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10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in 2007. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). Though these aren't technologies they expect to be in everyone's homes next year, they're sure this tech will be in the headlines. How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?" From the article: "Printed Solar Panels - Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually--more than triple the current solar output of the entire country."
The problem with the whole "Data Cloud" thing is that the network bandwidth just isn't there yet. I get impatient enough waiting for my files from my LOCAL hard drive (which has a peak transfer of around a gigabit per second) and yet the best broadband access you can get at the moment is lucky to exceed ten megabits peak transfer (and forget sustained). It's the same issue with network backups - you just can't transfer the terabyte of information I have on my home machine to anywhere on the internet fast enough for it to be called anything even approaching useful. I'll just keep the RAID setup for now, thanks.
Sorry, but I've been hearing about the wonders of storing all my data on some network drive for a long time now, but the storage requirements of "all my data" have been growing faster than the network bandwidth has. Until that trend is reversed, local storage is here to stay.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I work at a hospital, and I'll vouch that we're already investigating body area networks. Patient monitoring, obviously, is the big one; but we're also very interested in the cost savings of a good RFID sponge count system. After each surgery procedure, some poor shlep has to count through all the sponges and make sure that the count matches up with the number used. And if we're short a sponge or two, then we have to take an x-ray of that patient to see if something was left inside of them. And if something *was*, well, obviously it needs to be removed, necessitating more surgery, and another sponge count.... We're hoping that RFID/wireless chips are going to solve this problem. Also coming down the research pipe, as I understand, are a variety of wireless enabled surgical robots that can crawl the stomach and intestines and do various repair work, and RFID/wireless enabled aneurysm clips and pacemakers to warn against putting patients into MRI fields. Obviously, all vital sign monitoring equipment is getting ready to be put on the networks, which is going to be huge, especially with our associated nursing homes and the aging baby boomer population.
Even if solar becomes cheap enough, what will prevent me is my home owners association. They don't allow solar panels. Move to a neighborhood that doesn't have that rule? I would have to move to a neighborhood that doesn't have a home owners association. Yeah, good luck in finding one! Folks are so afraid of their property values being hurt, they turn into housing fascists.
Yes, this is a real problem. However, if cells become reasonably priced, and can be "printed", what would it take to "print" them onto an attractive subsurface so that it blends in nicely?
And, lest you think this is a NEW idea, an "I'm feeling lucky" Google search led me to somebody else who already had the same idea.
More expensive? Sure! Why else would they go to the extra effort? But it's at least POSSIBLE.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Heck, it's hard to argue against buying solar panels now. If they pay for themselves in 5 years, as has been suggested upthread, and they have a functional lifespan of > 25 years, you could buy >25 years' worth of electricity for the price of 5 years' electricity. The only 'risks', really are: a) what if the price of electricity goes down? and b) what if the price of solar panels (cost:watt) goes down?
If solar panels paid for themselves in 6 months, I'd cover my whole roof with them, sell my cars and buy cars that can run on electricity, convert my gas furnace and hot water heater to run on electricity... and I'd give my oil, coal, and gas-burning brethren unending hell until they did the same. If solar panels were cheap enough to pay for themselves in 6 months, it would make sense for everybody to do it- not only for environmental reasons, but also for economical ones.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.