12 Crackpot Ideas That Could Transform Tech 213
InfoWorldMike passed us a link to an entertaining article with a sort of 'top 12' innovative technologies that could change the world. Some of the techs include solid-state drives, holographic and phase-change storage, artificial intelligence, e-books, desktop web apps, and quantum computing/cryptography. For each of these technologies, expert observers weigh in on the potentials and pitfalls of these disciplines. Here are Esther Lim's comments on e-books: "Another issue, besides the prohibitive cost and cumbersome nature of e-documents, concerns the vast portion of the contracts that were signed and agreed upon before e-books came onto the scene ... That raises questions not just in terms of what rights the user has, but what rights the publisher has vis-à-vis the copyright holder." We've discussed almost all of these technologies on the site at one point or another. Which is the most important? Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'?
Solid-State Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
- Near-instant data access (think boot-up times)
- Lower power consumption
- Lower failure rate
- Many others I'm sure I'm unaware of.
I'd hardly call solid-state drives a "crackpot" technology.
Re:Solid-State Drives (Score:4, Insightful)
I would. Solid-state drives have been 'the future' since at least 1991 (I had a 128MB ram disk back then)... but they've never been able to compete with hard disks on capacity or performance. Nor are they likely to any time soon, as the need for space (and money to spend on more useful things) continually outweighs the need for speed.
Oh, and that 128MB drive cost roughly $60,000 back then. But Windows 3.1 sure did boot fast.
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Duh... obviously that should have been 'capacity or cost', since performance is about the only real benefit they offer
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Latency - yes, transfer rate - no.
Re:Solid-State Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Solid state has been around for a while, and has slowly been reaching into the mainstream. While it will be 20-30 years before it replaces disk for primary storage, its come from the stratosphere of the high end to replace floppy, Zip, Jazz, and other portable disk technolgies, and will soon embed itself into the hard drive as a cache for your boot OS. How soon until we just have a 20GB Flash C: drive and a spinning disk TB class D: drive for the rest of your data? The capacity of spinning disk drives is racing past the utility point for the majority of users, honestly my corporate desktop users would be fine with a 10GB disk partition.
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Applications, etc stored on the Hard drive, with user settings and folders stored on a removable flash drive. You can do most of that now with any *nix's. If OS X 10.5(leopard) really includes home on ipod then the rest of the system is done as well. The hard part would be to create a portable security sy
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Flash linux? Wii's internal flash drive? Any modern cellphone or PDA? The hundreds of thousands of devices that use flash as a replacement for dip switches?
All of which are installations where the operating system IS the system. I'm well familiar with the concept and have built thin client setups using only flash drive storage already. My point is that for REGULAR USAGE, a flash drive is not gonna be large enough to hold the applications, databases, games, movies, music, and other such data that most people use today. For those things, hard drives will still be in place for a very long time, even if the OS itself moves to flash.
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I'd argue that the speed of boot-up and program load are important, while the speed of data access is less so (and data access is dominated by a need for space)
BTW, there is a server with 1TB of Flash RAM in this room right now...
Re:Solid-State Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd hardly call anything on that list a "crackpot [wikipedia.org]" technology.
AI, quantum computing, holographic storage, e-books - they're all either currently being researched by a ton of academics and legitimate businesses, or (as is the case for e-books) they're actually on the market.
Where's the anti-gravity, and free-energy? How can they even make a list of crackpot technologies and leave them out?
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Re:Solid-State Drives (Score:5, Interesting)
e-books have been tried, and they've failed. They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that.
Web-based apps aren't there yet, and will probably never get there until we have protocols that will give you the rich API that coding directly for the desktop will give you. Faking it in Javascript just isn't going to cut it.
True AI has been at least 30 years away for the past 50 years. It's an open question as to whether or not we can ever really get there, or if getting there is even desirable.
The Semantic Web is an interesting idea in theory, but I think the article is hopelessly optimistic thinking that anywhere near a majority of web developers will buy in to it, considering the work involved. It suffers from a chicken and egg problem: it's useless unless everyone buys in, but no one will buy in while its still useless.
