean you didn't get your robot maid at the New Year's Eve party like everyone else? Well, that explains it
Will in Seattle
What's the point of putting harddisk and cpu together if you have lightning fast communications: right! there's no point. You might as well separate them.
I think this article takes the pc today and wonders what would happen if all of the components in the PC were improved and (surprise!) you get a very fast version of the PC. What this article does not do is wonder how we would build computers if we could connect the parts more efficiently. The PC I had six years ago was more than adequate to operate the fridge, microwave, tv and light in my house. The only problem was that it couldn't communicate with those things out of the box. But what if the lightbulp was bluetooth enabled? It might someday become feasible to do so, what are we going to then? That's what's interesting. I don't think I'll ever dictate an email to my PC, typing is much faster than speaking. I don't care if my wordprocessor runs at 25 Mhz or at 25 Thz. I use my home PC for gaming, browsing and typing (in that order). Only the first type of use requires the kind of PC I have on my desk. This is not going to change. I'll probably be playing cooler games in 10 years but what else am I going to do with the PC outlined in the article?
Jilles
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
This is _precisely_ what I was thinking of. So does Forbes predict that we'll be able to throw the 2010 PCs at people to de-rez them? Hope not, I'm not all that good at frisbee or jai-alai.
ObSimpsons: Has anyone here seen Tron?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I mean, really, why do people want to do away with keyboards?
Keyboards are quick and efficient. This article says that you'll instead use a 3D interface, and simply touch with your hands what you want to do.
Is it me, or does that sound rather slow and clunky? Do I really want to be waving my arms around just to open a damn program?
Face it: keyboards are still around after all these years because THEY WORK. They might not look futuristic or uber-high tech, but THEY WORK.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.
Ha! I kill me!
I can't talk 100WPM but I can get close to that on a keyboard
Actually, you probably talk well over 100 WPM. Time yourself: I just checked myself and reading fairly technical text ("Experiments in Physical Chemistry", Shoemaker et al.) at my normal speaking speed I got about 250 WPM. When excited I easily do 300 WPM, which my students sometimes hate.
I used to debate in high school and college. I "spread" at about 700 WPM: I knew folks who could easily top 1000WPM. However, I suspect it's going to be many years before voice recognition gets to the point of understanding that.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
can just hear it now - people trying to have cybersex at cybercafe computers...
... I mean, those keyboards really distract my girlfriend and the guy at the next terminal always complains that he can't hear the sound on the MP3 he's playing when we get into it ...
Well, it's better than meatsex on the cybercafe computers
Will in Seattle
We've already seen an article, here I think, that a bloke with IBM or someone was talking about non-dynamic RAM with low power requirements to run and NO power requirements to maintain state. Now I wouldn't be surprised if in fact it could stand a powered refresh every day or so to offset the effects of random magnetic fields - hell you could put a field detector on the MM and it could open a circuit for a powered refresh every time it thought it was required.
You don't want a disk in a mobile device, for a simple reason - torque. A fast spinning disk is essentially a gyroscope. While it would keep the device stable for use, the cost is horrific forces on the axles of the disks. Go on, run around with a mobile computer containing and 10K rpm disk and see how long it takes to fail. I'd be surprised if it worked at the end of the day.
So, clearly the computer of the future will contain two levels of RAM - something designed for performance with whatever power requirements that entails, and a larger bulk designed for stability over speed, which replaces the hard disk. Only it doesn't, because no matter how optimised it is for stability, it's still gonna spank a disk completely for response time and throughput. In 10 years, memory designed for stability without power (or with only a tiny backup battery rated at '12 months backup') is still gonna look quite nice compared to modern RAM for speed and such.
So you'd have everything you would normally put into cache and main RAM in your fast RAM, and all the contents of your disk, as well as swapped-out memory pages, in your 'slow' RAM.
To turn your computer off, all you do is flush the DRAM contents to stable RAM. How long's that gonna take? 0.1 secs, tops.
To turn it on, all you do is a/ read from slow RAM enough to give the user their desktop, and start swapping the relevant parts of the OS into DRAM.
That removes the power requirements of the disk, which are quite high, removes most of the power requirements of DRAM, as there isn't much (perhaps only 10-20 GB - shockingly low for 2010), and leaves your computer safe to cart round with you. All we need now is a decent display. And as for all you guys worrying about interface. Imagine you strap something around each elbow that detects the nerve impulses bound for your forearms where the muscles that control your fingers are located. Wireless of course, encrypted link to the computer. I'm sure you'll learn to 'want to type' without actually moving your fingers and control your computer that way.
If you could put such a device on your head, or better still implant it, imagine the "macros" you could use. Your computer is under attack? You think of being protected, and it replaced inetd.conf with a more secure one and hups inetd. and shuts down some other programs. and enables network logging. and performs reverse lookup on all ip's currently talking to you. and traceroutes them. and keeps the results... and and and and and
Given the utility of such an interface to users of realtime computer systems, no not fighter pilots at all, guv, honest, I'm sure we'll see it or something like it by 2010. Once they exist they'll get cheaper and cheaper (until they fry someone's head, then they'll get expensive for a while til that problem is fixed), and then you'll be able to go down to Sony or Toshiba or GE and request surgery to have a neural link implanted.
Anyway, I've done the Cyberpunk thing enough.
Cache-boy
Error 404: There is no spoon
They found people hated them because the monitor was too far to traverse from the keyboard.
Any solution you have has to cover nearly the whole range of things people will want to do. Changing tools to change function is going to be unpopular.
The mouse/keyboard thing only works because the mouse is near keyboard and mouseing and typing are rarely done at the same time.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
...in the diagram. take a look. i am anal today.
Think of holigraphic memory as a stack of those cool hologram pictures you have seen before. That stack would have height, width, and depth. And on top of that, holograms can store different information depending on the angle that you read/write from/to them.
You can't take the sky from me
Goddamn, I gotta play this game too...
2010 State of the Industry
1. Msfts new mouse goes "beyond optical"... it now tracks movement based on the earth's magnetic field. Naysayers point out that Sun produced a similar mouse back in '01, but you had to use a special planet with it...
2. In a button-adding frenzy, logitech has released the 101-button mouse (wheel, lever, hand crank and ripcord included as well). Ad campaign: "it's a second keyboard... on wheels!"
3. Logitech's new mouse prompts Wired Magazine to declare "The Keyboard is Dead"
4. What the hell comes after "pita"? Now we gotta find out!
5. Transmeta announces the ultimate in software emulation and completely eliminates all physical components in their new chip. Company officials say the zero mass of the chip will reduce shipping costs and inventory overhead... Torvalds admits in an interview that it's basically a Turing Machine with a box...
6. Windows '09... It's got fins!
7. Oni released.
8. moodMac line released, a throwback to post-gen-X 70's nostalgia it changes colour depending on your mood. Features quad G9 processors with repoVec, a sub-processor that actually uses photoshop for you.
9. Mac releases OS XVII.LXIV.rVII. considers upgrading to Arabic numerals
10. You're still playing minesweeper?
11. Compaq releases a "computer so advanced, it's smaller than a dime". Pundits say monitor size is a serious limitation. Ex-VP Lieberman new CEO of Compaq, changes ad campaign to "24x6 nonstop" to keep the sabbath...
12. Seti@home finds alien life! He's doing 2 units a day on an AMD K21 TweetyBird.
13. Bill Gates says "640Mb ought to be enough for anybody"
2 1337 4 u!
Now, let's talk about the computer of the future I imagine. First of all it will be a half dissasembled box with various optical cables coming out of it and a little bit of dust gathering on the exposed parts. The processor is of course tweaked in some way as to make it 1.5-2 times as fast if occasionally unstable.
The computer is hooked up via a wireless VPN to a bunch of my hacker friends all over the world where we share our thoughts, and our music in secrecy. Of course I've got a high bandwidth Internet connection. It's perfect for serving up movies, music, and games, but it's still not quite enough to handle some of the latest technologies (some things never change).
I've got several of my older computers hooked up on the other end. Sure, they are slow and primitive, but it's fun! Needless to say these are all in a state of semi-disarray, with cables in a giant spaghetti mess on the floor.
Sure, I've got one of those cool mega-displays that display everything in photographic quality in a screen the size of a desk, but I've got some throw backs. I've of course got a keyboard since those virtual keyboards are cludgy at best. I've got a scrolling LED display I found in a junk yard and managed to hook up to my box. If somebody tries to hack my box a bunch it displays a message on the LED to let me know what's happening.
Now, that sounds like my dream computer of the future! Maybe it would be nice to have something portable to go with it, but I want a box I can hack and play with.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I agree, this would be much more useful if they could fit it into a Palm or calculator form factor. With a port for a keyboard though.
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Do you suppose it's typical of the company that their web site made me wait for Flash? That might explain the magic invisble keyboard / voice control stuff -- style over function. Cool looking stuff, though.
Does anybody know what the SciTex thing is?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Did anyone else find the page navigation a little out of sync with the subject?
Forbes is talking about the computer of 2010 to people whom they believe want or need a link at the bottom of the page to get back to the top. Considering that the Forbes readership is supposed to Have All The Money, I'm a bit worried by this...
Forbes' next article: "The Scrollbar In 2010", with a sidebar on the marvelous research being done on keyboard shortcuts...
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
Squares and rectangles (no, I'm not referring to Apple's cube. It is too rounded at the corners), 1984 Volvos, square coffee makers, not those stupid streamlined German ones.
And by 2010, the world will be crying out for understated, nondescript beige. What a great counterpoint to all those candy-colored balloon puters.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Totally different theory of predicting there... the prediction you cite is a Quantitative prediction, ie "in the future it will be bigger (or for computers, smaller) and faster". A change in quantity. What we have in the article is a Qualitative change, ie the very nature of how it works, what it does etc is changed (albeit not as dramatically as one could speculate). We've seen a lot of qualitative changes in computers: The transistor, the GUI yatta yatta.
Of course, sometimes quantitative change results in qualitative change.... as Stalin said "bigger is different". But that's for the 200-level. ha!
2 1337 4 u!
When I think of a future computer, I think of a supercomputer in a Palm. The unit would also be a phone, gameboy, MP3 player, and whatever.
The unit would also have a bunch of plug-ins for the more advanced PC functions.
It would basically be a supercomputer with massive storage and functionality, in your pocket.
That's what I want...
