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20 Factors That Will Change PCs In 2002
bstadil writes: "CNN's tech site has posted a list of the 20 most significant factors that will change the PC in 2002. Its not very technical but it would be interesting to get the take on this from the Slashdot community plus what they think needs to be added."
I think that 1GHz Palmtops, IM, new fuel cells, and that new screen technology could be combined into one super PDA that has been promised since someone uttered convergence.
The Handspring Treo will replace my phone, my PDA, and my Blackberry. Now there's a something I'd shell out hard cash for in 2002.
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Some time back, I read on theregister about replacing PC bus with a bunch of fiber optics.
I believe this can turn on faster data than any physical/electrical bus.
But then every chip will have to have bunch of optical tranceiver/filter built in. As a good effect of this there will be only one physical "wire" capping single fibre carrying say 64 wavelengths, from each chip. Mobo size will be down to 20% of existing...
I don't believe that won't change the world...
Bring back those monitors-with-built-in-USB-hubs.
I'm shopping for a new LCD display, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of them have a USB hub. I wasn't quite so happy that many have junky built-in speakers, but of course you don't have to use 'em.
Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week.
Swing by your local CompUSA. Dual CPU motherboards are now under $100, often well under $100. A quick check of Pricewatch shows that two P3-667's will cost you less than a single P3-1ghz, so the only thing stopping you from SMP heaven is - well, you.
Less patronizing Windows UI ("My Documents", "My Computer")
Well, I can't help you there. At least it's not Microsoft Bob.
What's your damage, Heather?
What's cool? Even Moore's Law eventually gets trumped by the laws of physics. In a few years, the current method of packing ever greater numbers of transistors onto a chip will hit a wall. But a technology called Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography may break that barrier. Intel estimates that EUVL chips will boast 400 million transistors -- about ten times more than the Pentium 4's 42 million.
Sooooo...
(42 * 2)^n = 400
n = 3.3 lots of 18 months
3.3 * 18 = ~60 months
60 / 12 = 5 years
When's it coming? In three to five years.
Move along people... nothing to see...
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
For the desktop and laptop the writer(s) stop at 512MB RAM. Why? Why not go Gig? It is the future after all.
The OS choices were "unfriendly" at best. <Paraphrase>Some form of Windows (What, you were expecting Linux?)</Paraphrase>
I know I will sound like a madman but I think OSX or a *nix with a good, consistent GUI could easily replace Windows. It has in my house, and we appear to be discussing home computers.
Good article for someone who hasn't read any tech stories in the past 3 years.
This
Removable storage: Rewritable DVD and -- yes -- the unsinkable 1.44MB floppy
That's according to the article, but, I have not used a floppy disk in nearly three years. I took all the floppy drives out of my computers at home, and simply use CDs or CDRWs for all my data transfer needs. They are leaps and bounds more reliable (Ask me about reports on magnetic disks "Escaping" in my bookbag), and are generally just more sensible to use (more space for better presentations, etc). Even with driver issues - most, if not all, new machies are CD bootable, so, voila, you can have all your drivers on once nice CD.
I don't understand why any (non tech person) would still use a disk (as opposed to a disc).
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I guess they are kidding: 512 MB DDR RAM is nothing, even by today's standards. I guess people will hit the 4 GB limit on traditional x86 desktops even before the end of 2004.
There's a rule that today's hard disk capacities are RAM capacities in five to seven years. By this estimate, we're going to hit 4 GB during 2003, I suppose.
Look at the price...
PC's are commodity items of last year. If people can't buy a computer for $500, they won't be paying 4x that in 2004.
OLED? When they start to come out the LCD people are going to get very nervous and they have much more room to play on the price cut front. Result, OLED meet ch 11 and its back to LCD.
IM? Thats too much like peer to peer file sharing for the media folks. I predict M$ will get its self in court with the MPAA people as well as RIAA within a year.
Wireless? Why? The last stuff that was rolled out is a hackers dream. You think large compaines are going to try it again? Other than the cool, look I can do ____ from the other side of the room, whats it worth to most compaines? No one is spending on toys anymore.
XML? TLA for the decade. Its going to be here for a long time. Much more difficult to parse than most text files and this looks like a cool idea to thouse who didn't understand why we have LALR grammar.
Multi-threading made faster. Oh joy... how many programs do I have now that are multi-threaded. Most users are more than happy with the spell check thread running under word and about 90% of applications thread well.
