20 Factors That Will Change PCs In 2002

bstadil writes: "CNN's tech site has posted a list of the 20 most significant factors that will change the PC in 2002. Its not very technical but it would be interesting to get the take on this from the Slashdot community plus what they think needs to be added."

Why doesn't anybody get it? Voice doesn't work.

[Brento]

I really got my hopes up as I read through it - I thought for once, I would see an article about The Future that didn't say the equivalent of, "This year is really the year when voice recognition will be everywhere." But noooo, they had to say that voice-driven web portals will be one of the Big Things.

What is it about voice recognition that suckers journalists in every time? Nobody seems to get it: voice recognition is here, it's been here for a long time, it's just that the accuracy isn't good enough. You can't walk up to somebody else's installation of ViaVoice and start dictating a letter without missing a few words in each paragraph at the bare minimum.

Now they're talking about voice navigation of web sites? Let me get this straight: half of the sites I visit are so poorly designed that it's hard to tell where to CLICK, let alone what I would say if the site was actually listening to my voice. And if I have to read instructions on how to surf a specific site, you can bet I won't bother reading it - or even clicking.

I didn't bother reading the rest of their Big Futuristic Ideas, but if they're the kind of journalists that include voice recognition, it's not the kind of article I want to read.

Re:My wish list

[MtViewGuy]

Some comments on your wish list:

1. Hard drives are already pretty fast, especially now with ATA-100/133 IDE connections. Serial ATA will raise the data transfer rate by a factor of six. I do expect quiet 10,000-20,000 rpm Serial ATA hard drives in the next few years, though. For higher-end applications, expect the cost of Fibre Channel connections to come down, which will essentially put an end to SCSI.

2. Why do you want monitors with built-in USB hubs? I don't find them that useful, especially nowadays most pre-built systems now have USB connectors in front of the system case.

3. Unfortunately, not that many applications take full advantage of multi-processor boxes (or require their use). It's only with very specialized apps such as CAD/CAM and very high-end image processing that you really need multi-processor computers.

4. If you're looking for a less patronizing Windows UI, Windows XP's Luna interface is already a step in the right direction. You'll probably see other changes in the next few years.

Re:My wish list

[Anonymous Coward]

i am dumb so this could be wrong. but i believe if you want a faster hard disk then that automatically happens when you make them bigger. as the data density per platter increases so does the amount of data you can read off it in a unit time. the 10x data density or whatever in the article would result in 10x more speed from the platters (disregarding head seek/access times). assuming an 80GB disk now can do 30-40MB/sec or whatever then the 800GB disk (assuming same number of platters) should manage 300-400MB/sec. a fair bit more than you are requesting.

but i am dumb so i could be wrong.

Re:My wish list

[denzo]

Hard drives are already pretty fast, especially now with ATA-100/133 IDE connections.

Yeah, the latest ATA-133 interface may be fast (up to 133MB/sec), but the (consumer) hard drives have hardly caught up with it. It's just another one of those big buzzwords that computer salesmen use to make a computer seem like it's super-duper-fast.

Current hard drives can just about sustain 33MB/sec transfer rates right now, and not very much more. Hard drives are still the bottleneck in our systems, otherwise Windows and the latest games would start up in a flash and you wouldn't have to watch the hard drive light blink for a few minutes.

Re:Only 512 MB of RAM in 2004?

[WNight]

Worse than that, why does ~100k of text and formatting bloat into a 4mb .doc file? The fact that it then takes 200MB to load it is to be expected after that.

And ugh, have you ever output to .html from word? Not only is it completely *not* compliant HTML, but it's so very redundant... In a way that a 1st year comp-sci student could fix too.

Ugh.

Re:Markup languages than proprietary binary format

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X does this NOW. All of those .plist configuration files are xml configuration files. Apple also provides a nice editor for them if you install DevTools.