Slashdot Mirror
Computer Expectations of Today, and a Decade Hence?
Luciq asks: "The other day I was cleaning out my closet and started reminiscing about all the good times I had with my 33Mhz 486DX. I got the machine 10 years ago just as the first Pentiums were coming out. With a 33Mhz processor, 212MB hard drive and a whopping 8MB of RAM, I could surf the net at 2400 baud, manipulate photos and even play games with full-screen video like The Seventh Guest. Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512MB [not 512K!] RAM. While I can do some neat things with it, I must say that it's fallen short of the wonderous expectations I had for such a system in 1993 (no immersive VR?, no seamless voice recognition?). What expectations did you have for today's PC, 10 years ago and how does the reality match up? What do you expect from computing, 10 years from now?"
Will that even read the bios?
Obviously not running Windows XP then...
The Mothership
Sheesh, that's not advancement. :)
Every home will be eqquiped with a computer that contains SUPER PORN.. The files will have "Touch Abilities." Geek nation wide will contibute to this open source project to customize there own porn star..
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM.
Even after 10 years, 640K is *STILL* enough for anybody!
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
While our friend Bill may think that 512k should be enough memory for anybody, are you sure you didn't mean 512Mb?
There's no sig like SIGSEG
i expect everything work right,
and not be asked for a damn windows patch by all my friends every 5 freakin minutes
That you can have sex with? That would be cool, since I can't get any in real life!
I got my wish. I installed linux. :)
Oh wow! I'm posting to Slashdot!!!! Look at me!!! Look at me!!!!
A stable, secure, low-cruft OS.
Maybe in the next ten years.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
512K RAM
640K WAS enough!
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
10 years ago I expected some truly breath-taking an immersive 3D games with excellent gameplay for the present. However, I often times find that today's games are simply breath-taking in a graphical sense but really lack in the gameplay. Am I just spoiled or does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it's just that I'm remembering my childhood playing those side scroller games for hours.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Computer worldwide will have a new form of SUPER PORN... this is super becuase of the "touch abilities" built in.. Every geek will contribute to this open source project. Everyone will get there custom porn star.. Wow, I can't wait :D
I expect (hope?) that text-to-speech will start sounding natural in 10 years. I'm sick and tired of the bland TTS that still sounds like it did in the '70s. Here's hoping. :)
that when I moved from a 133 MHz pentium chip to a 266 k6-2 saying to my friend:
"who the hell needs more than 266 MHz!!! christ it is so damn fast!!!"
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
512K RAM.. Billy G. saying 640K was good enough for anyone isn't a hard and fast rule of life.
Time to hit crucial.com and get some of that good stuff.
Wow
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM. While I can do some neat things with it, I must say that it's fallen short of the wonderous expectations I had for such a system in 1993
512k of ram. Amazing.
- OLED displays that are like paper (thin and flexible)
;).
- fuel cell batteries that provide power for quite a bit longer
- 64 bit computing (arriving now - wonder what the next step would be - 128 bit?)
- Windows to require 30 terabytes of disk space
I hope somebody invents a better mouse (or whatever it might be called)
I also wonder if we'll still be using hard disks ten years from now.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I expect immersive virtual reality and seamless voice recognition. I also don't want it to crash too much, but do expect it to be easy to use. Finally, I want that %&*#!@% paper clip DEAD!
I was dreaming of a day when I didn't have to buy extra software for my computer to correct it's inheirent defects, like vulnerability to viruses.
Oh wait, I do that now, thanks Linus...
Hire me...
"What do you expect from computing, 10 years from now?"
I am expecting immersive VR and seamless voice recognition.
I wont make what seems to be the required 512K joke, come on people you never had a typo?
But I will say that my expectations for computer hardware at this point was pretty much exceeded. The fact that I now have about 10 times as much Ram as my first computers had harddrive space I am impressed. However, since you mentioned games within the post I'll reply that my expectation for how FUN games would be at this time was sorely underachieved.
Unfortunately, the pixel pushing hogs that are modern computers have left game design to rely on the next brightest nicest looking graphical engine with most games being "unique" like all others on the market.
It's not the technology I feel let down about, its the basic design for games which for the most part has not advance nor drastically changed in 10 years really.
-Bort
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM
Wow... my cell phone has more RAM than you.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
10 years ago I thought about how a computer was still like a keyboard with a TV (and a mouse). I expected better input technologies. Why do I have to move the mouse pointer with my hand? Why can't I guide it with my eyes, just looking around the screen and moving the pointer? Why are input devices so far behind anything else?
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Almost every comment is pointing out that 512k typo. I bet that 512k wouldn't even hold all of them. Although my first reaction was, "Well that is his problem!"
-Sean
In 10 years from now, we will have super-fast computers, with an unthinkable amount of ram, and our planet will be ruled by damn dirty robots!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
This article is only a few minutes old and everyone is flaming poor Liciq for saying KB instead of MB. C'mon now, let's grant him a full Slashdot pardon. I mean, it's not like his mixing of MB and KB crashed a Mars lander or something, like NASA's mixing of metric/US measurements did. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I don't need a sig
1. Be really small and run on almost no power. (Screw 70 Watt processors, gimme something i can implant!) 2. Automatically negotiate ad hoc networks with passersby, immediately establishing whether or not they are similar or dissimilar to you based on MP3 collections, web bookmarks, etc. 3. Thereby facilitating a new form of social selection in humans, whereby our computers automatically figure out whether we are meant to fall in love, be friends, etc.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Today I expect a PC that can play 3D games without hiccuping, display complex text and graphics and manipulate them in real-time, allow me to surf the 'Net at speeds that make my old 14.4 modem pale in comparison. I also, unfortunately, expect a system that is much less stable than what I had ten years ago. I expect the systems of today to require an enormous heat sink and a fan with an alarm and auto-shutdown on overheat function. I never needed this with my older systems.
In the next ten years I expect that the heat issue may still be around, but that the solutions will be quiet and won't require near-constant maintenance. I expect that there will be true 3D displays, along with OSes that utilize all that goes along with them. The "personal" in PC may go the way of Dodo with all the connected world has brought us. Although most of us will certainly have, need, or require local storage of some sort, it will most likely do little or no processing of it's own. I hope that I will have the choice to disconnect at the end of the day, but am not sure this will be so as the government and big business seems to need to know every little thing we do.
My biggest expectation for the future is that I will be surprised. That there will be something I want or need my system to do that I can't even imagine today.
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
Life will start looking more like it did in the middle of the last century, as computers disappear from sight and banal old devices start containing little bits of a massively distributed system.
I won't miss sitting at a keyboard and staring fixedly at a monitor, that's for sure.
Please stop that bill gates stuff. That post is so out of context. He said it was enough *because* the dos system at that time had a capacity of only 640 KB. How are you going to put 1 MB where only 640 KB is possible?
Evidently nobody reads other posts before replying. The 512K typo has been killed, we all saw it, you can stop now.
What ever happened to the world with out keyboards and mice? Where all we have to do is say cool phrases like; "computer, file, menu, menu, menu, file, menu, manu, meeen u, men you, darn thing, never works. nooo, dont open word", click, click, click ....
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
the computers 10 years from now will be almost fast enough to run the antivirus software scans and updates to protect themselves from the worms and viruses. Hopefully there might be a cycle or two left over for the Windows XXXP 2010 updates.
I don't know, I think it's pretty cool to be able to do this at smooth frame rates.
Compared to what you were doing on your 486.
The porn is much better now too.
A decade ago or so, I saw this fortune:
It was funny at the time. Those specs were ridiculous!
Today I've got a 200MHz+ Zaurus with 64MB of RAM builtin, plus about 512MB worth of CF cards. And you can get 1-2GB CF microdrives. And it costs about $300.
It's like "Unix! I know this!" line from Jurassic Park... reality caught up, and it's not funny anymore. :-( ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Perhaps with the inevitable introduction of the quantum computer in the near future, we will see the significance of Moore's Law. Image the possibility of an one terra-flop quantum computer doubling to two terra-flops within 18 months. The thought of such a situation arising is incredibly exciting.
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
Look at those amazing 4K demos that people did (and stll do) for DOS. People are doing wild stuff here-- things like real-time pseudo-3D rendering, fractals, you name it-- all inside of 4 kilobytes of code. And most of these demos will run just as well on a '286 or (at most) '386 than today's space-heater chips.
Contiki is a lovely example of what can be done with efficient coding. In my experience, this sort of efficiency is NEVER achieved today in "commercial" projects or even in OSS/FS code-- people never even come close. The only areas of computing which have seen significant improvements (I don't just mean "more widgets" or "better interfaces" (the latter has nothing to do with hardware improvements, so don't even mention it)) in recent years have been:
* Gaming (perhaps the only area where efficiency is even SOMEWHAT appreciated, as it leads to higher FPS)
* Rendering (ditto)
* Real-time scientific simulations
In 1980, I could flip on an Apple II and have a usable prompt inside of a second or two. Nowadays, even with a screamin' P4 or Duron will get you a 30-second startup time-- if you're lucky. That's just to boot up the OS. Wanna start a word processor? That'll take even longer.
If you want to get a sense of what MY expectations were that were shattered, go grab a good Apple II emulator and some appropriate software and fire the emulator up. Make sure that it's running at the full possible speed-- not "compatible" speed (which is 1.02MHz, if I remember correctly). Look at how fast stuff runs... and that's in emulation. Sure, there's no fancy GUI, there's no clippy, whatever you think "modern" OSes have to have... but the point is that even in emulation, old stuff runs REALLY, REALLY FAST. If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.
Then wake up and realize it's time to go buy some more RAM again... ho hum...BillG just raised the bar on hardware requirements. Back to the treadmill we go...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
That's what I believed the future could hold for me at the time. Now I'm typing from a gorgeous little Powerbook with built-in DVD writer, which is wirelessly remote desktop-connected to an XP-based 2.4Ghz PC with a DVD rewriter in it, 1 Gig of RAM and a 120Gig hard drive. That's not even considered a top-end system anymore. Peripherals I connect include a firewire video cameras, bluetooth phone, a scanner, an iPod which stores more than supercomputers used to at the time of my C64 dream...all very nice toys. The above systems also have a broadband link out to the internet. Given all the above, I have to say that personal computing (small 'p', small 'c') has surpassed my expectations by a long, long way.
Oh, and the C64? I have the system I wanted, leaving aside the acoustic coupler. Of course, it's an emulated system. I carry it around installed on my phone...
Cheers,
Ian
I expected them to have more than 512K of memory by now! Sheesh!
It needs to make a comeback. I have a 2.4ghz box sitting under my desk, but would be delighted if Intel made a commitment to bring back the turbo button.
Push it, and you have successfully doubled the speed to 4.8ghz. That's the kind of innovation computer industry needs. Forget complicated overclocking.
from my experience, computer technology is mostly driven by computer games.
anyone can still type up a letter using an old computer. science/research are adapting to what's currently available, rather than creating the needs, but i might be wrong.
on the other hand, not many game developers are still writing games for the current computers, instead, manufacturers are trying to come out with something so that their consumers can finally play GTA3 smoothly.
so a question to answer your question - what do you expect to see in computer games in the future.
instead of linux, we should have been hacking v6on286... sigh, those damn AT&T copyrights.. thanks to Caldera/SCO for freeing the ancient unix's... I don't get the linux lawsuits though........
I thought by now products like dragon dictate would be mainstream and be able to fully take over the role of a keyboard....but in recent times i havent heard much about them.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
My 4mb Mac CX ran Word and Excel faster then my current 2.8 GHz / 512 MB laptop. Waiting for a 3D/VR BSOD.
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
By 2013 we'll have computers that are dozens of times faster than today's and it will be commonplace to have 5-10 GB of RAM in your PC. Games will have photorealistic graphics.
By 2023 your average $1000 PC will have the computing capacity of a human brain.
By 2040 machines will be able to think, and we will have true immersive virtual reality via nanorobots embedded in our brains. The blue screen of death will become an ethical issue as it is worrysome that any sentient being should endure such torment.
Oh, and we'll still spill grape juice on our keyboards.
I was looking forward to a Zardoz type of crystal storage or computing... It seems like it should be at least a goal for the near future.
The future is now!
no sig here, please move on..
Hey, one can dream, right? That and I'd like to see those diamond semiconducters with solid state nanostorage. That and Duke Nukem Forever.
Hate me!
A full featured GUI library that is well established, cross-platform, cross-language, and not Java based.
(I guess I can keep dreaming..)
The unofficial
Once we have seamless voice recognition there will always be a faction to claim that the GUI is faster.
I can do l-click, l-click, double l-click, r-click, l-click so much faster than I can say: open doc abcd with word.
In 1993, I thought in 10 years that macs would catch up and surpass PC's. How young and naive I was then!
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
10 years ago, we expected things to keep relying on pure software. Today most every speed improvement is coming from hardware.
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM.
;-)
Sorry, but I'd rather go with your 33Mhz with 8Mb of ram. At least it may be able to boot DOS
It seems like nowadays, bells and whistles on the computer system get in the way of doing anything truly special. This is not to say that OS or hardware vendors are to blame. Look at your own system and see all the bells and whistles that you have that collectively get in the way of doing anything special with your computer. I'm not just talking about the slow-downs... I'm talking about the constant distraction from stuff like XMMS, or IE, or email, or (Heaven forbid!) Slashdot.
You'll never be truly happy as a "user" unless you are using your system to CREATE something yourself. Of course... that's it's most difficult and most rewarding use.
I got my first computer when I went to college (1995). I shelled out a ton for it, too. $3000 for a Pentium 133, 32MB RAM, you know the story...
I sit here, typing code on a 2400+ XP, 512Mb RAM and you know, the saddest part is that I'm still the slowest component of the computer. Sure, code compiles faster, but that's only a few moments compared to the hours I spend hitting keys.
It seems that hardware is just keeping up with the software that keeps bogging it down. Sure, my windows desktop is a '32-bit' blue rather than that sad '256 colors' blue. It's still the default color.
I wished that we had truly-emmersive 3D desktops. The kind where you can stack desktops on top of each other and you could control the mouse in 3 dimensions.
I wished that messages from the computer would be synthesized in a super-sexy voice. I wanted a holographic (Max Headroom-ish) interface that I could talk to. I wanted hot-swappable PCI devices.
I remember voice-recognition was just on the verge of becoming commonplace. I think it still is. Perhaps a vapor-ware award is in order...
OK, they're faster. The system unit itself, however, is still the same size or bigger than it was ten years ago. The machine I want is still $2,000, so even though they're comparitively cheaper, they high end is still not what I expected.
Anyhoo, I want better input devices. Touch screens, voice control, a pointing device that doesn't suck. I want a super high-resolution display that can scale fonts appropriately. I want a display that can put realistic looking pictures on the screen so my screensavers look like pictures. And it must cost less that $800. And it must be a notebook.
But I was right when I thought that Microsoft software would still be as bad as they were.
I would like my hardware to automatically morph into a new design depending on the application I'm running. Instead of having static hardware with a vaiable program, I would like to program to change a part of the hardware so it can do it's job faster. Maybe the FPGA technology of the future will allow this with fast clock speeds.
that the computers aren't getting us laid more often...everything is still in our two hands...one on the mouse (hey! hey! no Richard Geere jokes)...and the other well...you know...
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
Personally, I think something we should be seeing at some point in the future is speech recognition that is smart enough to understand complex phrases. For example, you could say something like "Check my email, and if there's anything from Bob, read it to me". Right now we have fairly good speech recognition, and we have fairly good text parsing, but as far as I know, those two technologies have not been effectively combined yet.
SCO sueing toaster manufacturers for infringements on their newly acquired bread warming copyrights.
Gnome and KDE users in block wars.
My mother still not able to reply to email properly.
Any finally - your PDA Cluster will come with a car.
I just can't be bothered.
Nothing will make a speed difference like killing off the Winchester-style hard drives and other such mind-numbingly slow storage media, to be replaced by static RAM.
I think we're well on the way to having displays that are flexible and translucent/transparent. This in addition to very small computing devices will turn the advertising world on end as every box, bottle, and broom will advertise to you from its very surface.
-- Brad Felmey
It too 10 years or so for Billy Boy's company to cath up with the Amiga, a PC that could do some really neet stuff with a 14 mhz processor and 512k of RAM.
For the last 8 years we have gotten faster, more storage, a slicker interface, buggier software, higher resolution monitors, and THE INTERNET.
Whats next? smaller thinner screens, even faster CPU's and more storage.
What I don't see are any potential killer apps on the horizon.
Chronos56
Yes thats right, most modems still operate at 2400 baud...
Ten years ago, if I'd have stopped to think about what I'd be running in ten years I'd be excited and optimistic. Who else dreads seeing what kind of corporate mandated crap will be forced down our throats in 10 years?
Personally I see computers 10 years from now either being embedded special purpose things (we're already largely there), or entertainment/information terminals that you have to pay as you go to use. I can see Disney/RIAA/MPAA, and Microsoft locking users out of being able to run things such as Linux on their own computers (for that matter you probably won't own the computer you'll 'rent' it).
I have seen the future and it is bleak.
Z
when i was running an Telegard BBS on multinode 9600bs on a 33 mhz packbell, i was reminiecing about the times of old.. stuck keeping 5 1/4 floppies with my text games save files (dos 4.something), staring into a green tinted monochrome screen, hoping for a harddrive.. now i had everything, it seemed.. communication with the WORLD (!).. err.. about 500 people in my state a month.. but man, could we exchange files, and posts.. oh my lord, and i even started / joined a few post groups.. amazing. And the online games, even! Wow.. the future must be in VGA.. why.. when the VGA BBS's come round, we'll chat in virtual bars that mimick local joints.. we might startfight in galaxies and co-draw masterpiece illustrations. We'd share photos and speak to each other as if in a playground again.. wow.. i'll defintely upgrade to a Pentium-90. THAT will be the perfect machine.
*1 yr later*
Dang. This machine takes 2 days to render a colored cone. Man.. but those svga/xga BBS's, well they.. well.. they suck. Darn. Hmm.. but when those 500 Mhz cpu's come out.. we'll be racing in cars next to each other on mimicks of REAL race tracks.. with small video cameras and voice chat. Maybe we'll even be able to share music across the software, through a car stereo interface! I bet by then all the components will be at best buy to hook up every device in my house, so vacation will be that much closer, and my home under surveilance. This will be GREAT! Not to mention I will finally be able to get rid of my land line and cell phone and simply use Voice over IP.. wow.. i can't wait.
*2 years later*
dang!! these stupid friggin.. hmm.. well.. when those 2 ghz come out we will burn our home video's, and be able to churn out media masterpieces by the day. I bet the computers will be so multifuctional as to seem integrated into almost every facet of our lives.. seemlessly! And information control / processing will be totally controlled at user end. Wow.. can't wait.
*the here and now*
Umm.. we might get Windows and Linux stable one day.. i hope to run across a beta word processor that is simple and functional enough to let me type my book. Maybe there will be a gaming theme programming revolution, but I'm becoming very fond of thumb wrestling, and am not hopeful. Maybe once the U.S. goes through a techonological black tuesday, software / patent / copyright controls / sales issues will be resolved for progressive integrations of ideas so as not to limit the actual reach of research dollars by having to reinvent the wheel with every company. I like Finding Nemo.. maybe there will be more pixar movies that make me not want to become a vagrant.
p
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Well, for computers that have a CPU 100X those of 10 years ago (without counting 16 vs 32 vs 64 bit, pipelining, etc.), bazillion times the storage, etc. etc. it seems all to have gotten gobbled up.
Does Windows boot any faster than it ever has?
That's my biggest gripe. My 3-year-old palm is approximately equal to a Mac II, and boots (from reset) in a few seconds. That's good. WinXP loads waaaay to much dren, and keeps right on loading.
Yeah, yeah, linux linux... but I'm talking apples to apples here.
Yes apps run faster -- no doubt about that. But I just replaced my inlaws' 150MHz Pentium (at least 8 years since the upgrade to that) with a 2.4GHz Celeron, and boot times aren't significantly better.
My friend with the native American name Talks-Through-His-Ass says the cure to that is boot roms. Feh. Sleep mode? Still sux.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Web Design & Software Development
Holy crap! You got the Seventh Guest to work on a 33Mhz! It took me hours and a dozen floppy disks with probably 3 dozen emm386 configs just to get it to work on a 486 75Mhz....you are my God! I will worship you...just tell me what direction you are in and I'll pull out a rug and bow down...
You forgot voice recognition, being able to graphically surf the internet, various multimedia stuff (dvds, mp3s, etc), and a whole bunch of other stuff that's possible now.
If "efficiency is everything" mentality was still around, software would take a very long time to develop and most would not be commercially viable and you'd never see them.
Swap cool new games on floppy disks?? Ha. There's no way to compress all that music, art, and video down to that level.
The biggest question is the amount of data we will be handling on computers 10 years down the line, while the hardware is getting better and smaller the amount of data we handle is growing much faster. I can see that in the future each individual would have his/her own central data storage (provided the data networks make the much needed advancement) and multiple devices to access this central data storage. For e.g.,
1. Computer at home (probably integrated with your entertainment center)
2. Computer in your car.
3. A cell phone with some basic access (it would replace the PDAs completely)
Of course this list is not complete (and my mind is going blank), so please add to it.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Back in 1993, my expectations for 2003 were basically that computers would be able to do the same things faster, have more storage space, and I guess that we'd have graphical Internet browsing. And, well, computers have gotten faster (disregarding Microsoft bloat), storage has gotten bigger, and we do have graphical browsers, so hey, good enough for me.
Of course, my point of view may be tainted by having been around in 1983 as well and seeing how computers actually did advance in 10 years (answer: they got faster, bigger, and more graphical).
Linux usage will double in size. No one will notice since no one cares about servers until they fail, and it will still be less than 10% of the Desktop market.
Everyone who is using Linux will have immersive VR, Super Porn. etc.
Everyone who is using Windows will have to go through 30 times more menus to get to the one option they want (I want bold text! Not Super Porn text! AAAARGH!!!) and lament about how the faster computers get, the slower they go.
Mac users will be just as insistant about how much better mac is, but they'll only have immersive VR -- no Super Porn because it wasn't a default setting.
A few Windows users will hold on to their old "POS" computers, never upgrade, and run about 5x faster than their other Windows friends.
And lastly: Slashdot usage will increase so fast that Moore's Law can't keep up, so that when a DSL user gets slashdotted, their box will become slag which they can sell online to a 3rd world country.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There was a Jerry Pournelle non-fiction short story from way back about what the future with networking everywhere could be like. I thought it amazing, and couldn't wait for it to happen.
It did, and the widespread use of the Internet is definitely the defining element in the last ten years of computing.
Now the question is, what are we going to do with it (besides more pr0n, of course)?
The social changes brought on by a constantly networked world have only begun to form.
Bell had no idea that 1800HOTSTUD was a possiblity when the phone was invented. The Wright brothers never imagined 9/11. What the Internet will bring us in ten years is beyond our dreaming.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
object-orientation from the file system out.
XML and DTDs carrying content for middle-ware.
IPv6 (and end-to-end tracing so spam and spoofing is impossible.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Initially most new products have very little expectations built up around them - new users are instead constantly being surprised and (hopefully) pleased with the new abilities and possibilities on offer. This is analogous to the model T era of car manufacturing.
As a product becomes established within a market the expectations and preconceptions of what they can achieve increases. This leads to a diminishing user experience as they feel they are being "let down".
This is not to say that the functionality, rate of change, or any other product metric has relatively decreased, only that our expectations have increased.
The 90's vapourware phenomenom also helped push users expectations beyond what can be delivered. Developers are still paying for this hyperbole.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I want a Holodeck.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Here is my pre-emptive response to all of the pro-status-quo zealots (yes, the most annoying sort of all, contrary to a recent poll).
