Opinion: 10 Technologies That Need to Deliver in 2012

[Device Unknown]

Yeah as far as Technology goes, it's not the particular products I want to succeed or fail. It's the companies. Like Supall said, my greatest wish is for AMD to become competitive in the desktop area again.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]It doesn't need to "evolve" it needs to be more affordable....[/citation]

Well, you never know when cold fusion and room temperature superconductor may be rendered feasible by science. Forgotten higher percentage of absorption of energy from sunlight by solar panels, perhaps even close to 100% one day.

 

[nebun]

who cares if blackberry delivers...there are other phones to choose form....blackberries are over-rated pos

 

[Tab54o]

Pretty disappointing list. I mean like others said none of this stuff is significant. A bunch of phone junk. I'm thinking electric cars, alternative energy, some sort of space tech. Hell I would even rather see some XDR memory than any of this.

 

[Tab54o]

I forgot to mention. Some sort of major internet improvements need to be realized. We need fiber in San Diego.

 

[70camaross396]

the problem with electric cars is that they SUCK! have you driven a Nissan Leaf? or a Toyota Prius or Chevy Volt, or any of the half dozen hybrids? they are abolute crap. Green energy is a lie. meant to funnel goverment dollars into cronies pockets. look at what Herry Reid is doing in Nevada. he funneled money to a company building thermal solar, using molten salt tech. but it reliese on water to make steam to generate electicity. whats the one thing missing in nevada.... Water! it a freaking desert!

If we really want energy idependance look at Diesel Electriv Hybrids. Freight Trains have been using it for years. Hell volkswagon has been using clean diesel tech in europe for years. diesel is 30% more eficent that gas. Dont get me wrong, I love the enviorment, and i am an avid hunter and fisherman, the last thing i wnat to see is the enviroment destroyed or piliged for big busniess. but this alternative engery thing is absolute crap.

 

[Onus]

Need to deliver, or what?
Touch is bogus. It is not at all practical. It needs to evolve into gesture, which avoids fingerprints, and avoids having to "reach" something. Gestures open up the possibility of a computer learning how you [want to] move and reacting accordingly.
RIM blew it, by kowtowing to certain governments who wanted access to their servers. Add that to the outages they've experienced, and their trust factor has almost disappeared. There's nothing wrong with a steady presence in a target market; the arbitrary search for "growth" is just to satisfy the greedy financial sector. This is the year I think that sector will finally be recognized as the fraudulent parasites they are, and treated accordingly; it will be a necessary part of the coming Greater Depression. Back to RIM, they are nothing special since they sold out. Why would a buyer want them, unless it can guarantee the security that used to be there, certain governments be damned?
Siri is a toy, and will be for some time to come. If it becomes a useful tool, that won't mean it's something that should be used often, except in the specific circumstances that warrant it. Asking for directions while driving is one such use, and beats heck out of stopping and pushing buttons and making menu choices.
One of the few I agree with, for Microsoft's sake, is Windows 8. If they don't "get it right," I could see enough momentum building to move in alternate directions (e.g. WINE) that it begins a slow but inexorable slide into irrelevance. Microsoft has no competition because it is way too fractured. As powerful as hardware has gotten, it may become feasible for someone to create a more universal Windows emulator, that will run consistently [across many flavors of Unix].
As for what's missing, what about GPGPU? That would be a remarkable change, if it can deliver. How would that fit in with SIRI and other human-supporting AI? "Shall we play a game?"

 

[kikireeki]

I think 3D TV should be among the 10 Technologies That Need to be dropped in 2012

Things that should be on the list:
wireless charging
A new mobile battery technology that can conveniently handle the new power hog devices.

 

[Guest]

One of the top ten techs for 2012 should be Piledriver. I am not an AMD fanboy but without it's success, I couldn't imagine the horror of an Intel CPU monopoly for x86

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]Anomalyx[/nom]One electric car designer put it this way: Electric cars will never catch on until they can out-power gas cars. I think it's correct. They've out-mileage'd gas cars, and are (slowly) becoming more affordable. The only thing they haven't done is out-power gas cars.Plus, you have to think about power sources, too. Environmental nuts are all psyched up over electric cars, but they don't realize where that electricity comes from...[/citation]

i forget the company, but they put out a 150 mile electric car, and with a newer battery, it would have gone 300 miles... but the scrapped the project for some, stupid reasons...

give me a car that can go from point a to point b on the extreme cheap, and can carry 4 people without to much hassle, and that's all i need.

