Always Coming, Never Here

These are the three most critical things for the future of personal computing. Why? Because the next thing coming down the pipe is massive, massive processing power. Which is great! We can keep bending Moore's Law over all day long, and make humongous irons available in people's living rooms and offices. We can do all kinds of great calculations... but what are we going to do with all this calculating power?

People will tell you that the possibilities are limitless - with huge data sets, you'll be able to figure out amazing things and make predictions and perform calculations previously only available to giant enterprise computing teams. But here's the root problem: you can crunch data all day long, but where are you going to get the data from? Well, unfortunately, you're going to spend all day downloading that data from the "wonderful" intarweb0rs. Bandwidth is going to become a huge problem; you're going to have this awesome computing monster at your feet, but have nothing to feed it!

People are going to want to keep massive databases locally so they can do cool computing tasks - so storage is a key thing, but thankfully terabytes aren't that expensive any more. I'm sure we'll see 1TB drives as standard shipping options by next year, if not the end of this year. And the advent of solid state storage will also make accessing data faster, so that's awesome too. The only piece missing from this equation is faster networks! Sadly, the computer network infrastructure of the U.S.A. is pretty pathetic when compared internationally. If our country has any hope of competing, we need to get on the stick and dismantle the network monopolies, institute real competition, and get innovating!

Does anyone have any web site suggestions or research on how to generate electricty at home or otherwise go off the power grid? I don't know how much it would cost to make/buy a fuel cell, but I'm really rip shit about having to pay almost $80 a month for next to no electricity usage. 3/5 of my bill is transmission charges for selling me electricity from White Plains, NY.

They're playing the same game with us on the East coast that they did with California... damn energy robber barons.

Update: So, after doing some research, it turns out that my electric bill is about as good as it's going to get. Everyone who lives on Cape Cod is automatically enrolled in the "Cape Light Compact" which purchases aggregated electricity from ConEdison in NY. Deregulator? I hardly know her. NSTAR charges me $30 for distribution of electricity - what's the breakdown of that cost, you ask? Well, it turns out that $19 of that is the actual cost of distribution, and $10 of that is "transition" which is apparently a "fuck the consumer" charge that "deregulation" brought about... CLC describes this as: "Transition is the charge that allows NSTAR to recover payments to wholesale power suppliers for terminating those contracts allowing for competitive suppliers to enter the market."

How nice for NSTAR.

Oh, and $1 goes to renewable energy and conservation. Yay.

So, as long as I'm paying more money, I figure I might as well pay more money and enroll in the CLC 100% green program (if I can). Joining that means that all my electricity would be produced by certified green energy sources (hydro, land based wind, and solar) that are actually located in New England. It's 75% tax deductible and will cost about another $75 a year (approximately an extra month of electricity for me).

But if I can figure out how to produce 4,000 kilowatt-hours a year for $1,000, I'll do that instead.