10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in 2007. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). Though these aren't technologies they expect to be in everyone's homes next year, they're sure this tech will be in the headlines. How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?" From the article: "Printed Solar Panels - Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually--more than triple the current solar output of the entire country."

2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

[8127972]

For example:

"Pedestrian Protection System (PPS)
Radar sensors and computer-controlled braking will keep drivers safer than ever, but what about pedestrians? In case your adaptive cruise control fails to spot someone darting into the road, TRW Automotive is introducing the PPS system: if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block. The system is already being tested, part of a drive to meet new European and Japanese regulations on pedestrian safety which are being phased in, starting with 2006 models."

Jaguar's new XK coupe has this: http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/xk/highlights/highl ights/performance.htm [jaguarusa.com]

Not to mention FTTH (via Verizon), Perpendicular Storage (via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Mobile WiMAX (Rogers and Bell in Canada have this).

Re:data cloud

[CopaceticOpus]

Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage, but it is something that will be exceedingly useful. There are files storage services now, but many of them charge ten times what it would cost to back up your files locally. The innovation is that these services will finally become cheap and/or free, even for data in the hundreds of GB.

This gives you countless advantages: You can get away without buying extra drives and implementing RAID. You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router. You aren't required to have a static IP for your home machine, and you don't have to always keep it running. You can take apart your local machine, rebuild it, and move things around without worrying about your files. You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection and storing it without extra compression. Sounds pretty darn good to me.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

? moderation?

So in 20 years the solar panel just stops working?

I think not. actually it's an asymptotic curve which levels out over time. Yes their peak is at teh begining, but they still produce Usable power for a long time.

From Wiki ". (Normally, photovoltaic modules have 25 years' warranty, but they should be fully functional even after 30-40 years.)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics [wikipedia.org]

Also, your economics are slightly skewed
your not paying for 100W of e-. Your paying for a system to manufacture a peak of 100W of e- during daylight hours (avg probably 50W (just guessing?))

If it was $5 for 100W panel, e- would be close to free anyway because everyone would produce their own.

Secondly not many man made conversions happen at 100% efficiency.

I am not a huge alternative energy freek, but economics dictate that solar panels are allready a smart choice for home use. Admittedly, if demand for them suddenly increased, that would not be so. But assuming e- prices continue to go up, (they will, you can bet on it in the long term for at least another 20-40 years) Then you have an even more economicaly strong position. Now, it's probably not going to net you the hugest gains, but it pays for itself, and then more. It's a solid return, that lasts a long time, and is scalable, upgradeable, and virtually maintenance free.

P.S. talking about grid tied, inverted system here. None of that silly battery stuff.

Re:data cloud

[CopaceticOpus]

Large user created data: photos and home movies.

A high percentage of people will have high resolution digital photos. Some users will have digital camcorders. A few will have 300 hours of their kids filmed on HD digital camcorders, which would be terabytes of data.

And practically, there is a need to back up one's CDs and DVDs, since if something happens to them, there's no other way to get them back short of repurchasing.

Re:2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

[exspecto]

I think it means that it will "pop" the hood up just a little so that when they land on it, there is some "give". I don't believe it means that the hood will open so wide that they'll be *eaten* by the car.

See here: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/whatsnew/3ded9ee77c5d 9010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html [popsci.com]

Re:2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

[Moofie]

You really didn't get that right at all. The hood rises up and forward, not opening like Herbie's mouth. New European pedestrian impact standards require there to be (I think) 6" of air space between the surface skin of the car and any big, heavy component like an engine or a structural member. This system allows compliance with that requirement, and a low hood line.

An example: Amazon S3

[Gordo_1]

Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.

Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.

You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.

No need to store byproducts?

[DarthStrydre]

Though of course the fly ash and the tons of debris produced by coal burners is more radioactive, per energy produced, than that from a nuclear plant. Nuke plants are just generally about a million times less entropic in their output of nuclear materials, allowing for convenient disposal, as soon as politicians remove heads from tails.

  - Strydre

In Summary

[Shadyman]

For those of us who don't want to RTFA [popularmechanics.com], (in no particular order):

10) Bendable Concrete
9) PRAM (Phase-Change Random Access Memory)
8) Printed Solar Panels
7) Passport Hacking
6) Vehicle Infrastructure Integration
5) Body Area Network
4) Plasma Arc Gasification
3) VoN (Video on the Net)
2) Smart Pills
1) Data Cloud

I guess when #3 comes about, we will be living in the "VoN Age"?

Re:I just love these feel good tech articles.

[rujholla]

Blah coal is relatively safe???