-- ERICmurphy -- www.jabber.org for open-source, XML-based IM
It's filled with multi-colored futuristic geek gut making jelly !!! Yeah !!!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Dak
Bossk
Zuckuss
4-Lom
Dengar
Captain Needa(sp?)
Moff Jerjerrod
Ponda Baba
Salacious Crumb, the
Boussh, a.k.a. Princess Leia Organa
R5-D4
EV-9D9
Power Droid
Nien Nunb
Mon Mothma
Dewback
Bantha
Gundark
Tusken Raider
Jawa
Discovering which of these additional names are already taken is left as a ("totally lame") exercise to the reader.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This article seems almost to have been written solely to give credence to some design firm's idea of what a cool notebook computer should look like 10 years from now. Because if you think about it, PDAs and smart cell phones are all the rage. Why? Form factor's a big reason, most bang per cubic centimetre. In ten years, wireless technology may well permit the handheld of tomorrow to be a simple network device that displays what is being served/executed from your home computer, or service provider, whichever you choose. It may well do a lot of its own processing but will be able to let the server simply push output to it. Such a device will have a small display for certain functions, but has the ability to redirect its incoming signal to a full-sized monitor (Jini, perhaps?), or accept input (still wirelessly) from a full-sized keyboard, or a picture of one on an ultra-huge desk display. In fact, the computers of tomorrow may well mirror the answering machine in its evolution. It went from being a clunky beast, to a slick device, to a *service* from your phone company. Only those doing serious computing will likely need their own secondary storage beyond cache, or require powerhouse computing. Once fat pipes are ubiquitous, services will surface to provide data storage and deliver it to you wirelessly in real-time. While the average person will be able to easily afford a unit powerful enough for their needs, most will want someone else to deal with the headaches, such as providing enough storage, backing it up, restoring it if the machine needs to be replaced. In ten years, these solutions will be in place.
--
--
quality costs *less*
Silly article.. Maybe they should do something on cars of the future and how they'll fly and have 18 cup holders. Or how about the TV of the future with 20000 channels. Maybe the robot of the future that will clean your flying car and change channels for you. A space-age oven that you put a food pill in and out pops a complete meal.
_______
2B1ASK1
What, like the Apple ][ box? Lovely shade of creamy beige, like Marantz hi-fi used to be... The keyboard and motherboard in one box, with 5.1/4" disk drives placed on top... a bit like a Commodore PET... Or is my memory playing tricks on me...
Or maybe behing the look of the Apple ///, or the Lisa, or early Macintoshes... lovely shades of creamy beige, parallel grooves... and very square.
As for workstations, which ones? The only one's I'm (slightly) familiar with are the IBM RS/6000 in a 19" rack... (little room for innovative design on a front-panel), various disguises of the Sun [Ultra]Sparc (from a pizza-box at first, but starting to look more and more like a "midi-tower PC", lovely shade of pale beige...) and the Silicon, oops, I mean the SGI Octane. Wow! At last, lovely shade of, er, is it indigo?
Supercomputers? Erm, lets see, is that an Origin 2000 over there in the corner? Oh no, It's a Convex SPP. Should have recognized from the fact that it looks like a scale model of the Tour Montparnasse in Paris (not Tx)... Did frogdesign do that? Looks nothing like an Apple Lisa...
Why does the article waffle on about MHz? We're not going still going to be using versions of the same crappy Pentium technology simply cranked to higher and higher clock speeds in ten years' time, are we? You can't compare a 400MHz Celeron with a 400MHz IP27 today; there's no point in talking about clock speeds (unless you're just trying to impress illiterates)...
The power supply will apparently be a "long, stick like lithium battery, bent into a doughnut"... Not if I can help it! I'll have a fuel cell that converts [m]ethanol to electricity... I'll grow fast-growing willows, pulp them (wind-powered), ferment, use a solar-powered still to get the pure alcohol.... That is, if I can't just pedal up a huge flywheel...
just my 0.2Euros.
I'm always impressed with any computer of the future utilizing holographic memory. "You see, it's 3-dimensional, which means you can store ONE TERABYTE of information. That's 1000 times as big as ... that old hard drive you bought in 1993!"
Holographic digital storage is right around the corner, along with antigravity, fusion power and warp drive.
This has got to be the most idiotic thing that I have ever heard of in my entire friggin' life. Think about this: you sit down and plug your comp into your desk and you proceed to work for 8 hours bent of your desk.. I don't know about you people, but I have three monitors hooked up to my machine and at the end of the day..12-14 hour days at that.. I have a bastard of a crick in my neck. If I had to hunch over all day, not only would my neck hurt, but so would my back.. and as a added incentive, my woman could call me quasimodo from then on.
No thanks.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Looks like this article is aimed more towards the PHBs...
There would have been no way that they would have predicted the importance of the Internet - or something like Slashdot. In 1990 the communications capability of computers was only known and appreciated by a very few geeks; most people had local call modem access to bulletin boardsif they had anything. (Please don't post how you had access to the Internet in 1983 - that just proves YOU are a geek and nothing else. Who could an average person have used as an ISP in 1990?)
In 1990 very few prognosticators would have predicted anything like a noticeable percentage of people running a Unix style operating system. Nor would they have predicted anything like Windows 2000 or an iMac.
One of the most interesting things about this article is that they had almost nothing to say about the - external to your house - communication capability of the machine. I suspect this will be one of the most important aspects of that machine.
One of the reasons that I bought OS/2 Warp 4 was the voice recognition capability built into the OS. I wound up using it very little. Not because it didn't work, it did. The reason I didn't use it much was that in order to activate it I had to say the word 'desktop'. For me at least 'desktop' is a VERY difficult word to pronounce properly. The 'k' sound at the end of one syllable followed by the 't' sound at the start of the next is just tough to say. When I thought about it I realized that I pronounced it 'destop' as do many of the people who say it in normal speech. The computer didn't know what a 'destop' was.
'Desktop' is a minor stumbling block, but it is the sort of thing that keeps voice recognition from being utilized as much as it could be. One of the keys to a useful voice command computer is to use words in the command structure that people can pronounce.
There is also a slight misconception in the article; the good thing about optical communication between computer subsections is not the speed of light vs the speed of electrical pulses - the good thing is that optical communications can switch on and off faster; you can obtain higher frequencies.
The article also gets it a little wrong when it blames the electrical interconnect for causing delays in main memory fetching. The problem is that dram speeds have only grown about 10 times faster since the days of the Z80 while processor clock speeds are up by a factor of 250 or so. Unless there is a real breakthrough in memory speeds that trend will continue.
To me, it seems as thought the author of this article but absolutely no research into designing his "Computer of 2010." It was almost as though he knows nothing at all about computers and found some old tech magazines and science fiction articles and combined them into a semi-realistic computer.
One of the things that bothered me the most the the appearance of the hardware itself. The author obviously thinks that the computer of 2010 is supposed to look like some kind of ugly disc that plugs into both the house and the desk. However, that is an entirely useless feature for the desktop of the future. If one truly wants his house to be computer operated, than it will be done with devices specifically designed to do so. Much like how cars have special onboard navigation computers to help the driver get around. Though it is possible to hook up a laptop, it certainly won't do the job as well as the onboard computer, nor will it be using the computer itself to its fullest extent. In other words, the technology has existed for over 20 years now, it's just that it is either too expensive or not interesting for the common Joe to go out and buy one.
But lets pretend that he didn't say that stupid thing about the house. Lets move on to the stupid things he said about the desk. You will plug this little module into your desk? Why? What advantages does this offer. What if you want to use this computer on the road? What if you don't have access to a desk? Well then, this idea becomes really retarded. Wouldn't it be easier to just carry around a laptop and hook it into a dock? That's basically what the guy "invented" in his little made-up story.
But let's move past this dock and look at how the thing actually works. You will have some kind of desk that is actually a computer. You will plug it in, wave your arms around and drag your fingers around it? If someone walks into your cubicle, you will look incredibly stupid. Why get rid of the mouse and keyboard when they are such great tools. Why have a magically disappearing/reappearing keyboard. Wouldn't it be a LOT cheaper to have a regular keyboard? The whole interface is retarded. And let's not forget about the cost of this fantasy computer. It costs a fortune to get a 15" LCD screen. I don't think the price is going to come down enough in the future for us to have desk-sized 3D touchscreen LCD. Even if it were, I wouldn't want it built into my desk. I'd want it the way they're dishing them out right now. A little stand but a big screen. A 30" LCD screen with 1600x1200+ resolutions would be much better than what this guy proposes.
Then there's his idea of security. These ideas won't take 10 years to implement. They're perfectly available now. The only reason they haven't caught on yet is because its too much effort for something that can be handled just as easily as a 10-letter password. It seems as though this guy was told to write up a story about the "world's most expensive"/"fantasy" computer.
Once we get past the terrible ideas for user interfaces, we get to terrible techinical rantings by the author about the hardware. It almost seems as though he was paid by different manufacturers to point out their names in his article as a form of advertisements. All the technologies he talks about have been known about for a long time and pretends that when IBM says 5-10 years, that means it will automatically be put into all computers in that time. But I think we all know that none of that is true.
The author seems to have some misconceptions about the way hardware works, and what he says about RAM makes almost no sense at all. All in all, this article seems like a hack. I think its interesting that they put it on slashdot because it gives real geeks the opportunity to poke holes into it and give the rest of the community a place to think about what computers will REALLY be like in 10 years.
Do you actually use a Palm regularly? I do, and some of my co-workers are true artists in terms of grafitti style writing. But they still write VERY slowly compared to their keyboard typing speed. It's just a slow way to enter data...
I do. And I am setting them to be standard issue with our sales guys.
I plan on giving them a PalmIIIxe, the Palm Modem and the folding keyboard as a replacement for a laptop. 95% of them don't use the laptops for more than a game machine so why not replace that?
Before I decided on embarking on this venture, I tried the Palm folding keyboard with my Palm V. The keyboard folds out to a standard keyboard size and has standard laptop 3mm travel. Feels great to type on.
So now they have their contacts and some custom enterprise software in their coat pocket. And when they're at the hotel they can write up anything large they need with the keyboard.
I may be issuing portable DVD players to do presentations. Even with the DVD players the total cost is about half that of a laptop capable of playing DVDs.
Actually I don't use a Palm but I've heard good things (still deciding if I want one). However I have used the specially designed single finger keyboard design which you can get for the Palm replacing the grafitti interface (can't remember the name of it at the moment but its very well designed) on my desktop for occasional mouse entry and can get to about 1/2 my hunt and peck speed without trying very hard (~20wpm or so) and have heard reports of people who use it seriously getting ~40-50wpm.
