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Junior Member
 
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| Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a coffee table shaped "Surface Computer" to further Bill Gates' vision of the future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced with natural interaction using voice and touch. From first look the "Surface" looks cool. Check out the videos at http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ Even though the videos illustrates a few applications, like photo sharing between devices, ordering from a menu at the restaurant etc, and the fact that it would cost quite a bit (at least in the beginning), a plethora of applications come to your mind when you think about how the "Surface" can be put to use. For example, just imagine the conference room of your office where every one is seated around "The Table" and the presentation requires a document to do a round among all the participants of the meeting to be reviewed. Once a person is done reading it, the person next to him can just "pull" the document toward him and read it!
- sinnerJi
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Why would you stop there. A portable device would contain the document and the meeting presenter could lay it out on the table which would on command would immediately copy the selected documents to all those who are seated at the conference table (identified by their identification on the table). These documents could be read only or accessible to editing by all participants with editing occurring real time.
Conferencing applications, gaming applications, engineering, etc. With technological advances these surfaces would not be limited to table designs. They could be mounted on walls and various other flat planes.
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Last Login: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 10:59 AM
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| I would think that architects and software design architects would love something like this. But if my experience with Windows Vista is any indicator, this new application is going to be an resource hog. The video almost reminded me of the sci-fi movie Minority Report. Some of the stuff being done by iRobot (IRBT), the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaning robots, makes me think that the world as defined in Isaac Asimov novel and movie I, Robot is probably not far away. Andrzej, I am assuming you liked V for Vendetta.
--If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. — William Blake.
Yes, I am blogging @ http://www.sinletter.com/ablog.aspx
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The future is very bright for technology. It has become fiercely competitive and some excellent products are begins spawned by that competition. A group of scientists only recently were able to virtually represent a subsection of the mouses brain at the cellular level, complete with thought patterns. Within the next two decades would could see a full human brain modeled as clearly. It may not be the future of flying cars or vacations to mars any time soon but Asimov has been fairly spot on, as was William Gibson Hardware will overcome any resource utilization in the new OS. Vista unloads UI interface activity to the graphics processor. Upgrading the video card and increasing memory helps.
V was a very good graphic novel. The movie was rushed but wasn't as bad as I expected. I like the symbolism of the mask. In the end the mask represents every man. I gives the faceless and the unknown a voice that they would not have because of fear of persecution. The internet provides that kind of anonymity more or less, and allows us to speak more freely, voice our opinions regardless of status or station in life.
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It looks like some of your thoughts about the future of technology are similar to those of Ray Kurzweil, who was recently featured in a Fortune magazine article titled The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth. It will be interesting to see how his quant based hedge fund performs. I have been toying with a quant model for a while now but the implementation will be a killer.
As for Vista, I am running it on a system with a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 card, total 320 MB graphics memory and 2 GB of RAM. Just a couple of years ago 2 GB of RAM was more than enough for a web server with moderately heavy traffic.
--If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. — William Blake.
Yes, I am blogging @ http://www.sinletter.com/ablog.aspx
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Junior Member
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Last Login: Monday, September 15, 2008 4:03 PM
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| Yes Andrzej, the list of applications for the Surface could be boundless. Here is another interesting link on the Popular Mechanics website that delves deep into the Surface. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html Talking about technology in general and the Web in particular, Web 2.0 is making the true essence
of the internet come alive i.e collaboration, but the current fabric of the internet is or rather was
designed for a different purpose. Research is under way to change all that and to redesign the framework
of the internet to suit current needs. Since you are a Software engineer yourself, you might be
interested in the following links related to the Research and Development in this area. Stanford program: http://cleanslate.stanford.edu Carnegie Mellon program: http://100x100network.org Rutgers program: http://orbit-lab.org NSF's GENI: http://geni.net
- sinnerJi
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Junior Member
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| Continuing with the theme of this topic i.e. high-tech innovations/products, another exiting product which will soon be available to consumers is the 3D printer, not the one which you use to take printouts, but the one which makes real-life 3D plastic things for you. Suppose you break your spectacle frame, instead of going to the optical store for a replacement, you could create one for yourself using the 3D printer! Currently confined to manufacturing industries design labs, this amazing product should be available to the consumer by the end of 2007 according to Desktop Factory, a spin-off from IdeaLab. Other related resources: Fab@Home: http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page RepRap: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
- sinnerJi
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