The next "big" thing?

I think the next big "thing" is going to be coming with this whole web 2.0 movement. A few months back, Google was hiring engineers to pack as much storage, ram and CPUs into large 20X40 shipping crates as was possible. I think what this is gearing up to do is entirely web-based applications. Computers in the future could merely be terminals to access the internet with and all the overhead and processing would be done on the server side. I'm not sure what to think about this just yet, but I suppose if I ever wanted to do any gene sequencing at home, I could log into one of their shipping crates and have at it.

Ready to play with PlayReady? Maybe Not.

Microsoft announced that they will be implementing their new DRM, called PlayReady. I really wish the world would just wake up and realize that information is going to be shared, paid for, shared, licensed, shared, stolen and shared again. Does anyone else see the trend here?

Humans, being the social creatures that they are, are going to share information with one another whether a management system allows them to or not; they will find a way eventually.

The kicker to the new PlayRead DRM, is that it will be managing other codecs, such as AAC and H.264 as well as M$ proprietary formats.

I still believe that one day we won't have to deal with this bureaucratic crap.

1.01 Teraflops - Oh My!

Intel announced today that they have designed a processor capable of 1.01 teraflops. That's over one trillion calculations per second. What makes this innovation even more interesting is that it runs at a clock rate of the average Pentium 4 - 3.16 MHz. Unlike the P4, however, it uses a mere 62 watts of electricity to do it.

In the past year, we've seen the outstanding clock rates of the Pentium series jump by leaps and bounds over their predecessors. Then came the advent of dual and multiple core processors that literally doubled the efficiency, though the clock rate was almost halved. Not we see an astronomical increase in efficiency. From the 12 gigaflop (12 billion), 3.06MHz Pentium 4 to the new Intel processor of the same speed up to over a trillion.

So what does this tell us? Well, internal clock rate only goes so far. Perfecting efficiency is working out rather well. It would seem that the guys down in Santa Clara are working smarter and not harder, after all.

Expect to see multiple core 1.0TFps processors at a higher clock rate within the next five years or so. It's only getting easier.

Windows Vista

So the latest Windows operating system was released last Tuesday, along with Office 2007. I must say that the new Aero interface is rather nice, but I am otherwise unimpressed. If Windows XP Professional were to have the Aero interface added, along with IE7, Office 2007 and Windows Defender (which I'm sure most of you already have already) I don't think there would be much of a difference.

What bothers me is the amount of time and resources that Microsoft spent on developing this "Nextgen" OS and the obvious lack of anything tangible being produced. This has been a trend with MS for the past decade. While it is true that XP was much improved over previous versions, it still took quite a long time for them to get it secure and even now, it's not as secure as it could be.

One thing I noticed on Tuesday was that Vista was not flying off the shelves. As a matter of fact, I didn't see very many copies sold at all, even a week later. I hope people are being smart and at least waiting until the eventual first service pack appears before installing it.