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What to Watch for in 2007
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek picks its '5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007.' The list, which is based on the idea that these are areas which will move into the mainstream this year, includes RFID, graphics processing engines, server virtualization, Web services, and mobile security." What made your list?
Disruptive technologies? Anything that makes us more efficient tomorrow is disruptive to what fell short yesterday.
1. CRITEO, the collaborative filter. They're moving forward with their API (it's free to register) and they're easy to integrate with from blogs and sites of all sorts. I'm a huge fan of collaborative filtering -- I think it's the next step beyond tagging.
2. HSDPA - High Speed Download Packet Access. T-Mobile should finally roll out some 3G services, allowing video phone calls, faster connections from the road, and a wider coverage of high speed access other than WiFi. I'm interested in WiMax, but I don't have as much faith in the technology due to our ridiculously tyrannical FCC regulations. HSDPA will seriously work to replace my car radio, Skype over GPRS, and other dead media.
3. More IP to POTS interaction. I'm really sick of the area code-phone number designations -- I use Skype for about 30% of my phone calls and 100% of my international phone calls, and I love it, but it isn't there yet. I can't wait for better ways to communicate vocally. My HTC Trinity P3600 phone supports WiFi, EDGE, GPRS and HSDPA -- hopefully soon we will see a move to an integrated POTS/WIFI(VOIP)/etc system where vocal communications can translate from one topology to another.
4. More bandwidth. I was one of the first testers of xDSL in Illinois before it was a catchphrase. I had a 128k/128k SDSL that I used for "free" for 6 months and then paid $200 a month for at the end of the trial period. It changed my world. Now we're rocking crazy speeds, but they're still not enough. I'm still blown away at what I pay for Comcast's 8mbps connection (2mbps realistic). The next jump won't quite be an order of magnitude, but everything helps, especially when running remote desktops, desktop collaboration, and high-bandwidth SQL requests.
5. Lower latency. I don't know if this will really happen, but I'm looking forward to even less lag. High bandwidth != low latency, and if anything I have seen worse latency lately than every before. My customers have been working harder to introduce faster websites, faster SQL responses and faster connections to their VPNs -- all to reduce latency. For me, latency is in the top 5 list of inefficiencies that slow me down. Reducing that inefficiency can likely double my producivity in many tasks.
Top 5 list of non-issues but seem to be important to others:
1. Mobile webpages. I run Firefox on my laptop tethered to my cell phone on the go. I also run Opera. Mobile websites sound great for the common phone, but the #1 reason why that is required is because cell phone companies lock out the ability to run better mobile web clients. Competition will hopefully knock this out -- releasing web designers from having to maintain a second mobile site (or a CSS that gives mobile sites better rendering).
2. RFID. This is a non-issue for me because it just isn't secure. While it is easy to fake a barcode (for example, to barcode a costly item with a less costly barcode and trick the check-out clerk), I'm not sure how RFID will really change my life. If anything, that form of automation will make my life more inefficient in having to deal with the "human check" follow through to verify that the RFID information is correct.
3. Credit Card security systems. I'm not concerned with credit card fraud. I hate Citibank -- they block my card about twice a week because I travel to a new city or country every week. If someone steals my card, I am not liable -- neither is Citibank. The retailer is. Security should be at the retail end. I do a chargeback, the merchant account provider charges back the merchant. End of story. I hate security on credit, it is ridiculous and limits me all the time.
4. Web 2.0. I'm getting sick of Web 2.0 interfaces, even though they look slick and they seem to work well for some websites. More than anything, they make my life difficult because they're not alw
"this year, includes RFID, graphics processing engines, server virtualization, Web services, and mobile security."
By my count, thats 5.
Vista.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
People complaining about RFIDs in passports, complaining about how software-over-the-web is just a way for companies to have a constant revenue stream without a physical product to show for it, complaining about "what will be hot in year 2XXX", complaining about how we've already had articles like this posted not long ago...
Keep an eye on cheese. No,no, not ordinary cheese. Cheese by itself is pretty interesting, granted. But there's something better - I'm talking about cheese over the internet.
