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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.
And still IDE controllers will only support 2 devices.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I really got my hopes up as I read through it - I thought for once, I would see an article about The Future that didn't say the equivalent of, "This year is really the year when voice recognition will be everywhere." But noooo, they had to say that voice-driven web portals will be one of the Big Things.
What is it about voice recognition that suckers journalists in every time? Nobody seems to get it: voice recognition is here, it's been here for a long time, it's just that the accuracy isn't good enough. You can't walk up to somebody else's installation of ViaVoice and start dictating a letter without missing a few words in each paragraph at the bare minimum.
Now they're talking about voice navigation of web sites? Let me get this straight: half of the sites I visit are so poorly designed that it's hard to tell where to CLICK, let alone what I would say if the site was actually listening to my voice. And if I have to read instructions on how to surf a specific site, you can bet I won't bother reading it - or even clicking.
I didn't bother reading the rest of their Big Futuristic Ideas, but if they're the kind of journalists that include voice recognition, it's not the kind of article I want to read.
What's your damage, Heather?
This ARTICLE should be modded -1 Flamebait
> Your desktop PC specs in 2004
[..snip..]
> Operating system: Some version of Windows (you
> expected Linux, perhaps?)
Hard disks that are faster, not bigger. If I need more space, I'll add more spindles. How about giving me a disk that can push 50 or 100 MB/sec from the platters?
Bring back those monitors-with-built-in-USB-hubs.
Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week. How about 8x500 MHz on the desktop, instead of 1x4GHz which is still crippled by 1 CPU hogging app?
Less patronizing Windows UI ("My Documents", "My Computer")
A decent NFS client for Win32.
That's all I can think of for now. I'm not terribly interested about vapor markup languages or 1 GHz palmtops. Give me something I can use.
dd if=/dev/coffee of=/dev/geek
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Subscription based Software / Services (games, streaming content etc etc)
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Advanced operating systems. Defining technology as a subset of an unresponsive monopoly OS is a waste of time.
Efficient programming tools. If four programmers could write a better Photoshop in two months and distribute it electronically, then things will change.
Human factors driven technology. People will buy more stuff that works easily and makes them happy.
I think that the largest change coming in the next few years, at least for laptop users, will be the increasing prevalence of pervasive, high bandwidth wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.11a-g protocols. I have the pleasure of working for one of the few companies that makes extensive use of these devices (we design them, actually), and I can't imagine working without them. When I go to a meeting, I just plug a card into my laptop and go. In the meeting I can bring up all of the relevant documents and data, check my email and stocks, and, most importantly, read Slashdot.
These technologies will have an even larger impact in academic institutions. At this moment, I know of at least two universities (Carnegie Mellon and, interestingly, Akron University in Ohio) that have essentially omnipresent 802.11b wireless networks. Students with laptops can access the campus network as well as the internet from any point in the university, even the football field.
I think that this will be the area of largest noticeable change because it is not incremental. We expect faster processors, greater storage capacity, faster busses, etc., but the ability to connect to the internet with a broadband connection from almost anywhere, that will be new and therefore more noticeable. However, even though it is novel, it is implemented with mature technologies that have been tried and tested for several years now, at least in the case of 802.11b.
400 gigs and a cloud of dust: AFC hard drives
:) !
well talk about storage problems. I'm having problems filling up my 48gigs.
I GHZ PDA & 10 Ghz PC
Allright what about workstations (maybe they'll start GIGIHertz and Mebihertz too)
LCD Replacement ?
Let them first replace CRT first
Instant messenger
hasn't it arrived here yet ?
Ah XML it's mentioned
this is going to be there "leave my files alone" -- Federal employee
Hyper Threading ?
Talk about "hype"
Good bye PCI ? costlier PC's ?
P2P
well it rocks (my gnutella !)
MRAM
Don't put that speaker near it !
The see-through PC: TFT computers
let me see it before commenting
Distributed Computing That works look at SETI@HOME:)
10 ghz
it's good to dream, but this overdid it
Serial ATA
bye bye ribbon cables
E-Wallet
we'll see more cyber crimes
well they didn't say Microsoft would change
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Can't half tell that the non-hardware concepts got some severe business bias, can we? Gees... I don't want "Presence," that's for damned sure. If I want to be found, I make myself easy to find - so why on earth do I need to be tracked to wireless devices, PCs, cell phones, etc? And the concept of having to "pay" to avoid it? Their comparison to caller ID and the blocking of such is bogus - if I'm calling someone, that's one thing, since I initiated the contact, but, but tracking location and usage? Ick.
And that's before the potential terrors of an electronic wallet - not that it's a bad concept, but I don't think it should get a '9' particularly when you consider that some monolith or other will be providing the service, and in a nasty, centralized fashion.
Bah.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
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.
Still, I could see some use for a voice-driven interface to a web-mail portal, so my phone can read me my voice mail, and for things like news and stock quotes as well. Of course, these things may already exist, and I've just been too Neanderthal to figure out how to do them from my cell.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I saw no mention of security improving. I realize that the hardest part of maintaining a secure environment is making the 'user' comply but there HAS to be a better way of protecting people from themselves. Sort of like if a burglar trips and breaks his leg in your house he can sue you.
I mention security because of the "Presence technology" that was discussed. If somebody can get ahold of my network identity and then use that identity to pinpoint my location we could have a whole new wave of identity theft. Not that I have thought it over much but knowing exactly where somebody is opens up a whole new set of opportunites for exploit.
White collar criminal -**- Signing Off.
He's been there where M$ want him to be... never knowing he needed it until he got it right in front of him. Him and the great crowds like him is what will give M$ the IM monopoly too, because "everybody else" will be on messenger. Yet another blatant case of M$ extending their monopoly, but I don't suppose that rises any eyebrows here because it happens so often, and nowhere else either because they don't care, in particular the Justice Dep.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
My hope is that the people who were polled to come up with this list were rating the Microsoft Passport with "Impact meter: 8" as a warning, not a subtle endorsement. The Presence Technology rating of 7 scares me. I don't want people to be able to track my every move, and shouldn't have to pay for the right to be left alone. Isn't this a little to close to the conspiracy theory of the government implanting chips at birth? I have never been one to take that sort of thing seriously, but I want to know I can keep on eating and breathing technology without some hacker knowing my life.
