Extinction Timeline from Past & Into the Future (1950 – 2050)
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predictions Category
Future of Technology Slideshow
“What will be the next Internet? 11 revolutionary technologies are shaping the future: molecular nanotechnology, biotechnology and personalized medicine, synthetic biology, life extension and anti-aging therapies, robotics, artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation, virtual reality, fabbing, quantum computing and affordable space launch.”
2057 – The City – Documentary about The Future
Super cheese but some interesting stuff in here.
See Also:
2057 – The Body
2057 – The World
[via smashing magazine]
The Big Future
Some things you can look forward to in the future:
Climate Chaos, Resource Collapse, Catalytic Innovation, Ubiquitous Transparency, New Models of Development, and The Rise of the Post-Hegemonic World
2001 to Timecop: 8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong
“Movies promised us we’d be flying cars to our jobs at the robot factory. Instead, we have to settle for iPods, free online checking accounts and AIDS. Of course, the future wouldn’t have been such a disappointment if Hollywood hadn’t gotten our hopes so high.”
10 Things That Will ‘Change Your Future’
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/31/1198949747758.html
Nick Galvin
January 1, 2008
Think back to the days before the network we call the internet existed. Think back to a world before “google” became a verb, before a user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia replaced Britannica and before eBay turned the planet into one big garage sale.
It’s easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations that are part of daily life had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness.
“The internet and the web have changed the way we keep in touch with family and friends, do business, form new relationships, leaving little of our lives untouched in some way or other,” says John Allsopp, a software engineer, author and founder of the influential Web Directions conference series.
“A decade from now, I’ve no doubt we’ll be similarly astounded with the way these technologies will have reached even further into our lives.”
But predicting exactly what will be the next thing or which ideas will bomb and which will fly is fraught with difficulty. (Besides, if I knew for certain, do you really think I’d still be writing for a living?)
What follows is a smorgasbord of websites, services, concepts and gadgets that at first glance seem to have little to do with each other but which taken together give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading.
THE CHUMBY The creators of this bizarre little device have generated a huge buzz over the past few months – and it’s not even due to be launched until early in the year. The Chumby is a wireless internet device about the size of a rugby ball. It has no keyboard or mouse but instead uses software called widgets to display pretty much anything you want it to – all the time. For instance, it will act as an alarm clock, play your music, show you constantly updated news or track an eBay auction.
And the really interesting thing is that it is designed to be hacked – everything from the software code to the specifications for the case are freely available. No one, including the manufacturers, knows what owners will make Chumbys do once they are released. http://www.chumby.com
MICROBLOGGING This involves sharing short messages among a group. Messages are typically posted from mobile phones via SMS or instant messaging. True microblogging obsessives will dispatch messages to the group dozens of times daily, updating their peers on even the most inconsequential details of their lives.
The best-known microblogging service is called Twitter and its best-known user is US presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Twitter has also spawned a host of imitators such as Pownce and Jaiku. Microblogging fans claim that, at their best, the mini-messages are almost haiku-like, while detractors question the usefulness of being bombarded with messages such as “Just made cup of tea”. http://www.pownce.com; http://www.jaiku.com.
EVERYBLOCK This is still in development but EveryBlock is definitely worth keeping an eye on, if only because it is the work of young Chicago journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty. He was the brains behind a celebrated project called chicagocrime.org, which overlays crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department on maps, thus providing a powerful graphic overview of crime in the city.
EveryBlock will use some of the same techniques to create “hyperlocal” news. The kinds of information Holovaty wants to provide include the results of house sales, scores from youngsters’ sports events, local crime figures and stories written by local people. http://www.chicagocrime.org; http://www.everyblock.com.
23ANDME With the tagline “genetics just got personal”, 23AndMe allows anyone to unlock their own genetic history – and likely future. For $US1000 ($1145) the service (named after the 23 pairs of human chromosomes) will reveal whether you have a predisposition to arthritis or Alzheimer’s or, more frivolously, why you can’t stand tomatoes.
23AndMe customers provide a sample of saliva from which technicians extract the DNA for analysis. When the results are in, customers are given a secure login that allows them to explore their own genome at their leisure, revealing their genetic “family” around the world as well as their likely future health. http://www.23andme.com.
PEER-TO-PEER LENDING Whether you’re distributing music or books, auctioning off unwanted household items, wanting to bet on a horse race or looking for a soulmate, the internet can put you in touch with someone who is interested in what you have or are.
Kiva takes that idea and applies it to the established concept of microfinance – making small loans to the working poor to help them establish or expand businesses.
So, instead of giving a donation to an organisation such as Oxfam to distribute, peer-to-peer lending lets you invest small amounts directly in a particular entrepreneur – such as Mohamad Marah in Kabala, Sierra Leone. With his $US200 loan, Marah has been able to expand his garment business, buying three extra sewing machines. So far he has repaid half the loan. More than $US15 million has already been lent through Kiva – and the default rate is claimed to be just .23 per cent. http://www.kiva.org
MOB RULES The concept of a “mob” of networked citizens forming an irresistible force has been proposed and developed by, among others, futurist Harold Rheingold and Sydney web theorist and author Mark Pesce. Pesce has pointed out that in about the middle of this year every second person on Earth will have a mobile phone.
“In just a decade, we’ll have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone,” he said recently. In effect, he reckons, the people are the network and when that mob of people get together and decide to go in a particular direction they are virtually unstoppable. Just ask the record companies that have battled in vain for years to stop people sharing music or former Philippines president Joseph Estrada, who was forced from office in 2001 by mass protests co-ordinated by waves of SMS messages.
According to Pesce, the mob is “faster, smarter and stronger than you are”. Just as importantly, the mob is quite unpredictable – so expect a wild ride in coming years. blog.futurestreetconsulting.com; http://www.rheingold.com.
GUERILLA WI-FI Having a wireless internet system set up at home is becoming increasingly common. However, tapping into the internet while out and about is still very hit and miss – and where it is available is often nose-bleedingly expensive (Telstra “hot spots” cost $14 an hour while Optus slugs users about $12 an hour).
Meraki is an internet start-up that aims to change all that by providing cheap – or free – wireless networks. Meraki sells a remarkable device call the Meraki Mini for $US49. Plug it in to your internet connection and it will instantly provide shared access to other users up to 50 metres away.
Put several Merakis together in a neighbourhood (and perhaps include a few of the more powerful versions that cover up to 350 metres) and they will instantly form a “mesh” network, giving internet access to anyone in the area. These “guerilla” networks are beginning to spring up in cities around the world, driven by people for whom internet access is a social-equity issue. Do internet service providers like this Robin Hood-style behaviour? Not at all. Can they do much about it? Er, no. http://www.meraki.com.
