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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."
#11 = Web 2.0
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I tripled the size of my Body Area Network using the Twinkie Expansion Method so I could have enough bandwidth to access my whole personal Data Cloud.
Now my bed is made of Bendable Concrete and my girlfriend has left me, complaining about my Plasma Arc Gasification.
Now who is going to mend my Printed Solar Panel shirts?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
For example:
l ights/performance.htm
"Pedestrian Protection System (PPS)
Radar sensors and computer-controlled braking will keep drivers safer than ever, but what about pedestrians? In case your adaptive cruise control fails to spot someone darting into the road, TRW Automotive is introducing the PPS system: if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block. The system is already being tested, part of a drive to meet new European and Japanese regulations on pedestrian safety which are being phased in, starting with 2006 models."
Jaguar's new XK coupe has this: http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/xk/highlights/high
Not to mention FTTH (via Verizon), Perpendicular Storage (via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Mobile WiMAX (Rogers and Bell in Canada have this).
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Even if they make theoretically impossible 100% efficient solar panel. That's not enough for me to buy a solar panel.
.. you can bet I'll be off grid. I don't care about efficiency, I only care about cost.
.. but if you think about it .. the sides of the square are only 3 meters wide versus the 1 meter wide sides of the 100% efficiency panels. That's not a huge land area to sacrifice.
However, if they can make a 5% efficient solar panel. I will buy it.
Why? It all comes down to cost. Solar power is too expensive for me. It takes over 5 years for a solar panel to pay for itself. Also, a solar panel only lasts (the efficiency declines over time) about 20 years. The capital cost is too high.
So companies should focus on reducing the per watt cost of solar panels. Not on improving the efficiency. If you can make solar panels for $5 per 100 watt panel
A 100% efficiency solar panel can take up 1 m^2 and generate a kilowatt, a 10% efficiency solar panel would need 10 m^2 to match that up
Most of these are rated "Low" for short term impact. So why do I need to know about them next year?
So when they finally do get well known and publicized, we can all say its a dupe, and post links to this story!
Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage, but it is something that will be exceedingly useful. There are files storage services now, but many of them charge ten times what it would cost to back up your files locally. The innovation is that these services will finally become cheap and/or free, even for data in the hundreds of GB.
This gives you countless advantages: You can get away without buying extra drives and implementing RAID. You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router. You aren't required to have a static IP for your home machine, and you don't have to always keep it running. You can take apart your local machine, rebuild it, and move things around without worrying about your files. You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection and storing it without extra compression. Sounds pretty darn good to me.
Thats the equivalent of powering 1.3 Libraries of Congress. Or a string of AA batteries that would wrap around the library of congress 3 times!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I should just ignore the ones for 2007.
damaged by dogma
A five year payback is great, roughly the equivalent of 15% interest. That's far better than stocks, with far less risk. Ignoring risks and commissions, the stock market can be expected to have a 8-10 "payback time".
You are right, though. The answer is dollars per watt. Solar is still not there yet, though it is getting close to matching peak prices in some markets (California, Japan, Germany). However, the "printed" thin-film versions are still highly inefficient compared to normal silicon-crystal systems. Their cost advantage does not make up for this.
I'm amazed these things are just coming around now. I remember seeing them years ago on some disconvery channel show.
Pretty neat things though.. but I don't envy those who 'recover' the pills after theyve passed through someone.
:x
This way your dealer doesn't need to stock a variety of substances. You pop a pill, when it goes in, it connects with your system, and figures out what you really need to feel good, and then provides it.
What exactly is the business model of giving people unlimited free storage? Hard disks cost money, bandwidth costs money, and most people block ads anyway, so where is the profit? I find it difficult to believe that a company can run a business like that, with the exception of those companies, like Google, who can run it at a loss and support that loss with some other line of revenue. I suppose the service would have some prestige points, but I really see no way to make money that way.
I think the point is that they're about to get much cheaper if this company succeeds. If those solar panels were only marginally more expensive than roofing shingles and could pay for themselves within 6 months, would you still not buy them?
Duke Nukem
I just did a backup of my laptop. It took 6 single-layer DVDs, which were nearly full. At 20KB/s upstream, which is about what I get (and yes that's kilobytes not bits), that's a minimum of 17 days of continuous uploading, and that's assuming Comcast doesn't shut me down first.
Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210156&cid=171 38018
I also have another one somewhere here on slashdot, but couldn't find it.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
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
There was an article in the WSJ a couple of years ago where a guy in TX had to move out into the country so he could put solar panels on a house.
Now, having a solar generating station out in the country would help me greatly.
Don't mod me down: I was joking!
