Hype List
1. Death of PDAs
After the Newton launch, it was immediately obvious that PDAs weren't going to be the overnight success that John Sculley had planned on. Yet most pundits predicted gradual acceptance, and companies from Compaq to AT&T continued with plans to roll out their own PDAs. But, recently, experts' tones have changed. Almost all the vendors have announced cancellations or delays. There are no standards, no software, and, to a large degree, no need. The brightest hope is Motorola's Envoy, but with that company's slim track record in consumer electronics things look real chancy for the next few years.
2. MPEG
Too many people believe the MPEG standard is the answer to all video compression needs, from desktop multimedia to HDTV. What's either forgotten or not realized is that a) MPEG is an extraordinarily loose standard, allowing many incompatible MPEG implementations to exist, and b) what it does standardize limits its uses. Because MPEG is extremely asymmetrical - it takes much longer to compress than decompress - it is good for things like HDTV but bad for interactive applications. There will be plenty of room for other standards which, while perhaps not offering as high compression ratios, offer simpler implementation and more predictable compression times.
Current Position Months Position Last Month on List ——————————————————- Death of PDA's 1 - 1 MPEG 2 - 1 Chicago 3 - 1 Caches 4 - 1 Net Backlash 5 1 3
3. Chicago
The new version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, currently called Chicago, seems to be in the news more than its municipal namesake. Breathless reports, pushing the edge of non-disclosure agreements, seem to come out daily. What makes this so remarkable is how unremarkable the Chicago OS is. While it rectifies many of the glaring limitations of previous versions (8-character file names, 16-bit operation) it makes no real strides in OS technology. And, if it is anything like other Microsoft releases, it is still chock-full of bugs. When is Microsoft going to use its resources to do something revolutionary?
4. Caches
While the capacity of DRAMs quadruples every three years, the speed of DRAMs - and hence of main memory - only doubles every 10 years. This imbalance is becoming critical with new processors that operate at superfast clock rates. At 150 MHz, almost 40 instructions could be executed in the time it takes for a single memory access. To prevent these stalls, computer architects are turning to increasingly byzantine caches - small amounts of fast (and expensive) memory that store the most commonly needed data. Look for fundamental changes in memory architecture over the next two years.
5. Net backlash
Now that the Net is so mainstream, the truly hip are unplugged, unconnected, and don't use e-mail. At least that's what a spate of recent media articles seem to claim. Perhaps these articles shouldn't be taken too seriously; after all, it's inevitable that what the media hypes relentlessly one month will be denigrated the next. Yet such critiques smack of elitism. While I never expected e-mail to break down hierarchies (as some researchers claimed it would) it is a bit disappointing to see the arrival of the global village greeted by murmurs of disgust about how mindless and perverted most people are.
Steve G. Steinberg (hype-list@wired.com)
