Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the P.C.
scarcrowman writes "This is an interesting article on the projected future of what we call the 'P.C.' It is becoming more 'Personal' than ever."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Am i the only one who reads that headline and finds some sexual undertones?
MABASPLOOM!
I want one for XMAS anyway!
Why UNIX?
Almost like the Truman Show. But when he says "every conversation," does he mean in audio or in text?
I guess this will be good for biographies. But who would want their life recorded?
I suppose it's gonna be small, probably wearable and very integrated with our senses. Typing everything on a keyboard is so passe...
And next thing worth considering is that we will have a programmable microprocessor in almost every device that we use and with IPv6 it can have it own Internet address...
So many possibilities arise, I think these times are quite good to live in as it is still quite easy to innovate.
On the other hand tools to develop ideas are lagging behind, if or when we break that barrier creation is going to become easier than ever and therefore not as valued as right now.
With machines doing most of the gruntwork it can either go bad or it can grow pretty nicely.
I just don't think human body is fit for that, however.
PC's will continue to be commoditized - expect $100 versions soon with all the connectors and wireless et al...
Surely no one actually puts periods in PC, as in "P.C."?
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The thin-client/application-server model that scott mcnealy evangelized can't give me the privacy, immediate availability and control I must have. Don't get me wrong, I use lots of online applications and lots of computers which act essentially as mere terminals, but I'll always have a personal computer. I expect I'll be wearing an all-purpose computer in the future. On a side note: Anne Coulter has a Giant Hyena Clitorus
Bush was a load Barbara should've swallowed.
...someone starts making Gibson's Sandbenders - this is some computer I'd love to get my hands on :-)~ (ref: "Idoru")
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
Brain implants! Finally, a terrabyte of storage in our brains. Now I can actually pass the calculus 2 final.
Is it just me who finds the article to be a tad strange? Perhaps it's the mulled wine but all it does is mumble about how we have technology that stores data, and we can buy things that store lots of data. What would be interesting is an analysis of what computer businesses are actually aiming at. I mean, we can see Apple are going for the digital lifestyle (iPod photo, iTunes, AirTunes etc.) but where are we actually going in terms of technology coming to the average user? I for one think that the bottleneck has to be our internet connections. Roll on household OC 48.
Before we get into a holy war over operating systems, set-top boxes, and other things that most of us probably don't want to argue about tonight, and for those of you who didn't RTFA, it basically looks at the possibilities of decentralising, if you will, certain functions of a PC.
I still believe, however, that the PC itself lacks a certain combination of features that other devices lack. A Tivo or XBox may be simpler to operate, but a PC is expandable and upgradable, simply does much more, and does those things better. A PC is more flexible, and that's what I believe counts. You can word-process or play games, browse the internet, whatever. But if you buy a bunch of 'appliances' to do those things, it really makes life MORE complicated, not less. I yield the floor.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not sure how that makes me feel about supporting this company.. I wonder how much of what I spend on electronics already ends up there.
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
It is becoming more 'Personal' than ever." eventually it will become so personal that it will soon be called the personal computer, or PC. oh wait...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Coming from an Amiga background, I bought my first PC in 1994. Man was I dissapointed when I tried learning how to code for this thing (in assembly language). The whole memory management and real/protected modes are a travesty other archs didn't get encumbered with. The stupid (as in not very capable) BIOS doesn't help matters either, especially when you have to dink around with IRQs (which shouldn't be a problem anymore but can be, as I recently found myself trying to cram 4 PCI network cards in a i386 router). Plug and pray, indeed! Perhaps not coincidentally, quite a few PC BIOS's have had "interesting" bugs.
Things have gotten slightly better over the last decade, but damn if it doesn't feel like a big waste of time, considering there were better archs available 10 years ago.
You can already get incredible PCs at 100 or 200 dollars. Athlon XP 2000+, 40GB hard drive, and the rest onboard. These days there is no excuse to not have a PC.
And your life will be all the better for it.
It comes with Lindows
is an opportunity for someone to sue you for something you may or may not have done, you will wont "every moment" on tape.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
he produced this laughable piece of crap http://homecomputer.istheshit.net/
did you forget to take your meds?