It's going to be bigger than tulips.
Mark my words, in twelve months time your world will be changed beyond recognition because of internet-cheese.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
Lives, Careers, Friends all disrupted.
Ubiquitous spelling & grammar check for the internet.
3rd party or built into the browser doesn't matter.
That'll be the first step towards SkyNet becoming sentient.
Otherwise, it'll just be a retarded "LoL n00b" AI.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Disruptive technologies to watch for, huh? I'm surprised they didn't mention even more advanced british cameras watching their citizens. People better watch for em cuz they'll sure be watching for people. With the latest loudspeaker and aggressive tone upgrades in 06, I bet some "disruptive" stuff is on the way this year. I'd bet any buck Britian will lead the way in AI camera technology in no time in the next year.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Wow, I got "mobile security" for Christmas. Thanks! This is going to change my life.
Would someone please tell me how server virtualization or graphics processing engines are disruptive. (Innovative, yes, but disruptive?)
Philosophy.
Come on you guys, no Neuronet? The soon-to-be replacement of teh Internets, the powerful and mysterious thick pipes that will allow full immersive virtual reality in exchange for your domain registrations and membership fees?
I feel disenfranchised.
is when you they decide not to work properly (if at all).
I find articles written by starry eyed techno-prognosticators are quite possibly more disruptive than anything that has come out in the past 4 years, (possibly withthe exception of DRM: a truly disruptive technology).
You are where you are at the time you are there.
#2. Web Services -
Yeah, "new" as in
#3. Server Virtualization (for free)! - I've been using VMWare since the close of the last century. It's "disruptive" now that it will be "free"? Whatever.
#4. Advanced Graphics Processing - Right. I'm sure everyone will find that typing their documents in 3d is so
#5. Mobile Security -
The "perimeter" needs to be re-established and re-evaluated as "defense in depth" with multiple levels of stateful firewalls and intrusion detection.
The stupid "scan the computer before you let it on the network" approach is too brittle. All it will take is the first virus / trojan / worm that can "reply" to that scan with faked credentials for the apps that are supposed to be scanned and you have an infected box on your network. Particularly with the new advances in rootkits for Windows.
Entire article on one page
Duke Nukem Forever is released causing a widespread rift in the fabric of space and time
ACK NAK RST
That's what I'm tipping for this year. A DRM drunk OS and the acceleration of the political maddness we've seen over the last few years. I'm tipping we'll see harsh and draconian enforcement against individuals of the criminal IP laws we've allowed to pass over the last few years too. Happy f'ing new year.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm shocked this hasn't been mentioned. I'm pretty sure were going to start seeing eInk displays all over the place.
CSS is fine. CSS3 is even better. The problems you're encountering are just half-assed implementations of the standard, most likely in IE and Gecko (though webkit/khtml and Opera have known issues as well). The worst problems come from IE6 and IE7 where rendering bugs, improper implementation, and non-implementation of standards cause poor results with things that work just fine in all the other major browsers. Once you start applying (admittedly dodgy) workarounds, which are done by either restructuring your XHTML or adding goofy hacks to your CSS, or both...then you start to to degrade your design in the competition's browsers.
As far tin-foil hattage is concerned, I firmly believe that this is intentional on the part of Microsoft.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Amen. DRM is going to be waaaay more disruptive than virtualization or, uh, shiny graphics.
Do you use a computer? Are you in any way involved in the consumer computer industry? How about the creation of digital media content? Do you like music, movies or pictures? If you said yes to any of these, DRM is going to be a major pain in YOUR ass.
"What made your list?"
Taco really fixes the problems with slashdot.
Massively parallel software development will move towards the mainstream as CPUs with 4 or more cores start to become mainstream. Inherently parallel languages such as system C intended for hardware design (and never really took off in this arena) may garner a second life as a way to reuse C/C++ libraries in environments with large numbers of processor cores running in parallel. Software engineers will eventually have to wrap their brain around the concepts found in HDL languages such as Verilog/VHDL whee everything is assumed to happen in parallel, with program state changes at defined synchronization/clock intervals.