As for Project Blackbox, I took a tour of it when it came to the local Sun campus, and it is actually a very impressive piece of engineering. Its uses are probably very limited, but the engineers who worked on it definitely deserve some serious geek points.
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Unless you happen to be Baen Books. They were the only ones who "got" the idea and provided books in a highly accessable format. Baen's ebooks have been a resounding success while all the Secure PDF and Microsoft eBook vendors scratch their heads at why they're doing so poorly.
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They REALLY get it, and I'm glad I found them. If you like SciFi or Fantasy (they are more geared t
Re:Solid-State Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
If you mean Strong AI, then most serious researchers have long abandoned that goal. The past 50 years have mostly taught us how complex intelligence really is, and that we still have no good definition of the concept. And as long as we don't know what intelligence in humans really is, how can we create it in computers?
Instead, most researchers are focusing on small, limited aspects of intelligence, like the ability to interpret sounds (including speech), images (handwriting, or following a road in the rain), playing chess, medical or other diagnosis, translation, etc. Many of those are here already in some form of another. We'll see a lot more of this in the near future. But if you want Daneel Olivaw, I'm afraid you'll need a couple of centuries patience.
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Your premise seems to reek of hand-waving. How would randomness in the human thought process give rise to the ability to "create algorithms"? This is the sort of fuzzy reasoning that IMHO gives rise to the argument that "Human consciousness must be quantum-mechanical in nature."
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Books have a lot of advantages. They're also bulky, heavy, utilize a "fixed" display mechanism, and require an external light source.
Backlit ebooks can be read in the dark or in low-light situations. Screens can increase font sizes for people with bad eyesight. Storage systems can let you carry hundreds, if not thousands of books all at the same time.
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Or you could say we had Turing-test AI in the 1960's because Eliza fooled a lot of people.
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e-books have been tried, and they've failed. They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that.
Or until a generation that gets to use e-books grows up, then the real book will have trouble selling - who would want to use all that volume up for just one story instead of quarter of the volume for 6 million stories - some with sound-effects and even animated pages. Imagine reading a few lines about how to play poohsticks, then pressing the screen to see the picture above show Pooh and Christopher Robin running across the bridge to see their sticks come out the other side - imagine the expression on you
Re:e-books (Score:2, Interesting)
I read text files from Gutenburg.org [gutenberg.org] on my Treo every day. Why, even when I have a paper copy of the book, do I choose to read it on my phone/PDA instead? Because it's always with me. I actually go to Gutenberg.org with the Treo itself and download something new whenever I find myself in need of good reading
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Plenty of things repel, but that does not make them the opposite of the gravitational force.
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I'd have to agree, since there's already software out there that will instantly transform your thumb drive into a portable scratch disk. It probably won't be long until such setups are commonplace.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Also, if you use SATA for your RAID, you can replace failed disks without any downtime whatsoever! [well, you could if linux didn't suck at hot-swappage]
Bonus points if you buy a fast processor and clock it down to the point where passive cooling is enough (i
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Swap is designed around expensive chips and cheap disk. With flash, a strategy using discard+read is somewhat more practical as the seek penalty is much lower, or more ram, etc.
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Well, that's good to know. I'm sure people won't care about paying $10,000 for 750GB of flash memory than $300 for a 750GB hard disk.
"(pretty much anywhere it is 'big enough' and power matters)."
Indeed. Solid state storage makes sense anywhere that it makes sense... as it always has done. But when even games are taking 15+GB of space these days, most people aren't going to manage long with a small flash drive on their PC.
The problem you're facing as an advocat
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Absolutely true but possibly irrelevant depending on the application. For applications where $/megabyte is the overriding concern hard drives are going to remain the way to go for the near future. But for applications like laptops where other concerns like weight, shock resistance, and boot speed are important
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I wish. As a developer and photographer who travels a lot, I'm waiting on tenderhooks for those 300GB notebook drives to ship this summer...