They're writing about what they see as most important. You need to remember that reporters/journalists/comentators in the print media want desperately to be in the non-print media (radio / tv). And to those in the non-print media, their voice is the most beautiful thing in the world. It's no points for content or relevance and full points for inflection and intonation.
With voice being that important (at least sub-consciously), of course voice response gets played up.
People want stuff that they can use everyday. Having a PC with software that uses voice recognition and learn my pattern usage is what I really want. I don't want to have to mess around anymore with DLLs, the registry, LD_LIRBARY_PATHs or .conf files. Applications should learn on how to adapt to my usage and fix themselves when broken. How about an instantaneous boot up people. My g4 with osx wakes up in 5 secs. Boots under 2 mins.
The idea of HyperThreading will create a new breed of applications, both on the client and server side hopefully. The hope of having a reatime application on my desktop is very appealing. No more me waiting for the application to respond to my command!!!
Operating system: Windows
Price: $2,000 and up
You didn't read that correctly; The price of the hardware will be so cheap it will be laughable. Windows, on the other hand, will cost $2000 and up. The funny thing is many suckers would probably pay it.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
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?
We need an imbedded AI to determine the data running across our networks is not copyrighted... as well as a slot for quarters so that every time we play an mp3 we can drop in our spare change... I heard Alternative Tentacles could use the money.
I'll add a sig just as soon as I clean up this room...
400 gigs and a cloud of dust: AFC hard drives
:)
:)
Not a bad idea. As the average amount of free space per PC increases, software makers will find a way to utilize it. They always have.
PDAs move to another level: The 1-GHz palmtop
Doubtful. Unlike cell phones, the demographic that buys palmtops aren't made up of teenagers. The people who buy and use palmtops aren't obsessed with making them smaller. They want connectivity first, then speed, then glitz. Besides, the typical uses of a palmtop don't extend to high-end computing. Having 1 Ghz under the hood isn't going to allow you to write your term paper any faster.
Scintillating screens: Organic-light-emitting diodes
Vastly overhyped. The intensity of OLEDs fade with time. When compared next to TFT, they look like shit, perform like shit, and go bad far quicker than TFT. They're also more expensive to produce. It'll be a novelty, but, it wont go anywhere in the end, IMHO.
The message is the medium: Next-generation instant messaging
Uhhh.....Ever heard of IRC? CUSeeMe? This is hardly a new technology. Its the same paradox as the video phone. Everyone thinks that videophones would be totally cool, but no one's willing to have their hair and make-up done in order to answer the phone. Pound for pound, text remains the best medium for large groups of people to share information. What good is a teleconference if only one person at a time can talk? If more than one person starts talking, you might as well be listening to a washing machine.
Tireless wireless: 802.11 networks
I absolutely agree. 802.11 is the beginning of something very big. Community networks, and the death knell for wire-provided technologies like DSL, Cable, 56K modems, etc.
In search of a common language: Markup languages for everything
Here we go again, failing to learn from history. People, its like this -- Programmers dont think alike. Thats what makes them programmers. You'll no sooner see people using the same language for markup as you'll see people coding in Smalltalk. People gravitate towards languages based on their ability to be proficient at it. No matter how good XML is, people will still use HTML becuase it suits them better, or PHP, or Perl, or C, or Assembly, or freakin Smalltalk if they want. Name a single time in history when a programmer was considered proficient in his art, WITHOUT knowing more than one language. Get my drift?
Getting a little hyper: Hyper-threading
Big clue for ya, gang--99.9% of your PC's lifespan is spent waiting for your lazy human ass to tell it what to do. Hyperthreading assumes that Moore's Law will flatline. It wont. What good is greater availability of processing power when you're STILL not addressing the fact that for most of your machine's usable lifespan, it's sitting idle anyway? Its like code optimization research. As time goes on, it becomes more and more irrelevant.
And now, my short list of what WILL take off:
802.11 and its offspring
Corporation-controlled P2P trading
P2P For Programmers--Wide and seamless code-sharing environments that replace segmented environments like SourceForge, Savannah, etc. Why not search for a bunch of good 3D engine s to pick from instead of just MP3s?
GUI optimization. Out with the old, in with the new. The need for a more intuitive interface always wins in the long run, over tradition-based designs. (cough)Scrollball(cough)
User-centric computing instead of application-centric computing.
Self-regulating and self-maintaining applications...Just picture it. Your antivirus software is eventually rendered obsolute because each of your applications, independant of one another, monitors its own structure and is aware of viruses that may attempt to exploit it. Also downloads and applies new updates, code patches, etc. Maintenance-free from a user standpoint.
Government requirements for both OS security and application security. Possibly even a ratings system.
Where will it end!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
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
Oh, the hard drive manufacturers will love this. A simple one-page document will take gigabytes of hard disk space :-).
Wasn't there a slashdot story in the past year about how a common binary protocol was being replaced with XML, with a corresponding increase of a factor in the hundreds in storage/network requirements?
I know that problem...
Out of curiosity, have you thought of proxys + DMZ? Are the clients in your network too diverse?
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
This sounds a hell of a lot like magnetic core memory. It's funny that they portray magnetic RAM as something new. Yes, I know the new implementation of this will be very different (sub micron scale etc) but the idea was popular decades ago. Does anyone have a good comparison of the old way and the planned new way?
I can hardly wait for IM porn spam
Sounds like a dream come true.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think the only thing that will shape the (home) computer world for the next few years is weather and when cheap broadband is available for the masses.
Cruise TT
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
As long as I can remember the battery of my notebooks all lastet ONE hour. I think thats a magic number. Obviously users dont need more than one hour and it is not as important as a faster cpu or a brighter display. The same is valid for PDAs or else they wouldnt sell so many ipaqs.
SMP does not require a special application to take advantage of, only the operating system needs to support it (Windows 2000, XP Professional and Linux all do this).
It is useful if you like to do more than one thing at once. If you are like me and open up multiple instances of Netscape or IE, Word, MP3 players, all while burning a CD and hosting a Quake3 server, you would immediately experience the benefit from SMP.
Any multithreaded app can gain the benefit of SMP (not to mention running many simultaneously)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
It's time to forget floppy disks, 2002 is a good date to stop using this old magnetig faulty devices.
