The Heretic
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2002
- Posts
- 28,592
I have done pretty well with my predictions so far. If you go back and look at my posts the last few years, you will see that I predicted that Windows Vista would be more or less a flop with regards to acceptance. The fact that Microsoft dropped a bunch of important improvements and features that they promised, not to mention that they managed to make it run even slower and require more horsepower didn't help things any.
I forget what other predictions I made, except maybe the one time I disputed that there would be 4 core laptops by now (there is only one that I know of, and it is kind of a custom desktop replacement machine, not really a laptop) - but maybe I will remember them as I go along.
My predictions for the future are not pulled out of a hat; they are based on news articles and technology trends and other people's predictions based on those trends, but I'll share them with you anyway in the hope that you will all ignore that and when they come true think that I am really smart and wise anyway and forget that I plagarized most of this (wait - did I say that out loud?).
In the very near future (now to 12 months out):
Four core desktops with a bare minimum of 2 GB, preferably 4 GB of RAM, will be more and more the replacement for the currently common dual core machines with one to two GB of memory. You can get Dell 4 core machines on sale now for $650. Increasingly these will be the sweet spot to buy at - less and you risk the machine being behind the curve inside of two years, more and you are probably paying a premium most people don't need to pay (I paid $3K for my 8 core machine with 10GB and I use every bit of it when I work).
You will start to see virtualization in various forms being available and used - especially on Macs (look it up if you don't know what it is).
Storage.
Increasingly, 1 TB hard drives will be the default config and the prices on these are already coming down (2 months ago they were $220, now they are below $200 with many $180 on sale). Inside a year the largest consumer hard drives will be 2 TB and then the price of 1 TB will probably drop to below $100 and they will be very common place.
Hard drives for most laptops (they are usually smaller physically) will be at least 320 GB with 500 GB available for most. Solid State Drives will be increasingly available, still expensive, but more available. Unfortunately, not all of these are worth the premium - tests have shown the first generation drives don't give much advantage, if any, with regards to performance or battery life - but they will improve. I don't think they will catch up to mechanical hard within the next few years though - at least not until the mechanical HDD manufacturers bump up against the next density wall (in a couple of years if they don't find a way around it soon).
We may start finally seeing e-ink displays (google it), but for now only on e-book readers. These are two slow for standard computer use.
The current sweet spot for displays is the 24" 1900x1200 LCDs for under $350 (shop around and don't pay for more than that unless you have special needs with regards to color). Maybe in about 2 years the thirty inch displays will come down well below $1000 - I sure hope so. I would like to buy two of them for $500 each - but for now, the cheapest you can get one is about $1100 on sale (rare). Don't buy a thirty inch display unless you know what you are doing (they require a Dual-DVI Link display card).
The future about a year or two out?
We will start seeing cutting edge (from the consumer's POV - the HPC [High Performance Computing] sector is already doing this) computers that are a hybrid of CPUs and GPUs that will run software that can take advantage of both at the same time for general computing. What's a GPU? That's the Graphics Processing Unit on your video display adapter. For what it does (streaming bit munching, parallelized bit processing, hard core matrix processing, etc.), it does a lot faster than a general purpose CPU.
The leading edge computer companies (Apple, Intel, AMD and other GPU manufacturers) are working on software and hardware to this end. Some software companies are researching using some of the special software libs to run certain types of processing not related to video on the GPUs, offloading the CPUs. Apple is working on a way to integrate their OS and programming APIs in such a way to make the use of the GPUs more seamless. Intel is working on integrating multiple GPUs with CPUs - we may see machines that have 16 GPUs on the same core die as 4 to 16 CPUs with more RAM on the die too (instead of on a separate bus/chip).
This may mean some really kick ass machines - especially for those who do scientific computing, or those who do CGI animation (think real time animation on a single machine).