 

[xtc28]

Tesla car ...... NUFF SAID!!

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Zanny[/nom]They did evolve. The US government was bought out in the 80s / 90s by big oil to cut funding for electric car research. OPEC wants gas prices high and a state of artificial scarcity since they have a nigh monopoly on our entire transport infrastructure.@ the list : I don't want new features in Firefox, I just want it fast, reduce the memory footprint, etc, and let the add ons do any additional features. As is, firefox works great. I have never had a reason to migrate to Chrome because I never felt Firefox was worse than it.Windows 8 is going to fail bad. Microsoft is trying to push touch screens and tablet interfaces onto mainstream computing (again, they did some of this crap with Vista) and it will fall on their face. The OS is still bloated as hell and slow, and I intend to completely switch over to Debian with Wine to play games this year since DX12 is no where to be seen so Wine is mostly usable with modern games. Anything else, I'll use my old copy of Vista I'm still on. No reason to upgrade Windows when all new versions do is shove crap down ones throat.The rest of it I really don't care about. I want to see fiber networks deployed more rapidly globally, but monopolies in the US are putting a damper on that. I don't expect much tech innovation to happen this year. We are aiming for another recession, and the US dollar might hyper inflate any day, so as long as Kepler, Southern Islands, and Ivy Bridge come out at reasonable price points with all the new tripping features like PCI3 for an upgrade this summer, and LED LCD prices stay low, and hopefully the mechanical disk market rapidly returns to old cost levels to complement rapidly dropping SSD prices, it will be a great summer to build a new PC at least.[/citation]

Are you insane? Windows 8 dev preview uses way less RAM than windows 7 does nad windows 7 alrady uses way less than Vista. It is also faster than 7 which is also faster than Vista. I have run both 32 bit and 64 bit VMs and native installations with the dev preview of Windows 8 and can confirm this.

And what is this talk of DX12? who told you that we would have DX12 in 2011 or any time soon? DX 11.1 is just coming out and is currently only supported by AMD's Radeon HD 7970 so DX12 is well off from now. Even if it wasn't well off from now you would need to wait for Windows 8 (at the earliest) to use it or use a distro of linux that supports it and whatever software you want to use that would be better with DX12 than 11.1 or 11 anyway so it doesn't matter that it isn't around yet.

I'll agree with most of the rest of what you said but those above two points are easily checked.

 

[vaughn2k]

[citation][nom]digitalzom-b[/nom]Given the gas price forecast this year... I'd say electric cars/alternate energy transportation needs to evolve quicker.[/citation]
I second that...

 

[vaughn2k]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]i forget the company, but they put out a 150 mile electric car, and with a newer battery, it would have gone 300 miles... but the scrapped the project for some, stupid reasons... give me a car that can go from point a to point b on the extreme cheap, and can carry 4 people without to much hassle, and that's all i need.[/citation]
That is because gas companies paid for scrapping of it. They know they'll lose money if this flies...

 

[djab]

[citation][nom]house70[/nom]Touch replacing KB/mouse for desktops? Good luck with that. Find an input that is superior to KB/mouse, not to mention touch, for desktops? Same.[/citation]
[citation][nom]taekwonmaster[/nom]I´m surprised that nobody has talked about windows 8-kinetick pc combo; I supose it is the alternative to touch desktops.[/citation]
Windows 8 Touch + Kinect for PC = Win !
This would not completely replace KB/mouse combo in softwares where you need really precise control or where you need to type a lot of text but in other software it could definitely replace KB/mouse (browsers, media players, ...).

 

[US_Ranger]

[citation][nom]digitalzom-b[/nom]Given the gas price forecast this year... I'd say electric cars/alternate energy transportation needs to evolve quicker.[/citation]

I sped up evolution and bought a motorcycle. 8-10 dollars to fill it up once a week and it's faster than any sub 50,000 dollar car on the road if I want to hit the throttle. Buy a decent backpack and you can even get your grocery shopping done on it.

 

[Onus]

I sped up evolution and bought a motorcycle. 8-10 dollars to fill it up once a week and it's faster than any sub 50,000 dollar car on the road if I want to hit the throttle. Buy a decent backpack and you can even get your grocery shopping done on it.

Nice idea, but unfortunately, that's only a 3/4 season alternative (and minus stormy days), nor is it feasible for the elderly, or people like me with balance too poor for a regular bicycle. If we'd only slow down a little, even gasoline powered cars could easily get double or triple the gas mileage.

 

[cyberscan]

I would like to see a small, turnkey, home (and small business) firewall/malware scanner appliance made available. I have put together quite a few of these using old, re-purposed desktop computers. However, what will sell is one made about the size of a Linksys WRT-54g router. I know that there are some Linksys routers out there that have been hacked into such appliances, but for the deices to be truly transparent, they need more memory and faster processors. If such a device can also be used to screen junk phone and fax (yes, it is still used) calls, all the much better.

 

[sykozis]

Another typical Wolfgang article....lacks any relevant information. None of the "technologies" listed actually have to survive. RIM, for the sake of their employees, needs to survive 2012. However, 2012 will not be a "make or break" year for them. Success of Windows8 won't "make or break" Microsoft as it's Windows operating system is the single, most well known operating system in existence. That alone will keep customers coming back. Do you really think grandma and grandpa are going to pay for broadband or wireless internet just to use an overpriced POS called a "Chromebook"? Sorry, not going to happen. The reason that 3D technology is having a hard time catching on is the simple fact it's existed for over 30 years in the same form. Sadly, after more than 30 years....TV manufacturers are pricing it likes it was just invented last month. To make things worse, there are people that are prone to headaches from viewing these "3D displays"....like myself and my wife for example. Nothing better to trigger a migraine than a "3D TV"... Siri? How long has Siri actually existed? I mean prior to Apple buying it from it's original developer. WebOS was dieing before HP bought it. For Firefox, all Mozilla has to do is focus on "quality over quantity"...and the market share will follow. They have no actual need for Boot-to-Gecko. In fact, according to Mozilla, they currently have no intention of offering Boot-to-Gecko as a product. So, why would you base a company's success on getting a "non-product" completed? In fact, here's a quote from Mozilla's own page...

Boot to Gecko (B2G) is an early-stage, exploratory project with the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web. It is not a product offering, but if successful, could form the basis for one.

Thank GOD Wolfgang's opinion has no bearing on day to day life....I'd hate to see a company go belly up for not completing a project that was never intended to be released to the public....

[citation][nom]us_ranger[/nom]I sped up evolution and bought a motorcycle. 8-10 dollars to fill it up once a week and it's faster than any sub 50,000 dollar car on the road if I want to hit the throttle. Buy a decent backpack and you can even get your grocery shopping done on it.[/citation]
Motorcycles aren't feasible for most of the population. They're typically only intended to carry 1-2 riders, so if you have family, it's a completely useless waste of money.

 

[sokangcraft]

Oled TV needs to be added to this list they were pretty big a CES. I have a feeling LG will be able to keep to the date of Q3 2012.

 

[markalex7400]

I do love the 3D technology but I feel uncomfortable using 3D glasses. I heard LG's 3D glasses are really nice, but i still have to reconsider it.

 

[kellywilliams0448]

i learned that LG's OLED TV even though not yet out, will be a 2D TV with 3D capability. am eager to get more facts about this. and if that's true, then other OLED TV brands can do the same i think.

 

[alexlanmdon]

Talking about 3D, i read it from cnet that LG Electronics has come out with a new tech where you can use your voice to control the LG Cinema 3D Smart TV. But i done know how that can be done. For me, it's like i'm dreaming guyssssss.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]digitalzom-b[/nom]Given the gas price forecast this year... I'd say electric cars/alternate energy transportation needs to evolve quicker.[/citation]

Hybrid: Arm and a leg, please.

Pure electric: The closest gas station with an electric charging booth is more than 100 miles away. Oh, and your electricity bill just shot up because of all of the power that your car was sucking up at your home. Cost? All of your limbs.