Magnet bubble memory is back... one more time its going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Its cool to be able to put the same 64mbyte card in my camera and my mp3 player but my rio seems to be having problems with its 1st sector as its fash has faded.
Fuel cells will be great if they don't get banned by the local fire marshal. I figure with H2's bad rap (think Hindenburg), all it will take is one accident and this will be baned in some major city. Then others will follow.
Voice portals... One more thing to strangle... too bad I can't put my hands around the things neck.
Smart cards are great. Now its difficult to get a magnetic card writer (who do you know that has one). Now everyone with a PC and the balls to walk into a Tandy shop can get what it take to reprogram some smart cards. The CPUs are too slow to do meaningful crypto and as the cable TV compaines have found out, there are people who can tell you the circut thats sealed in that thin plastic. My bet is smart card fraud will exceed US$500 by Dec of 2002.
G3? is this Gimik 3? DoCoMo will finaly get its act together, get live porn to phones in Japan. G3 will be dead anywhere they can export to or thouse parts of the world that don't have the guts to drop dead tech that isn't going to work.
Digital Cameras with more pixels. Ever try to explain to Mom why the screen can't show as many dots as the camera took and why good 35 mm fill is still 20000 lines of resulution while the overpirced camera has a few thosuand? What I want to know is why can't these $300 cameras have a lense better than a $10 disposable camera?
Not being a businessman on the hardware side of the world, there's one question that I've been wanting an answer to for some time. Is there a viable market for PC systems in the less-than-$700 price range? It would seem that educational institutions (especially public school disctricts) and the less-affluent consumer would be the perfect targets for this sort of marketing.
I realize that as technology ages, margins get slimmer and slimmer. What, however, is the floor? It would seem that in a world of "faster, smaller, cheaper," that there would be use for $200-300 machines that are new, out of the box, with warranty service, but are fully functional PCs. Net appliances were interesting, but for the average consumer nothing more than a pretty terminal device. Is it possible in this marketplace for a company to build and sell a cheap Wintel box to the budget consumer and still turn a profit?
It would sure beat having school districts full of old, beat-up, barely functional corporate write-off machines.
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
IIRC, porn (or Adult Entertainment, if you prefer) is the first market to make use of tech advances. I've got some old Apple ][ magazines from 1981 and they even feature porn ads. With the number of techies surviving by going to work for porn you can bet the quality will get better, or they'll just become more ruthless bastards at finding ways to launch from email and take over your PC.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Solid State storage. I'm tired of these Victorian style moving platters and arms. Almost steam punkish. Check out the USB based Piccolo storage keys w/o drivers. They're up to 128MB. Prices should be dropping for GB size stuff, I hope.
Real Firewire hard drives, not these IDE drives with adapter cards on them. Again, it's a serial style cable connection that will feed the beast faster and help neated up the case internals. Serial ATA would do the trick too. Now if only we could connect these cables up to the solid state storage.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Re: Me getting a new desktop in 2004:
I doubt it -- I have a PII400 I've used for the last 4 years... it served me very well until I got bitten by the Wolfenstein 3D bug over the summer and realized I 'needed' a new box so I built myself a 1.333GHz Athlon which I expect to keep until it blows up. Same with the PII400, it's a linux test box for FanHome which I keep all the dev code on .
I suspect, though, if things are that cheap in the year 2004 I'll go ahead and pick another computer up; I already have 3 -- another couple couldn't hurt (except the electric bill).
Wireless mouse and keyboard? Puh-lease. Those have been around for 5+ years and never, ever caught on (both infrared and RF). I doubt somehow we're going to want to sit on our couch and stare at our monitors. Why waste bluetooth bandwidth on your keyboard/mouse? I think the biggest drawback will be the need to replace batteries and/or plug the keyboard into the wall to recharge them. You'll always be working on a big paper or playing the perfect game of Counter Strike when your keyboard batteries die.
I dislike the idea of everyone using Bluetooth until their protocol isn't redicoulously easy to crack. Weren't there some stories posted a while ago about how easy it was to crack 128bit 802.11b -- with everyone and their mother using bluetooth it would be a cinch for someone to set up a wireless sniffer and read all your keyboard inputs (passwords, etc.).