Get with it, there are clueless people who think M$ is so big and wonderful that every innovation has come from them and Microsoft will be the last company to correct them on any praise. Now if they continued, ".. and in so doing, hopelessly choked the Net with bloat and brought the last broadband provider to their knees." then they might have something. Of course, Microsoft would happily correct them then "that's not bloat, that's a feature!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I was thinking over the holidays about how much I prefer playing games on a dedicated console instead of my PC. PCs have gotten to be necessary evils, especially in recent years. Consider:
1. Upgrading one piece of software or one hardware component (e.g. video card) can easily turn into a cascade of upgrades and a week's worth of evenings. I've gotten afraid to upgrade; I don't want to mess with something that works.
2. The rash of awful virii and worms that get released for whatever system provides the most opportunity (note: If Linux were on 95% of all desktops, there would be just as many Linux viruses; thinking otherwise is like thinking you have developed an unbreakable copy protection scheme). Keeping up with all the security patches and such has been a real headache. And unless I keep up with sites where these things are announced, I'd never know about them.
3. There's still a general unreliability factor associated with PCs. Sometimes my PC doesn't boot completely, and I have to power down and try again. Ever run a game and hear the monitor click indicating a resolution change, and then nothing happens and even if you could kill the game you can't get your video card to reset without a reboot. This is a common occurrence in both Linux and Windows.
4. 99% of the time there's a problem with a game or application, the response is "Do you have the latest video card drivers?" They seem to be released stealthily every few weeks. Who wants to deal with it? And whenever you upgrade there's a high probability of trouble with older software. See #1.
If PCs change in a drastic way, I'd like to see that change in the reliability direction. Yes, yes, yes, Linux is more reliable than Windows 95/98/ME, but Windows 2000 and XP are right up there with Linux. The OS wars dodge the issue. If PCs could be make as reliable as cell phones or PDAs, then I might be interested in them again. Right now I simply view them as mainframes for your home, with all the same system administration headaches.
How about gzipped XML? Or a compression scheme specially designed to compress XML? Really, this isn't that big a problem. In fact, a gzipped XML Word file would probably be smaller than the binary file as the text would be compressed as well. Faster processors make this easier than ever.
They're writing about what they see as most important. You need to remember that reporters/journalists/comentators in the print media want desperately to be in the non-print media (radio / tv).
I was hoping you were going for the fact that print journalists have to write a lot and since they often dictate into personal recorders to get a story and would rather not have to transcribe it later, to their computers, by hand.
A new bug that allows remote access will be found in Windows XP. People will be urged to install the critical update or move to a real OS.
A new bug that allows root access will be found in the latest version of wu-ftpd. People will be urged to patch it or move to a real FTP server.
A new bug that allows root access will be found in the latest version of Sendmail. People will be urged to patch it or move to a real MTA
A kid will be diagnosed with cancer, and will have few days left. People will send him lots of postcards.
Youll receive a warning about a terrible virus that can reformat your hard drive, and neither Microsoft nor the antivirus companies has the ability to fix it.
Motorolla will fill for Chapter 11 because it spent so much money giving cellular phones to everybody who sent lots of e-mails
Amazon will not make profit in 2002
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
you know, it is sort of sad that this journalist is to ignorant of the techmarket to realise that a standard PC and a standard Notbook will never be sold for more than $1200 and $1600 respectivly.
I thought it was sort of funny that he is predicting that PCs will cost the same as the did just before the tech boom. yeah never mind that the Cool new techs that came out in the last 10 years did not increese the cost of the PC or Notebook.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Requiring copy-protection to be built in every single computer peripheral capable of storage is kinda significant, yet merits no mention. Maybe nobody's supposed to know about it?
-A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I don't know why anyone would not use an ftp server connected to a cable box. proftp works for me, who needs media for anything but archives?
The kind of computer that lacks a network interface generally lacks a CDROM but has a floppy. Hate them as much as I do, I've still got a pile of floppies and several drives. Compared to the single CD writer, the floppy drives in my house are easier to write to when I have to run someplace unfamiliar.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
A new archetecture. No, we're just going to keep using the IBM-PC, with its IRQs and other funky crap that was invented in the early 80s and has to be hacked around to get today's computer working at a decent speed. Eventually, someone's going to have to take the plunge and reinvent the computer. Don't hold your breath.
I'm not interested in speeding up the interface. I want faster platters. The interface is already >> faster than the disk.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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
There's a massive Hitlerian effort to violate all of our civil liberties and force everyone to correctly speak the same
1. Sort of like Palm did with Graffiti - write the way they say or it won't work.
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.
Your desktop PC in 2004: Two years from now, your desktop system will be slimmer and trimmer. Flat-panel screens will replace bulky CRTs, and rewritable-DVD drives and fast graphics subsystems will turn your PC into a movie lover's dream.
And DVD and CD so fscked up with copy protection that you can't use any of it on your PC
CPU and RAM: 4- to 5-GHz microprocessor with 512MB of DDR memory and a 600-MHz system bus
Try more memory, 512 isn't that uncommon in off the shelf computers today. And as for CPU, how about mentioning 64 bits, like the Hammer, instead of yammering on about that ancient Pentium 4
Hard disk: From 300GB to 400GB on a Serial ATA bus
And no backup technology even close, so you'll have to have RAID standard or risk losing all those pr0n videos. Rather have SCSI, too.
Removable storage: Rewritable DVD and -- yes -- the unsinkable 1.44MB floppy
DVD+RW or something else, perferably without some built in copy protection lock, like HP's unit has.
Internet connection: Cable or DSL broadband if you're lucky; 56-kbps modem if not
If there's ANY left and IF they provide in a reasonably open service format and IF it doesn't cost $100/mo so they're profitable.
Video: 3D graphics card with 128MB of video RAM
And still able to play NetHack? :)
Display: 18- to 21-inch flat-panel LCD screen capable of 1600 by 1200 resolution
And weighs less than 20 lbs and lasts longer than 30 minutes on battery? I'd be happy with inexpensive 17", thanks.
Ports: USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394
Input devices: Wireless (Bluetooth) mouse and keyboard
What? Now Eye-mouse or Gyromouse?
Operating system: Some version of Windows (you expected Linux, perhaps?)
Some version of Linux (you expected Windows, perhaps?)
Other: An 802.11b wireless network designed for users with more than one PC
Or a more up to date version of 802.11, but why not network it to more than just PC's, or did the future vision 15 watt bulb start to grow dim?
