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12 Crackpot Ideas That Could Transform Tech
InfoWorldMike passed us a link to an entertaining article with a sort of 'top 12' innovative technologies that could change the world. Some of the techs include solid-state drives, holographic and phase-change storage, artificial intelligence, e-books, desktop web apps, and quantum computing/cryptography. For each of these technologies, expert observers weigh in on the potentials and pitfalls of these disciplines. Here are Esther Lim's comments on e-books: "Another issue, besides the prohibitive cost and cumbersome nature of e-documents, concerns the vast portion of the contracts that were signed and agreed upon before e-books came onto the scene ... That raises questions not just in terms of what rights the user has, but what rights the publisher has vis-à-vis the copyright holder." We've discussed almost all of these technologies on the site at one point or another. Which is the most important? Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'?
I agree. We've already seen flash RAM beat the micro drives in CF cards, and the advantages of doing away with moving parts (and with them, the inevitable mechanical failures) are compelling. Moore's law will do the driving, we'll have solid-state laptops in another year or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Phase-change optical drives were also on the market about ten years ago. Heck, recordable CDs and DVDs are largely based on earlier phase-change (both Write-Once, Read-Many -- or WORM drives, as well as rewritable disks) technology.
Bill Gates did not say that, I wish people would stop spreading this urban legend.
m ory.html
http://tafkac.org/celebrities/bill.gates/gates_me
Unless you happen to be Baen Books. They were the only ones who "got" the idea and provided books in a highly accessable format. Baen's ebooks have been a resounding success while all the Secure PDF and Microsoft eBook vendors scratch their heads at why they're doing so poorly.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't know when we'll be able to get our hands on them, but these ones already exist.
It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.
The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.
Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.
Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!
A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)
And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.
So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.
WTF?
ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.
Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the .lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?
I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.
Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.
Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.
This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.
The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?).
Pykrete; the operation was called Project Habakkuk.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
There's a long history of cryogenic computing in the crypto area. IBM and NSA put millions into this back in the 1960s and 1970s ("I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money" - NSA director in the 1960s), and there were some actual successes. Liquid nitrogen tank trucks pulled up to Fort Meade in the 1960s. The problem was that the computing element they were using could be made fast, but not small or cheap; it involved a coil and a magnetic field, so it was a discrite component, like a memory core. CMOS ICs won out.
Then there was the Josephson junction effort of the 1980s. Those worked, but again, CMOS ICs won out. Cheaper to build, easier to shrink. It's hard to beat the mainstream IC technology that everyone is working on.
While there _is_ a finite number of writes, that is _per sector_ not _per chip_. So after a while you will notice gradually decreasing capacity, it won't just fail outright.
Furthermore, the numbers I've been seeing have been closer to 1MM erase-write cycles per sector.
from Wikipedia:
"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors. This technique is called wear levelling. Another mechanism is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, which is named Bad Block Management (BBM)."
I use my PSP for reading eBooks frequently. It's missing some of the features you desire, most notably screen size, but actually works remarkably well. It's a bit of a pain to get it going initially, though, as Sony never intended the PSP to be used this way. Essentially you need to use some kind of exploit to trick the PSP into running custom applications (homebrew). The PSP hacking community is active and thriving with many homebrew applications that are useful, and once you've loaded a custom firmware it's easy from there.
The eBook reader I use is called Bookr. Usually I rotate the screen 90 degrees and read "vertically". I admit I still like books better, but using the PSP allows me much greater mobility for books when traveling, and it's not so irritating to the wife if I want to read and she wants to sleep. It also lets you underclock the PSP, as the reader doesn't need a very fast CPU, so battery life is very long. I don't know exactly how long, but I believe that with the backlight at the lowest setting it would last eight hours or more.
For $250 I wouldn't buy it as an eBook reader. But as a video player, eBook reader, integrated 802.11 web browser (not to mention MP3 playback and games), etc. it's a pretty good deal. Gorgeous screen, too.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Baen offers their books in unencrypted rtf format which works fine on the Sony reader.
Modern Flash can match HDD continuous transfer rates (ideal condiions for a HDD, reading 1 large continuous file), but because it has no seek times or roational latency, actually totally dominates for the demand heavy random I/O that cache & temp files inflict. One of the conventional worries is that Flash has a limited number of read/write cycles, so the constant hammering of internet caches would be bad, but flash has supposedly made some big strides here too.
But in a true high performace setting, you would prefer to use DRAM which is orders of magnitude faster than Flash, backed with flash memory and a battery backup that would dump the DRAM contents to flash before powering down then quickly re-fill the RAM after power-on. This is the current generation of Solid State disk, though they used to back the RAM with disks to keep costs down.