Re: Laptop
I have a Dell Insprion 8000 that I purchased last May. It was faster than my desktop at the time so it truely was a replacement. It's a PIII850 with 256MB RAM. Runs great for what I use it for (when I'm on the road or otherwise away from my home computer it checks my mail and provides Age of Empires 2 gaming ) and I don't hope to replace it any time soon. It has a 15" LCD already and I couldn't imagine anything larger since as they said it would get HUGE. As soon as they develop those 'roll up' organic LCDs (which they've been talking about for 3 years or more now so I doubt all of a sudden they'll appear) they could have a laptop without any screen and then some sort of 'projector' type screen which you set up. I also have and use 802.11b at home and at work which is great although it is a separate PC card which sometimes I forget. If it was built-in like the Mac Ti Books (which are AWESOME btw) it would be a lot easier... Although one would think that would limit upgradeability since you'd have to rip the thing apart to replace the 802.11b with 802.11a. I don't know why they've limited the RAM to 256MB -- mine has that now with one slot free (for another 256MB DIMM I guess). If we're going to truely have desktop replacement laptops I'd see no reason why to get 512MB RAM (certainly whilst it is pennies on the dollar compared to even a year ago).
Thanks,
--
Matt
frankly, who would want more than 2 devices on a single channel? It would only cause miserable slow down. If you need more than four devices, get an IDE card. The promise 100 is sweet - and an amazingly cheap upgrade (~$30) that will boost system performance significantly.
Only a fool discounts voice recognition. I haven't dialed my sprint phone for the past six months, instead I simply tell it who to call and it does.
:-)
I'm sure Douglas Adams would be giggling uncontrollably but that's OK, I think that's pretty neat technology.
Voice recognition has come to high-end cars (remember the "rain stop" commercials?" And it's come to TV remotes. When it's put into microwaves I'll be one of the first to buy it.
There was a time not ten years ago where nobody would dream of doing stuff like this but now we're on the verge of getting rid of the clunky typewriter keyboard and our children may look at our use of these devices as quaintly as we look upon our great great grandparents as they huddled around the radio listening to broadcasts of the lone rangers.
So while you may stop reading future trend articles because they talk about voice recognition I won't read one that doesn't because like it or not, it IS the wave of the future and every year the technology entrenches itself a little more into our lives.
And that is a very good thing IMHO
In any event, the My Computer, My Documents, can easily be renamed, if that is such a huge deal...
I take it you've never tried to tech-support people who've renamed their My Computer, My Documents, etc.
Especially not other people trying to use said computers with the 'clever' renamings.
Most especially not technical-iliterates who really can't handle the idea of thinking about the icons (don't even get me started on themed desktops with both new non-intuitive icons and non-intuitive names).
Very much especially when you're on a phone line and can't see the other screen.
VNC + VPN has become my friend for all still-functioning systems. (here, install software from the following Windows share. Set default password. Don't watch my drunken mouse movements over your modem while I fix the password in the registry. Ahh, all better now).
From what I've heard, voice recognition is fairly good at this point -- the one remaining problem is that human speech isn't all that clear. ("Humorist" would not be a viable career choice otherwise.) If you read a list of random words aloud in your normal speaking voice (not taking care to separate words and talk clearly), chances are most people would mis-identify a quarter to half of them. Read normal sentences aloud, and the error rate of humans who understand the topic is pretty low -- because usually there are many ways the words could be interpreted, but only one way they fit together into a sensible sentence. But there are always some misunderstandings of spoken speech, because now and then there is another coincidental interpretation that seems even better.
Voice recognition systems are actually pretty good at identifying the words. Where they fail is at deciding which of the various possible interpretations of a sentence make sense -- since machine understanding of a typed-in English sentence is still hit or mostly miss, the machine is not going to get enough help interpreting ambiguous sounds from the context of the sentence...
So you aren't going to be able to dictate to your Palm Pilot and get a business letter that you can mail without proofreading and revision. But a human stenographer can't do that either, unless she understands quite a lot about the subject and has experience with how _you_ want the letters to come out. But there was a time when most businessmen thought it worthwhile to pay the wages of a stenographer even though they had to revise every letter and send it back to be re-typed. It beat banging on the old typewriter yourself... I think the best voice recognition now is roughly equivalent to a stupid stenographer; it should do grammar better and spell perfectly, but get the wrong word more often. It's not for me (imagine trying to dictate C code!), but if you aren't willing to lug around a full-size keyboard, or haven't become good at typing, it is quite likely that it will be faster to dictate to a voice machine and then do the needed corrections than to type a document into a palmtop.
As for why print journalists fixate on voice recognition, that's obvious. There was a time when they'd take notes on a little pad, then race to a typewriter -- now that they have laptops, they can add back strain from lugging around the 'puter and many sets of batteries to the older occupational diseases of writers cramp and carpal tunnel. And they still have to run around finding someplace to set the laptop. So say "voice recognition" and they're all dreaming about being able to just find a quiet corner and talk into a palmtop. And let the editors do the re-write, they will anyhow!