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For Logistic's sake, get an mid-large external 7200 2.5in HD in a rugged USB/1394-powered case, and an 18" cable. The data is safer (carry it in a pocket) and you save on the penalty for bleeding-edge prices. Smaller than a paperback, so a tolerable addition to the package, with the benefits of providing backup and added security.
BTW, it's "Tenterhooks" -- used to strech wool for drying, nothing tender about them.
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Furthermore, the numbers I've been seeing have been closer to 1MM erase-write cycles per sector.
from Wikipedia:
"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some ch
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As others have noted, the rewrite issue is improving daily. I remember slashdot posts like yours from a year or so back that used "10,000 rewrites" as the scare figure. In addition, OSes could be reorganized to minimize the issue. (For instance, just adding more RAM reduce
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How big is your cache file? A gig? Let it use all unused space on the drive, and overwrite the oldest parts of the cache when necessary. That would reduce the number of writes substantially, and since flash doesn't have the same performance limitations as standard drives, there is no loss of efficiency with the cache not being located on the "edge" of the drive.
A highly efficient, low power, impact resistant hard drive that would reliably last a fe
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most flash chips are only reliable up to 500,000 rewrites, if that sounds like a lot to you, try using flash for your swap partition on your desktop, you're lucky if you can get two years out of it, I'd estimate more like 6 months.
Did you actually run the numbers on that?
Supposing you have a 1GiB flash partition, on a device with integral wear leveling that supports 500,000 write cycles. To wear out that partition would require writing ~500 TB. Doing that in six months, even with a machine that's on 24x7, would require writing 35MBps continually. That's about as fast as a typical hard disk drive can sustain, so you're basically talking about a machine that would be thrashing 100% of the time with disk-based swap.
Assuming you
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The problem with that statement assumes the consumer know how to buy a computer. From what I seen most computers are sold with the fastest CPU and little RAM.
They're not sold with so little RAM that they swap continually. Frequently, yes, continually, no.
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I think that it's fair to say that storage is the weak link in personal computing. Ha
I think you're right. (Score:4, Interesting)
With reliability comes complete erasure. Unless your file system or OS incorporates unerase, that could be trouble. A new paradigm for mirroring, such as time-delay mirror algorithms, will be vital
With a really fast fixed storage, bus bottlenecks demand attention. If the speed difference between external and internal storage is less than an order of magnitude, but the I/O bus is too slow to take advantage of that, well, buy stock in motherboard makers with fast busses.
But the big change is to the operating system. All current systems have an implicit distinction between 'RAM' and 'disk': you load a file into memory by opening it. Remove the speed distinction between RAM and disk, and all of a sudden virtual memory schemes lose many of their disadvantages. Faster disk also means dramatically faster database access, so among other things, all of those LAMP-driven blogs will be a lot nicer to troll. Invest in companies selling blog (anti)spam software.
The OS bloat that will result from an all-virtual-memory OS will probably mean eye candy at first, but in the end can take us into a true 3D interface, which will be a paradigm shift as big as the move from text to GUI. Look for a new pointing device, such as a touch-ball or cube (instead of a pad) or a wii-like wireless thingy. Maybe something like riding gloves, that leave the fingertips free to type, or even take the place of both a keyboard and mouse.
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Why would 'solid state storage' remove the speed distinction between RAM and 'disk'? If the 'solid state storage' is as fast as RAM, why would you bother with the RAM in the first place?
In reality, we'd still have a limited amount of fast RAM and much more but slower solid-state 'disk' storage. The difference is that 'disk' accesses might be only 1000x slower than RAM accesses rat
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Volatile memory access speeds will improve faster than disk access speeds have. The bus makers will try to keep up, and eventually you'll have something like an order of magnitude (think 10x) difference in speed between the two. With caching and OS changes, there will be little difference in feel between long-term and
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So instead of a failure rate based with a mean of 4 years and a stardard deviation of 1, we have a drive that si garenteed ot be bricked in 1 year. I guess thats improved reliability. We can reliably say it will will soon. Remember flash memory has a finite write life. 500,000 write
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Not crackpot, but still prohibitively expensive.
