Ideas about computers

Here is a page for some ideas that I've had related to the computer industry. I share them with you because I doubt I'll have any role it creating them (too many other things to do). Some of them are extensions of other's ideas. Also, there is no guarantee that I'm the first to think of these things. After all, as David Byrne said, "If you can think of it, it exists somewhere."

Neural interface software

For a while, I've thought about the prospect of wearing a computer on your head. Probably a lot of the influence came from a movie in the early 80s called Brainstorm.

They already have devices that can read the signals from your brain to control a computer. What about the other way, having a computer provide information into your mind's eye. I thought what some of the future uses of such a device may be. One use could be to translate our senses. In other words, the computer could refocus our eyes, tune our ears, feel things like exact temperatures and so on. It seems like these would be great simple applications that could be included with such a device.

Imagine being able to put on a compu-headband and suddenly you don't have to wear glasses because the computer receives the data from your eyes and transforms it properly. Or better yet, image being able to see infrared other wavelengths.

You walk outside and immediately know what the exact temperature is.

You listen to a piece of music and know what key its in or the computer part does a search and figures out what song is being played and passes that information back to you as a thought. The possibilities will surprise us. And before you know it, you'll be a cyborg.

Shipping container data centers

Sun Microsystems has demonstrated the idea of having a portable server room inside of a shipping container. This is a great idea, but I think people are thinking of its potential in the wrong way. Instead of thinking of it as something portable, think of it as modular. The advantage to this shipping container style is that its a uniform unit that could be turned into a pluggable unit. Like a big blade that could go into a chassis. Buildings in the future could be designed so that these modules could just slide in to the building and plug in to a kind of connection that would give it power, data and water if necessary for cooling.

This would be a great product for enterprises and organizations that want to create server farms or delve into super computing.

Size of graphics/text/windows independent of resolution

I know that Apple has just released this feature with Leopard, but I had the idea back in the 90s. As resolutions where getting higher and higher and windows and text on a 17", 19" or 21" display where getting comparitively smaller, I thought what if the size of graphics elements on the screen where the same size, but just higher quality at higher resolutions. So if you had a graphics card capable of doing 1900x1200, that text that was blocky at 1024x768 would now be really smooth. Sure there would be aspect ratio issues. Perhaps you would just have to put up with a different screen shape. But what are we going to do when we have 3400x2000 pixel capable video cards, but can't use them on a 19" display without a microscope.