What Do You Think Is In Store?

[Weyoun Ten]

A friend of mine and I have been bouncing ideas back and forth regarding technology in the last year.

We both made the observation that a kindle, iphone, ipad, droid (etc), were kind of like the PADD's you see in many Star Trek series. It was also the same for things like cell phones and portable UBS drives.

My friend and I hypothesize that the next best thing in transporting information (like you do with a USB drive), would be a crystal due to the fact that scientist have the formula of crystals, and crystals have individual frequencies. Soooo, maybe ten years at the most from 2011? Call me crazy, but I am pretty sure it might happen if its not already in the works of happening.

What does everyone else think? What would you like to see in technology become a reality?

 

[Campe]

Uber fast wireless everywhere and all of your information in the cloud where you could potentially download a cinema-quality film in seconds. Physical media will be a thing of the past.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Wi-fi connected dildos and feedback-activated sheaths for interactive Internet porn.

 

[sojourner]

^Already here I think.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

^Already here I think.

Well, I'm not an expert in such matters.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Uber fast wireless everywhere and all of your information in the cloud where you could potentially download a cinema-quality film in seconds. Physical media will be a thing of the past.

Hopefully people will have the sense to maintain physical backups - there's already a number of not too old visual and audio artworks that no longer exist because they were stored entirely in virtual space and were lost to server crashes and the like.

 

[Weyoun Ten]

Uber fast wireless everywhere and all of your information in the cloud where you could potentially download a cinema-quality film in seconds. Physical media will be a thing of the past.

Hopefully people will have the sense to maintain physical backups - there's already a number of not too old visual and audio artworks that no longer exist because they were stored entirely in virtual space and were lost to server crashes and the like.

Aaah true. If I remember correctly, I heard a DJ report on how programmers think that the internet is running out of space. Maybe the servers will crash again and the internet will be down world wide for some time. :/

Who knows for how long, but I hope that if that does happen, the crash, the internet will not be down for long. I cannot function without my internet.

 

[sojourner]

The internet can't "run out of space". That's like saying the highway is going to run out of parking. Individual servers can run out of space. The internet could have bandwidth issues what with everything from refrigerators to phones sending data.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The Internet is running out of IP (internet prototcol) addresses, and the current system of IP addresses (IPv4) is poorly organised for routing data to its destination. Fortunately, IPv6, an upgrade if you like, fixes these problems and will interoperate with IPv4 provided that the backbone infrastructure is upgraded correctly.

 

[DoBa]

The internet running out of space is the funniest thing I've heard all month.

 

[Weyoun Ten]

Show of hands, who wouldn't be able to function properly at first if this reality came to past?

Reality: Internet shuts down.

 

[JoeFromEarth]

http://www.xkcd.com/865/

 

[Jadzia]

What does everyone else think? What would you like to see in technology become a reality?

I read about some researchers who developed a prototype storage medium that involves etching data into glass plates. On the positive side, the prototype held a petabyte (not a terabyte), but on the downside it is a record once technology.

If that technology was made commercially viable, it's conceivable we could have it in 10 years.

At the present time, it could be a self-destruct button for the hard disk industry: If you have a petabyte drive, would you ever need to buy another?

 

[Irishman]

What does everyone else think? What would you like to see in technology become a reality?

I read about some researchers who developed a prototype storage medium that involves etching data into glass plates. On the positive side, the prototype held a petabyte (not a terabyte), but on the downside it is a record once technology.

If that technology was made commercially viable, it's conceivable we could have it in 10 years.

At the present time, it could be a self-destruct button for the hard disk industry: If you have a petabyte drive, would you ever need to buy another?

"What do you mean this floppy drive has 1.44 MB of storage!?!? You'll NEVER fill that up!"

 

[Jadzia]

Okay... increasing data size and corresponding disc capacities has been a steady trend, but why should it be a permanent trend?

First of all, we had software and digitized pictures which used kilobytes per file. We needed megabytes of storage to hold those files all in one place. So we needed megabyte floppy disks.

Then we had digitized music and high resolution pictures, which used megabytes per file. We needed a gigabyte of storage to hold them all in one place. So we needed CDs and hard disks.

Then we had digitized videos, which used about a gigabyte per file, and we needed a terabyte of storage to hold them all in one place. Modern day hard disks and blu-ray satisfy this need.

But what type of media would require terabytes per file, to justify producing petabyte drives? There isn't one.

So short of accumulating millions of videos, (which you couldn't watch in your own lifetime), why would you need a petabyte?

Even if you watch ten 1GB videos per day, and you live for 30,000 days, That's only 300 TB for a lifetime of unique video.

 

[Irishman]

Okay... increasing data size and corresponding disc capacities has been a steady trend, but why should it be a permanent trend?

First of all, we had software and digitized pictures which used kilobytes per file. We needed megabytes of storage to hold those files all in one place. So we needed megabyte floppy disks.

Then we had digitized music and high resolution pictures, which used megabytes per file. We needed a gigabyte of storage to hold them all in one place. So we needed CDs and hard disks.

Then we had digitized videos, which used about a gigabyte per file, and we needed a terabyte of storage to hold them all in one place. Modern day hard disks and blu-ray satisfy this need.

But what type of media would require terabytes per file, to justify producing petabyte drives? There isn't one.

So short of accumulating millions of videos, (which you couldn't watch in your own lifetime), why would you need a petabyte?

Even if you watch ten 1GB videos per day, and you live for 30,000 days, That's only 300 TB for a lifetime of unique video.

Blu-ray is 25 GB. That alone upsets the apple cart.

 

[sojourner]

And good digital cameras used to be 2 megapixels, now a standard camera is what? 16? and the image files are almost logarithmically larger.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

And good digital cameras used to be 2 megapixels, now a standard camera is what? 16? and the image files are almost logarithmically larger.

So not much bigger then?

 

[trekkiedane]

Uber fast wireless everywhere and all of your information in the cloud

Sure, I'd like all of my data to be in a place where anyone (private, government or corporation) can get at it!

where you could potentially download a cinema-quality film in seconds.

if I have "uber fast" ( ) wireless why would I choose to DL anything that can be streamed?

If you have a petabyte drive, would you ever need to buy another?

(If it's bigger than the base-unit you capitalize it: Peta-byte -- if it's smaller than the base-unit you don't mA = milliampere )

Yeah, I would! - 1080p-video takes a lot of space! (and that is merely 'broadcast TV-quality'!)

What would you like to see in technology become a reality?

An implant that would only need a chip (or the cloud) to give me the ability to do anything anyone could do (as read in that novel, you know which one )

 

[Smellincoffee]

Last week I saw that commercial in which the guy asks his car for a facebook update, and I thought: the 21st century is going to be strange.

I'm only 25, but the way tech is going disinterests me more and more. Why do we want to be THAT connected? Do we really need to be SO stimulated, CONSTANTLY? I'll just go sit under a tree and listen to the breeze, thank you, and maybe in an hour I'll start reading my book. My REAL book, my book with a leather cover and rich, textured pages that bear the smell of history.