For RAM drives, you have basically $70/GB, and good luck finding the hardware to use them... The iRAM (which they apparently renamed to "GC-RAMDISK", with comparable (ie, no) availability) looked promising, even came down to a reasonable price, but as I just mentioned, no one seems to actually have them in stock.
The situation looks quite a bit better for flash... You can get 4GB CF cards, which
Think boot-up times? Think again.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like your machine spends all its time seeking the drive heads around during boot. "If only I had a faster seek time"
It's all the stupid delays, timeouts, and busy loops in the Win32 drivers, probing for things that probably aren't there -- waiting for other things to finish, making network connections, and so on. The actually reading-from-the-drive time, even
Superconducting computer are 'psychoceramic'? (Score:2, Funny)
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Never is a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be hard pressed to say "never" to just about anything when it comes to tech. Remember the famous Bill Gates quote - "640K ought to be enough for anybody." It was true at the time, but looks extremely silly now.
Will we manage any of these in a year, or five years, or five hundred are probably better questions.
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http://tafkac.org/celebrities/bill.gates/gates_me
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Bill Gates did not say that, I wish people would stop spreading this urban legend.
http://tafkac.org/celebrities/bill.gates/gates_mem ory.html [tafkac.org]
You're absolutely right. That's good to know.
But this whole deal reminds me of something Bill Gates said once: "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." - it's pretty funny, because it sure isn't true any more!
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If that isn't funny enough, how about this one?
"We'll kill spam in two years." - Bill Gates, 2004. [theregister.co.uk]
I wonder how long it will take him to say he never said that one either? ;^)
Crackpot ideas? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sony and ebooks (Score:4, Interesting)
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Getting it right (Score:2)
Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It essential involves a simple question of whether IP is still able to, as the US Constitution says, "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It was my conclusion that the massive increase in communication technology recently has turned "Intellectual Property" [sic] into a hindrance of progress today rather than what A1S8C8 was intended for. Yes, it has been an effective establishment in the past, but look at the reality for a second. How fast
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Anyway my take on this is that is you abolish IP laws you also have to let content producers protect their content as they see fit. That's freedom for everyone. Otheriwse, you can try to come up with some half-assed compromise. I believe that neither of these scenarios is going to happen anytime soon, though.
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I don't see any line of argument in this tree that says that progress isn't taking place.
you abolish IP laws you also have to let content producers protect their content as they see fit.
So.. you're saying they are going to have us sign non-disclosure agreements?
I don't see how this is off topic.. IMO if copyleft gets to be too intrusive on intellectual property holders, the IP holders will want to abolish copyrights. Without copyright, there is no copyleft,
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And if you care so deeply about giving people access why don't you, you know, go and do it? I suppose it's much easier to sit back and whine.
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The near term important ones (Score:5, Insightful)
The only ones I see that are near term likely and widely relevant:
2. Solid-state drives
Already here in some applications. Just needs a touch more capacity (I think around 32GB is the tipping point) and economies of scale to bring the price to reasonable levels. This will have a tremendous impact on laptops enabling them to be smaller, lighter and more durable. I would love to replace my laptop hard drive with something solid state. Damn thing is fragile enough as it is.
3. Autonomic computing
Think about all the spam, viruses, etc. We're already building what amounts to an immune system for our computer networks. It just needs to become a little more automated and clever. IBM is actually right in that it will be an incremental addition to existing technologies. It's not going to be a top-down mandated thing but rather a collection of technologies to deal with specific issues which (ideally) can work with each other.