How many times do I have to tell you people? Hogsheads!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Actually, if you stopped for a moment to think about what's actually *your* data, in terms of original creation, a gigabyte is overkill. Individual people have a My Documents directory, containing text files and word documents, their program profiles, bookmarks, and emails (received and sent). I'm sure some extremophiles would contest me on the size, but for the average person, I don't think there is that much there.
MP3s is an entirely different subject.
I didn't see anything on the 2006 list that became a buzzword in 2006 - maybe they will in 2007, who knows. Only two on the list, Fiber to Home and IP Television, have made much news. There's a few obscure technologies that people will never care to know the name of, and the rest simply haven't come about. For 2007, how long will we be waiting for these? And why is Body Area Network on the list, a mere repeat of things that didn't make it to prime time in 2006 and is admittedly something they don't think will become widely manufactured or even accepted. In other words, these lists are a total washout.
So, while the US is facing terrorism that we fund ourselves via our addiction to foreign oil, the president is going on and on about switchgrass, and the entire world may be facing declining oil production while demand continues to increas, technologies that turn trash into power, cheaper solar pannels, and more secure passports will have a LOW impact? At the same time TV and file sharing over the internet, both problems we already have perfectly good solutions for (Cable, Satellite, movie rental stors, Netflicks, HTTP/FTP protocols) will have a HIGH impact? Something just doesn't add up.
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.
I wish the real world would really work out like that.
Last night I watched the movie "Who killed the electric car?",
(Everyone should see it, along with and "Hacking Democracy", "Fahrenheit 911" and "An Inconvenient Truth").
In that movie, Texaco bought out the NiMH Electric car battery technology and killed it.
Then GM and Toyota took back all the EV1's and crushed them.
I wonder how long it will be before some Oil company buys up NanoSolar and kills them too.
The same thing happen over and over. It's the same group of Big Oil, Bush and friends, that are holding us back from progress in almost the same way
MA Bell had done 20 years ago before it's breakup. Most of you don't realize that the Internet, Unix and Video Confrencing was held back for decades by MA Bell.
It's not technology that moves us forward but the decisions of the Rich and Powerful to allow us to move foward.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Are you kidding me? There's no way they can make sailor power more efficient. It's been in use for thousands of years, and it's not going away any time soon.
Large user created data: photos and home movies.
A high percentage of people will have high resolution digital photos. Some users will have digital camcorders. A few will have 300 hours of their kids filmed on HD digital camcorders, which would be terabytes of data.
And practically, there is a need to back up one's CDs and DVDs, since if something happens to them, there's no other way to get them back short of repurchasing.
A fraction of an amp? They'd better be talking about nanoamps, because anything higher would be hell of a lot to have coursing down your arms!
There was an announcement earlier this week by IBM that they've come up with a PRAM that is 500x faster than Flash, with unlimited writes, using half the power. This blows away the PRAM mentioned in this article. The lesson: IBM's unreleased product will always be better than your unreleased product!
Yeah - what you said, PLUS the ability to buy pieces at a time. The systems need to be very modular, so I can buy them as I have the resources. I'll probably never go out and buy $X,000 of solar panels in one shot, but I could probably afford a few hundred dollars' worth every few months. If you make it so you need to buy the whole system at once, and replace the whole thing at once should it die, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
The nice thing about the incremental purchase approach is that they probably won't all die at once, either. If the system is designed to be fault tolerant, it's much easier for me to replace one small subunit than to replace the whole kit-n-kaboodle.
-Walrus
New? Anyone who's ever done anything with old Macs knows this is the Preferences RAM, and when the clock starts acting funny, it's time to replace the PRAM battery.
<obligatory>"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"</obligatory>
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"That's not a huge land area to sacrifice."
Why would you sacrifice any land at all. How about just sacrificing some roof area instead?
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.
Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.
You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.
Though of course the fly ash and the tons of debris produced by coal burners is more radioactive, per energy produced, than that from a nuclear plant. Nuke plants are just generally about a million times less entropic in their output of nuclear materials, allowing for convenient disposal, as soon as politicians remove heads from tails.
- Strydre
I've known about PRAM for many years now. I was hoping by 2007 I wouldn't have to know about it, as it would be made obsolete - and I would no longer have to "zap the PRAM" when things start acting funky. Sigh.
... and then they built the supercollider.
For those of us who don't want to RTFA, (in no particular order):
10) Bendable Concrete
9) PRAM (Phase-Change Random Access Memory)
8) Printed Solar Panels
7) Passport Hacking
6) Vehicle Infrastructure Integration
5) Body Area Network
4) Plasma Arc Gasification
3) VoN (Video on the Net)
2) Smart Pills
1) Data Cloud
I guess when #3 comes about, we will be living in the "VoN Age"?