Let's say you had a time machine. (Let's say it was built out of a DeLorean, just for fun's sakes.)
So you fire up your DMC chariot, head back to 1965, and pick up some computer scientists.
You then take them back to the present and start showing them things.
After they get past the whole "You elected RONALD REAGAN President!?" bit, they'll probably faint dead away when you tell them about modern computers. "WHAT? The system REQUIRES 64MB of memory to boot!!!??? And 128MB is recommended!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?" At this point, they would probably punch you in the face, and tell you how much of a failure the modern computer world is (by virtue of being the most prodigious waste of perfectly good supercomputing hardware conceivable... short of using all the world's hardware to render an animated video of Britney Spears's assets bouncing... using a renderer written in BASIC, of course.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
... was a device that did the ironing.
What do I expect? I expect prices to go up, GUI's to get more 'pretty' and less useable generally and feature wise, hardwares useable life and performance (compared to prev version) to shrink even more (along with my wallet having to endure their purchases) and less and less competition as all the companies eat each other up for the sake of a .02 cents a share profit while putting 5,000 people out of work and customer service to continue to hit all time lows in the Tech Industry.
;)
Yeah, I'm an Optimist
In 10 years, the computer will read the SCO stories to us?
It should be eight, or sixteen years. Decimal is the main thing holding us back.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I can't believe I'm sitting in front of a box that's bigger than the IBM XT. What ever happened to miniaturization? (Oh yeah, it all went toward cell phones which have exceded the limits of human usability, unless you have the fingers of an eight-year-old.) Back to the PC - the box is still mostly air. It's only hotter.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
will actually be usefull. There are many ways for computers to improve. Hopefully multiprocessor systems that share the same memory will be useful in a sence, allowing true multitasking. Diamond and not sillicone microprocessors, no hard-drives (flash RAM cards with hundreds of Gigabytes on them?) Peripherals will communicate to the main computers without wires. Maybe even hot-pluggable boards for multiple flash-cards.
:)
True voice recognition systems?
DRM everywhere.
You can't handle the truth.
With Lazers on their heads
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I would have KILLED for this system ten years ago. Correction, I wouldn't have imagined this much power, speed, and functionality in such a tiny, yet solid system. Ten years ago I was using a big clunky desktop PC, with a 14-inch CRT monitor, Windows 3-something, Prodigy dial-up to get to a kludgy graphical system where you could read about six lines of text on the screen and the amount of information was very limited, everything was wired together to form a basic ethernet network with lots of hoops to jump through to get it to work seamlessly. I think we had available for the entire department some $5K Toshiba laptop that was also clunky, and heavy, and ran the same lame OS with the same lame limitations.
Now I'm using this aluminum wonder to wireless connect to my broadband, always-on, super fast connection, while watching TV in the living room, a Terminal window open to let me do command line stuff in BSD, while using a super fun, super smooth OS X system that makes Windows 3 look like a torture device.
Speed, power, slickness, functionalty...you couldn't pay me to go back to what I was using ten years ago. Personally I can't wait to see what I'll be using ten years from now. Gripe all you want, but I think things have gotten waaaaaaaaay better in the last ten years.
always seems to be the case, my expectations for 2013 are as follows:
- Computers will be much, much faster
- Operating systems will be much, much more bloated
- Our demands will have gone up
- Mozilla will have become sentient, and will be its own project maintainer
And the end result will be roughly the same. Except that last part, that will be new.
Alpha-blending at the OS-level will be not just standard equipment, but nearly required. Games will be more beautiful, but will come on 3 DVDs and take 3 or 4 minutes to load up, giving about 30-50 FPS on a "fast" machine. (Seriously, load up UT2K3 on a "fast" machine, it looks nice but is very slow...)
The video card will be about the size of the motherboard, and will require more cooling than the CPU. Audio cards will come with fans (if that sounds weird, what if I told you, in 1993, about fans on video cards, water-cooling, or heat-spreaders on RAM modules? Case-mods, LED-fans,
We'll keep hearing about how magnetic media is coming to an end, reaching the end of Moore's law, even while Maxtor is releasing 4.5 TB disk drives, and Seagate (among others) announces a new standard to replace the SATA that we'll have all become quite familiar with.
Video capture/tuner cards will be standard equipment (like audio today), and maybe -- just maybe -- by then we'll have some kind of industry standard on digital broadcast (cable/sattelite). Eh, probably not...
IMO anyway.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Writing very complex software means that you can't write it in Assembly and hope to be done in the next 10 years. Sorry to burst your bubble.
"even with a screamin' P4 or Duron"
Please do not use 'screamin' and 'duron' in the same sentence.
Duron = Celeron = No_Cache = Slow_Crap.
Well, first off. I use my 486 as a great monitor stand, punch out the front panel and I even have a "shelf".
;)
My main "hope" was that portable pcs would actually become trully useful. I'm really dissapointed about how slow they are - I have a 300mhz pocket pc and it is painfully slow - my palm m105 is roughly as fast and has a better battery life. I know a new generation of pocket pcs is coming out, but my 486 sx33 can open big text documents faster than the 300mhz pocket pc can. Not cool. The newton kicked ass as an idea, but never picked up. Upsetting really, but hey. The tablet pc is going in the right direction I think. A bit bigger, but the screen space doesn't hurt.
Voice recognition also blows - I'd rather type. I type faster than speak to the computer and have it understand me. This tech is still a pat pat"That's nice dear" technology. I just can't take it seriously. I'm sure people who can't type find it useful, but I don't really.
Removable storage. When I got my first zip drive with my 200mb hard drive, it was very "WOW". A dvd does hold 4.7GB, but just doesn't have the same "wow, this is half my hard drive" effect. Tape drives and tapes have remained hellishly expensive for the home users. And why the hell are floppies still used, someone, please kill the floppy - the usb "keychain" is a great replacement, especially with regards to price per mb now.
Where the hell are the touchscreens? The technology is cheap, but nobody has implemented it. Another reason I think the tablet pc is a good idea.
The "quality" of lcds. I have 486 laptops with no dead pixels, my friend bought a new laptop and it came with 3 dead ones - WTF?
I have a lot of gripes, but what has surpassed my expectations:
- 3d rendering, lightwave and the like. Sure, what I can do in lightwave might look as good as something for Babylon 5 in its first couple seasons, but I do this on my own box and it doesn't take too long at all. I set up all my boxes to be render nodes for one project, but
Of course, I'm a nUb with lightwave compared to others, but just the fact this technology is available to the masses.
- photoshop - a-friggin-mazing. What it can do today was inconceivable in '93
- Games / on the fly rendering. Also really good, I'm not jumping in glee, but it definately has improved.
-Cheap old server hardware still surviving - perhaps this is a testament to how computers used to be built (at least servers, workstations began to suck for longevity after 386s came along ) Anyways, there is so much of this great equipment still around, working and available for cheap, it is really cool. Nothing is wrong with a quad xeon system with a raid array for $400 (proliant 6500s, great boxes).
As for the future? feh, work on getting my flying car goddamnit
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Well, I did not really expect that I would be using the *exact* same keyboard that I did 10 years ago. However, in 10 years I highly suspect that I'll still be using it, if at all possible.
Go Model M!!!
That transistors being made out of diamonds would be nice. Holographic keyboards, or neural computer control. Ummmm, 3dimensional graphics like star wars style(but better). Computers the size of a mouse and 10 times as powerful as current computers and using 1/10 as much power. Anything else I cant think of at the moment.
75% of all statistics are made up!
w/o IE, w/o media player, w/o mouse support, just a background screen (the only thing allowed by the DOJ).
Or with the current trend, RedHat 4307.1 should be out by then
-- Leeeter than leet
computers will not start to look like unpowered, non-electronic objects. there are lower bounds to the energy required to produce all the state changes which a computer is constantly undergoing. plus with that amount of energy in use by the device there are lower bounds on the amount of heat which is generated as a side effect. these problems increase as the device gets smaller, although with more efficient memory and processors, that could be offset. so far it seems to me that the energy and heat is getting to be more, not less, though.
I'm sorry I just re-read your post. Yeah if the main processors and memories were off in another room that would help. However with all the multi-sensory IO that IO device is going to need to do no small amount of work to talk to you, and to its network... And you'll still have to go mess with that box, I'd bet!
It's a typo, a fairly obvious one at that, get over it.
10 Years from now I expect to see a drop off in the increase of CPU speed. On the other hand I expect to see, cooler running, energy efficient, systems. Rather than a computer that is tied to your desk or to a relatively short lived battery I see systems that can go for a day or more between recharge, with foldable/rollable high definition sreens. Speed will increase but for most functions efficiency will become more important.
Storage wise I expect to see traditional magnetic platter technology replaced with something else (pick your favorite). Multimedia will become the push factor in storage. Provided the MPAA/RIAA, etc. does not legislate it to death, at the 10 year mark I can see 2 TB or more in portable systems.
Network connectivity will become pervasive, and content will be location aware. When you walk into a shop you might be able to pull up the products that are available, check for sales, or do a query for the location of a item you are looking for.
Peer to Peer systems will grow to have a much greater utility beyond dubious file sharing utilities. The concept of social computing will become increasingly intermingled with physical social interaction.
Those are my predictions but technology has a tendency to dart off in directions other than expected, so we'll see.
Back in 1992, I was able to store all my stuff on a SyQuest 44MB removable cartridge and I was happy. When I had first heard of drives that could actually store a gigabyte, I was amazed and thought that no one would ever really need more than a gigabyte or two for storage. Now my machines have hundreds of gigabytes of storage and even that is not adequate for my storage needs. I had never expected to actually have over 300 gigs of storage in my workstation.
Right now it seems that processors have plateau'd. I somehow doubt a 3GHz P4 is THAT much faster than the average modern machine. Sure a P4 can pump flops like a motherfucker and an Athlon XP can pump integers pretty quickly, but we perceive everything on a logarithmic scale. I recently upgraded my 1GHz AMD Thunderbird (256k L2) to a 1.83GHz Athlon XP 2500+ (512k L2) and I barely notice any boost in speed, besides slightly faster compilation times (I can build a fresh 2.6 kernel in just a little over 6 minutes!) I think that with the advent of smaller transistors and diamonds, computers of the future will be noticeable faster, but I still think it will be a while before we can talk to our computers (definitely at least 30-40 years.)
Well back in the 486 days I was hoping for games not VR but looks truly realistic without seeing polygons and have it feel like you are watching TV but you can control the characters in realtime, as well as complete alteration of this world.
Secondly I was hoping for instant boot and application load speed. So when ever you clicked or typed in the DOS command it will be loaded and running waiting for your input.
Third I was hoping the end of a video resolution so every image would look clear and non-blocky no matter how close you look at it.
Forth a common standardization of the SVGA cards and protocols.
But these are some of my expectations that did come true.
One Bandwidth Speed although everyone wants faster bandwidth but my cable-modem I get transfer-rates that I am happy with and none of this long waiting like back in the 2400 bps days.
Two Instability. I use to joke to my friend when my PC locked up so bad that the reset button didn't work, that in the future Microsoft will find a way to stop the power button from working. Well now that is the case with the ATX motherboards where the primary power switch needs to be processed threw the mother board first.
Three Memory and Harddrive. The memory storage now is what I expected back 10 years ago.
Finally what exceeded my expectations.
Connectivity. 10 years ago I wasn't thinking in terms of Internet I was only thinking in term of BBS's and Online Services.
Size. I never really expected laptops to really shrink much in size or LCD Flatscreens for PCs. I always happy with the current sizes of the equipment before and now looking back 10 years I can see how big and clunky they were.
The fact I would use a Mac. 10 years ago I hated GUI so much that the thought of me using a Mac made me sick. Now after this time I started to get use to GUI interfaces and I have learn to delt with them so now because I have to deal with GUI I might as well use a good one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think the shadow of MS and Intel has decended apon humaninty and cast us in to a dark age of computing. The market was vibrant from 1975 to 1985. The technology the systems in the past where primative but the creativity was amazing. New idea's where coming to the market with blazing speed, the only part which was unsubstainable was the lack of data interchangeability. Of course that is the one thing we get from the MS domination, everyone uses the same OS, same program... no problems. I would have rather seen the market grow up around common file formats and not common OS.
Where should we be? no one will ever know, I only hope the next 10 years will see a return to creativity in the market.
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
.Net. Byte code/virtual machines eliminate the need to port our application 50 times, but in trade we give up a whole bunch of speed. If speed doesn't matter, it's all upside.
While this may be true, it's largely done on purpose.
Professional programmers are in the business of making tradeoffs: time versus space, speed of execution versus speed of development, etc.
While it's true that a crack team of assembly programmers could probably rewrite the whole of MS Office for optimum performance, chances are:
1) It would take them years.
2) Users would hardly notice a difference ("Wow, the about box comes up in 100 ms instead of 500!")
3) The code would be impossible to maintain.
Nowadays, professional programmers who are working on performance-critial software tend to write first and optimize second (after they profile the code to determine where 'hotspots' are).
Just look at 'write-once-run-anyware' languages like Java or
Ten years ago, I was on the Internet (had been for about three years). I had been on BBS's for five or six. However, if you had told me that in ten years practically everyone would be on the Internet, I would have laughed. Now, though, we see more than 50% of Canadian households have high speed Internet in their homes. I don't remember the last time someone gave me a telephone number but everyone trades email addresses. It is just what is done at least amongst people in my age bracket. I'm 29, the bracket I'm talking about here is probably anything from 14 to 45 at least.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
While I'm in full agreement that today's programs are much fatter than those of 10 or 20 years ago, and I'll bravely resist the temptation to point fingers at Microsoft, I should point out that larger, slower programs are not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve. (Though granted, there is far too much gratuitous bloat around--a minimal Linux system I keep on hand can boot in 2 seconds on a machine that takes 40 seconds to get through the BIOS startup...)
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like. I get frustrated every time I see people saying "extra checks are inefficient and a waste of resources" (though admittedly I was of the same mind until recently). What else are you going to do with all those spare cycles? Twiddle your thumbs?
http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/
I find Charles (UK English) to be the best at sounding natural.
This space available.
I'm still waiting for a fast desktop that DOESN'T double as a space heater
Will embrace our new Amiga Overlords.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
In ten years the slowest machine will be 1 terahertz, 1 terabyte of ram standard, and the text editor will still be slow and jerky.
10 years from now, I will hopefully have switched from my current OS to a then working TUNES.
:)
No idea about the hardware though, hopefully something that can play Doom 3
10 years ago I was fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys files so I could play some game I just bought from Babbage's. Using your computer as an entrainment device, aside from gaming never went beyond some .mod or .wav file, and short video clips -- usually as filler in some "multimedia' game.
Things have gotten bigger, but not necessarily better. Now instead of well-thought out games, there's a ton of 3d animation and filler. Instead of the fun conversations on IRC and BBS's, there's spam filled usenet and E-Mail.
Ease of use hasn't drastically occurred -- because face it, nerds (who develop software) always turned their noses up at "the easy way" of doing things. Which is why the kids with Macs and Amigas got made fun of. The real thing the nerds were hating in the GUI was the inability to get under the hood.
10 years ago I couldn't have imagined downloading full music files and movies so easily, or creating your own with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. Even getting your own home network going is insanely cheap nowadays.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm pretty happy with how things have gone. What I didn't anticipate was how much Microsoft would totally dominate, and ruin computing. If I could have seen that then, maybe I would have bought a Mac in 1993, not another PC. Apple has flaws, but I just can't see them contaminating the Internet the same way Windows users and Microsoft has.
I'm happy to see the open source movement making waves, and 10 years ago I wouldn't have imagined a free OS could provide so many options. Nowadays your average cable modem provides the kind of bandwidth many universities had . . . I never would've imagined that 10 years ago.
Of course, the things I was doing in 1993 (using IRC to chat, looking at web pages, sending E-Mails), I'm still doing now. Except, with IE's non-compliance to standards and Windows viruses, it's actually worse than it was 10 years ago.
Saying all that, I love what Linux and BSDs offer for free alternatives -- a few of my computers are running Linux right now. As far as being completely satisfied though, OS X is exactly what I wanted in a computer 10 years ago. It's easy enough to deal with, stable, and I can get tinker with UNIX whenever I need to. I really became disinterested in computers from 95-98 or so; OS X is what made me buy a few programming books and get back into things though.
What sucks in 2003 is Microsoft and people not following standards on the web. DRM applies here too. A lot of really great things have happened in 10 years, what's held them back is MS dominance.
Well I'd hope for a girlfriend... oh... what I expect from computing? Dunno.
I think they would be rather amazed at the power of the computers themselves. Show them that we can store 2 trillion bits of data on something thats about the size of a paperback book. Oh yeah, and it only costs about $200 too. However, they may not be so impressed when they discover we use it mostly to store vast quantities of bad music, bad movies, and porn. Oh well.
Or the processors that run at 2 billion cycles per second that cost less than $100. It would blow them away.
You can tell them, "Sure, the thing won't boot with less than 64MB of memory, but who cares when that much memory costs $15?" Oh course they will probably say that's our problem - what incentive do we have to elimate bloat when it's so much cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem?
BTW, be sure to tell them to put all their money into the stock of a small company named "Microsoft" in the early 1980's, and that around 1999 you'll be expecting a nice check in the mail.
grib.
maybe
What I expect? Every new home to have it's own LAN that will replace phone lines. A Central server in every home that acts to manage everything from your home's Voice over IP, to storing your family photos, securing your important docs, providing VPN tech to any hardware behind the server like your fridge so you can tell if you need to pick up some eggs thanks to the RFID tags, to storing and recording all TV shows/movies that you rent on PPV/and mp3s...the key will be some form of TCPA encryption to protect all that data from leaving the server. 10 years from now there will be 1 computer for a home. Terminals will come back into play as people realize they don't need a 2Ghz machine to use MS word. Every TV/plasma or not will be hooked up to it....you'll have a 23" LCD at your desk which will become a desk again when those huge ass towers leave the scene...you'll have a 14" LCD in the kitchen to help with your cooking...you'll have a small LCD outside your front door as a keypad....
But in the end the most important thing that will change with PC's in 10 years is that people will NOT be buying PC's in 10 years...they will be expanding the cluster of PC's they already have. Systems like MOSIX clustering that will have shared memmory support to make such clusters as efficient as SMP systems. In the future OEM's will become obsolete...the only hardware will be the Server...diskless terminals...and expanded CPU add ons for the cluster. Then after this takes hold the biggest step ever...all these homes will join into a central source for research. AI's using evolution algos will develop the techs of the future on the PC's we buy today...as they sit in the closet instead of by our side.
Of course I could be way off...quantom computing may take hold...but in the end I don't think we will ever see the PC hardware boom like we had in the 90's. Look for less hardware not more...embeded systems are being oversold...unless they are outside of the home they will not be used.
In 10 years, I hope my Mac has a mouse with 2 buttons; a webcam that works with more than just a single piece of beta software; a multimedia platform that doesn't require me to update for a yearly fee; an operating system that lets me adjust whatever settings I want; a hardware manufacturer that transcends cultish secrecy as a way of hyping its new products; and freedom from marketing campaigns that rely on telling me how cool my computer is because a 14 year old enjoys using the world's fastest personal computer.
In 10 years, I hope my PC has an operating system that doesn't need to be patched every day; a processor that won't be outdated in three months; networking that recovers gracefully from unexpected events without crashing the computer; and the freedom to use solutions that aren't stifled by one corporation's attempt to rule the world via software monopoly.
In 10 years, I hope my other PC has an operating system that works with all the hardware that's out there, without recompiling drivers; applications that can be installed and uninstalled without knowing the entire directory hierarchy of my system; the ability to adjust settings without manually editing text configuration files; and the ability to figure out basic operations without consulting a man page or HOW-TO.
In 10 years, I hope my Palm PDA becomes fun to use, my PocketPC becomes reliable to use, my cellphone becomes affordable to use, and my microwave becomes intuitive to use.
Man, 10 years never felt like such a long time.
Interestingly enough, my calculations show that 4096x4096 is pretty close to the point of diminishing returns -- it's the point at which you can't see individual pixels if you're far enough away to see the whole screen. Any further increase in resolution is only usefull if you're only going to use half the display at a time.
I'm not particularly pro-status-quo, and I well remember the Amiga Demo scene and the amazing things you could fit on a floppy disk and slow hardware... BUT, the game has changed since then, and so have expectations. Assembler is madness when you've got to code a big flashy OO user-driven app. And if you don't produce that sort of thing, most folks won't buy it.
Having said that, I think there are still ARM based RiscOS boxes that this is done for. The screamin' x86 stuff just doesn't require it - the trade-off between efficiency, features, maintainability and development time dictates something more managable be used.
I guess the issue is that software is generally "fast enough" and that more speed is cheap. If RAM cost anything like what it did back in the day, we would have incredibally efficient (and functionally limited) apps and OS - but it doesn't so we don't.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
An handheld computer the size of a large paperback, with integrated rugged LCD (no glass, solid plastic), virtual keyboard (touch keys with a stylus), and an 800x600 display in True Color. At least 512MB ram, at least 100GB disk. Waterproof, shockproof, rubberized, and available in a variety of colors. You carry it around, and at work or home, you plug it into a monitor and a "real" keyboard and mouse with a single plug. Wireless connectivity of course... Linux/Java based. Powered by an alcohol fuel cell. If they called it the "Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7" I'd preorder several of them in sheer joy.
;)
Heads up display glasses that don't cost a thousand bucks, with built in nightvision and thermal vision (to see today's REAL version, which isn't *that* unwieldy, check out www.tekgear.com, and look for the "spectre").
Mapping software for the computer described above. Also, some kind of VR overlay, so you can use it while you walk.
Game consoles that are *even better* than today's. Fully cinema-quality 3D immersion, usable with a HUD to really draw you in, and controls that strap on like gloves.
Hydrogen-powered everything! It's the future, you know...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
10 years ago, I was an exclusive die hard Mac Fanatic. In 1993, if you had asked me about the landscape of future computing, I would have told you that Apple would have taken a much larger market share and would be battling Microsoft and Microsoft only for dominance.
I had no idea that Linux would be the force in the market that it is, I had no idea that Apple would only marginalize themselves even further. I had no idea that "DOS" would be all but done away with. I had no idea that the internet would be used by grandmothers and housewives on a daily basis. I didn't expect user interfaces to come along as far as they have.
Oddly enough, this month will mark 10 years since I first used elm, pine, and gopher for internet access. 10 years since I first used vi. 10 years since my first exposure to UN*X.
Last month was 10 years since I got my first modem. It was a 2400bps modem for my Mac Plus. I used Prodigy and Compuserve for the first time. It opened me to the world of BBSing.
The only things that I was right were that I would expand my knowledge of computing tenfold. I knew that I'd be able to program in a language other than BASIC.
I didn't really expect to have HAL sitting on my desk. So I'm not disappointed.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
it's probably an open question as to whether or not a piece of software as complex as a current Windows OS could be hand optimized to the degree that those old programs were. Usually they were single threaded, single user, assembly language programs with very few modes of IO, and the use cases were very tightly constrained.
:)
The methods for software development are entirely different these days. (afaik, most experts think necessarily so)
And I dare say that programmers are notorious for killing themselves with work, nearly as much today as in the old days you mention.. I'm not sure they're slacking off in proportion to the efficiency decreases you've noticed..
Give the poor programmers a break. Most of them probably don't even have girlfriends/significant others, because their brains are stuck on VULCAN_MIND_MELD_MODE all the time.