:)
Also this is still a useful area of reseach. If you can get fast data entry (~40 wpm) in a device without a keyboard (even a folding one) is a great advantage because this and the screen are the two largest items.
Now all we need is a foldable paper thin 11x17" display. ummmmm..
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
...up to the point of attaching it to the wall with magnets. Know of anyone with metal walls?
Secondly, why the hell should I have to move it around my house, to have it available in different areas? Stick the thing in a closet and have smart interfaces throughout the house.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
True, ditching a keyboard seems to be a nice fashion -- replace it with either a voice interface or a 3D something-or-other. But touchscreens?.. I'd say there is a use for touch-sensetive screen, but not as much as a keyboard/mouse replacement.
How about a device that would track your eye movement for screen navigation? Although then we probable don't need a screen as such, but rather some sort of gogles...
--AP
Moore's Law states that transistor density doubles every 18 or 24 months (depending on the flavor you prefer). Increased transistor density does not necessarily equate increased performance. The relation between the two is not a simple function. Putting the transistors closer together does generally let you clock them faster, but the speedup is not linear with density. Nor does 4x as many transistors == 4x as much work done per clock cycle, because we have run up against the point of diminishing returns with taking advantage of instruction-level parallelism in C code. As the number of transistors on the die has increased with time, the proportion of those transistors dedicated to on-die cache has also increased, just to keep the main memory from being more of a bottleneck than it already is.
If the popular programming paradigm changes from single-threaded to massively multithreaded, then the number of ALU's we will be capable of putting to work processing instructions at the same time will increase dramatically. Then the computer of 2010 will look less like one mondo-huge-fast processor, and more like several (at
Today's processors aren't running at 1GHz just because of process shrinkage; they're because of massive pipelining too. The current i686 has (iirc) 20 pipeline stages. 1GHz is the rate at which instructions are passed from one stage to another (and issued or retired). A 500MHz processor with an 8-stage pipeline would actually be faster than a 1GHz processor with a 20-stage pipeline. Admittedly the architects have been able to grow the pipe partially because of the larger transistor budgets Moore's Law has given them, but more is attributable to the cleverness of the EE's designing the logic and the increasing sophistication of IC layout tools.
-- Guges --
(Since then, I've gotten fast enough on the QWERTY that I think there might be some truth to the theory that QWERTY can be just as fast as DVORAK. But I guess that's like trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop. "The world may never know.")
Another example is the VITALY keyboard, which is a keyboard layout for palm pilots that is optimized for one-handed stylus hunt-and-peck speed. It's a great idea, and everyone I've heard who's tried it claims a huge increase in speed and accuracy. Despite this, competing products with a qwerty layout are selling extremely well (I think).
Since users are so incredibly loyal to the old familiar QWERTY keyboard, I am pretty confident it will still be the primary input device in 2010.
Beige Box with a keyboard, monitor, telecom wire running to the wall and power coming from the wall.
Computer I bought 4 years ago (almost to the day):
White Box with a keyboard, monitor, telecom wire running to the wall and power coming from the wall (plus mouse, speakers).
The computer I'm building this moment:
Blue Box with a keyboard, monitor, telecom wire running to the wall and power coming from the wall (plus mouse, speakers).
Are the people writing this article trying to be revolutionary? It sounds like they are trying do exactly the same stuff, but use buzzwords and fancy plastic molding to accomplish it. I don't expect the computer of 2010 to look any different, just be faster and slightly more ergonomically friendly.
One thing that has remained constant in PCs for the last 20 years: the mechanical engineers designing the physical apparatus holding the works together have come secondary to the EE's and CE's building the junk inside.
"Blue Elf shot the food!"
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
By definition, all software sucks. Some just sucks more...
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
I'm not so sure that using an eye control would be a good idea. Although it would be okay for moving the mouse around, there are some problems. First off, you blink naturally many times a minute, so who knows what you might accidently click on? Also, our eyes have a tendency to wander to take in the whole picture. So you'd probably be subconsciously moving the mouse around and clicking all over the screen, which would probably mess things up quite readily. If you can have an interface that can translate your thoughts in to words on the screen, why not use the same thing for the mouse? It'd be much more effective (though harder to design). Anyway, I'm not saying you don't have an interesting idea, I'm just saying that I don't think it's compatible with our biology.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight... maybe.
Just to let you know, they already have polymer based batteries that can come in any shape you want.
You can't take the sky from me
This has got to be the biggest piece of horse hockey my brain has ever played with. The authors of this article have obviously not been paying attention to trends in computing.
Most of the technologies that they mention are in the theoretical stage at this point, and as we all know, most theoretical technologies are press fluff. 5 years ago I remember hearing about "Ion Drives" that would be able to write a GB of data to a square inch by changing the electrical signal of individual molecules. It was an optical technology etc........ Where is it?? Still in my May '95 copy of Wired apparently.
It is a well known fact that Academia has a cute tendency to announce technologies that will be available "in a few years" knowing full well that they will never materialize. Hell, we're still waiting for Rambus and Sapphire chips aren't we??
Also, the computer market is moving more toward embedded computing and small "appliances" like wireless web-pads. Not the monolithic beastie presented here.
And the idea that the "Biometric horah-doodah" will make my computer infinitely secure?? Yeah, when the Slashdot community has been lobotomized...
And I can't see my employer shelling out for the future desk they write about either. The f***er won't even get me a separate phone line for Bhudda's sake.
This might be the computer of 2525, better yet, the computer of 2050, but even then I doubt it. Most likely this is just the unfortunate side effect of an acid flashback.
(Besides, I have this scary vision of everybody in my office talking in C code at once and me screaming across the room, "Shut up! You're screwing with my syntax!") But in ten years apparently programming will be something you do in plain English. (Ha, ha, ha.... They said that in 1980 about 1990...)
At least a cow leaves behind something solid, powerful, and nutritious for geese. Forbes has simply contributed to landfill... But hey, mental mastrubation is almost as fun and doesn't leave your arm all tired...
~Hammy
"The 486 processor is so powerful it is doubtful that it will ever be used in anything other than high end servers." -Byte Magazine, October 1991
er... does it have a red light and say "I'm sorry dave, I can't do that" because we all know thats what computers in 2010 do...
The last thing I need is a computer that looks like a frisbee
When I want to use it the dog will have it in the backyard waiting to play catch.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Then again, maybe I'm smoking crack. Can someone back me up or correct me?
While I'm on the subject...
Wouldn't it be faster to incorporate the cache on-die, like with Celeron As? Uh, why's that? What makes 'holographic memory' any different from regular memory? (I don't think they're wrong, I just want more info).Forbes' design of this "computer of the future" just smells an ancient seventies design smell. Of course they avoid mentioning what aoperanding system runs inside their box, and they forget that, by 2010, there will be no more desktop.
In other words, their lack of imagination is blatant.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
After an extensive look at this computers specs, I am confident when I say, "Sign me up!". I mean look at that thing:
.75x2.5x2.5 footer out the window (About the size of half the available space on any desktop in the world). Time to get me a PC that can *really* fly!
Hard Disc
*FAST* memory!
CPU
Power supply
and to top it all off, MAIN RAM.
Who would have thought, that by only 2010 we're going to be seeing computers, "[that], believe it or not, [are] about the size of a Frisbee". Time to throw this old
The best part of all, they've incorporated 20th century "The Clapper" technology, for us stingy throwbacks who are scared of product ideas that are actually new!
'Plug it into the wall with a magnetic clamp and watch as our home comes to life. In essence, the computer becomes the operating system for our house, and our house, in turn, knows our habits and responds to our needs. ("Brew coffee at 7, play Beethoven the moment the front door opens, and tell me when I'm low on milk.")'
Someone weld a misty-mate on the side of one of these suckers, and I'll drop my other testicle!
Ace
512Kbit up/down will be the minimum 'low end' connection for the average urban user, and will hover between 1 and 3MBits on average. Modems will NEVER completely die off. I predict at least 10% of all world users, and 3% of US users will still be on analog connections in 2010.
The Internet will slowly commercialize farther and farther. Directories and search engines will continue to improve, but not fast enough to keep up with all the content of the 'Net. Content quantity will increase faster than bandwidth will rise, leading to more and more content uncategorized by search engines, though smarter search and scan algorithms will largely offset this.
Processors will continue to follow Moore's law. Computers as such will continue to exist far past 2010, but Appliances and PDAs will gain market share until they significantly overshadow that of pure PCs. PCs will NEVER become 'user friendly'. They will remain crash prone, obfuscated, and a major hassle to administer. I believe that some force will rise to combat this, but I do not know what form it will take.
Monitors will change slowly... but by 2005 flat panels displays will have overtaken CRTs, and by 2010 LCD screens with HDTV resolutions will be considered the minimum. Color depth will stay at 32bit for most consumer machines, but we will have 64bit color depths for graphics workstations, printing, movie production, etc.
Wearable computers, home networks and such will become a reality, but they'll still be somewhat 'fringe' in 2010. Some appliances will be 'obvious' targets for connection, such as your Phone, TV, and VCR (can anyone say Networked TiVo?), but others will not. Networking will be a extra cost feature, much like ice makers on Refrigerators today.
IPv6 will be used, but it will STILL have legacy IPv4 compatibility in use. Linux will be very common, but not as the 'Linux OS' (ie Redhat, Slackware) but as the common backend to much Appliance hardware. Linux desktop usage will be more prevalent than it is today, but Windows will remain the dominant consumer OS. Some big company will make a strong attempt to create an OS that competes with Linux for the same target demographic, and may even succeed... whether they create it largely from scratch (like BeOS) or revamp an aging contender (MaxOS X) I don't know.
We will run into a new problem... electromagnetic pollution. We'll have so many wireless devices on so many different frequency bands that it will become harder and harder to find free spectrum to communicate on. How this will be solved I don't know.
The Internet will still be running over much the same protocols as today. MUDs will still exist... they will not be graphical. HTTP will still be in use as the primary web protocol, though some new web protocol will also be used and supported by a significant number of sites and browsers. XML will be in wide use, as will the successor to CSS, but HTML will continue to be the primary content platform.
Business to Business transactions will rapidly increase. Phone and Personal service will be a luxury by 2010. Internet cash services like PayPal will continue and thrive... I wouldn't be surprised if PayPal itself became the next 'Yahoo', as commerce transactions become more and more common on the Internet.
