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IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006

Posted by Zonk on from the win-some-lose-some dept.

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."

7 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Losers by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

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    Summation 2
  2. Battery Life by emmp · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article:
    A cellphone based on software-defined radio would be lighter, smaller, cheaper, and more power efficient.
    Would it really be more power efficient? I can't imagine having software cycling through wireless frequencies would be more efficient than a "hardcoded" hardware frequency, am I missing something here?
  3. Virtual chickens by Bob54321 · · Score: 4, Funny

    These have to be the best winner ever... I'm sure everyone else here wants a virtual flock of 16000 chickens.

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    1. Re:Virtual chickens by Aladrin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You know what's even dumber? He's so impressed with his 'chicken ai' because he can run 16k of them... But games like Ninety Nine Nights have a LOT more complicated AI, and they already run many hundreds to a few thousand at a time, while dealing with sound, input and graphical output on a massive scale. I think he aimed quite low at only 16k chickens.

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      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  4. Brazil in the news... by ulzeraj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)

  5. Re:Ethanol from corn??? by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  6. Winner: Multicore by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

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    The Army reading list