4. DC Power
I've wondered for some time why we don't have a standardized DC outlet for home use. Have 1 big efficient transformer instead of 50 little inefficient power bricks. The downside is that you are introducing a single point of failure but it's a well understood and pretty reliable technology. Every circuit board requires DC anyway so why not have a standard DC along side AC in the house or office? May require some government assistance and/or standards organizations to make it work but it's a good idea. I'm pretty sure we'll see this in data centers sooner rather than later if the power savings really are there.
8. Desktop web applications
Gmail and web calendaring have made their way into my every day tool chest. It's only natural that we'll start to make these applications more accessible via traditional applications.
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Crackpot (Score:5, Funny)
Still to inside-the-box for me. Personally, I'd think infinite improbability has much more interesting ramifications. If only there wasn't that darn Total Existence Failure thingy to worry about. Technical enterprise, who cares? I'm talking about undergarments suddenly jumping three feet to the left.
Perhaps we can start out small and work on a bistromathic processor and a finite improbability drive and work our way up from there.
You just may be on to something there....but.... (Score:2)
eBooks (Score:4, Insightful)
I would really like to use eBooks. I read a lot. Often, I have to read sitting in front of the computer when I'd rather read on the couch -- an eBook would fix that. Often, I have to invest in huge heavy blocks of paper with hardly any resale value -- an eBook would fix that.
And there's no shortage of content. If I had a Wikipedia snapshot on an eBook, that alone would be worth it. I could never get finished with the interesting parts of Project Gutenberg, or the vast amount of other free content in the world, let alone the technical manuals I sometimes need to read and the documents I could scan in.
I NEED an eBook reader, I am willing to PAY for it, I would pay $2000 for a really good one.
But there isn't a really good one. There's ePaper technology, EMR tablet technology, battery technology, all the necessary technologies, and yet no actual useful eBook product. They're all small, or they only read PDFs, or ther only read Sony rubbish, or they're indistinct, or they don't have annotations/bookmarks, or they have a battery life of less than 8 hours, or they just aren't finished (iRex Ilead, I'm looking at you).
And so here's this money that I would LIKE to spend, on this thing that would be really of value to me, and I CAN'T, because the sad fact is that the kind of guys who sit in boardrooms trying to think of new products just aren't good at knowing what makes a worthwhile new product.
It needs an 8" epaper screen, a stylus with which I can navigate and draw annotations, a USB port that makes it appear like an ordinary USB mass storage device, a battery life of 10 hours, and the ability to navigate by pages & bookmarks in PDF, text, HTML, and
Would someone PLEASE make one? CORPORATIONS, take my MONEY FROM ME!
(*)If I want Linux, I can use my DS.
Completely Off Topic (Score:2)
(Yes, I'm one of those people who follow links in sigs on occasion, hoping that it won't be a goatse mirror.)
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Seems like you could pick up a used Tablet PC for that price and look at any kind of format you want.
Re:eBooks - use a PSP! (Score:2, Informative)
I use my PSP for reading eBooks frequently. It's missing some of the features you desire, most notably screen size, but actually works remarkably well. It's a bit of a pain to get it going initially, though, as Sony never intended the PSP to be used this way. Essentially you need to use some kind of exploit to trick the PSP into running custom applications (homebrew). The PSP hacking community is active and thriving with many homebrew applications that are useful, and once you've loaded a custom firmware it
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I'd really recommend playing around with it first. The page-turn rate on the model I saw at a Sony Store was slow. You can absolutely forget about the idea of "flipping through" an ebook on one of those.
That may be tr
ebooks will probably a mess (Score:5, Informative)
It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.
The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.
Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.
Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!
A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)
And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.
So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.
WTF?
ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.
Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the .lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?
I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.
Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.
Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.
This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.
The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.
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What are you talking about? I love used books. A well-worn book is one that people have found worth reading more than once. And we all know the advantages of buying used textbooks, back in college.
Flying cars! (Score:5, Funny)
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Which would make for happy bureaucrats. Give them something to do that keeps them busy, and out of my hair.
Who's to prevent your average 'driver' from accidentally flying over secret military airbases?