WORLD COMMUNITY GRID The World Community Grid project is one of the latest examples of a concept called distributed computing. The idea, though not new, involves harnessing the computing power of many thousands of idle PCs around the world to try to crack complex scientific challenges.
Distributed computing first came to prominence with the Seti@home project, which uses participants’ computers to analyse radio telescope data in the search for extra-terrestrial life. World Community Grid takes the concept one stage further and aims to establish “the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity”.
So far 343,000 members have donated a total of 128,000 years of computing time. Projects include one aimed at giving scientists a better understanding of cancer and another that is modelling the effects of climate change in Africa. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org.
LOOPT One of many social networking services that capitalise on the global positioning software now standard on many mobile phones.
Loopt members register with the site and then, when one of their friends is nearby, their location is shown on a map plus a note about what they are doing at that time.
You might not want your location to be always visible – so, thankfully, users can turn off the service. http://www.loopt.com.
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD When marvelling at the potential of the networked world it’s easy to forget the 2 billion youngsters in the developing world who don’t have the tools to connect.
The One Laptop per Child program is a bid to help bridge this digital divide with a machine called the XO Laptop that sells for just $US200. OLPC is a non-profit group established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte and supported by companies including News Corp, Intel and Google.
Under a “Give One Get One” scheme, donors give $US399 and they receive a child-sized XO machine and another will be sent on their behalf to a youngster in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. http://www.laptop.org.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/31/1198949747758.html
The World of Tomorrow
The following comes from the New York Times
By JIM RASENBERGER
ON Jan. 1, 1908 — New Year’s Day one century ago — The New York World greeted readers with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America. The title of the article was simply “1808 — 1908 — 2008.” The World began by marveling at how far America had come since 1808, then turned to the question of the future: “What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?”
The essay’s visions were not timid. “We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,” the newspaper went on. “We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?”
Predictions about the future were a staple of New York journalism in the early 20th century. Newspapers, including this one, frequently solicited prominent citizens for their thoughts on the future of the world, of America and, most urgent, of New York.
The city was vaulting into the 20th century with a haste that almost demanded prediction-making. As the population grew by 130,000 a year, New York’s infrastructure exploded.
Within the 12 months of 1908 alone, New Yorkers would see the cantilevers of the Queensboro Bridge joined and the cables of the Manhattan Bridge spun. They would see one tunnel open under the East River and another tunnel open under the Hudson. They would see the tallest inhabited building in the world, the 612-foot Singer Building, completed on lower Broadway, only to be immediately overtaken by the steel skeleton of the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.
What next? New Yorkers were besotted with the possibilities. Architects and visionaries imagined a “cosmopolis of the future” with thousand-foot towers connected by webs of tall bridges and served by aircraft. Meanwhile, the very air seemed to buzz with the infant technology of wireless communication.
“When the expectations of wireless experts are realized, everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be,” one magazine predicted in 1908. Equally farsighted was a prediction made by Dr. Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute. The same New Year’s Day that The World was conjuring gyroscopic trains, Dr. Flexner declared that human organ transplants would someday be common.
The point of such predictions was not necessarily that they were accurate but that people cared enough about the future to bother thinking about it. With that in mind, 10 knowledgeable New Yorkers, from the Nobel laureate Paul Nurse (Simon Flexner’s successor) to a 12-year-old girl named Kate, were asked to imagine the city a century from now.
Whether their visions turn out to be right or wrong, whether they are bleak or tongue-in-cheek, all are generous efforts to wonder about the lives of New Yorkers of 2108, as those New Yorkers of 1908 once wondered about ours.
KEN PERLIN
Inventor; professor of computer science at New York University
In the same way we now have enhancements like pacemakers, it’s reasonable to suppose that in a hundred years everyone’s eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy, when the next subway will arrive, how to hook up with friends. We’ll be able to see a virtual reality superimposed over the physical grid.
This city is all about intensity of purpose and connections, and technology will only make it more efficient and more fluid. And in a city that is so multicultural, communication will be easier. A hundred years from now, you and I could be having a conversation in two languages and translation would be automatic. I could look at a newspaper written in any language and have the translation superimposed on my vision.
Being in the same room with people, looking in their eyes, touching them — this will still be important. But when people come together, there will be a lot more information at their fingertips and floating in the air between them.
JIM CRAMER
Host of “Mad Money” on CNBC and co-founder of TheStreet.com
I have a genuine optimism about New York in 2108. The city will be the international city to live in. It’s just that we won’t be able to afford it. The financial capital of the world will be probably Dubai or Beijing, and New York will be owned by Chinese and Arab investors, among others. Travel will be much faster and more fluid, and coming to New York from the Emirates, say, will be as easy as going to Mecca. It’ll be like a country place for the wealthy elite of the world. “Oh, yeah, I have a country place — I have the Essex House.”
If I’m a guy sitting on top of $200- or $300-a-barrel oil, how can I not own a borough? “Hey, what borough do you own? I got this Queens borough. They even throw in a bridge.”
We have a few guys who will be able to step up. Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, just got $70 million; that’s definitely two-bedroom material. And Dick Fuld of Lehman — count him in.
The rest of us can live in Schenectady or Plattsburgh. We can come here on the weekends and stay at a nice hotel in Astoria. I’m telling you, New York will be an amazing place to visit.
ROBIN NAGLE
Anthropologist-in-residence, New York City Department of Sanitation
Assuming there’s still a tourist trade to New York a hundred years from now, people will visit Fresh Kills landfill the way tourists go to the cemeteries in France. It will stand for us as a grand monument, like the Great Wall of China.
The lower layers of Fresh Kills are so tightly compacted that there’s no chance for microbes to get in there to eat things, so you have very well preserved hot dogs, for instance, that you assume rot over time. And newspapers and CDs and DVDs, cassette tapes and eight-tracks and videos by the zillion.
In 2108, somebody may have the curiosity or foresight to excavate the landfill to learn about the culture that created this vast repository. They will do it, too, because there will be a lot of resources that can be mined, like tin cans.
Garbage won’t be garbage anymore. Sanitation workers won’t throw it away; they’ll take it to vast reuse centers. They will be heroes because people will recognize how sanitation workers are keeping the city alive.
BILL T. JONES
Choreographer and founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
Because I think we will lose the battle with global warming, and because I think a nuclear device will be exploded somewhere on the planet, New York will be quite a different place. The less fortunate will go hungry and some may be crippled, but there will be enclaves of great opulence.
The likes of a Lincoln Center will be constantly under surveillance and surrounded by police officers. Our cultural landmarks will be supported by private individuals with private armies. Dance will enjoy a precious place; it will be a darling of these survivors.
