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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
Vista.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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'
Would someone please tell me how server virtualization or graphics processing engines are disruptive. (Innovative, yes, but disruptive?)
Philosophy.
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
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.
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
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http:
would become:
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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)
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.
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...
- 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.
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.
In Japan there are many more high-population density areas where people have a reasonably high average income, and as a result, there are many more companies competing to provide the same service: in one place, even in the suburbs, you'll get the telephone company, the cable company, and the electric company all building high-speed networks, including the final segment to individual homes/apartments. Any company that has any kind of pipes or conduit that might be used for optical fibers (the electric company strings them alongside the power lines) is putting them in, and they know they can't overcharge for long without getting destroyed by the competition in this environment.
I dunno if the U.S. has the kind of density in many places to support that, or whether the utility companies have the competitive instinct to go for it even where it does make sense....
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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.
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