Price: $1,500 to $2,000
Well, ok, but only because the $900 model has that crappy P4 in it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
MSN messenger is barely a functional tool providing only the absolute bare bones of communication functionality.
As for video? Try talking hooks with Microsoft Net Meeting. MNM doesn't work well behind many corporate firewalls (it's useless behind my company's simple little NAT network for talking outside).
Finally, the idea that bundling the tool with the OS is an innovation could only come from a reporter who has had ear plugs over their ears and a paperbag over their head for the last five years. Puhhleeez.
Microsoft needs to be forced, for each bundled application that comes with Windows, to allow competitors to bundle their own products.
I wasn't too impressed with the first part.. stopped reading the article when I read this ditty.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Did anyone besides me wonder why most of these technologies that will change the PC in 2002 aren't expected until 2004 or so?
From the article: Your Desktop PC in 2004: Operating System: Some form of Windows (You were expecting Linux, perhaps?)
Stupid smart-off comment. My desktop PC has Linux now. The big change between now and then will be I quit using the Macintosh next to it. I'm tired of pompous folks telling me Linux isn't ready for my desktop. I'll make that decision, folks.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
3. Political Bull-Shit (e.g. Intel and RAMBUS's agreement a while back)
2. Ego
1. Money
"20 Factors that CNN was paid to advertise for in 2002"
-- Dan
... a phone, that has no cord!
... a machine that does the work of 20 math-crunching calculators, in ONE SECOND!
... a decent story from timothy!
Your desktop PC specs in 2004
;)
;)
;)
;)
Your desktop PC in 2004: Two years from now, your desktop system will be slimmer and trimmer. Flat-panel screens will replace bulky CRTs, and rewritable-DVD drives and fast graphics subsystems will turn your PC into a movie lover's dream.
CPU and RAM: 4- to 5-GHz microprocessor with 512MB of DDR memory and a 600-MHz system bus
Only 512MB? DDR is cheap enough now. Why not a couple of gigs? The processor sounds about right, though.
Hard disk: From 300GB to 400GB on a Serial ATA bus
Sounds good to me. I'll definatly be at the high end. My 20GB drive has been full since the first month I bought my current PC...
Removable storage: Rewritable DVD and -- yes -- the unsinkable 1.44MB floppy
Honestly, the PC floppy drive just might die eventually. I haven't used mine in quite a while, except to create an extra emergency backup copy of my essays to take to school just in case their network is broken. Still, the floppy is the easiest way to transport small files at the moment...
Internet connection: Cable or DSL broadband if you're lucky; 56-kbps modem if not
I wonder how much bigger broadband will be in 2004? I'd think the number of people with broadband connections will grow, if the companies providing it can weather the current recession. I do expect all broadband connections (even cable) to have tiered pricing plans based on speed caps, and to be coming down hard on customers who actually dare to use their promised "unlimited" access, though...
Video: 3D graphics card with 128MB of video RAM
I predict we'll see more than 128MB cards by 2004. 256MB wouldn't suprise me one bit. Also, I am sure all of the decent cards will have nice, speedy GPUs. Yummm...
Display: 18- to 21-inch flat-panel LCD screen capable of 1600 by 1200 resolution
You can have my CRT when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. I won't touch LCD for my desktop until it looks as good (read: bright, crisp, clear, and perfect) as my CRT. It's nowhere close yet. And until I get laser surgery, I won't be running at anything more that 1024x768, and that only on a 19" screen, thank you.
Ports: USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394
This will be nice. No more multiple serial and parallel ports using up IRQs, and lots of speedy connections for video and other high-speed applications.
Input devices: Wireless (Bluetooth) mouse and keyboard
Not for me, thanks. I'd prefer a wired system. I don't need my neighbor or the FBI tapping my keystrokes.
Also, I expect that most, if not all, mice will be optical by this time, and scroll wheels and extra buttons will probably be even more commonplace than they are now.
Operating system: Some version of Windows (you expected Linux, perhaps?)
Windows for the masses, but some flavor of *nix (probably Linux) for me. With regards to Microsoft OSes, I doubt I will ever go beyond Windows 98 for my primary PC, though I may set up a dual-boot 98/2K box sometime in the future. I am not touching XP and it's descendants will probably be worse...
The article fails to mention other things that will affect PCs and other such devices, like content control, government intrusion and restrictions, nastier spyware than ever, etc. But I guess we don't want to alarm the masses, do we?
DennyK
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!
The tools we use still suck, we programmers are stuck in the 1950's, while the rest of the world gets all of the toys we built with this stuff, only with extreme tedium. We're trappist monks, trapped by the bounds of syntax. The time for change is near.
--Mike-- (a.k.a. one who has seen a hint of the light)
force everyone to correctly speak the same
dillon cited the single German dialect (out of dozens) enforced by schools in Germany. It's not just Germany. Linguistic imperialism is far more common than linguistic freedom. In France, the government has forced the Parisian dialect on the rest of the nation. In England, they don't care how the peasants and servants talk, but I believe Eton and the other high-priced schools have been teaching the entire upper-class a particular and highly distinctive accent for a couple of centuries. In China for at least 2800 years, anyone wanting a role in government had better speak the Mandarin dialect; Cantonese is tolerated in south China, but that's just one other dialect out of at least dozens that once existed.
Display: 18- to 21-inch flat-panel LCD screen capable of 1600 by 1200 resolution
Why such a crappy display? I run 1600x1200 already, and can't even look at the full frame of the pictures from my digital camera any more. I want at least 4000*3000 pixels if I'm going to be forced to look at an LCD. It had better be driving digitally, as well, just like my laptop.
If the OS can't handle it, I'll just open the source, and fix it myself.
--Mike--every little region of Germany has its own accent (not unlike England, actually), but the schools teach and enforce a single "correct" pronunciation.
Yup, Hochdeutsch. I grew up in Rheinland-Pfalz, which was notorious for its accent. My school definitely made us aware of the distinction, but I wouldn't say they "enforced" the higher standard.
The weeks/months of uptime you get on AAAs is one of the big advantages of the Palm platform, and a major factor in their dominance.
I hate to tell you, but they don't sell that many iPaqs. Palm has gained back the market share they lost early last year.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Here's another thing journalists (and a lot of other people) don't get: more RAM is the best way to get more out of your computer! For their "specs of your PC in 2004" they list...
