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?
Video and all-in-ones (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing new under the sun (this year) (Score:5, Insightful)
It's evolution baby, not revolution, and that's the way I like it :)
Re:I Want My Personalized Entertainment (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Monthly service for radio link servetude: $30
2. Airtime charges to download the news: $10
3. 911 access fee
4. License fee: $7
5. Newspaper subscriptions: $15
6. Knowing you'll be leached to death by yet another inadequate technology: Priceless.
[yes this is a rant about how cell phones cost too much and do so little]
Tom
Predictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Prediction: economic colapse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prediction: economic colapse (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fusion! (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, I'd predict better photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, and fuel cells. None of this will power anything bigger than a lawn-mower, but it will look great in the lab.
On the other hand, what won't look better will be designer bioweapons. Not that they'll be released, just the capability will give us one more thing to worry about.
Someone will realize that with Google's increasing suite of information organizing technology, that they can become a privatized CIA/NSA. Watch for new bloggers who actually do data mining, rather than off-their-meds rants.
And to stay on topic, controlled nuclear fusion will be right around the corner.
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
400GB of flash would be bigger, heavier, and probably slower than 400GB of magnetic storage. It would also be less reliable. You might be able to get decent performance in a lower-power, quieter device, but even with price parity, why would you want flash with all its drawbacks?
The winchester hard drive really deserves some sort of award. Second only to the microchip, the hard drive has been the most successful technology product of the past 20 years, I would say. Consider that its evolution in terms of capacity has far outstripped that of the CPU, while its price has remained low. The same basic principles have scaled from the largest several-hundred-pound devices of old to the 19 gram Seagate ST1, and from the early 1MB drives to current half-terabyte drives. These devices can be found in all but the smallest of consumer electronics and in the largest of mainframes. Only the integrated circuit has shown similar technical improvements and wider applicability, yet the hard drive gets little respect, even within the computer industry. Sad.
best in the thread (Score:1, Insightful)
My best guess is that it will kick off with a phony WMD series of attacks on US soil, which will be blamed on the bad guy du juor overseas and unnamed domestic "terrorists".
Gold and silver are OK as far as they go, but I would also recommend actual long term stored food and medical supplies, etc as sound "investments". That and being totally out of debt. There's a reason they passed that bankruptcy law this year, and it's because they know what is coming and they are planning to shift masses of wealth upstream quasi-legally. Also see the FED stopping the reporting of the hard data of the M3 supply. A very telling clue there.
Predictions for 2006 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Number 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
>> outsourcing work to places like China and India, where labor is cheaper.
This item did not surprise me one bit. The MBA types are going to continue to hype this point for years to come.
What surprises me is that they (the MBA types) are starting to be more aggressive with how they "fudge" the numbers. For example, one of the managers that I work with was touting (in a meeting with upper management) that in two years time companies will be able to cut development time by 50% by outsourcing the technical work to India. When I confronted him for some references or reasons to back up his claim he could provide nothing, not even a magazine article.
>> Many companies, seeded by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, set up
>> headquarters in the valley, where they employ high-end engineers, marketing
>> professionals and senior management.
Okay, this is going to sound like a troll (and probably get modded off-topic) but this is my honest observation from the field
Re:Painkillers (Score:5, Insightful)
The real technological advance would be a free society, not newer and better ways to fuck up people's days.
Re:Predictions (Score:3, Insightful)
On second thought, though, maybe not.
Re:Painkillers (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding an opioid antagonist like nalaxone doesn't do anything when you snort it, only when you inject it. If you add enough of it that it has any effect when you take it orally or when you snort it, then you're blocking off just as much of its analgesic effects. Same with trying to remove the psychotropic effects of ecstasy--its the psychotropic effects that also make ecstasy theraputic (it's not really a pain killer).
Our drugs laws are just dumb. People are always going to take opiates and other drugs recreationally because it's fun. It's like trying to prohibit the recreational consumption of alcohol (a societally accepted recreational drug which we have a double standard for) just because there are alcoholics. The funny thing is, before opiate dependence was made a crime, it was seen by Americans as less of a nuisance to society than alcoholism--people could also support their opiate habit on pennies a day and still be functional members of society. In fact, you'd be suprised at how many well known people in history used opiates such as opium/heroin/morphine regularly.