I would think that the pile of blasted cars, from previous attempts, would be a deterrent.
Waterproof e-books (Score:3, Insightful)
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Cyrogenic computing, back again (Score:3, Informative)
There's a long history of cryogenic computing in the crypto area. IBM and NSA put millions into this back in the 1960s and 1970s [amazon.com] ("I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money" - NSA director in the 1960s), and there were some actual successes. Liquid nitrogen tank trucks pulled up to Fort Meade in the 1960s. The problem was that the computing element they were using could be made fast, but not small or cheap; it involved a coil and a magnetic field, so it was a discrite component, like a memory core. CMOS ICs won out.
Then there was the Josephson junction effort of the 1980s. Those worked, but again, CMOS ICs won out. Cheaper to build, easier to shrink. It's hard to beat the mainstream IC technology that everyone is working on.
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Just general commentary (Score:3, Interesting)
Quotes are from the FA.
Interestingly enough, modern processors already have a "sit around and wait" phase. Intel calls it a "drive" stage, and there are (IIRC) two drive stages in the classic P4 pipeline.
Also, the chief obstacle is that all this shit is insanely expensive and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Superconductors have to be cryonically cooled (does cryo-SRAM indicate anything, or is it just a cute name? Too lazy to look it up) and that means you're spending a lot of money just to keep it running, let alone to build it.
Moving on; solid state drives are (as we know and the FA states) already here and there's a ton of new technologies coming along to make them cheaper and lower-power than they already are. A winner. In particular the mp3 player and high-end digital camera markets are pushing this, not to mention subnotebook which is still a very popular form factor, especially among businesspeople. And ESPECIALLY among female businesspeople - I don't want to seem like some kind of sexist or something but it's simply the case that a woman is more likely to be offended by a heavy and/or bulky laptop. Plus, they tend to have smaller hands, so those tiny keyboards don't cause them to seize up and fall over.
Well, in a word, yes - if it worked and was more efficient than having humans manage it. But virtualization brings us close enough for most purposes already... as the FA says. Still, yes, I do want a datacenter that is simply smart enough to maintain itself. Still, you can achieve so much of this by creating a number of simple behaviors that I figure it's here already to some degree.
Moving on again, DC Power is a great idea to me if only for one reason: it eliminates a lot of extraneous EM fields. Call me a hippie if you like (I was born in Santa Cruz, I can take it) but the simple fact is that our bodies (and especially our minds) produce and respond to EM fields and 60Hz is the frequency of the alpha state. Every wire is an antenna and it is radiating the frequency applied to it at all times. Just some food for thought. I'm not making any specific claims.
Holographic Storage is the biggest piece of vaporware ever. The idea was old when I was a kid and products have always been just around the corner. I'm not that excited. The phase-change storage seems to have more promise for actual working products that don't cost more than the computer they're attached to, but maybe that's just because the holographic stuff has been coming "real soon now" for decades.
Not even going into Artificial Intelligence save to say that we know so little about actual intelligence that it's no wonder we haven't invented any.
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Regarding Artificial Intelligence...
Of all the technologies listed, this is definitely the King of Crackpot... people have been heralding the possibilities of AI for decades now, and when you get right down to it, all we have is tree searching, finite state machines, and genetic algorithms, none of which are very intelligent. The first is brute force, the second is an elaborate robot, and the third depends on randomness to appear as intuition. The only reason I can fathom that AI even made it on the list
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Scheduling capacities well beyond the possibility of the human brain are used in internet traffic routing, compiler optimizations, project management, delivery services, air traffic (in some places).
There are free services available on Internet which can roughly translate a document (Hey, you can at least gra
Real transformation (Score:5, Interesting)
- Queue a file to be copied later to another computer. Why do that, when you can manually make the connection and copy it now? What's the point of adding extra automation that just delays things? Because the extra automation can be used to add routing, addressing, notification, etc. Email.