My first computer was a 286 with two mammoth harddrives.. one 30 meg and one 40 meg. I had a monochrome monitor, but I could call BBSs. I had more fun playing trade wars than I ever did playing everquest. The first computer I built was a 386 DX-40 with eight megs(cost me $300 for those 30 pin SIMMS). My wishes for computers were more space, more memory and multi-tasking. I couldn't have dreamed of what I have now. The video cards on both my PCs are more capable than any computer I envisioned at the time. I also dreamed of the day I didn't have to install slackware from floppies. Woot... cept now I run red hat. Mostly I wanted knowledge, but I turned out to be too lazy. Today I dream of a world that is not ruled by Microsoft. I imagine that most people ten years from now will at least have seen Linux(or BSD.. whatever). I don't think much will have changed in the US in only ten years, but the rest of the world will have largely cast away their MS chains. That is the day that I laugh and say I predicted it all. If it doesn't happen, no one but google will remember I ever said this.
My Blog
I'm using my old Tandy 486SX/33 with a 540 meg hard drive right now. I recently set it up as an interim mail server/spam filter (debian+fetchmail+spamassassin) for my+family's ISP email. Before that, I was using it to run an irc deamon and an eggdrop.
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Ten years ago: I thought some of the titanic applications I was working on would be re-written in nice spagetti-free code that would be easy to maintain and reliable. I was wrong. The code that was there in the 1960's is still there, code today is often like the ultimate junk yard. I thought that eventually everyone would develop code with some degree of planning, coding and testing and maybe "code gardening" where you go weeding and clean up some of the mess. This would produce code that was reliable and easy to maintain blah blah. I thought that governments might be educated to introduce legislation with some understanding of the coding changes required to implement it. We were constantly fighting to get stuff implemented with stupid deadlines. Nobody said "this piece of legislation will take 4 years to implement and cost 1/4 of your annual budget, annually". And they'd pass it with a 3 month deadline or even better "retrospectively" and wonder why nobody ever enforced it. I thought games would get more interesting and easier to play. Wrong. I thought there would be more puzzle based games that didn't require reliable finger twitching to play. There probably are these but I haven't noticed. I thought that the fax-photocopier-printer would be cheaper. I thought that TV's, stereos, and vcr type things would be better integrated. I never thought I'd have a mobile phone, though I frequently wanted one. They still don't work on the lonely highways where you would need one most. I never thought I wouldn't be able to live without email. Actually I'm fine without email out in the desert without email but other things back home fall apart. Ten years from now: I can see a good deal of chaos. How will we filter the information overload, the truth we want to hear from everyone's opinion. I guess Slashdot moderation systems is a start. I'd really like to see real reporting instead of media baron/political brownnosing reporting. I'd like a spam filter that fries the source computer, or at least locates the sender and sends the appropriate info to the cops. I'd like to see companies that insist on inconvenient and expensive activation systems go belly up (broke). I want a home security system with a couple of motion activated cameras that send the photos off site. You can steal my vcr but the pictures are not there. Then the system can alert my neighbour. The one with the rotweillers. I'd like to be able to read stuff on paper or something that didn't involve refresh rates. I'd like a home blood tester that lets me know if I've got something serious that needs treating. I'd still like some privacy but I'm not sure if I will have it. What will cameras everywhere do? Will we all be living "big brother tv game"? I'd like some piece of technology that helps me get a bit of focus instead of distracting me with lots of new ideas and concepts that need to be explored. I'd like to be able to surf the web (what ever that may be) with no wait time. I'd like to have a huge LCD or projection screen with whatever visual art/film/game/novel I like. Hook that up to stereo and have a tropical fish aquarium visual and mood music for dinner parties. I still want my friends to come round. And somehow backup and restore will be redundant or painless.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
10 years ago I was doing everything in dos.. no multitasking (didn't own deskview) for the most part (well not os multitasking anyhow)... I think things are a hell of a lot better now in the gui world, but I was pretty hesitant to make the leap. I had Windows 3.1 but never really used it, just to play with Winsock and Netscape, most of my online time though was in a dos terminal program. Things are getting better, dreams of VR are a tad unpractical.. I doubt I would use it anyhow.
Have you tried recently to make a program in ASM?
:)
:)
A 3D program? how about a game? It'll take you hundreds of times the amount of time it takes in C/C++/Perl/Java so on.
That's how languages evolve. Less speed, more features for the programmer. This is to make more complex programs feasible, otherwise, every new program would take 2 times the amount of time it took for the older version. Point is.. faster development time, more features go into it. Hardware today is underused anyway.
PCs are slow to start up because of the BIOS. There are many people pushing for it's removal and replacement by other things. www.linuxbios.org
As for the predictions:
HURD (yeahh.. righhttt)
A few new programming languges. One to replace C/C++. That would be much simpler to learn, faster to use, and have more features.
More advances in Language processing.. maybe even a more natural programming language that could be learned very quickly.
Computers will become part of the house, and controll everything from lights to stove. (You come into the house.. lights come on automatically, Star Trek type voice controll)
A better way of interacting with computers, maybe hand gestures, coupled with voice recognition.
Much better voice recognition
Games with storyline and with graphics.
Linux maturing and taking up a big share of the desktop market.
Intuitive desktops and applications. Try looking at someone when they first come to a computer and seeing what they try. I'm doing this with Linux (trying on people with no Linux exprience just windows). When I've gathered enough data I'm starting an app to make migration simpler. (a unified setup utility)
Surprises.. things we never thought of, actual innovation
Although hardware speeds have increased a 100 fold software has not kept up with it, instead software has become bloated and slow. Windows still takes a minute or longer to load, applications still crash and overall realibilty still has not improved.
Roughly butchering Moore's law:
10 years / 18 months ~= 6.666
2^6.666~=60
So, as a rough rule of thumb, expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today:
Given my 2GHz, 1Gb ram, 128mb video ram, 100Gb hard drive system today, a kind of typical PC, I should be running, by then:
120 GHz, 60 Gb ram, 7.5Gb video ram and a 6 terrabyte hard drive.
However, the following will also be true:
1) Windows 2013 will still be as slow as hell (probably clogging that fast 120 GHz processor with all of the things it securely prevents me from doing).
2) My wife will have finally killed me for all the money I've spent, especially as I swore that last year's 80Ghz processor would see me through for a couple of years.
3) According to Nick's newly coined law - every eighteen months my PC will give off roughly double the heat energy - I have just single handedly caused the ice caps to melt.
Ten years ago, before Commodore's forced demise at the hands of Irving Gould and Medhi Ali.
I would have expected the Amiga engineers to devise a wicked cool, almost supercomputer type system that no one would understand or buy, but the dedicated few would remain faithful..... with the latest and greatest Video Toaster installed, Lightwave and Imagine v10.0 rendering cinematic quality scenes in realtime.
An extension to the datatype's modules to allow for new video, image and sound codecs, that run on all programs, assisted by newer ultra fast co-processors..
Oh, yeah, and protected memory would have been a must have.
Unfortunatly, the company sunk, along with the dream of a niche computer that did exactly what I wanted it to, tho Linux comes somewhat close.
And put the submit and preview buttons further apart
Ten years ago:
I thought some of the titanic applications I was working on would be re-written in nice spagetti-free code that would be easy to maintain and reliable. I was wrong. The code that was there in the 1960's is still there, code today is often like the ultimate junk yard.
I thought that eventually everyone would develop code with some degree of planning, coding and testing and maybe "code gardening" where you go weeding and clean up some of the mess. This would produce code that was reliable and easy to maintain blah blah.
I thought that governments might be educated to introduce legislation with some understanding of the coding changes required to implement it. We were constantly fighting to get stuff implemented with stupid deadlines. Nobody said "this piece of legislation will take 4 years to implement and cost 1/4 of your annual budget, annually". And they'd pass it with a 3 month deadline or even better "retrospectively" and wonder why nobody ever enforced it.
I thought games would get more interesting and easier to play. Wrong. I thought there would be more puzzle based games that didn't require reliable finger twitching to play. There probably are these but I haven't noticed.
I thought that the fax-photocopier-printer would be cheaper. I thought that TV's, stereos, and vcr type things would be better integrated. I never thought I'd have a mobile phone, though I frequently wanted one. They still don't work on the lonely highways where you would need one most.
I never thought I wouldn't be able to live without email. Actually I'm fine without email out in the desert without email but other things back home fall apart.
Ten years from now:
I can see a good deal of chaos. How will we filter the information overload, the truth we want to hear from everyone's opinion. I guess Slashdot moderation systems is a start. I'd really like to see real reporting instead of media baron/political brownnosing reporting.
I'd like a spam filter that fries the source computer, or at least locates the sender and sends the appropriate info to the cops.
I'd like to see companies that insist on inconvenient and expensive activation systems go belly up (broke).
I want a home security system with a couple of motion activated cameras that send the photos off site. You can steal my vcr but the pictures are not there. Then the system can alert my neighbour. The one with the rotweillers.
I'd like to be able to read stuff on paper or something that didn't involve refresh rates.
I'd like a home blood tester that lets me know if I've got something serious that needs treating.
I'd still like some privacy but I'm not sure if I will have it. What will cameras everywhere do? Will we all be living "big brother tv game"?
I'd like some piece of technology that helps me get a bit of focus instead of distracting me with lots of new ideas and concepts that need to be explored.
I'd like to be able to surf the web (what ever that may be) with no wait time.
I'd like to have a huge LCD or projection screen with whatever visual art/film/game/novel I like. Hook that up to stereo and have a tropical fish aquarium visual and mood music for dinner parties. I still want my friends to come round.
And somehow backup and restore will be redundant or painless.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
My random guess:
I hope that systems become cheap enough for computing to become even more ubiquitous. Go to a resturant, there's a cheap, elegant system, completely display, as the menu. If it needs replaced, it's only $30, most of that for the custom software for the menu display itself. Want to watch TV?
Walk up to the wall with the special wallpaper, drag your finger as a rectangle forms to the size you want, select TV from the menu, then grab the remote. The special wallpaper cost $175 a roll last year, now it costs $120.
Computers themselves will become more lego-like as they grow smaller. Because the components are so small, sensitive, and solid state, they will have to be contained in a protective case. Because of this, you won't have to have the computer intelf in a case, you just have to put the parts together somehow, have some connection to your outputs, to your inputs, to power, and to your network. As interconnection standards between parts becomes more robust and tolerant, computer parts will become more than ever, completely interchangeable along with software. Eventually, even average grandparents will be able to intuitively put together a system based on what they need to do with it, and the parts will be everywhere from checkout lanes to garden supply stores.
Ryan Fenton
Intel's Pentium 4 processor still has a turbo switch, triggered by a thermal sensor on the chip. When the core temperature drops below a specific temperature, your P4 model 2400 will jump from 1.2 GHz to 2.4 GHz. You can affect this thermal sensor by turning your machine's CPU fan on and off. Turn the fan off, and it's in "stealth" mode, passively cooled by the CPU heat sink; turn it on, and it's in "turbo" mode.
At the time this report was filmed, AMD's competing processor didn't have a stealth mode and just gave up its magic smoke when the CPU got too hot.
Will I retire or break 10K?
10 years ago I had a huge collection of 3.5" floppy disks, one of the first things I did when I moved from a 40 meg HD to 512 was move everthing to the HD. about 6 years after that my music became Mp3's and all of my cd's went on to a 5 gig drive. These days my movies are ripped to divx and stored on the HD. Give me another couple of years and I won't rip them to divx, I'll be storing hundreds of movies on terabyte drives in raw format.
To go with all this new storage I'll need faster cpu's. Remember when mp3 encoding was used as a test for processor speed? These days dvd encoding is going the same way. One day I hope to drop a dvd in and rip it to HD in 5 minutes.
I also hope for more bandwidth at home. Yes DSL is great but It could always be faster. I want tv on demand from foreign companies. No need to pirate that anime, just select it and watch. My anime started with renting licensed vhs tapes, then went to ordering "imported" dvd's, to downloading series on newsgroups, to kazaa, and now to bittorrent. Each step got me what I wanted quicker and easier. A popular series now takes me 4 hours for a popular series of 24 episodes, taking 3.5 gig. 1 dvd used to take 3 weeks. This will get faster in the future.
All of this moving of media is currently questionably legal (hence the ac post) and the media companies would love to wipe it out, I don't think it will happen. People want instant gratification, and when it comes to copyright infringement most of them won't even slow down their downloads long enough to think about it. The media compainies will change or will be crushed. SO I'm also predicting all DRM features will be removed after a short and disasterous entry into the market.
I'll also add a bit or troll value here by predicting someone will get serious about a virus or worm and they won't ddos a site to send a message. They'll simply leave a few million machines wiped clean causing billions in damage.
What expectations did you have for today's PC, 10 years ago and how does the reality match up?
Why not step into the ol' time machine, aka Google Groups' Usenet archive? The thread What specifications will the standard year 2001 PC have? is a fascinating read (really -- I recommend reading every post).
I noticed a few common thoughts throught the thread that didn't pan out: Multiprocessor desktops becoming commonplace. The demise of X86. Also on a whole people's estimates on HD space were very conservative. People predicted ridiculous resolutions for video.
Some people were right on the money though: 1GHz processors, 512MB RAM, and permanent connections to the 'net.
This is one of the best finds I've come across on ye olde Usenet.
Personally, I expected operating systems to get better, but while they've definitely become more feature packed, they've become inherently unstable in certain ways.
I mean, take Windows XP and my preferred OS, Mac OS X, for example. If my network should go down, both of my computers running these OSes take an eternity to boot up. Shouldn't whatever network activity that these OSes are trying to do be thread based instead of freezing up everything for a minute or more? It's things like this, coupled with the complete lack of usability in things such as Windows and KDE preferences, that make me glad I'm getting out of computer science and doing my PhD in algebra instead.
Between unexpected crashes, poorly behaved apps, badly written drivers, etc..., I find myself longing for the days of the Commodore 64. Sure, the OS / BASIC interpreter on that thing was pretty primitive compared to what you see today, but you didn't have to be a computer guru or shell out money for IDEs to learn basic programming skills, and the thing never crashed unless you started POKEing around in weird memory locations.
Ten years ago I had a 486DX/2 running at 66Mhz with 16MB of RAM, 400MB HD, and a 14.4 modem. My 17" IBM running 1280x1024 in 256 colors was the envy of my friends.
...
Rather than being dissapointed by what didn't happen, here is what I'm pleased about that did happen, that I didn't expect.
- T1 download speeds into my house. My cable modem does 1.5Mbits down and 256Kbits up. That never occurred to me.
- Back then my machine could play back video from CD. Now I can do it in real-time off the Internet.
- Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.
- I can make my own CDs. Data, music or both.
- My machine serves as a digital darkroom.
- My machine lets me communicate with other people through email. (More of a social change than a technological change - back then I had email, but nobody to write to!) IM, IRC, etc. are also common now.
- Home networking.
- A powerful version of Unix in my house, free, with a lot of great applications. (Including MYSQL, which I'm toying with now.)
- Wireless capability so I can work where I want to, not where the computer is.
We've come a long way in 10 years
And there'll be no cables all over my desk. I'll probably still have a keyboard. My computer won't be sitting on the desk with its back facing outwards so I can share the keyboard and monitor with the unix box when it crashes (for some reason insists on a keyboard).
No network cables, no peripheral connector cables, no power cables, no voltage converters or powerboards...
And I will have a reliable power supply, probably provided by my own equipment. Hmm I'd like to fast internet out somewhere rural like a farm or something.
And I'd like to know that if the cables are replaced by electomagnetic waves, that those are not giving me cancer or sharing all my info with that blue van parked out the front etc.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
We are learning more and discovering more about our environment every day with possibly an exponential rate of increase. But as a society we're incapable of creating the proper structure and environment to promote art like software developement. There are too many distractions in daily life for most people to be able to focus on complex algorithms. But once we finally squeeze AI out of our puny little tortured brains it can take over where we left off, giving us software capable of doing what we want.
The problem is not that the system lacks the capacity to do those neat things. Its just that we don't have enough intelligent programmers. Society doesn't foster that sort of intense study and thought very well in its present form. I contribute most of the problems to money.
....would IPV6 and free broadband for everyone be asking too much???
"ph33r m3 n07, f0r ! @m the 5@vi0ur, r00tus."
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Byte Mag ran articles:
3D holographic storage:
divide a cube into layered checkerboards or storage material. Access/Written by laser.
Supposed to hold terabytes accessed in nanoseconds.
No moving parts, etc.
instead industry just improved 1960s winchester design. ho hum
Oh yea, and nobody worries about optimizing to the CPU instruction level.
Then maybe XP might boot as fast as than apple...
IE: its NOT a good idea to have EVERY LANGUAGE known to man to compile down to: the SAME DAMN THING: a CLR
what a waste
why not assembly on top of interpreted RPG?
Though I don't think we've slacked off in our coding so much as we are incapable of creating programs that would make effecient use of such boundaires.
It's a lot easier to write efficent code when your system limits you. It's far more difficult to do so when you have a sort of boundless realm to work in.
I'd probably say our hardware speeds are growing faster than our programing skills... Which is why you end up with greater and greater system requirments. Windows XP was devloped with a programing skillset years behind the hardware progression... it could have been created then just as easily, but the hardware wouldn't support the bloat.
It's unfortante that we try to make more powerfull hardware instead of effecient code.
Shirt pocket form factor
Human Interface: Stylish eyeware like direct retinal projector for display with integrated hi-res video camera for capture of environment and behind the ear bone conduction audio and neural sensors for subvocal interaction with a cadre of agents.
Skins like configuration of world viewed for work/play/entertainment/education/communications.
* CPU: 200GHz 256 bit, 1 GWord (GW)data and instruction cache
* Main Memory = 256 GB
* Other Storage = 20 TB with 2 TB removable (IBM MIMS are what I have in mind)
All interconnections are wireless, Nightly backup might be handled by optical interconnection with house server and/or off site archive.
Power = Fuel Cell good for a minimum of 24 hrs between refuelings. Wall wart power also.
The user interface should read my mind or at least allow me to subvocalize ie think the interactions I want with an agent.
Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it! But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
I must say that I'm actually a bit bummed that Ultima Underworld hasn't gotten more credit for helping create todays 3D FPS games.
I also played that game until the cows came home and it was just one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had.
Yet, it is never mentioned when people talk about the origins of 3D games.
I don't quite remember the timeline any more. But I do know that Ultima Underworld was really early.
I even remember that you would bounce up and down a little as you walked (because of your steps).
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I'm writing this note on a Powerbook. After I open the screen, I have a usable bash prompt in front of me within two second. And even with the screen included, it weighs a pound less than my Apple II did in 1980
Of course, I confess that it doesn't go through a full boot procedure, but then... it almost never does so. From a usability perspective, the machine is just "always on" (even if I log out, and in as a different user). Something Apple has got right for 23 years... and Wintels have yet to figure out (but Palm has the right idea here also).
Of course... jEdit still doesn't go nearly as fast at 1Ghz and 512MB RAM as Wordstar or VDE (anyone remember VDE, a powerful freeware DOS text editor) did at 10Mh and 512KB RAM.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Things will get smaller in our pre-quantum computer world and processing speeds will increase. The price of the computer will continue to become more affordable partly because Linux will dominate both the Server and desktop market.
It's a far cry from the days on my old Tandy Color computer when we had to put the code in before we ran the program - I remember buying books of Basic code, rushing home and typing in the code for a program only to find out I had a Syntax error (I mistyped something). OH those were the days.
centrifugalforce
I don't disagree that some software is bloatware. But I think you're forgetting some of the improvements that have been taken for granted.
It's taken for granted that a modern computer will be able to edit files larger than 64k (I remember having problems with a DOS based text editor not being able to do that), can drive a super high resolution display at 32-bit color depth, run a GUI operating system, have internet connectivity and have 3D acceleration. For example:A modern game like Quake 3 writes to 40 times the display memory than an old DOS one, but Quake 3 runs at 60fps+ on a modern machine and is fully interactive rather than pre-rendered.
What I'm trying to say is that you're mostly taking the improvements for granted. Yes, there are some staggeringly bad examples of bloat that I could point to (*ahem* Microsoft Windows) - but not everything (at least, if it's been engineered properly) is that bad.
I kinda hoped that in the future, I would be able to have my entire music collection in one little box, in a format that wouldn't get scratched no matter how often I played it, and that I'd be able to access any track I wanted at a moment's notice.
And I pretty much have that.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Being a PGP & Crypto zealot in the early 90's, I expected that more apps today would embed security (e.g. seamless encrypting of email, like Ordo in Cryptonomicon). Hushmail has come close, but theirs is only seamless with other hushmail users, AFAIK.
I would also liked to have seen more OS/hardware-level encryption of physical disks.
Comments anyone?
Lets face it, the PC is very much a young piece of technology that isn't as much as one piece of equipment and it is dozens of pieces flying in close formation.
Hopefully in a few years there will be a VCR-type appliance PC that's mass-produced and simple to use.
First we'll need some real network security and encryption/authentication.
For the sake of argument lets just say it runs a very locked down version of linux. Think of a mix between Lindows and webTV. I'm sure the faithful have already fainted from reading this last sentence but we're talking Joe User not "I own a linux box Lenny" here. When online it'll automatically upload your documents and settings to some central server. It'll be cheap and small and if lose you just plug it into a broadband connection, type in your passphrase, and everything is restored.
It will certainly not be a gaming machine and development on it will be slow (compared to windows) and controled by a central authority. It'll follow protocols, have an easy to use GUI, and do all the "AOL basics" like Web, email, chat, video chat, office, etc.
It'll be the volkswagon beetle of computers in a micro-laptop format. Power users and corporate can stick to Windows, Unix, and OSX, but home users will have their easy to use, limited scripting, non-user programmable device.
Its a lot like the thin-clients from a few years back, but I think those failed for a few reasons: they were weak and slow, there was no such thing as broadband or wifi everywhere (or GPRS), they couldn't run office apps, and few were portable.
The proper mix between thick and thin client and a locked down simple computer could really revolutionize everything.
Meanwhile, we've got people calling their techie friends to remove this blaster thing, install drivers, edit their registry, show them how to stop pop-ups, explain to them what networking is, etc when all they really want to do is edit some documents, surf the web, and chat with friends.
FSF==COMMUNISM!
Huh? I know you are joking/trolling but isn't free software on the opposite side of the spectrum from communism? Communism is all about a central body of government controlling the people where as free software has little or no control at all.
It seems to me that machines today are really what I *thought* the Amiga was 10-12 years ago.
:^)
Gaming is one of the greatest reasons to soup-up your PC today... and strangely was one of the reasons the Amiga was never taken seriously in it's day.
Many Amiga programs supported external scripting via AREXX, to control certain functions (like Digipaint3)-- much like the use of XML today for configurations of of apps like... Trillian.
3-D rendering/ray tracing (Sculpt/Animate4D - Turbo Silver) -- yes it took 2 weeks to render a ray-traced silver-sphere on a red/white checkerboard, but it was photorealistic.
Music production hasn't ventured far either...
though it was 8-bit sound, it was two channel stereo with 4 complex wavforms triggerable simultaneously...
You had more professional software (Bars & Pipes, Dr. T's) and then your more underground software - ProTracker, Delitracker, etc..
just comparing tracker software to Sonic Foundry's Acid, the difference being that you "paint the waveform" in a track and apply effects through plug-ins, In tracker software it was ALL hex addressing,(even effects!) and a screen filled with multiple (dizzying at first) columns of numbers, it was all sample based -- they (music modules, "MODS") sounded a hell of a lot better than sucky general midi and the "M-PC" of the early 90's...
The problems I see with PC's today is there is really too much integration to be supported by the operating system of popular choice (windows).
