Technology Predictions for 2006? 344
OffTheLip writes "As 2006 fast approaches it's time for some to gaze into the crystal ball of technology and predict what will be hot, what will make a difference in our lives or make someone rich and famous. The Mercury News takes a shot at predicting the coming year of technology. No great revelations but it nice to see clean technologies make the list. The list is light on pure technology and big on trends. Perhaps killer apps are not as important as they once were thought to be." What would Slashdot users put in their top 10?
The Future is here (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Predictions (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How about (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
They didn't just make up the 11 year figure either. The prediction is based on price trends from the last few years.
The article also explains why performance and maximum write issues will not be an problem by then.
Re:More hybrid and bio diesel technology... (Score:2, Informative)
In 2003, with alot of land unused, the US produced 256,904,992 metric tons of Corn for example.
The United States has a vast range of products that can be economically produced.
As of 2003 some tax credits are available in the U.S. for using biodiesel. In 2004 almost 30 million US gallons (110,000 m) of commercially produced biodiesel were sold in the U.S., up from less than 0.1 million US gallons (380 m) in 1998. Due to increasing pollution control requirements and tax relief, the U.S. market is expected to grow to 1 or 2 billion US gallons by 2010. The price of biodiesel in the United States has come down from an average $3.50 per US gallon ($0.92/l) in 1997 to $1.85 per US gallon in 2002. This appears economically viable with current petrodiesel prices, which as of 09/19/05 varied from 264.8 cents to 306 cents.
A pilot project in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, Alaska is producing fish oil biodiesel from the local fish processing industry in conjunction with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It is rarely economic to ship the fish oil elsewhere and Alaskan communities are heavily dependent on diesel power generation. The local factories project 3.5 million tonnes of fish oil annually.
Meanwhile, independent results have shown that a Cambridge, MA company, GreenFuel Technologies has been successful in producing biodiesel using flue gas emissions from power plant smokestacks. Using a patented algae bioreactor, GreenFuel utilizes algae, and a process of photomodulation, to reduce emissions while extracting oil rich biodiesel from the system. Currently, the company has a field site at the MIT cogeneration facility and at an undisclosed power facility in the U.S.
The United States also has the ability and experance to ramp up and produce alot of a new technology when it's politically or economically viable to.
Re:Video and all-in-ones (Score:5, Informative)
If only it were that clean.
Horizontally speaking, NTSC encodes various components as signal brightness and two color information streams of differing bandwidth. The brightness can change at a rate that is approximately equivalant of 700-ish brightness changes per scan line, with the other 20 or so appearing in the overscan area which is typically hidden by the way television tubes are mounted; your milage may vary a little if you have an LCD, but then again, it may not. Color changes are a function of combining the brightness change with the two color components. These components can change at an average rate of 100 color changes per complete line, however, because one component is slower than the other, not all color changes can be reproduced at that rate. Notice that I described this as a rate; that's because television, real television, is a pure analog signal and although the rate that the brightness and the colors colors can change is limited, the position that a brightnes or color change can occur at is only limied by how recently one already did... if colors haven't changed within 1/100th of a line, then you can have a color change fairly precisely located... at the cost of not having another for a 1/100th. Similarly, a brightness change (or a green amplitude change... some of you will see why when I describe the math, for the rest, it's magic, trust me) can occur at a rate of about 700, but they can start anywhere and so the precision with which either a brightness change or a color change can be located on a scan line is in effect infinite with an analog system. When displayed on a typical color television tube, most of this capability is lost because the display beam only has a finite number of RGB phospher triads it can illuminate, and the analog detail is re-sampled by the "jail-bars" of the phosphor dots or slots. However, this is still true of a black and white set, which has a continuous display surface. Again roughly, greens change the fastest, reds the next fastest, and blues the slowest of all. These color change ratios (to one another) were designed to mimic the ratios exhibited by your eye's sensitivity to similar changes. Unfortunately, while the idea is sound as far as it goes, your eye's ability to deal with those changes, ratios aside, is so much higher than the change rate video provides, that I would argue that the designers kind of screwed the pooch in this area, but that's a different discussion. :)
The math is done like this, again more or less, using the R, G and B (red, green and blue) color components: Brightness = .59 times G plus .3 times R plus .11 times B. That gets you luma, a black and white signal that offers compatability with how the older BW television sets worked. This is also called "Y". The first color component is simply (R-Y), although as I mentioned above, it is bandwidth-limited so that the color changes are encoded in a broad, blurry way. The third component is (B-Y) and it is bandwidth-limited even further... slower and blurrier. The color image is re-created at the display this way: R = (R-Y) + Y, B = (B-Y) + Y, and G = Y - (R + B), keeping in mind the RGB .59, .3 and .11 scaling factors.
