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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 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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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...
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A problem with Sony's reader is that when one publisher (Baen) contacted them about software to convert existing ebooks, Sony started talking about wanting royalties per book. So while Baen publishes their books in a variety of formats, don't expect them to publish in Sony's format. But Baen already sees more ebook sales than they do sales to Canada, as an example.
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.
What?
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.
Still to inside-the-box for me. Personally, I'd think infinite improbability has much more interesting ramifications. If only there wasn't that darn Total Existence Failure thingy to worry about. Technical enterprise, who cares? I'm talking about undergarments suddenly jumping three feet to the left.
Perhaps we can start out small and work on a bistromathic processor and a finite improbability drive and work our way up from there.
Solid state storage could have an immediate impact on computer processing, but its long-term effects are even more important. These include reliability and changes in the way hardware is designed, to take advantage of faster I/O.
With reliability comes complete erasure. Unless your file system or OS incorporates unerase, that could be trouble. A new paradigm for mirroring, such as time-delay mirror algorithms, will be vital
With a really fast fixed storage, bus bottlenecks demand attention. If the speed difference between external and internal storage is less than an order of magnitude, but the I/O bus is too slow to take advantage of that, well, buy stock in motherboard makers with fast busses.
But the big change is to the operating system. All current systems have an implicit distinction between 'RAM' and 'disk': you load a file into memory by opening it. Remove the speed distinction between RAM and disk, and all of a sudden virtual memory schemes lose many of their disadvantages. Faster disk also means dramatically faster database access, so among other things, all of those LAMP-driven blogs will be a lot nicer to troll. Invest in companies selling blog (anti)spam software.
The OS bloat that will result from an all-virtual-memory OS will probably mean eye candy at first, but in the end can take us into a true 3D interface, which will be a paradigm shift as big as the move from text to GUI. Look for a new pointing device, such as a touch-ball or cube (instead of a pad) or a wii-like wireless thingy. Maybe something like riding gloves, that leave the fingertips free to type, or even take the place of both a keyboard and mouse.
sigs, as if you care.
That's a pretty old idea. During WWII, the Allies first studied the practicality of strapping engines on icebergs and using them as aircraft carriers. Finding that unsuitable, a fleet of ships made of ice were actually commisioned. Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?). That would have surely been a sight to see. But the project was scrapped when Canada couldn't build them as fast as they were needed (a near logistical impossibility).
So I don't know that driving icebergs is all that crackpot.
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
Would someone PLEASE make one? CORPORATIONS, take my MONEY FROM ME!
(*)If I want Linux, I can use my DS.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Some observations from experience:
I hope this helps!
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.
What about flying cars? I've been promised my own flying car "real soon now" for ages! If they can't give me a simple thing like my own flying car, how can you expect them to do any of these other complicated things?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
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.
Quotes are from the FA.
Interestingly enough, modern processors already have a "sit around and wait" phase. Intel calls it a "drive" stage, and there are (IIRC) two drive stages in the classic P4 pipeline.
Also, the chief obstacle is that all this shit is insanely expensive and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Superconductors have to be cryonically cooled (does cryo-SRAM indicate anything, or is it just a cute name? Too lazy to look it up) and that means you're spending a lot of money just to keep it running, let alone to build it.
Moving on; solid state drives are (as we know and the FA states) already here and there's a ton of new technologies coming along to make them cheaper and lower-power than they already are. A winner. In particular the mp3 player and high-end digital camera markets are pushing this, not to mention subnotebook which is still a very popular form factor, especially among businesspeople. And ESPECIALLY among female businesspeople - I don't want to seem like some kind of sexist or something but it's simply the case that a woman is more likely to be offended by a heavy and/or bulky laptop. Plus, they tend to have smaller hands, so those tiny keyboards don't cause them to seize up and fall over.
Well, in a word, yes - if it worked and was more efficient than having humans manage it. But virtualization brings us close enough for most purposes already... as the FA says. Still, yes, I do want a datacenter that is simply smart enough to maintain itself. Still, you can achieve so much of this by creating a number of simple behaviors that I figure it's here already to some degree.
Moving on again, DC Power is a great idea to me if only for one reason: it eliminates a lot of extraneous EM fields. Call me a hippie if you like (I was born in Santa Cruz, I can take it) but the simple fact is that our bodies (and especially our minds) produce and respond to EM fields and 60Hz is the frequency of the alpha state. Every wire is an antenna and it is radiating the frequency applied to it at all times. Just some food for thought. I'm not making any specific claims.
Holographic Storage is the biggest piece of vaporware ever. The idea was old when I was a kid and products have always been just around the corner. I'm not that excited. The phase-change storage seems to have more promise for actual working products that don't cost more than the computer they're attached to, but maybe that's just because the holographic stuff has been coming "real soon now" for decades.
Not even going into Artificial Intelligence save to say that we know so little about actual intelligence that it's no wonder we haven't invented any.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
- Queue a file to be copied later to another computer. Why do that, when you can manually make the connection and copy it now? What's the point of adding extra automation that just delays things? Because the extra automation can be used to add routing, addressing, notification, etc. Email.
- View an ordinary formatted text file (maybe a few pictures thrown in), but on another computer. That makes no sense, to rely on an unreliable and slow network connection and on the other computer to be up, when you can just copy the file (or have it emailed to you) so you can look at it whenever you want. Besides, how do you even know how to locate the file? Except the protocol for identifying and exchanging this information allows web applications, and you get the HTTP and the World Wide Web.
- GUIs. Using a little wand or ball or mouse to move shapes around on a screen is okay for specialised applications, but computer data is numbers and words, which are all abstract and have no relationship to things on a screen. Besides, you'd have to give these controller gadgets to everyone in the world with a keyboard already, who wants that expense? Besides, keyboards are always more efficient because you can keep your hands in place. GUIs for real (number and word) applications existed for decades before they caught on.
- Apple iPod - less capable player, relied on PC software for functionality. Well, PC software has a better interface and makes things easier overall - plus the iTunes music store.
I predict the next big thing will be something along these lines. Maybe already here, but dismissed as equally silly.- A display-neutral protocol that lets applications run on a server with the GUI on a user's screen. Not pixel-oriented bandwidth hogs like X windows or remote desktop, but something based on well established GUI components and window layout. Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP) is a much overlooked example.
- Deductive databases. A reasonable relational database with foreign key constraints means that if you select only the data and tables you want, it should be easy enough for the database to select your joins for you. It's an NP problem, but lots of caching could fix most of that. Oh, plus SQL sucks, and it's nearly criminal that people think SQL and relational database mean the same thing.
- Statistical text analysis. The very beginning has started with SPAM filters and Baysian models. Spammers are starting to figure out how to fight them, but variable length Markov chains have the potential to start to glean more meaning from the text and make better decisions. This could lead to the ability to extract common concepts from phrases or sentences which are different, but mean the same thing. This would allow processing text based on chunks of meaning rather than pattern recognition - far from artificial intelligence, but opens up the possibility of a lot of new very high level applications.
There's a few thoughts. Any other things that seem trivial and with vastly overlooked potential?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.
Telco COs have always had this.
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.