The operating system is not LOGICALLY extensable in the way that unix was (before linux became easy to install)
application software should NOT put it's meathooks into your OS. ever.
games will transcend polygon count alone. I imagine that some people will spend their entire waking life immersed within massivly multiplayer simulation that will become so life-like they won't want to leave... less like EverQuest, more like THE MATRIX -- without the kung-fu.
input devices -- mouse is dead, joystick dead. your screen-mounted webcam will track your eye movements, a stylus will be provided for "detailed" work.
I imagine that we will have so many networked devices that our machines could aggregate computing power wirelessly in parallel with other devices, in effect, becoming virally faster, and temporarily intelligent.
speech recognition will never work.
your OS will heal itself BEFORE it breaks.
storage costs will decrease, while capacity increases allowing an economic means of transaction auditing and journaling file-systems for general use (our PC's will work like a Mainframe, but with the power of an entire datacenter of today!) Imagine being able to roll your pc back 20 seconds ago, on the fly! you can change the past....roll forward... your browser cache history will no longer have ANY record of that accidental click to goatse.cx!
Anyone else out there who was working 10 years ago would know how WONDERFUL it is these days that you can compile a fair-sized application inside of a minute.
Ten years ago, you'd often have time to go for a coffee and have a chat before you returned to find that your program failed to compile at 98% because of some stupid syntax error you missed while coding... at 3 in the morning... hoping to be ready for tomorrow's demo.
Don't even get me started on the Internet! How many more of you were completely screwed at some point because you left a 4kb driver file about 1000 km away from your demo... and your client didn't have a modem for you to use for download.
These days, a single e-mail solves all problems.
Magic!
I hoped to start apps by giving voice commands to my PC. I also expected voice authentication.
Does any slashdotter knows if there are GNU/Linux programs/libraries for that?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Yep, in ten years I expect that all computers and media devices will have DRM systems installed, complete with regional encoding so the local governments can filter the content and ensure that your viewing pleasure is safe, and the news you are exposed to does not lead to any confusion.
That and more networked monitoring devices to ensure that we can live in a terrorism free society worldwide and enjoy the elimination of even the most petty crime.
Also we can look forward to that "paperless society" we've been promised, which will not only reduce the demands on our forests, but will eliminate the horrible firehazards known as libraries. Eliminating print media will do wonders for reducing littering, as well as ensuring that the news stories correspond well with the (electronically) published hiostory. Getting rid of all of those mouldy books will do wonders for public health and safety.
So all in all, it seems we've got much to look forward to, and as long as we leave the future of technology in the capable hands of our legislators and those corporations that have served our interests so well for so long, we just may get to see all of that come true!
Read, L
If you are going to do that time travel thing you might want to mention for them to buy Intel in the early 70s and Cisco and Yahoo in the early 90s might as well really rack up the bucks.
I do not think they would hang there head in shame. Instead of thinking about how little we are doing with our giga hertz and giga bytes think of how much we are doing with our cubic feet and watts. If you think our cpus are space heaters think of what those tube based monsters must have been like. Even the big iron of the 70s and 80s put out some HEAT.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hello old-timer. I think it's only people like us who have been in computing for longer 'get it' about hardware / software efficency. We've seen computers spiral upwards so far, that we're still thinking of a 486 as being a mighty powerful computer (I still find myself in that position).
Yet the bugger of it is that my current, modern, Athlon system is slower than my 486 computer was. Sure, this thing has got faster hardware, but everything except pure maths (video, jpeg decompression etc) runs slower. It's slower to boot up, slower to do this and that etc etc. I can't believe how much ram WindowsME/XP swallow up, enough to bring a 2y old system to a crawl.
If you gave a highly detailed spec sheet of everything WinXP can do to top computer engineers in 1989, and asked them how much hard drive space, ram usage and CPU cycles it'd need for them to do it in, they'd plain laugh at you if you said it'd take more than a 486-DX/25 with 4mb of ram.
That was the ceiling they knew, and that was what they made things work within. The truth is that software has got its own Moore's law - it bloats by a certain amount every 18 months. I've got an old drawing program from 1993 - couple of hundered kb - the same thing today would no doubt take up to 10mb.
Frankly, I have been in computing for too long and I am sick of the utter wastage that goes on. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources. There is no good reason why a 100MHz 486 system can't surf the internet and perform most modern computing tasks other than the human failing of the software side of things.
They may say, computers are "progressing!" But progress it what? How many MHz do you need? How much time must humans waste on ever flashier graphics in games? Weren't the old games good enough back then?
Computing it a huge, dysfunctional, wasteful mess.
So much effort for a score of one. Glad those moderators think about a persons good intentions when posting such a lengthy comment. Not that I'm bitter... just a long time slashdot member enjoying the high noise-to-noise ratio.
Today I use an Athlon XP 2400...
Bet you didn't think you'd get a space heater out of your computer!
...requiring 20-30GB of HD space, 4GB of ram or more, and boots up with the Enteprise theme song
I certainly didn't think I'd be using the same damn floppy drive 10 years later!
I guess I expected there to be no more CRT monitors taking up my whole desk and although it was 1990 before I installed Unix for the first time, I thought it would have had more apps than Windows by now. I suppose I half expected floppy drive speed to go up just like CD speed was too.
But if you had told me in 1990 I would be running multiple GHz, 1.5 Gig of RAM that only cost me $90, An 80G HD that cost about the same, my video card would be more than twice as powerful as my entire system, and that I could burn CDs for about 10 cents each....I wouldn't have believed you.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
-Desktop linux dominance! -VR MMOG's. -Some moderately usefull holography equipment.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
One thing I was expecting (and I'm still hoping for) is some kind of biological interface.
Something of a neuronal/silicone interface. This would be amazingly helpful for dealing with disabilities (have a spinal cord injury, no problem here is a neuronal chip implant).
Also I expected some new way on interacting with computers that goes beyond mouse and keyboard, like a headset where you control the computer with eye movements.
In short, the future will be Orwellian, and dark......VERY DARK!!!!!!!!!!
And yes, this was a joke!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You have never developed software yourself, have you? Not breaking existing functionality is the second-hardest problem in software development - the hardest problem being estimating an accurate schedule. IMHO, of course.
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
n/t
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
My prediction is that in 10 years we wont have a desktop pc any more. Instead we'll have a central server in each home that controls everything from the blinds to the recipe book on the kitchen counter. It would obviously be net connected and have a huge cache of media (music, movies whatever else you can think of). The user will access these via a smart terminal of some kind that executes many programs on its cpu but a lot of the hard work is pushed off to the server. Most of the devices on the network will have a plan9 style cpu sharing scheme where the load can be distributed onto numerous devices. For the software I hope to see open source software really take off and put out a decent gui, I'm sorry but gnome and kde just plain stink. Granted there light years ahead of fvwm, but usability just isn't there yet. Most likely there will be a lot more interoperable objects, and we'll be able to connect em all together in some nifty 3d program. That's on the desktop front, now on the super computing front I hope to see QUANTUM BABY! It may happen if the theorists get it right, but there is still an extremely large chance that in 10 years it still wont work. Anywho, thats just my 2 cents.
Later,
Phil
Many of you expect so much, but have no idea how hard it is/was to create...
These billion-transistor CPU's that people use every day go unnoticed. Do you know how much genious was poured into it's creation?
And you go on to ask for voice recognition and perfect speech generation? Why not perfect AI while you're at it?
Be greatful and don't ask for much... until you go out and contribute to the development of this technology you ask for then you have not right to complain when you don't get it.
Did anyone see the DMCA or RIAA legal pack of business coming ten years from now? Just think of what life in the future will be like post-resolution-of-said-issues. Orrin Hatch wants to crack our cases with destructive virus files...what will electronic entertainment of the future be like?
Cold War II: The Race between Digital Rights and Hackers.
It is a rather well known (at least as far as I have seen) "fact" that many game dev studios pump out crap, usually under the license of franchises from the media but sometimes just their own in-house crap. This has plagued writers for a long time as well. Yet we see that once again the solution to this all lies with *drum roll please* the CONSUMER. When the consumer exercises discipline, constraint and wisdom through informed buying decisions, they send a clear message that crap doesn't have a market. They force the industry (all of them) to raise the bar. Complacency however is rewarded with complacency resulting in more crap.
This all rolls into computers as a whole. With bloatware and crapware inefficiently wasting computer resources and more efforts going into advertising rather than development, innovation and refinement it is not surprising at all that many have very expensive web browsing and solitaire devices. Demand more if you want it, don't bitch about it then pay for it. Your wallet is the voting ballot.
...or something like the gloves in Minority Report.
First, the bad news... computing in the large...
I generally see less and less interest in formal methods, formal design, disciplined approaches to software construction (by which I am referring to the use and adherence to serious models, not just fodder for coffeehouse discussions). Small, proven O/S kernels, supertight code, and emphasis on requirements analysis as the sorts of things that make for well-built and defined systems are costly, and just don't sell well in a commercial market which demands and receives revenue and, increasingly, waivers from liability for bad software products. Increasing "offshoring" of software development projects won't help keeping the gap between systems-as-intended and systems-as-developed issues from arising.
Organizations will lean on, and people will continue to accept descriptions of software quality where software testing is emphasized, before software development methodology or rigor.
Many more large and complex systems will be developed. Their sizes (and complexity of interactions) will outpace the ability of the implementation of their development models to support final code products that meet the required security needs of the public, or of customers. Security problems will get worse before they get better.
And in the small...
The good news? Consumer appliances.
You will be able to carry on a thumbnail chip (or, probably, through a more convenient mechanism, access to your personal material of interest. Wifi-type-access back through VPNs to your data should be readily available. This isn't too far from available now...within some limits...) all the music, photos, and items of personal interest that you would collect and store. I would like to have some confidence that this won't be ruined by digital rights management implementation and supporting legislation, but time will tell. I suspect workarounds will exist to circumvent most DRM systems that will come along. Oh yea, store any of that on a server owned by someone else, and you may end up giving up copyrights and more...Privacy rights and related issues over information you store on anyone else's system will get worse before it gets better.
Anyway, some thoughts...
Sam Nitzberg
http://www.iamsam.com
Sure GHz is great marketing, but marketing is very blind to the problems of trying to simply speed things up. Seriously, what is better: 3GHz processors that take 100A @ 1V or four 1.2GHz processors that that take a mere fraction of the power and do it at 1.8V, which is far less current and far less error prone. Its all wrong and just because M$ cannot deal with SMP is no excuse to limit the techonology!
Hope is in the making with 64bit processors. M$ failed with the Alpha while it became the real 'home Unix' and further failures can be expected with the ia64 and amd64 lines that will bring REAL computing power to your desktop if you can forsake Micro$oft!
Yes, and imagine those games costing $200 a pop and taking ten years on average to develop!
The reason they don't is because higher-level languages and abstraction layers like DirectX allow efficiencies in development that you couldn't get writing to the bare hardware in Assembly. There's a tradeoff in performance -- it costs more cycles to do something through an abstraction layer than to do it directly -- but we accept that because large software projects would quickly become unmanagably complex if we didn't.
And the cost? Think about this. Today the average game costs ~$50. Ten years ago, the average game cost about... ~$50. Heck, fifteen years ago the average game cost about $50. That's fifteen years in which the cost of a computer game has held steady despite inflation -- which means the real cost of those games has been steadily dropping. Think the game industry could have pulled that off if they were still sweating every last byte? No way.
Read my blog.
I had hoped for better video and Internet bandwidth. Those dreams have been realized. I also remember wishing for UNIX on my computer. I did not discover Linux until 1995 and was constantly looking for a cheap version of SCO's UNIXWARE or something similar that ran on x86.
Running any game at 640x480 was a pain. I was still satisfied with 320x200 but I started out with a monochrome monitor. I was hoping for better joystick control and support but the FPS games now work fine with a good trackball and keyboard. I can play games at 1600x1200 on the RADEON 9600 pro, thats a relief.
I wondered if I would even get speed fast enough for a T1 connection. Remember the days of downloading all night? Remember using the earlier versions of getright to download slackware files? The DSL connections of today are faster than a T1, at least on the download and getting and burning ISOs do not take all night. Thats a relief too.
I was about to ask you not to throw that 486 out, but Ive recently thrown a 486 and some Pentium1s. I used them in a small cluster here, but bought a bunch of sparcstations to learn about them. Older computers can be put to good use but there are too many of them now. Keep the oldest one you have.. maybe an XT and throw the rest out. I expect the antique value to rise the way Atari and Commodore computers are rising in price nowadays. Thats not a bad investment.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
first, i use Linux on my server. I've been using Winxp for 2 years however (ever since it came out) and despite my hate of M$ as a company, I must say Winxp was a BIG improvement in stability and usability over Win98 let's say.
I can run my box for a week at least, and have only seen BSOD once or twice which were due to hardware.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
I think you need to lower your expectations. Doing what you describe is pretty much impossible.
Writing compact code (usually in assembly) means said code requires top-notch programmers, has few features, takes a long time to write, is completely unmaintainable, unportable, and usually has tons of subtle bugs that take lots of time to find and exterminate. Those 4K demos are neat tricks, but they take a hell of a lot of time and resources to write. If not for the 4K limit, they could be written in one evening and have more features.
The only reason the Apple II could boot up that fast was because the OS was a piece of shit. Hell, it was hardly an OS. I would say the BIOS in your computer does five times as much as the Apple II OS. And it boots up instantly, too.
The point is, Windows XP or Linux or OpenOffice are all extremely complex programs. They do a lot of things. All of those things require programming. Furthermore, they have to be developed by a finite number of developers in a finite amount of time. A lot of times, they have to be portable from one OS or computer architecture to the next. Obviously, you can't write them in hand-coded machine language.
Finally, if you don't think that computing improved dramatically since the Apple II, why don't you keep using that machine? You seem to be happy with its efficiency and feature-completeness, right? If you think GUIs are not an important advancement, don't use them.
To sum up: most programs are slow not because of inefficiencies caused by lazy programming, but rather because of their complexity and flexibility. You can make a super-efficient program, or you can make a usable, feature-complete program. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
I figured Windows 2003 would be less than or equal to Mac 1984. I should've just figured "".
Speaking as an Engineer,
....
Change and the development of a future technology of any given product is also subject to the market forces. What I mean is that it is hard enough now to get "mom and dad" to be able to use the simple things on the computer without becoming scared at the first warning sign. The learning curve for the older generation is much tougher. It leads to more of the same, just better. You go to what you know ( one of the reasons why Microsoft would rather have you steal their software than use linux )
Ipso facto there is no real reason for any of the big companies to innovate too much beyond the realm of familiar products. Imagine what computer could have been like if we haven't been subdued in the PC world to the same doses of Microsoft brand new operating systems, which in reality aren't that much different from the end user point of view as the first setting of windows 95. It has almost been 10 years and what do we have to show for it? (Even Linux as much as I do love it, is also fighting to become like windows in the desktop arena. Yes there are some real nice distinguishing features from all the camps but it is very windows like you can't deny that, not faulting the developers )
I don't pretend to have the answer but I think as long as you have a Wintel grip on things, (maybe the Wi-fi hand held computers will help shake things up), dont' be surprised if the next windows super duper XP 2.0 looks a lot like the previous versions
my $.02
I remembered thinking (waaay back in 1991) that if it took forever to boot up (about one minute) on a 486 DX 33 MHz, that 500 MHz computers would take a second or less to boot up. Good times.
In 10 years I expect non-silicon cmos (not the best way to explain it, but it'll do), based processors to be available. I expect quantum processors, diamond processors, organic processors, optical processors, spin processors or such.
I do security
I also remember getting a machine about 10 years ago, and I remember that "the future" was all about voice recognition, automation, crazy multimedia at home, etc. It all seemed very exciting to me back then, and for the most part feels kinda "blah" now that we're here.
/. readers fit here). There are more possibilities in software, hardware, networking, and overall usability then there were 10 years ago, but it's pretty much only the power users who really a) understand them, and b) make direct use of them. For the mainstream users, the computing experience is largely unchanged: email, websites, IM, store your digital photos (this last one may be stretching it for the average user).
/. readers. It took my dad about 10 years to figure out that he didn't have to double-click everything with the mouse (including web pages) in order to open it. And what about our grandparents?
So where's "here"? My summary of where we are today consists of a several things. First, I think there's a bigger divergence between the computing experience of a mainstream user vs. the computing experience of a power user (probably most of
While I always enjoy reading about Microsoft's latest fumble, I think they've been *trying* to make computers more specialized so that the user doesn't have to be. All of their Auto Correct features, assistant paper clip thingies, fully retarded (and grossly insecure) scriptability of every goddam product, and various other "features" that end up annoying the hell out of most of us are in fact a solid attempt to make the experience of using a computer more enjoyable for somebody like my mother. In fact, most of our mothers (and fathers) could probably do well to have a helluva lot of assistance using a computer, while most of us probably disable all of that in favor of more direct control. Keep in mind the population spread - there are way more baby boomers using computers than there are
So for the future, while I would *like* to see all kinds of cool things that would appeal to our geekiness, I'm predicting a slow, plodding future of more of the same - increased divergence between the computing experiences of regular and power users, and way more AutoBullshit and assistance features for the average home user.
Innovation is a funny thing. There's only so much of it that can happen at any one time. That's because there are two finite resources required for it to happen: attention and money. In other words, someone needs to care enough about something to spend time thinking about ways to do it better, and then someone needs to care enough about those new ideas to pay to turn them into realities.
The reason there has been practically no innovation on the desktop in the last ten years has been because that span of time -- ten years -- coincides precisely with the span of time the Internet has been in the public consciousness. Ever since Mosaic hit in '93 the vast majority of money and attention that's available in the world has been focused on the Net -- making it better, faster, more reliable and able to support more complex applications. That hasn't left a lot of those resources to support innovations on the desktop -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The first computer I ever connected to the Net, I connected in 1993. It was a 486SX/25 with 8MB of RAM and a whopping 200MB (yes, MB) hard drive. It ran Windows (version 3.1), Office, and some games.
Today I have a Duron 1200 with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It runs Windows (2000), Office, and some games... and a whole boatload of applications (Web browser, graphical IMAP mail client, IM programs, P2P, etc.) that I could not even have imagined in 1992. And, generally speaking, I'm happy with that -- those things are more useful to me than all the things we thought were going to be huge back in 1993 (immersive VR, CD-ROM encyclopedias, etc.) would have been.
So, in short, there's been plenty of innovation -- it's just been in a different direction than you (or I) were expecting.
Read my blog.
...is that computers still aren't the same as televisions: You hit the power button and it's just "there". Sure, we've got suspend and standby and XP boots faster, but it's still a few tens of seconds before the desktop is up and running. Even BeOS wasn't up instantly. Until this happens, PCs will not be where *I* expect them to be by now. The PC should be an appliance by now, and it really isn't.
Un-news
My computer doesn't have a "BIOS", per se. It's a Mac.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What makes you think that natural selection no longer applies to humans, in a "civilized society"?
If anything, I think it's become much more rigorous - just not dependent on physical prowess.
Hmmm.
... no operating system to get in the way. I don't particularly consider it "programmer inefficiency" that the copy of Mozilla I'm running can't overwrite the kernel's memory. I can't code a good demo on Linux because I can't access the hardware (among other reasons). I do agree that people don't consider "efficient" programming as much nowadays ... but quite frankly, there are a lot of projects that are having trouble just getting "correct" down. Pathological cases of that are probably what started the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" school.
:3 )
Part of the issue is that with DOS, you have total control over the machine
I also disagree on games with "lots of videos and speech" being overkill on standard CDs on the issue of data representation, but I'm not a multimedia expert.
(Also, I dispute your "inside of one or two seconds". Four is about right, from what I remember of the bootup sounds.
It's 2003. So where is he? AI has not seemed to improve much despite ambitious software projects and even games that would seem to require neural networks. Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of much improvement in VR, with disappointing progress in input devices and 3D and other monitor technology. Voice synthesis has made some improvements though. Not bad, although it's still not HAL quality. Voice recognition seems to have matured quite a bit as well. IMO, the most significant progress has been in graphics cards with processors nearly as impressive as the main CPU. The impact this has had on games cannot be underestimated.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?
everything was in my trapper-keeper
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
I feel the same about video games. I just don't get excited about video games like I did 10 years ago..
I will be running /. OS on most of my computing environment. While turning up the thermostat on my solar powered furnace, I will get a ticker tape from /. telling me about a potato gun. I will click it, and my TV will launch the story.
Mhhh future so different, Arghhhh
Now the thing that really adds the most amount of time on to the boot process is autoconfiguring hardware because you have to sit and wait for it. My POST is longer than my XP boot because I have a raid controller. I used to have SCSI, same story. At boot, all this hardware is powered up and checked, some of it even asynchronously now Interestingly (to me) Microsoft has written a bunch of papers on asynchronous booting procedures, and XP really does boot very quickly, if you throw enough hardware at it. Trying to do many things at once still consumes a lot of resources. Mostly memory.
Personally the furthest back into the past I would want to go (and my first computer with nonvolatile storage was indeed an apple, it was a ][+) is to the Amiga days. The Amiga had most of the modern doodads, and it was designed to be patched. Of course, it had no memory protection, which made it fast and crashy. It'd be perfect for a PDA. Having half the OS in ROM makes it boot like lightning, and it was autoconfiguring. Everything (and I mean everything) is in the user space, but more to the point, everything is a process, including drivers.
Anyway everyone has their own opinion of where it all broke down. I think we can all agree that today's computers do more, and that code is generally less efficient, but in exchange we get a greater volume of software, and if you contribute to open source software, you are always welcome to contribute optimizations, or for that matter, you can completely change the way things operate.
By the way, Mini CDs cost more than full size ones (the recordables) so the only reason they are superior for anyone is space, and really, a full size CD is not that large. If you want to save space, keep them in binders. Meanwhile, a particularly large game executable is perhaps ten megabytes, with a small handful of DLLs usually not exceeding another five megabytes. The things that take up the space are music, sound effects, and textures. For some first person shooters (and probably other games) there is a lot of precomputed data for lighting and occlusion, that is sometimes somewhat massive compared to the other content, but the game content is what takes up the space, and that's not going to change except with greater advances in compression, which is to say, mathematics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Software doesn't need to be complex to have the features people want.
/your/ bubble.
Most of the bloat in modern software comes from abstraction on top of abstraction.
The abstraction is there to allow sub-par programmers to write software that does more than print "Hello world!".
Sub-par programmers are let near computers because there aren't enough good programmers around.
Have you seen what Chuck Moore is up to lately? He's got a VLSI CAD package running in a few K. And don't tell me a VLSI CAD package isn't complex software.
Yeah...
Sorry to burst
I claimed only that Athlon processors don't have a slower "stealth mode" that can safely run fanless. I know that AMD motherboards designed in the last two years protect the CPU from melting down, but do they slow the processor down, or do they just turn it off? I don't follow CPUs much, but I still haven't seen any x86 compatible processors besides the P4 and the Pentium-M that slow down when too hot.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Uh, Bobcat?
That would run in 640K, might run in 512 if you pushed it...
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
I was hoping for more than twenty frames per second in DooM and Wolfenstein 3D. Also porn thats 3D, lifelike, and interactive! Oh well, one out of two aint bad. ;-)
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I started out with a 12Mhz 80286FX. It had 512k of Ram and an 80mb harddrive. I used to word process with WordStar 6.0. An amazingly beautiful piece of software. I don't know what I expected by now.. but I didn't forsee a couple steps back in word processing technology. Microsoft Word.. crashes every hour. And OpenOffice/StarOffice... why do I have to wait 20 minutes for it to load on a 1.4Ghz machine with 512mb of ram. OpenOffice is about as slow as Java! I wish WordStar still existed...