My rights don't need management.
I predict that Slashdot will fix the Y99 Dates in 2007
//it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/01/2359254
//it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=2007/01/01/235925 4
http:
would become:
http:
"Do you use a computer? Are you in any way involved in the consumer computer industry? How about the creation of digital media content? Do you like music, movies or pictures? If you said yes to any of these, DRM is going to be a major pain in YOUR ass."
Which at this point is more hot air than real result. You're more than free to demonstrate a content creator who couldn't play their own content. Read that again, their own content. Most of the DRM bellyaching is about content created by someone other than the owner of the device.
From the article; "Nvidia has had its CUDA program for several years now to assist developers that want to harness their graphics engines for computational applications."
Nuh uh. CUDA is new with the G80. They may have had something going, but it wasn't cuda.
As for being disruptive -- maybe using the GPU for computation will speed some things up -- those things that are extremely parallelizable, and single precision FP -- thats about it. The GPUs are not easy to program to -- CUDA is pretty tricky, and it's fairly well tied to nVidia's new architecture (I don't see ATI adopting it). The stuff from PeakStream and RapidMinds is a bit higher level, and can work on both ATI and nVidia chips, both have their pros and cons. It's early days yet for this -- I don't see it catching on in a big way for another couple of years. Then I think it will catch on in a big way -- but the tools are too immature at the moment for that to happen, and it's hard to predict what is going to catch on. Anyone interested in this stuff should be paying close attention to all of them -- I know I am.
Ian Ameline
I expect chip manufacturers to stop wasting time building more cores, more threads, etc. That doesn't scale linearly and gets horribly convoluted after a while. It is getting back to the level of complexity that caused RISC to evolve. AMD are already looking into building many specialist cores and this is a sensible way to go about things in many ways. 2007 may well spell the end of the "microprocessor" in favor of building a large number of specialist cores, producing a distributed processing unit, not a central one. Along with this, I also expect "Processor In Memory" to be revived as a technique - stuff that is small enough to be added to the RAM directly may as well be done entirely within RAM. There have been attempts at using this to reduce network latency - have the network stack within the memory itself. No bus traffic, so none of the problems of offload engines. Based on Cray's paper in this field, I'm guessing that you can cut latencies by 90% by this method, for stacks small enough to cram into memory.
Provided development goes well and we can eliminate the infighting, political intrigue and backstabbing, an organization I am connected with should have a major piece of disruptive technology out this year. If it doesn't go well, then it might easily be another twenty years before anything is produced at all. Just remember, you didn't hear it here first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have stopped holding my breath re eink.
But sure, there seems to be some appliances coming. Now we just wait for e.g. support from the major book publishers -- and a good code browsing/annotation application.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Do you use a computer? Are you in any way involved in the consumer computer industry? How about the creation of digital media content? Do you like music, movies or pictures? If you said yes to any of these, DRM is going to be a major pain in YOUR ass.
Amazing. Tell me, how big a pain has iTunes been now? Or the CSS on the DVDs your grandma bought? Because that's the consumer level of tolerance for DRM, and as far as PITAs go, it's kinda minor.
Last I checked it is disruptive now. One 4p server hosting 20VMs. Saving power, saving space, etc.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The same as the kind you buy right now to protect your iPod (but really to make it look different from everyone else's).
You'll be able to buy "custom" wrappers, skins, protectors, whatever with built-in Faraday cages and little velcro flip-up windows to unshield your RFID chip.
In fact, now would be a good time to start working on those designs and the marketing material.
Mobile web pages aren't important on cell sanymore because the providers try to keep you in their fence. I have a Verizon handset and the mobile web browser USED to be able to go to ANY mobile site on the web but now I am stuck in their walled garden. Examples are the FREE traffic web stuff on Google pluse just google searching at all. Verizon has both of them blocked. There's a software product called Metro which does subway time tables and would be damn useful in DC and Chicago when I go there and they just recently webified it for cell phones. Well, Verizon blocks this too. I have called Verizon supprt and bitched but got nothing. Verizion wants you to pay for all of the stupid java apps to get weather and more. Get it now should be called ROB me now.
