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'?

Comments

Solid-State Drives

[goldspider]

I think solid-state drives is going to have the most immediate impact. Their potential includes:

- Near-instant data access (think boot-up times)
- Lower power consumption
- Lower failure rate
- Many others I'm sure I'm unaware of.

I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[0123456]

"I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology."

I would. Solid-state drives have been 'the future' since at least 1991 (I had a 128MB ram disk back then)... but they've never been able to compete with hard disks on capacity or performance. Nor are they likely to any time soon, as the need for space (and money to spend on more useful things) continually outweighs the need for speed.

Oh, and that 128MB drive cost roughly $60,000 back then. But Windows 3.1 sure did boot fast.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[smenor]

I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology.

I'd hardly call anything on that list a "crackpot" technology.

AI, quantum computing, holographic storage, e-books - they're all either currently being researched by a ton of academics and legitimate businesses, or (as is the case for e-books) they're actually on the market.

Where's the anti-gravity, and free-energy? How can they even make a list of crackpot technologies and leave them out?

Re:Solid-State Drives

[iamdrscience]

Solid-state drives could be considered a crackpot idea for two reasons: first because regular hard drive technology is insanely cheaper than solid-state and it looks like it will continue that way. Second because for most desktop systems solid state drives are patently unsuitable because of their relatively low rewrite limits compared to standard drives -- most flash chips are only reliable up to 500,000 rewrites, if that sounds like a lot to you, try using flash for your swap partition on your desktop, you're lucky if you can get two years out of it, I'd estimate more like 6 months.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[JPMaximilian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA/

In actual use in modern personal computers both SATA 3 Gbit/s and SATA 1.5 Gbit/s hard disk drives run at non-burst speeds comparable to earlier IDE interfaces (under 50 MB/s). Since the theoretical burst speeds marketed by drive manufacturers are rarely achieved, a smaller power and interface cable plus the ability to hot-plug are the most practical SATA benefits to everyday computing.

I think that it's fair to say that storage is the weak link in personal computing. Hard drives keep getting bigger, but they don't get that much faster. Plus, the more data you have, the faster you'll need to be able to sort through it. As far as burst transfer speed, the fastest SATA is at 300MB/s, which still isn't as fast as the fastest SCSI drives. Drive failure is also an issue, so hopefully some of these new storage technologies could increase speed, reliability, and storage-security.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[maxume]

The price difference doesn't matter very much. Sure, a $100, 60GB disk is a lot nicer than a $60, 4GB sd card, but a $200, 80GB flash drive beats a $100, 300GB disk for lots of things(pretty much anywhere it is 'big enough' and power matters).

Swap is designed around expensive chips and cheap disk. With flash, a strategy using discard+read is somewhat more practical as the seek penalty is much lower, or more ram, etc.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[mcvos]

True AI has been at least 30 years away for the past 50 years. It's an open question as to whether or not we can ever really get there, or if getting there is even desirable.

If you mean Strong AI, then most serious researchers have long abandoned that goal. The past 50 years have mostly taught us how complex intelligence really is, and that we still have no good definition of the concept. And as long as we don't know what intelligence in humans really is, how can we create it in computers?

Instead, most researchers are focusing on small, limited aspects of intelligence, like the ability to interpret sounds (including speech), images (handwriting, or following a road in the rain), playing chess, medical or other diagnosis, translation, etc. Many of those are here already in some form of another. We'll see a lot more of this in the near future. But if you want Daneel Olivaw, I'm afraid you'll need a couple of centuries patience.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[ePhil_One]

I used to have a pair of old Apple II hard drives that cost an airline $5,000 each. So the cost was $1,000 a MB (thats right, they were a whopping 5Mb (in an age where the average PC had 16k and maxed at 64k (the glories of 8 bit computing), that was serious storage. So in a few short years (ok, maybe 10 :), your solid state storage had 25x more capacity at half the cost per MB.

Solid state has been around for a while, and has slowly been reaching into the mainstream. While it will be 20-30 years before it replaces disk for primary storage, its come from the stratosphere of the high end to replace floppy, Zip, Jazz, and other portable disk technolgies, and will soon embed itself into the hard drive as a cache for your boot OS. How soon until we just have a 20GB Flash C: drive and a spinning disk TB class D: drive for the rest of your data? The capacity of spinning disk drives is racing past the utility point for the majority of users, honestly my corporate desktop users would be fine with a 10GB disk partition.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[shmlco]

"They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that."

Books have a lot of advantages. They're also bulky, heavy, utilize a "fixed" display mechanism, and require an external light source.

Backlit ebooks can be read in the dark or in low-light situations. Screens can increase font sizes for people with bad eyesight. Storage systems can let you carry hundreds, if not thousands of books all at the same time. If you had a fairly inexpensive sturdy lightweight reader with good battery life, and a bright, contrasty, high-resolution backlit "writeable" screen that could also double as media player and internet device... and couple that with DRM-free standardized content, then, in my opinion, you'd be well on your way.

Especially for things like school books, tech manuals, reference books, trashy paperback novels, magazines, and so forth where the "feel" of a book is much less important than its contents.

Speaking of reference books and tech manuals, I have a ton of them (almost literally) sitting on shelves around here. And what do I do when I need to look something up? I Google it. The ability to quickly find information hidden somewhere in a mass of physical books is nearly non-existent.

In short, real books have many, many, many limitations, and as such neither you nor I WANT an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a real book, any more than you want a car that that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a horse-drawn carriage.

