What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? 03/26/2008
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What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? | Mechanix Illustrated, Nov 1968
Wow, these predictions made in 1968 actually panned out! James Berry got a lot of things remarkably right 40 years ago. Click the link above to read all his predictions.
Here’s a sample:
“The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.
“Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.
Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.”
Head in the Clouds | CIO Insight 03/26/2008
Posted by thaadsma in Amazon, Linux, SaaS, google, ibm, microsoft, security, web, web services.add a comment
The Forecast for Cloud Computing
A couple of good takeaways from a solid article:
“Like all technological advances, cloud computing isn’t without risk. For instance, there are security risks related to commingling your data with that of other companies. And reliability concerns arise whenever you depend on a third party’s systems to be up and running 24/7, as companies that rely on Amazon.com’s fledgling Simple Storage Service, or S3, learned when the service went down for two hours last month.
“Still, IT folks seem willing to put up with the glitches in exchange for the potential benefits, as indicated by one online poster who chimed in on the Wall Street Journal Web site after reading of the Amazon outage. “Cloud computing may be new and may not be at telephone reliability,” wrote the S3 user, “but Internet hosting as a utility is a trend that’s well on its way.” “
… and of course:
“Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com who built his company on the slogan “No software,” says the distress over the perceived lack of security of the “multitenant” model—in which multiple companies’ application instances are stored on the same servers—is overblown. Granted, Benioff has reason to promote such a mindset, but the analogy he uses, comparing cloud computing service providers to the banking industry, has merit.
“If you met a CFO who insisted on keeping the company treasury in a safe in the basement, you’d think that he or she were nuts.”