The Internet will NEVER lose its 'free as you come' tone, though commerce sites will continue to thrive. Internet advertising will get smarter, but how I don't know. The banners will become more and more fancy as time goes on... 3D renderings may become commonplace as CPUs become able to support it effortlessly.
Some new Interface paradigm will gain major acceptance in vertical markets, but it will not supplant the keyboard and mouse in consumer systems. Eye tracking is what I'm hoping for, but it might be voice recognition.
Computer and console games will continue to be a driving force behind the manufacturers, urging them to keep up with Moore's Law. Games will continue to increase in realism and eye candy. By 2005 we will finally have games that support complete terrain deformation (ie, shoot holes in walls, burn houses down, dig tunnels in ground, demolish buildings with explosives), and it will be standard by 2010, much as 3D is standard now. Virtual reality may finally have arrived as well, due to the advances made in LCD technology allowing ultra-light, ultra-small 'glasses' offering stereo picture, but it will not be pervasive... many 3D games will support it, in the same way they support Force Feedback joysticks, but the average gamer will still use normal monitors to play games. There is a slight chance that LCD glasses will allow nifty uber-PDA HUD systems... I can dream, but I won't hold my breath.
Those are my predictions.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
STOP is all that matters in voice recognition today. And maybe automatically sending appropriate feedback when I curse.
It's mounted on a rack in the closet, and the cabling goes all throughout the house. Better yet, BlueTooth.
Any component you want to add can be plugged in anywhere. A new flat-screen TV is your monitor, as is the PDA in your pocket. You speak into the air in any room, and you are obeyed. You buy a new refridgerator, and it's suddenly online. Where you put the keyboard - and there WILL be one - is a matter of decoration more than functionality.
And it's completely transparent to all, except the technologists - which is as it should be. Just as I don't care to know the exact air/fuel mix in my engine, neither does my mechanic care about his chip-set or the temperature of his CPU.
People who are not passionate about the tech find it too complex and too intrusive. They want a box they plug in, more easily then a stereo component or VCR. They just want it to work, seamlessly and without requiring them to RTFM.
The computer of 2010 may be more like a CD changer than anything else. The computer of 2015 will be a freaking LAMP. Seriously... You can cram a whole lot of hardware into those things - all that empty space. Network the thing via power-lines, and to upgrade your processing power, you just buy another lamp, or TV, or Microwave... Or a slot mounted, monolithic box (the size of a VHS tape at most) that you plug-in to a rack in the closet.. But this is where I came in.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
heck. The hell with talking. Voice is S-L-O-W. I want the damn thing to read my mind. Or at least be able to interpret my literal hand-waving. Even the latter could be a lot faster than I can type if I get to teach the beast to understand what my gestures and moods and such mean. I always wanted hand-waving to mean something. :-)
Well, not the keyboard itself, but typing. The problem is in getting the chemical infomation to come out of the person. For text based linguistic information, even a poor typist can type much faster than most any person can speak clearly - especially clearly enough for a computer (or ME) to understand. Nothing has been found to be superior, and I don't think anything will, because our fingers are the most agile. Now the combination of this with possible foot, eye and verbal input could certainly be more powerful. There are some definitely problems in keyboard design, too. But basically it won't eliminate your fingers for anyone who cares about speed. And certainly a stylus is better for lines, and a mouse better for navigation (for now)
On to my more annoyed point - no NET? Macs already AirPort around your house without being plugged in. And if a computer costs $700 new and you remove the video, audio, input, removable media, etc, it should be quite a bit lower. And those are approximately 50% as fast as the blazing new ones... so to be conservative they're saying you won't be able to get a cheap 10 Ghz processor? Or that you'll need faster than 10Ghz to run your appliances? I don't think so. Obviously you buy one to run your house. Maybe when you bring home your computer they interface (but plugging it in is so passe') in case you made changes to what you want to happen that night, but the idea that your computer runs your house only when you're home is ridiculous.
$0.04 - Arete
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Gee, security - only I will be able to use my computer! I love it. I love, also, the ability to uniquely identify myself to any website I visit!!! No more of these stodgy userids and passwords that convey no other information! And I'm sure I won't even have to intervene - it'll be all automatic. And people who read my emails (including the recipients!!) will KNOW they're from me.
Doesn't that make you fee SO secure?
not.
/(o\ I'm not a medievalist - I just play one on weekends!
There are some sound refrences to up and coming technologies. I think the disk shaped computer is impractical though. If we are going to have a computer that needs no external devices for input then it should be something very small that we could wear on our person. Then you have all of the benefits of a computer that can track your heartrate and oxygen levels while you are out doing you activities. When you come home and plug it into the network, it customizes your Super-Duper-Does-It-All workout machine for you, then changes your Diet Recomendations in your Makes-Any-Food-From-Tofu cooking device.
You can't take the sky from me
Can you imagine trying to think about anything, especially code, in a big room where everyone is busy talking to their computer?
Agreed, but that doesn't mean it's not useful in a home setting, for instance, or a private office. Naturally office etiquette would prohibit the regular use of such things in shared areas.
And even if you are coding away at your latest application, I would think it's more efficient to pause for a moment and say, "Computer, when's my next appointment?" than it would be to move out of your development app into a calendar of some sort, and then go back. Even in a public area, this level of occasional voice control is probably acceptable. *shrug*..
I totally agree, though, keyed input will still be primary for most industrious work, but simple tasks in a more intimate setting would be so much more efficient if they could be done effectively by voice. Just think, you could browse the web, update your calendar, compose a few e-mails while cooking yourself dinner, or cleaning house. After a long day at the office, that level of ease-of-use would be spectacular.
I'm a big advocate of "behind-the-scenes" computing, where the PC is hidden and unintrusive (and today's paradigm largely unneeded).
Well, exa of course.
Our computer, untethered and unfettered by wires and electrical outlets, becomes something of a key that unlocks the safety deposit box of our lives
That is a damn funny analogy.
Funny thing - he didnt mention what monumental tech. breakthroughs are going to get us a reasonable wireless networking technology... What good is this computer when it is disconnected from the net or worse: connected at 1.5Mbps.
Sony's CEO Got you scared? Its a simple product of Corporatism and the Corruption of Democracy. GET USED TO IT!
or:
Yada yada speed, yada yada optics, yada yada memory.
The problem with forecasting is breaking out of the current mindset. It is assumed the computer of the future will run a cow of and OS and elephantine applications, like those today.
What about specialized computers/devices? Seems like we're heading that way already with Tivo, PDA's, digital cell phones. My modest prediction is specialized computers/devices which fit the situation of their use. I don't expect to need some bloated Wintel box in a couple years. Heck, I hardly need one now.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
by plugging our computer into an office desk, its top becomes a gigantic computer screen--an interactive photonic display. You won't need a keyboard because files can be opened and closed simply by touching and dragging with your finger
Sounds like Dilinger's computer in the cult-movie "Tron".
Is SF the first inspiration source for engineers?
(No answer needed)
Anyway, something really scares me: They still have this need for mono-processor machines with one harddisc, etc.
I think it would be cooler to just design Lego-like components, each of which would be a tiny computer that could interact with one another like in the good old times of Atari ATW.
So, instead of paying a huge amount of money to change computer every 6 months (however quick they are you know people will still pay to upgrade them, a friend pertinently compared computers to cars : you want them to work properly but to amaze your neighbours) why wouldn't we pay a few bucks for some more GIPS to fit ? With wireless communication, this would then be tomorrow's computer and I bet my vision is far realistic than ASAP's nice-looking box.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The premise of that article is entirely ridiculous. About 2/3rds of the "technologies of the future" have a date of availibility listed as "2010 (With luck!)"
Hell, I may as well say "With luck, we'll all have robot maids and hovercars like the Jetsons in 2010," because it's about as solid a prediction as the writer of that articles's.
Assuming all of these technologies are released exactly on-schedule, they will be prohibitively expensive (Ex: Any new processor for about 2 months) and poorly implemented in the software-side (Ex: USB in Windows 95).
Not to mention the 'appearance' of the computer of the future. Apparently, in 10 years, our computers will be comprised primarily of colorful rectangles and circles. Neat.
that were so popular in the 50's and 60's.
I kept (one of my Dad's) from the late 60's - it's too funny.
Most stuff in the book was either stupid (like those cars that drive themselves from millions of wire planted in the road) or way off base.
I think ( the future ) will hold cheap nearly disposable (computer equivelent) devices, much like the "use once" cameras.
However; they will all still be (one of 100 variations of) beige.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Where's the obligatory "I'd like to have a Beowulf cluster of those" post?
cat
The thing about voice interaction, or any other form of poorly defined interaction is ambiguity. Try to build ANY context-free language that understands any plain english and you'll quickly realize that it's not context-free. Even if we were to somehow create an incredibly smart interpreter on the computer-end, typing '1' means exactly that, but speaking "one" could be a different story.
Besides, typing ';' is so much damn faster than saying "semi-colon". I'd hate to dictate C code.
Moderate this one up its funny
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
Let's take a little look at this proposed computer of 2010:
SECURITY
The PC will be protected from theft, thanks to an advanced biometric scanner that can recognize your fingerprint.
Now all they need is biometric scanners on screwdrivers too.
INTERFACE
You'll communicate with the PC primarily with your voice...
This should make university computer labs interesting, especially for people writing code. And how about when your friend Bob pops into your office to say hello:
The Desktop as Desk Top
In 2010, a "desktop" will be a desk top ... You won't need a keyboard because files can be opened and closed simply by touching and dragging with your finger.
Be careful when drumming your fingers.
Your Home
The PC of 2010 plugs into your home so your house becomes a smart operating system.