Re:Solid-State Drives

[BranMan]

Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of Baen and have purchased quite a few books from them. The 'innovation' of theirs I like the best is making the first chapter or few chapters of a book available to read before buying it. I like long stories and series and that is invaluable to 'pull a reader in' and make a purchase. They are bundling series together now, which is also something I like.
      They REALLY get it, and I'm glad I found them. If you like SciFi or Fantasy (they are more geared towards SciFi, but have both in good supply) you should check them out too.

Never is a long time

[Weaselmancer]

I'd be hard pressed to say "never" to just about anything when it comes to tech. Remember the famous Bill Gates quote - "640K ought to be enough for anybody." It was true at the time, but looks extremely silly now.

Will we manage any of these in a year, or five years, or five hundred are probably better questions.

Crackpot ideas?

[FredDC]

I would hardly call these "crackpot" ideas. Just because they probably aren't going to be mainstream anytime soon doesn't mean they are crackpot ideas... I find that quite insulting for all the people who are currently working on these technologies! They are visionaries, who might not even see the fruits of their work in their lifetime. And then they have the nerve to call them crackpots...

Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'?

[iminplaya]

Pffft, should be obvious. IP law. By the way, it's abolishment is idea number 13 that actually will transform tech, and virtually everything else relating to progress. We might actually see some.

The near term important ones

[sjbe]

Some of these are great ideas but the technology is in the (possibly distant) future (i.e. superconductivity at room temp) or are government/corporate desires that will be resisted until their more intrusive/abusive issues are addressed (ebooks, total information awareness).

The only ones I see that are near term likely and widely relevant:

2. Solid-state drives
Already here in some applications. Just needs a touch more capacity (I think around 32GB is the tipping point) and economies of scale to bring the price to reasonable levels. This will have a tremendous impact on laptops enabling them to be smaller, lighter and more durable. I would love to replace my laptop hard drive with something solid state. Damn thing is fragile enough as it is.

3. Autonomic computing
Think about all the spam, viruses, etc. We're already building what amounts to an immune system for our computer networks. It just needs to become a little more automated and clever. IBM is actually right in that it will be an incremental addition to existing technologies. It's not going to be a top-down mandated thing but rather a collection of technologies to deal with specific issues which (ideally) can work with each other.

4. DC Power
I've wondered for some time why we don't have a standardized DC outlet for home use. Have 1 big efficient transformer instead of 50 little inefficient power bricks. The downside is that you are introducing a single point of failure but it's a well understood and pretty reliable technology. Every circuit board requires DC anyway so why not have a standard DC along side AC in the house or office? May require some government assistance and/or standards organizations to make it work but it's a good idea. I'm pretty sure we'll see this in data centers sooner rather than later if the power savings really are there.

8. Desktop web applications
Gmail and web calendaring have made their way into my every day tool chest. It's only natural that we'll start to make these applications more accessible via traditional applications.

eBooks

[kahei]

I would really like to use eBooks. I read a lot. Often, I have to read sitting in front of the computer when I'd rather read on the couch -- an eBook would fix that. Often, I have to invest in huge heavy blocks of paper with hardly any resale value -- an eBook would fix that.

And there's no shortage of content. If I had a Wikipedia snapshot on an eBook, that alone would be worth it. I could never get finished with the interesting parts of Project Gutenberg, or the vast amount of other free content in the world, let alone the technical manuals I sometimes need to read and the documents I could scan in.

I NEED an eBook reader, I am willing to PAY for it, I would pay $2000 for a really good one.

But there isn't a really good one. There's ePaper technology, EMR tablet technology, battery technology, all the necessary technologies, and yet no actual useful eBook product. They're all small, or they only read PDFs, or ther only read Sony rubbish, or they're indistinct, or they don't have annotations/bookmarks, or they have a battery life of less than 8 hours, or they just aren't finished (iRex Ilead, I'm looking at you).

And so here's this money that I would LIKE to spend, on this thing that would be really of value to me, and I CAN'T, because the sad fact is that the kind of guys who sit in boardrooms trying to think of new products just aren't good at knowing what makes a worthwhile new product.

It needs an 8" epaper screen, a stylus with which I can navigate and draw annotations, a USB port that makes it appear like an ordinary USB mass storage device, a battery life of 10 hours, and the ability to navigate by pages & bookmarks in PDF, text, HTML, and .doc. That's it. It does not need DRM, color, wireless, the ability to automatically read RSS feeds, sound, a phone, a keyboard, or the ability to run general purpose applications(*).

Would someone PLEASE make one? CORPORATIONS, take my MONEY FROM ME!

(*)If I want Linux, I can use my DS.

Waterproof e-books

[Bender0x7D1]

Someone needs to develop a waterproof e-book reader so I can read while sitting in a hot tub. Normal books just aren't suited for the environment.

Think boot-up times? Think again..

[Dr. Ion]

Where does this myth come from? Have you tried booting WinXP from solid state? (8GB CompactFlash, for example) It's not that much faster.
It's not like your machine spends all its time seeking the drive heads around during boot. "If only I had a faster seek time"

It's all the stupid delays, timeouts, and busy loops in the Win32 drivers, probing for things that probably aren't there -- waiting for other things to finish, making network connections, and so on. The actually reading-from-the-drive time, even if you made it much faster, wouldn't really mean a world of difference in boot time.

Re:ebooks will probably a mess

[orkysoft]

Free textbooks wouldn't really be free, the price would just become "invisible" to parents. They'll still pay for them, of course, through taxes, but it also gives the publishers the opportunity to raise prices unnoticed.