Up until then every few years something really revolutionary would come on the scene. The very first homebrew kits, the Apple II, the Mac with it's gui, then the Amiga with it's full-colour multi-tasking system (the Atari ST almost makes the grade, and was a little earlier, but the Amiga was definitely more jaw-dropping).
Since then it's all been just evolutionary, not revolutionary. Nothing you'd go to a store and think "that's amazing".
Probably just a sign of the maturation of the industry but it's a bit of a shame. It was fun growing up during the birth of the PC.
I'm hoping someone will invent one of those pocket sized USB flash memory "hard drives" that looks like a dildo. That would really piss off the librarian. ;-)
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
...the x86 architecture will be dead and finally replaced with a up-to-date one.
definition
Architectures and Compilers to Support Reconfigurable Computing
brass
10 years ago, I called Gateway to buy a 33MHz 486, only they talked me into a '66 for only $60 more. I sent back my graphics card and $300 more for a video card that could (are you sitting down) 800x600 at 24bit color. Wow. Now, my monitor does 2048x1536 at 32bits/pixel (only I prefer 1940x1280 at 70Hz). And higher-res pictures than that come in digitally. That's amazing. I thought I would be scanning pictures in at 2000dpi by now, but didn't think of the powerful imaging capabilities my home PC would have.
10 years from now? MS Windows running on top of a stable Unix system, 10MPix displays with HDTV movies that are kinda fuzzy compared to the full-res of the monitor. Let's go for 100MBit bandwidth, while we're at it.
That was my point. She's using Irix with the fancy 3D information explorer, but back then, it was highly unlikely a kid of her age would even know what Unix was, no to mention how to use it. Who could afford a workstation with 3D accelerated graphics? These days, kids can put Linux on their PCs and they've got 8X AGP GF4Ti cards, and it's not even unusual. Reality caught up, and "Unix! I know that!" isn't funny, because it's not unusual.
Of course, now that I had to explain it, it's even less funny. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Pitty this is getting so little support
Help fight continental drift.
Given that we're already starting to approach fundamental limitations of the current hardware approach, it'll probably take an entirely new technology to get that kind of speed. I could be wrong, but I'll bet it will be more than 7 years before we start seeing 1GHz clock speeds in commonly available computers.
Heh. I find it fascinating that every year, we're 'starting to approach fundamental limitations of the current hardware approach'. Wonder what this chap would have thought of 3 Ghz processors.
Really cool thread though, the parent's right about that.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
It's already got to the stage where you don't need anything faster than an ('obsolete') high end pentium 2 with an affordable amount of RAM to do everything an average user will need to do on their machine. Desktop applications, decent games, all run fine in such an environment. Even new releases of desktop applications and games run on five year old systems. That was never the case ten years ago.
.net offers to, and with enough momentum it's possible Novel could embrace and extend it to be a competitor if Microsoft changes focus).
I think over the next ten years we'll see that spread into development, and the demand for cutting edge hardware will be less than it is now, and far less than it was ten years ago, when even the fastest computers didn't feel fast enough.
Further, I think we'll see an evolving commoditisation of the software platform. The open source community has already reached critical mass. Within ten yeas, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBeOS and Macintosh will be pretty much interchangable, and compatibility layers will exist to bring Windows into that group as well (java, qt, gtk+ and cygwin are already breaking down barriers here.
I also think that the world of functional programming is a sleeping giant, and it will only take a perl-analogue funcional langauge (eg: hacker friendly, not as quirky as common lisp, good libraries, great community) to jump start it now that cycles and software components are cheap.
We just need to make sure we come down like a ton of bricks on techologies like hailstorm and shocking IP law while we're getting there, because both of them threaten offer the ruin the promise of a bright future.
Believe with me, my saplings.
faster computers were made so that programmers wouldnt have to worry about those 128k or whatever limitations. Also, if you had a time machine, you would only be able to bring back computer scientists that were very dedicated at what they were doing since it wasn't as lucrative a field as it is today... now you have regular joes going into comp sci for the money (HA!) and then they go into the field and put out unoptomized code... Also, if Microsoft could get Office XP to run on my 486 processor, whats the damn point of me ever upgrading? The whole industry would collapse because no one would ever upgrade and all time would be spent optomizing code to run on antiquated machinery. The industry is heading exactly where it needs to head and everything is as it should be because we're living in the best of all possible worlds.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
And there will still be a visible hesitation in Word when you scroll into a page into which a bitmap image has been copied . . .
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
In 10 years, because of RIAA, MPAA, Trusted Computing, media giants, "content providers", etc we will be forced to use computers that require us to pay at every turn. Every game, every page read, every download, every email.
While my PC of today can do soo much more than what I had in 1993, I can honestly say I no more enjoy using it now than I did then. Computer culture has changed a lot in 10 years. They no longer reside in the realm of the geek, rather anyone who can use a mouse now considers themselves computer literate. It's the culture shift that has changed my experience with my computer, not so much the machine itself.
Still, I like to advocate the preservation and continued usage of old computer equipment by finding new and innovative ways of extending their usefulness. This is precisely why I chose to run a website for this very purpose on a vintage 1993 (10 years, how coincidental) Macintosh LC III (25 Mhz) running Debian, Apache & PHP 4. It may not be the same experience I had with computers 10 years ago, but it's a whole lot more fun than the "everything done for you" mentality of today.
www.brownsauce.org
I'm still waiting for the day that I can flip open my personal digital assistant in New Constantinople while trading the tungsten ore I just shipped in. I'm still waiting for the day that I can pick up a quick job at the information kiosk, to move a shipment of 'hot' books out of New Oxford, with 6 space pirates on my tail ;)
;)
I'm still waiting for the day that I can bring up on the display an analysis of the planetary bodies in the system held by the Stentor, while I ponder whether or not I should take them out, or take them up on their deal for a time traveled ship.
I'm still waiting for the day that I can double-cross those arrogant Broodmasters.
No, wait, computers have already given me all of these things.
The dissappointment with computers, is that these worlds never grew; I drifted away from them as they drifted away from me, and I can not visit them any more. I fear that even if I could, it would never be the same.
Being imersed in those worlds, through my little portal, was as compelling and real as I can imagine any "VR" system ever could be.
I want a structured, compelling world, where me and my imagination can visit for a time, maybe even take up residence, and meet a few good natured people while we're at it, people who may or may not have a corresponding manifestation is this present world
Nethack, perhaps in many respects, more than anything else, is a good ways there.
We do not need more technology; all that we need is more imagination.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
IBM PC, 8088, 4.77Hz, 256K+ RAM, $10,000. Language of choice is BASIC. Video is CGA, but only if you can afford the card, MDA otherwise. Removable storage is the 5-1/2" floppy holding 320K. Some people get wise and punch their floppies to make them double sided.
The OS was PC-DOS, and fit on part of a floppy. Small, fast and feature-less.
Game I remember distinctly was "Gato" (came out about 1985 I think), a submarine hunt game. It fit on a floppy, and was awesome fun!
All PC software had to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.
Networking? Not on the PC! Of course, the PC makes an excellent (but expensive) terminal for a UNIX system, from which you can access the ARPAnet.
Packard Smell, i486, 66MHz, 2Mb RAM, $3,000. Language of choice was Turbo C, although some Turbo Pascal diehards (myself) still lingered. Video is VGA and a smattering of SVGA, XVGA cards. Removable storage of choice was the 1.44Mb 3-1/2" floppy. Some people have CDROMS, but not many. Harddrives are the norm, and their typical sizes are about 100 to 500 Megs.
The OS for most people was still DOS, now version 5.0. People are running this cheesy environment called Windows 3.1 on top of it. I rebel and use OS/2. I need 8M RAM to use it, but it had a UI that GNOME and KDE are barely approaching ten years later.
My games of choice were Civilization and SimCity. They came on floppies, but a lot of other games are starting to come out on CDROMS, which pisses me off since I can't afford one. They also tend to use more RAM and Video than I can afford either.
Software in general is bloating. Stuff that takes up 5 to 10 Megs of disk is common. But I'm not bitching much, since they're adding a lot of features, not counting the GUI.
Networking has arrived! 14.4K modems are becoming standard. If you live in the right area, you can get an internet account. Otherwise AOL and Prodigy are somewhat suitable substitutes.
Home Built, P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gig RAM, $1,000. Language of choice is C++, although several dozen other major languages are common. There are no video standards anymore, but the minimum resolution anyone can put up with is 32-bit 1024x768. GPUs are more expensive and have bigger fans than CPUs. Removable media of choice is the CD-R, with USB memory sticks becoming popular. But the 1.44M floppy is still king. It will probably remain standard equipment until the typical BIOS can boot from USB devices (guesstimate of one year).
The common operating environment is still Windows, but fortunately, the current incarnation runs on top of NT instead of DOS. WinXP recommends 512M RAM. UNIX is making strong headway into the desktop market. Even the most basic Linux distro requires a minimum of 16M RAM, with most recommending 64M.
I haven't bought any games in a couple of years. The last one was Civilization III. (My how things change!) The game market has become dull. My prediction from ten years earlier, that game developers would start scaling back and produce games that would run on systems that the public actually owned, proved false. Instead, the public eagerly upgrades their RAM and GPU's every six months. I see that the many new blockbuster games require video cards that haven't been on the market more than six months.
Software in general has long since passed the bloat stage, and has become quivering mounds of fat reminiscent of dead whales washed up on the beach. This isn't limited to the Windows world. I don't see much increased functionality with OpenOffice versus the Lotus SmartSuite of ten years earlier.
Highspeed internet connections are considered a human right in some regions. You hide your head in shame if you're still using a dialup modem or ISDN.
Okay, now time for 2013 predictions:
Sun Home Workstation, 128-bit i986 class, 1
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yeah, rocket shoes and mind control lasers and fully immersive 3D porn with virtual hot chicks who are dying for it 24 hours a day and a robot to be my personal slave and computers that are so smart you can program them in English by just reading the spec to them and they work the whole thing out for you without you having to fiddle about with actual code so programming could be reduced to the fine art of specifying more or less what you actually want but most of all, rocket shoes.
Now wash your hands.
So I grabbed and compiled a copy of VICE, the Commodore 64 emulator. Then I grabbed an abandon-ware copy of SAM, the Software Automatic Mouth. Its text-to-speech was about equivalent to the modern program. Plus, it had the option to type things in phonetically, including syllable emphasis. And it added the SAY command to the C64 built-in BASIC. All this in less than 32K is just incredible.
To be fair, I have heard some of the more modern TTS programs, and they do a pretty good job. So do some of the newer voice recognition programs, especially the ones now used on automated phone systems.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist)
Efficency is everything... but what's more scarce: memory or labor? Consider that 2 hours labor == 1 Gig RAM... in the early 90's that ratio was more like 2 hours labor == 4 MB RAM. Ten years ago, I had to endlessly fuss over the exact combination of extensions and control panels my Mac IIsi and Mac Classic would boot up with. Today, it wouldn't make any sense for me to delibrate whether or not I could afford the memory footprint of all the little startup programs on my PC... it's a non-issue. The analogy carries over to programming: while I could write a really swift C program to process a 5 meg text file buffer by buffer before writing the results to a database through a raw socket, I prefer to use a nice garbage collecting, virtual-machine based OO language to suck the entire file into memory and process it all at once. Sloppy, but it saves time for me and future maintainers.
My point is not that we have it easier or that we can laugh off issues of efficency because hardware is cheap. My point is that, with the change in technology, it is most cost-effective to be addressing other problems. How do we make software robust and ensure uptime? How do we cleanly integrate disparate data systems w/o the whole thing becoming a maintainability nightmare? How do we make it secure and usable at the same time? Whether the software takes a full CD or a mini-CD is not a pressing issue with most software development managers.
This is just like any other resource management problem: in general, you should spend your capital optimizing for the resources that are scarce, not the ones that are abundant... and for most apps, space and time efficency is yesterday's problem.
The parent post does deserve some credit though... efficency is more important than your college professors would have you believe. Sometimes every little byte and CPU cycle really does count (especially when dealing with embedded systems, RTOS, or other low-level software). Efficency is also nice (and sometimes critical) for usability: an effecient GUI is a snappy, responsive GUI. Imagine how much better Java might have done in the consumer market if AWT and Swing did not run like molasses during their early years of use. And let's not forget the command line interface, which--for all the power it provides--is very efficent on space, time, network, and screen resources.
Efficency has its place, but it's no longer the top concern. And of course... every problem is different.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
I've been thinking about this more and more recently: nearly all of the fricking clutter in my office and in my home is paper, and I want it to go away.
Getting a Palm did away with a BIG chunk of that clutter: no more scribbled notes to myself or notepads full of handwritten ideas filling up the drawers.
More and more of the doc I work on at work is electronic, and with a 2-monitor setup, that's the way to go. One screen for reference, one for work. You still have the problem of printing things out to take and show someone, but that kind of thing could be done with a tablet-sized PDA. Most of those get thrown out immediately, anyway.
Next up is electronic bill-paying, to clear the mail off the kitchen table.
Then, it's tabletop role-playing with a laptop instead of a GM's screen. That may have to wait for better LCDs, but I want to see what WXGA looks like before I put it off.
After that, the last to go will probably be taxes, just because dammit, I want the hardcopy record if the bastards ever come knocking on my door.
There will probably always be some paper in the loop, but if I can take it down to 5% of what there is now, it will all be good.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Sorry, but you've been misled. Communism is about everyone giving to society as they can, and taking as they need. It's an economic system. A central controlling government is totalitarianism -- it has nothing to do with the economic system. In fact, if you read Marx's Communist Manifesto, the idea was supposed to be that the government leaders (borgoise) would disappear, leaving the people (proletariat) to run the country for themselves. (Of course, it was doomed to fail due to natural human desire for power.)
But you've obviously been brain-washed by an American propoganda to believe that totalitarianism and Communism are one in the same. Which is equivalent to saying that Democracy and Capitalism are one and the same. I see no reason why a truly Communist government could not be a Democracy. They both are centered around giving power to the common man.
In the strict sense of the word, Free Software has a lot in common with Communism. But it has little to do with the bastardized common usage of the word.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Let's consdier 1993 vs now.
.mod files, so we could go "wow, these almost sound like REAL" music. Or I'd chat with my friend with the insane idea of "Yeah I wanna have a pirate radio station and send the sound over a 14.4 in realtime." and everyone would laugh saying "There's no way to compress it enough!"
Back in 1993, I didn't know what a web browser was. I was looking forward towards college, and I was enjoying the new fast 14.4 I had got and my fast 486/66DX2 that cost a ton with its entire SCSI disk system.
I would commonly dial up various local BBS's, leave posts for my friends, upload and download interesting files. Stuff like
Socially, everything was posts and emails on isolated systems, and you'd go system to system like a bee harvesting data for you, and that's how we all kept in touch. You rarely communicated outside the local few area codes because it'd cost too much to dial that far.
People spread rumors about new BBS's that would allow actual graphics instead of just text. But everyone said it wouldn't work because it would be too hard to get everyone to use the same systems.
Today, most of my friends live in other states. I can grab music and video for just about anything I want and have it in less than a day. I don't even have to think too hard about setting up this kind of functionality. Everyone just talks to each other on different OS's and exchanges files without much thought outside "Do I have a player for this? Where can I donwload one for free if I don't?"
Computing has become more abstracted. Nobody thinks about opening a web page, you just do it. There can be 5 gifs 9 jpgs and pregenerated content on it, but you don't really care much about your browser or OS except in a few specific cases. You go somewhere else and use a browser and expect the web to be there, with graphics and maybe sound and text and easy to use. You grab a file and don't think about where it comes from, you just search entire networks without a second though. Can't remember something? Search google about it. As long as you're online, information is there, and you're ALWAYS online at high speed, unless you leave the house, and then it's maybe low speed if you're lucky.
This is a BIG CHANGE. 10 years ago setting up a network was a huge hassle, and inter-system exchange was a veritable nightmare of standards. Today that's all gone. Almost completely paved over with systems that WORK and work so well most people aren't even aware of them.
So what's coming in the NEXT 10 years?
Wireless will be big. It will be huge. Everyone is going to want to take their data, and have it everywhere. On their PDA, on their phone ( which is their PDA), in their laptop (which connects to their PDA), at their friends' house (which networks with their laptop or pda). People are going to want to be able to just drag files at their friends' machines and swap them just like that. Better integration of popular apps will mean IM peer groups that are also P2P file clusters that can be searched and traded among as seamlessly as IMs are sent now.
The concept of "Desktop PC" will begin to fade. There will still be geeks who love them to death, but the average joe won't care. He wants the latest PDA/cellphone combo with 500mhz CPU, 256MB ram, 10GB of storage, and ultra high speed networking links to a half dozen wired and wireless network standards all over the globe. And his OS will manage all this and transition from one network to another as he roams through coverage areas that provide different services, just like we take DHCP for granted now.
Maybe he'll go pick up one of those docking stations he saw his sister get for school. You know, the kind where you put an adapter on your PDA and then it locks into a standard bay in the side of what looks like a traditional laptop, letting you use the bigger screen and comfortable keyboard and expanded ports while still using the PDA's cpu? And you can even add a fuelcell to it that can recharge your PDA's supe
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Isn't it funny that over the course of the last 20 years, and the doubling of performance every 18 months in accordance with Moore's Prophecy, and even with the fact the average price of a new computer has fallen, they still average 2 minutes from power on to useful application running state?
When I had a Commodore 64 it was loading a game off disk. (Sure, BASIC was in the ROM, but we wanted an application. And I wont even talk about loading games for the VIC-20 off the Datasette!) Now, it's booting up Windows XP off ATA hard disks. Whatever the advances in hardware, software has risen to match it, where functionality really hasn't increased that much at all.
Thats the killer that people need to look at. Take older technology and do cool things with it, and tell people they no longer need to wait the 2 minutes to make their computer useful.
It'll make people healthier - no more just-turned-the-PC-on cup of coffee.
Well that happened. A little late maybe, but it happened. The iPod even exceeded it.
But I'd never have guessed we'd still be using a shitty 1960s era operating system (Unix) as our reference standard. And even worse, that it would still be way better than all the commonly-available alternatives (unless you count BeOS as "commonly-available"). Nor would I have predicted that software would still be developed in death-march sweatshops led by clueless pinhead bosses, to end up being just as buggy and fragile as it ever was. Nor that we'd be rehashing crap like virtual machine interpreters and reference count garbage collectors, dressing them up with new chrome nameplates and trying to pass them off as anything but the old, tired, failed ideas they always were. About the only thing good about software today is that at least nobody uses Ada any more.
Electrical engineering has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. Computer science pretty much stopped dead in 1985. It's easy to blame this on Microsoft, but that's overly simplistic. Microsoft, the ubiquity of commodity (lowest-common denominator) computing, and the overarching need for backward compatibility were certainly big factors. But we also need more Feynman-type thinkers to continually remind us when we have our heads up our asses, so new computer scientists won't think the pablum they're taught is as good as it gets. Dijkstra was the best we had at this, but he's dead now. At least we still have Tufte, Gabriel, and these guys.
How strange, I was cleaning out my own computer closet and had a similar thought back to my own 1993-vintage 486 -- and 20 years ago, when I was using Apple II, C-64, and PC XT machines.
My thought was this:
If a computer user from 1993 was transported to 2003, they could sit down at a modern PC and find it pretty familiar -- just a lot faster and slicker! Word and Excel today would look pretty familiar to a user from 1993.
In fact, even the OS was very similar in appearance in 1993 my case. I ran OS/2, and the Workplace Shell was very much like the Win NT/2000 GUIs that MS later developed -- much closer than a Mac or X-Windows, let alone that glorified program launcher known as Windows 3.1
Now imagine a user from 1983 being transported to 1993. Someone familiar with Wordstar on a PC XT running DOS would be utterly lost when confronted with a GUI and WordPerfect or Word.
Would it even ocurr to that refugee from 1983 that the funny looking thing next to the keyboard would move the arrow on the screen? OK, I suppose mice had appeared by 1983 (yes, and I know they were invented much earlier), but mice were still rare.
From 1983 to 1993, I used seriously six different operating systems, six different word processors and three or four different spreadsheets. In the last ten I personally have used a variety of systems due to preference and technical jobs, but could easly have gotten by with nothing but Windows, Word, and Excel.
I was using virtually all the same categories of applications in 1993 as in 2003. I guess web browsing and audio/video are the main new uses for me in the last 10 years (and technically I was using web browsers by late 1993). Half of the applicatoins of 1993 didn't even exist yet in 1983.
While some innovation is as fast as ever -- CPU speed and RAM density -- on the software side the industry became much more "mature" in character in the 1990s. That's one reason I suspect why we didn't see huge productivity gains in business from microcomputers until the 1990s -- they were too much a moving target. Word processors and spreadsheets weren't going to be a net plus until you didn't have to retrain your admins and accountants every year or two.
just a fast computer.
...
;)
... but i thought then, why not make a window in a windows on web-pages for a link. buh!
;)
cheaper bigger faster switching LCD-screens.
better GUIs. please please don't go on the road of apple where every icon is like half my screen.
since i am a gamer, clicking a small (even tiny) icon doesn't bother me at all.
i suppose if you have touchscreen like on palms clies etc... large icons make sense
but i saw an OS X gui once and suddenly the room filled with the smell of babies/children. i dunno why
i'm still in love with the look-and-feel of windows ME (believe it or not)!
but i was really hoping they/we would improve the
web-interface a-la johnny mnemonic!
and more broadband internet access (WIRED, not wire-LESS) in every hotel and @ pay-phone.
also more public GIGABIT PoP's, so we can go
to the dessert like in neuromancer and have
mega bandwidth with no police in sight!
>>>:)
i'm still high from my pot-overdose five years ago
but not text, but a small rendered version of the web-page we are linking to. like a preview. like a hyperlink wormhole
swiss-cheese HTML v.0.01a (scHTML)
WOULD
YOU
LIKE
TO
PLAY
A
GAME?
yet?
I mean geez it's 2003 and I've been waiting for 20 years now. Come on. How come that guy's computer in War Games could do that but not my expensive ass Pentium III? Huh? What a letdown...
It's interesting that nobody is talking about everyone having laptops instead of desktop machines. Yet that was one of the big sea changes to occur in the next ten years.
If I hadn't invested in a nice monitor, I'd certainly have bought a laptop instead of a new desktop this time around, and I still want a better laptop than I have.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Hmm. Don't spend much time in restaurants, do we?
Is it fascism yet?
When NeXT was a new company they put out a poster featuring a pic of their pooter and proclaiming ~ "In the next decade there will be 10 computer innovations -- Here's 8 of 'em"
Well, my old 25 mgz NeXTstation with a 200 meg SCSI hd, 8 meg of ram, and grayscale display still does the job for me. (Granted lots of stuff stored on network drives, but I digress.) Best GUI I've ever used. If it weren't for work compatability, I'd have no need for another box at home.
What annoys me more than anything is when people want new computers for no reason other than newness. This is especially true in the work place. If the company hasn't grown or changed significantly, once a good computer setup is established, changing is most often a waste of time and money.
Signed,
Grumpy Old Man
PC's will have large amounts of nonvolatile ram. Hard disks would be used mostly for backup purposes.
Many programs will run 100 times as fast as today, but only if they are multithreaded, and only if they are optimized by today's standards. Software written in the newest high level languages will still appear to run just as slow they always have, since the late 70's.
3D desktop, but not in a first person sense. Stuff still pretty much stationary on the screen unless you move them, and your point of view rarely changes unless you have multiple desktops. Holding down ctrl while resizing a window will scale it.
Microsoft will evolve to become a hardware giant, doing business as BigHard (j/k). Their software division will produce free software that will only run on their hardware. Bill Gates will somehow still be the richest man on earth, marking the last of the super-billionaires, admired and hated by all.