With ideal compression, they are technically the same. Add some metadata that explains tone of voice, pacing, rhythum, cadence... 100 megs worth of samples of your voice. Why record the actual waveforms when they could be synthesized with a decent level of fidelity to the original?
I guess the only limiting factor at all, would be whether cpu performance increases more than storage in the coming years.
if only they make it mandatory for all politians then we would have 100% accountability
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It's the most personal computer too... it's called my brain.
I think the "PC" as we know it is bound for a destiny as little more than a file server. I mean, let's look at some common uses of Joe six-pack's PC:
Playing songs and movies
Chatting with an IM, checking e-mail
Writing documents (letters, resumes)
Playing games
Let's start with the first one. Songs sound better through a full stereo set, we can all acknowledge that. Stereos right now are very good at playing audio: they aren't that great at holding the songs they play. Clunky 600 CD changers aren't really the answer. A PC can hold, index, categorize and search more songs in a smaller space than a CD changer ever could. With the advent of set-top boxes, playing and storing movies and videos is now almost practical in a non-PC device. However, a PC is still a more extensible platform for storing and retrieving video data. For display of video, a properly sized television is simply larger than my 17" monitor, and better suited for viewing from a distance. So playing your audio through your stereo and your video through your TV are both better options than just using your PC, but using your PC for storage and retrieval is the best way to look after data.
For chatting/e-mail, the PC is still the premiere platform. However, increasing numbers of people want to take their e-mail with them. Also, people may tend to both chat (IM) with a person they also call on their cell phone. Currently, synchronizing the data between your PDA, cell and computer on who can be contacted where is a pain in the butt. The PC is best suited to storing contact information, but a cell phone is better suited for phoning somebody, a Blackberry can check your e-mail anywhere and hopefully someday will be able to use IM as well (if it doesn't already?).
Although it's a long way off yet, e-paper is still being actively pursued as a better way of entering data. The modern PC, with it's QWERTY keyboard (a design meant to hinder speed, not help it) isn't the premiere choice for entering data. The e-paper with a clipboard could go more places than your PC ever could, but probably won't have the storage capacities that modern *cough*MS Office*cough* document formats require. So having a PC act to save and retrieve all the documents for your e-paper is probably the right combination of technologies.
As for game playing, we all know that both the console and PC games market aren't dying (haven't heard a peep out of Netcraft), but costs for a modern gaming PC are continuing to climb (look back at the pricing for a "budget" GeForce 2 card, now look at the price for a "budget" GeForce 6600 card). At the current rate, the "PC" that you play games on will be a completely different beast than the "PC" that is targeted towards the mass consumer market.
In the end, I'm trying to say that just about the only thing a PC does really well is store stuff. Playback and data entry are done much better by devices specialized for that task. So, in the long run, I think the PC will end up acting as a data server/hub for a variety of devices and server to keep them all in sync with one another. Just my $0.02
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
See this.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
My fear is that people will start doing this and then it will be possible to subpoena the information.
My *hope* would be that the courts would understand that to record your life in this much detail is essentially an extension of memory, and that there should be some criterion for a device which is included under the laws which prevent you from testifying against yourself.
You might be quite innocent, but if you are suspected of having committed a crime in a two month period with probable cause, the conequences of having someone have every second of that period might be socially disastrous.
I highly doubt the courts will understand.
It seems that a similar transformation is occurring (has occurred?) in the computer industry. Instead of having one computer you use for everything, a multitude of small computerized devices now exists for fulfilling specific functions. Of course, a great deal of this is just natural, considering you wouldn't want to lug a desktop PC around with you whenever you wanted some tunes on the go. :-)
And humbug to the rest of you!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'd rather not go thru the countless "redundant" entries.
You're nothing; like me.
At some point, ever faster and better computers will outpace the average user's perceived need for upgrading. Sure, dual Opterons running on 5 GB RAM in a 2 TB server case is incredibly sexy, but Joe Average doesn't really care about that.
Remember that the popularization of computers and the internet was created by this "Joe Average" market and they typically don't do complicated fluid mechanics calculations or weather prediction programs.
Aside from 3D gaming there's no real reason to spend more money/upgrade machines for most people.
festivus was yesterday
Convergence is where one box does it all. It is a computer, it is a PVR, it is a media player, it is a phone, it is a radio and a TV.
