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Technology Predictions for 2006?
OffTheLip writes "As 2006 fast approaches it's time for some to gaze into the crystal ball of technology and predict what will be hot, what will make a difference in our lives or make someone rich and famous. The Mercury News takes a shot at predicting the coming year of technology. No great revelations but it nice to see clean technologies make the list. The list is light on pure technology and big on trends. Perhaps killer apps are not as important as they once were thought to be." What would Slashdot users put in their top 10?
I think that most innovations will come in video and handheld form. Things will get more consolidated very quickly, and the handheld will become even more central than it is now. I hope to see something like an iPod Video that can store movies at screen sizes creater than 320x240 just so they can be hooked up to TVs and played back anywhere. Also, the outcome of Apple Intel machines should be interesting - one place for OS X, Windows, and Linux to all run at the same time.
It's evolution baby, not revolution, and that's the way I like it :)
Problem with e-paper ...
... on a piece of paper ... : $1 :-)
1. Monthly service for radio link servetude: $30
2. Airtime charges to download the news: $10
3. 911 access fee
4. License fee: $7
5. Newspaper subscriptions: $15
6. Knowing you'll be leached to death by yet another inadequate technology: Priceless.
[yes this is a rant about how cell phones cost too much and do so little]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My prediction is that technology predictions will be cut short because the US economy is getting ready to fall off hyperinflationary debt cliff. A rare condition where costs and prices become orders of magnitude larger while at the same time pay and employment become orders of magnitude lower. With over leveraged housing debt on a housing market that is getting ready to fall, too much credit card debt, too much corporate debt, too much trade debt, too much municipal debt, too much state debt, too much federal debt - and 270 TRILLION with a T in derivatives contracts that must settle wether thru default or thru printing up money. It wouldn't take too much in the modern efficient US economy for things to snowball and between the FED and a potential panic out of foriegn dollar reserves - it could really be a very very ugly global colapse. IMHO, people should really consider gold in their portfolios this year, there is a reason why it has been going up for the last 5 years, and recently those reasons have become a lot more immenent.
Yes, but will that get us closer to Fusion-powered Ramjets?
But seriously, I'd predict better photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, and fuel cells. None of this will power anything bigger than a lawn-mower, but it will look great in the lab.
On the other hand, what won't look better will be designer bioweapons. Not that they'll be released, just the capability will give us one more thing to worry about.
Someone will realize that with Google's increasing suite of information organizing technology, that they can become a privatized CIA/NSA. Watch for new bloggers who actually do data mining, rather than off-their-meds rants.
And to stay on topic, controlled nuclear fusion will be right around the corner.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Why?
400GB of flash would be bigger, heavier, and probably slower than 400GB of magnetic storage. It would also be less reliable. You might be able to get decent performance in a lower-power, quieter device, but even with price parity, why would you want flash with all its drawbacks?
The winchester hard drive really deserves some sort of award. Second only to the microchip, the hard drive has been the most successful technology product of the past 20 years, I would say. Consider that its evolution in terms of capacity has far outstripped that of the CPU, while its price has remained low. The same basic principles have scaled from the largest several-hundred-pound devices of old to the 19 gram Seagate ST1, and from the early 1MB drives to current half-terabyte drives. These devices can be found in all but the smallest of consumer electronics and in the largest of mainframes. Only the integrated circuit has shown similar technical improvements and wider applicability, yet the hard drive gets little respect, even within the computer industry. Sad.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
The powers-that-be are fully aware of this situation and the "social ramifications" of what would occur. So I will add to your prediction (that I agree with), that a very large dual foreign/internal war will be promulgated. They have about failed to contain the information and even the most optimistic of stock market bull shills is having a hard time keeping up a happy face, so the herds are close behind. So, judging by historical parallels, they will need a diversionary tactic, and it's invariably always been a larger general war. It's always been the last gasp of failing empires....
My best guess is that it will kick off with a phony WMD series of attacks on US soil, which will be blamed on the bad guy du juor overseas and unnamed domestic "terrorists".
Gold and silver are OK as far as they go, but I would also recommend actual long term stored food and medical supplies, etc as sound "investments". That and being totally out of debt. There's a reason they passed that bankruptcy law this year, and it's because they know what is coming and they are planning to shift masses of wealth upstream quasi-legally. Also see the FED stopping the reporting of the hard data of the M3 supply. A very telling clue there.
>> Second, U.S. companies can lower their costs and boost profits more quickly by
... The "high-end engineers" in Silicon Valley will be needed to clean up after the "cheap labor" in India and China. More and more I find that the job of senior software engineers in the US is to clean up after the team(s) in India or explain how to do the work (over and over again) instead of just doing the work ourselves. We are no longer training the next generation of American engineers like we did in the past. The "senior software engineer" title in corporate america is becoming synonymous with middle manager. Perhaps this is why (as a previous post put it) that the year of 2005 saw no real new technologies.
>> outsourcing work to places like China and India, where labor is cheaper.
This item did not surprise me one bit. The MBA types are going to continue to hype this point for years to come.