People will want artists to return them to certain periods. They will suffer what I call hyper-nostalgia as they look back to a time when people talked robustly about ideas like democracy. Our age will be seen as a glorious last hurrah. Period dancing will be highly prized, almost like an exotic sweet. There will be some people who lose themselves in looking backward.
KATE KAPLAN
Seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park
The city will be all skyscrapers, no more town houses and brownstones. Buildings will connect to each other through an aboveground tunnel system. You’ll no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom; you’ll just carry a small chip with you that can expand into a private portable toilet.
Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud’s wax figures will have robotic capabilities.
Finally, instead of antidepressants, doctors will make people happy by implanting chips in their heads with comedy routines and programs, like my favorite, “The Colbert Report.”
OSCAR HIJUELOS
Author of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” and “A Simple Habana Melody”
I see a city of high-rises accommodating only the rich who can afford to live here. I’m sure some historic districts will be preserved, sort of like those old Colonial districts in Boston, but they will be surrounded by towering buildings.
Immigrants will still come here. But do I think an enterprising guy from Puerto Rico will be able to set up a restaurant on $20,000 savings? No. The history of New York used to be about mom and pop businesses that could thrive here because of low overhead. Those will be gone. Some bodegas may be preserved as museum displays. You’ll go into a giant mall, a larger version of the Time Warner Center, and there will be a special exhibit on the fourth floor, bodegas of Harlem circa 1972.
PAUL NURSE
President of Rockefeller University
As long as the city keeps its social structures in good shape, this will be an enormously attractive place for academic researchers a hundred years from now. It’s an extraordinarily open society of accomplished and ambitious people, and that’s exactly what you need if you’re going to drive the research agenda forward.
Medical innovations are likely to pop up in New York earlier than other places. One thing I can easily imagine is tiny motorized robots that crawl through the body like ants, sensing medical problems and doing repairs with surgery.
Because we live in a concentrated area and are a harbor of transport, infectious diseases will be an issue. But New York has been around for a long time and hasn’t particularly suffered badly from major pandemics. The best way to avoid disease will be to maintain the social fabric, keep the poor out of poverty, and have a city affordable enough for the people who keep it going to live here.
CAROL WILLIS
Founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum; curator of the exhibition “Future City”
If the city is not under water, it will look much the way it does now. People will value the historic character of the city, much as modern Parisians preserve the 19th-century city and modern Romans preserve the Renaissance city.
There will be little opportunity to build the tallest buildings here anymore, but the skins of buildings will change. The technology of glass is improving rapidly; glass will be infinitely more sophisticated, both more energy-efficient and energy-generating. The glass facades will be screens for the projection of images.
You might think of the city as a big three-dimensional TV set or computer screen. Many buildings will communicate with us through advertisements. We, the people of New York, will tell the city what we desire and we’ll get it back, monumentalized, in the images projected on our buildings.
DANIEL BOULUD
Chef; owner of Daniel, Café Boulud and — opening Monday night — Bar Boulud
I think the children of today will have a big challenge persuading their children to take time to enjoy food. But restaurants will always be important in New York. People will see restaurants as a home away from home, where they feel secure.
Chefs love technology, and there will be constant evolution of equipment. From your home, you’ll be able to see the restaurant, choose the table you want, choose your waiter, choose the dish you want to eat, and then see how it’s made.
Genetically engineered food is something I don’t think anyone can escape, but the great chefs will still want a product that is natural. More food will be grown locally. Some of the wines that were not even around in 1908, the pinot noir of Oregon and Washington, the California cabs — it will be fantastic to drink those in 2108. Will Daniel still exist? I hope so. I just hope they don’t serve the same thing.
KIM HASTREITER
Co-founder and co-editor of Paper magazine
The island of Manhattan in 2108 is half the size of what it was a hundred years ago; Seventh Avenue and Third Avenue are waterfront. Richard Meier’s glass towers are under water and filled with schools of phosphorescent fish; tourists come by submarine taxi to see them.
The tropical temperatures have brought a huge alligator problem to Central Park, although New Yorkers have recently taken to taming alligators from birth and keeping them as pets. The city’s first “alligator run” has just opened in Washington Square Park, which is now lush with palm trees.
What used to be known as downtown types have all moved to what used to be called New Jersey. Bayonne is the new mecca for radical thought and creativity. An archaeological dig in the former subway system in New York uncovers hieroglyphics signed K. Haring, spawning an urban myth that New York was built by aliens and crawling babies.
Jim Rasenberger’s latest book, “America 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation,” was published last month by Scribner.
BusinessWeek Predictions 2008
BusinessWeek has some predictions for 2008. Is that the best they could do?
David Brin Predicts the Future
photo by sskennel
The following article was written by David Kushner:
URL: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/the-discover-interview-david-brin
Sci-fi author knew all about the Web, global warming, and more
by David Kushner
David Brin works out of his home office in San Diego County, but he spends much of his day in invisible worlds—ones hidden from us because we can’t perceive them or because they don’t even exist yet. For the past three decades, the Hugo Award–winning author has been mapping out his vision of the future in dozens of works, both nonfiction and sci-fi. His 1998 book, The Transparent Society, explores how technological innovations force us to choose between privacy and security, foreshadowing the era of YouTube and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. His 1990 novel, Earth, anticipates so many of today’s trends—from the World Wide Web to global warming—that there is a Web site devoted entirely to its prognostications.
How did this 56-year-old father of three, who lives mostly outside of academia, get so adept at parsing the future? By keeping his journeys of imagination grounded in the real world. After getting a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of California at San Diego, Brin completed a Ph.D. in space physics and worked as a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Today, in addition to churning out novels that chart his fictional Uplift universe, he continues to work closely with the people developing technologies that will transform our lives.
Why do you have such a good track record as a prognosticator?
When prediction serves as polemic, it nearly always fails. Our prefrontal lobes can probe the future only when they aren’t leashed by dogma. The worst enemy of agile anticipation is our human propensity for comfy self-delusion.
Peering ahead is mostly art. We all have tricks. One of mine is to look for “honey-pot ideas” drawing lots of fad attention. Whatever’s fashionable, try to poke at it. Maybe 1 percent of the time you’ll find a trend or possibility that’s been missed. Another method is even simpler: Respect the masses. Nearly all futuristic movies and novels—even sober business forecasts—seem to wallow in the same smug assumption that most people are fools. This stereotype led content owners to envision the Internet as a delivery conduit to sell movies to passive couch potatoes. Even today, many of the social-net and virtual-world companies treat their users like giggling 13-year-olds incapable of expressing more than a sentence at a time of actual discourse.