Divergence is where we move to seperate boxes to do all those things. We have one box for a media player, another for a PVR, another for email and internet. etc.
With the cost of electronics getting cheaper and cheaper, I think we will see divergence.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
The comment may be troll, but it is NOT offtopic. May you rot in M2 HELL!
Are you airing a grievance?
Wasn't it on the 23rd?
yes, today is the 24th, yesterday was the 23rd
People have been predicting the demise or decline of PCs forever. First it was the console, then PDAs, etc. But their argument usually starts out like this:
1. People generally use the PC for A, B, and C.
2. New devices are coming out that can do A, B, and C better.
3. So PC will decline or die out.
But they always forget why PCs became popular in the first place. PCs are GENERAL computing machines. With new software or upgrades they can take virutally any role. Their functions are virtually limitless. As a result they are often the nexus of different devices. They help bridge the conntection between other devices or give rise to new ones. How are you going to use your iPod without a PCs? The PC bridges the connection between Internet and iPod. The trend has been towards a convergence rather than a divergence of information and computing. A general computing device is what's going to make it happen, not individual devices that stay one way and operate apart from everything else.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Within the next two or three years, I expect to see some major security debacle, like a week of total unusuablity for the Internet, major phone system downtime, or a collapse of part of the financial system.
Not where I am it isn't... :-)
While on one hand I am horrified by the idea of a device recording everymove I make, every conversation I have, and would not use a device of this nature of own free will, I do see some use for these devices. I see life recording technology as usefull for those affected by alzheimer's, as a sort of reminder system, queing them in as to who people they are interacting with are, or reminding them to take medication. As for myself, as long as my God given memory works, I see no need to upgrade.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
So, once we can record every thing we say, do, and see, what comes next? Will we get to the point where we can record thought processes? If so, would you really want your thoughts recorded? Or will we have a say in the matter? I know that I think enough things that I never want recorded, that I couldn't even endorse that kind of technology. And if it is some thought process that I do want to have for future reference, what are the chances I will be able to make sense of the flow of the thought when I try to look at what I was thinking at a later time.
friendly reminder to all linux users: Its time for your yearly shower.
always a good reason to buy something else.
You're all gonna be shoppping boxing day people - read some labels. if it was made by some poor bastard sweating under the barrel of a gun, mebbe, just mebbe you should put it back and buy something made somewhere else.
It might cost more to buy made in E.U/Canada/U.S./etc but it is worth it. Those dollars you might save come at the expense of basic human rights.
If it goes with you, it'll converge into your mobile phone. Most PDA's and cameras sold are now phones; likewise radios, remote controls, iPods, media players will all move into your phone.
It'll be a while before storage becomes compact enough, or network-accessible storage becomes fast enough, to carry YourLifeRecorded with you. Right now Tivo is a separate box with a big hard drive, a PC is a separate box with a big hard drive. But eventually (15 years?) your phone's SDIO slot capacity becomes big enough that you store everything on your phone, and occasionally plug it in to watch on a big screen or download through a fat pipe.
There will always be specialized devices, but just like digital cameras, the majority of every electronic function besides desktop work at a "PC" will live on your phone.
=S
Somehow this reminds me of http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/graphics/ran d_computer.jpg/
PC operating systems suck on many levels. They are expensive, insecure, prone to failure, hard to repair, fragile, inefficient, and are unable to offer guarantees to applications. You can't build reliable, cost-effective and efficient systems on such a poor foundation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think that the computer (PC) will go through phases where it becomes specialized units (stereo, DVR, Playstation) but eventually it will all coalesce back into a BOX/UNIT called the PC.
.. a slut. The more personal, portable, usable, modular, functional.. the better!
.. bastards ;)
Why?
Becuase people will allways need a Personal Computer and a Jake of all trades
And although I may have a DVR, playstation/XBOX, and a stereo I trust that if truly needed I can pick up my laptop (PC).. And it can function as all three.. Mabey not as usable as the specialized units.. or as functional.. but workable.. for now.
Cheers! And MERRY FESTIVUS!
Smile.
iLife? - Apple Computer has had the answer for you for over a year by now. Unix at the core, Power5/G5 inside and a human-oriented interface.
