Future technology
The effect of netbooks and the cloud on computing
In his column at PCMag, industry analyst Tim Bajarin writes that netbooks and the cloud are impacting computing in a serious way:
The lower cost and increased performance in these smaller notebooks, or netbooks, could eventually drive growth in the PC industry and if tied to the cloud- and Web-based apps, they, potentially, deliver a computing [...]
Breakthrough technologies?
Here’s another stab by somebody at being a tech Nostradamus. At PC World , Glenn Fleishman describes what he says are “5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything”:
3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile “augmented reality” will emerge as breakthrough technologies in the next few years. Here’s a preview of what they [...]
Your 10 minutes are up, another dollar please
That may be the type of message you’ll be seeing as you use software in the future. Microsoft has applied for a patent on timed software. InternetNews reports:
Microsoft has applied for a patent on a software licensing technology that could be used to bill users for the time they spend computing, just as if they [...]
Future mice
Microsoft is a big seller of computer mice and recently the company previewed some new concepts for the mouse interface. Gizmodo shows some of the ideas. You can see a video there along with some pictures of futuristic mice. The main technology theme seems to be using touch and gesture instead of clicks:
The name of [...]
Possible new security defense
I have no idea how well this might work out in practice but here’s a new security approach reported at ScienceDaily:
In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature’s hardiest creatures — the ant.
Unlike traditional security devices, which are static, these “digital [...]
Will touch be the new PC Interface?
Using touch to interface with a computer is an old idea but has not been seen much in standard desktop PCs. Specialized systems in businesses and devices like the iPod use touch but it’s keyboard and mouse for most home PCs. However, Windows 7 is coming with enhanced touch features and some are saying that [...]
Is the Internet broken?
That’s the question asked by Douglas McIntyre over at the site 24/7 Wall Street. While I don’t think the Internet is broken, it is certainly suffering from some outdated infrastructure and ways of doing things. After all, we are still using approaches developed 20 or even 40 years ago. It amazes me how well those [...]
A new design for electronics?
The present types of materials and circuits used as the basic pieces of computers have been successively honed and reduced in size over the years and we have gotten ever faster computers. But the present technology is approaching some fundamental limits and scientists have been hard at work looking for new approaches to computer circuitry. [...]
A new Internet?
That’s what Om Malik says we are getting. Writing at his site Gigaom, Malik describes what he calls the “NewNet”:
Right in front of our eyes, the web (and by extension, the Internet) is changing — specifically, the rise of social networking and the real-time web are changing the way information on the Internet is created [...]
The future of the computer operating system
The computer operating systems currently running PCs are based on a model that is years old and goes back to the time when PCs were stand-alone systems. As the Web has become the dominant application for PCs, this out-of-date model is more and more a mismatch to how PCs are actually used. Progress to something [...]
IBM working on DNA circuits
As the silicon-based computer chip begins to approach some theoretical limits on its miniaturization and computing speed, other ways of constructing computer components are being investigated. Some approaches use the same kind of architecture but different semiconductor material such as germanium. More intriguing are the biological approaches that I have mentioned before.
Most reported research in [...]