"Open the refrigerator door, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Nov 28: Moved in to my new digitally-maxed out Hermosa Beach house at last. Finally, we live in the smartest house in the neighborhood. Everything's networked. The cable TV is connected to our phone, which is connected to my personal computer, which is connected to the power lines, all the appliances and the security system. Everything runs off a universal remote with the friendliest interface I've ever used. Programming is a snap. I'm like, totally wired. Nov 30: Hot Stuff! Programmed my VCR from the office, turned up the thermostat and switched on the lights with the car phone, remotely tweaked the oven a few degrees for my pizza. Everything nice & cozy when I arrived. Maybe I should get the universal remote surgically attached. Dec 1: Had to call the SmartHouse people today about bandwidth problems. The TV drops to about 2 frames/second when I'm talking on the phone. They insist it's a problem with the cable company's compression algorithms. How do they expect me to order things from the Home Shopping Channel? Dec 2: Got my first SmartHouse invoice today and was unpleasantly surprised. I suspect the cleaning woman of reading Usenet from the washing machine interface when I'm not here. She must be downloading a lot of GIFs from the binary groups, because packet charges were through the roof on the invoice. Dec 3: Yesterday, the kitchen CRASHED. Freak event. As I opened the refrigerator door, the light bulb blew. Immediately, everything else electrical shut down -- lights, microwave, coffee maker -- everything. Carefully unplugged and replugged all the appliances. Nothing. Call the cable company (but not from the kitchen phone). They refer me to the utility. The utility insists that the problem is in the software. So the software company runs some remote telediagnostics via my house processor. Their expert system claims it has to be the utility's fault. I don't care, I just want my kitchen back. More phone calls; more remote diag's. Turns out the problem was "unanticipated failure mode": The network had never seen a refrigerator bulb failure while the door was open. So the fuzzy logic interpreted the burnout as a power surge and shut down the entire kitchen. But because sensor memory confirmed that there hadn't actually been a power surge, the kitchen logic sequence was confused and it couldn't do a standard restart. The utility guy swears this was the first time this has ever happened. Rebooting the kitchen took over an hour. Dec 7: The police are not happy. Our house keeps calling them for help. We discover that whenever we play the TV or stereo above 25 decibels, it creates patterns of micro-vibrations that get amplified when they hit the window. When these vibrations mix with a gust of wind, the security sensors are actuated, and the police computer concludes that someone is trying to break in. Go figure. Another glitch: Whenever the basement is in self-diagnostic mode, the universal remote won't let me change the channels on my TV. That means I actually have to get up off the couch and change the channels by hand. The software and the utility people say this flaw will be fixed in the next upgrade -- SmartHouse 2.1. But it's not ready yet. Finally, I'm starting to suspect that the microwave is secretly tuning into the cable system to watch Bay Watch. The unit is completely inoperable during that same hour. I guess I can live with that. At least the blender is not tuning in to old I Love Lucy episodes. Dec 9: I just bought the new Microsoft Home. Took 93 gigabytes of storage, but it will be worth it, I think. The house should be much easier to use and should really do everything. I had to sign a second mortgage over to Microsoft, but I don't mind: I don't really own my house now--it's really the bank. Let them deal with Microsoft. Dec 10: I'm beginning to have doubts about Microsoft House. I keep getting an hour glass symbol showing up when I want to flush the toilet. Dec 12: This is a nightmare. There's a virus in the house. My personal computer caught it while browsing on the public access network. I come home and the living room is a sauna, the bedroom windows are covered with ice, the refrigerator has defrosted, the washing machine has flooded the basement, the garage door is cycling up and down and the TV is stuck on the home shopping channel. Throughout the house, lights flicker like stroboscopes until they explode from the strain. Broken glass is everywhere. Of course, the security sensors detect nothing. I look at a message slowly throbing on my personal computer screen: WELCOME TO HomeWrecker!!! NOW THE FUN BEGINS ... (Be it ever so humble, there's no
virus like the HomeWrecker...).
Dec 18: They think they've digitally disinfected the house, but the place
is a shambles. Pipes have burst and we're not completely sure we've got the
part of the virus that attacks toilets. Nevertheless, the Exorcists (as the
anti-virus SWAT team members like to call themselves) are confident the
worst is over. "HomeWrecker is pretty bad" one he tells me, "but consider
yourself lucky you didn't get PolterGeist. That one is really evil."
Dec 19: Apparently, our house isn't insured for viruses. "Fires and
mudslides, yes," says the claims adjuster. "Viruses, no." My agreement with
the SmartHouse people explicitly states that all claims and warranties are
null and void if any appliance or computer in my house networks in any way,
shape or form with a non-certified on-line service. Everybody's very, very,
sorry, but they can't be expected to anticipate every virus that might be
created. We call our lawyer. He laughs. He's excited!
Dec 21: I get a call from a SmartHouse sales rep. As a special holiday
offer, we get the free opportunity to become a beta site for the company's
new SmartHouse 2.1 upgrade. He says I'll be able to meet the programmers
personally. "Sure," I tell him.
If memory serves correctly. Didn't someone have an input device that connected to your fingers? Moving your fingers around in certain ways to communicate.
Out of curiosity, what would this input device register if the only finger being moved around in "this certain way" was the middle one?
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The reason we have mice today instead of touchscreens... the touchscreen is to expensive...
:)
Keyboards are good, cheap and reliable devices...
But when looking for "the interface of the future" people first look to toss the keyboard... they see it as the first roadblock...
Byond applications wanting the curser keys there isn't much reason to not use them in place of the mouse.... There were a few mouse drivers for dos that did just that...
3D interfaces... thats sensors.. probes... Touch screens were expensive in the 1980s.... this things gona make the 1980s price tag for touch screens look like nothin....
In my view the 2010 interface is more down to earth... a Unix GUI with a touch screen in place of a mouse... the devices still exist and the prices are comming down... they work in Linux and on Mac.... I want one myself...
Before then however.... touch pads... also working in Linux etc.. pricy now but they are comming down.. more and more people are using them and they are MUCH more useful than a mouse...
But that keyboard thing is here to stay....
Try getting rid of text.... same problem.... Icons are neat but text is here for life.... so are keyboard... thats how the text gets in there....
IR and RF interfaces will replace cables... voice keyboards for portability are no good for some of us..
Computer of 3001... the FIRST computer to not need a keyboard.....
Yes... there is even a keyboard for the palm... the happy hacker no less
I don't actually exist.
Operating systems have an incredible half-life. NT is already a decade old or so if I am not mistaken. We will definitely still be kicking around Win2k, linux, and OSX in 2010.
"the size of a frisbee"?? I think they're being a little conservative there. In 10 years we will be able to pack supercomputer-power in a wristwatch. More likely is that wireless networking will be so pervasive and fast that you don't even need to have so much power on your wrist, you will simply access your home server from anywhere in the world.
1. The Hard Drive:
Non-solid state hard drives in 2010? Give me a break. remember that 18TB solid state storage device that was slashdotted? It exists today.
Only 1TB? heh. In the current rate of development, we will almost certainly reach 1000TB (=1PB) by the year 2010.
2. The CPU:
Will be SMP certainly! No reason to think otherwise.
3. RAM
The RAM and the hard drive could be both the same device.
Well, that's pretty much what I have to say.
In other words, we've brought the speed and bandwidth of optical communications inside the computer itself. This mix is called optoelectronics, another buzzword we encourage you to start using immediately.
Am I the only one scared by this? Yeah, I know all about optoelectronics now! I read about it in an article in Forbes!
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
Here a couple of suggestions to get us started, feel free to disagree - this is just one concept:
1. We won't know what it looks like, 'cause we'll never see it. We may have a couple of interfaces to it, some looking like PDAs, monitors, keyboards, clipboards, whiteboards, etc. But none of them are the actual machine, they all just connect to it wirelessly. Either with lots of bandwidth, compressed data streams, or both. And don't forget encrypted.
2. Hard disk? What's that? Maybe we'll still have it for our larger (>1 TB) needs, since that much memory might be expensive in terms on money or power consupmtion. And since we're not carting around the actual system, it doesn't matter as much if it's a moving part or not.
3. CPU. Huh? Why one, and why even a central one? Personally, this whole rush for a faster chip seems kinda silly considering SMP & such. However, those don't scale as well unless they have work for all the processors. Do we expect lots of good stuff for theat by 2010? Sure, why not, this is my fantasy. Anyway, if they are runnign my house, my office, my pr0n surfing, and my investments, my ray tracing, ..., I think we can keep 'em busy. So maybe 16-way 10GHz system for the newbies, with us serious users going more.
Which of course, brings us to speciallized PUs. Right now we have our FPUs, our graphics PU, etc. Let's have lots of them, which we can add on to have the system that is right for us. The voice-recognition folks have their VPUs, the 3D gamers have their FPUs & GPUs (oh wait, they already do), etc. Whatever we need.
3. Interface - whatever we want. As long as we can define data streams, we have interfaces. Some are output only (printers, they'll still be around), some may be input only (keyboards), some may be both (touch sensitive screens, speach). Why tie the computer to the interface at all? As long as their are "drivers" to render the input into a form the computer likes it, it should take input from your VR glove as easily as your smartpen as easily as your chord keyboard.
What other ideas do we have? Is this worthy of a "Ask Slashdot?" 8)
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
Cool! It'll save lots of time in the cities, too. Tap a wall and say "Graffiti" and your gang's symbols will show up.
Unless, of course, someone's hacked the building to produce a PalmOS interface instead...
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The advent of languages like Perl and Python are mainly due to the fact that computers are finally fast enough to overcome the higher CPU cost of these languages. Even at this point in time, both of these languages suffer from the need to create many of their components in a faster language (e.g. C or C++). This will slowly dissappear as CPU becomes faster and cheaper, and programmers desire to become more efficient. That details one of the biggest problems I have with people asking "who needs a 1 GHz CPU?". The end user doesn't, but the programmer does.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
The future holds many advances in technology and personal computing. In that future I cannot see anyone carrying their PC home from work and plugging it into their desk. Nowadays people carry pagers, cellphones, and PDAs - let's not add another thing to the list.
-Mike_L
Who cares what the computer we'll be using - we'll be far more concerned with:
"THE GREAT IP CRUNCH OF 2010"
;)
One can only hope, but perhaps at some future point we can move beyond propriatary hardware implementations... that's right, open-source hardware...
...but they are still all using [essentially] the same instruction set.
Many of us today recourse in horror at the notion of using software whose stucture and method is wholly determined by a fixed entity; but all of our software is running on propriatary hardware platforms.
Yes, of course, there is currently competition in the x86 family, with offerings from AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix, etc.
I envision/idealize a future in which a standard computational fabric, inspired perhaps by the RAW project at MIT
(which is akin to a FPGA [field programmable gate array], but with a different sort of abstraction... Unlike a FPGA, in which you actually program a virtual machine in hardware [unfortunately needing something like 8-12 (?) transitors for ever simulated one].
FPGA's have proved very usefull for certain DSP type operations and for their utility of giving you 'hardware speed' for custom algorithims that can be rewritten onto the chip 'on-the-fly'.
The raw architecture, although simmilar, instead creates a massive SMP machine-on-a-chip with hundreds or even thousands of mini-cpu's, local memory units, and 'network-switches' to control the data flow.
