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?

Comments

finally!

[nuttzy]

this is the year we all get flying cars!

Re:finally!

[ackthpt]

2006 will be the year Duke Nukem Forever comes out!

Nope, it's the year we find out that the Pentagon has been secretly breeding sharks with lasers and the CIA has overthrown the government of Atlantis, to be replaced by a demoracy, while we drill for oil offshore of .. Hold on a second, someone at the door

[NO CARRIER]

Re:finally!

[HardCase]

Ahem. I predict that most predictions will be wrong. Thank you.

I Want My Personalized Entertainment

[moresheth]

I'm anxious to see dynamic (digital) paper, like with newspapers and junk, but I doubt we'll be seeing them this year.

Most likely the number one spot will be a-la-carte television and music downloading. Not just to compete with piracy, but just because that's what people want.

Re:I Want My Personalized Entertainment

[tomstdenis]

Problem with e-paper ...

1. Monthly service for radio link servetude: $30
2. Airtime charges to download the news: $10
3. 911 access fee ... on a piece of paper ... : $1
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

Oblig Simpsons quote

[Anonymous Coward]

The domestication of the dog continues unabated.

I predict

[TubeSteak]

That we will have _____ wonderful technology in 20 years.

Because for some reason, everything wonderful always seems to be 20 years away.

Trusted people, of course

[TheNoxx]

Although Microsoft didn't do so hot with their "trusted computing" initiative, they'll do much better with "trusted people". Check out a future issue of Playboy: "Hottest Places to Have Your RFID Chip Inserted! Please Your Woman and Keep Your Nation Safe at the Same Time!"

Video and all-in-ones

[Diordna]

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.

Re:Video and all-in-ones

[fyngyrz]

where I come from PAL has a resolution of 720x576, while our neighbors in NTSC land can see 720x480

If only it were that clean.

Horizontally speaking, NTSC encodes various components as signal brightness and two color information streams of differing bandwidth. The brightness can change at a rate that is approximately equivalant of 700-ish brightness changes per scan line, with the other 20 or so appearing in the overscan area which is typically hidden by the way television tubes are mounted; your milage may vary a little if you have an LCD, but then again, it may not. Color changes are a function of combining the brightness change with the two color components. These components can change at an average rate of 100 color changes per complete line, however, because one component is slower than the other, not all color changes can be reproduced at that rate. Notice that I described this as a rate; that's because television, real television, is a pure analog signal and although the rate that the brightness and the colors colors can change is limited, the position that a brightnes or color change can occur at is only limied by how recently one already did... if colors haven't changed within 1/100th of a line, then you can have a color change fairly precisely located... at the cost of not having another for a 1/100th. Similarly, a brightness change (or a green amplitude change... some of you will see why when I describe the math, for the rest, it's magic, trust me) can occur at a rate of about 700, but they can start anywhere and so the precision with which either a brightness change or a color change can be located on a scan line is in effect infinite with an analog system. When displayed on a typical color television tube, most of this capability is lost because the display beam only has a finite number of RGB phospher triads it can illuminate, and the analog detail is re-sampled by the "jail-bars" of the phosphor dots or slots. However, this is still true of a black and white set, which has a continuous display surface. Again roughly, greens change the fastest, reds the next fastest, and blues the slowest of all. These color change ratios (to one another) were designed to mimic the ratios exhibited by your eye's sensitivity to similar changes. Unfortunately, while the idea is sound as far as it goes, your eye's ability to deal with those changes, ratios aside, is so much higher than the change rate video provides, that I would argue that the designers kind of screwed the pooch in this area, but that's a different discussion. :)

The math is done like this, again more or less, using the R, G and B (red, green and blue) color components: Brightness = .59 times G plus .3 times R plus .11 times B. That gets you luma, a black and white signal that offers compatability with how the older BW television sets worked. This is also called "Y". The first color component is simply (R-Y), although as I mentioned above, it is bandwidth-limited so that the color changes are encoded in a broad, blurry way. The third component is (B-Y) and it is bandwidth-limited even further... slower and blurrier. The color image is re-created at the display this way: R = (R-Y) + Y, B = (B-Y) + Y, and G = Y - (R + B), keeping in mind the RGB .59, .3 and .11 scaling factors.

As far as vertical resolution goes, this is a bit easier to understand. For both systems (PAL and NTSC) the display is created in two passes. One the first pass, half the lines are painted. On the second pass, the other lines are painted in between the originals. Next time, the others again and so forth. These are referred to as the odd and even fields of a frame. A frame is considered to be definitive of how many lines you see, and it adds up to 400+ (odd=200, even=200) for NTSC, PAL a little more, with the remaining scan lines again typically hidden as a consequ

Nothing new under the sun (this year)

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the odds of a new technology coming out of nowhere and becoming popular? Look at 2005 -- just an expansion of existing tech. Torrents become more popular, more bandwidth means people exchange more videos, bird flu will continue to be overrated and containable and there will continue to be few deaths, wifi will be more popular, more telephony, and so on.