;-) is lower power consumption, less heat output, etc.
Desktop: 512MB RAM
Laptop: 256MB RAM
Huh? I have more than that in both today. My desktop has 1GB and my laptop 384MB.
On the other hand they see a 4-5GHz CPU in the desktop and a 2-3GHz CPU in the laptop. Who needs that? 1-2GHz is very fast... the main reason even todays 1GHz PCs often "feel slow" to their users is that they don't have enough RAM! I hear it all the time... "my PC is slow" (brand new PC with 1GHz CPU)... turns out they only have 128MB RAM and every time they switch between their Word processor and their browser half of the other gets paged out. Duh.
I doubt that the default laptop will go much beyond a 1GHz CPU in the next few years anyway... what we need much more now in laptops (other than RAM
And I doubt desktops will go much beyond 2GHz soon... servers, sure, some high-end workstations, sure, but a typical home/office PC? Who needs the speed? With what we have today you can process a live video stream while silumtaneously playing Quake at 60fps (with help from dedicated video/3D hardware) which are some of the most computing resource intensive apps anyone has come up with yet.
:j
Currently, I don't have a floppy drive at all in my PC. I was thinking exactly like you are when I built it without a floppy. But, I need to go get one anyway.
:-)
;-)
I didn't think I'd need a floppy because today's standard is CD. If I need to send someone files on physical media, I've got a CD-RW for that. If I get new software or new hardware with driver media, it'll be on CD. Great.
But just a few years ago things were still being put on floppies. And that's my problem. See, I went to install the latest drivers for a used P II system I bought for a family member, and they were only available as disk images. Okay, there are tools which can decompress them, like WinImage. That's fine for getting the drivers out of the image. Annoying that it just isn't zipped like normal people would do, but workable.
However, software disk images are another matter if they're in some weird self-floppy-writing format, which does sometimes happen. I have a lot of older software, mostly games, ("abandonware" sites mostly--call it piracy if you want, but I think we should preserve our gaming heritage, and if something is no longer retailed at all, I find no harm in archiving and occasionally playing it) on disk images in a dozen different formats. It's a big pain in the ass to deal with when you have to get around writing them to floppy, whereas you could write them on a floppy in no time if you actually had a floppy drive.
That problem is increased since I'm using VMWare and a trial copy of VirtualPC for Windows. I wanted to run a free (legally, too) copy of DR-DOS I got, but it's in a disk image format, and as far as I can tell--I'm not *completely* familiar with the programs, so maybe one or both have this function and I haven't found it--both VMWare and VirtualPC need to install an OS from media (unless you buy one of their retail "packs") and you can't just copy the DOS files from your HD into the virtual PC's HD.
So, it would be much easier if I just broke down and bought a floppy drive. Which I did, actually, but being a geek I thought it would be cool to get one of those old combo 3 1/2 inch and 5 1/14 inch drives that a couple of companies used to make, if I had to hook up a floppy. I bought one on eBay since they don't make 'em any more--but it arrived DOA, dammit. That of course is just a side rant.
But anyway, I'll probably end up buying a shiny new 3 1/2 inch floppy drive just to deal with disk images. Dammit.
As a side note, I use and love Daemon Tools. Whenever I buy a new game with CD-check protection and can't find a simple way or crack to disable it, or if a new game I buy has CDA sound tracks, I can just make an image of the CD and a batch file to mount it in Daemon Tools before running the game. Very handy--no CD swapping, ever, which will be especially useful when I get around to building an ultimate arcade PC and an arcade cab around it. Daemon Tools is basically a free implementation of a Virtual CD program. I just wish there were a Virtual Floppy program that worked the same way, so that software and driver disk images could be easily and seamlessly written to a virtual floppy drive and then just as easily copied back onto the HD and zipped up in a standard archive if desired. That would be PERFECT for what I currently need a floppy for, and for all such "legacy" uses of floppy drives.
It's times like this when I wish I could code anything other than HTML.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Computers are transforming into collections of separate networked modules.
Most computer components are already available as networked modules: storage, audio, input, printing. Even displays with graphics processors are available as tablets and webpads. This trend will continue. Protocols and software will evolve to support it.
Soon, processors will find their way to the market as a separate networked module, probably coupled with memory. When you add one of these modules to your network, distributed processing will let you use it in addition to all the others you already have.
You and your family (and maybe even your neighbors) will share processing and storage resources as you use your own separate portable terminals.
Your most important data will be encrypted on a storage module that looks more like a safe, set in concrete in the foundation of your house.
------DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE------
By then, we'll have the ability to connect a number of keyboard/mouse/monitor/removable-drive combinations to a single computer, and OSes will have enough stability and extra power to handle it. A family will buy a single fast computer and 2-3 heads for it, and then they'll never have to argue over it, because each head is really cheap. In fact, they'll probably get extra heads to have in different rooms, just because it's convenient.
Once flat-panel displays are as cheap as CRTs, there's no reason to sit at a desk to use the computer; have something laptop-shaped, but attached to a machine in the closet. Everything that is expensive to make small isn't; everything that's small by default fits on your lap.
Then people will want to ditch the cords, and they'll be out of Bluetooth range, so the heads will turn into 802.11 network appliances; LAN appliances, not internet appliances. You'll buy a computer, and it won't have a monitor or anything; those will be in the appliance. The whole thing will only cost a bit more than having a single unit, and it will be much more convenient.
Eventually, of course, you'll be able to do things like use your home computer from a friend's house; since everything has been designed for having an 802.11 network between the user and the CPU, having the internet in between isn't much different.
So, in 2004, my "desktop" computer won't be on a desk, and I won't be sitting at a desk to use it.
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.
This article should have been called:
"We've found a way to fit more advertising in less space and get people to pay attention at the same time."
Most technology companies have had a terrible record over the last 20 years when it comes to designing technology for easy, efficient usage. I seriously doubt that in three years things will be any different, because that requires changing the attitudes of the people who design technology and changing the way they think about their designs. It's a lot easier for technology to change and evolve than it is for people to change and evolve.
it looks like these projections are for 2002 and beyond. some of them aren't even due until 2006 or later according to this story.
also, the release of some of the technology they're talking about is dependant on where you live in the world. for instance, in the US,the petrol corps have such a lobbying stranglehold on our govt. that we'll probably be among the last in the world to see any form of usable fuel cell technology.
i think a lot of this is optimistic at best and utter drivel at worst.