What's the cost of your electricity in 20 years? Oh, you have no idea? Correct. So how do you know whether or not it's cost effective?
When you can show the lads-point to a link-with your local electricity supplier that offers a 20 year pricing contract, then you can make such a statement. Until then, you have absolutely no data to assert your assumption and cult-like belief system, ie, it's time to dump "junk economic science".
Now, I can't assert anything either, but I can say that solar bought today has a verifiable fixed price, you can get ten year warranties on batteries and 20-30 years on panels, and odds are the normal electric bill will always be going up in cost,by the charged kilowatt hour. See, I admit I don't actually know, but run the odds around in your brain, do you really believe it is going to be either exactly the same as you pay now or actually get cheaper from your local electrico? Or do you think "energy" in all its forms will just be rising dramatically in cost?
Now I read a lot of energy news, and I'll tell you this, you ain't seen nuthin yet like the demands coming from the developing world within the next decade, and, if it is fuel derived-any brand fuel-costs are going to be going up, from sheer market pressures. There just slap doesn't exist the reserves in the next 20 years to fit that demand coming, especially from reserves that are already gone now, and even nuclear power has never been any way close to being as cheap as they always claimed, in fact, just check the rates anyplace where it is used extensively now, barely better cost-wise than coal, and actually more expensive than natural gas.
Solar is our only practical fusion power, something that joe sixpack to joe big company can actually get their hands on and *use*, and it will be that way for decades to come. Coal has giant environmental and health impacts, which if you add those into what electricity costs, would probably double it right today, just like if you add in what having to have some huge military keep the oil flowing from ovewrseas (and that barely) really means your gallon of gas is a lot higher, they just hide it with more junk economic science and astroturfing FUD..
We just don't have a lot more in the way of practical, deployable options right now,solar and wind power are at the top of the "we got it-let's use it" pile of the alternatives, so the sooner we start adopting, the faster we can get economies of scale going. Waiting until it is cheap enough by some vague junk economic science forumla is the same as waiting for cars to achieve 250 MPG before you buy one, you'll be a pedestrian for a long long time. It's better to support what we have now, with our wallet voting, if we want that tech to get better in the future.
Now I will agree that "cheaper by the watt and who cares about the size" is a completely valid option,I would actually thow some cash at that (I have thrown cash at normal PV now) but here's something else-there's no law says you have to immediately go from grid suplied to totally solar powered in one step. You can start with just running a few things around your house, then work your way up as the tech gets better and more affordable. This way the solar companies make some money, keep doing research, more and better factories are built,stuff gets better, and etc.. That has worked with any number of other technologies, look at computers and just the last ten years for example, but the nice machines we have now with the much better pricing only happened because people bought computers on a large scale ten years ago.
We are part of the problem, or part of the solution, that's the only choices we have right now.
No nuclear is not inevitable... Using things like the Nanosolar solar cells or one of many other promising alternate power systems.
Solar, Wind, wave, geothermal, Bio-fuels etc, it possible to recharge your electric car without Coal, oil or Natural gas.
Actually for $30K you can power your whole house just fine off the grid even sell back electricity to power your neighbors and make money from the power companies.
So with an electric car, you'd just get that charged at home for free also without polution...
Now with home prices at $500K for a shack here is California what's another $30K for Solar Panels.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Is anyone out there thinking what backups does the data centre do? Does it just use another online service? Tapes? Raid? These are important questions that will shoot it down for corporations. Who backs up the backups? who is responsible for the data?
My Grandfather was an expert on concrete, especially pre-stressed concrete. One of his party tricks was to show off a piece of thin, flat concrete, slightly larger than a standard ruler, then bend it in an arc.
He'd created this by stretching a thin wire with weights along a form, then pouring the concrete. Once the concrete was set, he removed the weights, which caused the wire to shrink, compressing the concrete and rendering it much more flexible.
Admittedly, they're actually talking about a different technology in the article, but they make it sound like no-one's ever made bendable concrete before.
|>
Here be Dragons
Body area network, must be invented by a geek who can't get laid:
"Let me just examine your body area network to see if I can pin-point this little problem... Do you feel a little tingeling here?"
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
will however completely change the equation for new housing.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
That would be cool, as long as you don't need special paper or ink.
Don't read Popular Mech.. I mean Science. I used to think they were okay until I found out they are a total tool for the man. They are tasked with shaping public perception and expectation. I read a report pointing out several examples but just the most recent one I can think of is thier 'debunking the 9/11 truth myths'. They are completely full of shit, although there is some cool technology in the mag.
If you watch 'They Live' three times in a row and then look at an issue of PS, I swear you will see the brain slugs all over that rag.
Believe it.
While I like online storage for transferring files between machines in different geological locations, I don't trust it for the majority of my files.