A contrarian trick that has served me well is to ponder a coming technology and then imagine, What if everybody gets to use it? In really smart ways? Most of those imaginings have come true.
What’s the biggest trend you’ve failed to spot or the biggest prediction you think you got wrong?
Back in 1999, I forecast that people would shrug off future shock when the big millennium rolled around. At first it seemed that way, as people blithely went about their routines. Now I suspect there really was a 21st-century trauma. Romantic nostalgia is rampant. You find very little interest in the modernist agenda of confident problem solving. Robert Heinlein predicted this, but I didn’t. I also expected a few technologies that never came. For example, lie detection based on involuntary eye movements, a method that ought to work even during a televised interview or press conference. A potential nightmare for deceitful politicians! But I was misled by hope. Other disappointed forecasts include rapid understanding of the immune system and big advances in computerized teaching.
At the other end, some trends exceeded anticipation. I did not expect the “age of amateurs” to progress so far, so fast. Fifty million hobbyists are demanding that professionals, from doctors to scientists to movie directors, accept a new world where expertise is not limited to the licensed.
You have said that science’s ability to look beyond the familiar is subject to our psychological, as well as physical, ability to perceive. What do you mean?
There is a famous, but much-debated, anthropological myth that the Carib Indians were unable to perceive the first European ships offshore until one of their shamans sat and contemplated for a while and then explained it to them. I think the people are smarter than that, but as an oversimplifying metaphor, it does point out that what we are able to see depends upon a variety of things. Let me give you a real way to put it into perspective. In the 15th century, we got the printing press. Printing is a way of augmenting human memory. Printing not only vastly expanded the ability to convey human knowledge and memory to other people but also made it more robust.
People tend to assume that when things like this happen, it automatically results in an improved humanity. This is what you’re hearing from the techno-transcendentalists on the Internet. It is a religious statement that what we’re seeing on the Internet today is improving discourse and improving democracy and improving markets. I’m very skeptical of that because at the beginning of any of these revolutions, always what is empowered is demagoguery. The immediate outcome of the printing press was the Thirty Years’ War. The immediate outcome of radio was the empowerment of demagogues like Huey Long and especially Adolf Hitler. It always takes a while for the people to learn how to use the new media critically, to be able to perceive the good from the bad.
Now we have computing and databases, expanded memory, television and mass media. We’re headed toward the day that databases become a knowledge mesh; we’re going to have super memory and super vision. But what is going to enable us to perceive better?
Are there some examples of how science is helping us perceive better right now?
There is the basic, ever-increasing power of instrumentation. You have electron microprobes, which are involved in the cutting edge of nanotechnology, for instance. You’re able to measure the field of individual atoms. You are able to come up with wonderful crackpot notions like Wil McCarthy’s concept of Programmable Matter—that if you were to adjust the electrons on the surface of a sheet of silicon and control them through simple voltages, you could effectively make that surface of silicon behave like iron. We wouldn’t have been able to imagine this concept without the ability to operate on an atom-by-atom level.
But the rate at which we are seeing better with telescopes and probing better with microscopes is not where the real action is. Sure, every year we can see smaller; sure, every year we can see farther, but the real breakthroughs are coming in our ability to make more of these observations and do it faster. For instance, look at the recent use of the Cosmic Evolution Survey, using the Hubble Space Telescope to study gravitational lensings [in which the gravitational pull of galaxies and dark matter bends the light from more distant objects] in an area of the sky nine times the apparent surface area of the full moon. To be able to take a patch of sky and unleash computers to find so many gravitational lensings you could then make a three-dimensional depth map billions of light-years deep so you can find the patchiness of dark matter—that is very impressive. That’s the difference between seeing a pixel and deriving information about things that are far away from that pixel. That’s a matter of perception.
What is the biggest change you see coming?
I believe that the real breakthrough is connected to something I referred to in The Transparent Society, and that’s the distribution of power. For example, low-cost screening methods will lead to personalized diagnostic therapy. People are talking about inexpensive methods to screen for millions of biomolecules. Try to imagine what it will be like when cyberneticists do to their room-size laboratories what others did to the room-size computers of the past. And of course, it’s going to pose a great many problems to us. Because when pimple-faced teenage hackers can’t mess up just your Web site but they can also synthesize any known or unknown organic compound and then go to work at a fast food joint, are you gonna eat fast food under those circumstances? The fundamental thing that’s always made a difference in every revolution is the distribution of power. That’s my main theme—it’s not about fast-paced changes in how small or big or penetrating we can see individually. What’s very fast-paced is the spreading of seeing in parallel. It’s happening in biochemistry. It’s happening in astronomy. It’s happening in almost every source of perception.
How will the distribution of power help expand our understanding of the world?
Consider that NASA can’t continue to find killer asteroids as they were commanded to do because they don’t have the budget. Within five years, amateurs will take over this task. You are going to have asteroid surveys in 10,000 backyards with incredibly sophisticated CCD cameras that feed into loyal robots that are searching the sky in order to make their owner famous. It is the distribution of instrumental power that is driving our new ability to see.
“For privacy and freedom to survive, we’ll need a civilization that is mostly open and transparent”
Take a petaflop [1 quadrillion calculations per second] computer. Some years ago I was at the first petaflops conference where they were discussing what uses people might have for such powerful devices when we finally get them. Now we’ve got them. One way to visualize what a petaflop computer can do is to put a ball on a narrow pedestal in the middle of the desert and take all the light coming in at that ball from every angle. It takes a petaflop to perceive light coming in simultaneously from all those angles. It is one of those things that computers can do that we can’t. The fovea of our eye sees only a tiny bit, and then the brain stitches together a mosaic—a marvelous, illusory mosaic—that we are actually looking out at, maybe, a hundred degrees. But a petaflop computer can take in and process photons from every direction at once. We are going to reach the point where no part of the sky is not being looked at at any given time. This will be the age of amateurs.
How does it feel to see your earlier ideas vindicated? These days, with ubiquitous cell phone cameras and YouTube, almost everyone has the power to document and distribute. You were thinking about that 10 years ago in The Transparent Society. Why do you think it’s one of the five major public policy books that’s still in print? Back in 2001, when the Patriot Act was proposed, I kept getting e-mails that said, “P206!” and at first I didn’t get it. Then I turned to page 206 of The Transparent Society, and it says roughly, “Suppose at some point we take a major hit and, for example, terrorists ever brought down both World Trade Center Towers. What would the Attorney General ask for?” Then I went through what basically was a mild and more reasonable version of the Patriot Act, because I never pictured John Ashcroft. I suppose I could say, “I told you so.” But by now I would have expected some of the other aspects I predicted to be a little stronger, like vigorous activity by whistle-blowers.