What surprises me is that they (the MBA types) are starting to be more aggressive with how they "fudge" the numbers. For example, one of the managers that I work with was touting (in a meeting with upper management) that in two years time companies will be able to cut development time by 50% by outsourcing the technical work to India. When I confronted him for some references or reasons to back up his claim he could provide nothing, not even a magazine article.
>> Many companies, seeded by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, set up
>> headquarters in the valley, where they employ high-end engineers, marketing
>> professionals and senior management.
Okay, this is going to sound like a troll (and probably get modded off-topic) but this is my honest observation from the field
I can't believe that this thread is treating this stupidity as if it were a good thing. The piles of red tape and bullshit that people have to go through to buy scheduled drugs are not because of the abusers, it's because of the War On Drugs. How can someone consider themself free if they don't have basic sovereignty over their own body? Good god, people, the only difference between abuse and use is whether or not a Doctor wrote you a prescription. As long as you don't get stupid, there are a million doctors who will prescribe basically whatever you're smart enough to request and provide basic, rudimentary symptom support and insurance for.
The real technological advance would be a free society, not newer and better ways to fuck up people's days.
Thinking outside my Head
Adding an opioid antagonist like nalaxone doesn't do anything when you snort it, only when you inject it. If you add enough of it that it has any effect when you take it orally or when you snort it, then you're blocking off just as much of its analgesic effects. Same with trying to remove the psychotropic effects of ecstasy--its the psychotropic effects that also make ecstasy theraputic (it's not really a pain killer).
Our drugs laws are just dumb. People are always going to take opiates and other drugs recreationally because it's fun. It's like trying to prohibit the recreational consumption of alcohol (a societally accepted recreational drug which we have a double standard for) just because there are alcoholics. The funny thing is, before opiate dependence was made a crime, it was seen by Americans as less of a nuisance to society than alcoholism--people could also support their opiate habit on pennies a day and still be functional members of society. In fact, you'd be suprised at how many well known people in history used opiates such as opium/heroin/morphine regularly.
What we need to do is just reform our drug policies and most of the societal problems related to drug abuse will simply go away--like people ODing on "ecstasy" because it was cut with more dangerous substances, or the prohibition style crime-wave which has sweeped the nation, etc.
Yeah. I've been trying to figure out what that's going to be though. I don't think it will be the war on terrorisim
[from a different AC]
watch what's happening in Iran. U.S. has them cornered, with bases in Afghanistan on one side, and Iraq on the other. They're working on building some nukes, because the U.S. has a policy of not invading nuclear-armed countries. Israel will attack Iran to take out their nuke sites, the U.S. being the enabler by removing military opposition in the in-between country of Iraq...
China is also a powder-keg. If they see the U.S. too distracted with briar-patch entanglements elsewhere, they'll move to take Taiwan...
Silver, Food, Guns and Gold are on my shopping list. Silver before Gold, because Silver is industrially useful, and it's easier to trade. 1oz silver liberty is currently ~$10, whereas a 1/10 oz Gold Eagle is ~$58. Also, most of the silver that's ever been mined has been used up over the last 20+ years (production deficit + price controls == big problem).
Got a bag of rice, bag of beans, and a 50lb bag of wheat is in this week's natural food buying club order (they deliver to seven western states - four corners, Nevada, SoCal, W. Texas). I'm also stocking some seeds... Yes, economic troubles are certainly ahead, and all the world seems blind to it.
fulfilledprophecy.com looks interesting (found link from the wikipedia), though I haven't really looked through it.
also see Michael Mandeville's The Coming Economic
Collapse Of 2006
michaelmandeville.com/collapse2006/index.htm
"400GB of flash would be bigger, heavier, and probably slower than 400GB of magnetic storage. It would also be less reliable. but even with price parity, why would you want flash with all its drawbacks?"
Given that a 32 GB SD flash card is likely to be available very shortly, that it only takes 13 of these cards to reach past 400GB, and that a pile 13 SD cards is still a tiny fraction of the size and weight of 3.5 inch disk drive, I think your size and weight assumption needs rethinking.
As to reliability, I have no idea what you are talking about. I can drop and SD card from shoulder height onto conrcete and it will almost certainly keep working. Hard disks rarely pass the same test. If you are talking about the write limit of flash memory. A simple comparison with a hard disk of today shows this misconception to be just that. Taking a the example of a flash drive of 200GB with a write speed of 40 Megabytes per second (similar to a modern hard disk) and doing some basic calculations shows that it could be written to continuously for just over 15 years before every block passed the 100 000 write mark. The equivalent of todays 200GB drive some 15 years ago was the 210MB disk. There are not many machines running today with 210MB hard drives, let alone dong the kind of work that requires continuous writing to the disk. And 100 000 writes is often considered a minimum. The secret is wear leveling algorithms.
So to sum up, given that you might be able to get decent performance in a lower-power, quieter, lighter, smaller, tougher device, with price parity, why would you not want to use the flash drive?
2006 will be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A "free society" is like a flying car. It does not work without competent, responsible users. I don't care how many drug users die or are damaged, but I do care about the rest of us.
Drugs differ. Weed? Fine. PCP? Bad Sh1t. Some regulation is needed.
Want a free society? Move to Somalia. You can do what thou wilt, but so can others.