There will be a growing class of minimum wage software developers with limited knowledge and experience to throw together custom software on demand from random free packages and a bits of script to serve the needs of the non-programming community. "You want source with that?" "That'll be $8."
I predict ray tracing and photon mapping will replace triangle rasterization as the preferred technology for interactive 3-d graphics.
Anyone else agree?
-jim
Before I heard about the demise of the Commodore corporation, I thought that the Amiga would take over. The way I saw it was by 2003 we would have real-time graphics editing on our desktops using the VideoMicrowave or VideoWisk. We would all be confused about how the Amiga25000's HAM203947456980 really worked, but it would be an awesome image. Midi music would be enhanced to include realistic vocal tracks. In addition, we would have superior VR games with all the players images rendered as the opponents. Sid Meyer would still be the king of great video games. The latest game time would be, "Lemmings: Going extinct." Both the PC & the Mac would no longer require a CPU expansion daughter board to emulate. In fact, the Mac fans would have finally realized that the Amiga was a far superior use of the Motorola 68990 CPU. The PC would be dead because 16 colors just isn't enough and everyone would finally have enough of that damned BEEP from the PC speaker. Who knew that innovation is rarely welcomed, executives are scum, and the PC actually could improve? What is in store for us in 2013? Probably the Intel "Septium" and Athlon ZP AKA "Zippy". Our children will get PC with thier happy meal. McDonalds will thus be able to track their every movement and advertise directly to them. Microsoft will have thier OS burned as part of the 32TB Rom and will actually regress to having no command-line interface. IOW, more of the same.
Hrm. I hate to waste this on an AC but you really are a bit behind the times and mal-informed on top of that.
First off, both the Duron and any even remotely modern Celeron have cache. The Duron always has had cache. The Celeron has had cache since the advent of the Celeron 300A several years ago. They do have less cache than their "big brothers" surely.
Secondly, even 1.02Mhz wasn't "slow crap" when it was introduced. Next to that, a 2Ghz Celeron is orders of magnitude faster, truly mind-bogglingly fast even if you think about it from today's standpoint. 2 billion cycles per second. That's 1,020,000 cycles per second compared to 2,000,000,000. "Screamin'" doesn't even come close to describing that difference really.
So as not to seem off topic, I more or less expect the same from computers in 10 years that I expected of today's computers 10 years ago. It'll be right (or at least approximately equivalent) someday. I also want flying cars dammit... and for people to have to actually be required to have a certain level of competence to be allowed to drive them. A level above zero this time.
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
I don't recognize the Russian chick, but anime model #1 sounds like the original All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku with a little bit of Skuld mixed in. Anime model #2 sounds like Demon Hunter Yohko.
Do I win anything?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
My gut reaction is that the computer would be:
All this being said, you could actually use your computer or watch a movie while lying down, and become the ultimate bed potato, as opposed to couch potato.
P.S. I'm too lazy to link or search for relevant URLs, not unless I could lie down & sip some ice tea while typing this.
BTW, be sure to tell them to put all their money into the stock of a small company named "Microsoft" in the early 1980's, and that around 1999 you'll be expecting a nice check in the mail.
Are you kidding?? I'd have them take Governor Arnold back with them to kill Bill Gates!
Funny though, I didnt read your post, I coppied it into the clip board and had a spiffy little proggie read it to me. Sure, the voice sucks, but I'm lazy and tired of reading every /. post. I can breeze through articles this way.
I only wish I could capture the days slashdot articles and top 10 +5 comments to mp3 and take them with me jogging.
PLEASE point me to a source forge project that does this!
Oh yeah, and I hate CAPS because my TTS reads each letter instead of the word. At least I can program it to read "/." as "slashdot" instead of just "slash"
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I think the fact that we havent managed to /. a Tripod server is indication that the future of compusing is here.
The computer is not your friend. The computer is not a human being. Both the article poster and you seem to have this all confused.
It doesn't have AI nor speech recognition because it's not human and I shouldn't be grateful my CPU has 3 billion transitiors. It's a tool to get... Oh my god... Work done! It's not like a presidental election... "you vote, you're allowed to bitch".
I paid my money and I expect to get what I paid for, not excuses about "wanting too much". You nag like my ex-girlfriends.
You'll learn to write paragraphs.
I don't know what computer you are using, but I do know that every computer in my house goes from a power on to a useful application running state in less then 60 seconds (providing nothing exceptional happens, like a disconnection from the Internet or new hardware). I use a quick-POST BIOS (2.5 seconds); WinXP takes about 25 seconds to boot to my desktop (Barton 2500+, 512MB RAM dual-channel DDR, 80GB WD "Special Edition" 8MB cache). For my Linux desktop (same machine), since I have to log in, it is harder to measure, but the logon: prompt comes up in about 35 seconds (kudzu and ntpd are the killers in speed here). KDE takes another 10 seconds to start.
On both platforms, Mozilla Firebird is up in about a second; Kmail takes almost 2 seconds to start, and gaim takes however long it takes to log in to my MSN account (it's always slower then my other three). In any case, 60 seconds flat gives me a usable desktop with three applications (not including Kwin, Kicker, etc.). If I disable ntpd and kudzu, I can be up in 32 seconds.
But does anyone actually turn their computer off any more? Suspend and power managment make actual boot times irrelevent for me. As soon as ACPI S3 (Suspend-to-RAM) works for Linux[*], I'll be in heaven. You can thank Microsoft for the recent decrease in boot times, btw: Microsoft talked to a lot of users and found out that boot times were more annoying to them then basically anything else, so they started working with hardware (meaning motherboard, mostly) manufacturers to speed up boot times. No more triple-counting RAM checks, indeed.
Of course, boot times aren't really a recent affair. My sister's Athlon 700 (256MB; 5400 RPM Maxtor drive) comes up in about 45 seconds; the K6-2 I use as a proxy (if I remember correctly, since it's been about 2 months since I've booted it) comes up in 45 seconds too (more time in BIOS, less in OS loading, since it's just loading to a Linux command line and automatically logs in).
[*] Does this work in 2.6.0-testx? I've been meaning to download them, but have not had time. I remember that the ACPI devel said it was basically impossible on 2.4.x, and that he wasn't even going to try...
Quantum computing, that's what I want, and that's what I see in the future, it WILL change everything, forever.
Forget this. It looks like you never tried to use voice recognition. Latest versions of Dragon software are extremely accurate. 98% accuracy with my horrible accent, and 99-100 for native english speakers. BUT. If you try to use it more than one hour you WILL croak like raven. Surf the web around -- it's much easier to kill you vocal cords than to get RSI.
BTW try to read aloud C or perl code. Try it, really. No need to dictate to Dragon, just read aloud two or three pages of you program. If you want to dictate program you'll need a very wordy language (no, not cobol) and such language doesn't exist now and nobody with keyboard would want to work with it.
...but you try and tell the young people today that, and they won't believe ya'.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
At the risk of getting flamed as a Mac nut, I just thought I'd point out a couple of your wishes that I already enjoy:
Connectivity. 'tis getting better. Google is good. P2P is good. Email is ok. IM is good. Video phone anyone?
Yep, I've already got a videophone -- it is called iChat AV and although it has some room for improvement, it is pretty incredible to start with... now we need more clients to support the protocol.
Music and Video on demand.
iTunes music store is pretty close on this one... I'd be willing to bet video comes in the next few years!
He is really a pain to code with he just throws everything on one line and does not believe in nl characters or comments. Such is the problem of working with genius. I sure wish I could code as fast as him! Perhaps the answer will come from using math in combination with actual sound samples. Even a P4 with lots of ram does not seem to be up to the task. I cannot afford a real powerhouse smp box yet so thing are slow. When the Sledge Hammers come down in price I will think about it though. Access to a scookum multi 64 bit would be great! Even if some of his routines would need to have their math changed. It is not easy and I am suprised that it has not already been done by someone other than Sun. They built a java program that could be used as a type and say, what ever happened to it I do not know.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I want everything wireless. Wireless everywhere.
What i'm really missing today is a cordeless monitor so that I can put my noisy computer in another room!
I'm still using the same computer from ten years ago!!!!
Okay, 8 year, but still... close enough.
I remember thinking that Harddisks would be completely replaced by other technologies so that there would be almost no moving parts in a PC.
It's a pity that didn't come true.
I also remember telling my friends that in 10 years time we would not buy CD's , but we would go to the shop and purchase a little RAM chip with the latest music on it. I never thought we would actually download cd-quality music in a matter of minutes.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
In ten years computers will be able to correct my misteaks.
Slashdot will be able to do line breaks and html without gobbling either...
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
jalefkowit's right, you haven't thought this through (though I disagree about his argument about game costs: I'm sure that has much more to do with demand economics than production costs).
Most glaringly, you forget that game CD's contain mostly media, not code. And while I'm sure Doom III redone entirely in assembly would run faster and in a smaller footprint, I doubt any game today uses more than a fraction of its required RAM for actual code.
What do you expect from computing, 10 years from now?
Since this appears to have sent all the geeks into nostalgia-land, I think I'll answer the last bit instead.
For one, I think most people will have broadband (yeah yeah I know a lot of us geeks have it today, but I mean the average mp3-downloading grad student today will want broadband after they graduate.) Piracy even more rampant as the primary showstopper have been time and bandwidth, not morals or anti-piracy protections.
I think we'll finally see the distancing from a traditional "PC" towards a central headless "house" hub (noisy, hot, "large") somewhere out of the way, run by wireless communications (or alternately by a Gigabit cable if one has higher requirements). One or more "smart terminal" instead of the traditional desktop (I'm guessing one per family member if you can afford to...), which has the graphics card, a slim DVD-burner (which also does CDs, one slot), probably all built into the LCD monitor foot, preferably all passively cooled. All the heavy computation made server-side.
The really high-end PCs wouldn't change much those. They'll be a solid space heater, make noise like a small plane, including the GPU fan, but it'll outperform the stuff above and probably fit better in a student's dorm room. However, for families the above is something people will have in their living room, the "PC" has been relegated to really hardcore gamers/performance freaks.
In combination with that, you'll have a host of appliances, something like slimMp3 running on wireless, and a video player/PVR running of the same (kinda like Kiss DP-500 does today over Ethernet.) In terms of innovativeness I think Apple will lead the way (classy stuff for those that can afford it), followed by Linux imitations (does the same but not nearly as polished) with Microsoft trailing.
On the OS side, I think it'll be quite a bit the same. Apple will still be there in their niche, not dying but not taking over the market either. Microsoft will try to stamp out piracy, and still be holding onto the considerable quantities of less computer-savvy users, while the big question is where the reasonably tech savvy people are (those that could dance circles around MS' XP/SP1 activation, not that all do). In ten years, many more will have grown up with computers making this group considerably bigger. There is no doubt in my mind that the number of Linux users will increase, the question is by how much. I don't think Linux will manage to cease the market, but I'm guessing 25%, also helped by many businesses running Linux to lower costs.
When it comes to applications, I don't think too much will change. Features sell, not bugfixed. People will still complain about their system being buggy, but will buy the latest flashy version anyway, even if the code quality is more "mass market beta testing" than "production quality". I think the "core" set of applications will stabilize though, such as office tools and common internet tools.
I don't think we'll make any great improvements in interfacing with computers (as a computer), I believe it'll still usually be a screen/keyboard/mouse setup. I do however think we'll integrate the computer into more systems (stereo/radio/TV/cell phone) all working with one central hub though, and using a remote (or the switches on the set) it might not seem as if we're interfacing with the computer at all, it happens "behind the scenes".
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am hoping voice recognition will be close to common place usability, right now it is a ways off. AI is atleast more of a possibility, with some cool projects hitting the streets.
:)
heads up/glasses display will be more common(still mostly a geek toy, but a cool toy!), preferrably the system overlays what you see with information about what you are seeing... labeling the building you are looking at with a digital readout of its address, company, office hours, contact info... the same with people, having common place(And usable!) face/person recognition that is overlaid in your glasses. Ofcourse these glasses would have a nightvision feature to that feeds the printout right onto the lense, along with (maybe?) a heat vision filter as well.
I would also like to see a useful, not annoying, secretary AI system... one that would be able to do an auto-google for things you asked, along with the basic PIM functions we use palms for now... with decent voice recognition, synthesis. The AI doesn't haev to be phuman-like, only able to figure out what you mean, and answer you.
And one more.. having a directions/mapping system built into cars, the system must both work, AND not suck.
So, essentially, what we really want is a whiz-bang new compiler that maintains (or exceeds, but I'm not sure how you exceed an effective 100%) current code correctness, and retains the current ability for readable, maintainable code, but during compile is able to intelligently optimize code at a non-trivial level.
I really want to see someone write a genetic-algorithm based compiler utility that would make minor tweaks to the code, check for correctness, compile, and then compare for speed performance. It'd take freaking forever to compile, but if it cuts execution time by some sizable portion...
What about Planescape: Torment, or the team's ealier efforts, Fallout 1 & 2? All those three have excellent replay value, story and dialogue. In the case of Torment, the dialogue and story are the best you'll find this side of Grim Fandango.
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.
Although this will probably find it's home first in Mac OS12. I think that in 10 years personal computers should have a competent "assitant" AI program using speech-to-text.
I'm not talking about clippy on steroids, I am talking about something along the lines of and interactive ananova program.
i.e. user: "assist, search local pdf keyword presentation"
assist then opens up a file search with the results of a pdf search for "presentation" on the local drives.
user: "assist, google how to uninstall assist software"
assist: "I'm sorry, I can't do that dave"
We'll have 8 GB RAM, 80 TB harddisk memory and the processor will be about a hundred times as fast as we have now. And we'll still be running wordprocessors that take forever to start and eat up huge chucks of memory. However, I hope that by then we will have a choice in what word processor we use because the document file formats are open and can be read and written by every word processor on the market.
-- Cheers!
Looks like he earned that cookie :)
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?
In 1973, I saved my computer programs on paper tape half an inch wide and dozens of feet long - it used holes punched in it to represent ones and lack of a hole represented zero - 8 bits across the half inch width.
A teletype machine connected to a phone line and a paper tape machine was the computer interface.
Access to the computer at the other end was limited to one hour a day for the entire high school (and so limited to a few select students in 12th grade advanced math class... )
3Dwm
3D-Desktop
Personally I think/hope that after a few decent programs are released there will be a huge surge of interest in making 3D realistic looking movies (like Final Fantasy but with a few tradeoffs and optimizations for performance). And there will be standardization in the tools so you can buy virtual actors and sets. I think this is starting to get more interest in the last few years but to make it practical not only is there the need for better hardware but there will have to be very easy to use software and really impressive text to speech that is easily customised, but I don't see this as being impossible in ten years (Okay not final fantasy quality but close to thanks to a few optimizations/intelligence in the renderer.
Three guesses as to what the first computer I owned was, and the first two don't count. Yes, the Amiga was ultra ahead of its time, but it couldn't boot in two seconds no matter what you did to it. It's been too many years, but I'm pretty sure the best boot time I got out of it was about 10 seconds, and that without Workbench (I was very much a CLI fan even then).
Here's proof (current as of when this VC was purchased: 2001) which I keep handy for disbelievers like you.
http://www.mackido.com/History/AppleTimeline.html
1993 saw the introduction of Nextstep 3.0 and NeXT taking up support for the 486 version of Nextstep.
Not many improvements in programming or multimedia have been made since then. Just how visionary can a system design be?
Kristian
Some years ago televisions needed some time to start up too.
Ask anyone who remembers old televisions where it took almost a minute of warm-up time before you could see anything. And the sound started while the screen was still blank.
I still have a 2400baud modem (hitachi) laying around .. the things weighs approximately 40lbs (either that or I'm a whimp).
Err, try 3D gaming sometime. Granted, it's not photorealistic just yet, but it's certainly immersive. And the only reason it's not *truly* 3D is because nobody wants to mess with the goggles --it's a supply and demand thing.
Of course, if you're talking about Matrix-level VR, that's another matter. Unfortunately, that's a bit of a hard problem, just like AI; in both cases, it turned out that outdoing the human brain is harder than it looks...
Without Jews, there would be no Christianity. Grateful my ass.
My computing dream for the next 10 years is a pda type device with the resolution of pencil-and-paper that rolls up (from maybe A4 size ... though if it ever happens I expect it will be non-standard size so they can sell cases easier!). It will have a 24hour battery life (and in the next 10 years will have a flexible solar panel on the rear and the backup power will be gathered from some type of e-m wave produced by a remote battery pack or it will gather stray radio/microwaves).
...
The device will be usable rolled up via wireless connection to seemingly everything (so it can play music to my in-ear Bluetooth device and video to my home entertainment system) and the rear of the device will incorporate a fractal antenna (Von Koch probably, but see http://www.fractenna.com/). The device itself will have a touch screen area which can display a keyboard or gamepad and of course will run all the usual apps.
It will probably come with Slackware 20.2 (kernel 8.2).
Dream
pbhj
For backup, the storage unit should be removable like and ideally external. This is why:
- The computer could get stolen - a thief is not going to do the favor of popping out the backup unit.
- The building could burn down - for businesses and organizations, off site backups are a must.
- A rampant worm, virus or cracker could nuke the machine's BIOS or OS or any data within reach - external would encourage keeping the backup off line and make it easier to load up a new machine.
And the obligatory anecdote: Years ago, thieves broke in to a building I was at and swiped each and every CPU they could get on one and a half floors. In and out by the time the police arrived 15-20 minutes later. Perhaps they could have gotten more, if the building were not physically partitioned. The thieves left the RAM, but more importantly they left the hard drives -- the staff were most people could not remember the last time they had made backups. If the target had been whole computers, then the drives would be gone too.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Twenty years ago I was using a Xerox 1108 Dandelion. It had a megapixel display (admittedly monochrome only, but for more money you could get an 1132 Dorado which had 24bit colour), an optical three button mouse, ethernet, a WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word-processing, spreadsheet, bitmap and vector graphics editors all as software components so that you could drop a vector graphic into a word-processing document and vice versa. It had a distributed hypertext system, technically similar to the Web. And it had a software development environment which makes today's IDEs look primitive.
The system box was about 10% bigger all round than a modern mid-tower case. The monitor was very big and heavy, but it was twenty-one inch. Sometimes the machine was infuriatingly slow, but then we were running very compute-intensive software, which would still be slow on today's boxes.
So what progress have we actually made in twenty years?
Boxes of this class are now cheaper - much cheaper. Ordinary people can now have them. The Dandelion, in those days, cost about two years of my salary, whereas I can earn the price of my current machine in a couple of weeks. And that ignores the fact that my Dandelion had only 4 megabytes of RAM and 80Megabytes of disk (but against that, the LISP system, criticised in those days for being wasteful of memory, was actually a lot more efficient of memory than modern systems).
And processers are faster. How much faster in real user terms I don't know. I remember when I switched to an Acorn Archimedes - the first ARM based machine - how much more responsive it felt. The Dandelion was capable of around two DEC MIPs. My present box does over six thousand 'bogomips'. How close a bogomip is to a 'DEC MIP' I don't know, but in terms of user experience this machine is certainly not three thousand times faster than the Dandelion - ten times, maybe.
So what I'm saying is that actually we've made frighteningly little progress in the last twenty years. In software terms, we've acutally gone backwards. The reasons are very simple
So what are the achievements of the last twenty years? Well, the hardware boys have achieved a lot. Kudos to them. On the software side I think the best and most creative thing that's been achieved is the GNU General Public License. It's about the only real software advance I've seen in my working life.
The next twenty years
So what does this imply for the next twenty years? I think we have to face the fact that the hardware boys will continue to leave us behind. We will see smaller, lighter, lower power devices. We may see usable speach input. The 'desktop box', as we know it, may die, leaving only servers and portables.
Processors growing faster is always good but in a sense this is academic. For most purposes a good user experience can be provided on machines a thousand times slower than our present machines, or, to put it differently, bad programming can eat up every ounce of speed the hardware boys can give us for no discernable improvement in user experience. What I hope to see in twenty years is my six thousand bogomips of processor in a package that draws curre
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
the one who invents this will become a very rich person... and I'm not talking about any kind of battery. just plain simple wireless power supply... :)
I don't know what kind of games you were buying, but in the 80s, I was paying 1.99-9.99GBP for Spectrum games (average was probably 4.95-5.95GBP for a long time). During the 90s, Amiga/ST games were typically 20-25. Now, most games are 35-50GBP.
--
Nowadays, professional programmers who are working on performance-critial software tend to write first and optimize second (after they profile the code to determine where 'hotspots' are). Unfortunately, in my experience, it's a case of "write first and never, ever optimize". In the last two jobs I've seen the products we've produced to be quite sluggish, becuase of the fact that performance had zero priority (unless it was actually so slow that it was unusable). Management say, it doesn't matter as long as it works. I'm afraid I don't agree with that opinion. Even if it does the job, it's a waste of the end-users time and creates a bad impression of the quality of your product. Having said that I think the "optimise second" rule is one of the best rules in programing, as long as you don't take it as a blank cheque to not bother at all.
$60.00 was a weeks salary for a factory worker in 1965.. so in today's prices.. that 64meg of ram stick costs ... $250.00
pretty damned expensive to the folks from 1965...
and dont get me started on your other "cheap" prices...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That linux would explode....
And it certianly did.
in 1993 things were bleak for the pc except for this one tiny ray of hope from finland... today? I dont even think that Linus himself would have expected it to come this far this fast.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Duke Nukem Forever will have reached 1.0
What I want is a computer that entangles more of my senses. Yeah, I want smell-o-vision. The more senses that are touched by a medium, the more it envelops us. Right now of the 5 senses we have one done really well (sound), another moderately well (visual), one barely (force feedback), and two pretty much not at all (smell, taste). I think the keyboard and mouse are fine instruments for input for work purposes, but for games I want to see force feedback gloves that make it feel like I'm holding the weapon, some sort of treadmill system for moving the character around (on a different note I think more people would exercise if the were playing a game at the time, then just jogging on a treadmill, but I digress).
By that I mean the machine will be so fast and powerful you will not know (or care) about the hardware that comprises it.
Chipset? Who cares when the thing could fully model a tornado as a background task while doing the rendering for Finding Nemo in real time? Oh yeah... AND performing your daily tasks: playing your tunes, surfing whatever the net has become, and automatically updating its kernel (if a kernel still exists then).
Software too - I run both XP and Linux, and if set up correctly it really is kind of transparent (Ok, so the Windows do look different, and drive volumes are labled differently).
I expect that using a computer will become more cognitive: currently you have to think like the computer - the computer doesn't adapt to your thinking (regardless of what Apple says).
One last thing: no more moving parts in the persistant storage, please.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
...will come up with something that makes our systems look like the TRS-80's that they are.
They will laugh out loud at the mention of Linux. Some of the geekier ones will create Linux emulators and user groups.
Windows will make them roll their eyes (it does that now tho).
One thing is for sure - our kids will make us look like the doddering fools we are, just as we did to our parents.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Partial ACK.
Although today's computers are capable of more than they do, they are not fully exploited.
But IMHO it's rather the software engineer's arrogance towards hardware. There is is ugly concept of... e.g. JAVA. Your average computer science guy will tell you: hey, if I code my quicksort in C or if I code it in JAVA, that doesn't matter because both run in O(n log n) on average - but he abstracted that the JAVA code is 30x slower because it interpreted.
It's that problem. Thinking too much in O-notations. JAVA is not entirely bad and it surely has it's applications, but rather as an high-level "scripting" language. There are people who do *numerics* in JAVA or paint pixels in JAVA and that really hurts.
