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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."
"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."
Surely you just need a bloke with a pen and a piece of paper to make a list.
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.
A hand-carried fusion reactor, unless you want to take down the grid with those ideas...
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
=============
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
================
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
====================
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
==================
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
... I can debunk this one for you right away.
Take your mouse. Hold it the air for five minutes. For extra effect, wave it about. Now imagine doing this eight hours a day. And being accurate.
Tired arm much? Using a 2D mouse is about accuracy and long-term usage. OK, the mouse isn't perfect, but hanging it in space significantly deteriorates both these properties.
The Wii controller is a whole different ball of wax - it's for using for a couple of hours at most, and you don't try clicking on unfolding menus with it.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
FTFA :
A gaming PC with dueling graphics cards can line up 12 projectors in as little as 5 minutesWhat if I don't want my graphics cards fighting it out to see who survives? Will it take only 2 minutes if they join forces instead of trying to kill each other?
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
I cant help being reminded of those wonderful 1950s popular mechanics articles which predicted we would all be flying home in our flying cars to watch our 3D Tv while eating a robot cooked meal.
The present is never the future you thought it would be.
Everybody predicted talking computers able to predict the future, but nobody predicted YouTube or predictive texting.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
That's what it comes down to. We already have computers that calculate faster than anything we combined have. They just cost more than we combined have, too. These ideas all sound nice and pretty, but generally what it comes down to is cost. 12k for a home entertainment? Who can afford that? Who'd WANT to afford that? Especially with probably no movies to see on it in the forseeable future, since studios won't allow ... I digress.
Any prediction past 5 years in the future of IT is a pipe dream. Accept that. Think back, say, 10 years. You know, when the Internet was the next hot thing and broadband was the dream. When we sucked our data through 56k modems. When the first FTP servers sharing music appeared. When Napster came to fame. What was the prediction? That Napster is so hot it smokes and that it will soar. That on the internet we'll all make a ton of money with ads on our pages. That in 10 years (i.e. today) the corner store is gone and we'll do all our business on the net. We'll all be having fiber to our homes and watch our movies online, hell, all our data will be online, since loading it from the HD is just as fast as accessing it on the 'net.
Well, some of it came, but compared to the explosions predicted it was at best a greasefire. Yes, you can shop on the net, and Amazon surely dealt a serious blow to book stores, but otherwise, the economy didn't suddenly go full force online. Music sharing is a topic for lawyers rather than technicians, and Napster kinda-sorta folded (yeah, it still exists, somewhere, somehow, but nobody cares anymore). Fiber is a dream for most people, and while the net speed went up, it's a far cry from what was predicted. Services that store data online are currently starting to get started, but they're far from being a HD replacement, at best, they're offsite backups (and even as such they suck, due to space limitations).
Technical issues actually went to the background, replaced by legal problems and privacy concerns. Nobody predicted that, IIRC.
So doing a prediction up to 2020 is kinda pipe dreaming. You have no idea what obstacles will come in our way, you can't even imagine what kind of problem we will have to deal in 2015 already. For all I know, it could happen that Google gets bought out by some megalomanic and insanely rich guy who then starts to milk it for private data. Can it happen? For sure. Will it happen? Who knows.
All I know is that predicting the IT future is a business best left to fortune tellers. At least they don't have to fear for their credibility when their predictions are so way off that it's not even funny anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... for retarded definition of "computing".
I guess by "man-made" they mean artificial and that it will REVOLUTIONIZE(tm) computing since these artificial brains are going to be built in to every PC. Where did I hear that before? I think at the time they grossly overstated the capacity of computers such as the original IBM PC. So perhaps Moore's law applies to hardware, it surely doesn't apply to exaggeration.
Anyway, who needs an electronic brain? Now I can at least yell "idiot" to MS Word when it joins sections or splits pages without it getting offended. Can you imagine Clippy looking angry and saying in this cute cartoon like blob "Now I'm not going to erase your document, you asked for it".
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.
The "router-based peer-to-peer system" isn't all that revolutionary: the load-spreading system they describe is similar in many ways to a system of caching web proxies (good) mixed with Steam (evil). The article also describes a content-centric model of accessing data as opposed to a server-centric model, and that's kind of cool, but I don't have a whole lot of faith in that sort of thing right now.
What I THOUGHT they were talking about when I read "router-based peer-to-peer system" was ISPs and backbone services finally implementing multicast. Give any p2p software author a network where multicast actually works and you'll definitely see a revolution.
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.
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).
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Sorry, but the article is just dumb.
How can you put quantum and organic computing on the same list as a hack to join up a bunch of projectors to make a larger screen and a fricking "beanbag" mouse that you wave about?
Absolutely!
