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IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006
eldavojohn writes "As far as technologies go, there are clear winners and clear losers. This month's IEEE Spectrum issue contains an interesting list of winners and losers from 2006. Among the winners are a new radio technology, IP phone networks & memory technologies along with ethanol from sugarcane. Among the losers are tongue vision, LEDs in clothes, a flying car and ethanol from corn."
Among the losers are [...] a flying car
Hopefully the day they become reality won't involve Emmett Brown jumping of a DeLorean and taking us Back To The Future.
An Aston Martin DB9 though...
Summation 2
These have to be the best winner ever... I'm sure everyone else here wants a virtual flock of 16000 chickens.
:(){
Nice to see "The Omnivorous Engine" in TA. There are a lot of brilliant minds here.
:)
Ethanol is cheap and it's very common here.
The only problem comes from the use of natural gas, since most of it comes from Bolivia, and we're having some problems with their new government claiming that Petrobras (government-owned Brazilian oil) has no right over their natural gas.
And of course... we're also self-sufficiency in petroleum.
They do it for the taste. Trying to make production levels is easy, but way too expensive. In fact, cane and corn is too expensive and is a batch process.
A far cheaper approach will be ethanol from algae. The algae approach will allow for more of a continuous stream and can use waste water and non productive land. Interestingly, it could turn America and even Europe back to a large energy exporter, rather than major importers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The blurb on parallel constructs is well said. This has been said on Slashdot before, but with more and more computers getting multicore CPUs, it behooves us to figure out ways to get apps to use multiple threads of execution.
We can do this by multithreading in a single process, which the latest release of PMD does. This is kind of complicated, although using a good concurrency library certainly helps. Or we can separate concerns, like moving the user interface into a separate process like we do with indi. Either way, no sense in leaving CPU power on the table...
The Army reading list
I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.
1 77-1212162_9475_1132326712652-Op_weg_naar_All-IP_1 81105.pdf9 419&print=true
o n6 (minute 25 and onwards)
However KPN is doing something more than just changing the backbone. KPN will roll-out VDSL2+ to the end-users as well. This will all be Ethernet/IP based for the backhaul and VDSL2+ for the last 450 meters, allowing 50/20mbit down/up. KPN will close 1350 swithch locations and roll out 28000 street cabinets to deliver the speeds to the end-user.
http://www.kpn.com/upload/1215076_9475_1132830598
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=6
(the lightreading article forgets the vdsl2+ bit, see presentation for that)
In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessi
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"LEDs in Clothes" is a loser? I'm guessing the authors haven't purchased young kids shoes recently; it's hard to find a pair of athletic shoes that DON'T come with LEDs.