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"What I hope the future holds" rant
I'm sitting in my house playing Guesstures with family, and the lights flicker. Then, nothing.... Power outs happen, and all we can do is play on our laptops by candlelight, or some of us could power up our backup generators. All that's left to do is play games or think. Why do power outages happen? Could this all be prevented in the future? How will we get power in the future? All of these questions lead to us wondering, just what wil th future hold? I feel like ranting...
Where is my teleporter?
I want my freakin' jetpack! What happened to the ray guns, hovercars, and chromed out spacesuits? What happened to us living on Jupiter? We all worry about gasoline being expensive, but ethanol gasoline is in the works. What if we were using water to power our cars, will we eventually talk about water being expensive to run cars? I want my car to run on a battery. Not a huge battery that costs $500, but a battery you can buy at your local Wal-mart for $19.99. What if we didn't even have cars? These are all questions that float through my head at 11PM on a Saturday night in the dark.
The birth of a miracle:
First DDR memory, then DDR2 memory, now DDR3 memory, when will we have DDR8 memory? On December 23rd, 1947, Bell labs came out with a miraculous invention that would change the face of technology forever - the transistor. In 1959, the IBM 7090 had 32KB of memory, was programmed in Fortran, and actually aided in the Mercury and Gemini space flights. Being 20 years old, I can't visualize a space shuttle coming home with a computer that couldn't run pac-man.
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The transistor in 1947 |
The transistor now (1 micrometer) |
If the Ford Model T improved as quickly as computer technology, it would travel 145,361,703,700,000,000,000,350,000 MPH, get 58,144,681,470,000,000,000 MPG, and would cost $0.00000000000000688. This difference was taken over a 61 year period! Can you physically imagine the type of technology we'll see in 2069? With the rate of technology as fast as it is, a computer should reach the human thought equivalent around 2040. Remember that movie I, Robot? THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
This whole editorial may seem pointless, but I felt like ranting tonight. Oh look, the lights are back on. Maybe in the future they'll never go off :-)