Mon, 31 Oct 2005
Future of Tech
Ed. Tom Standage, The Future of Technology, The Economist
This a collection of articles from the UK weekly, The Economist and
whether you'll be blown away by the wisdom might depend a little bit
on how close you are to the subject.
In this sort of line, going through the wishlists of big companies
can give us a clue about possibilites. In the software line, Microsoft
might have wished that we'd all been using decentralised systems with lots of
Microsoft scattered about... which is what a lot of people did and do.
A company wishing that the network is the
computer will be hoping for lots of thin clients and distributed
services. These days that looks very much like Microsoft also, and Sun.
In those particular cases you'd have to say the odds were
probably with the latter ... which ties in with the idea that the whole
shebang will become totally service oriented, which is pretty much what
commercial Linux is about.
What this book is really about is the present. It is an informed view
of what is happening in software development and distribution, security,
gaming, home computers, and artificial intelligence, amongst
other things. And what is happening suggests a near future. Looking at the
far future, would be, of course, science fiction.
One interesting present idea I came across recently in Dr. Dobb's AI
newsletter was that modern computers don't actually need operating
systems. They are there for reasons of backwards compatibility and
commercial needs. What do you make of that one?
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here
