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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 3:50:27 PM
From: daryll40	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 70976

I don't understand why voice recognition applications haven't really caught on. THAT would get the whole technology sector going. Heck, half of America cannot read or write (at least not well). That half would be more inclined to use technology products if they didn't haf ta sho their ignerinse with tiped mispelingz.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 4:18:13 PM
From: James Calladine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

NEW APPLICATION? The closest I have heard is: -- digital camera with utterly simple plug in to -- home computer -- program for both simple image manipulation and album storage with filing under both keywords and names and in the same program: -- simple e mail with integrated images automatically pasted in (not attachments) -- high bandwidth to the home. -- business version is creation of the electronic handbill coupled with 1 click distribution to various selected lists OK, OK, I am not wowed either, but that's the best I have heard/seen/visualized etc. Namaste! Jim

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 4:22:22 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

As a technology investor, I'm much more interested in that question than in trying to call the equipment cycle. Anyone got any ideas? Wearable computers or PDA devices. Perhaps you'll have all your data and software licenses with you all the time and then connect to a network computer to do whatever. I'd think an IBM microdrive and bluetooth networking to connect the device and you are set. Get into your car and the onboard computer recognizes you and connects to your computer. Voice recognition - you say "Call Chef Chu's" and the onboard computer gets Chef Chu's take out number from your PDA and dials for you then uses the auto sound system to connect your call, all hands free. The phone will probably have an IR port on it that plugs into a slot in the dash much like you plug in your coffee cup today (I actually helped design that IR module for this several yrs ago). I think "compute anywhere" is where we will eventually go. I don't use PDAs as they are a pain to keep syncronized...... except I do use my old HP100 LX from yrs ago... and a scrap of paper I print out from Excel with phone numbers on it taped to a biz card in my wallet is far more portable than the smallest PDA. A 2nd biz card works wonders for taking notes... so my PDA is two biz cards! 8) Go AMAT! I calculated Book-2-bill as up at 0.91... revenue down 11% this quarter. Will be interesting to hear what they say for the next quarter. Oh yes, wearable displays. Consider Agilent... put your PC in a PDA and you just need voice recognition for input and a display. A wearable display gives great resolution and takes little power... Kirk out

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 5:31:04 PM
From: mitch-c	Respond to of 70976

Thanks! It was a back-of-envelope style of analysis - nothing rigorous to several decimal places, but hopefully in the ballpark. I'm glad someone with your technical and industry knowledge could follow it and agree with it. Opportunities for the future (AKA Cheap Logic Gates): A) I think the cell phone, PDA, and GPS will converge into a single integrated unit. Just as someone used cellular towers as an ersatz phased-array radar, I think the signal timing from them lends itself to a differential GPS application. Positional accuracy from DGPS is measured in centimeters at worst. Expect these units in less than three years. B) Last-mile high-bandwidth constraints are the dam holding back a lot of innovation. Transmission speeds have lagged Moore's Law for the general consumer; when high-speed links are common (and mobile), expect all the promise of video-on-demand and realtime VR to kick in. Those will demand horsepower. (VR - Virtual Reality; but Voice Recognition could also be there.) The telecom collapse looks to me as if it happened because everyone solved the simple problems first ... counting on others to wire the "last mile." No users = dark fiber = no revenue = bankrupcy. c) For all its drawbacks, Windows (in various flavors) is the most common platform that specialty software gets written to. A stable, robust, extensible, securable OS kernel would do wonders to streamline what I see as the bottleneck in writing software apps. Linux is a prime candidate, as acceptance grows. (Review my choice of adjectives; Windows, IMO, meets none of those. <g>) d) My new truck has a totally electronic ignition; no distributor. Spark advance can be set by individual cylinder. Likewise, the not-very-sexy world of industrial process controls (and manufacturing automation in general) will continue to evolve behind the scenes to replace manual or mechanical controls with automated ones. (Check the pricing/benefits of programmable thermostats for the home, for example. They ought to be damn near mandatory by code.) e) Developing world opportunities. They will skip the evolutionary technology investments (analog cellular? copper wire?), and go straight to the later revisions (digital cell) for minimal cost. As much as we feel markets here are saturated, many parts of the world are not. South America and Africa are very underserved. As a corollary, we have a number of translation/cultural issues to solve, to which technology may lend an assist (universal translator?) Anyway, those are some areas that come to mind. A lot depends on the breaking of a few logjams, then the flood cuts loose. - Mitch (pensive this afternoon.)

