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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?
Not only not disruptive, but not new. What amazes me is how they wrote about virtualization without mentioning Xen or VMware.
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.
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)
Virtualization's new in that it was rarely used in the recent past. Instead of big boxes running lots of things, the trend has been towards commodity boxes running in clouds or doing small tasks. Apparently the hardware (compiler?) dynamics are currently such that big iron is economical on a per cycle basis with small, cheap 1U boxes. Everything old is new again.
I suspect that there is a similar argument regarding graphics processing engines. For example, maybe they mean the trend towards using the GPU's cycles to supplement the CPU. Perhaps that will temper the need for bigger/better CPUs in the near term?
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
UK is very similar to Japan. But nothing like this in place. Why?
Copper is cheaper and most people have no clue about technology. It's easy to sell them anything.
In contrast in Japan education system is much better than US/UK so people are more aware of new technologies. And their culture is different - they don't want to make a quick buck and f*ck their customers. Their ethics are totally different. Example? Look at their crime rate.
Hope that helps with understanding.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
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
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!
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