In the server world (those machines that run the apps in the web and business world), multiple cores will be the default as they are now. With regards to raw computing speed, these will not be leading edge. With regards to the amount of memory they have - they will have huge amounts. Increasingly, the problem in this sector is not how fast an instruction is processed, but how fast data can be accessed. The problem is that hard drives are where the data is. The answer? Cache the data in RAM. Anything that is not to be persisted long term to permanent storage will be in RAM. THis means a lot of the databases are coming off the hard drives and into RAM. This means terabytes and terabytes of RAM. Most consumer computers don't need this but business/web servers that need to handle thousands to millions of transactions per second do - and it is only going to get worse.
Broadband. Penetration (how many people have broadband) will level off or at least the growth of penetration will slow significantly. The problem is that most people who can get broadband will have it already. Those that can't because they live outside the service area will be stuck. Wireless won't be much help here. Maybe, just maybe, power line broadband will help - if it does then I can see real growth in that area as almost everybody has a power line coming to their house and those that don't have broadband in areas not currently served (about half the country - the rural areas) will jump on that bandwagon real quick. Unfortunately, I don't see the current hurdles being overcome without a kick in the rear to the FCC.
Speeds. Probably increasing at the same rate they are now. If Verizon can keep installing fiber they will see people switching over to that wherever it is offered - just for the internet access alone.
Wireless? WiMax is looking like it is going to fail. The same will probably happen for other plans to offer internet access via wireless. Not talking in-house WiFi here.
SAAS (software as a service)? Ehh. I don't like most of it. But some people will buy into it - and probably regret it. It is the next new fad in the software provider's world - because it means steady income and more control over their customer base, but it provides little benefit to the user - especially in the long run. The free services will work okay, but those that require a subscription? Snake oil.
Open Source? It will keep growing and present an increasing threat to those big software companies that aren't agile, that are entrenched in their ways, that are almost cult like in their thinking (i.e., Microsoft). Where MS is losing in market share to OSS is in the business world; not so much in regards to the OS, but with regards to the software that is needed to run the apps on those business servers. I think Postgres will start eating serious market share away from SQLServer and maybe even start to compete with Oracle.
The real threat to Microsoft?
Google? No.
Linux? No. At least not on the desktop - unless somebody like IBM and/or Sun throws a bunch of the right kinds of resources at the problem.
Apple? Yup. They are eating Microsoft's lunch. In a couple of years they will double their current almost 8% desktop market share to 15% or more. Apple will increase their lead in quality and features in OSX, and bring down their prices to become increasingly competitive.
I forget what other predictions I made, except maybe the one time I disputed that there would be 4 core laptops by now (there is only one that I know of, and it is kind of a custom desktop replacement machine, not really a laptop) - but maybe I will remember them as I go along.
My predictions for the future are not pulled out of a hat; they are based on news articles and technology trends and other people's predictions based on those trends, but I'll share them with you anyway in the hope that you will all ignore that and when they come true think that I am really smart and wise anyway and forget that I plagarized most of this (wait - did I say that out loud?).
In the very near future (now to 12 months out):
Four core desktops with a bare minimum of 2 GB, preferably 4 GB of RAM, will be more and more the replacement for the currently common dual core machines with one to two GB of memory. You can get Dell 4 core machines on sale now for $650. Increasingly these will be the sweet spot to buy at - less and you risk the machine being behind the curve inside of two years, more and you are probably paying a premium most people don't need to pay (I paid $3K for my 8 core machine with 10GB and I use every bit of it when I work).
You will start to see virtualization in various forms being available and used - especially on Macs (look it up if you don't know what it is).
Storage.
Increasingly, 1 TB hard drives will be the default config and the prices on these are already coming down (2 months ago they were $220, now they are below $200 with many $180 on sale). Inside a year the largest consumer hard drives will be 2 TB and then the price of 1 TB will probably drop to below $100 and they will be very common place.
Hard drives for most laptops (they are usually smaller physically) will be at least 320 GB with 500 GB available for most. Solid State Drives will be increasingly available, still expensive, but more available. Unfortunately, not all of these are worth the premium - tests have shown the first generation drives don't give much advantage, if any, with regards to performance or battery life - but they will improve. I don't think they will catch up to mechanical hard within the next few years though - at least not until the mechanical HDD manufacturers bump up against the next density wall (in a couple of years if they don't find a way around it soon).