Do you worry about the loss of privacy as both the government and amateurs have more and more access to surveillance?
I got some of my nicest letters based on Chapter 9 of The Transparent Society, because I really disassemble my own theory, and I talk about all sorts of ways a transparent society could go wrong. You could have a really nasty version of majority rules. I believe that Ray Bradbury shows that in Fahrenheit 451. The thing I use to counterbalance that is this: If you look at the last 50 years, whenever the public learns more about some eccentric group, it judges that group on one criterion, and this is always the one it uses: Is this group mean? Are they harmful and oppressive to others? When the answer is yes, the more you learn about the group, the less they’re tolerated. If the answer is no, the more you learn about the group, the more they’re tolerated.
If that’s true and if it holds in the future—if people continue to defend other people’s eccentricities because a) they think it’s cool to live in a world of harmless eccentrics and b) for the sake of their own protection—then you would likely see a 51 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent dictatorship by a majority that insists on crushing intolerance. Now, that is a group-think majority-imposed will, but it’s probably the least harmful one you can imagine. As far as privacy itself is concerned, I have a simple answer to that. Human beings want it. We naturally are built to want some privacy. If we remain a free and knowing people, then sovereign citizens will demand a little privacy, though we’ll redefine the term for changing times.
The question really boils down to: Will tomorrow’s citizens be free and knowing? Will new technologies empower us to exert reciprocal accountability, even upon the mighty? It may seem ironic, but for privacy and freedom to survive, we’ll need a civilization that is mostly open and transparent, so that each of us may catch the would-be voyeurs and Big Brothers.
What does the enormous expansion of human perception imply about our future?
The theological implications are profound. As Einstein said, “There is no reason to believe that the laws of nature had to be so beautiful or so easily comprehended.” He thought we were intended to engage in conversation with the Creator, if there is one, and become apprentices. The notion of a humanity of apprentice Creators is implicit in everything that’s going on right now. That’s why you see scientists assiduously avoiding any discussion of what we’re doing as being an apprentice Creation, even though it’s blatantly obvious. It’s right there in front of us, but we cannot see it—just like the Carib could not see the ships.
Would you rather be living 100 years from now, when we’ll presumably have access to so many more answers?
Is it better to sow than to reap? Jonas Salk said our top job is to be “good ancestors.” If we in this era meet the challenges of our time, then our heirs may have powers that would seem godlike to us—the way we take for granted miracles like flying through the sky or witnessing events far across the globe. If those descendants do turn out to be better, wiser people than us, will they marvel that primitive beings managed so well, the same way we’re awed by the best of our ancestors? I hope so. It’s poignant consolation for not getting to be a demigod.
PC World: Your PC in 2008 and Beyond
The following article was written by Robert Strohmeyer for PC World Magazine
URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/pcworld/article185344.html
Blindingly fast chips, flexible displays, nanotube cooling, and more: Tomorrow’s technologies will change everything about computing, whether you’re at home, at work, or on the road.
The pace of everyday living may be hectic, but the pace of innovation is downright frenetic. Technologies barely imagined a few years ago are now poised to change the face of computing, as digital devices continue to burrow into every aspect of daily life.
The world of science fiction is rapidly becoming fact, from tabletops that charge your laptop wirelessly to wall-mounted PCs that recognize your face and gestures. Thanks to breakthroughs in miniaturization, you’ll be able to tuck products into your pocket that wouldn’t have fit into your briefcase a few years ago, such as projectors and photo printers. The next generation of Internet technology will change everything from TV to Coke machines. And standard computer building blocks are growing ever more powerful, as processor makers squeeze more cores onto each chip and drive makers pack more bits into each platter–guaranteeing that even ordinary PCs of the future will be anything but ordinary.
In the pages that follow, we spotlight a dozen major innovations, from ones right around the corner to a few that won’t show up until at least 2012. On multiple fronts, the future you’ve been waiting for has almost arrived. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for it.
Kiss Your Power Cord Good-Bye
You hardly think twice about connecting your wireless laptop to the Internet, but you still have to fumble for a power cord when your battery runs out. How quaint. Soon all those cumbersome power bricks will be just a footnote in your grandchildren’s history books, as wireless charging comes to market.
What is it? Currently two ways to accomplish wireless charging exist. Inductive charging works by matching the resonance of the charging pad’s electromagnetic field to that of the battery, allowing the battery to charge over a small physical gap. In contrast, conductive charging passes electricity directly between two surfaces in contact. Which method will win out is not yet clear, but in either case you’ll be able to simply place your laptop, phone, and music player onto a universal wireless charging pad that will immediately begin juicing them up.
When is it coming? Next year both inductive and conductive charging technologies will emerge onto the market, but most devices will require a $30 adapter to work with them. WildCharge expects to roll out its first conductive-charging notebook product (paired with a compatible notebook) in time for 2008’s back-to-school season, while eCoupled is pushing to get its inductive technology into cars, countertops, and desk surfaces by 2009. Look for wireless charging to become commonplace in 2010, after major phone and laptop vendors sign on to support it.
Print From Anywhere (and Anything)
Forget about running home to print out your photos or–gasp!–ordering prints online. The next generation of mobile devices will come with their own built-in printers.
What is it? Zink (short for “Zero Ink”) Imaging, a spin-off of Polaroid, has been working on a new way of making photo paper. Zink paper has a crystal substrate sandwiched between its layers that colorizes as it passes through a slim-profile printer. The printers themselves are so small that you can slip one in your pocket, and they can easily be built into cameras, laptops, or other devices.
When is it coming? In 2008, Zink will partner with a major camera vendor (name not announced) to release the first pocket-size digital camera with a built-in printer. This early model will produce 2-by-3-inch photos. At the same time, the company will begin selling a tiny handheld printer (probably for about $99) for camera phones; it’ll print adhesive-backed photos that will likely grace the school binders of many eighth-graders. Two or three years after that, the technology may be integrated into laptops and other mobile devices.
Great Graphics Inside
“Integrated graphics” has long been synonymous with “sluggish graphics.” But soon the phrase will have a whole new meaning, thanks to new CPUs with powerful graphics hardware built in.
What is it? AMD’s acquisition of ATI brought the company’s rivalry with Intel–which already made its own basic graphics chips–to a new level. Since then the two competitors each have been working to bridge the gap between CPUs and graphics processors. Building graphics-processing functionality directly into a CPU eliminates the delay you’d otherwise experience as data passes between the CPU and GPU across the system bus. Such combined CPU/GPUs will feature DirectX 10 support and acceleration for Blu-ray and HD-DVD while consuming substantially less power, requiring less space on the motherboard, and performing significantly better than most of today’s discrete graphics cards do.