But the official figures on the cost of coal don't tell the whole story. Coal is a killer: a more profligate one than you would expect. And it maintains a lethal efficacy across its entire lifecycle. One of the main objections held against nuclear power is its potential to take lives in the event of a reactor meltdown, such as occurred at Chernobyl in 1986. While such threats are real for conventional reactors, the fact remains that nuclear power - over the 55 years since it first generated electricity in 1951 - has caused only a fraction of the deaths coal causes every week. Take coal mining, which kills more than 10,000 people a year. Admittedly, a startling proportion of these deaths occur in mines in China and the developing world, where safety conditions are reminiscent of the preunionised days of the early 20th century in the United States. But it still kills in wealthy countries; witness the death of 18 miners in West Virginia, USA, earlier this year. But coal deaths don't just come from mining; they come from burning it. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC - a nonprofit research group founded by influential environmental analyst Lester R. Brown - estimates that air pollution from coal-fired power plants causes 23,600 U.S. deaths per year. It's also responsible for 554,000 asthma attacks, 16,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks annually. The U.S. health bill from coal use could be up to US$160 billion annually, says the institute. Coal is also radioactive: most coal is laced with traces of a wide range of other elements, including radioactive isotopes such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products, radium and radon. Some of the lighter radioactive particles, such as radon gas, are shed into the atmosphere during combustion, but the majority remain in the waste product - coal ash. People can be exposed to its radiation when coal ash is stored or transported from the power plant or used in manufacture of concrete. And there are far less precautions taken to prevent radiation escaping from coal ash than from even low-level nuclear waste. In fact, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. estimates the amount of exposure to radiation from living near a coal-fired power plant could be several times higher than living a comparable distance from a nuclear reactor. Then there are the deaths that are likely to occur from falling crop yields, more intense flooding and the displacement of coastal communities which are all predicted to ensue from global warming and rising oceans. There's so much heat already trapped in the atmosphere from a century of greenhouse gases that some of these effects are likely to occur even if all coal-fired power plants were closed tomorrow. Whichever way you look at it, coal is not the smartest form of energy.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348/ [cosmosmagazine.com]

Nuclear is increasingly the only quickly viable alternative to fossil fuel generation of power. I'd encourage all to read the article its a very interesting breakdown of possible energy generation sources.

you have zero proof

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the cost of your electricity in 20 years? Oh, you have no idea? Correct. So how do you know whether or not it's cost effective?

When you can show the lads-point to a link-with your local electricity supplier that offers a 20 year pricing contract, then you can make such a statement. Until then, you have absolutely no data to assert your assumption and cult-like belief system, ie, it's time to dump "junk economic science".

  Now, I can't assert anything either, but I can say that solar bought today has a verifiable fixed price, you can get ten year warranties on batteries and 20-30 years on panels, and odds are the normal electric bill will always be going up in cost,by the charged kilowatt hour. See, I admit I don't actually know, but run the odds around in your brain, do you really believe it is going to be either exactly the same as you pay now or actually get cheaper from your local electrico? Or do you think "energy" in all its forms will just be rising dramatically in cost?

    Now I read a lot of energy news, and I'll tell you this, you ain't seen nuthin yet like the demands coming from the developing world within the next decade, and, if it is fuel derived-any brand fuel-costs are going to be going up, from sheer market pressures. There just slap doesn't exist the reserves in the next 20 years to fit that demand coming, especially from reserves that are already gone now, and even nuclear power has never been any way close to being as cheap as they always claimed, in fact, just check the rates anyplace where it is used extensively now, barely better cost-wise than coal, and actually more expensive than natural gas.

Solar is our only practical fusion power, something that joe sixpack to joe big company can actually get their hands on and *use*, and it will be that way for decades to come. Coal has giant environmental and health impacts, which if you add those into what electricity costs, would probably double it right today, just like if you add in what having to have some huge military keep the oil flowing from ovewrseas (and that barely) really means your gallon of gas is a lot higher, they just hide it with more junk economic science and astroturfing FUD..

    We just don't have a lot more in the way of practical, deployable options right now,solar and wind power are at the top of the "we got it-let's use it" pile of the alternatives, so the sooner we start adopting, the faster we can get economies of scale going. Waiting until it is cheap enough by some vague junk economic science forumla is the same as waiting for cars to achieve 250 MPG before you buy one, you'll be a pedestrian for a long long time. It's better to support what we have now, with our wallet voting, if we want that tech to get better in the future.

      Now I will agree that "cheaper by the watt and who cares about the size" is a completely valid option,I would actually thow some cash at that (I have thrown cash at normal PV now) but here's something else-there's no law says you have to immediately go from grid suplied to totally solar powered in one step. You can start with just running a few things around your house, then work your way up as the tech gets better and more affordable. This way the solar companies make some money, keep doing research, more and better factories are built,stuff gets better, and etc.. That has worked with any number of other technologies, look at computers and just the last ten years for example, but the nice machines we have now with the much better pricing only happened because people bought computers on a large scale ten years ago.

We are part of the problem, or part of the solution, that's the only choices we have right now.

nuclear is inevitable!