Imagine having as many companies that make networking cards today all competing with each other to produce RAW chips.
[Of course, we will need a whole new world of compiler-theoreticians to allow contemporary software to be most-efficiently implemented on such an architecture]
If this ever happens, I will be waiting next for an open-source car!
[I just paid 170$ for a propriatary rubber tube from volvo. argh..]
--------
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Not only that, it will send the status of your larder, so that when supplies of a certain processed, tinned meat run low.....
They can send SPAM to you....
Sorry, couldn't resist!
You're absolutely correct. Except you forgot something. Try adding punctuation, capitals, curly braces, quotes, formatting - telling the cursor where to go - and you'll find your speed goes through the floor and aggrivation goes through the roof. I had a Newton for awhile and this was the main problem - the handwriting recognition was actually really good - the problem was putting the text in the right place on the screen, and that time outweighed any benefit the handwriting bought you.
Don't believe me? Try programming with ViaVoice. Or doing more than simple dictation, like adding bold or *Removing* bold to a sentence. You'll go insane.
..don't panic
But beware. If your computer is stolen or destroyed, you might actually start wondering who you are.
Oh, Yeah!! This sounds fucking great!!
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
it's interface sounds like the MCP from Tron! remember that desk the bad guy had?!
Also, suppose you spot a misspelled word (or worse, something like a person's name) that you want fixed. How long does it take to move the cursor there by means of a keyboard and/or mouse and fix it? How long does it take for you to say (and the machine to understand and execute): "third paragraph, eleventh line, replace McIntire with McIntyre"? Hmmm, seems like you will even have to count and specify the individual characters to get it to do that right...
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
It will also take heavy machinery to get people down out of trees. And to stop dragging things and use wheels instead. And to stop using animals to lug stuff around.
Rest assured. The heavy machinery is coming, and it will make your keyboard an anachronism. Seems to me like it will be an exciting thing...let's wait and see!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The master control is made up of no fewer than 50 redundant processors, each smaller than a millimeter cube and much faster than a modern computer, though they vary somewhat in their contruction, scattered about my reinforced skull. There is no way for all of them to be damaged while I remain alive.
The workhorse of the system responsible for archiving and heavy processing, a solid-state homogenous massively parallel connection machine about the size of my fist, is tucked away in my chest cavity between my oxygen-storage organ and my 2nd and 3rd backup hearts (cylinders about the size of a thumb).
The interface can take any form, since the system has full access to all nerves leading into my brain, and has plenty of power to simulate a believable environment; it can be superimposed atop real-world data or it can be fully immersive. The failsafes are carefully trained (in a process taking months of daily feedback training) direct neural connections to the master control, which can be used to cut off any problematic computer functions and reconnect my mind to my body; a spare nervous system is tatooed across my skin so there is no single point of failure. I'd have to be almost fully decapitated to lose control of my body (not likely to occur accidentally, thanks to carbon microfiber reinforcements). I'd certainly be dead before my connections were disabled, unless a very careful surgery was undertaken.
Connections to other computers can be made by many different forms of electromagnetic transmission, or by tiny electrical currents through contact on any of hundreds of points on my body.
Power is available through the main storage battery of my body (a distributed system with surprising capacity), but essential functions, such as the master control, can be supported by generation of minute amounts of power from the glucose and oxygen in my blood.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It's written for Forbes. What sort of intellect does your average CEO wannabe have, anyway? That of a candy-starved child. All fits together, huh?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"Plug it into the wall with a magnetic clamp and watch as our home comes to life. In essence, the computer becomes the operating system for our house, and our house, in turn, knows our habits and responds to our needs." Better hope that its not running Windows 2010 or we will be having real problems! And also hope that it is not sending all of our personal information off to some marketing company. Imagine the spam advertising potential.
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
He remarks that the last time ram and cpu ran at the same speed was with the 286-8. I had a 486-50 that ran on a 50 mhz bus. It was one of those nifty 'Blue-Lightning' chips from IBM.
hehe good one :)
however im only ignoring 1/2 the market if by The Market you mean S&M folks, which isnt really where this is targeted (try getting your jollies from humans before resorting to computers). I'm shying away from the idea of Personality Modules, as I would rather see them develop naturally :)
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
About the only thing I'm confident to say about handhelds 10 years from now, is that they won't have discs. Discs are cheap, but solid-state memory is almost cheap enough NOW for a portable computer. In 10 years, spinning discs will seem as antiquated as the spinning tape reels that adorn movie-computers.
I think that in general, the line between "live" and "archived" storage is going to be blurred more and more, in all computers. I don't expect that portables will distinguish between memory and mass storage at all.
Man, if you want squares and rectangles and 1984 Volvos, more power to you. Just leave me and my Audi TT fetish alone.
Aesthetics is important to some people. If it's not important to you, fine. Nobody's going to take away your ugly beige box. They're going to have options...isn't that good? Don't we like options?
Man, some of us free thinkers around get awfully territorial and change-averse sometimes, eh?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Hardware will be so cheap and powerful, that we will forgo the dull, mundane materials now used in favor of "optoelectronic substrate". It will be moldeable into various shapes, strong enough to be used as a substitute for drywall or maybe even steel, and it will have any "active properties" you might desire.
Need a computer? No problem. All you have to do is tap the desk and say "keyboard" (remember, everything is made of this material) and a keyboard and active display will appear on your desk. Any data you enter will be stored permanently on a secure central server that you can access from any item that is made of substrate.
Lightbulbs and sockets? The dark ages! Just tap the wall, and say "light, medium intensity" and the wall will emenate a soft glow.
Children will be born and grow up in entire cities where the walls, sidewalks, and cars are made of substrate. Just tap your foot on the sidewalk and say "hopskotch!" and a hopskotch board appears.
You'll take your daughter to visit the country. She'll tap a rock and nothing will happen. She'll say "how boring".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hmmm... Large, flat panel touch screen monitors? Voice Recognition? On screen virtual keyboards? ...
Anybody else instantly think of a Startrek themed GUI when they read this? We could get the sounds right and everything! The desk'd be just like the helm!
I'll have touch screen panels through out my whole house then designate different areas as the Bridge, Engineering, etc... My closets would be designated as Cargo Bays...
Heh, all I'd need then is a neeto liquid nitrogen cooling system or something equally volital so that when it startes to break down, I'd have the computer programmed to say "We have a critical coolent leak leak in Engineering!" and I'd yell "Eject the core!" and whoosh! A little discus shaped thing goes rocketing out a "launch bay" in my roof, landing in the neighbours yard and promptly exploding. ...
That, or if I become extreemly rich, I'll go skeet shooting with discus shaped 100gHz computers...
PULL! *BLAM*
-- We should kill all the intolerant people in the world.
my computer will fly when I throw it out of frustration
There's not doubt in my mind, the computer of 2010 will be able to fly.
Errr... Wait, that was the prediction for the cars of 2000.
If people didn't spend so much time on making these lame predictions, my car probably could fly.
*shrug*
`AC
Or nearly so. Or maybe it can be done, but here's a problem I see: Say one has a 100GHz processor. I don't really care what it looks like (I won't call it a 'chip'), but say it's 4mm across, and it is necessagy to the functioning of the processor to send a signal from one side to the other. Tell me if this math is all wrong: At 100GHz, the processor can not be larger than 3mm across because otherwise a signal would have to travel faster than the speed of light. c (m/s) ------- = .003m
1GHz (1/s)
or
3e8/100000000000 = .003 meters
Thoughts?
.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
Why don't they just come out and admit doing this just to create a buzz around themselves?
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
It will take heavy machinery to get people away from their keyboards, simply because it is what they are used to. 2050 maybe, but we must always remember we are dealing with ordinary people here, and i doubt they will change by 2010
The article is tech-lite, well they say that current RAM uses magnetism and this hasn't been true since the days of core.
Overall, I feel that the article is total marketing B.S. ignoring things such as usability and the limits to Moore's law.
Hand input and 3d is already there, they use it for molecular modelling. Designers will love this feature too but I agree with the comment about the lack of keyboards.
I do have my doubts that we will still be using Li-ion batteries in ten years. There are other technologies that should be working well by then that offer better energy density and a higher internal resistance (Li-Ion looses charge quickly).
I'm inclined to agree with your commentator about notebook memory going non-rotating. Spinning a disk of any technology costs power.
From my own point of view, I see three market slots, there will still be a PDA. It is smaller but very personal and a lot more powerful than anything we have now but it will be combined with a mobile telephone and a GPS. For input, we have voice or pen and for output a small flat-panel or a mini HUD on a pair of glasses. Emphasis on low-power and portability.
I still see the notebook. There is always a place for a larger and more detailed display and lots more memory which cn fit in a briefcase. Expect it to look like an A4 pad with keyboard/pen and a 3D mouse. Viewing maybe either through the builtin flat-panel display or a min-HUD.
Actually HUDs are quite interesting technology, if it can follow your pupil. You only need detail where the eye is looking, the rest of the picture can be shown at lower detail.
Expect enough wireless peripherals to be floating around that we are worrying about the prevailing EM field around your body.
In the end, the workstation will remain because there are people who don't want to compromise on speed or expansion capability.
All those guys that Forbes used, was to design a game console.
- No keyboard
- Color/Aqua
- Odd shape
This must be the Apple G13 Donut.
(Please don't think of this as flamebait, it's a joke)
# debian/rules
Hey let's get some design firm to draw us a pretty picture of what we think a computer will look like in ten years and then write some filler so we can kill more trees with our bloated magazine.
------ Tim O'Brien
"I speak of none other than the computer that is to come after me, A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate - and yet I will design it for you."
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Frankly, this article is really poor.
a) optic is only one of the technology which is racing to replace the classic Silicium, there is also nanotechnology, supra-conductivity, quantum computers.
Which technology will "win"? I don't know, there will be surely some mixing that is to say a computer which use both optical technology AND nanotechnology for example.
b) I don't understand what the "refreshing of cache means". Which cache? L1, L2 cache are usually in SRAM not in DRAM, so they are not refreshed the way DRAM memory needs to be, may be they are talking about HDD cache?
If they are talking about L1,L2 I don't understand how using magnetic memory will help!
In short, a low quality article IMHO.
No one has any idea what *anything's* going to be like in 10 years, let alone something changing as much as a computer. I read through this and it sounds like some guy's just making up things. Sure, there's technical background to what they say, but it's about 90% speculation.