When is it coming? Intel plans to put its graphics-integrated Nehalem processors into production in 2008, beginning with a line of server chips. AMD intends to release its integrated Puma notebook platform about the same time. In 2009, Intel will bring its graphics-integrated chips to desktops and notebooks, while AMD’s Puma will likely reach desktops in 2010.
Screens Get the Bends
The smaller and more powerful devices become, the harder they are to use. Tiny screens just don’t cut it when you want to do real work. But if your phone or PDA came with a large roll-out display, you could work in comfort without sacrificing portability. That’s where flexible polymers will come in.
What is it? Display manufacturers make traditional LCD screens by sandwiching liquid crystals between layers of glass and then zapping them with electricity. Replacing that glass with plastic makes things a little more malleable. Initially developed by E Ink and Philips, so-called electronic paper compresses organic light-emitting diode (OLED) crystals between very thin layers of polymer, allowing for tremendous flexibility. Unlike conventional LCD screens, such ultrathin displays are completely shatterproof, and can even be rolled up into tight spools. The result is a wide-screen monitor that you can carry in your pocket and use anywhere. Better still, such screens will be cheaper and easier to manufacture than today’s flat panels–they’ll simply be printed directly onto sheets of plastic.
When is it coming? First-generation flexible displays are already here–they’re just not that flexible yet. E Ink’s electronic paper can be found in such nonflexible products as the $300 Sony Reader and the $130 Motorola Motofone F3. The first actually rollable displays, created by the labs of Philips’s Holland-based spin-off Polymer Vision, will reach the market in 2008: A cell phone from Telecom Italia will carry the world’s first Polymer Vision roll-up display. Currently under wraps, the phone (pricing not yet available) is expected to offer a 5-inch, 320-by-240-pixel, monochrome rollable display. By 2010, Polymer Vision expects to market larger color displays with much higher resolution.
The First Real Net Phones
Simple wireless calling satisfied users during the first generation of cell phones, but the second generation (2G) made things more interesting with the introduction of SMS messaging and WAP Internet browsing. 2.5G added pictures and video, but at speeds that feel more like dial-up than broadband. (That’s the main problem with the iPhone’s data service.) With 3G, higher-bandwidth connections have made 2.5G’s multimedia capabilities palatable. 4G will be a whole lot cooler.
What is it? The fundamental difference between 4G and 3G is the way in which the networks will be switched. Until now, most phone networks (except for VoIP) have been circuit switched, meaning a dedicated circuit is activated between the callers. This outdated method puts voice calls in a category all their own, distinct from data connections, and prevents cell phones from transmitting voice calls and data simultaneously. 4G networks will be IP switched, just like all the traffic on the Internet. That not only means that you’ll be able to talk and text at the same time, but also that your 4G device will be able to do far more on the network than it can today. IP-switched cellular networks will work more as ISPs do, allowing for greater flexibility in running data applications. Just about any device–from a phone to a laptop to a Coke machine–will be able to connect to the network, and you’ll be able to do just about anything with it. Another result of this flexibility: Wireless carriers will likely be forced to loosen their iron grip on the services customers can use over their networks, giving everyone more freedom to communicate from the road.
When is it coming? The four major U.S. wireless carriers are just scratching the surface of what their 3G networks can do, and most consumers seem uninterested in more-advanced data streaming. But the underlying technology for 4G networks, WiMax, exists now and is slowly growing in large enterprise networks and telecom companies. WiMax itself is not a cellular technology, however, and before a fourth-gen cellular network can evolve, the industry will need to find a new telecommunications protocol to base it on. As business users increase their demand for high-end wireless data services, cellular carriers will begin to deploy networks and devices that deliver 4G service. We expect the first handsets and data cards to hit the market in 2011.
Enter the Octagon CPU
Regardless of what Moore’s Law has to say, there’s not much point in increasing processor speeds or doubling the bit paths in a CPU if the system bus can’t carry the traffic anyway. Since problems with transistors leaking current also worsen as clock speeds increase and CPUs shrink, both AMD and Intel have decided to focus on increasing the number of processor cores on a chip instead of increasing processor speeds.
What is it? The centerpiece of any given CPU is the processor core, which is responsible for the actual calculations that make all of your software run. Placing multiple cores on a single chip dramatically increases the number of calculations that can be performed, without having to raise the clock speed of the chip itself. By keeping clock speeds relatively low while increasing the number of calculations performed simultaneously, chip makers overcome the inevitable overheating problems associated with faster clock speeds. And the more cores a manufacturer crams onto a single chip, the faster the CPU can go. The performance boost isn’t one-to-one, however: Intel’s four-core 2.66-GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 performs just 26 percent faster than its same-speed, two-core Core 2 Duo E6700 on certain applications, according to the company (see the results of PC World tests). So while you will see improvement with eight-core CPUs, the speedup won’t be as dramatic as it might sound.
When is it coming? Before AMD can start selling eight-core chips for the desktop, it needs to get its quad-core Phenom chips to market in 2008. Intel has been selling quad-core desktop processors for about a year now, and it has announced eight-core chips for servers in 2008. Expect OctoCore–or whatever the company ends up calling it–to come to desktops in 2010.
Put Your TV Anywhere
Despite the wireless revolution happening all around your home, your high-def television remains shamefully hard-wired in place. Wouldn’t it be great if you could put your TV anywhere you wanted, without worrying about where the cable jack was, and still get top-notch video quality? Soon you’ll be able to do just that.
What is it? Wireless High-Definition Interface (WHDI) is a cable-free replacement for HDMI that uses a 5-GHz radio transmitter to send an uncompressed 1080p, 30-fps high-def video signal from a WHDI-equipped DVD player, game console, or set-top box, for example, to a WHDI-equipped TV across a distance of up to 100 feet. Because the WHDI signal is compatible with HDMI, you’ll be able to buy HDMI wireless modems for your existing entertainment gear–and that means you can finally rearrange your furniture the way you’d really like it, without having to run additional cables through your walls.
When is it coming? Amimon, which manufactures the WHDI chip set, released the technology to electronics makers at the end of August. Now the race is on to bring WHDI to market. TV makers have already begun demoing new wireless-equipped HDTV models at trade shows, and fans of bleeding-edge tech should be able to get their hands on hardware by the start of the new year. WHDI is expected to add about $200 to the cost of a new TV, so expect to pay a premium for the technology in 2008. WHDI modems for your existing hardware will likely cost $300 to $400 for a pair of adapters (you need at least two–a receiver for the TV and a transmitter for your set-top box, for example–to get started). In a few years, says Amimon vice president of marketing Noam Geri, costs should drop to about $10 for inclusion in a TV and $60 for the adapters.