[John Sokol]

  No nuclear is not inevitable... Using things like the Nanosolar solar cells or one of many other promising alternate power systems.
    Solar, Wind, wave, geothermal, Bio-fuels etc, it possible to recharge your electric car without Coal, oil or Natural gas.

    Actually for $30K you can power your whole house just fine off the grid even sell back electricity to power your neighbors and make money from the power companies.

  So with an electric car, you'd just get that charged at home for free also without polution...

  Now with home prices at $500K for a shack here is California what's another $30K for Solar Panels.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

[Pharmboy]

Who paid $10k for an electrian to wire you to the grid?!?

The power company runs the power to your house for free in every state I have lived in. They will even upgrade the service from 100 amps to 200 amps for free. The only "tie in to the grid" is the connection from the meter to the mains, which are less than a meter away from each other, as required by code.

This is a $200 job, not a $10,000 job. Everything else you are paying for, from the mains to the socket, has to be done regardless of where the power comes from. AND you can wire a brand new 2400 sq ft house for less than half of what you are claiming, sockets and switches included.

Now, to hook your DC powered solar panels up to use in your home, you will need to either wire new DC circuits to everything or use an inverter system. To connect YOUR power to the grid to sell back/use off time, and sync the phasing, etc. you are going to spend several thousand for autoswithing, inversion, etc. It's worthwhile, but it isn't cheap to connect your OWN power source to the grid.

Your numbers are simply out of whack and (with all due respect) not based on real world scenarios.

Re:An example: Amazon S3

[CopaceticOpus]

This is a fine solution for storing a gig or two of data, but let's say you need to store 300 GB. For this example, we upload the data once, download or update it an average of three times per byte, and store it for two years:

300*(.20 * 4 + .15 * 24) = $1,320

I don't see how that's a reasonable rate. A 300 GB drive goes for about $100 these days. Also, compare this to Dreamhost's web hosting plan. There you can get the "Code Monster" plan which gives you 400GB of storage, 4TB transfer per month, not to mention an entire web hosting package. If you pay for 2 years up front, it costs $382. That's much cheaper and you're getting much more bandwidth usage.

Now imagine if you used all that storage and bandwidth with S3:

4000 * .20 * 24 + 400 * .15 * 24 = $20,640

Yikes! Amazon's prices seem to have little relation to the real cost of hosting and transfering data. (Disclaimer: I'm a Dreamhost customer but I have no other interest in their company.)

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

[Yartrebo]

Perhaps the parent is using union labor that has to be paid a living wage? I certainly would never bid $10,000 for a modern wiring job of a huge house (2,400 sq. ft. is huge in my book) if I'm paying my employees $20/hour + medical + taxes.

If it's in new construction it's maybe doable, but as a retrofit job (which I'm assuming is the case as this is being conpared to a solar panel retrofit) it will be extremely labor intensive as old plaster has to be removed and then new plaster put over wherever you have to go into the wall.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

[Pharmboy]

He was saying you pay $10k for the tie, which is absurd. I am currently rewiring a 2700sqft house, but it had only paneling and I tore it all down. Doing the work myself, so not paying but a few hundred for wire.

Doing it to an old house wouldn't require tearing out much sheetwork or plaster if you have a clean run from the attic to the socket. Even if you did, you would just be ripping the section between two 16" studs. Not a $10k job in the worst of situations. The main point is that it is CHEAPER to tie in mains for the power company than for solar power.

Yes it is.

[tygerstripes]

You're right, this isn't the same tech at all. What your grandfather demonstrated was an extreme example (ie very thin) of a well-established structural technology - pre-stressed steel-reinforced concrete. Putting the steel members of a beam under strain before pouring in the magic-mix is very, very widely used in the construction industry.

The reason this allowed the beam your grandfather manufactured to be so flexible is that it was so thin - basically a steel member with a coating of concrete (probably with a heavy dose of admixture to increase the concrete's plasticity). Attempting to apply the same approach to a concreate beam of appreciable scale would result in something that basically lacked the compressive strength or tortional rigidity for which it had been manufactured (the tensile strength would be unaffected as this essentially comes from the steel reinforcements in any case). This new technology allows you to fabricate a decent-sized beam of appreciable strength which nevertheless does not crack or spall when forced into flexure, but bends a little instead.

This will make a huge difference in the construction industry where serious over-stresses are a possibility (earth-quakes, land slippage, explosion risks). The one disadvantage I envisage is that - more often than you'd like to know - miscalculations or unaccounted stress factors can lead to the failure of structures over time, and while this is usually noticed and corrected thanks to stress cracks in rigid concrete members, flexible concrete will probably not give you the same warnings before it fails. This would need to be offset by the use of stress-monitoring and displacement checks such as are used in large bridges atm.

Of course, the focus this will bring to dynamic structural calculations means that Civ Eng undergraduates are going to drop out in their first year instead of their third...