It's evolution baby, not revolution, and that's the way I like it :)

GoogleRate

[zymurgy_cat]

Google will come up with GoogleRate, a neat application that will automatically search for, record, archive, and then verify all these claims and predictions that everyone makes.

People will then be able to quickly find out how accurate companies, newspapers, etc. have been in the past when they now say that X will be popular this year or that the nano-wireless-widget market will grow from $2M to $100 billion over the next 5 years.

How about

[BCW2]

Flash drives get priced competitivly with hard drives of the same size?

Re:How about

[ottffssent]

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.

Predictions...

[Wyatt Earp]

Advancements in artificial limb technology driven by the Iraqi Military Operations
Advancements in stripping the psychotropic effects of drugs like Ketamine and X for use as pain killers, driven by the Iraqi Military Operations
A video card that cracks the $1000 US price point
More hybrid and bio diesel technology from the big Automakers
F/A-22, Eurofighter Typhoon purchases get cut, F/A-22 or the F-35 programs might get totally eliminated by the US DoD
Quad core AMD and Intel server chips
US program to put GPS in all cars becomes a political hot issue
UK program to track all cars does not become a political hot issue

Fusion!

[headkase]

2006 will be the year we finally achieve a sustained controlled fusion reaction! My 1970 copy of the new book of knowledge annual edition says it's just around the corner! Let's hope its not around the corner for another 35 years as we really do need it....

Predictions

[ackthpt]

• 1. Someone will challenge Moore's Law as not being true any longer.
• 2. Cell phone batteries will need longer life as people listen to music and watch video on them.
• 3. Nano physics will be all the rage, but nobody will still have made anything practical with them.
• 4. RIAA will continue to hound people who really don't affect their bottom line, then blame the loss of music sales for the expense.
• 5. Howard Stern will not have the new customer draw Sirius is betting on.
• 6. Red Wine will be found not to actually have any real impact on reducing heart disease when they find a bunch of drunken italian doctors made it all up.
• 7. Video Games will continue to be ballyhooed as more realistic than ever, but movement will still look terribly wooden.
• 8. New processors, mother boards, video cards will all come out and amazingly the top of the line will cost what the top of the line has cost for the past ten years.
• 9. Moore's Law will be reaffirmed.
• 10. Cheezy Poofs and Coke will be declared heart-healthy by firms in Plano, TX and Atlanta, GA, and the media will not question it one bit.

Re:Predictions

[slashname3]

2. Cell phone batteries will need longer life as people listen to music and watch video on them.

Which will result in cell phones the size they were back in the 80's, satchels weighing about 8 pounds.

This will also result in a record number of car wrecks as more people are found watching their cell phones while driving which leads to several states banning the use of cell phones in cars.

There will be a large number of complaints by cell phone users that even with 200 channels available there is nothing worth watching.

There will also be a project started to port mythtv to these new video capable cell phones.

Re:Predictions

[equallyunequal]

Howard Stern is definitely drawing new customers to Sirius radio. I work at Radioshack and my entire district is sold out of all Sirius recievers and we have waiting lists. 75% of the customers say they are buying because they wanted Howard Stern.

What I really wish

[selil]

1. The DMCA is overturned entirely when all the chief justices get threatening letters from RIAA for watching jib/jab videos. 2. The Patriot Act is declared dead in the water when it is found that undeclared wiretaps were actually against the FISA judges. 3. Video on demand systems requiring no physical media and available on multiple formats cause independent media moguls to become instant zillion-aires and they buy up studios by the dozens converting them to creative commons. 4. The really cool ultra slim portable gadgets found in Japan and Europe are actually released to North America versus gray market. 5. The hottest TV show involves high geek factor when a three guys, and a kid are marooned on a haunted island being bombed by the Pentagon, while a forgotten civilization forges forward trying to find a lost city in another galaxy with wierd looking zombie dudes who eat flesh play pool on the island with the guys and kid. 6. Video game ESPN sports takes on a new twist when they electrify the chairs with 100,000 volts. 7. Windows XP SP4 is released when nobody upgrades to the "late" Vista when no OEM produces a machine with a terabyte of disk space, and a 20Ghz processor required to do anything but load the OS. Bill Gates bursts into flames when demo-ing Vista from a microwave leaking processor. 8. Open Source Advocates actuall publish an agreed upon coding standard for all languages and it is ignored by all. 9. NASA launches a man to the moon sans rocket as it is determined that no rocket is safe therefore they get rid of the rocket and use a giant sling shot. 10. The Cubs win the world series.

Painkillers

[TubeSteak]

I agree with the need for more/better pain killers

One of the main problems with the current meds is their massive potential for abuse.

I predict this will take off in 2006

To counter abuse, drug makers are developing ways to reformulate prescription painkillers. Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Conn., which makes OxyContin, is thinking of adding a second drug, called an opiate antagonist, that neutralizes the effects of the opiate.

