Future Of Computing, where do you think it headed?

Machine have already taken over, the only one who can save us is Neo. Neo is said to be markmcb! I saw him yesterday chasing a white rabbit.

There was a time, when nobody could do things with electronics without a good understanding of physics or some good insight into how components worked. Even kits like this still required a level of understanding beyond "just put the pieces in". Nowadays, however, electronics kits are like duplos with snap-together components. You can even do micro-controller programming with a BASIC stamp with little knowledge of what's really happening at the circuit level. Now, I'm not complaining - it's certainly helped to make things cheaper and has lowered the entrance bar into the field. But there is a level of knowledge that is lost with this.

Computer science is pretty much going the same way. Visual Basic (booo ... hiss) made it possible for just about anybody to be a programmer. It also made it possible for just about anybody to write viruses and malware, too. Such are the inevitabilities of enabling the "everyman" with powerful tools. It was once thought that programming to the AGILE motif would be next to impossible for multiple purposes, but Ruby on Rails is rapidly crushing that notion Does anybody really know assembly language anymore? How many people even know how the hardware on their computer works? Could you control the mouse without an operating system? Boot your computer from scratch? The loss of such an ability (as common knowledge) is the future of computing.

Many would argue that such an ability is no longer necessary. We'll ignore that for a moment. The consequences of losing that ability are that simple tasks require more and more horsepower. You get such bloat as shown by this comparison - a 1986 Macintosh Plus vs a Dual Core AMD Athlon - why should the modern machine be more or less equivalent to something twenty years its senior? What added functionality really required 1GB of installation and all those CPU cycles?

The future of computing is simply the rapid development of commodity software. The hardware has become irrelevant. Despite the bloat, the speed of hardware is fast enough that the machines are waiting for user input. The software is loosely built enough that within ten years, anybody will be able to verbalize some "objects" together into a program.

Nobody will think of the sweetest video games in terms of "computing platform" nor will they care about who makes their office suite. The computer will be like the refrigerator in the office pantry - nobody knows what brand it is or how it performs - it just keeps food cold. The money is simply going to go to those who can put together chunks of hardware and code into the cheapest, most durable boxes (with an aesthetic purpose - thanks Apple) as quickly as possible. With prices down, nobody is going to care if it dies because the newest gizmo will be out in a year anyway.

the touch screen interface is use on the new iphone

For those whose interest is piqued by the video, the software shown is being developed as part of Microsoft's Surface project.

There's also an open-source project working on multi-touch extensions to X-Windows.

Also, the hardware they're using isn't outrageously difficult to build, for someone reasonably competent with their hands. There are are number of DIY projects that give instructions of varying completeness. The basic idea is that infrared LEDs around the edge of an acrylic plate naturally stay within the plate, but when you touch the surface of the plate, some of the IR light is reflected by your fingers through the other side of the plate. An IR camera is positioned behind the plate and it tracks the IR bright spots. The technique is called "Frustrated Total Internal Reflection", or FTIR.