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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.
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
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
In case of a natural disaster, they are on a server
No, mine aren't. They are on multiple site, geographically dispersed, diverse routed synchronous data arrays in secure and hardened data centres.
who has the proper copy and what data gets lost during automatic updates
There are 16 "proper copies" of each instance. Each instance represents a doctors surgery, a hospital trust*, an ambulance trust etc. There are no losses during updates, it's designed to be fully available and resilient in the event of the total loss of a datacentre.
(*trust is UK medical system speak for a local area and may contain one or all of the above)
I seriously doubt they can even call this a method to save storage space
Agreed. Last time I looked it was projected to be +9Pb. I have around 1Pb to look after here.
the weekly/monthly backups would take nearly as much space
The datacentres are synchronised. No old-fashioned "backups" take place. See my first point. However, non-patient related data is taken to tape daily and offsited.
It's a serious undertaking. ;-)
I laughed out loud when I saw that Bush had allocated $125m for EMR in the USA. This will cost BILLIONS.
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... [Argh!!! Your computer is infected!!! 8-[~~ ]...
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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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