Technology is still exciting
I'm a tech geek, no surprise there, but I'm actually excited for the first time in a while (8 years or so?) about some of the new tech that's available or on the horizon. Two things of note that are really neat, even though I won't own either within the next five years:
The nVidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer: Using four non-graphic cards based off nVidia's GPU technology and using the CUDA API to directly command 960 parallel processing cores, you can have almost 4 TFLOPS of computing power on your desk for under $10k. Really, this is amazing. This is like having 80 Connection Machines (the giant blinky light computers from Jurassic Park, about 50 GFLOPS each) next to your monitor, and not having to pay $25M for each of them (that was only in 1993, 15 years ago!). Now I don't need this kind of computing power, but it's useful for biochemical engineering, medical imaging, geological exploration, and all sorts of scientific investigation. Add in the fact that it is relatively inexpensive, and that's pretty damned cool.
The Chevy Volt: As much fun as it is to knock American auto makers (even though I proudly drove a Saturn for a decade), I think the Plug-In Series Hybrid is really the future direction for commuter cars. Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive, and the most efficient conversion of fuel to energy is performed in large power plants, not tiny gasoline motors. Still, by having a backup gas powered engine in the car that's not coupled to the wheels in any way, it can run at peak efficiency 100% of the time. Having an electrically driven car also eliminates complex transmissions, and provides peak torque across the entire rev-range. For city people, I think this is the car of the future, and a decade from now I expect to see a lot of Plug-In Series Hybrids on the road around Seattle.
The nVidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer: Using four non-graphic cards based off nVidia's GPU technology and using the CUDA API to directly command 960 parallel processing cores, you can have almost 4 TFLOPS of computing power on your desk for under $10k. Really, this is amazing. This is like having 80 Connection Machines (the giant blinky light computers from Jurassic Park, about 50 GFLOPS each) next to your monitor, and not having to pay $25M for each of them (that was only in 1993, 15 years ago!). Now I don't need this kind of computing power, but it's useful for biochemical engineering, medical imaging, geological exploration, and all sorts of scientific investigation. Add in the fact that it is relatively inexpensive, and that's pretty damned cool.
The Chevy Volt: As much fun as it is to knock American auto makers (even though I proudly drove a Saturn for a decade), I think the Plug-In Series Hybrid is really the future direction for commuter cars. Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive, and the most efficient conversion of fuel to energy is performed in large power plants, not tiny gasoline motors. Still, by having a backup gas powered engine in the car that's not coupled to the wheels in any way, it can run at peak efficiency 100% of the time. Having an electrically driven car also eliminates complex transmissions, and provides peak torque across the entire rev-range. For city people, I think this is the car of the future, and a decade from now I expect to see a lot of Plug-In Series Hybrids on the road around Seattle.