Power Lines Look Promising For High Speed Internet

Smart Dust And Ratbots In Our Future

from the I-just-can't-wait dept

Wed, Jan 15th 2003 4:46pm — Mike Masnick

For the aspiring science fiction writers out there who need some ideas on technologies coming down the road, take a look at the new predictions from IDC about nine technologies that have the potential to change lives, but which are still off the radar screens of most technology research firms. Of course, there's a good reason why most of these technologies are off the radar screen - they're mostly a long way off. The list of nine is: smart dust, lily pads, ratbots, nanotubes, nanomachines, quantum computing, plastic transistors, the semantic web and grid computing. Some of these have been talked about for a long time, and are still in the very early stages. I'm not sure that things like the semantic web and grid computing are really "off the radar" either. They seem like the type of things that certainly do have the potential to change lives, but which also have been hyped up quite a bit.

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dorpus, 15 Jan 2003 @ 11:52pm

Would it be so bad to hire librarians?
Techies seem too carried away with the theory of how to organize search engines. Is there anything wrong with hiring large numbers of librarians to better organize information, weeding out the false positives? Just as stock brokerages use a combination of human expertise and machine-based math predictions.

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Mike (profile), 16 Jan 2003 @ 12:13am

Re: Would it be so bad to hire librarians?
While I have no clue what your comment has to do with the story it's posted under, I agree that a human element helps as a filter. That's the entire basis of the business side of this site.

The problem, of course, is that hiring a large number of librarians means you need to pay a large number of librarians.
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