We may start finally seeing e-ink displays (google it), but for now only on e-book readers. These are two slow for standard computer use.
The current sweet spot for displays is the 24" 1900x1200 LCDs for under $350 (shop around and don't pay for more than that unless you have special needs with regards to color). Maybe in about 2 years the thirty inch displays will come down well below $1000 - I sure hope so. I would like to buy two of them for $500 each - but for now, the cheapest you can get one is about $1100 on sale (rare). Don't buy a thirty inch display unless you know what you are doing (they require a Dual-DVI Link display card).
The future about a year or two out?
We will start seeing cutting edge (from the consumer's POV - the HPC [High Performance Computing] sector is already doing this) computers that are a hybrid of CPUs and GPUs that will run software that can take advantage of both at the same time for general computing. What's a GPU? That's the Graphics Processing Unit on your video display adapter. For what it does (streaming bit munching, parallelized bit processing, hard core matrix processing, etc.), it does a lot faster than a general purpose CPU.
The leading edge computer companies (Apple, Intel, AMD and other GPU manufacturers) are working on software and hardware to this end. Some software companies are researching using some of the special software libs to run certain types of processing not related to video on the GPUs, offloading the CPUs. Apple is working on a way to integrate their OS and programming APIs in such a way to make the use of the GPUs more seamless. Intel is working on integrating multiple GPUs with CPUs - we may see machines that have 16 GPUs on the same core die as 4 to 16 CPUs with more RAM on the die too (instead of on a separate bus/chip).
This may mean some really kick ass machines - especially for those who do scientific computing, or those who do CGI animation (think real time animation on a single machine).
In the server world (those machines that run the apps in the web and business world), multiple cores will be the default as they are now. With regards to raw computing speed, these will not be leading edge. With regards to the amount of memory they have - they will have huge amounts. Increasingly, the problem in this sector is not how fast an instruction is processed, but how fast data can be accessed. The problem is that hard drives are where the data is. The answer? Cache the data in RAM. Anything that is not to be persisted long term to permanent storage will be in RAM. THis means a lot of the databases are coming off the hard drives and into RAM. This means terabytes and terabytes of RAM. Most consumer computers don't need this but business/web servers that need to handle thousands to millions of transactions per second do - and it is only going to get worse.
Broadband. Penetration (how many people have broadband) will level off or at least the growth of penetration will slow significantly. The problem is that most people who can get broadband will have it already. Those that can't because they live outside the service area will be stuck. Wireless won't be much help here. Maybe, just maybe, power line broadband will help - if it does then I can see real growth in that area as almost everybody has a power line coming to their house and those that don't have broadband in areas not currently served (about half the country - the rural areas) will jump on that bandwagon real quick. Unfortunately, I don't see the current hurdles being overcome without a kick in the rear to the FCC.
Speeds. Probably increasing at the same rate they are now. If Verizon can keep installing fiber they will see people switching over to that wherever it is offered - just for the internet access alone.
Wireless? WiMax is looking like it is going to fail. The same will probably happen for other plans to offer internet access via wireless. Not talking in-house WiFi here.
SAAS (software as a service)? Ehh. I don't like most of it. But some people will buy into it - and probably regret it. It is the next new fad in the software provider's world - because it means steady income and more control over their customer base, but it provides little benefit to the user - especially in the long run. The free services will work okay, but those that require a subscription? Snake oil.
Open Source? It will keep growing and present an increasing threat to those big software companies that aren't agile, that are entrenched in their ways, that are almost cult like in their thinking (i.e., Microsoft). Where MS is losing in market share to OSS is in the business world; not so much in regards to the OS, but with regards to the software that is needed to run the apps on those business servers. I think Postgres will start eating serious market share away from SQLServer and maybe even start to compete with Oracle.
The real threat to Microsoft?
Google? No.
Linux? No. At least not on the desktop - unless somebody like IBM and/or Sun throws a bunch of the right kinds of resources at the problem.
Apple? Yup. They are eating Microsoft's lunch. In a couple of years they will double their current almost 8% desktop market share to 15% or more. Apple will increase their lead in quality and features in OSX, and bring down their prices to become increasingly competitive.
