30 Years from now

Interesting article - http://www.builderau.com.au/webdev/sitedesign/0,39024698,39129283,00.htm

Takes guts to predict anything more than 5 years in IT field - IF you want to be serious about it that is.... considering the miserable track record of similar predictions ! (remember Bill Gates , Thomas J. Watson , etc ?!)
Some nice facts in the article : puts current technologies into perspective - from a evolutionary point of view - I wonder what it would be like 10 years from now !!


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*UPDATE* (Primarily triggered by Manoj's comment :-D )

Moore's law - I never believed much in it , but you must admit that it has been pretty consistent !
Also - w.r.t possible going down the drain - remember the tech jump from vacuum tubes to semiconductors ??
Compare ENIAC, to say your laptop - or even the MAC from 20 years back :P

If you go back 30 years and tell a guy then that desktops will be running at 4 gig 30 years from then - (well first explain to him what a desktop is ;) ) now you can appreciate the tech growth !
Heck , 10- years from now Rao's latest PDA would be much faster than this comp of mine !

What I liked were his article were the broad set of thrusts at the future - indexing , places were mem/proc power is going to be utilised , bandwidth , etc.

I know of people who reorg code and optimise like crazy in assembly for past 20+ years - while I code in C and now java.
Notice all the mem requirements going up and processor power leaking away ?

If you give the current desktop to a guy from 25 yeas back , his programs will be blazingly fast - since his whole attitude towards coding is different : CPU is expensive and precious resource and memory is like a godsend boon not to be used for trivial purposes !
And then we see memory leaks and OOM in current apps - sick.

This interview http://www.builderau.com.au/webdev/0,39024680,39130602,00.htm by the same guy got into lot of rough weather - though his salient point wrt open source interfaces is quiet valid , some of his others views I cannot agree with.

**UPDATE**

Was surprised to know that lot of people did not know of this article : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html