One thing I would like to see friggin FIXED this year is a EVDO handset with bluetooth that Verizon will let me use my PDA with or failing this a fair price plan. I don' tlike the idea of paying them 80 bucks for EVDO which see's LESS use then my Cable modem yet my cable modem bill itself is HALF the cost of the EVDO plan. The first EVDO or HDSPA provider to have a 20 a month plan for unlimited bandwidth will see masses of users go to them.
Gorkman
>Amazing. Tell me, how big a pain has iTunes been now?
Well, Itunes did require me to deal with a woman who was literally sent into a murderous rage when it erased her ipod without warning.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
what you should really watch for, at the same time even, are robot or other AI rebellions and alien invasions (and asteroids I suppose too but that's not technology but yes aliens are cuz it's...alien technology lol) Your homework for 2007 is to go watch the movie Signs and i Robot back to back, alright?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
These many answers are good, but I think we should all be wary of the Spanish Inquisition. No one ever expects them, possibly due to their many elements of surprise...let's see, there was uhm...
More bad posts from me? :-D
Oh gawd, not another free energy device. At least they have a pretty website. It'll be interesting to see how they react after their claims have been examined by credible scientists.
CSS3 is 'fine' in the sense that it doesn't exist yet in any practical sense. What prevents every browser from interpreting CSS3 differently, as they inevitably will do?
CSS3 isn't any more fine than what's already around, but we can remain hopeful =)
Want to see the whole article at once? So do I!
t icle.jhtml?articleID=196800208
[printable version]
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableAr
- The first U.S. Passport RFID virus.
- The first virus to successfully attack the passport reader at an airport.
- A marketing gadget that enables Mobile-spam phone calls via automatic IMI look-up.
- Binary or Trinary component virii that adapt by downloading components off the web based on the environment they execute in.
- Hardware Update viruses that embed themselves into the Flash-ROM of your devices and cannot be removed.
- Botnets on cellphones.
- "Spam servelet" applications that do something actually useful (contact management, phonebook, etc) in order to disguise their primary function as open-relays.
- IT wages to continue to decline as PHB's start believing "Network Management for Dummies" sales-droids.
- Singapore becomes the next IT Out-sourcing capital of the world after American companies realize that 'pore labor is even cheaper and better educated than Indian, and a 'porean speaks better English.
- 'Firmware-By-Software-Driver' companies panic after a buffer-overflow exploit cripples Vista.
- Microsoft tries to buy more bloggers, and fails miserably, again.
- Some middle-eastern country becomes the first nation to be suborned into a single bot-net.
- 'Dumbing Down' of American Television continues. The number of people who cannot find Canada on the map sky-rockets.
- A 'Family First' politician resigns over a sex-scandal with a neighbor.
- A 'Ethics First' politician commits suicide over a sex-for-influence scandal.
- Hollywood releases the first movie in 30 years that is worth paying full ticket price to see again.
- The RIAA sues someone who doesn't even know what a computer is for downloading music illegally.
Friend of mine lives in Fukuoka, Japan. Has fiber-to-the-house. Has had it for years. Pays less for it than you'd pay for xDSL or cablemodem here, and the bandwidth is incredible.
I vote for the telcos actually rolling out all the fiber they promised us (and the FCC?) they would 15 years ago. They hung 72-strand SieCor in front of my folks' house back then, for commercial customers.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
... to see 'Web services' in that list. AFAIK Web services are used already in many applications. Maybe not calling it selves 'web services', but still...
So I wonder: What exactly people consider "main stream"? Quantification (how many people use it) or advertising/popularity (how many people scream "I use web services and I'm happy with it")?
Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
How about an actual, working neural disruptor? Or an off the shelf EMP generator? Where are my touchless tasers? What about a new growler, with digital cycling of frequencies for maximum, ear-bleeding auditory annoyance?