My notebook is a little too bulky and slow to start and my phone is a little too limited in input and display. My PDA attempted to cross that bridge but failed, although if I got a new high end it would come very close.
I think the best device would have a keyboard/trackball and a screen that flips up and a docking slot that the PDA plugs into. Wireless built in to the PDA for local LAN, with a slot for WAN broadband. Standard phone rechargers, docking bay has its own powersupply.
Max weight 2.5lbs.
Performance roughly equal to a low end PC.
Pretty soon it will become so personal that we, the operators, won't be needed to manage our online selves. The computers will do it for us. In fact, they will soon replace us offline as well.
Like for music recording you can get a device for $1200 that out of the box you can use. It has 8 inputs and records in 24 bit audio. Pretty cool
And then every time the Linux kernel is upgraded you can be sure that you won't loose your ability to record.
That makes sense to me.
Why don't these little rio things have a record that lets me get 24 bit audio?
Because they want to sell us the music, not give us the ability to make and sell our own.
PC's are so generalized that they do a lot of things, but none of them with the quality that you need to have a professional product unless you dedicate the PC to that function. Hence distros like Planet CCRMA.
But even if you can get your PC to record music, you will have a lot of buzz and hum from all the fans and all the other crap too.
It is better to have a dedicated device so that it will do what you want well.
I will never pay for music again.
I will produce all my own and sell it.
Your vision is a PC that is just a consumer product.
If that is all you can do is consume, and you don't produce and aren't creative then you will want to pay Apple for music.
I will never pay Apple for music.
Not everyone is a talentless consumer.
"So IBM is out of the PC business, and Lenovo has become a major global player. It's epochal, yes,to see the founder of an industry exiting"
That statement gaffs me because IBM is not the founder of the PC per say. Sure they are the one who chose the currently dominating architecture, but they are not the founders of personal computing itself by a long shot. I am sure I needn't point out the obvious examples (still present, or long since faded away).
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
If my computer gets any more personal, I'm getting a restraining order. My penis is just fine, dammit!
This article is nothing more than another forward looking year end article about the PC and what it may possibly become. Don't we kind of expect to read this kind of dross every year about this time. The author really has no special insight because, nobody does. The winds of change are fickle and blow at their own speed on their own terms.
Do I doubt that the PC will change? No. Do I expect that this article will be an accurate prediction of what we will see? Hell no.
I hope that the PC will remain a general device that can do many different things. To me, the versitility of the PC is the key to making it personal. Once you start integrating it with other things, it becomes less general and more specific to specialized tasks. When you integrate a PC with entertainment functions, it becomes a specific kind of tool - likely to be used for entertainment. If that is what you want, fine but I still like pulling up a spreadsheet in one window and surfing the net in another. Nobody else uses a PC exactly like I do and to me, that is what puts the "P" in PC.
I can see the value in different machines to record TV shows, play games, and to do "office work" but I see another side to it too. About the only way that I can explain it is to compare it to a collection of tools. A few years ago, when I was single living in an apartment, I kept my tools in a bucket under the sink. I had everything I needed, a hammer, a crescent wrench, a couple of screw drivers and a couple of pairs of pliers. Today, I own a home. I own woodworking tools, mechanic tools, yard tools, an air compressor, power tools, and many other specialty tools. My investment in tools must come to thousands of dollars. Yet most of these tools sit idle until I need them. I'd rather not have a bunch of computers that sit idle until I actually need them.
I want a more general single device to call a PC! More like that simple bucket of tools that did everything I need. If I don't have that, I see a huge investment in machines that I won't use nearly as often - kinda like my tool collection I have today.
..., you can have 1 Terabyte for free!
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
PC has no future.
longhorn.
gotta love tux
It's just windows that's that way.
Now, we wouldn't wan to offend anyone, especially our silicon-based microprocessor-controlled friends.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
Hey, where's that on switch at?
If a person lives to be 85 they would only get 33 MBs a day. How will that be able to record ever conversation in decent quality. Also 500 you can get some 5 inch ide drive, I'd like to see sombody string a bunch of them to there body and hook up the computer, there life would be real interesting, because they'd get beat up everyday for being a loser.
P.C. about PCs...reminds me of that business with master/slave.
Think of this:
What if were done against your will?
