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."

Comments

"Re-invent modern computing"?

[pzs]

Most of these ideas look more like cool gadgets or specific applications to me.

Computing is everywhere now. I think a "re-invention" of it should probably be something that applies to the huge numbers of people who use computing as part of their everyday lives.

I was much more interested in these comments, which involve trying to fundamentally change the way in which we use our technology.

Peter

Missed the real potential breakthroughs

[ardor]

Most of these ideas are just gimmicks. One HUGE milestone only gets a footnote: non-volatile RAM.

Look at today's PC. Where is the bottleneck in 95% of all cases? The hard drive.

So, what could be the next killer feature? Non-volatile RAM (PRAM, FRAM, MRAM..). The immediate advantage is speed of course. But there is something much bigger.

Most of the time, loading a file is no longer necessary! Much of the boot time of today's OSes comes from loading stuff into RAM. This can be omitted with P/F/MRAM, reducing booting to device initialization. Also, suspend-to-disk comes for free.

Every single OS is based on the fact that there is a slow, but persistent memory (hard drive) and a fast, volatile one (RAM). They'd need a complete overhaul to fully exploit the new paradigm. Hell, almost all programs too. "Loading file to memory" is not necessary anymore, because the file already IS in memory! Thus, some sort of direct access is needed (unless the file is fragmented).