Five Terabytes per Drive
Even if you’re not a digital pack rat, you probably still manage to cram a lot of data onto your hard drive. Digital photos, movies, music, and overflowing e-mail folders can pile on the gigabytes before you know it. But don’t worry: Way bigger hard drives are on the horizon.
What is it? Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR (and a nearly identical technology called Thermally Assisted Magnetic Recording), uses lasers to heat the surface of a drive’s platters, making it possible to pack a terabyte of data onto a single square inch of drive surface, roughly twice the current limit. As the drive’s read/write head goes about its business, it briefly fires its laser at the surface, destabilizing the iron-platinum particles for reading and writing. With the platter heated, the read/write head can manipulate the surface on a very fine scale–in just tens of nanometers–letting it cram enormous amounts of information into a small space. A few nanoseconds after the work is done, the surface cools for long-term stability. The way data is organized on a disc will change, as well: Rather than having arbitrarily arranged disk sectors, HAMR drives will work with the natural grain of the disk surface, organizing data into self-arranging magnetic arrays that allow the creation of a single bit of data on every grain of the platter’s surface.
When is it coming? HAMR is still very much a research project, but it should be coming to market in the next several years. Seagate expects to introduce 5TB HAMR hard drives by 2011, with capacities of up to 37.5TB to follow a few years after that.
A Better Internet
TCP/IP, the technology on which the entire Internet is based, is no spring chicken. The current version of the Internet protocol, IPv4, has been around for more than 25 years. The old technology suffers from some serious limitations–including a shortage of addresses for all the computers that use it. Internet Protocol version 6 will change all that.
What is it? Unlike IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses like 155.54.210.63, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses like 2001:0ba0:01e0:d001:0000:0000:d0f0:0010. This small, simple change permits every person in the world–and even every computer in the world–to have a unique IP address. In addition, IPv6 features network-layer encryption and authentication, enabling secure communications between parties.
When is it coming? IPv6 is here right now, and has been for several years, but almost nobody is using it yet because the hardware needed for it remains more expensive than that for IPv4, and few network administrators are trained to manage it. However, the United States government has declared that it will move all of its networks to IPv6 by the summer of 2008, which even at government speeds means the technology should arrive in time to pick up the slack when the pool of available addresses runs out around March 2011. The depletion of addresses should also induce your ISP to update its network before long.
A PC in Every Surface
Though it seems second nature to us now, the idea of manipulating images on a screen by moving around an input device–a mouse–on the desk was revolutionary when Douglas Engelbart introduced it in 1964. But as well as it works, the mouse is still a surrogate for a far more natural human interface, the fingertip. Over the next few years, a new category of PCs will put your fingers in control.
What is it? Tabletop computing (aka surface computing) gets back to basics by letting you gather around a table with some friends for some good old-fashioned interactivity. Accepting a variety of input types simultaneously, tabletop PCs allow multiple users to work with data projected onto the surface of the table by touching on-screen objects with their fingertips. Many companies are working on tabletop computing technologies, but two of the leading efforts are Microsoft’s camera-driven Surface PC and Mitsubishi Electronics Research Labs’ RF-driven DiamondTouch. Surface PCs use rear projection to present an image on the surface of the table from inside, while five infrared cameras in the table track finger movements on the screen. DiamondTouch projects the image from above the table and uses capacitive coupling (like that employed in laptop touchpads) to follow your fingertips–with this design, though, you create shadows when you touch it.
When is it coming? MERL’s DiamondTouch is still predominantly a research project, but Microsoft’s Surface PC will arrive this year at a hotel, casino, or cellular store near you. First-generation Surface PCs will be strictly for showcasing in public locations, but Microsoft expects to offer a conference-room version for businesses by 2010. Home users will get them three to five years from now. Eventually, says Microsoft, you can expect to have Surface PCs built into countertops, mirrors, or just about any other flat spot in your home.
Put Your Data in the Fast Lane
As CPUs grow more powerful and graphics cards rocket toward ever higher levels of realism and detail, a significant bottleneck in your PC’s data flow remains: the system bus. When data travels through your PC, it’s the system bus–not the processor–that limits overall performance. What you need is a faster bus.
What is it? PCI Express (PCIe) is the leading system bus architecture for high-end hardware such as graphics cards. The current specification, version 2.3, offers a data transfer rate of 5.2 gigabits per second. The next generation, PCI 3.0, will offer a data rate of 8 gbps. In addition to supporting much higher GPU performance, a key benefit of PCIe 3.0 may be the ability to power graphics cards directly from the system bus, rather than requiring a line into the power supply. But there’s a catch: In order to support the higher data rates, the architecture will no longer work with the older 5-volt hardware used on PCIe versions 1.1 and 2.0. Whereas PCIe 2.3 supports both 5V and 3.3V cards, PCIe 3.0 will be 3.3V only. That means most current 5V hardware will be obsolete when PCIe 3.0 debuts.
When is it coming? PCI-SIG, the group that oversees PCI architecture specifications, expects to release the final PCIe 3.0 spec in 2009. PCIe 3.0 graphics cards should hit the market in 2010.
Pocket Presentations
Watching video on a cell phone is a pain. Even if you find the content you want, the tiny screen makes enjoying the program difficult. Before long, however, you’ll be seeing shows right-sized again, thanks to your projector-equipped cell phone.
What is it? Microvision Pico projectors employ light scanning technology to generate a complete, full-color image from a beam of light. Within the device it’s embedded in, a single red, green, or blue laser bounces off a tiny scanning mirror that oscillates vertically and horizontally to render the image pixel by pixel, producing a larger picture that projects onto a wall or other surface (as large as 120 inches, from 12 feet away in a darkened room). Controlling the scanner, the light source, and the optics is the PicoP engine, which coordinates the various components to control the intensity of each beam of light to create thousands of colors. By using a single beam of light rather than three beams, Microvision is able to make the projectors small enough to fit into cell phones without appreciably increasing the size of the phones. And the company even expects the integrated projectors to play a feature-length movie on just one cell phone charge.
When is it coming? Microvision has partnered with Motorola to build Pico projectors into mobile phones, and the first projector-equipped model is expected to debut in 2009. Meanwhile, the company is designing a projector accessory for PCs and game consoles that should be available by the end of 2008. Built-in projectors can be expected to add as much as $150 to the price of a phone, while accessory projectors will likely cost around $200, says Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis and editor of the Home Theater View blog.
Tech Beyond 2010
Gigabit Internet (2012): Dogged by the speed of your home broadband service? With a gigabit Internet connection over a fiber-optic line, you’ll be able to download the latest movies in less than a minute at speeds up to 1 gbps.