I would settle for a better stinkbomb - more farty, if you please.
I'm just saying, if we're talking disruptive, let's be disruptive. I read the article looking for real goodies and ended up suffering fatigue and dismay.
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Digital Restrictions Managament (DRM) is getting more and more so every year. This is a truely disruptive technology, disrupting your ability to use material you have paid to be able to watch/listen to.
Web 2.0 was a lot of hype, but I hear they're bringing out the point release this year. Web 2.1 will be the shit.
I'm really looking forward to (video) games being more and more useful in real life; for example, the end of 2006 saw the launch of Wii, which helps nerds excersize (of course, let's not forget DDR for the same reasons :)). Then there have been games which inadvertently teach problem solving skills (although somewhat limited to real-life application) since the dawn of computer games. And then there's MMOs, which encourage social interaction. I'd like to see 2007 herald more and more "useful" games - perhaps in the games becoming more realistic, we'll see skills (like driving, marksmanship, dating?) translating to ability in real life.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Wasn't this 2006's list?
To be specific, I live in a small city called Exeter, in the southwest of the country.
About six months ago a city woman was found wandering in the early morning, naked, confused and injured, she has been beaten and raped, since then she has had 159 days of hospital treatment and still ain't "right"
We have these privacy invading CCTV cameras all over the shop, and the local paper and national press has been posting images from them, here is the attacker walking behind the woman in sidwell street, here is the attacker in paris street, here is the attacker in high street, basically there is 15 minutes video of this guy from every angle you could hope for.
In CSI land they simply press the "enhance" button and keep zooming until you can see the suspects DNA.
In reality, despite it being a high profile crime, CCTV produces images that make drunken 1st generation camera phones look high quality, except instead of being taken at arm's length from the face, which is what we use to identify people, it can easy be 100 yards away up a pole.
Even if you could force pedestrians to walk slowly in a line underneath cameras focused on their faces, the analogy of the CCTV camera used to catch speeders on the road, or London congestion charging etc, it still would not work, because OCR is one thing, matching faces to identities is another.
For example, it is trivial to OCR a vehicle number plate and flag a stolen car, or add a congestion charge, or a speeding fine, but this is not identity. You get the fine because your name is linked to the vehicle ownership, and the vehicle is linked to the registration number, which is all well and good, but if I see you driving into London every day in your Ford Ka (blue) while driving my Ford Ka (also blue) then all I need to do is use a copy of your number plate.
CCTV is a lot of things, but the barriers to it being a serious curb on privacy or anything else are HUGE, 1080i CCTV cameras anyone, what you going to store the date stream on? what you going to process the images with?
RFID does the job a lot easier, with a lot less computing power, a lot more redundancy, a lot more accuracy, lot less bandwidth, and it can be done today, cheap.
The above long range blurry CCTV example, or the OCR of vehicle registration, is a feeble and distant cousing of.
Subject is wearing sneakers bought by john smith with john smiths credit card
subject is carrying mobile phone registered to john smith etc
subject is carrying packet of mints and newspaper bought by john smith 10 minutes ago
subject is wearing underwear bought by john smith
subject is wearing prescription spectacles worn by john smith
it won't pick up the acme disguise kit, stick on beard, trenchcoat, fedora, latex gloves, or anything else.
Total bandwidth required, dunno, doubt it would saturate a 14.4k modem though, total processing power required, negligible, total cost, fuck all, after all the consumer goods vendors already provided the RFID tags, you already have the network, just need readers and some new software.
The blurry CCTV will still be used.
if the image looks like you it will be used as evidence, "see, it is john smith"
if the image doesn't look like you it will be used as evidence "see, john smith is clearly wearing a disguise"
If you had ANY idea how close they already are to real time with simply correlating credit card data and mobile phone cell lock records, you'd shit yourself.
AT PRESENT the sheer volume of data, bandwidth and processing power means that this data is only actually processed AFTER the event, to identify terrorists and their final movements.
