Slashdot Mirror
15 Important Tech Concepts In 2006
MBoy wrote to mention a Popular Mechanics story discussing 15 technology concepts that are likely to be important in the coming year. From the article: "Body Area Network (BAN) - Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home." I prefer Personal Area Network (PAN), myself.
There are those who will put forward the argument that 30 megabits isn't going to improve the average Internet experience over the 5-8 megabit speeds being offered now by a lot of cable and some DSL providers. But didn't Bill Gates once say that 640k of memory should be more than enough for anyone? :-)
Just like most broadband service offerings, speed will be asynchronous. Right now, my 8 megabit downstream line is only 768k upstream. But the 5 and 15 megabit service will be 2 megabits up, which gives you better than a T1 into the home. The 30 megabit service gives you 5 megabits up. The consumer packages, according to their FAQ, do not allow you to run a server, but give it a little time. 5 megabits up is enough to run a nice little web server so long as you don't get Slashdotted or DDOS'ed.
Of course, it also means that compromised PCs will be able to do nasty things their botnet masters command 6-7 times faster. But when I go FIOS, I go 100% Linux.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Someone messed up while writing this article. Samsung said that they were making 16Gb (gigabit) chips, not 16GB chips. TFA: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 13/0243231
until some jerk hacks that pacemaker and starts setting elderly people's heartbeats to 250 BPM....
From TFA:
Ajax
When you use Google Maps, the Web site doesn't pause to reload the page each time you zoom in or pan to the side, and the URL remains "maps.google.com" instead of the meaningless string of letters and numbers you see at older sites like MapQuest. Google Maps is using a new technique that Web-watcher Jesse James Garrett has dubbed Ajax, for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Weaving together existing technologies, Ajax will help make Web services feel more like programs that run on the user's own computer, Garrett says, releasing Internet content from the limitations of conventional Web design by reimagining the browser as an operating system.
Surely, if the concept already exists, people know (of) it, and it's not one to know for 2006, but one already known from 2005?
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
Ok great, electronic medical records... Lets break this down shall we?
In case of a natural disaster, they are on a server... unless the server was the point of impact of that disaster. Then you may think distributed copies, which leads to a problem of who has the proper copy and what data gets lost during automatic updates. I seriously doubt they can even call this a method to save storage space, seeing as how even if they were served in a single local, the weekly/monthly backups would take nearly as much space. Let alone distributed backups, this is just my tangent tho... proove me wrong people.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Last fall, Apple brought NAND chips into the hands of the public with the 2GB and 4GB iPod nano music players. Capacities will only increase. Samsung has announced that its 16GB NAND chip will be on the market before the end of 2006.
Anyone remember this one from a few days ago?
What kind of a concept are these 'screwdrivers' and 'hammers' you speak of?
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP): Think of it as DRM for your display. Microsoft will be supporting this technology into the upcoming Vista operating system and others may follow as well.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI): As seen on the new Intel Macs, EFI is an upgraded BIOS specification as created by Intel. EFI allows for hardware drivers to remain in the firmware and operate independently of operating system. The EFI can also detect and select operating systems, eliminating the need for a separate boot loader.
Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE): While this was created in 2005, Microsoft hopes for SSE to gain momentum and compete with the RSS standard in 2006. SSE extends the RSS 2.0 specification from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows. Microsoft even released it under the Creative Commons license, the same license covering RSS 2.0.
Radio controlled pacemaker? This will have to show up on 'CSI' pretty soon then. Would _you_ want a pacemaker that someone could re-program wirelessly? Say someone sitting behind you on the train/bus/subway/airplane?
Or maybe they use some strong security... WEP anyone? Now that would be freaking hilarious. Security Alert: "We regret to inform you that your heart implant is vulnerable to a wireless attack. The risk is mitigated by the fact the attacker must be within 5 feet of you, and own a laptop with special radio components that can be built using plans freely available on the internet for about $26 in parts.Please do not worry, sue us, or be surprised if you die when your enemies figure this out."
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
I don't thing this is much of a help "if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block". What?
Driving is a privilege not a right - people should not have technology fill in for their lack if skill and/or concern. I used to drive professionaly, transports {tractor trailer}, school buses, furniture trucks, courier vans, taxi, etc and over the years I have taken 9 PDI { professional driver improvement} courses. More people should have greater concern for their driving habits and more people should have their liscences revoked for their thoughtless/reckless behaviour. It's not that I'm against technology to help drivers, it's that studies say that many drivers are now using these systems as crutches. Bah Humbug - just had to get that off my chest :(
They were the "killer apps" of 320 BC.
Ben | PhotoSydney
By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home.
i find this scary there was a horrifying bugs in old computers that could be used remotely to purposes increase the CPU clock rate to rediculous levels resulting in serious damage.
Since a dead CPU is the heart of a dead Computer
i wouldnt want dead heart in my body
How about the so called HAN that was hyped by RedTacton?
www.redtacton.com/en
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Screwdrivers?! I don't think so.
But hammers certainly.
Ben | PhotoSydney
From the article:
Likewise, Microsoft says metadata searches will be integrated into its Vista OS, which ships later this year.
Funny people, that.
I
...
predict
that
fitting
one-page-articles
...[Next>]
on
one
web
page
... [Buy now!]...
will
be
hot
in
2006.
... [Argh!!! Your computer is infected!!! 8-[~~ ]...
Ah,
wishful
thinking
...
Clueless management of a secure OS makes it less secure than an insecure OS fully patched up and properly administered.
WELL DUH!
Global warming is a cube.
Exactly how does that fit with HAN SOLO? Networks usually consist of more than one....
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
I don't know what happened to that technology in the end. Its not visible today so they must've shelved it. But IBM owns patent rights to the use of the term Personal Area Network, of that I'm sure.
Late middle ages, apparently. I'd never thought to wonder when the screwdriver was invented. Thanks for the prompt.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Total worth of 2 cents:
:) I just use electricity...
------------
- Driver-Monitoring System
As demonstrated earlier by Mercedes, here is one more next-gen driving system in your car that can fail in unexpected situations.
No wonder that for mission critical systems in space ships, NASA still uses previous generation computers.
- Body Area Network (BAN)
Perfect marketing strategy: call little electornic devices you implant in your body "ban". Cue in music from the Matrix.
There will be of course, major privacy concerns about this (imagine someone waving a small device around you and obtaining full personal info and medical records).
- IPTV
2006 is a bit earlier to call it a win for IPTV and a bit late to call it a "new concept" as well.
- Metadata
Again, why the heck is this called a "new" concept? OSX had it before 2006, office (and other apps) had it for years, but most importantly, Internet had it for ages and is already sick of it and deprecated it.
Metadata in that context is just poor man's data indexing. Search engines in the past used metadata because they didn't have the brains and power to read the pages themselves, now Desktop search engines need that hack until smarter algorithms are developed.
While I'm all for it, it's just too old to be new again.
- NAND Flash Memory
Uh 16 GB? Nope, 16Gb, err 2GB in other words. That said with those prices and sizes, you can still have a 2.5 inch hard disk sized Flash block at around 200GB capacity.
Which will cost roughly $9000.
- Nanoparticle Batteries / Micro Fuel Cells
We've had revolutionary laptop and mobile batteries coming every next year and still nothing. I'd rather wait and see this time, instead of trusting the hype again.
- SPIT
Right, we have new tech concept for spamming. Thanks for mentioning it folks, just rub it in, won't ya.
- EMR (electronic medical records)
Hehe, wait until we have the "600 000 medical records lost (or stolen) from hospital X" news, following similar trends for other important electronic data we see nowadays.
- Coal Gasification
I prefer mine hard, but ok I have no clue about this anyway
- Perpendicular Storage
They missed the more important news. It's not perpendicular storage, which is great but which most of us shouldn't care about, but what it enables and how it changes the HDD designs.
2.5 inch designs are set to replace the current 3.5 inch drives on desktops (Seagate pioneers this move). the avdantages are:
- much lower noise
- higher rotation speed
- much faster access time and reading speed
- much less electricity spent (I think around 5-6 times less than current generation 3.5 inch disks)
- they are a lot smaller and look pretty cute (yep I know I know..)
With that you can have reasonably priced desktop 2.5 disks with capacity 160GB.
I for one, welcome our new... ah forget it.
------------
What happens when a deprived person brute-forces your wireless pace-maker and sets it to extreme mode?
Of course the chances of this are slim to none and the benifits of these emerging technologies peobly outweight the risks, as long as adequate debugging measures are taken during the process of writing their firmware.
I always imagined a time in the near future, where the implimentation of technology into the human body would happen slowly, and thus allow for adaption. When someone screams out 2006 "Year of the Cyborb" one needs to remeber that hearing aids, and pace makers have been around for a very long time. Of course, now it is only a matter of time before electronic prehipherals become something of a "i do/i dont" in society.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FLASH has NO moving parts, not FEWER than hard disk technology?
Havent read the article.
Is there security on that? You know someone will walk through a crowd with a portable transmitter, setting everyone's pacemaker to 'off'. Some people are just antisocial. (Me, I'm cynical)
Yay me!
"By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office"...
Umm.. so.. this straight up gives you the ability to kill someone using home-made tech. How long until someone steals the "doctor-only" equipment, reverse engineers it, and suddenly schematics/code are written up? I can just imagine the possibilities, and they are NOT worth the convenience.
Nice powerful transmitter to set all in-range pacemakers to 2 beats per minute... grab tickets to the Superbowl... now maybe our wirelessly-configured pacemaker isn't so convenient. The most disturbing thing is, it's obvious you could transmit these lethal configuration signals completely undetected. You could commit murder to no end in that manner and NEVER be detected, or even suspected.
Fucking unbelievable.
"I prefer Personal Area Network (PAN), myself."
Agreed. Much better than wearing a old school deoderant brand, IMO. Of course, it does have a certain appeal in the slang. Maybe you could call these people "k-lined" or something. You know... Ed was K-Lined with a pacemaker. Come on... Klined. BANned... IRC... Wireless...
Ok, I'll shut up now.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Drive is a privilege. But if you think that technology is not already making up for poor driving skills, then you are mistaken. What do you call power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmissions? How about artificial lighting to make up for our species generally poor night vision?
Following your logic, we should ban anything useful that could be used to kill a person. Let's see, where do we start? Knives? Axes? Baseball bats? Crowbars? Darts (put on your poison of choice)? Syringes and needles (see previous)? Cars? Gasoline and lighters? Fact is, there are many usefull things that could be used to harm people, or to kill them. It's called murder. Of course murdering with a knife could be done as discreetly as killing your victim with a radio-programmable pacemaker, except that in the latter case, defending the victim is orders of magnitude easier. The only difference between my examples and these pacemakers, are that they involve technology, which, as we all know, should be feared and prevented from being implemented in modern society.
"Durr, this key has a top, and that's a moving part, right?"
[sigh]
From the article (Ajax):
"When you use Google Maps, the Web site doesn't pause to reload the page each time you zoom in or pan to the side, and the URL remains "maps.google.com" instead of the meaningless string of letters and numbers you see at older sites like MapQuest."
So according to Popular Mechanics, breaking Web bookmarking is now a feature. I like apps that break bookmarking about as much as I like apps that break the back button, style the scroll bar (usually in a way that would have a bad affect on usability), and/or write to my browser's status bar.
OK, the speed of Google Maps is a Good Thing, but everything comes at a cost. The cost, in this case, is pretty high. Breaking bookmarks breaks sharing, and ease of use for single users.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Ajax is not the first thing to break bookmarks. Hell, POST DATA, used very regularly, will break your bookmarks as well. Plus, google maps still gives you a dedicated link you can click on which will reload the page with the real link if you really need to bookmark it or send it to others.
A voice in your ear says: "Possible copyright violation detected. Pending further investigation, we have shut off your pacemaker."
I prefer Personal Area Network (PAN), myself.
Does this mean that a man with erectile dysfunction might be implanted with a peter PAN?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah, like in the beginning of The Core movie.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The human population is on a straight line of technical developpement that is really impressive! I read in "Science et Vie" that the blind people becomes to see, that the paralyzed people can learn to walk again and a lot of stuff like that. I think we should have "espoir" into the technology and I'm sure that if you read this, you think the same thing! And now, the can repair the life itself where any medidal intervention was possible before! The coolest thing in that is that it is because os the computer science, the same science that give us all the possibilyty to navigate on the Web! Thanks Eintein! It is a part because of you! ___ Sebastinator.. Thanks for visiting my web site...