A mid range Sony Vaio can be had today with those specs for $1500, including the docking station. Admittedly the processor is 1GHz rather than 2, but batter life is the principle reason for that. And most people who have the choice today go for smaller machines that are lighter than huge brick like desktop replacements.
What I think will happen is that the laptop phenomena will start to merge with the PDA line. Most people don't actually need or want a laptop, they want a PDA that can read email and do powerpoint presentations.
Another thing to think about is that with 802.11b and the like it is not necessarily the case that you need a powerfull machine in your hand. We may well start to see the portable display tablet becomming detached from the desktop processor.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I find this fascinating. On the one hand, we have great programming languages, tools, and libraries whose only disadvantage compared to C, C++, Java, and C# is that they are maybe 10x slower. We have the processors to run them faster than we could run assembly a few years ago. Yet, whenever these new processors come out, everybody goes back, wastes lots of time tuning their C/C++ code and then complains that all those cycles are useless. There are still endless debates even in 2001 whether Gnome or KDE is faster. The Linux kernel developers don't even want to move to C++
Folks, those cycles are very useful. Not for some obscure technology that you know nothing about. They are very useful to let you program faster by worrying less about fine-tuning your software and for automating lots of tasks. They are very useful also for making programs safer and more robust automatically by eliminating common bugs like buffer overflows. And they are very useful for component-based software construction, which requires some form of runtime reflection--much better done automatically.
They should have stated it as follows: With all your eggs in one basket...
Programming code needs markup capability, not just comments. Markup provides the ability to specify addition LAYERS (Plural!) of information about something. You should be able to add as many of these layers as you like, they should be able to overlap as you like. The compiler output should just be another layer on top of your source code, if you like.
--Mike--
2003: Ebay rejects ads for analog speakers as piracy devices.
Personally, I'm hoping for a holodeck-like experience. "Computer, give me Victorian-era England. And don't skimp out on the bustiers".
Outside of games, there aren't many applications that really need much more compute power. The concept of needing a 1GHz CPU in a handheld to work on a spreadsheet, as suggested in the article, is idiotic.
We need bandwidth more than CPU power right now. TV needs about 3Mb/s, and home Internet connections aren't delivering that yet. (And it terrifies the content providers if everybody has enough bandwidth and storage to pump video around, let alone HDTV or theatrical film bandwidths.)
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.
A good film image with good optics and lighting taken with good film will need about 20 megapixels in order to be comparable digitally. For shots most people would never notice the difference in unless blown up fairly large is from 6 to 9 megapixels, these numbers of course are assuming the colour range is higher than 8 bits. What camera makers are working on is the colour depth of digital cameras. Single CCD or CMOS cameras only have 8 bits of colour depth per pixel and in order to generate full colour RGB images interpolate the remaining 16 bits of colour information. Digital cameras also have problems with contrast since they're only getting 256 levels of it while negative film grabs about a thousand levels of contrast. Digital sensors also have blooming problems where bright pixels bleed over into neighboring pixels which prevents you from taking pictures with really fine contrast between pixels. As it stands colour film scanners are much better for high quality shots because they have adequate pixel resolution as well as colour depth to get as much information off the film as possible. When 5MP cameras get down to consumer quality that is when you can figure that digital camers really will replace celluloid film cameras. Crappy shots from disposable camers are about what you're getting out of the current line of 1-2MP cameras but for much higher prices. Right now the Canon D30 CMOS camera is one of the best you can buy but it costs several times more than my Rebel 2000 (and uses the same EOS lenses) and doesn't deliver the same quality. Though this argument enters a grey area when you compare 5x7 prints from a 35mm film camera and a 5x7 print from a high quality photo printer (unless you're talking terms of cost in which I still win :).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
which will fuel the need for about 20% of the mentionned stuff on that site :)
Factor: 10
coolness: priceless.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
And what the hell is that all about: "Next time you call your bank or your travel agent, that pleasant-sounding woman who answers the phone may be a Web server." <seductive voice>"Hi, I'm Apache, what can I do for you."</seductive voice>
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
that Microsoft's relentless expansion of Office "features" and condescending dictation of how everyone organizes files and uses productivity software is _reducing_ usability of the products.
With Office95 I could set each application to save its files in a specific directory by default. So I had separate directories for Word, Excel, etc., and I'd use Save-As to place files in Client folders as needed. Lately with Office2000 I have to use Save-As for every frickin file plus having to click up and down the directory tree to reach my file structure. Its painful and it wastes time - all simply because Microsoft _enforces_ their "easy" (dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator) approach to saving files. It insults me to use it. What I want is software that's easier for me to use in the way I want to work. And that is Not M$ Office. I do hope Star Office 6 will be more usable in this sense and wish Sun would finish it up and finally release it real soon.
The CNN article's apparent deference (or pandering) to Microsoft's plans seems rather strange, seeing as how CNN is part of that other Great Satan - AOL/Time-Warner - which is positioning resources to take on Microsoft wherever it can in a battle for consumer control of media and transactions.
Erm...no?
As a journalist-to-be, I can tell you that my interest is not in TV or radio. I'm a writer, not a parrot. Where voice recognition really would be helpful to me is in dictating passages and editing them. I'm rather surprised at your suggestion that print media journalists "want desperately to be in the non-print media". What basis do you have for this odd assumption?
A word can paint a thousand pictures
Big Brother Inside: The SSSCA and Digital Rights Management
What is it? A new mandate being legislated as we speak, pushed by the record companies and movie companies (disclosure: CNN is owned by AOL Time Warner, which is also a record company and movie company, which is why they didn't say anything about this) to keep users from copying copyrighted material without "permission."
What's cool? Depends on whether you work for a movie company or record company--if you don't, there's very little "cool" about this. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (to be introdued by Senator Hollings, R-SC) will mandate that all digital devices contain copyright protection systems to keep people from copying "copyrighted material." What this means is unknown as of yet, but it's for certain that the days of Napster and Gnutella wll be long gone if this comes to pass...and perhaps the days of Linux as well, since it would be impossible to put secure copyright protections into an open-source operating system. The bill also mandates penalties for tampering with digital rights management systems, and for connecting an unprotected digital device to any computer network. If you want to enjoy music or movies on your computer, the movie and record companies will tell you "It's my way or the highway"--and you'll probably have to pay. And pay. And pay. And pay. And pay.