It is a race between the increasing use of things like ID cards to provide more data that can be used for tracking, and technologies like RFID, in reality I suspect BOTH will complement each other, so to paraphrase Scott McNealy all those years ago, "Privacy, no such thing, it ALREADY doesn't exist"
The Exeter rapist is still at large because we don't yet have RFID, and the shops were shut so not way to tie him into a credit card purchase, no cameras on hole in the wall cash machines and the only businesses open, pubs and takeaways, use cash.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Disruptive to no end!
A standard option built into firefox that will allow users to place (and stick!) comments on just *any* site (or page/url)
Implications:
- You could start a forum on just any url.
- On commericial sites, users can place recommendations or criticism, *without* intervention of the vendor.
- On political sites, users can do basically the same.
- Basically, with such a tool, slashdot could be reduced to just a set of lead stories (the forum-part will be dealt with by firefox / some
moderation system of your own preference).
Of course, you would like some moderation system for this, but perhaps you could choose one from a set of options (just like you can select your favorite search-engine for the search-tool).
Hmmm ... I would like to see collaborative filtering applied to bookmark-collectors (such as del.icio.us) ... so that I could get personalized suggestions for interesting urls. Or does this already exist?
e.g., get indi. Sure cuts down on spam, and you can reliably transfer large files within a group of people.
Plus, it's probably the largest desktop out there that uses Flash for its primary user interface. w00t!
The Army reading list
Somebody divides by zero and Earth explodes.
Who is John Galt?
Credit Card security has to be done by the banks otherwise it'll take too long per transaction for the retailers to do it. I don't want to wait longer in line for some store to run thru whatever authorization system they may have come up with. Plus there's a lot less banks then there are retailers out there which means there would be an order of magnitude more systems to choose from if retailers handled it. It would be chaos. And for what gain? The small number of people who travel as often as you do? Besides, banks are the only ones with your complete transaction history. How is a retailer going to have access to that? Its not even their right to have access to that information.
As for government failing....I didn't realize our government had failed. Is someone flying another flag over DC? Government isn't meant to do everything but what it does do it happens to do very well because no one else can do it better (or even as good.) The occasional bone-headed administration can't be helped however.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
AFAIK Web services are used already in many applications
It's been the year of web services for the last five years. It's just a freaking tool. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes not. We've got some mid-managers at one of my contracts that think web services are the solution to every IT problem and overlook other more secure and convenient solutions in their headlong quest to implement the tech buzzwords of yesteryear.
Not coincidentally these are the same people who took a working application built by three people and turned it into a barely functional application managed by a committee of 30 people. But they got them some web services. Yessirreee. They got them some web services.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Is Windows Vista on that list?
www.stumbleupon.com works great for me. I'm very satisfied so far.
you are adam.DADA at gmail.com ?
That's funny, my Cingular 3G service lets me browse the "mobile web" all I want (and the "regular web" through Opera). The charges for data are a different matter, though...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Just want to share my experience with Metro (although this is slightly off-topic).
I use it every time I travel to Europe, and their coverage and update-rate is truly amazing. Specially Paris and most German cities. The "tourist" version of some cities even has the admittance price for points of interest (like museums).
I use the PalmOS version in my Tungsten|W though.
If you're planing a trip to Europe, check the Metro website.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
I'd be interested in reviewing what last year's results were to see how close they came... anyone have those?
In all fairness, your cable modem is tied to your cable; your EVDO handset will work anywhere you've got a signal. I'm willing to pay double for almost cable modem speeds wherever I need it.
I was referring to CSS3's feature richness, not implementation.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Is that because it's now in the mandatory passports we need to travel to Mexico and Canada starting this year, or because it's embedded in our underpants and tube socks?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is Windows Vista on that list?
...)
No, because fewer than 17 percent of businesses have any plans to rollout Vista this year, and it's even less popular with consumers.
