What to Watch for in 2007 122
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek picks its '5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007.' The list, which is based on the idea that these are areas which will move into the mainstream this year, includes RFID, graphics processing engines, server virtualization, Web services, and mobile security." What made your list?
Re:Huh (Score:2, Interesting)
Watch your rights disappear (Score:5, Interesting)
eInk Displays (Score:3, Interesting)
Low latency (Score:5, Interesting)
I expect chip manufacturers to stop wasting time building more cores, more threads, etc. That doesn't scale linearly and gets horribly convoluted after a while. It is getting back to the level of complexity that caused RISC to evolve. AMD are already looking into building many specialist cores and this is a sensible way to go about things in many ways. 2007 may well spell the end of the "microprocessor" in favor of building a large number of specialist cores, producing a distributed processing unit, not a central one. Along with this, I also expect "Processor In Memory" to be revived as a technique - stuff that is small enough to be added to the RAM directly may as well be done entirely within RAM. There have been attempts at using this to reduce network latency - have the network stack within the memory itself. No bus traffic, so none of the problems of offload engines. Based on Cray's paper in this field, I'm guessing that you can cut latencies by 90% by this method, for stacks small enough to cram into memory.
Provided development goes well and we can eliminate the infighting, political intrigue and backstabbing, an organization I am connected with should have a major piece of disruptive technology out this year. If it doesn't go well, then it might easily be another twenty years before anything is produced at all. Just remember, you didn't hear it here first.
A better list (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh (Score:2, Interesting)
Virtualization's new in that it was rarely used in the recent past. Instead of big boxes running lots of things, the trend has been towards commodity boxes running in clouds or doing small tasks. Apparently the hardware (compiler?) dynamics are currently such that big iron is economical on a per cycle basis with small, cheap 1U boxes. Everything old is new again.
I suspect that there is a similar argument regarding graphics processing engines. For example, maybe they mean the trend towards using the GPU's cycles to supplement the CPU. Perhaps that will temper the need for bigger/better CPUs in the near term?
Re:Low latency (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Disruptive or just overall greatest? (and worst (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I would like to see friggin FIXED this year is a EVDO handset with bluetooth that Verizon will let me use my PDA with or failing this a fair price plan. I don' tlike the idea of paying them 80 bucks for EVDO which see's LESS use then my Cable modem yet my cable modem bill itself is HALF the cost of the EVDO plan. The first EVDO or HDSPA provider to have a 20 a month plan for unlimited bandwidth will see masses of users go to them.
Re:A better list (Score:3, Interesting)
The economic implications of robots are enormous. Historically, the higher the efficiency of a worker at producing the necessities of life, the greater the disparity between the wealthy and the poor (the guy that owns the huge grain thresher compared to the guy that employed 30 people to do that job in the past). Robots will provide nearly infinite cost efficiency. Consider the man that owns a robot that can create clothing. For a nominal cost (maintenance and some electricity), the robot produces marketable goods at 0 labor cost to the owner. This should drastically reduce the cost of goods in many markets, but then the incentive for human beings to work changes radically. Either costs for necessity items will be kept artificially high, thus making the owners of the robots incredibly wealthy (virtually free labor to produce valuable goods), or all items that can be manufactured by robot labor will be free. You would think we would all be liberated at that point. No need to work. Just do something creative and enjoy it. But I think it is likely that huge segments of our population would descend into a destructive spiral of hedonism, or apathy, or violence. This would be most severe of the advent of robot labor occured in a single human generation, and that is extremely likely when considering the pace of advancement in the area. If you think about the implications of free labor, it means that property is king. Transforming the materials into goods becomes extremely cheap, so owning the land with the raw materials is everything. In the past, the need for laborers to transform it helped distribute wealth, but without it, I suspect massive concentration of wealth and power into a small elite of property owners.
I'd love it if we were all freed to pursue artistic, scientific, and atheletic endeavors, and many would. But even now, where goods are still expensive enough that most work a good portion of each week, there are many, many unhappy people. Perhaps it is not as gloomy as I think. But I feel very certain that there will be tremendous social upheaval when robots reach a point that they can handle the majority of manual labor tasks (and computers are coming along nicely on the higher order analytic tasks as well). And people with wealth just tend to seize every opportunity to protect and increase that wealth...not a positive scenario.