First why don't you defend why you think that is a proper example and not just arbitrary fearmongering? It's a giant conceptual leap from voluntary activity to coercion, and this:
The porn industry may adopt tech first, but totalitarianism is always a close second or third.
is hardly a sufficient premiss to base an argument upon.
BTW, such "totalitarian" tracking technology already exists in the form of house-arrest ankle bracelets; somehow, despite nearly a decade of use, only the criminals are wearing them still...
I'm reminded of the film Brainstorm 1983 (Natalie Wood's last film).
It's about a super virtual reality machine that can record the brain's sensory input and play it back to another person. In the film the machine used special 4-inch-wide silver videotape to do this.
Anyway there's this scene where a scientist convinces a young lady to have sex with him while he is wearing this brain-recording headset. So naturally, after she leaves he cuts the tape into an endless loop and spends hours playing it back; sexing himself into the cosmos.
He then quits his job, saying that he had a religious experience that went far beyond 'just sex'.
By the way, the movie 'climaxes' with another researcher actually dying while wearing this super brain life recorder, and it is Christopher Walken (who else?) who plays back this tape to find out what is actually to actually die. There's lots of cheezy late '70s Hollywood light show effects from the same team that did 2001:A Space Odyssey thirteen years previously.
Oh, and I remember a scene where an executive shows off 'the chips that make it all possible'; these were a couple of 40-pin DIPs without any conductive foam around the pins.
Bizarre, the pseudo-technical movies that we remember. Hook a life recorder to my head and you are going to get a lot of really dumb movies. Now if I could only get stuff like El Topo out of my head! That would be a machine that would really be worth buying!
lots of muttering, picking our nose and trying to find our keys. can't wai
The P.C. is becoming more personal, yet that data on the PC is becoming less personal (e.g. trojans, spyware).
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
or TCPA as it's called these days.
As far as I can see, if MS et al manages to push TCPA out the door we're all screwed. As far as privacy goes we're headed for a Orwellian society if TCPA gets accepted by manufacturers - MS will decide what software we run, what ISP we use and what we type in our email. We'll be using Freedom Operating System graciously provided by MS and munching Freedom Chocolate all the while constantly having MS monitor our email to make sure that we don't write any nasty stuff about our Gracious Liberator Bill Gates.
Admittedly though I am quite the cynic about these things.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Completely fucking hilarious!!!
Hey grammar nazi: clitorus!
It's highly unlikely you're not a silly little bitch!
Bah! Since there is no free will, you'll only need enough space to very precisely save the beginning state when you're born. All the rest can be calculated from then.
And for your answer: I knew you'd say that!
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
The trouble isn't recording it.
It's cataloging it and making it searchable. The vast majority of most people's lives aren't going to be something they are going to want to sit down and watch again later. Things, such as your daily drive into work, cleaning your teeth, unblocking a drain etc.
In this vast morass of data, there has to be a way of searching for things you actually want. Video search at the moment is practically unusable unless you want to enter loads of metadata by hand. Same goes for photo search.
It'll be a long time before that portable terabyte of storage is actually useful for recording your entire life, even if it'll be possible within the next couple of years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
A drm addled multi ghz monster that only allows you to access "good" information that can be controlled remotely by appropriate business interest or peoples governemnt, working at the speed of a 386 in a vat of molasses.
...is that we will not have PCs as today. We will have servers and terminals (hello old school). I imagine something like an "iCenter" or something like that which is your PVR/digital library, audio backend, fileserver, printer hub and so on with terminals connecting up to act like "PCs". It will synch automagically and wirelessly with laptops, PDAs, cell phones etc. when in range.
Each of these terminals are "specialized". Your video box has a video remote, your stereo has a stereo remote, and they act on the surface as simple individual units, but they work towards the same back-end. You could browse photos on your (HD)TV, and send them directly to the printer. You could see a video on your TV, and have it compressed into a mini-format and sent to your PDA for your flight.
It will come with all those things that are considered "server" security today, such as UPS and RAID, a decently filtered case etc. The terminals could have specialized hardware, like e.g. a MPEG4 hw decoder being your video player (preferably en/decoder for a PVR), your game terminal a blazing GFX card and so on. The biggest hurdle is to make a system, and have device manufacturers follow that system. That is not trivial.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings