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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.
until some jerk hacks that pacemaker and starts setting elderly people's heartbeats to 250 BPM....
Because you know... Linux is unsinkable, like Titanic? Read through Secunia advisories when you have the time... if you run a server, possibly a web server serving PHP scripts vulnerable to a variety of exploits, some of which can even lead to system compromise (rather than, say, something that can only be used to DDoS someone else), it's far less secure than just using an up-to-date Windows XP workstation with proper firewall setup and a user with good sense (i.e. don't visit untrusted sites with IE, don't run executables that you don't know what they are). Running a server more than offsets whatever security you gain by switching to a Unix.
The group I volunteer at runs a dozen or so Solaris workstations. Just because Solaris is less used, we have gotten past a few Linux exploit attempts (because script kiddies can't tell a unix from windows, and a real unix from a unix clone), but our users still somehow manage to get themselves hacked into. Just remember: Linux != Security. ${ANY_OPERATING_SYSTEM} + good sense == security.
Total worth of 2 cents:
:) I just use electricity...
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- 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.
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