Never mind live video streams and voice recognition, we haven't yet got the basics working. How about allowing all applications seemlessly integrate pictures into the documents. You may think this already works, but it doesn't (at least not seeminglessly). I can't copy and paste a graphic from Mozilla into a Outlook (sorry, copying the picture to disk and then navigating through the file system heirarchy and inserting isn't what I call seemless integration). A picture can only be Pasted into Outlook *uncompressed*. I can't post a picture into any forums. I do a lot of GUI design and it's impossible to communicate your ideas without pictures.
The funny thing is, my dad and I dug up an old Apple II from the closet two years ago. We hadn't used it in so long, it was time to get rid of it. For nostalgia's sake, I decided to use it one last time. I stuck in a floppy, powered it up, the floppy drive whirred for one second, and there was Karateka on the green monochrome screen!
It has been so long, everyone has forgotten about the instant boot of the old personal computers.
As a child, I was never able to win Karateka -- I always got killed by the princess near the end. This time, with modern technology, I found the solution on Google. After 15 years, I finally finished the game, and I could toss the computer away.
Anyway, back on subject... PalmOS boots almost instantly, and I'm quite sure that any Palm today is more powerful than any Apple II ever was. If you could hook up a keyboard and a decent display to one, you would have your instant boot computer.
Microsoft will be a pale shadow of what it used to be. Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, and Samsung will be the primary movers and shakers in the computing realm. Most people will have given up the heavy and unreliable PC in favor of phones that have a plethora of computing/communication tasks built-in.
Consider the following, what do you already use your PC for? Surfing the web? Email, chatting, games, mp3s? A phone can do that now, but not so good. But in 10 years, it wll be better at it than PCs. Plus, it can be used as a phone.
Phones are going to eventually replace the PC.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
1. my mail program will still take 45 seconds to open
2. i'll still have to wait 3 minutes for my computer to boot
3. i will still have only one option for broadband cable modem access.
4. There will be a full Mircosoft computer, after Gateway or Compaq sells their assets, and it looks like and has the same functionality of the Apple computers we have today.
5. I will have to pay "The Man" to listen to any music, so I end up not listening to any.
6. My cell phone/PDA/electronic key still runs out of batteries without telling me to charge it.
7. All of the programs on my computer have to authorize themselves with the central Total Information Awareness database before they will start up.
8. I get eye scanned when I try to start my car so the car knows i'm not drunk
9. I still get more spam than actual e-mail I send.
10. Movies still come out with lots of fancy gadgets that will never be invented to "WOW" the audience.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.
You put your entire music collection on the White House Web page? That is so cool!
Oh yes it does. It's not as ugly as the one on the PC (and doesn't display weird messages), but Macs certainly have one. If you want to see what it looks like, take out the hard drive(s) and power on the Mac.
I want to see the electrical cord go bye-bye. Maybe they will come up with some new power source that can eliminate the need to plug the computer into the wall. Maybe they will come up with a new processor that doesn't require the power of today's computers.
I want to see the monitor as we know it today go bye-bye. OLED, paper thin displays. Or some other funky new technology. The monitor is the biggest, heaviest part of the computer. (I still use CRTs)
Unlimited storage. So much effort has been put into software because we have limited storage capabilities. Remember that software back in the early 90's that would double your hard drive space? (Stacker?) We always talk about doubling our storage needs, but what if nanotechnology could give us reliable terabyte storage? Advance that to virtually unlimited storage. Instead of formatting a "drive" you just write the new copy and move on. Built-in versioning and backup. No need to ever erase anything.
I always wonder what we will look back on in 30 years and laugh about, like "I can't believe we had limits on disk space" or "Remember when we had monitors?". Oddly enough, talking about what will be in 10 years, I just purchased a TRS-80 model III, the first computer I programmed on. 48k of memory in it, two 320k floppy drives. You can put about 2000 of those floppies on a CD-R.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
sure we all have fond memories of spyhunter, riverraid, stampede, agent usa, adventure, galaga, tempest and their ilk.
but don't push this 'games were all better back then' stuff. it inevitably becomes a comparison between the cream of the crop from the last 20 years vs the average shlock of the last 3.
lets not forget, that while doom isn't necessarily deep, neither was contra.
to be fair, take the last 5 years and compare its hits with those of the 5 years before that, and those of the 5 years before that. you'll see that there's no basis for the viewpoint that games aren't getting better. it's revisionism by your mind - which wants to forget things like the kool-aid-man game and bad dudes.
and its not like the cute graphics moving shlock is a new phenomenon. just look at the 'innovation' from one side scroller to the next. whats the gameplay difference between ghosts and goblins and castlevania? how about between karateka and street fighter? double dragon and tmnt? more resolution, more colors, better effects - that's . about . it.
graphics have been the driving force for -marketing- ever since games left ziploc bags.
if you only look at what people are trying to sell the loudest, you may think that games are -only- prettier. but then you'd be missing the best games of the present.
what games back in the day had the immersiveness of deus ex or halflife? what games back in the day had the coop experience and ai of halo? what games had the depth and replay of syndicate wars, xcom, populous or civ? what games had the 'i dont know why this is fun but i can't stop playing' factor of the sims?
action games will always be 'just' action games, and it's intentional that they don't advance in different directions. but don't let tunnel vision confuse you into thinking that games stopped advancing. perhaps you've just grown out of that genre.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Yes, it's a fact... 10 years later, it is undeniable that *BSD is dying. Netcraft confirms...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I would like to see divers just go away. I remeber a while back Sun pushing for Jini I think it was. Basicly what I would like to see is each hardware device have a 32M Flash modual that would contain a universal driver for all OS, UNIX Windows and what ever else. That way I could just plug in some card, the driver would download from the flash and just work.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
It works the other way around.
If $60 became $250 since 1965 then something that feels as cheap to me as $60 would have felt as cheap as $14.42 to the factory worker back then. That would have seemed incredible for 64MB.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
You know, we keep moaning about the great strides in hardware and the bloat of software when the real impact in my opinion seems to be on the social side. Maybe its me but 10 years ago computers were still a big social thing.
/. Being online rarely involves echanging ideas anymore. Most people online seem to be all about gaming, e-commerce and/or porn.
In 1993, I was one of the main FidoNet nodes for the Pinellas County, Florida. I ran a three line BBS with one of the lines a subscriber only line. I knew all the other FidoNet SysOps in the area. We got together at a state park once a month, grilled stuff, drank some beer and geeked out. Being online was about discussion and the exchange of ideas.
Jump ahead to 2003. My BBS is long dead. I am one of a million strangers on
Even gaming has changed. About the only time I game anymore is the once a month LAN parties I have with a couple friends and most of the conversation there is along the lines of "OH, the had to hurt!" Most "gamers" I know are really just running the hack/slash/up stats treadmill with nameless strangers on this weeks version of Ultima Online.
I used to be so excited about being online and the whole concept of the Internet because I saw a world growing up around me where people broke down barriers, spoke from their heart and judged people by what they wrote instead of physical appearance. Instead, the Internet has been twisted into some mutated creation that speaks to the lowest parts of our person.
And the worst part is that I can't really blame it on the technology. We, as individuals, are guilty of letting *OUR* Internet get corrupted. I am just as much to blame as anyone else.
Well, maybe this post is one small step back in the right direction.
I don't think we'll get too radical within ten years, but I think you're on the right lines.
The days of the desktop PC as we know it today are numbered. It's still essentially based on a particular idea of how we work, and a particular architecture. Both of them are a couple of decades old, and no longer reflect the requirements of end users as well as they once did. As a result, I think we'll see (or at least move towards) a few key changes over the next decade.
In particular, I think a lot of technologies in the home that we currently perceive as individual will converge. I expect your "home cinema" kit (TV/projector and DVD player), your sound system (radio, CD player, amp, speakers), general purpose appliances (desktop PCs, game consoles) and convenience tools like remote controls will all become more interactive, to the point where each device is just a node in a home multimedia network. You'll only need one DVD drive and one Internet connection anywhere, and it's quite possible that things like graphical tablets or today's PDAs will be used around the home. I expect there will still be some sort of workstation at your desk, probably still with a screen, keyboard and mouse or something similar, though.
The other big changes I see coming involve communications outside the home. Increased bandwidth and performance will probably spell the end of various current technologies, including "timetabled" TV and radio in their current form. Instead, we'll see a combination of pay-per-play offerings (and probably some option to download permanently for unlimited play, at a higher but fair price) and guide/recommendation systems rather than strict programming by channel as we have today. The classical telephone network will give way to Internet telephony, as will current mobile systems, with the service providers moving to support fully Internet-based bandwidth or just giving up. Telecommuting will become much more widespread as the infrastructure improves and travel conditions worsen, although it'll take a couple of knocks when big companies fold due to viruses, security breaches or other communications flaws costing them a fortune.
Finally, mobile technology will advance a lot. I think the current "3rd generation" mobile phones will flop -- data of the Internet kind doesn't work well on a tiny screen -- but some form of PDAs or laptops that hook into the network routinely and securely interact with your home or office systems will become the norm. There will also be a booming market for information on local services, both so that you can investigate your holiday destination in detail from the comfort of home, and so you can look up local taxi services or reviews of nearby restaurants from your mobile system, which will automatically identify relevant information given your current position.
So there you go: serious home networking, making the Internet what it should be, and more powerful mobile technology. Any takers? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
1. Advanced programming languages..
Amazing programming languages were developed in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s: Lisp, Smalltalk, various out-there functional languages. All of them have always been amazing languages to work with and offer much higher productivity than just using C for everything. But a 33MHz processor with an 8MHz bus, and more importantly little RAM, was stifling to say the least. You couldn't write more than toy programs in a functional language on consumer hardware. Now we have what amounts to supercomputers on our desks, and a full-blown Lisp system looks darned tiny next to an installation of gcc.
2. Inexpensive notebook computers.
This was a small market ten years ago, and now notebooks are outselling desktops--for roughly the same price.
3. Consumer-level graphics hardware.
There was a long gap between the Atari 800 (1979), C64 (1982), and Amiga (1985) and good, reliable graphics-done-in-hardware for the PC (1996). Now, of course, consumer level 3D hardware is beyond what anyone ever expected. You can buy better 3D hardware for $200 than the folks doing graphics research in the 1980s ever had access to.
...I thought I'd have a future computer that didn't crash. I had no idea I'd have to worry about toasters, refridgerators, and dishwashers crashing too...
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
People predicted ridiculous resolutions for video
:) ...let alone being able to take these pictures in cameras the size of your wallet... sheesh!
I still remember - and I'm pretty sure this was more than 10 years ago - working on my Amiga 2000 in DPaint, and being so impressed by the 320x200 *256* color pictures that were demonstrated and advertised in computer stores, magazines, all that... it was so amazing seeing an actual photograph in 'full color'... hehe
who woulda thought that we'd now have 1000's x 1000's of pixel images, and 16 million colors still isn't enough for truly full color images...
Some of that stuff you request is here in OS X. Not all of it, of course, but I can address most of the software stuff...
* Software that works. Office is a good example of bad things. Why the hell do features that worked in an earlier version of office get broken in later editions. I would think software would evolve in such a way that stuff gets better, not stuff added on and and the old stuff worse.
Can't help you much there. Office for Mac is almost as broken as Office for Windows. OpenOffice.org pretty much sucks. AppleWorks is, ironically, the epitome of a bad Carbon port. I used TeXshop most of the time, but the learning curve on TeX is rather steep.
In other areas though, Mail is the best email client I've ever used (beats out KMail, Outlook Express, Entourage, Eudora, Claris, Mozilla, webmail and ssh+pine), and Safari is the best browser I've used (beats out Konq, MSIE, Netscape/Mozilla, Chimera/Camino, and Phoenix/Firebird). Neither one is perfect (brushed metal???), but the clients are fast and the user interfaces are very clean. Most of the utilities that ship with the system (basically wrappers around BSD tools such as cdrecord, hdutil, fdisk, etc) are very well-designed also.
* Better GUI... obviously. I've used KDE, Knome, Win2000 (like Win98), and WinXP... XP still messes me up everytime. Why did they change the start menu. I know, go and change the scheme.
OS X has an excellent GUI. It could use a few additions, such as multiple desktops, and the Finder needs to be fixed (happening in 10.3). FFM would be nice too, but it's incompatible with Fitt's-Law-compliant menubars.
However, applications integrate very nicely in Cocoa and in Carbon, with AppleEvents and such, and the system control GUIs are excellent. Compare, for instance, difficulty in setting up a firewall on Windows, Linux, *BSD, and OS X. Or a webserver. Or whatever.
* Connectivity. 'tis getting better. Google is good. P2P is good. Email is ok. IM is good. Video phone anyone?
iSight + built-in mic + iChat = video and voice chat.
* Related to tech: telecommunications. fucking joke. With lots dark fiber out there, phone services should be a dirt cheap commindity. land lines are a joke. Everyone, please get broadband, if you can, and dump your landline. The baby bells need to suffer.
You can get a VoIP client for Mac, of course, but the real hurdle here is for everyone else to get VoIP. (The Ukraine, btw, is going for landlines + VoIP. It's actually pretty scary how far ahead they are in terms of technological infrastructure. Nobody uses checks anymore, everything is wired.)
* Music and Video on demand. There is no good technical reason that I shouldn't be able to purchase and instantly listen to any audio or video thing ever created. Big media blows, I hope they bankrupt with the telecoms.
The iTMS will get you music on demand. They don't have every label, but they have a pretty large selection. $1 a song. Now, video, that would be nice...
* Backups. Consumer level PC need a VERY GOOD inexpensive method of backing up stuff... I'm talking the whole hard drive in a manner of minutes. Cheap. Often.
I don't know about this, as I've only looked at free tools. I made incremental backups to CD (cheapest you can get) every week at school, and a full backup to DVD before going home for the summer. However, I wouldn't say that Joe User can do this very easily.
I accomplished it with a cronjob that runs a Perl script I wrote. Every Friday, it would check for changed files, handle the files in there according to an RC (most of them got hfstar -czvpf, but the more private ones were encrypted with gpg), and collect them in one place. When I got back from class, I'd add anything special I wanted to backup (usually a network-account image), and it'd make an ISO and burn them to multisession CDR.
I might upload my backup utils, but they'd be just one package among many.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
As per the question asked in the article. What do I expect? I expect applications to run faster than they did on my previous computer. Lately it seems that after every upgrade things don't seem to be much faster. (ie desktop applications, word, ie, netscape, etc..)
I haven't timed it (I should haul out my old 486) but I bet WP 6.0 on an old 486 with 16megs of ram will start up just as fast as word on an athlon 2000 with 128megs of ram. Its rediculus.. I upgraded my computer at Xmas and games are faster but I don't see any different on the desktop.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Ten years ago I was starting on MS DOS (MS Windows capable machines were too expensive at Brazil, and GNU/Linux I had just heard about from my little brother then at the University), and the following year I started working with IBM mainframes.
I had expected, especially with GNU/Linux, to combine the simplicity of MS-DOS with the mainframe's reliability and a relational database, and we are nowhere near that.
GNU/Linux is still incredibly complex and buggy, still taking loads of memory, PC hardware is still crap, and X Windows still can't resume a session like the mainframe could, and I hear the Sun XRay can. We are still stuck with SQL, and instead of going relational people are making the situation even worse with network data model disguised as OO.
I am decided to only buy top-quality hardware from now on: RISC machines with SCSI disks and so on. It doesn't matter I can get a fast CISC IDE system, I want RISC silence and SCSI reliability, and speed really isn't the issue anymore. I want to build a X host and have silent, simple X terminals, hoping XFree 5.0 will have a protocol for resuming sessions -- not the crappy session management now in Gnome, but really being able to loose power on the X terminal, turn it on again and being able to begin with the cursor where it was.
I suspect part of the complexity is due to POSIX itself. I hope the Hurd will help us migrate to a Lisp world, but meanwhile I can't really even Emacs working exactly as I want with IMAP and authenticated SMTP; I suspect the transition from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd will be a pain, and then the migration from POSIX to Lisp (as I am sure RMS and other hackers dream) will be another.
I also expect to have a relational OS... perhaps the Hurd can be a platform to that, where all data structures will be simple relations with arbitrarily complex data types. That, coupled with a Lisp or otherwise functional programming model, could be heaven, and much simpler and more reliable than we have now... only dreaming.
Ah, and formal methods such as Z.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
You've just described the computer section buyer at foyles bookshop!
Apparently the author doesn't use OS X. He'd believe that computing has evolved if that was the case.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
- Large flat panel screens (no CRTs)
- Ubiquitous networking. Anything could (and would) connect with anything
- The online world would be a giant library/shopping mall. Take CompuServe in 1993 and take it up a few notches.
Not met:"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
We are spoiled nowadays with these new fangled Hard Drive things. Back then I thought the 3 1/2 inch floppy disks WERE hard disks! They certainly are harder than the 5 1/2 inch ones! I remember when we got that extra 3 1/2 inch drive. No more floppy disk swapping. You could boot off the main drive with your operating system floppy and run programs and store files using the other 800K floppy drive. That was the shiznit!
Eat at Joe's.
Personally, I lusted after an Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster and a couple of genlock cards; a complete video solution in a single box. That one little computer 13 years ago could replace an entire off-line video studio. I have friends who are STILL nursing those boxes and praying for Workbench to make a comeback.
I would have expected the PC architecture to be replaced by something new. Instead we keep putting band aids on the existing architecture. We had the 640K memory limit & hard disk size limits at several different places. We still need to ditch bizzaro things like PCI I/O address space shadowing. There's too much pressure to maintain backwards compatibility. Someone should start from scratch.
While windows has gotten a lot better, I expected a lot more stability by now. Why can a misbehaving app still take down the OS?
10 years ago (or there abouts)
VIDEO:
I had access to a 486-66 with an intel hardware video encoder. I could encode a 160x120 video at something like 15 FPS and if I used the hardware encoder it would come out really blocky, it was much smoother when I wrote it unencoded and used Indeo3 to compress it. I expeced in 10 years I would be able to smoothly watch full movies on the computer.
AUDIO:
I encoded several albums to mp2 (yup, before there was a free mp3 encoder) and burned them to a cd. I wanted all my cd's on a hard disk.
IMAGES:
I was scanning in images at a managable 75dpi (about 300x450pixels) In 10 years I wanted all my pictures on computer (by 1995, I was using PhotoCD's so I partially got my wish early)
INTERNET:
Wished everyone could have email. I think I was still dealing with gateways to FIDONet to email my dad. Wasn't sure if WWW or Gopher was better/more usable. Gopher had some nice stuff then (wiretap) there were also some useful services available via finger (weather and such) I thought in 10 years most people would at least have shell access to the internet (and a chunk would have SLIP) and have symetric T1 speeds.
Of course, those are just the things I came close on. I also expected more dualprocessors, that everyone would have 9Gig hard drives and 21 inch monitors (I can't believe still people buy smaller ones) and that everything would have spell checking.
Thank you for a funny reply. Nobody else will probably see it, but you have brought joy to the world.
... I thought W was acting kind of weird lately.
...)
Now I have to go delete those files
(head like a hole! head like a hole! I'd rather die
90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
Programmers' time is a resource that can also be used inefficiently.
If it takes Coder A one day to write an infrequently-called routine in a high-level language like Java, and it requires 10,000 instructions to run, and Coder B spends 2 weeks tweaking an identical routine in assembly code so that it requires only 1000 instructions, and the CPU it's going to run on is capable of executing 10,000,000 instructions per second, which coder acted more wastefully?
In the earlier days of computing, when storage and processing power were scarce, every tiny bit of performance you could eke out was essential.
Today, your processor is going to be idle a good chunk of the time whether your code is optimized or not.
If you want to run 15-year-old software blazingly fast on an emulated 6502, feel free. But wouldn't you rather get the benefits of modern software that have been made possible by a decade and a half of hardware improvements?
How is it extra clicks away?
On the old menu, you had to go to "Programs."
On the new menu, you have to go to "All Programs."
How is your screen cluttered with crap? There is just a second column on the start menu, and you can turn it off. The Start button doesn't have to be a "huge cartoony blue thing that takes 1/4 of the whole screen" either. Just switch to Windows Classic.
Sounds like another non-issue.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm still waiting for R.J. Mical to finish his top-secret game project.
-- thinkyhead software and media
But that's just a guess. :-)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
The corporations will use their super DMCA powers to virtually halt all progress. Open source will become outlawed. One day in the future, no one will own anything, only rent it, due to DMCA and RFID tags. Prices will rise, and choices and quality will diminish, until an outside observer will no longer be able to distinguish a 21st century man from a 14th century one, except the 14th century man at least owned his own clothes and had some privacy from his master.
hah. foolish mortal. Yeah sure, Chuck Moore has VLSI CAD software in a few K, written in a *language of his own design* which also happens to run only under *an operating system of his own design*. Sure its compact, and very cool, but anything that specific can be compact. You're right, software is larger today because of abstraction, but abstraction isn't about enabling 'sub-par' programmers, it's about generalizing software systems into portable components allowing the creation of complex systems that can run (or at least compile) nearly anywhere without having to reinvent the wheel and the fucking transistor while you're at it.
While you plug away at your 4k demos and marvel at how much of a better programmer you are than me because you can do binary math in your head and have memorized every Intel opcode, my code will actually RUN on non-obsolete computers 10 years from now...
If people insist on backwards compatibility on their hardware and software, then it's not going to advance much at all, if any. The real jump comes once the direct interface from computer to the human brain ( ocular nerve, audio nerve, etc. ) is available to people at a low cost. Robert
...can get you far. They provide what seems to me the simplest recovery method available. Of course you have to be using C++.
Personally I use throw/catch only sparingly, and once my program has been thoroughly beaten-on and seems robust all my assert()s get conditional'ed out for the final build. But then I'm writing games, so there's not really any such thing as a graceful error recovery. I just have to make sure the engine can hold up for an hour or two.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I've been a game fiend since before Space Invaders, and this is the only game that gives me the adrenaline rush I used to get in arcades.
Unfortunately the masses couldn't quite get their heads around the 3D FPS/RTS hybrid concept, and the game foundered when it released in 2000. However, there is a small, helpful community of long-time players, and a LOT of excellent free addons. You can find them at bzuniverse.com
Battlezone II can be found on ebay or other places for under 5 bucks. Highly highly highly recommended.
I would use a pair of such goggles as my main computer screen if I had them, and they didn't give me a headache. Can LCD pixels be made small enough to look good when viewed at such close range as goggles though? Think of the added privacy of not having people be able to look over your shoulder while you type...
Gameplay has gotten worse since the end of the SNES era. The SNES had the power to run just about any 'Jumping around game' side scroller that you could think up, and the controller style that was introduced with the NES and perfected with the Sony Playstation's advanced version ( the one with the additional 2 analog joysticks and the shaker feedback ) was perfectly suited to those games.
Atari was fun, but the controllers sucked. The analog joystick didn't let you control Pitfall Harry exactly, and exact on/off timing is what you need control of in a side scroller. With the Atari's limited power/memory, impresice analog control made the repetitive and simple screens hard/variable enough to be fun for a long time. The NES with the memory and power to display many different screens of side scrolling action meshed perfectly with the easy to use and ergonomic NES controller. The SNES with more power added more buttons, still on/off only, no analog which was fine for 2D games.
The playstation and N64 were the first popular game systems that had the juice to render truly 3D games. The N64 added a single awkwardly placed analog joystick to it's default controller. The playstation stayed with on/off buttons. But the playstation had a CD Rom drive so only it had the storage capacity to hold many different screens of 3D action. You could buy an optional vibrating controller with 2 much more ergonomically placed analog sticks in addition to the standard on/off buttons. These optional analog controllers were supported by many later Playstation games.