The antagonist would be walled off using polymers or some other sequestering technique, said Dr. David Haddox, the company's vice president of health policy.

A patient who swallowed the drug would get full pain relief, as intended. But if someone tampered with the pills, the antagonist would be released.
...
A second approach is to mix in a chemical irritant like capsaicin, the main ingredient of hot chili peppers, said Dr. Woolf, who has a patent on the idea.

Because the esophagus and stomach do not have many receptors for hot peppers, patients could take the pills as prescribed and find relief, he said. But the lining of the nose and cheeks are loaded with pepper receptors, and anyone who ground up such a pill would get a burning feeling in the chest, face, rectum and extremities, as well as paroxysmal coughing.

It doesn't really advance the effectiveness of painkillers, but it'll be a very very effective stopgap measure to basically kill the street trade in these meds.

Doctors will also be able to perscribe powerful painkillers to the patients who need them w/out constantly worrying the DEA will investigate them for possibly overperscribing pain meds.

BTW - the second method (with capsaicin) is really fucking evil. The Dr. describes the pain of snorting/injecting it here

Re:Painkillers

[NixLuver]

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.

Re:Painkillers

[lysergic.acid]

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.

Prediction: economic colapse

[argoff]

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.

Simple.

[Tatarize]

Wimax becomes huge.
OpenOffice.org media campaign speeds adoption, achives 30% penetration.
Britney Spears remarries.
AJAX becomes even more popular making the internet kinda suck.
UPnP applications become almost universal.
Firefox penetration hits 25% before IE7 comes out and knocks it down to 15%, even though IE7 sucks.
Pope Benedict XVI dies.
Democrats take the house, gain in Senate.
US troops remain in Iraq throughout the year.
Bush's approval rating reaches 30%.
2006 Hurricane Season exausts name list again.
Somebody creates an effective non-website based bittorrent network.
Pi proven to be normal.
3 new higher prime numbers found.
Bird Flu kills about a dozen people and is stopped completely.
"The third man of the fire will empower the forces of the blue prince." - Deemed to be quite vague but fits several situations that occur.
South fails to rise again.
Majority of scientists backslide on existence of dark matter halos.
RIAA/MPAA go even more apesh!t.

The latest advance from Diebold

[Belseth]

Voterless voting machines. No longer will the average american be burdened with the inconvience or respnosibility of voting. Simply register and you're done. Diebold will even see that you get to have a say in elections after you're dead. Field tested last year in Ohio the system is now ready for widespread use just in time for congrssional elections next year. Sit at home in comfort and watch the results to see who you voted for election night.

Predictions for 2006

[Animats]

1. Saudi Arabia finally admits the Gawar field has peaked. Oil passes $70 per barrel.
2. US interest rate spike. "Homeowners" with adjustable-rate interest-only loans default and are foreclosed.
3. Housing prices crash as foreclosures glut market.
4. Congress finally starts investigating some activities of the Bush administration.
5. No real change in Iraq. Neither side can force a decision, so both sides keep bleeding.
6. China announces major progress in their space program.
7. Micropayments flop, again. Goodbye, Bitpass.
8. A Cat 4 or 5 hurricane wipes out another southern US city, or New Orleans floods again.
9. One of the big three US car manufacturers goes bankrupt.
10. Total number of active blogs decreases.

My (decreasingly) reasonable predictions

[Shazow]

1. A dozen of new web-based RSS feed readers will be announced, all featuring tags and various intricate social features. Eventually one or two will be considered the "norm" (as Blogger, Livejournal, etc are considered the norm for blogging, despite all the imitators). My bookmarks folder rejoices.

2. AMD motherboards with DDR2 will finally show up. I finally upgrade from an obsolete 32-bit system. My applications rejoice.

3. Sony PlayStation 3 will be released. It will be sold out. Then more will be released. Then more will be sold out. Then more will be released. Then the price will drop a little. Then I'll buy one. Then it will be hacked by various groups for various purposes. Sony pouts. I rejoice.

4. A new flavour of Cola: Chocolate! (Eww) Oops, not technological, sorry.

5. Opera finally releases a stable, good, browser for PocketPCs. I rejoice.

6. Enlightenment 17 is finally released. I try it, don't like it, go back to XFCE.

7. XFCE 4.4 is finally released. I upgrade. I rejoice.

8. Microsoft releases Vista. Only thing new from XP: Aero and 9 versions of the same thing with 9 different price tags. (The cheaper version users are stuck with an inferior plastic paperclip.)

9. Apple releases their new line of Intel PowerBook laptops. No one notices -- attention diverted by the release of 4 and 8 gig iPod Nanos with FM radio. I consider buying one until I realize, again, that it's a waste of money. iPod lovers' collection of iPods grows to 9 units per person. Apple rejoices.

10. I go to sleep. You rejoice.

- shazow