I propose we change this terrible chauvinistic term to (wait for it):
'man-made
There you go, centuries of gender bias solved with a simple apostrophe!
Now where's my damned award?
Saying this is going to reinvent computing is like saying habaneros are just a bit spicy. At the very least, this will completely overhaul civilization.
RTFA. The article clearly describes the differences between the new technologies and the old ones they're based on, and it gives examples of real-world research that is actually making progress towards the two technologies that you have said might never happen. You obviously haven't read the article at all, and are just making assumptions based on the short list in the summary.
Wait, has anyone ever TRIED the whole 'theatre at home' thing? Even if you could sacrifice your entire living room to set up the gigantic screen, and arrange the seats to advantage, you -still- don't get the same experience as the theatre. The screen there is taller than your house and the volume and bass on the speakers would have the neighbors calling the cops.
I've only got a 37" TV and I decided not to replace it with a 50" Plasma because I just didn't have room for a bigger one. There's no way I could possibly put an IMAX-class screen in my house, even if it only meant keeping 1 wall clear to project on.
People go to the theatre for the experience and to get out of the house, and you just can't do that at home.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
I didn't immediately know what you meant. Now I see you're referring to the 'a=209783' part. I just spent 2 mins trying to make a link without this but gave up ... and now I see CowboyNeal has edited the summary to use this same link.
12 off-the-shelf projectors, for when one projector isn't noisy enough for you.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I went to the soap homepage (http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/soap/inde x.html) and watched the demo. DOA. The gyrations that guys hand has to make to control the mouse, and the speed of the cursor (I know, you can set that, but there's a limit to maintain precision) makes the propsect of using something like that for an extended period of time seem like a CIA torture technique. I use a "regular" optical moust with a wrist pad that has a wrist rest. It requires very little effort, and I can both zip across a 1920pixel screen and precisely pick points in CAD using the same settings. Plus I get three buttons and a scroll wheel (which, if you pan and zoom in good applications is a great movement saver).
In some ways it reminds me of a trackpad. Very cool looking and futuristic (back when they were first introduced) until you try to use it for anything, at which point it becomes a burden which slows down and degrades the accuracy of all of your pointing and selection operations.
Besides, once I get to eliminate my desk, end table, couch, and bed, where should I put my keyboard - or will they come up with a 60wpm on-screen soap-mouse-pick keyboard?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Actually, precision is one of the things I would be concerned about. Think about it - with a desk-bound mouse you can make relatively precise movements in two axes, as the third is constrained and the surface provides support for the device. With a hand held object, you must support it with the same fingers used to manipulate the device. Very few people have perfectly steady hands, which means decreasing the sensitivity to avoid shake - further aggravating the speed issue. Second, most of my mouse operations end in a click. My mouse doesn't move under the pressure required to register a click. It's one of the big problems I have with tapping a touch pad - enough sensitivity to allow useful mouse motion causes drag-clicks (i.e. - misses) with all but the most careful taps. That may not matter for a big Allow or Deny dialog, but for accurate cursor placement in graphics, dense text, or CAD, it's the kiss of prductivity death. Zoom and pan, I hear you cry? So I need to do an extra zoom/pan action to offset the click accuracy? How does that speed up my progress.
No, it's a fun looking device, but I think it may not be the mouse of the future unless a lot of other things change.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The article is clear and utter BS. Poopoo de Toro.
This is akin to "Flying Cars Will Reinvent the Commute", "Water as Fuel Will End the Energy Crisis", "Slapping Wheels on Your Grandmother's Butt Will Make Her a Wagon".
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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.
True speech input with language understanding might bring about a major shift, but I can't see it for just a better mouse.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Actually, you _can_ already do this, but it's still in it's early days yet. When get get as far as seamless support for geographic virtualisation, then we _will_ have revolutionised computing - we're getting there now, but it's still not quite there yet. Cluster each of the objects for failover reasons, and you have a system that at least in potential, has 100% uptime. You can even migrate 'stuff' off sufficiently resilient hardware, replace the failing component, and migrate back seamlessly.
Extend this into remote sessions, such as citrix environments, but with the extra cool that you actually can move the OS instance to be 'close' to the user in terms of network topology and bandwidth.
Of course, the irony is that this isn't so very different from what mainframes were doing, back in the day. I guess things really do come full circle.
The things this guy lists? Meh. They're gimmicks, not revolutions.
No, the mouse won't re-invent computing, but the home imax projector? Man, that will change everything! University curricula will have to be rewritten from scratch!
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
My parents made three of them. They just didn't need "high technology" or scientists to do it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
In response to you and the Canuck above you... I have to say that since a woman was obviously it was only partially a man made brain....
Make America grate again!