When's it coming? The SSSCA will likely be on Congressional committee agendas early next year. Expect its sponsors (mostly Disney) to try and get it rammed through Congress as fast as they can, with as little review as they can. Then, the "industry" has a certain amount of time to come up with the copyright protection standards that will be mandatory from then on...and if they can't come to an agreement, the government will do it for them.
What's the catch? This will basically be The End Of The World As We Know It for the computer industry. The only beneficiaries of a law like this will be the record, movie, and other "intellectual property" companies, who will expect to see more cash flowing into their already-bloated coffers. Meanwhile, a lot of people are going to get harassed for the crime of using computer systems of their choice...and the average consumer, as always, will get screwed. Repeatedly. Forever. On the other hand, it may still be possible to stop this from happening...write your Congressional representatives and tell them why this law would be a Bad Thing for the consumer, for the computer industry, and for the American economy as a whole. Of course, bear in mind that the record companies and movie companies have more money than you do, and so they're likely to get listened to first.
Impact Meter: 10...no, make that 10,000,000.
This is just a poor and feeble first draft...anybody else out there, feel free to rewrite it.
Eric
Be who you are...and be it in style!
That's enough to change how you interact with a PDA - instead of a screen interface with handwriting input, you can do an earphone/mike interface, voice input, voice output for many things, though possibly a screen as well. Obviously you'd want to integrate it with a cellphone and voicemail. E-Books are probably way too annoying when read through most common text-to-speech systems, but perhaps the new AT&T Labs Natural Voice stuff is good enough.
Some of that can probably be done with much lower-end speech-recognition, and possibly with speaker-independent. The Sprint voice-dialed cellphone is a cute trick - the memory and speech recognition parts can live in the server side of the system, but since the system knows it's *your* cellphone, it only needs to look up your few dozen phone numbers, rather than having to recognize across their entire subscriber bases' set of "Mom", "Home", "Work" voice patterns.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hear, hear. For personal use (since I'm not a gamer, and don't use my PC as a substitute for a television :-), I don't need multi-GHz processing, especially if I'm not wasting it on patronizing bloatware user interfaces, and I don't need a Beowulf cluster in my garage. For business applications, there are obvious applications like encryption for web servers (lots of SSL sessions, though custom accelerator boards (or less-custom DSPs) are often worthwhile ways to speed that up) or database searching - but that one parallelizes well, and the real performance problems are usually in how you handle the disk drives. The old Teradata Database Engines had up to 432 processors, each with their own disk drives, and a funky fast bus connecting them - the master processors would split up database queries into slices that each little CPU could go search on and then collect the results back together. You could build similar things today using PCs and either chains of fast Ethernet - Beowulf is designed for more general-purpose applications, but much of the philosophy is reusable, and the techniques for splitting up queries can probably be adapted easily enough. Inktomi/b> and similar highly parallelizable indexing and search engines are another point in the loosely-coupled-processing space, though obviously you're not going to run a massive web-crawler in your garage behind a little DSL connection - the processing needs to balance the network bandwidth.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Very interesting idea; it raises some obvious questions (e.g., how to code the "modification tags" in a way that doesn't totally break portability). I suspect it would work best at the upper levels (e.g. if you could write "sort X" or "sort [use quick-sort] X" or "sort [if count X lt 20 use bubble-sort else use quick-sort] X", etc.) But then of course the question would be "can't you already do that?"
-- MarkusQ
Yes, you could get a $1500 desktop machine if you want to spend $1000 on a really good flat-screen display - and if this were still the Dot-Com-Boom of 1997 instead of the Dot-Com-Bust of 2001 you'd do it in an instant, but this year, you'd only spend that because it's really nice, not because it's actually enhancing your ability to do work.
The real must-have component for your desk-top machine - it's the $25 plastic slide-out disk drive drawer, so you can upgrade that 20GB drive to an 80GB drive without disassembling the box. (And of course the CD-R, because 650MB CD-Rs are cheaper than floppies these days.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What about anything I said about bit depth is wrong? Besides I answered the question the guy asked and that was whether digital camers right now really compare to film which they don't. Price/performance wise they are completely uneconomical unless you have a point and shoot 35mm and take more than 40 rolls of film a year. People with those sorts of camers are lucky to develop 10 rolls a year. Here you you will be better informed read up. He says the exact same thing as me and is an admittedly better photographer. Fucking smug people.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
XHMTL 1.0, which is the current W3C recommendation to replace HTML 4.0, IS XML!! The next version of HTML will be XHTML 2.x probably, there will be no HTML 5.x, so people that want to take advantage of any new features introduced in the next version will be using XML for their pages. They will just be using a specific DTD known as XHTML.
1) There will be no HTML 5 because the W3C wrestled control of the HTML standard back from Netscape and Microsoft and is placing new work in appropriate places (DOM, XML, etc). Proper HTML has been mostly feature complete since 3.0. The only real major addition I can think of is tables, which have a valid use when they are not being butchered by 99.5% of web sites (W3C included). HTML 4 added some SGML-derived descriptive tags that everyone should use but doesn't.
2) The next recommendation is XHTML 1.1, which is basically XHTML 1.0 with the "flavors" removed (only "strict" now) and some hooks for other W3C technologies.
3) "The XHTML is XML" thing doesn't mean much. HTML is XML is SGML. They're all based on a tag format defined in a 1986 standard. HTML 4 needed very minor hacks to make it XML compatible. In fact, the only one I can think of is the new tag completion rule. Besides ending single tag elements, this doesn't affect things much since tag minimization has been depreciated for years.
I've found that XML is one of the most misunderstood technologies out there, people seem to think that it's a drastic departure from what they know and nobody seems to understand where it's true power lies. XML is not going to replace PHP, Perl, Python, C, Java, or anything else.
On the contrary, I don't think it is misunderstood. By "us" at least. I can't tell you how many times I've laughed at these absurd concoctions for XML: TCP protocols, file systems, database backends...it just goes on. XML is a tag language. It does things tag languages do. XML is a minor extension of SGML to escape the 1986-ness of the format.
XML isn't the end-all future, but these publications make it seem that way, and when it's not that it's Java.
Some of us have real jobs man...