Thanks for visiting my Web site! Post your comments on my forum!
.. catching a virus :-)
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Wait till you see how much 98% of the country *doesn't* have insanely high rents, how much food *doesn't* cost, how *cheap* gas is even after wars and hurricanes, and what a "multicultural society" looks like that has zero active control over its borders (think crime like you wouldn't believe and half the radio stations are spanish now, and every time you have to use phone support you get asked if you speak english before anything else happens). Oh ya, you'll rediscover how huge the US is and how cool it still can be, near tropics to arctic inside the same nation, two ocean frontage, and one sea (3 if you count the arctic ocean), and there's still a whopper amount of good lookin' girls. And you can drive big cars, and some of them even are starting to get acceptable mileage now.
The good, the bad and the ugly, if you have been gone for some years it will be a mini culture shock.
Not harder. How hard can it be to be a legal business??? simple paperwork crap. Register a corporation (your choice of type) in Delaware for 50 bucks and call yourself a consultant. Done. It has a lot of other tax advantages as well then, including your business class high speed synchronomous line then. Go ahead and play their silly game, everyone else does. You don't really think wealthy people actually pay a lot of taxes do you? The middle class folks who aren't incorporated pay the bulk of the taxes in this nation, wealthy folks are incorporated and use trusts, they get to deduct most everything, or transfer it, or delay it, or whatever, the same way big corps milk the system. It's setup for THEM, so just buy and sign your way into the "club". Immediate fringe bennies like getting your high speed connection.
Funny, I've never been hit by anybody in over 10 years, and I drive a lot.
I'll bet that you live in a more rural area, and the GP lives in a more urban one. I dont know if there is research to support this, but I would bet that as you increase the number of drivers in a limited area, you increase the chance of a mishap.
I have certianly noticed this after growing up in a small town, and moving to a medium sized city. In the small town even as a teenager I never even had a close call. Wheras I am a much better driver now, and drive a smaller car rather then a pickup, but I still have had several close calls in the past 5 years.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
But what do you mean by "My ISP"? Do you mean your cable modem company, or do you mean some DSL company that you're using, or some DSL company your telco has a deal with?
Cable modem service really is highly asymmetric technology, and when they deploy faster services for businesses it's usually either DSL or a fat private-line access of some sort, which they'd typically deploy equipment for into heavily-business areas, not heavily-residential areas (if you're in a suburb, your local corner store probably can't get high-end business lines from the cableco either, just DSL.)
DSL services come in many flavors of symmetric and asymmetric, and most of the symmetric versions top out at 1.1 or 1.5 Mbps, and only if you're close enough to the telco office - I live somewhere between 11000 and 16000 feet from my telco, depending on which telco tech you believe, and I can only get SDSL up to 384kbps, while 768 fails - but the ADSL flavors generally get better distance, so I'm running on antique 1544/384 service until I get around to upgrading to 3 Mbps.
384 kbps is a *lot* of upstream bandwidth for a home user. Unless you're file-sharing, or trying to ship out Linux distributions, or running a business that ships lots of graphical data to prospective customers, you're not going to keep it very full. Business video-conferencing, for instance, typically uses 320-384kbps of video data, which expands to 400-450 after adding IP headers, but that's the kind of image you get from a $5-10,000 Polycom system; a $29 webcam is more likely to run 128kbps or less. VOIP runs as much as 80kbps if you're using uncompressed voice, so it can be nice to have 384 instead of just 128 upstream, but it's not critical. Blogging and posting on forums don't use any significant upstream bandwidth - you probably don't type faster than 100 WPM, which is about 100 bps, so maybe if you wrap a lot of web decoration around it you need 300 baud upstream. (If you're filesharing, then yes, you can soak up unlimited upstream bandwidth, especially if you're using BitTorrent, which is designed to use bandwidth aggressively.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm surprised that more wireless devices haven't already been in widespread body usage. One of the hard problems is a simple idea: getting a signal to and from something in the body (like a brain implant) through a wire that penetrates the skin. It's hard to make it so an infection doesn't start around the hole that the wire is passing through.
Wireless would bypass this completely. Put the implant under the skin and transmit signals through the skin. No break in the skin that could let an infection in.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Overall, good summary!
hilarious
In 1895 there were only two cars in the whole state of Ohio. They collided.