What we need to do is just reform our drug policies and most of the societal problems related to drug abuse will simply go away--like people ODing on "ecstasy" because it was cut with more dangerous substances, or the prohibition style crime-wave which has sweeped the nation, etc.
second the vote for 'best in thread' (Score:1, Insightful)
[from a different AC]
watch what's happening in Iran. U.S. has them cornered, with bases in Afghanistan on one side, and Iraq on the other. They're working on building some nukes, because the U.S. has a policy of not invading nuclear-armed countries. Israel will attack Iran to take out their nuke sites, the U.S. being the enabler by removing military opposition in the in-between country of Iraq...
China is also a powder-keg. If they see the U.S. too distracted with briar-patch entanglements elsewhere, they'll move to take Taiwan...
Silver, Food, Guns and Gold are on my shopping list. Silver before Gold, because Silver is industrially useful, and it's easier to trade. 1oz silver liberty is currently ~$10, whereas a 1/10 oz Gold Eagle is ~$58. Also, most of the silver that's ever been mined has been used up over the last 20+ years (production deficit + price controls == big problem).
Got a bag of rice, bag of beans, and a 50lb bag of wheat is in this week's natural food buying club [shopnatural.coop] order (they deliver to seven western states - four corners, Nevada, SoCal, W. Texas). I'm also stocking some seeds... Yes, economic troubles are certainly ahead, and all the world seems blind to it.
fulfilledprophecy.com looks interesting (found link from the wikipedia), though I haven't really looked through it.
also see Michael Mandeville's The Coming Economic
Collapse Of 2006
michaelmandeville.com/collapse2006/index.htm
Re:How about (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that a 32 GB SD flash card is likely to be available very shortly, that it only takes 13 of these cards to reach past 400GB, and that a pile 13 SD cards is still a tiny fraction of the size and weight of 3.5 inch disk drive, I think your size and weight assumption needs rethinking.
As to reliability, I have no idea what you are talking about. I can drop and SD card from shoulder height onto conrcete and it will almost certainly keep working. Hard disks rarely pass the same test. If you are talking about the write limit of flash memory. A simple comparison with a hard disk of today shows this misconception to be just that. Taking a the example of a flash drive of 200GB with a write speed of 40 Megabytes per second (similar to a modern hard disk) and doing some basic calculations shows that it could be written to continuously for just over 15 years before every block passed the 100 000 write mark. The equivalent of todays 200GB drive some 15 years ago was the 210MB disk. There are not many machines running today with 210MB hard drives, let alone dong the kind of work that requires continuous writing to the disk. And 100 000 writes is often considered a minimum. The secret is wear leveling algorithms.
So to sum up, given that you might be able to get decent performance in a lower-power, quieter, lighter, smaller, tougher device, with price parity, why would you not want to use the flash drive?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Painkillers (Score:1, Insightful)
Drugs differ. Weed? Fine. PCP? Bad Sh1t. Some regulation is needed.
Want a free society? Move to Somalia. You can do what thou wilt, but so can others.
Re:Prediction: economic colapse (Score:3, Insightful)
The must anoying thing about making predictions are those guys that come saying " ... bla bla bla ... the sky is FALLING!". So, the sky really falls, and they shut up. But a week later, you make another prediction, and they say the same thing again.
You know... There are people out there who really know what they are talking about. Those persons are capable of making a real diagnosis of the situation, and you'd better folowing their advice.
Specificaly for this thread, the only speculation the GP does is that the sky will fall in 2006, not 2007 or 2008. Everybody already knows that it will fall soon, and it isn't even a hard guess, because there are plenty of evidence pointing that the fall will happen next year.
About the other discussion (abrupt or slow falling), My guess (based on a lot of evidences) is that the US (with the world toguether) will face several abrupt hits, with one of them being next year. Every hit, you'll have the chance of avoiding the next ones, but it will become harder and harder to do, since you will probably answer to them with increased protectionism and power concentration.