100 Fearless Forecasts

PC World lists "100 Fearless Forecasts". I picked my "Top 10" from their list of 100. These are the 10 things I look forward to.

Superfast Boot-Ups Adding flash memory to the motherboard could lead to PCs that boot up and load applications more quickly. We expect to see systems with such technology in 2007.

The Day That Gigabytes Become Passé In 2007 you'll be able to buy 1 Tera-byte hard disk drives says Bill Healy of Hitachi. Drives will grow to 2 terabytes by the end of 2009, and to an immense 8 terabytes by the end of 2013.

Memory That Doesn't Forget Your existing PC memory gets amnesia when the system power goes off, but NRAM (nanotube nonvolatile RAM) remembers everything, and is as fast as modern memory. With NRAM, your PC could turn on and off immediately, dispensing with all of its tedious booting up and shutting down.

50-Terabyte DVDs Researchers at Harvard Medical School have produced a prototype of a light-sensitive coating that they believe will eventually store up to 50 terabytes on a DVD-size disc. NEC, which has been codeveloping the technology, hopes to have a USB thumb-drive version a year from now, and a DVD-size disc a year after that.

Quad-Core Processors Dual-core processors have given PCs a big speed boost, but the advances won't stop there. Quad-core systems from Intel will arrive before the end of the year, and AMD's quad-core chips will hit the market in mid-2007.

An Entire MP3 Collection on a Flash Player The capacity of MP3 players that use flash memory keeps on growing: Apple and Sandisk now have 8MB models. We're looking forward to a small flash MP3 player with enough capacity to hold an entire music collection. About 30MB, say, would do nicely

TVs Out of Thin Air The Helio display can create a TV out of nowhere, projecting an image onto a curtain of compressed air. Right now it is prohibitively expensive (around $20,000), but the price will fall as the technology matures.

WiMax in the Wild The wireless technology WiMax has been "coming soon" for some time, but it looks like it's finally here: Sprint is using it as the basis for the Fourth Generation Wireless data network(4G). Let's hope the other cell phone networks follow Sprint's lead and roll out similar services.

Fiber Everywhere Fiber-optic broadband service is currently available in 17 states, providing up to 50-megabits-per-second downloads and 5-mbps uploads to the lucky few subscribers who happen to have access. But companies such as Verizon are continuing to pull more and more fiber, and the latest equipment could enable even faster access. How does 200 mbps down/20 mbps up sound to you?

Thousands of Photos on One Memory Card New technologies (such as the experimental atomic force probe tip technology that companies like Nanochip are working on) can store tens of gigabits on a single chip. It's a few years away from being ready, but one day your digital camera's memory card could hold thousands of images, not hundreds. ...Read the entire list of 100 here...