Dreaming of the future…

Here are some technologies I just can’t wait for:

• OLEDs:
  • for room lighting – ambient light from ceiling-tile sized light panels [those of us that suffer migraines want an alternative to fluorescent lights, compact or otherwise]
  • for either back-lighting of LCD screens, or for the screen itself – I didn’t know until after I bought it that my laptop uses a fluorescent bulb for the backlight. When the battery gets low, I can see it flicker, and I have to turn it off or risk another migraine.
  • Are they green? They’re any colour you want, baby!
  • Oh, you mean are they ecologically sound? Far more so than incandescent, fluorescent, effervescent, evanescent or putrescent. Incandescent bulbs burn way more power; fluorescent bulbs have mercury – and, surprisingly, burn way more power for the amount of light they put out than equivalent LEDs or OLEDs.
  • OLEDs are cool to the touch – perhaps in some climates this means you’ll have to run your heater more, but really, you don’t think a light-bulb is an efficient heat generator, do you?
• Multi-touch support, including fingertip and stylus support.
  • Windows 7 (which I thought would be called "Viista") will feature multi-touch support, where users will grab objects with a couple of fingers, to more naturally twist and scale them.
  • Stylus support would allow drawing and writing – I wish I had an excuse to get a Tablet PC, but I just can’t afford to sacrifice power in order to get that capability. Maybe I’ll buy a cheap USB tablet to plug in at the side.
• Single sign-on through the use of federated identity.
  • Okay, that one probably needs some explanation.
  • I’m tired – so tired – of one password here, a different password there, here I’m "alunj", there I’m "aljones", another place I’m ma7amj, yet another place AMJ10.
  • I want to enter one user name, one password, and be able to authenticate to everywhere.
  • Of course, that would mean everywhere would have to trust the one user name and one password – and if that isn’t carefully monitored, you’ll see people tying their bank accounts and nuclear secrets to a one character password. This requires some thought.
• Transflective displays.
  • Tra-wha?
  • Put simply, if it’s light enough to read a piece of paper, I want to be able to use my laptop. And if it’s really, really bright, I want to be able to use my laptop.
  • No backlights – I want the screen to be like coloured paper, reflecting ambient light.
  • That’ll cut down on weight, battery consumption, and probably also frame rate in games. Can’t have everything :)
• Wi-tricity
  • Wireless electricity.
  • Sure, it’s going to bombard me with electrons, but only if I’m resonant. Otherwise, it’ll power my technology without requiring that it all be tethered to the wall.
• Wide-spread adoption of IPv6
  • Heck, even though Microsoft installs IPv6 by default in Vista and Server 2008, there still isn’t an IPv6-based Microsoft "front page".
  • www.ipv6.microsoft.com has been dead for months.
  • Akamai, which hosts www.microsoft.com, doesn’t appear to know about IPv6.
  • IPv6 brings us back to the way that nature intended the Internet to be – everyone’s a peer node; everyone can be a server. Firewalls are firewalls, and NATs are non-existent.