Dude, you are like, so right. Actually, tech support is only a small part of my job - also includes Sysadmin, Devel, and recently pointy-haired-ness over my two shiny new assistants.
Hey, and I get paid rather well by today's standards or something - I'll even do Wind0ze for money - shit, I never said I wasn't a cheap whore (thought I let cheapslutsrus.com go now that I actually have a steady girlfriend rather than a bunch of messed up semi-relationships for my friends to laugh at) - note to self, keep away from married women, only brings trouble.
Ouch - bound to get Vickified or something now.
Definitely... I find it amazing how accustomed we've all gotten to asking someone to repeat what they just said ("Huh?" "Put the yellow cup next to WHAT?" "Come again?") - yet we have no patience for a computer/machine not grasping 99.99% of what we say the first time its spoken.
The problem with voice recognition systems is we expect them to work better than we do!
Personally, I still want to know why everyone's so interested in every digital camera on the market getting multi-mondo-megapixels of resolution in the first place??
.BMP backgrounds out of pictures of my friends and pets, and have an easy way to email photos around. For these purposes, resolutions above 1024x768 are usually more hinderance than help! Your average Windows desktop runs no more than 1024x768 resolution, and you don't want more than either 640x480 or even 320x200 for a small .JPG to upload to eBay or email to a relative.
If I'm really concerned about high resolution photos, then I'm probably going to shell out the $'s for a high-end camera (digital or not). If I go the digital route, probably would be best to do it with a digital camera back for a traditional 35mm camera.
If I'm like 90% of the digital camera buyers, I just want to shoot quick pictures of my stuff to post on eBay, make cool Windows
Most people using these higher-resolution cameras end up shrinking their photos in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, so they're a manageable size to upload.
The written language is considered the "high language".
:)
But we're discussing voice recognition...I'm talking not simply about word choice, grammar, and other issues that are common to both spoken and written language. I'm referring to how phonemes are pronounced. For example, my cousin, a southerner, pronounces "are" and "air" the same, although he knows how to write them and use them. He is well-educated, and writes with great skill, but his pronunciation differs from mine. A system trained to recognize my accent would choke on his.
That said, I yield to your obviously superior experience in the matter of German language education.
MY notebook PC specs in 2001
My notebook PC in 2001: By 2001 a notebook will be some users' only PC. These mobile monsters will have the power to replace desktops, but will stay slender enough to tuck into a briefcase. Screens won't get much larger than 15 inches, though -- any bigger and you would lose portability -- and battery life will improve, but not as much as most users would like.
CPU and RAM: 550- to 666-MHz G4 chip with 1GB of RAM
Hard disk: 20GB to 48GB with Ultra ATA/66 interface
Removable storage: Slot Loading CD-RW/DVD
Internet connection: 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet; 56K V.90 modem (backup) (Home - DSL; Work - T3)
Wireless technologies: 802.11b for connecting to a LAN
Display: 15.2-inch LCD
Dimensions: 5.4 pounds and barely 1 inch thick
Battery: lithium ion unit good for 5 hours of life per charge
Operating system: MacOS X.1
Price: $2,200 and up ($2000 for DVD-only still available retail)
----
Just to note... I don't actually have one of these. I'd sort of like one, as a fantasy, except I really don't want to have the burden. I have a G4 (Dual 533) at home and a G4 (Dual 800) at work, as well as a Dual Athalon 900 at home (on a 2.4 kernel) and a few 600 to dual 800 range PIII boxen, (2.4 kernel, Win2000), an 8-way Compaq behemoth (8x1GHz Xeon), and a Sun E3000 at work... if I had a cool portable, I'd never escape the damned silicon monsters. A good friend does have one (666MHz/1GB/40MB/DVDw/extern CD-RW) that he got for $2.4k+tax (ADC Premier, the lucky B*st*rd) plus the cost of the memory upgrade (he had one 512MB built in) and while the 550 would be cheaper, the faster bus certainly seemed to give his book more power. Now, I know the costs are lower for PCs, but they don't seem to be much lower for equivalent portables. It isn't like you can (as I do with my boxen) order all the parts through the company's wholesale supplier and assemble your own laptop. And to get 1" thick and 15" screen and optical drive (not in an external bay) is next to impossible. So... when I see nothing compelling about this two-three year off laptop they describe, perhaps there's something there for the PC world. But I still much doubt the 3lb 15" screen DVD-R thing. The 3lb thing will only happen when LCDs get replaced by something lighter (Organics? Would take work) and optical drives get thinner. And Li-ion batteries can't get that light, and power something like that...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
256 levels of contrast ratio is not nearly enough to match what the human eye can see. Colour negatives come far closer to what the eye can distinguish. Also there are only a very very small handful of cameras that offer more than 8 bits of quantization and these all cost more than 1000$ and then a small portion of those have interchangable lenses and the ability to do long term exposures. If you'd be so kind as to be specific as to why my price/performance assertion is bogus I'd really enjoy that. I'd love to see how a 300$ digital camera that takes pictures equivilent to a disposable Kodak camera at best beats even a crappy SLR camera. Maybe as you move up the rungs of camera quality high priced digital cameras might come out close to cost effective when compared to SLR camera but I really don't see it. I think I'd take my SLRs and my film scanned by professional scanning labs over a 5MP Canon until I scan upwards of 70 rolls a year which I don't happen to.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
In the end, it doesn't really matter though, since the movie and record companies will buy off Democrats and Republicans alike to try and get this passed.
Eric
Be who you are...and be it in style!
That only really applies to like 3 things, the recycle bin, my documents, and my computer and thats because they are really mapped to some other folders depending what user you are logged in as .. and you can change those using tweakui.. altho there is no reason to unless you want my documents to be on some drive other than the windows drive..
Hydrogen fuel cells offer the possibility of dumping the hydrogen into the air in a confined space and igniting it, making a wonderful little bomb. This would be just the thing to take down an airliner. (It just occurred to me that the same could possibly be done with regular old NiMH batteries, if you had enough of them; how much H2 does one of those store?) I wonder if anyone is analyzing these possibilities, and if so, if the FAA is ready to restrict problematic technologies from commercial aircraft. Methanol fuel cells, by contrast, don't appear to be abusable in this way and ought to be clear to fly; if you're looking for a technology which is going to take off and make money, the one which will be permitted on commercial aircraft seems like a better bet if all else is equal.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist