We don't really have a techtalk board here, so i opted to post this here. Mods, please feel free to move if this thread is lost. Anyway, recently came across how Microsoft sees the near future. Very optimistic indeed, to early for 10 years i think. But then again, I guess, they wouldn't want a prediction where Bill is already dead. Lol
Microsoft's 2019 Vision

Then it belongs in the general section, which helpfully says "Talk about anything you like in general! (As long as it doesn't fit anywhere else)." underneath (and it certainly has nothing to do with unattended installs). Another mod will move it.

BTW, it made the front page almost a month ago...

People, you wanna know something, most of that things are already possible to exist, of course they would cost thousands of dollars.
ex: its already under development a malleable paper "like" "LCD" that is very thin, i've seen a year ago if not mistaken on television
Processors almost double or triple its capacity every year that passes, and besides that they do become smaller very year.
Hard drives are becoming solid like SD cards no discs in a very near future, may be 5 years, and even quantum hard drives in a little far future may be 50 years or something like that.
RAM someday will disappear because the hard drivers are becoming to fast that there will not be the need for that, or they will become an 1cm² chip with 1TB of capacity, not kidding.

Let's just think about 15 years ago(more or less), that I(9 years old) was messing up on a win 3.11 computer with only 33mhz processor, 1mb of ram, 80mb HD, and disk drive, that is real funny to me thinking about that.
Or even go back a little more and think about the time were computers were using tapes like video games, hey that only 20 or 25 years ago, almost crying here, so funny.

If we compare the evolution between these times, what was shown there is nothing more than obvious, and i can say even plagiarism, oh my god are they breaking the law and copying ideas from other people, i think they cracked some mind to make that video, .

bye for now

well that thing they found the calendar thing they found that was like 10000000000 years old and its a calander thats ends 2012
so every one probloy be dead or some thing lol

jks! or it may be real i forget what the thing was called now

Well as far as CPU technology for desktop PC's, it's not going to be that much different 10 years from now. They've gotten to a point now that they can't make the things that much faster, so they put multiple cores on a CPU. So who knows 16 core CPU 5 years from now? lolz

Someone else posted that RAM might disapear in the next 5 years, I totally aggree with that. 'Cause well with hard-disks storage geting so fast it'd be kind of a waste having RAM for certain systems (in the future it might be extra thing when you need things to be ridiculously fast.

I'm typing this on a Pentium 3, this computers heyday was probably in 1999, and I can do things like watch Youtube and all the basic stuff you can do on a system you can buy brand new. That's a huge indication to me technology is stagnating a bit since if you go back to 1999 that's like using a 286 to listen to mp3s. It's not really advancing as fast as it used to.

Hmm, no. Just look at the techs that are likely going to become mainstream soon e.g. multi touch, amazing hand writing recognition, stream processing, 1080p H.264 playback including Blu-Ray, devices "talking" to each others and streaming multimedia content (i.e. DLNA) and so much more... We're barely getting started.


According to who? Everything is going up in speed quite a bit, be it CPUs, RAM, GPUs, buses and so on.


Yeah, because having more than one core is the only improvement, right? Just like a 8086 is every bit as fast as a Pentium D, I'm sure.

Passmark scores:
Average Pentium 3 (800MHz): 125
P4 3GHz: 480
Core 2 Duo E6300: 1100
Core 2 Quad Q6600: 2892
Core i7 975: 7113

Yeah, looks like CPU progress has stopped altogether! </sarcasm>


Except, that's not what he said at all, and anyone thinking that would only point their ignorance towards the fundamentals of computer hardware.

Hard drives have access times a million times slower than RAM (one is in nanoseconds, the other is in miliseconds). And the best way to make a computer crawl, is to decrease the RAM until it starts having to page to disk a lot (funny how using storage a million times slower makes your PC crawl). Great way to make your CPU wait! He talked about SSDs also (those aren't really hard disk drives -- no platters or anything), but even there, we're nowhere near RAM speeds. And it's not exactly mature tech either (many are having big performance issues). I don't see NAND based flash (or based on anything else for that matter) ever catching up with DRAM in terms of speed.


Your definition of basic stuff and someone else's obviously differs quite a bit... All this says is that you don't do much with your PC, don't care about things taking a while, and don't mind doing it with software several versions out of date.

Honestly, it just sounds like you're stuck in another decade, and are somehow trying to convince yourself that barely anything's changed since then.

I have to disagree with this point. I define basic stuff as word processing, casual gaming (solitaire, flash games), web browsing (youtube, facebook, and general viewing), instant messaging and downloading files. All of this can be done with a Pentium 3 running an older OS such as Windows 98 without difficulty. All this can and is done regularly with new dual core machines running Vista. In fact, they are the primary uses of a desktop system. Anything more extreme than that is NOT general use IMO.

I agree with most of your other points though. The biggest selling point of the new wave of processors is not how many cores they have or clock speed, it is other new developments.

That would have been accurate several years ago IMO (XP's era). However, I see loads of people even in their 50's and 60's who do much more than that with their computers. Like converting videos to DVDs, editing photos (who doesn't have a digital camera yet?), using GPS tools, sync'ing their iPods and so on. Also, half the tasks you mentioned are only somewhat doable on a P3 if you're willing to use software several versions out of date which most people don't really want to do.

As long as the PC has a free PCI slot, it should be able to convert VHS to DVD. Editing photos is a good point which I forgot, but this is still very possible on a P3 for simple (basic, IMO) jobs like rotating, cropping, removing red eye and so on. I had a really early digital camera that came with software to do that. Ooh boy, memories. AA batteries, lost its memory when they ran out or when you switched it off. God they were primitive.

Syncing iPods? Another very common thing that I missed. But I have to disagree that you'll have to use outdated software. The latest iTunes does work with xp, as do nearly all legacy machines. I believe there is an older version for 98 that might work with some iPods, but I don't want to go into the Windows 98 area. For photo editing, Windows Live Photo Gallery should do, or manufacturer specific software. GPS software... do you mean Google Earth and that sort of thing? I remember using that on an old 400mhz Celeron running xp but probably was bundled with 98. It was slow, but not unusable.

That's not to say I would actually be prepared to use one of these old machines as my primary computer, not any more.

What I want to say is that while computers are certainly far faster, and have a ton more functionality, a lot of this functionality is either not very well accepted yet, is unheard of, or is only useful to enthusiasts or people who have a fair bit of money to spend. A lot of this technology is certainly up and coming. Technology has not stagnated, it is not and will not stand still. You can find innovations everywhere. It's just that the PC has matured, and such improvements and features take their time to make headway in the mainstream market.

I was talking more about say, XviD to DVD. But either ways, encoding on a P3 is painfully slow.


And most software suites to do that (often bundled with cameras, or those sold in stores like photoshop elements) will run like crap on a P3, at best.


I've seen a lot of people running XP on P3's (stripped down as much as possible), and I wouldn't exactly call it fast... Running modern apps on top of that? Only if you're very patient.


It's not so much the OS support. A nice library in iTunes can get pretty heavy, even on a modern CPU.


No, I meant like Gamin or TomTom software. But even Google maps is quite sluggish on a P3.


Barely adequate, and only for the most basic tasks, yeah.

But yes, I agree that not everyone is a hardcore gamer or Blu-Ray watching addict. Saying a P3 is "good enough" is very much the extreme opposite though (mainly used by those who basically don't do anything with their PCs).

Even the P4 (a chip released back in 2000 -- 9 years ago) is also on is way to irrelevancy now (power hungry, not exactly fast by today's standards, not dual core, not a 64 bit design, most have no instruction sets or features past SSE2, old FSB design every manufacturer abandoned, netburst junk, old boards with bad caps everywhere and often little in terms of modern features, uses old AGP cards, etc -- far, FAR behind even a low end $50 Athlon64 X2)

A P3??

I think I have one of those in the closet

Seriously since multi-core came out pIII went the way of commador64.

Well in a way.. he is right. I posted an article on my friends website a while back with my P4..
It was about windows 7 running perfectly on it.

http://royaldez.com/go/index.php?option=co...;view=frontpage

Theres the link for anyone who wants to read it.

What im getting at is out of date hardware is still usable... we just PREFER to use our beautiful multicores and thousands of megabytes of ram. lol. (I HAVE 8 GIGS!!!)