You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router.
Keeping an off-site backup of data does protect against fire. However, you'd be relying of your service provider to protect against theft and accidental deletions. No, you wouldn't need to open a local ftp channel with online file storage. However, your service provider would need to provide 27/7 online access. At least with having a local channel open, you can control how and when people access your data.
You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection
As this is illegal in several countries, I wouldn't recommend it. Service providers have a poor track record when it comes to handing data over to police without a search warrant.
One last thought, most corporations have policies against storing data on servers not controlled by said corporation. If the business sector doesn't trust them, why should I?
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
I assume from the title you think there's something wrong with the units used. They didn't say "430MW/year".
If you make a 43W cell, and you can make 10,000,000 of them in 12 months, then you can make 430MW worth of cells in a year. Units are ok, just a question of whether they have the technology and resources to achieve it.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
If you have put it in an autoclave, I don't have any issues about you inserting it into me afterwards. Do I want direct blood-to-blood contact with any member of the population? No. Do I think that fear is rational? Yes. Do I worry about surgery because oh-my-God-who-knows-where-that-scalpel-has-been? No. I *know* where it has been: the autoclave. It has no magical memory of being in the HIV-infected crack-fiend two weeks before.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Exactly. You'll be left at new years eve and be forced to party until new years eve 2007. On second thought, that's not so bad... Oh damn why did I read the article?
Just try having a dozen sailors in your cellar for a while and you'll soon try and find another power source !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
So we can then use any mp3 player out there with itunes.
This would be killed faster than you can eat an apple, and a new itunes would probably be released to detect it, but it could be done if you emulated
an older ipod 100% and remapped its HD to the other imposter mp3 player.
Any one got a dump of IDE/USB traffic dumps from itunes when it talks to the ipod?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really. On top of that maxing out the ADSL upload is going to make the connection suck bigtime
The reason this allowed the beam your grandfather manufactured to be so flexible is that it was so thin - basically a steel member with a coating of concrete (probably with a heavy dose of admixture to increase the concrete's plasticity). Attempting to apply the same approach to a concreate beam of appreciable scale would result in something that basically lacked the compressive strength or tortional rigidity for which it had been manufactured (the tensile strength would be unaffected as this essentially comes from the steel reinforcements in any case). This new technology allows you to fabricate a decent-sized beam of appreciable strength which nevertheless does not crack or spall when forced into flexure, but bends a little instead.
This will make a huge difference in the construction industry where serious over-stresses are a possibility (earth-quakes, land slippage, explosion risks). The one disadvantage I envisage is that - more often than you'd like to know - miscalculations or unaccounted stress factors can lead to the failure of structures over time, and while this is usually noticed and corrected thanks to stress cracks in rigid concrete members, flexible concrete will probably not give you the same warnings before it fails. This would need to be offset by the use of stress-monitoring and displacement checks such as are used in large bridges atm.
Of course, the focus this will bring to dynamic structural calculations means that Civ Eng undergraduates are going to drop out in their first year instead of their third...
Meta will eat itself
but when do I get my flying car?
Uhm.. Not to put a spanner in your ideas, but where I live 20Mb and 24Mb (cable and ADSL respectively) are available to customers without any problems. I'm currently paying 60 euros a month for a 20Mb downlink (granted that uplink is 2Mb). So if you would want to use this for purely retrievable data, then your 10Mb doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
And just ftr, this is sustained. I get 2.4MB/s from my corporate network through a VPN connection without any real problems.
Furthermore in the university town I used to live, we had Gb fibre pretty much all over the place. My connection to the university network was 11MB/s sustained, only limited because of the intermediate 1G -> 100Mb router.
So it's available, just not everywhere yet (and yes, I live in the Netherlands, which seems to be a leader in the broadband arena at the moment)
Splut.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Butt-Area Network? As in "you can take your poxy 56k modem and route it via your BAN"...? Hm, maybe I should go and read teh article!
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I won't buy a Hybrid car, it's too expensive. I won't buy solar panels for my roof, they're too expensive.
The fact of the matter is that if we want our planet to be here for our children, we need to re-evaluate our priorities, do things that GASP might inconvenience us. It's not a game anymore, it's we're not talking about 3 toed butterflies or baby seals, global warming is happening as we speak, and we can stop it.
Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage
I agree. It makes me think of a tag cloud, not hard drive space.
I have the same issue with "VoN (Video on the Net)." Nobody calls online video distribution "VoN," do they? The closest to that I've actually seen is the term "net video."
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I use http://www.carbonite.com/pricing.aspx? very cheap, unlimited storage, and fantastic customer service! (not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer). BTW: if you do sign up, why not use the referral link http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUI D=3557&a=0 :)
R