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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)
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.
"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.