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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."
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.
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
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
Pretty neat things though.. but I don't envy those who 'recover' the pills after theyve passed through someone. I don't imagine these are "recovered", but can you imagine the conversation in the doctors office when presented with one of these?
Doctor: Well sir, you have 2 options.
Doctor: We can give you this brand new SmartPill for $500
Doctor: or you can take this recycled SmartPill we just "recovered" from an elderly gentleman with chronic diarrhea for $7.50
Patient: uh...I'll take the new one, thanks.
You really didn't get that right at all. The hood rises up and forward, not opening like Herbie's mouth. New European pedestrian impact standards require there to be (I think) 6" of air space between the surface skin of the car and any big, heavy component like an engine or a structural member. This system allows compliance with that requirement, and a low hood line.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.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.