Developing Upwards

Looking at Science and Technology over the next year is one thing, but its far more fun and far easier to make wild guesses that cover the next decade! There will be at least one machine capable of carrying out a phone conversation that passes the Turing test. This is bigger than it sounds, because you can fail the Turing test and still be smarter than a lot of people, these days. The end of the decade will likely see annoyingly friendly automated phone services and websites, first as terribly novelties and slowly as useful, subtle additions to our user interfaces. When you click the wrong thing in Firefox and mutter, "Ugh, not that!" and it corrects it for you, you'll finally stop finding it annoying. Automated photo and video manipulation is going to get weirdly good. I mean, this stuff is going to creep you out. People will delete their ex from entire collections of videos and photos without a trace, like they never existed (not a bad thing). Weird, is inserting peopl...

I made a few long-term predictions in conversations over the past week about science in the next century. Focusing on only the next year is much more challenging. Also, I'll be proven wrong much more quickly. Mass market CPU/GPU hybrids are going to make netbooks and tablets very viable machines. HDMI outputs will make them powerful docked machined, capable of replacing a laptop realistically. Intel might have dropped the ball, but Nvidia's Tegra chips are going to prove this in the early half of 2010. Cheap DNA tests are going to be a noticeable social problem. We're going to see numerous news items this year about disgruntled parents trying to prove some fear with a few stolen strands of hair and a self-addressed envelop from a shady testing company. The legal and social implications aren't going to be pretty. At least one eBook reader will be released with color support in the US market. TMOS displays will appear in netbooks and phones. Our display technologies will ...

So this is my obligatory start-of-2008 post. I know I haven't written much lately, but work was busy and then there was the holidays, and I'm making a commitment to really revitalize my blog. Part of that may be that my adsense, after years of blogging, as only hit half the required minimum balence for payment . But, I'm not in it for the money. Not unless there was a lot of money in it! For 2007 this means... that I need to wrap up the last year We moved back to North Carolina when the Pennsylvania winter cleared up, and I'll admit that the summer was a bit rough. I lost my most steady contract when funding went sour, shortly before the movie, but you know what? Staying home with the family was great without a lot of work to be done, and we got by OK. I enjoyed the time. After a while, I started CharPy, the Charlotte Python Group. We're still small and growing, but the first meeting gave me a lead on a full-time position at SocialServe.com, where I'm now happil...

The idea has been floating around before, but finally seems to be coming into the light with efficiency and cost . The day will come soon when we can drop any of wireless devices onto a table and let them charge. When our desks will run power to everything sitting on them, without any connections or wires. Awesome. They do say it could be many years before we get anything reaching wide support. The problem is that the devices need to support these new sources of power, and the devices won't support them until everyone has the new sources of power. You know how those great cyclic dependencies go. Now, we'll probably see them first in devices that are high end enough to warrant including stand alone power pads with them. I'll peg Apple's iPod as an early adopter. However, I do have an idea to push these power pads more quickly: receives compatible with standard batteries. AA, AAA, and C are the most common batteries used today, so packing a receiver coil into the right sh...