>>PDAs move to another level: The 1-GHz palmtop
>Doubtful.
Two Words: Voice Recongition
a PDA with a 500+ Mhz CPU will be able to support Voice Recongition for issuing command or typing simple notes. Corp Execs will eat this stuff up!
However, PDA's need to be equipped with a lot more of memory (Atleast 128 DRAM + 64 MB Flash + 1 GB Microdrive). The real question is, is there power supply lite enough to power all this stuff?
Having more than two devices on a channel only causes slowdown on a broken channel design. I've had 5 drives chained onto an UW SCSI card and benchmarked better data transfer off of them while simultaneously running the benchmark on all five drives than I got from a singe 7200RPM ATA66 drive in my other system. (This was a couple years back.)
I wouldn't expect most people to realize that, of course. SCSI is, as was noted, really quite pricey. But it's damned fast and doesn't break a sweat being chained. It's unfortunate that it was never able to get into competative price points with IDE and the various kludges that have been made to it over the year. While I don't have the systems to test it, I'd be willing to bet that a fast SCSI II system with the best drives available from 1992 would still blow the doors off of a brand spanking new ATA 100 system in data transfer.
The problems with dictation are two-fold. The technology is way too fragile. It is too easily thrown off by changes in ambient noise environment or the speaker's level of stress/emotion. That will slowly improve. More processing power and storage will become available for more robust pattern matching. But the second problem is probably more the point: people can't dictate. Dictation is a learned skill and few people are willing to take the time to learn or to be that disciplined. With a keyboard and a word processing program, you can noodle around and generally do what we do on pencil and paper until it's right. Dictation isn't easy.
The other side of speech works well. We use it in offices, in factories and on trade show floors all the time. Browsing the Web and filling in forms designed for data entry by voice works . VoiceSurfer by Conversay works. The Web works as well by voice as it does by mouse. It would work better if Web developers did some simple things ... but they don't know what to do and nobody's pushing the isues. Conversay's software offers easy JavaScript scripting or effortless voice enablement. If you don't mind wearing a headset, you may find it is as easy and almost as fast as the mouse.
The real message is that people don't talk to their computers. Most don't wear headsets or have high-quality directional microphones attached to their computers. And virtually everyone feels strange talking to a machine. I have a headset on mine that I use for voice over IP, I still don't run with VoiceSurfer on all the time :-( ... proof of BrentO's position at a powerful level. We'll see if that strangeness fades ... my prediction is that it's 2005 and beyond.
For higher-end applications, expect the cost of Fibre Channel connections to come down, which will essentially put an end to SCSI.
You should be aware that fibre channel isn't the death of SCSI, it's a new life for SCSI.
Fibre channel is a physical transport. SCSI is a data transport/command set on top of a physical transport (which is also called SCSI). Fibre channel is just going to provide a newer, faster physical transport for the next generation of SCSI devices. Furthermore, SCSI is expensive because it requires complex controllers on the host and on devices. Fibre channel won't change that. As the cost of fibre channel comes down, it'll approach the current cost of SCSI, but won't make them any less expensive.
2. In Germany, they do this...every little region of Germany has its own accent (not unlike England, actually), but the schools teach and enforce a single "correct" pronunciation.
So I assume my answer is also off topic.
However: thats plain wrong.
In most European languages you have dialects.
In most languages you have a written version of the language.
The written language is considered the "high language".
The high language is the language used in TV, newpapers and radio, and of course in law and governmental issues.. Everybody understands it.
No one is forced to SPEAK actually the high language, only writing is needed.
I would bet you would not easyly be able to understand all written dialects of your own language.
If you meet poeple in the street, they *ALL* speak dialect. And the so called "high language" is only a dialect, too! It is only THAT dialect which won the competition to be the official writing/speaking version of the language.
And the reason why the language won the competitio is in germany: Martin Luther wrote his bible in "high german", Gutenberg living at the same period in time printed the bible, of course in "high german".
Well, in fact he did not write it in "high german" but in his own dialect, which evolved over time to the now known "high german". So one widely available printing was the vehicle transporting the high language into the regions.
Your claim pupils would be forced to speak "high german" is wrong. They learn it form TV ... only a moron teacher, those exist of course, would force pupils to speak high german.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. yes I'm german :-) But I know that the above is also true for france and italy.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.