As far as vertical resolution goes, this is a bit easier to understand. For both systems (PAL and NTSC) the display is created in two passes. One the first pass, half the lines are painted. On the second pass, the other lines are painted in between the originals. Next time, the others again and so forth. These are referred to as the odd and even fields of a frame. A frame is considered to be definitive of how many lines you see, and it adds up to 400+ (odd=200, even=200) for NTSC, PAL a little more, with the remaining scan lines again typically hidden as a consequ
Re:Video and all-in-ones (Score:4, Informative)
A horizontal scan of 320 is (more or less) naturally derived by cutting a 640 clock in half, where 640 was conveniently available since early days of graphics cards because those engineers knew that the color information came at exactly that rate if video scan frequencies were used, and again when working with video, 320 double-width pixels fits onscreen sans overscan. Again, there are more clocks that don't "have pixels" that extend into the overscan areas at the left and right, and so you can't usually paint past the display edge in a 320 horizontal design.
Now: If you actually meant 300, this can be done as well but would more typically be an RGB resolution, not a video resolution, meaning that it would not be expected to encode quite as easily into a video signal because it can't be presented exactly at the rate that the color information changes. If video is not a consideration, then no resolution is impossible, it more depends on the display having enough phosphor or display elements to reproduce the signal than it depends on the card hardware — it's a lot more difficult to make a display that can show some arbitrary resolution, especially if they're high resolution, than it is to make hardware that emits an appropriately encoded signal.
Another thing that can skew all this is the question of rectangular pixels. Looking back at the Amiga, which was designed from the outset with video in mind, the pixels were not square, and that was done specifically so that the rate that the pixels changed folded perfectly into the rate at which color information can change when those changes are in phase with the color information... you can actually make an illegal NTSC image with a system like that by changing (for instance) from red to blue in one pixel; a video signal can't pull that off when the horizontal rate is 300+, so you get a smeary, nasty result if you actually try to encode it. Good video hardware would wipe the change out (filter it) before trying to encode it, but the net result is the same, it doesn't get to the screen.
One of the things we have in our software is the ability to filter an RGB image or animation into NTSC-compliance by transforming it into video encoding space, filtering it timewise, and transforming it back to the image buffer; this is useful if the video hardware doesn't do the filtering, and also useful if you just want to see what you might get on screen (assuming the video hardware does in fact filter.) This will be less important as we move forward and NTSC video sees less and less use for commercial display. It works on any resolution, such as your 300 example, as long as the presumption that a whole scan line is in the buffer isn't wrong. These are the kind of backflips that are sometimes required to get a good image from production to the viewer; it is particularly a problem when the image is artificial, such as raytrace output, because those images contain ultimately sharp color transitions without any regard for video legality. Video cameras tend to never produce illegal images (though they certainly produce poor ones if fed scenes they can't encode.)
As sort of an addendum to my first post, we sometimes see framebuffers with much higher horizontal resolutions than 700-ish; this is a nod to the idea that since you can only get a rate of change of 700, but if things aren't changing now, you can start to change anywhere. If the horizontal resolution is, for instance, up in the 1400 range, then the precision with which an edge can be placed doubles if no change preceeded the new one by more than 1 pixel. You can go higher, too. The framebuffer can be correctly loaded by software that ensures that the changes aren't illegally encoded.
Re:How about (Score:2, Informative)
It's also that hard drives have a high overhead cost. No matter what size the hard drive, you need some controlling stuff, a motor to drive the head, the head itself, and a hermetically sealed container.
The rest of your post is great, but hard drive cases are not hermetically sealed. They are pretty dust-tight but air (and moisture) passes through them just fine.