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Tim O'Reilly Points Toward Next 'Killer App'
santos_douglas writes "Extreme Tech has this article in which Tim O'Reilly, the man behind every geeks favorite tech manuals, points toward four major leading indicators that will predict the next likely 'killer app' to emerge from the hacker community. They are: (1) Amazon.com web services (2) BARWN (3) Hardware hackers and (4) online gaming communities."
gnutella-style non-centralized encrypted file-sharing thing with full irc-style-chat and superduper intelligent dynamic node management type stuff to regulate the network.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
Perhaps the point will be 20 fold when it gets really REALLY popular. Or expect thousands and billions of quakenets.
Note, XBox, PS2... all the consoles are really getting hot in the online arena.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
...Like BitTorrent.
It's a bit difficult to think of distributed services being for anyone other than uber-geeks and people who desperately need processing power. We've been doing distributed number crunching for a few years now, so it's only a matter of time before distributed services take hold. Distributed downloading, which was started by the various P2P apps and has been almost perfected by BitTorrent is the next iteration of that. Imagine what the next iteration of this tech will bring. Imagine hosting your entire website off of your own computer, but as part of a 'distributed' web with a browser Torrent plugin to make bandwidth seem thicker and easier to come by.
Other distributed services are just around the corner.
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And singles are the driver of Album sales (albeit a loss leader) and priced at the stupidly low levels that they can be set at on a medium like the Internet (99 cents has been mentioned) that is well within the means of teenagers everywhere.
I think this will be a virtuous circle of people putting the singles directly onto iPod mp3 players and the like and then going back for more. This could really change the whole nature of Album sales (often containing more than a couple of duff tracks to make up the numbers) and providing the mechanism for download is both strong enough to be profitable and not too strong as to irritate customers then they could have a winner. Both for the music companies and the Internet as a whole...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Ah, but being a user to QuakeNet doesn't automagically mean that they all play Quake. I know plenty of people who reg at QuakeNet yet hate Quake itself... They even hate the entire FPS genre, they're on QuakeNet just for fun or other games or what else. I'm not saying Quake isn't popular, but measuring the popularity of it against the number of users on an IRC network is kinda flawed.
Heck, online gaming communities are flawed imho anyways. If I want to game, I want to fly a spaceship and blow up stuff, trading salvages crap and doing whatnot. I want to run around with a big run, shooting people and getting shot myself. I want to run around with WW2 weapons, jump in aircraft and take the battle to the sky! If I just wanted to chat I wouldn't buy the damn game and join a random community instead.
Hate me!
This whole social fixation on the next big thing is stupid and counter productive. About the only thing this achieves is liberates money from those stupid enough to buy in and into those lacking morals and ethics.
case modding is about as much hardware hacking as putting a giant tail on your honda civic is hot rodding.
I'll just say the current generation of microcontrollers is a dream to work with, and programmable logic is really hot right now too...
foog (who has been up all night with an Atmel AVR, and the blinkenlights are flashing and the solenoid valves are clacking and everything's worked as designed so far, just with the usual minor hitches...)