How many times have we heard that by the year 2000 we'd be driving space cars and have robot maids a la Jetsons? Come on....
We've seen art "evolve" from making paintings and statues to throwing paint on the canvas and calling it a painting up to dumping piles of metal junk on the grass and calling it art (to bad about corrosion) right up to stringing up dead horses in a tree (another exclusive form of "art"). I really don't think we need that crap in the technology sector. While I admire these "artists" for getting paid for doing IMHO absolutely nothing for it I don't feel good about letting them decide how the machine would operate and feel. This is a totally different sector; people need to work with these devices, which takes another form of expertise. Judging by most of the modern "art" I really doubt that most artists are capable of having some consideration for the public.
1)my office is noisy
2)sometimes i talk on the phone/to co-workers while computing
3)sometimes i like to play music & sing along while computing
etc etc etc
I think he came prety close, especialy with the underlying archatecture, but the thumbprint/biometric secrity and voice recognition are going to be a hard sell. the biometric scanners are prone to dust/dirt and if you are anything like me, that could be an issue. the voice recog? well who wants everyone around them to know what they are doing and when? Listening to someone check their voicemail through speakerphone is anoying enough already.
(out loud)www.persiankitty.com.....yes i am 18...ect...
Dirty Pirate Hooker
You mean *cloned* leopard skin cases.
I'd have to say, vocal training or no, the limit to speech speed is going to be alot lower than the limit to typing. I can talk like that character six on that annoying blossom show (for maybe 30 seconds) if I try really hard, and that's not much more than ~45 wpm. I can't imagine anyone being able to talk more than about ~60 wpm without somehow truncating the language, which might be ok for a command system, but won't work for dictation.
Intolerant people should be shot.
It always occurs to me when predicting the future that the predictions never, ever, in its original form, come true. If you look at history in a bit broader perspective, you will probably remember what the director of IBM said back in 1957; "In the year 2000, there will probably be demand for about three or four big computers worldwide". Those predictions failed dramatically, as the technology always finds different paths, and every once in a while someone comes up with a star idea, and manages to build his or hers vision in much shorter time predicted by the person who came up with the idea, if he or she is given the neccessary resources.
Technology always finds a way.
It scares the hell out of me sometimes.
-- Who slipped something in my coffee this morning? (And can I have some more?)
Lets see.
Carry your computer to work, plug it in.
Carry your computer home, plug it in.
Repeat.
Just a thought but why don't you leave your
computer (and all your important files) at
home and just access it over the internet.
We will still have the internet in 2010 won't we? This article seems to suggest no. Why else would you have to carry your fileserver around with you?
Bob.
IMHO, it is going away. When all the devices you use can talk to each other over the network (where network = Bluetooth LAN, Internet, whatever), SneakerNet becomes unnecessary.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Okay - we have the computer of the future here, with 256 GB of *non volatile* RAM. Why on earth would you introduce moving parts to this machine. For god's sake, quadruple the amount of RAM, and forget the spinning disk. How often do HDD's and CD-ROMs fail now as compared to RAM or the CPU (moving parts vs. solid state)? This should boost reliability while greatly reducing power requirements. And it wouldn't have to look like a friggin' frisbee.
Next: While I love the idea of having a desk-sized plasma display, actually making it the desk surface is stupid. Perhaps as an *extra* display, but not for primary. Chiropractors are giggling with glee right now thinking of all the people hunched over, necks bent, waving their arms around at their desk. Ergonomic nightmare.
Third: No keyboard, use voice. Great idea, if you're alone in a soundproof room. Bad idea on a cubicle farm with tens/hundreds of other users. Also would tend to cripple speed on a lot of things. I can type clearly a lot faster than I can speak clearly.
An interesting idea, looking at the computer of 2010, but I think (hope) they missed the mark.
CmdrTaco laughs.
CMDRTACO: Perhaps you refer to the imminent attack of your Rebel troll horde.
spiralx looks up sharply.
CMDRTACO: Yes... I assure you we are quite safe from your friends here.
Hemos looks at spiralx.
spiralx: Your overconfidence is your weakness.
CMDRTACO: Your faith in your friends is yours.
HEMOS: It is pointless to resist, my son.
CmdrTaco turns to face spiralx.
CMDRTACO: (angry) Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. (indicates Slashdot) Your friends up there at the secret sid...
spiralx reacts. CmdrTaco notes it.
CMDRTACO: (cont)
band. An entire legion of my best moderators awaits them.
spiralx's look darts from the CmdrTaco to Hemos and, finally, to the keyboard in the CmdrTaco's hand.
CMDRTACO: Oh... I'm afraid the moderation code will be quite operational when your friends arrive.
CMDRTACO:(cont) Come, boy. See for yourself.
CmdrTaco is sitting in his throne, with Hemos standing at his side. spiralx moves to look at a small terminal.
CMDRTACO: From here you will witness the final destruction of the Troll Collective, and the end of your insignificant Rebellion.
spiralx is in torment. He glances at his keyboard sitting on the armrest of the throne. CmdrTaco watches him and smiles, touches the keyboard.
CMDRTACO: You want this, don't you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your MS keyboard. Use it. I am unarmed. Hack me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment, you make
yourself more my servant.
Hemos watches spiralx in his agony.
spiralx: No!
CMDRTACO: It is unavoidable. It is your destiny. You, like your father, are now mine!
CmdrTaco, Hemos, and a horrified spiralx watch the viewscreens as yet another troll is bitchslapped to extinction by the merciless moderation.
CMDRTACO: As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the CPU utilization of this fully licensed and operational slashcode. (into comlink) Fire at will, Commander.
I'd really like to see a huge advance in non-volatile storage, particularly something that is not fragile, very very small, and has much faster data transfer rates than hard disks. Admittedly, market trends make this unlikely by 2010.
This comment by the_other_one on another article sure thinks the idea has merit, albeit in jest.
The workstations of 2010 (assuming we still have them) will run at 33 Gigahertz on 64bit chips, have 32-64 GB of onboard ram, HDD will be 300-600GB with 1 Terabyte avail on high end systems. You'll probably be running some linux derivitave(probably Microsoft's), but you'll still have to run MS Office and Outlook to satisfy the man. You'll have a wide choice of designs and colors. Much like cars, vendors will seek to use custom cases as a selling point. Some with the coolest designs will go for prices which make the family SUV seem cheap. And of course my biggest prediction is that in 2005 or so someone will develop a process for mass producing quantum computers. These computers will be packaged as a co-processor with your computer and be used for: 1. Really amazing graphic and sound effects. 2. High speed searching. 3. AI in your favorite computer games.
Granted, power generation techniques haven't changed much in the last 40 years or so... The method by which we turn the turbines has seen innovation but the fact remains we still are making big magnetic feilds to induce current in wire coils. This doesnt bug me. It is easy and efficient.
What bugs me is that battery and/or portable power technology has not yet reached anywhere close to a pinnicle in terms of storage or efficiency. They inted to put a Lithium battery in this beast and have it run for two weeks? Great. Waste a bunch of engineering time so you can BEND A CIRCA 1999 BATTERY INTO A DONUT SHAPE?
What about zinc/air batteries? What about fuel cells? Recharging, please! If this thing requires so little power what about solar? I haven't used a tiny, cheap four funciton calculator that needed batteries in about 6 or 7 years!
These people are just making noise with buzzwords to sell their design services. There is little vision (as far as technology goes) apparent in their work.
~GoRK
Like you, I can type at ~100WPM. But it took time to learn how to do that. Years. Wonder how fast I could be dictating words if I had trained that as hard as I did typing. I'm also pretty sure that sore vocal chords would be a reminiscent of old days once you mastered it, just as sore hands from typing when I was still learning to do that...
Why does everybody demand that voice recognition require little or no training whatsoever? I've been able to move my fingers for years before I could type, and I'll happily accept that it'll be a considerable time before I can dictate with any form of precision and speed. Once we can do that (assuming that the current crop of speech recognition software catches up), *THEN* let's discuss if typing or dictating is faster than the other.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
OK, it's 2000 and I don't even have a robot dog that can vacuum red plush carpet, or even a manned visit to Mars. So I expect the computer of 2010 will run Windows Naught-Seven, and the revolutionary feature of computers in that year will be leopard-skin cases.
Not math. While it is accurate it is not exact. Until we solve the heat barrier by inventing cheap room temprature superconductor we will see a slowing trend in CPU speeds. ('electroptical' indeed!! what rubbish.)
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Or at least Robocop 2. The badguy interfaces with liquid crack. That's an interface humans have understood since before they were humans.
Do you actually use a Palm regularly? I do, and some of my co-workers are true artists in terms of grafitti style writing. But they still write VERY slowly compared to their keyboard typing speed. It's just a slow way to enter data...
Don't get me wrong - I really like using my Palm. But not for hardcore typing. Good for taking notes during meetings. Going over my calendar in the commute train. Catching up with the news that got hotsync'ed while I was busy typing to earn a living.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
And as soon as they aren't looking, we break their knees and steal their wallet.
Who's with me?
- W
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
This was an interesting exercise in fantasy. I wonder how close they will be? I actually hadn't heard of some of this technology (Holographic memory?) and some of it I had just heard the barest of theoretic ideas (Like opticalelectronics). I am surprized that they did not mention Quantum computing, but from what I have heard I guess that it is more than 10 years out. They did not mention removable storage.. I would be inerested to see where that is going. They overstated the problems with current computers (The CPU does not actually spend a full two thirds of its time waiting for data from memory), but overall a good read.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
There will still be legacy parts of 16 bit DOS running within the 1024bit Windows 2010, which would mean the memory wouldn't be described as "segmented" as much as "diced".
Plugging my computer into my home doesn't sound like a good idea. I don't want to have to reboot my plumbing.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
When you walk down the street you can find the /. trolls by the people waving like idiots at their virtual keyboards as they troll down the street.
Seriously if you want a good look at a reasonable future watch a few episodes of Earth: Final Conflict. (But ignore the cheap aliens) The ID shuttle for example uses an optical/visual interface thingy and the internet in the show is not too far away (as long as Micro$oft doesn't screw it up first).
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
Secondly, all this talk of supercomputers of the future always reminds me of movies. It always seems that the movies has this stuff beforehand. The keyboards in Hackers, the all-in-one computer of Electric Dreams, RoboCop of... well... Robocop. Movies always look ahead and take computer futures to a conceivable new level; but surprisingly it never is believable at the time!
