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Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Computing
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine looks at 5 ideas that will reinvent computing. IMAX-quality movies at home with new projectors, a mid-air mouse that requires no flat surface, a home quantum computer, a router-based peer-to-peer system, and a man-made brain all made the list."
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http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=20978 3,00.asp?hidPrint=true
Idea #6 would be: online articles without numerous page impressions.
Unfortunately, PCMag detects the attempt to get the print page and redirects you to the original one. Bummer.
I took the liberty of copying and pasting the meat of the article here. WAY too many ads and click-thru's for my liking.
IMAX at Home
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You thought LAN parties were fun? Get ready for the projector party. At HP Labs, Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata have spent the past few years developing a technology that reinvents the notion of a home theater. With Pluribus, you can build a cineplex-quality image using a handful of ordinary, $1,000 PC projectors--in less time than it takes to pop the popcorn.
The Midair Mouse
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Your brand-new wireless mouse? That solves only half the problem. Sure, you're untethered, free to drive your PC from afar. But you still need a flat surface. You may be camped out on the couch or curled up in bed, but you're never more than half an arm's length from an end table or a lap desk.
Soap goes one step further: It works in midair. With this new-age pointing device, now under development at Microsoft Research, you can navigate your PC using nothing but a bare hand. You can lose the end table and the lap desk. You can even lose the couch and the bed, driving your machine while walking across the room. It's a bit like the Wii remote--only more accurate and far easier to use.
Extreme Peer-to-Peer
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In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus forever changed the way we view the cosmos. He put the Sun at the center of things--not the Earth. Today, at the famed Palo Alto Research Center, Van Jacobson hopes to lead a similar revolution, one that forever changes the way we view PC networking. He aims to put the data at the center of things--not the server.
With a project called Content-Centric Networking, or CCN, Jacobson and his team of PARC networking gurus are turning this model on its head. They're building a networking system that revolves around the data itself, a system in which a router can actually identify that Bode Miller video and act accordingly. Under the CCN model, you don't tell the network that you're interested in connecting to a server. You tell it that you want a particular piece of data. You broadcast a request to all the machines on the network, and if one of them has what you're looking for, it responds.
The Man-Made Brain
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It could be the most ambitious computer science project of all time. At IBM's Almaden Research Center, just south of South Francisco, Dharmendra Modha and his team are chasing the holy grail of artificial intelligence. They aren't looking for ways of mimicking the human brain, they're looking to build one--neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse.
"We're trying to take the entire range of qualitative neuroscientific data and integrate it into a single unified computing platform," says Modha. "The idea is to re-create the 'wetware' brain using hardware and software."
Their first goal is to build a "massively parallel cortical simulator" that re-creates the brain of a mouse, an organ 3,500 times less complex than a human brain (if you count each individual neuron and synapse). But even this is an undertaking of epic proportions. A mouse brain houses over 16 million neurons, with more than 128 billion synapses running between them. Even a partial simulation stretches the boundaries of modern hardware. No, we don't mean desktop hardware. We're talkin' supercomputers.
So far, the team has been able to fashion a kind of digital mouse brain that needs about 6 seconds to simulate 1 second of real thinking time.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Gyroscopic mice have been around for years (pioneering the same tech you now see in the Wii remote and PS3 SIXAXIS). You really wouldn't want to use one unless you're doing a presentation or similar since you'll just hurt your hand and wrist waving the thing around in mid-air.
Do you even know how the Soap pointing device works? Hint: you don't wave it around in mid air. It's essentially the guts of an optical mouse put into a smooth, clear container and stuck into a sock. The optical sensor tracks the grain of the enclosing sock, and you manipulate it by squeezing the sock gently, causing the "mouse" inside to rotate - much as if you were squeezing a bar of soap (hence the name)
Unlike a lot of stuff coming out of Microsoft, I regard this little invention to be actually rather creative and worthwhile. If anything, it will definitely be a boon to people who need to use a pointing device during presentations (much better than the trackball solution we have today)
node-def: a tactical hacking sim. Now in open beta.
Quick... someone send a memo to Microsoft to let them know someone did this years ago. Nip over to your local computer shop and pick up a Gyration Ultra GT. Only problem is that your arms feel knackered after about 5 minutes of use. Pointless.
D.
You dont even need to do the experement, there is a name for it since the 1980s From the Jargon files gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".
For me the exception in this list is the Xerox PARC work on Content-Centric Networking. I have been following this for some time and feel that it is good research. Xerox has always been at the edge and many people never realise the fruits of their research as the projects are often spun off as separate entities. This seems to incorporate many of the ideas behind Cougaar, Jini and Jxta but using the discovery process in a different way.
c ontentcentric/default.html
Good overview http://www.parc.com/research/projects/networking/
Also Van Jacobson, the man behind the project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson was responsible, in part, for traceroute and other goodies, so there is probably quite a bit of traction there.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
This concept was published in Make in one of their first year issues. It might have been the same guy and Microsoft just bought it out -- but it sure looks to be in the public domain. Here is a link to the Make article: http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/07/soap_ mouse.html
There is also a video on YouTube (search for soap mouse" on how to make and use one. It's basically just a mouse in a sock.
And PC Magazine... what can I say? I haven't been there in a while and was amazed at all the crap on their web pages. One little block of text and the rest of the page is nothing but ad links. Very sad.
Early computers used non-volatile magnetic memory[1] in the place of RAM, which was really great in some cases. The memory was persistent, so if you lost power, the machine could pick up right where it left off, it was fairly resistant to radiation and/or EMPs, etc. However, if something went wrong in the program (esp. infinite loops), you had to stop the machine, physically remove the memory core (Typically on some kind of heavy drum in those days) and put it in another machine to overwrite the bad code. RAM was designed to be volatile precisely because the odds of some program going nuts (especially in a consumer device) and hosing the machine are relatively high. When that happens, the user needs to be able to recover control of the machine without requiring the use of another device to wipe the non-volatile memory and replace it.
While non-volatile RAM as persistent storage may prove an *excellent* replacement for our slow ferrous-oxide-based hard drives, I'd be very cautious about replacing our good ol' volatile "working-space" RAM just to take advantage of increased boot speed.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.