Mobile fuel cells (2013): Now in development, hydrogen fuel cells will power your laptop for a week at a time using store-bought fuel cartridges.
Smart homes (2014): We’ve heard for years about the smart home–a house chock-full of computer-driven appliances that cater to your every need. As homes with built-in ethernet wiring become more common in several years, central home PCs will control everything from the thermostat to the lighting to the security system.
Probe storage (2015): Code-named Millipede, the probe storage system being developed by IBM will use atomic force microscopy (think itsy-bitsy dots) to store more than a terabyte of data per square inch on a polymer surface. An array of thousands of little probes will be able to read and write large amounts of that data far more quickly than today’s drives can.
Nano lightning systems (2015): It has “lightning” right in the name, so you know it’s cool, but it’s really about cooling off your hardware. Microscopic nanotubes will use an electrical charge to generate tiny wind currents on the surface of your chips to cool them down without the aid of fans.
Hot Products
Impatient for the future? These items are due in the next few months.
Microsoft Windows Vista SP1: Early in 2008, Microsoft is expected to release its first service pack for Windows Vista. The update will likely include fixes for everything from User Account Control to DirectX 10 performance, as well as a few interface tweaks.
Apple Mac OS X Leopard: It’s been a long time coming, but Apple’s latest revision of OS X, version 10.5 ($129), may be available by the time you read this. It includes an enhanced interface with a transparent menu bar, stackable menus, dynamic workspaces, and the Time Machine file-restoration tool.
HP MediaSmart Server: Based on Microsoft’s Windows Home Server platform, MediaSmart Server–starting at $599 and due out late this fall–will deliver pictures, music, and movies to devices around the home.
Super Talent 32GB SSD 2.5-inch SATA: The 32GB Super Talent drive is one of the first flash-based drives. But early adopters beware: The $500 price tag is likely to drop, particularly after 128GB drives from mainstream makers hit the market next year.
Electronic Arts Crysis: Hitting shelves November 16, the $59 sequel to Far Cry looks to be the most visually stunning PC game ever. Developer Crytek has taken full advantage of DirectX 10 graphics technology, offering realism and detail unlike anything we’ve seen.
Battles to Watch
Here are the top technology fights to follow in the coming years.
AMD vs. Intel: Though Intel currently has the performance edge with its Core 2 line and its quad processor, AMD will soon counter with the release of its own quad-core Phenom chips. Expect things to heat up in a big way with the release of consumer graphics-integrated CPUs in 2009.
DRM vs. unrestricted access: Will user outrage prompt entertainment resellers to come up with a sensible copy-protection scheme, or will corporations overrun fair-use rights with pay-per-play media services? We’re putting our money on a compromise between the two, as some labels have already begun offering DRM-free music through iTunes and other services in response to consumer demand for more flexible formats.
Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux: IDC estimates Apple’s market share at roughly 5 percent in the United States, while Linux is gaining popularity around the world, particularly with governments and educational institutions. Most estimates still peg Linux desktop users at around 1 percent of the market, but the numbers appear to be climbing. This year, Dell and Lenovo gave Linux desktop users a boost by adding to their product lines systems with Linux preinstalled.
Microsoft vs. Google: Microsoft’s long-standing dominance in the office-productivity software arena is facing new threats from the likes of Google, which offers its own productivity suite–Google Docs–online. While Docs has yet to make significant inroads against Microsoft Office, Microsoft’s efforts to beat Google at its own game with Live.com have yet to bear fruit. CEO Steve Ballmer’s July announcement that Microsoft will begin shifting to a “Web-enabled desktop” in the coming years suggests that the company takes Google’s threat seriously.
Overhyped Trends
Here are three allgedly hot topics we’re tired of hearing about.
Microblogging: What are you doing right now? If the answer is “Washing my poodle in the kitchen sink,” we’d rather not know. With short attention spans becoming the norm, services like Twitter and Pownce probably aren’t going away anytime soon–but they’re not very useful, either.
UMPCs: In 2005, Microsoft announced a bold new standard for mobile devices known as the Ultra-Mobile PC. Armed with touch screens, GPS, and Wi-Fi, these not-quite-tablet PCs were supposed to revolutionize how and where people compute. But by delivering a platform that’s too small for true productivity and too large for genuine mobility, Microsoft ensured that the UMPC was pretty much dead on arrival, and new designs have done little to arouse consumer interest–Palm recently scrapped plans for the Foleo, a device with similar dimensions.
Kitchen PCs: For a while now, certain trade shows have been annual love-ins for companies hyping a future full of household appliances with built-in computers. In all these years, however, the best thing we’ve seen is LG’s LSC27990, a $4000 icebox with a 15-inch LCD screen crammed into the door. It’s mildly interesting to be able to watch a ballgame or get birthday reminders and weather reports while you’re standing in front of the fridge (assuming you have a cable outlet tucked behind your appliance nook); but these overpriced, barely functional computers amount to little more than amusing proof-of-concept novelties. They’re a far cry from the true smart appliances of the future.
Overdue Tech
After years of waiting for these promising technologies, we think they’re still far from mainstream.
WiMax: Back in 2003, WiMax was heralded as the ultimate solution to the world’s connectivity problems, capable of covering an entire city with ubiquitous broadband. WiMax today, however, is little more than an IT backbone for long-distance line-of-sight wide-area networks, largely because it’s not very effective for the kinds of mobile devices that most people use for wireless Internet service. The basic technology of WiMax may yet evolve as part of future 4G cellular networks, but that’s still a long way off.
IPTV: Oh, how we’ve hungered for the video nirvana that IPTV has been promising. But while Verizon’s FiOS TV and AT&T’s U-Verse are finally rolling out, they’ve yet to produce the amazing lineup of HD channels, on-demand shows, integrated gaming, and digital voice calling the companies claimed would come, and they’re still anything but ubiquitous. Meanwhile, digital cable has evolved enough to take some of the wind out of IPTV’s sails.
RFID: If early predictions were to be believed, today you would be walking through the grocery store filling up your cart as tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) tags announced the contents of the cart and an RFID-enabled credit card automatically paid the bill. Ummm, nope. The biggest holdup has come from the very companies attempting to roll out the technology, with industry infighting over standardization keeping RFID on the shelf.
Virtual reality: Second Life boasts a 3D space in which users can buy and sell property, create objects, and socialize, but its relatively crude graphics still feel more virtual than real. Virtual reality as folks imagined it in the 1990s isn’t likely to emerge until someone invents a wearable display that people will actually wear. At least we have World of Warcraft.
URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/pcworld/article185344.html
[PC World]