I am skeptical that 2007 is the year, but I am certain that this change will occur and when it does it will likely occur in less than a decade, and that will create challenges...big challenges.
Re:More Bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)
Copper is cheaper and most people have no clue about technology. It's easy to sell them anything.
In contrast in Japan education system is much better than US/UK so people are more aware of new technologies. And their culture is different - they don't want to make a quick buck and f*ck their customers. Their ethics are totally different. Example? Look at their crime rate.
Hope that helps with understanding.
No, I live in the UK, CCTV capital of the world (Score:5, Interesting)
About six months ago a city woman was found wandering in the early morning, naked, confused and injured, she has been beaten and raped, since then she has had 159 days of hospital treatment and still ain't "right"
We have these privacy invading CCTV cameras all over the shop, and the local paper and national press has been posting images from them, here is the attacker walking behind the woman in sidwell street, here is the attacker in paris street, here is the attacker in high street, basically there is 15 minutes video of this guy from every angle you could hope for.
In CSI land they simply press the "enhance" button and keep zooming until you can see the suspects DNA.
In reality, despite it being a high profile crime, CCTV produces images that make drunken 1st generation camera phones look high quality, except instead of being taken at arm's length from the face, which is what we use to identify people, it can easy be 100 yards away up a pole.
Even if you could force pedestrians to walk slowly in a line underneath cameras focused on their faces, the analogy of the CCTV camera used to catch speeders on the road, or London congestion charging etc, it still would not work, because OCR is one thing, matching faces to identities is another.
For example, it is trivial to OCR a vehicle number plate and flag a stolen car, or add a congestion charge, or a speeding fine, but this is not identity. You get the fine because your name is linked to the vehicle ownership, and the vehicle is linked to the registration number, which is all well and good, but if I see you driving into London every day in your Ford Ka (blue) while driving my Ford Ka (also blue) then all I need to do is use a copy of your number plate.
CCTV is a lot of things, but the barriers to it being a serious curb on privacy or anything else are HUGE, 1080i CCTV cameras anyone, what you going to store the date stream on? what you going to process the images with?
RFID does the job a lot easier, with a lot less computing power, a lot more redundancy, a lot more accuracy, lot less bandwidth, and it can be done today, cheap.
The above long range blurry CCTV example, or the OCR of vehicle registration, is a feeble and distant cousing of.
Subject is wearing sneakers bought by john smith with john smiths credit card
subject is carrying mobile phone registered to john smith etc
subject is carrying packet of mints and newspaper bought by john smith 10 minutes ago
subject is wearing underwear bought by john smith
subject is wearing prescription spectacles worn by john smith
it won't pick up the acme disguise kit, stick on beard, trenchcoat, fedora, latex gloves, or anything else.
Total bandwidth required, dunno, doubt it would saturate a 14.4k modem though, total processing power required, negligible, total cost, fuck all, after all the consumer goods vendors already provided the RFID tags, you already have the network, just need readers and some new software.
The blurry CCTV will still be used.
if the image looks like you it will be used as evidence, "see, it is john smith"
if the image doesn't look like you it will be used as evidence "see, john smith is clearly wearing a disguise"
If you had ANY idea how close they already are to real time with simply correlating credit card data and mobile phone cell lock records, you'd shit yourself.
AT PRESENT the sheer volume of data, bandwidth and processing power means that this data is only actually processed AFTER the event, to identify terrorists and their final movements.
It is a race between the increasing use of things like ID cards to provide more data that can be used for tracking, and technologies like RFID, in reality I suspect BOTH will complement each other, so to paraphrase Scott McNealy all those years ago, "Privacy, no such thing, it ALREADY doesn't exist"
The Exeter rapist is still at large because we don't yet have RFID, and the shops were shut so not way to tie him into a credit card purchase, no cameras on hole in the wall cash machines and the only businesses open, pubs and takeaways, use cash.
I hope it's indi (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, it's probably the largest desktop out there that uses Flash for its primary user interface. w00t!