- View an ordinary formatted text file (maybe a few pictures thrown in), but on another computer. That makes no sense, to rely on an unreliable and slow network connection and on the other computer to be up, when you can just copy the file (or have it emailed to you) so you can look at it whenever you want. Besides, how do you even know how to locate the file? Except the protocol for identifying and exchanging this information allows web applications, and you get the HTTP and the World Wide Web.
- GUIs. Using a little wand or ball or mouse to move shapes around on a screen is okay for specialised applications, but computer data is numbers and words, which are all abstract and have no relationship to things on a screen. Besides, you'd have to give these controller gadgets to everyone in the world with a keyboard already, who wants that expense? Besides, keyboards are always more efficient because you can keep your hands in place. GUIs for real (number and word) applications existed for decades before they caught on.
- Apple iPod - less capable player, relied on PC software for functionality. Well, PC software has a better interface and makes things easier overall - plus the iTunes music store.
I predict the next big thing will be something along these lines. Maybe already here, but dismissed as equally silly.- A display-neutral protocol that lets applications run on a server with the GUI on a user's screen. Not pixel-oriented bandwidth hogs like X windows or remote desktop, but something based on well established GUI components and window layout. Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP) [openxup.org] is a much overlooked example.
- Deductive databases. A reasonable relational database with foreign key constraints means that if you select only the data and tables you want, it should be easy enough for the database to select your joins for you. It's an NP problem, but lots of caching could fix most of that. Oh, plus SQL sucks, and it's nearly criminal that people think SQL and relational database mean the same thing.
- Statistical text analysis. The very beginning has started with SPAM filters and Baysian models. Spammers are starting to figure out how to fight them, but variable length Markov chains have the potential to start to glean more meaning from the text and make better decisions. This could lead to the ability to extract common concepts from phrases or sentences which are different, but mean the same thing. This would allow processing text based on chunks of meaning rather than pattern recognition - far from artificial intelligence, but opens up the possibility of a lot of new very high level applications.
There's a few thoughts. Any other things that seem trivial and with vastly overlooked potential?Re: (Score:2)
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I think the trend is there, and once someone gets it right, it will produce a technology usage transformati
Cryptography (Score:2)
10. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography The manipulation of subatomic particles at the quantum level has raised eyebrows in computer science research departments lately
I did my masters thesis on DNA computing, specifically on the application of cryptography. At the time, in 2002, there were many large scale implementations of DNA computers that were prototypes. I think this sort of thing will be (probably already is) used exclusively to hack encrypted messages intercepted by intelligence agencies.
The basic idea of the DNA computer was to represent data using DNA strands, then implement math operations like Or's, And's, masks, shifts, etc. commonly used in encryptio
Crackpot? (Score:2)
DC power in datacenters (Score:3, Interesting)
Back to Basics (Score:2)
How about this: a computer's default behavior should not be "lose everything," but rather "save everything."
That's just the beginning.
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i think that an ebook reader is something like an MP3 player... it's a handy device for accessing digital media you already have. until ebooks are in the hands of millions of people (like mp3s were when the ipod hit the scene) there won't be much market for a dedicated device, regardless of the cost. at the end of the day, people like MP3s because they are cheap, convenient, and portable. until the ebook is the same way (or it offers something that a traditional book can't, like search) i think that the
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Moving Icebergs (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a pretty old idea. During WWII, the Allies first studied the practicality of strapping engines on icebergs and using them as aircraft carriers. Finding that unsuitable, a fleet of ships made of ice were actually commisioned. Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?). That would have surely been a sight to see. But the project was scrapped when Canada couldn't build them as fast as they were needed (a near logistical impossibility).
So I don't know that driving icebergs is all that crackpot.
Wikipedia is your friend (Score:4, Informative)
Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?).
Pykrete; [wikipedia.org] the operation was called Project Habakkuk [wikipedia.org].
Re:I also have a crockpot idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Some observations from experience:
I hope this helps!
Would that be Goat Cheese.... (Score:2)