But gameplay was really stuck at that point. People usually have only 10 fingers and some of those need to be used to hold the controller itself. Also, certain fingers are biomechanically coupled to some extent to others, so the range of coordinated movement is limited. The SNES controller really took full advantage of all the fingers of a human hand. The playstation controller added another pair of L/R buttons, for a total of four, but that is about the limit. Players choose whether to use the analog sticks or the on/off buttons because they do not have the fingers to take advantage of both.
In real life, you have 10 fingers, 10 toes, 2 legs 2 arms, a movable head, a twistable spine, aimable eyeballs etc. In game-land, you have 10 fingers, 4 of which are holding the controller at best, more like six unusable ones. The thumb does double duty controlling and pressing buttons and the index finger presses buttons. You really have only 4 fingers that are used to control the game. Your eyeballs face straight ahead and view the world through a window ( your TV screen/Monitor ) Turning your head or moving means using a finger that could otherwise be used to control some other action.
Playability is what makes games fun. Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 are still fun to play for hours even though they are passe. This is because they are playable. Even a really low tech game like chess is fun, because it is playable. Chess isn't immersive, it doesn't simulate a real military conflict, but it is still fun. Now that 3D graphics are possible
Eat at Joe's.
What did EQ have over muds? Only graphics, there are many muds out there which provide a more enriched user experience. Its just people these days like eye candy and have to be forced to use their imagination.
Multiplayer isn't what its cracked up to be anyways. Take Command and Conquer Generals and try playing a decent, fair game. Impossible. In 90% of the games the other person cheats or if you start to win they drop to avoid affecting their stats. There are so many arseholes playing online games nowadays that i'd soon play single player missions/games or just network with my friends.
The game industry is officially big business and there doesn't seem to be the same pride/effort put into the products. They are continuously rushed out the door before effectively tested or complete. MMORPGS are perfect examples, ex Asheron's Call2. Its been almost 10 months and they still don't have in game chat working! A feature is 'monthly content updates' but thats just so a game can be pushed out before its ready. I can't believe some people fall for that marketing. Look at EQ, one zone was so hard that they didn't expect players to get to a certain area in it so they didn't even bother completeing it.
Sure, there have been some breakthrough games but how many games out there today differentiate from games in the early 90's? With respect to graphics and multiplayer sure, but most are old rehashes with some slight twists and alot are no where near as indepth.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
128 bits may not be needed for addressing physical memory, but there are interesting applications for very large virtual address spaces. They can be used to address huge databases, networked filesystems and the memory of large collections of computers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You mean something like this?
I hear chord keyboards are nice too.
It was a great game, I got it for christmas one year. What a great game for its day. The fully rendered 3d house was a beautiful sight. And how can you go wrong with having live actors develop the storyline? Cheesy acting, yes. Cutting edge graphics, yes. I can remember playing it on my dad's 486 dx/100 with 24(!) mb of fpm ram. Man that was a scream machine.
-D
been promised that thing since, what, 1929? I WANT MY GOSH DARN FLYIN' CAR!
PC? PCs sucked, Amiga was THE machine.
Therefor my expections for PCs was uhm, nothing actually, DOS and Windows sucked, the PCs was expensive and boring. Why would I expect anything from that?
On the other side the A1200 and A4000 had been released, so I guess I would have some crazy thought if you had asked me where it would end in 10 years. But as we all know Commodore screwed it all up, and todays is even worse.
It's so weird how the death of a computer platform can stop the whole computer evolution ;). Todays PCs are no more than last decades Amigas =)
AMIGA RULES, PC SUXX! Btw, keep up the good work Genesi (Creators of the Pegasos PPC platform which ships together with MorphOS) and of course the AROS-guys.
You know what, you're right, why just go out and buy a couple more $500 machines to speed your server-side application up when you can spend $10,000 on two programmers and a month of development time?
The economics of computer technology and the software development process show that you're much better off buying more horsepower than you are trying to build a better horse. I would expect more developments to be made in the domain of distributed/parallel computing in the coming years.
I'm fifteen now but I used Apple II's until about fifth grade in 1998. (I went to a cheap grammar school ;) I remember sitting there at the Apple II and being able to drop a floppy disk in the drive and have it load up instantly, then going home to my dad's Windows 3.whatever or 95 box and wondering why it was so much slower even though it was newer. And it didn't have that little game where you answer a math problem and depending on how hard the problem was, your little character would hit a baseball and you would try and win the baseball game. I miss that game.
I love this game. Unfortunately, it crashes my Linux right now. The gameplay is amazing. It completely blows Counter-Strike away. Plus, since it is based on Wolfenstein, it has one of the most realistic flamethrowers I have ever seen. The only thing I wish there was more of is maps. The four or so get old pretty quick.
This is the first game that has really brought that "Saving Private Ryan" experience to gaming, IMO. In other words, it feels like a real war.. minus the part where you physically die.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
You have said a real thing... you have a system you never dream of... ten years ago... but then again... ten years ago...
* You fill forms in the net the same way you do it now
* You can find information in seconds because the pages were simple... small pics (300x200) that take 1/2 of the computer monitor space in 16 or 256 colors... and they were good pics...
* You can see direct video over a modem connection of 14.4 (remember those?)
* You can send real audio in WAV! (no compression)
and talk with your friends...
Oh well... what i'm trying to say is... all that is possible now, all that has better specs now (pics even to 1024x768 64k colors, MP3, Video Codecs so you CAN view movies over the internet even when you are not allowed to) BUT... Why those things are NOT for everyone? why with all the power we have now we still use the same software that makes the same things? where are the virtual comunities?
I know they exist but why not every one USES them?
most of that things are complex, need a lot of stuff and top computers... BUT if i do some of that things in a 486 75MHz with 500MB HD, 16M RAM and a 14.4 dial up connection!!!??? That's a non sense!
Computers in the future will be integrated into our lives so they will be invisible. They will be voice controlled so you don't have to press these stupid buttenboards :)
I _really_ would like to see a clustered/grid revision-based transactional object store in the OS with a backward-compatible filesystem view layered on top. I also want a clustered/grid application framework that builds in fault tolerance so that the failure of a single device or network connection has no impact on running applications. This would then truly make a network that is the computer. Applications could run on the network rather than on a single computer. I'm still not exactly sure how to implement this, but I might make it my master's thesis or doctoral dissertation if I start coming up with some possibilities. This could surpass Windows, Linux, OS X, and just about any OS out there, unless if an OS I don't know about already does this..
instant on
I put the computer to sleep and never shut it down. It comes on in under two seconds, ready to go. Programs like EyeTV can wake the computer up unattended to record TV programs, then the computer can go back to sleep.
stateless - just pick up where I left off any time, instantly
I hear you. This would be like the Palm OS. You start up a program and everything is just as you left it. Even if you're in the middle of a game it's just right there. Some modern document-based programs can be configured to behave this way, bringing up the last set of open documents. It would be interesting if this became a standard.
totally responsive. I *never* wait while computer crunches, trying to draw windows, etc. And I mean *never*. Things that take time just take time without affecting anything else.
I won't claim I never have to wait for something, but I can't remember the last time I had to wait for the GUI to be responsive. On my Dual-867 G4 everything is super-responsive. I can be burning a CD, loading ten tabbed websites in Safari, and run two instances of gcc compiling code, and the GUI is just as responsive as if nothing were happening in the background. You really have to love modern OS task scheduling.
bug free - things work they way they should, always, no exceptions. A computer should compute as reliably as a housebrick is a housebrick.
Things have really improved in this area. I have one or two applications that occasionally crash. And frankly there are a dozen alternatives for any of my standard programs, so if one sucks I've got another on deck. But the main thing is that the system itself almost never crashes. No BSOD, no kernel32.dll panics. (And no porn-sucking trojans from god-knows-where!) This is especially great for development. My programming speed has easily tripled since I no longer need to reboot if my program crashes. It's made me kinda reckless and more experimental, truth be told - but I like it.
intuitive - I'm gonna have a hard time explaining this one, but basically I end up in a lot of situations where I feel like the computer should have common sense. Like if I just saved 5 .mp3s in a row to the same place, it should "just know" where to save the sixth. That's not a good explanation... what I mean is the computer should know what I want to do and help me do it....
This is a common complaint by the majority of computer users who have been abused by the inconsistency and complexity of unruly OSs. Many tasks require too many steps, getting lost in layers of tabs, or poking in menus to check what the shortcuts are because of lax standards.
Fortunately, modern OSs are better at balancing flexibility with heuristics. Rather than useless wizards and condescending alert boxes they simply provide smarter default actions. Apple has always been tops in consistency, intuitiveness, elegance, and simplicity. But the OS is still being incrementally improved with every release. For example, under Jaguar file dialogs open up to the last place you saved / loaded with the savename filled-in, focused, and highlighted. All you need do is type a savename and hit Return.
Smart defaults are the future, plus quick access to Recent actions, locations, and items where and when you need them. Modern OSs like Jaguar do a fairly seamless job of it. The next generation, beginning with Panther, extends the paradigm in new yet familiar ways. For example, "instant" filters will become ubiquitous in the OS. (That's where the results are coming up instantly as you type text into a search box.) This feature is being added to the Finder. XCode has it. iTunes has had it forever. Waiting for search results in your filesystem or database is becoming passe. I think most of your complaints will be moot by the time 10.5 rolls around.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Ten years ago I wanted to see in a decade an Apple computer that doesn't use Mac OS. I got my wish. I'm on the BSD based OS X now. I used my IIgs with it's 1200 baud modem until 1998 when I got a 300MHz Pentium II with the just-released Windows 98. I felt really dirty until I installed Linux. Now I have a 14" iBook with 640MB RAM and 802.11b, so life is good. Now if only I could get Apple to stop calling it a "Mac".
While CPU performance has improved by several orders of magnitude in recent years, we still have brain-dead operating system schedulers that can't properly allocate system resources to multiple applications. Why does the user interface turn to shit when I run a CPU or I/O intensive program in the background? Performance should degrade gracefully, not fall over a cliff. A program should be able to request, and get, X CPU cycles every N milliseconds. It should also be able to get guaranteed amounts of network and I/O bandwidth.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
so you are telling me that a person from 1960 will instantly think that when I say $60.00 that I mean a far lower number?
I highly doubt that.
what would you think that a person from 500 years in the future were to contact you and say, "Oh yeah, 1 gig ram costs only $12,000.00 and hard drives are only $25,000.00"
do you instantly think "wow that is cheap!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think we should demand better spellcheckers.
It is not unreasonable to expect to be able flowchart the problem at a high level, and have a code generator pop out whatever code you need. In ten years, the code generator should have a state-machine for its target to run the code against for ititerative optimizing cycles.
Well, o.k., ten years ago, I expected it to be here today....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
So you fire up your DMC chariot, head back to 1965, and pick up some computer scientists.
You then take them back to the present and start showing them things.
I can just see it now...
"... and so now that we've finished installing the operating system and some basic tools, you can see that we are *only* using 1.21 gig of the available disk space..."
"1.21 GIGABYTES?? Great scott!"
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Don't know why I'm bothering, but...
No, but if the person told me that a petabyte of memory cost $12000 (a much better analogy), I'd think that it's pretty damn cheap.
Subject: Re: What specifications will the standard year 2001 PC have? ,
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: 1994-03-03 10:24:08 PST
In article
>What sepcifications do you think the "standard" year 2001 >PC will have? 1 GHz clock speed
1 nanosecond cycle time, huh? The fastest super-computers right now can't
even do that (though they're getting close, last I heard). Given that
we're already starting to approach fundamental limitations of the current
hardware approach, it'll probably take an entirely new technology to get
that kind of speed. I could be wrong, but I'll bet it will be more than
7 years before we start seeing 1GHz clock speeds in commonly available
computers.
>2 or 3 processors
This, on the other hand, is probably too conservative. We're already seeing
workstations with multiple processors. Once you've got an OS that can
deal with a multi-processor environment, it's just a matter of what the
hardware can deal with to add more. It's hard to say how fast this will
develop, but I wouldn't be surprised to see computers with tens or even
hundreds of processors available in the next decade.
>20 MB "floptical" removeable disks
These are available already. I do agree that within the next ten years,
portable media will move to something more capacious than 3.5" floppies
(it's weird to think that a floppy that holds 1.2meg is too small, but
it often is...)
Berivity is... Wit.
Silence Bossy Meat Creatures!
Where are the flying cars?! They promised me flying cars!
---------
Launch all sig
- HOPEFULLY cheap high-speed bandwidth will finally be available. Ten years ago it sure seemed like it would have been a reality by now. Fiber, ethernet, or something everywhere. Can't believe POTS is still so prevalent and still maxed out at 56kps. DSL and cable are significant steps toward this goal - but still, more and cheaper!
- See above, but available in wireless.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I think if a Cray "decided" to make another computer the actual computer community's responses would be more along the lines of "WTF?????"
Odd that they have 16$ million in orders then.
The 33Mhz 486DX you talk about was my introduction to computing at home; I had seen, and used, computers at school (BBC Micro's with BASIC and the good old Acorn) and also seen one at a mates house, but my fascination only really started to grow once I was unleashed on a home system, I still remember when my dad bought a computer game for my mum's birthday, and we had to go out and by some more ram to get it to work, my dad shelled out for 4MB of ram at a price of 125. All this took place when I was just on the underside of 10 years old. Since then I have progressed from someone who just uses computers to play a few games, perhaps write a piece of homework on it. To someone who has a much deeper and more connected experience with computers, with a bit more knowledge of whats going on, and someone who does quite a bit of web-based coding. I have no intention of stopping there either, I fully intend to go on to learn much more about computing and push myself closer to the development side of computing, and such I am going off to university in a years time to study Maths and Computer Science.
Anyway, on to the point of this post, really I intend to give you an insight into the way I envisage computers and the way they fit into our lives in the future. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I would LIKE computers to fit into my life in the future.
With the rise of the internet and the need for worldwide communication, I can see computers drifting towards much more of a communication tool than anything else, very network based. Computers will replace the phone and postal services (Couriers taking over for packedges and very important hard copys of documents) Having a central message center for the house, which will collect your e-mails and voice calls in one place, probably with the addition of video calling. And the computer offering and answer phone service as well. However, I envisage this being no more than just simply a server for this information, with many applications around the house displaying this information. I can imagine every household member having a PDA type device which will interface with this "data-centre" (wirelessly - of course) and provide everyone with their own personal connection. This *could* also work when people are out of the house, as mobile phones seem to be moving closer to PDAs nowadays.
I can see Computers as mostly as an information device, with nothing more than a simple screen and possibly a keyboard/mouse in each room. Personally I think the mouse will die out and we will move more to touch screens, and gestures for doing things. I think there will be a place for voice recognition, but only for simple commands. Why Dictate and E-mail when just as easily the computer will call the other person up and you can have a face to face (possibly video) conversation.
I think that, although they would/could run though the same screen/Input devices gaming would shift more to consoles. I think that many thinks will be centralised. With more than one system in one place delivering content to multiple places. There would be a primary communications machine, and then possibly one (or more - depending on the usage levels) gaming systems which would all be able to deliver their services to any where in the house.
I can also envisage home automation becoming much more popular. Lighting/appliances/heating/etc. being controlled by computer, imagine sitting watching TV and realising you may have left the oven on, or forgotten to flush the toilet, then just doing it right from your seat. Some things even becoming automatic, ligthing being a good example already in use, but these things would ultimately be entirely controllable by a UI interface (or indeed command line - if you like that sort of thing)
I don't see computers ever talking back to us, I know features will always rule supreme, without bug fixing ever being top priority, but this is the way things go. I can see security becoming a much bigger issue than it is at the moment.
.sigs are for losers
When I got my first computer (Apple II) in 1981 I dreamed of what I could do in the future with a "more powerfull" computer. It would be neat to have a high res screen so I could use it to help design circuits. Maybe a 16 color display. I thought that the rotating shield displays they showed in Star Wars would be neat. During the day you could buy 68000 10MHz accelarator boards for your Apple. 10MHz!, 512K RAM, WOW. What neat things could I do with one of these.
My imagination came utterly short of reality. Real time full color lifelike rendering virtual realty gaming (Quake, Counter Strike, Tribes) was far beyond even imagining. And of course the GUI desktop was not anything I could have imagined. Many of us have computers that put the first Cray super computer ($10,000,000, 100,000 Watts of electricity) introduced in 1976 to shame. I think I'm still in shock. I can't wait to see what another 20 years brings.
Da Blog
I'll register my prediction for 2013 here...
The average geek's desktop PC will be something close to the following:
- 4 64-bit CPUs running at 18GHz
- 32 GB of very low-latency very high-bandwidth SRAM-type memory
- 2 TB of low-latency solid-state persistent storage, used mostly for applications and small-ish data files.
- 64 TB of non-solid-state storage, used mostly for media and other large data.
- 26 inch "thin" display device at 2560x2048
- 512GB removable re-writable storage
But the thing is, most non-geek people will probably not use desktops anymore. Desktops will be still used, but mostly only by the computer geek and the hardcore gamer types. Most people will have a personal network device which works as a very sophisticated PDA.
This "PDA" device will be about 2.5 x 3.5 x 0.5 inches in size. When you come home, it will initiate a wireless VNC-like connection to your desktop monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound system, and other input/output devices.
- The screen on the device itself will be about 3 by 2.25 inches and will be able to display up to 1024x768 at 300 dpi. It's CPU would be equivalent to a 4GHz Pentium 4, and it would store about 16GB of MRAM-style memory.
- It would be always connected to the Internet, and will adapt to several different wireless protocols.
- It would work as your (video)phone, and would be the primary phone line for most people.
- It can browse the web and will be able to handle nearly all plugins, java applets, scripting languages, etc.
- It can stream audio and video from the network.
- It can record audio, video, and take pictures (with a 2 megapixel camera). You can send live streams to the net.
- It will allow you to watch any of thousands of "tv" stations or listen to radio stations.
- It can receive and send faxes.
- It can record and playback audio.
- It can record and display multi-megapixel images.
- It can tell you roughly your current latitude and longitude, and give you the option to share that information on the net with your friends if you want.
- Data will be stored persistently on the network, and synchronized with a local copy in memory.
- It will be aware of other wireless devices nearby in it's environment and be able to interact with them (you could use it to place your fast food order while waiting in the drive-through, for example).
- It will respond to verbal cues, and will do a fair job of speech recognition. A form of verbal "Graffiti" will be useful to learn to improve communication accuracy.
- Placing the "PDA" on top of a special pad on your desk will magnetically recharge it's battery which should last about 2-3 days on a two hour charge.
- It would probably run a commercial operating system for most people, but you will be able to easily choose to install another OS of your liking.
- You can send payments for face-to-face or vending machine transactions immediately. The device would wirelessly obtain a vendor ID from the person you are making a payment to, then authorize a specified amount of money be sent to that vendor ID, after you type in a PIN number or some other personal authorization code. The recipient would get a notification within seconds if transaction was successful.
Ok, I'm getting a bit carried away =) Maybe that last one will take 20 years, but I'm estimating that a very large percentage of the items I've listed here should become quite commonplace in 10 years, all based on the ubiquity of a very small, well connected, and powerful PDA device.
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In a decade computers won't exist. They will have vanished into backgroud. You'll buy a computer like you buy pens, printer paper, bookbag, etc.
In a decade, 99% of computers will be bought based on price, $179 or $229, color, purple, yellow, green, and style, delicate or BMX. A key issue will be whether you can get matching pants or shoes.
10 years from now... I imagine cardboard thin tablet PCs enabled for short range wireless networking - perhaps hybrid celluar. Screen resolution/quality will be similar to that of a glossy magazine. User input will be by wireless enabled microphones, which the user wears however pen will be used for pointing functions where voice doesn't work. Perhaps even a camera which watches where you're looking as a pointing device - if they can ever get around the jitter problems. Plain paper is being phased out. Office printers are becoming fewer - office scanners are used for migrating paper documents into doc mgt systems. A special port for a cryptocard type keyfob is the new style of creditcard. To purchase the morning newspaper, click purchase, plug in your key, validate merchant code, enter security code, read newspaper. It's a start...
Odd that they have 16$ million in orders then.
I didnt say "if Cray "decided" to make another computer" I said "if a Cray "decided" to make another computer" - i.e. if a Cray machine itself suddenly decided to make another computer as in it developed AI became self aware etc etc.
I beleive that if this were to happen, I for one would be amongst the people saying "WTF????"
All computers to be able to withstand the Slashdot effect!
Actually my expectations have been exceeded in one area. I remember seeing a late night (Leno or Letterman... Carson?) interview with the guy that coined the term Virtual Reality. And no, it wasn't William Gibson. Anyway, in this interview, this guy said that computer graphics will always look "computer-y". We'll never see truly photo-realistic computer graphics. About two years later the GPU was invented.
Site Manager, AC2 Warcry Owner/Founder, Tumeroks.com
These are in many ways the same predictions we talked about in the late '80s.
Site Manager, AC2 Warcry Owner/Founder, Tumeroks.com
I want japanese dominate the Microsoft so that we don't have to deal with the ugly icons on our windows system anymore but maybe we can have this pretty pokemon and etc on our desktop.. like this little electricity whatever mouse running around mouse and act just like the office asssitance but cuter. for some perverts, they will release windows pervert xp so that all the icons are boobs and naked ladies.. whatever.. in 10 years.. we should enjoy using computer like that.. yeah.. oh, and I also completely agree with null, etc guy... except for the apple part.
I want cheap nearly disposable legacy free computers commonly available. I mean cheap $20, impulse buy, in the checkout lane at the supermarket, i-POD sized nano-ATX linux boxes. I want $10 10" flat panel displays, next to the keyboards and mice.
Oh, I forgot my computer, I'll just go to the 7-11 and get one, plug in my 10 GB thumb drive with all my work on it and I'm set! When I get back it goes into my Beowulf cluster automatically.
The industry is heading exactly where it needs to head and everything is as it should be because we're living in the best of all possible worlds.
:) I completely agree that it's difficult to take a better direction. Anyway, when we have computers powerful enough to run brain simulation in real-time, we will quickly have AIs and they can spend their time optimisng the software. :)
It's pretty funny that you are right.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Kusanagi. Having a character named Motoko Kusanagi is about as realistic as being named "Jane Excalibur" (at least, Helen McCarthy says so), but it just rolls right off the tongue.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
onboard (on MB) audio with Dolby whatever
Dig it.
The Abit NF-7 S supports Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio along with optical or coax SPDIF output. It costs around a hundred and ten bucks. The future is now, baby!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hey everybody, check this guys website out. He named his dog "twinkie" and all his computers after characters in "Top Gun", which, according to him, is the best movie of all time. What a complete funcking tool.
The problem with the Amiga wasn't that it was good with games, or multimedia, or such. The problem was that this was its focus. Not that it didn't have decent word processing and such. But the designers of the Amiga weren't trying to compete for existing computer users (that would have been foolish), they were trying to create new ones.
Unfortunately, existing platforms were too well established. They didn't do multimedia stuff as well as the Amiga, but they did it well enough to lock the Amiga out. My brother-in-law, a musician, was shopping around for his first computer at the time. I recommended the Amiga because of the multimedia hardware. But he ended up buying a Mac. Sure he had to pay extra for a MIDI interface, but all the musicians he knew were buying Macs, and his record label used Macs. If he'd taken my advice, he wouldn't have been able to share files with them.
But who would want that? I already think that the wizards most modern RAD environments give you do more harm than anything else.
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
It's a bit of a pipe dream really... but I want stuff that just does what it's supposed to do in an intuitive way. When the most basic PC tasks pass the Mom test, I'll be happy. Email, web, printing, letter making. That's it. We're not there yet. Maybe it's time for the Mom Linux distro... strip it down to a handful of applications and add lots and lots of GUI tweaking to make things make sense to people who really don't want to spend time to learn how to send an email.