This is the year of the Linux Laptop - at least for me it is. If my games don't work on my new Wii console, or my son's mid-2006 Mac Mini, they darn well better work on Linux or WinXP, cause many of us including myself aren't going to shell out $2000 or more for a new laptop that offers features that Mac OS has had for years, when our current WinXP laptops work fine for everything else.
This disruption, however, may cause Open Office to take off, as people ditch MSFT Office which won't work on their Linux laptops, and isn't supported on Mac laptops after this year (unless I heard that last part wrong
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Flat-screen TVs pass CRT sales. 2007 will be the year Joe Sixpack gets a flat screen. Look for low-end units with fewer cables and connectors.
According to my print edition of the Wall Street Journal (expensive subscription required), flat screen TVs already passed CRT sales in the Christmas 2006 season. In fact, the two big winners in the November to December Christmas season were the Nintendo Wii and HDTV-capable flat screen TVs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
CSS will be fine when it reaches a point where random behaviour, like the addition of a border to a cell doesn't move it up/down by 10px or so (yes, it happened), stops occurring.
some of CSS is OK - the how it looks bit, mostly.
the rest is abysmal, IMO. if i tell something "width: 100px; height: 200px;" i damn well expect it to be 100px wide, and 200px high. not 'only if it's in display:block',
always.
personally, i reckon it's about time we had a new web language from the ground up.
fuck backwards compatibility.
sometimes the only way to progress is to get a clean sheet of paper out of the drawer, sharpen your pencils, and start again.
I don't agree that the retailer necessarily should be the only place responsible for losses. eg. if an online merchant has a stolen card number used, they get the chargeback, plus a chargeback fee, for a card they can't even see. Or if you don't sign your card immediately, it gets lost/stolen, signed by someone else, then used - who is really responsible?
A lot of the time there really isn't a fair place to put the loss, IMHO.
Homebrew streaming of content becomes easy enough via an app such as VLC (but with a newb friendly, better explained, and less confusing GUI), that it really takes off and sucks up even more internet bandwith. Unlike current big name online video or audio services, it'll be peer orientated instead of centrally hosted. (Few -if any- permissions to ask, and content can be live instead of pre-recorded due to its streaming nature.) The current system of broadcast media starts feeling competition with free streams, the equivalent of countless public access channels coming from anywhere broadcasting anything. Not to mention offerings of commercial "stations" which aren't anchored by any contract cable/ISP-package deal. ISPs, traditional broadcasters, and **AA groups end up going even more nuts trying to figure out how to deal with this. Despite existance of and competition with pirate and non-profit networks, some upstart commercial streaming networks will become profitable via this newer broadcast media model which breaks traditional market boundaries.
Regardless of the potential network and marketplace messyness, those who seek audio/video entertainment and information will rejoice in this technology trend.
Ok, so if we reduce the volume/mass of what we are moving, we can move it faster and with fewer hiccups. Are there any other things we can do? Oh, sure! Distance is a HUGE problem, but why move the data the full distance? Europe is smothered in web caches and America could be if it pulled its collective finger out and STFU'ed those who complain caching is a copyright violation. If you cached common bulk traffic transparently (so no having to figure out which cache is where - everything Just Works, novel a concept as that is) - most of that will be FTP and HTTP, but I'd cache Gopher as well just to sicken the old-timers like myself who still remember fast network service.
So, we've cut bulk, we've cut distance. What else can be saved? Well, the data paths are sickeningly contorted and designed to provide as close to a pared-down tree as possible. That means that data has to travel MUCH greater distances than mere geography suggests. Easy fix - light up a few more dark fibers and turn the US and Europe into super-sized meshes. Slash the logical distances, reduce the strain on the existing low-bandwidth lines and provide vastly superior coverage areas. All in one.
Next up, protocol. The laws of physics limit how fast a router can process a header and search through volumes of entries in a lookup table. Even a fast n-ary search takes time to go through a few million entries. Switch to IPv6 and both header complexity and router table complexity are eliminated. Utterly. It also gives you proper mobility without having to bounce everything through a home station.
These don't mean you can travel faster than light. What they do mean is that you can travel more effectively and with reduced baggage.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)