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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--
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?
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?
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!
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.