Thirdly, IBM came out with the home computing aspect a few years back with modules you pluged into the wall. Essentially they acted as power plug timers hooked to the computer, but it seemed like a big step that IBM was making in their vision.
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
From the article:
[Concerning the hard drive]...it will hold an astounding terabyte (1 trillion bytes) of data, just a tad more than we get today--1,000 times more.
Great!!! That should be just enough to install Windows 2010
Aside: Bastards! I had a previous boss who, if told a new buzzword by an article like this, REALLY WOULD start using it the next day.
--
The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
I'm a sceptic at heart, and I always sigh when I see predictions about what we'll be doing in about ten years time. The fact is, nobody really knows. 10 Years in computing terms is beyond imagination, so why try ?
"We'll all be living in the sky in silver plastic suits!"
"We'll be travelling in flying cars and have disease won't exist!"
Actually, I have to say that the picture of this future machine looked a little bit too much like something copied out of Star Trek.
As for operating systems, there's just no point in getting excited here. Expect Windows 2010 to exist or V5 of your friendly Linux Kernel with V10 of KDE/Gnome. True, they'll probably do some funky new things, but these predictions are always way out. There will still be loads of old code lying around there....
Finally, as one poster has already commented, I do actually like to use a keyboard or mouse sometimes. Why remove them ? An intelligent design would use these as a backup input mode in case that oh-so-good voice recognition goes pear shaped.
Just my 2p.
M.
For some reason people are obsessed about guessing our future, and determining how our lives will be affected and what technologies will be in use. The simple truth of the matter though, is we are really, really bad at doing it.
In the 1950's and 1960's a lot of predictions (many of which you have probably seen yourselves) were made as to how we would live in the year 2000. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm not wearing silver jump boots and driving my hover car to work yet, and I still have to cook all by myself. It was foolish to try and predict 40 or 50 years into the future, and we've learnt our lesson. So now, a design team want to get some publicity and attempt to predict where our computers are going to be in 10 years time. There are some flaws though.
1. Why do I want a computer shaped like a frisbee in the first place? Too big to carry around, too small to make it look like it deserves a space in my office.
2. All of these technologies are still on drawing boards and we won't see prototypes until 2010 at the earliest. In addition better and more useful technologies are likely to emerge between now and 2010 meaning some of these components may never get the R&D required to develop them.
3. Desks as screens is the most stupid thing I've ever heard in my life. After a weeks use, the cramp and pain in my neck would probably become unbearable. It's also an "illegal" position for visual display equipment to be placed in under the Health and Safety at Work Act in the UK. But hey, that nasty dude with the supercomputer in Tron had one, right?
4. More powerful computers doesn't mean smarter computers. The article implies that because this machines will have equivalent power to something like a Cray J90 or somesuch that it will therefore make our environments "smart". So, does that mean they are predicting advancements in artificial intelligence as well? Funny that, because for the last 2 decades people have been saying that in 10 years time we'll have smart machines.
In short, I think that this is possibly the worst article I have ever seen concerning the future of computers over the next ten years. Seeing as it's completely publicity-generating pie-in-the-sky and not clearly thought out by anybody who understands these issues, why am I even bothering writing this reply? Because I've got nothing better to do? In that case, I think I'll go and design my house of the future (*yawn*).....
retsina or ouzo usually ...
I think that the future of input devices will not be an all or none soluation, but rather a combination of input devices and methods.
As it is, there are many things I want to tell my computer to do, for example.
Save this file then shutdown for the night.
Saying that one sentence is much faster then waiting for the file to save, then checking to make sure that the OS actualy shuts down OK (granted, more reliable OS's would solve half of this problem.)
On the other hand, there is no way in the world that you are going to seperate me from my Rhino3d command bar, its a lovly thing. Abbreviations are much easier to type then say, and often times written words form patterns that spoken words do not. Thus the reason that I can type my name two or three times faster then anything else, my fingers have become acostum to typing it. On the other hand I still stutter while saying my name (ironic, eh?)
I do like the idea of a virutal desktop though, there are many times in life that I just wanted to be able to play around with somthing in real 3d. In addition, it is easier to tell a computer to do somthing like:
Undo that second to last spell check
Then it is search through a document for the word that you accidently corrected (spell checkers don't understand most industry buzz words, go figure!)
Of course there is one major problem with voice reconization technology right now, namly
THE DAMN THING CAN'T UNDERSTAND A WORD THAT I SAY.
Sure sure, I've read the manuals "may need 3 or more hours of training in order to work as advertised"
I've also spent half an hour trying to get the trainer to understand a single word that I am saying.
The reason?
Simple.
I have spent so much time reading, that most of the words that I know the definition of, I have never actualy pronounced!
Honestly, how often does the word defiled or the phrase uber mage come up in daily conversation?
The fact is that the written english languages deviates strongly from the spoken english language, heck, ask almost any english lit teacher if you don't believe me.
Many words that people use in their daily spoken language that they have perfected the pronounciation of, they have never actualy written down, and many words that they write down, they may have never pronounced in their entire life (I know I have gone 5 or more years without actualy speaking a word but using it almost weekly in my writting.)
The basic fact is that it is not natural to dictate a document. Most authers who dictate documents (do any writters still actualy do that anymore?) have somebody else go through and eliminate the standard mannerisms of speech.
(this also explains why those medieval fantasy novels sound so emmensly lame when read out loud).
Yet there is hope for integratiing voice reconization into the modern and everyday computer. Many long winded or multiple step commands would fit very well into a voice reconiziation programmed enviorment. Granted, all the Linux nuts out there have script files to do most of the work for them if the job exeeds 5 or 6 long winded tasks, but for other commands, such as the given example of save then shutdown, this would be the perfect system.
Imagine somebody being able to give the following command:
Delete all games that I have not played in the last 5 months and then defragment my hard drive.
The best part about the above command is that it is not technoloicaly impossable. Heck, a file system which keeps track of "last date accessed on" and that allows for catagorizing of directories (games, apps, pr0n) is all that is needed.
Whats more, it would save me the 5 or so hours it takes for me to sort through my games directories.
It has even another bonus, the average user could understand it! Granted, I'm not a big fan of the "average user" (*cough* newbie *cough*) but it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to understand the idea of deleting everything that hasn't been used in at least 5 months. Just follow up by (attempting to) explaining defragmenting a HD (you have to do it, shut-up, end of story,-- my perfered method) and you have a very easy to use and often needed command that is actualy easier to use through voice reconization then it is to do by keyboard or mouse
.
Examples of other commands that are easier to use through voice recon then traditional commands:
Save this file as (document name)final.txt then delete all other previus backup copies of this file.
Goto visited websites and rotate all passwords
remove all non-program essential image files
DELETE THAT DAMN DIRECTORY ALL READY (for those people are are stuck with windoze and uninstall shield, you know what I am talking about!)
Find some of all items in colum C and place it in the next avaible row of colum C
Run virus program, clean up temp files, then run defrag
Partional off the newly installed 20gig HD into two 10gig segments labled D and E
Copy all user created text files to the CD-RW that was just inserted
Delete all MP3's that have only been listened to once
Collect all non-program attached midi files and move them to usr/music/midi
(yes yes, some people here still listen to midi files, get over it!)
Anyways, just my, err, uh
2 and a half bits I guess, heh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I recently purchased an used book called Computer Systems in Business: An Introduction recently. Published in 1986, it features computer systems that seem pretty quaint almost two decades later.
One clever thing the book does is discuss the concept of P, a relative-cost measure for dicussing how much computers cost in light of the opposing forces of inflation and Moore's Law which make costs difficult to forecast in actual currency. P is equal to the average cost or value of a standard microcomputer system, which at the time consisted of...
- CPU
- Main memory (256K)
- Keyboard
- Monitor (they specified monochrome)
- Two diskette drives
- Dot matrix printer
The book does mention some things that seem pretty quaint these days: main memory for some larger micros exceeded 2 megabytes in 1985, two diskette drives would give you a total on-line storage capacity of a megabyte, and my favourite line: "A Winchester is sometimes called a hard disk."The books goes on to discuss minicomputers (6 megs memory with 200 ns access time, 8K cache and 1.8 gig of hard disk -- er, Winchester -- space. Only when the book gets to mainframes do the machine specs seem somewhere in line with a machine you could probably buy at your local appliance shop...
The diagram, which I can't include in this posting, shows 35 disk drives of 800 megabytes each (28 gigs total). In P units, the cost of such a beast was 1,043, or about $3.6 million dollars.If we assume that the rate of tech progress over the next 15 years is roughly the same as the past 15, we have a starting point for visualizing what the average personal computer of 2015 could be like -- simply look at machines that cost about a thousand times more than the Celeron 600 at Circuit City.
Then, in the best /. traditon, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
I see absolutely no reference the the 'Any' key.....
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Choose the future. Choose frisbee-shaped ergonomics and shopping for hardware in Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazine. Choose restrictive software and operating systems that obfuscate what lies underneath. Choose shouting impotently at a multimedia interface that knows what you want far better than you do. Choose software that spends your money for you, wants equal rights and can only be made to work by flattering its (bad) poetry. Choose electronic rebellion from your fridge, your toilet and your television. Choose news, censored by your intelligent agent to suit your delicate sensibilities, and by the FBI to suit their political agenda. Choose slashdot future. Choose life... but why would I want to do a thing like that?
And guess what is one of the more promising materials for optical computing? Silicon. Silicon is transparent at the wavelengths used in optical data transmissions, and Silicon Dioxide is opaque.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
How far off are biological computers? When will we reach the boundries of silicon, glass and metal and be forced to 'grow' computers rather than make them. Asimov never really explained the positronic brain, and that was the point... Daneel existed somewhere between man creation and God's/It's/Buddah's/Gaia's (you get the drift, trying not offend) creation..... just a bit of food for thought.....
....Be careful of dueling with dragons - you are crunchy and taste good with tomato sauce....
Nothing's going to help you with that!
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
I hope that computer they're predicting is running an OS a little less frustrating than most of what you find nowadays, cause that thing really looks like it'd be easy to toss out a window.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
How come every new concept of the future has to be aerodynamic? I mean, please, it's not like my machine is going to be going faster because it has a slender design. How the hell am I supposed to balance things on that thing if it has all those curves? Give me a damn computer that is a square and won't tip over.
Although now that I think about it, a drink holder in the case would be pretty damn cool.
-Frijoles-
Worst post ever.
"...[treat] every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
Yes, but can I throw it to defeat my enemies in the Game Grid? //rp