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 5:43:23 PM
From: mitch-c	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Converged opinion seems to be the swiss-army-knife PDA. To be Star-Trekkish, I'll call it a Tricorder. <g> - wearable display - wireless and mobile - universal translator - voice recognition - universal communication with diverse platforms (car, home, cell, etc) - camera and/or image handling - Mitch

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 5:58:46 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

So... who benefits from cheap transistors? It isn't Intel-- ... Katherine, Why should the next decade be any different than the last 3. Continuous deflation in the chip sector has stimulated innovation and growth in chip applications across the economy. There's no evidence that that progress is anywhere close to stopping. INTC has evolved its product line during the past decades and benefitted. I see no reason why that success won't continue. I believe that many parts of the sector will be winners. The SOC companies, the DSP makers, the bluetooth guys, etc... FWIW, Ian

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/14/2001 11:41:59 PM
From: Pink Minion	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

So... who benefits from cheap transistors? I also try to think who is going to benefit from faster chips. Most of your responses were for future uses of basic applications of chips so I don't see who benefits besides the end user. I think what you want to know is who is going to be the next INTC or MSFT. To answer your question I think you need to look at what products are currently too costly for mass markets. Also, what applications requires a lot of processing power. So you have to ask yourself what are supercomputers doing now that J6P would want to do? What military applications will move to the private sector? I could see car navigation systems that avoids accidents or drives the car themselves. Anything that requires real time analysis of the environment and calculations of moving objects. I've heard a lot of wireless networking is becoming possible as chips for processing higher frequency becomes cheaper and integrated. Satellite applications should also get much better

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/15/2001 1:07:53 AM
From: Pete Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

I'll respond to "who benefits from cheap transistors?". The answer, IMO is that the consumer does directly, and indirectly, the industry desperately needs cheap(er) transistors. Why? Because electronics are still too expensive for the average person. Advocated Evil (sorry) said that he's (?) a computer geek and has 4 machines networked in his home. In the future that I and many others envision, that would be a pretty underdeveloped infostructure for a home. (Ie; a server/router, several Webpads, wireless access point, lots of smaller machines monitoring things like temp, security, watering, weather... personal GPS/comm in watch, portable wireless connected smaller Webpad for travel, you name it.) But to do all this, this stuff needs to get dirt cheap! It's incredible that a Webpad is still a dream, and when it comes I'm still supposed to shell out >$1k for something I could likely accidently drop in the hot tub, not to mention all the other throwaway electronics I will have. Not to mention the current high price of bandwidth and the lack of it in the last mile. It's no wonder people have stopped buying this crap. Look at this monstrosity I'm typing on right now for example. The damn thing is still the size of the first one I bought in '89. The boards got smaller, but the box stays the same. Noisy bunch of whirring fans, monitor and keyboard all tethered down with a mess of wires that I have to sit at a damn desk (I hate being inside!) to use. To add insult to injury, Bill makes me press CntrlAltDel to make sure I maintain manual dexterity on a regular basis. If it wasn't for the excellent content on the Internet (this thread being one of the sources of), I think I might have given up on PCs. Really, why pay out around $1k every several years to "update" such a beast to play Bill's overpriced bloatware? I really think the industry has sat on it's hands in this area for years while they all congratulated themselves on their stock prices. Maybe now that they are dependent on real sales to real consumers instead of ripping off the investing public they'll get off their asses and produce something out of the box (or away from it.) We need cheap, and we need innovation. Cheap means lots more sales. Lots. Innovation means we get away from clunky stuff that makes your back ache and your skin go pale and drives sales through the roof. Expensive and clunky means we are a niche market for the rich (and geeky, like me)and small sales as people have to update their clunky, crappy, PCs because of clunky, crappy OSes. It also means that lots of mankind will miss a better living in my opinion. So cheap and innovative is very, very good IMO. And this is what gets a kick when Silicon Valley turns down... So, I have not come here to bury cheap, but to praise it...

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50519)	8/15/2001 7:13:10 AM
From: w0z	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

So... who benefits from cheap transistors?...So who is it? Sounds like another famous quote Katherine...<vbg> "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell (Commissioner at the U.S. Office of Patents - 1899) "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson (Chairman of IBM - 1943) "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson (President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp. - 1977) "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates (Founder and CEO of Microsoft - 1981)