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Wired's Wish List For 2013
jpt.d writes "Wired has a nice article on what they wish to be for 2013. It is not too far fetched either! My personal favorite is the roll up television screen made of light-emitting-polymer. How about another Apple gadget? Their first item is an iPhone bracelet, including the functionality of a 'PDA, wireless Internet, a mini iPod, and, of course, a phone.' Notice the Apple logo in the picture." I'd settle for ubiquitous unmetered wireless network access.
BY 2013, we need to have net access (whether wireless or wired) run like a utility rather than a commodity. There is no need to have companies like Sprint trying to make a killing by artifically restricting what really should be a near-limitless resource (bandwidth).
Let the gov't run the backbones.
The problem with all of these combination devices is that no device is going to do everything well. I have a somewhat small wrist and larger watches seem huge. At the same time, I want a large color display for my PDA.
These two things work against each other.
The display on my phone is not important (especially if I can use it as a simple modem for my PDA), but the button size is. I do not want a combination PDA and phone (think Treo and others) since I want a small phone (since I carry that on me at all times) and will take a somewhat larger PDA since I can choose to carry that or not.
So I want a small display phone with non-small buttons.
I want a PDA with a large color display (I currently have at Clie 665c to give an example).
I want a small watch with small buttons (I have a Nike Triax 42)
I want a small camera with a decent display and good optics (I have a Canon S200)
I want a MP3 player with a decent display and small size (I have an iPod)
One thing I really want is a Bluetooth-like personal network. If I pull out my PDA, I want it to sense my cell phone in my pocket and use it to connect to the internet. I want my PDA to recognize my camera and download pictures from that. if I have a laptop with me, I want it to do the same thing.
So available wireless internet is one thing, but I would rather have workable, wireless personal networks (meaning on my body).
Even better would be the ability to have a neetworked storage device somewhere (wallet, etc) that could work as a networked storage device for everything else I am carrying at once. No more carrying a 10gig iPod, a PDA with a 128meg MemoryStick and a camera with a 128meg CompacFlash card. Ideally the iPod would simply be used as storage by all devices without wires.
This would allow easy modularity without trying to pack everything into once device.
[If someone tries to patent this idea in the future, I suppose my idea cannot be used as prior art. I think I have to actually implement the idea, right? Any non-lawyers out there want to comment?]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
10 years ago I was posting messages to BBSs with a 14.4k modem, a 14" monitor and a 7MHz PC.
OK, Internet is a bigger BBS, my modem is 4x faster I've got a 17" monitor and my PC is 50x faster.
In ten years expect things will remain much the same but bigger again. Maybe I'll surf Internet2 at 250k, have a 24" monitor? My PC may even run at 20GHz
I found a 17" monitor next to a dumpster recently. Really, it was better than most of my old ones. It's amazing the useful things people throw out simply because something "better" has come along.
I also noticed a PC in the dumpster one time but I decided to pass on thatt one.
With a bit of work (And hopefully photos of my new house and this setup upcoming) a wraparound TV isn't all that impossible. Using a wrapping screen and an LCD projector this should be only minimally hard to achive. I'll post pictures when/if I get this working in my new house. I'm thinking of throwing the front speakers BEHIND the wrapping screen so they aren't in the way.
Light-emitting polymers aside, I think one much more interesting field of progress is paper-based dynamic displays. I recently watched a feature about this, and it seems that the technology isn't far off.
But why paper? Because, unlike any kind of polymers that we'll know of in the near future, paper is cheap as heck. Paper also provides excellent contrast and is pleasant to read off. Not to mention the ability to draw stuff on top of it with a regular pen.
I would personally not be surprised if paper-based computer displays rule the earth in ten years.
In 10 years Apple (or someone else) might be ready to pioneer the holographic interface to work with this iPhone.
Possible Output Methods
Possible Input Methods
So in closing... everyone complaining about the size of the iPhone being to small to see anything on, is being short sighted.
Rod!
Actually, where are the damn robot servants? The ones who can cook/clean/fetch beer.
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates. Oh, an AI lawyer and account would be nice too.
The cars that can drive themselves, and let me read a book on the way to work.
With dual incomes becoming the norm just to live in the USA, where are the time saving robot/AI programs to give us more time to spend with the family. Work a ten hour day, commute for 2 hours, sleep for 8, doesnt leave much time to eat dinner with the family and and wind down from work.
I hope by 2013 that GNU/Hurd will see a 1.0 release.
All the time. For example, Medicare/Medicaid is far more efficient than just about any privately run health plan, and government research is highly efficient and has been responsible for most of the real innovations over the last 50 years.
When it comes to big organizations and big projects, the government works very well. The real question is: what big private company has been better, cheaper, or quicker than the government? Enron? IBM? AT&T? Don't make me laugh. Big corporations are command economies but without the transparency and checks-and-balances of governments, and the often do their business free of they kind of competitive pressures that make markets efficient.
I am all for a private sector and free markets in telecommunications. The trouble is that we don't have it. And if the choice is between unregulated inefficient corporate behemoths and public utilities or strongly regulated private utilities, the latter is much preferable and likely to be more efficient.
1) A cure for HIV that is cheap enough to be rolled out in Africa. Failing a cure, a vaccine to stop new infection would also halt the pandemic.
2) A method of world governance that rids us of rogue states that persecute their own populations (Saddam, North Korea et al) and also curbs rogue states with semi-democratically elected leaders who want to attack other states on dodgy pretexts (GWB I'm looking at you)
3) An end to the tech slump, sustained growth in IT sectors, more coding jobs for me!
4) Moore's observation to continue to hold true, more better toys getting cheaper.
5) Following on from that, widespread internet rollouts in the third world. The street finds it's own uses for technology, and the villages will find their own uses for information and commication.
6) Open source software to keep getting better, no more constrictive tech monopolies, and end to DVD region coding and hard crypto staying legal.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog