i was contemplating the other day an 8 GB SD card and had the usual moment of thinking about how fast things moved in the past 10 years or even less. 10 years ago i had a 4 GB hard drive and used to share mp3s with my friends on floppy disks (curse you bad sectors!). also the first time i saw the Epic Citadel demo on the iPhone, i was pretty baffled.. that is incredible on so many levels.

well, anyway.. what do you expect in the next 10 years?

a few things i look forward to:

1. a video capture program (like Fraps) that uses hardware compression done by the GPU with CUDA/OpenCL/whatever. right now Fraps eats a lot of disk space for lenghty recordings, not to mention it sometimes gets choppy because normal HDDs are such a bottleneck these days and can barely handle this task. i know a capture card could solve this problem, but hey.. why not a software solution?

2. this i guess is in everyone's mind: unified RAM and hard disk memory which of course results in instant on computing and proper session saving. that swap file will stop being useless and become the actual RAM resized dynamically according to needs.

3. full hardware virtualization. a hypervisor that runs multiple operating systems in virtual machines with standard performance. this would be extremely helpful in maintaing the health of your usual OS. you just snapshot it periodically and if it breaks you can restore it immediately. of course, right now this can be achieved loosely with Acronis or Clonezilla, but you need to boot from USB/optical media and it takes a while to save and restore system partitions. i have installed WindowsXP about 3 times in total since i started using it and now i'm on a 1.5 year old Win7 install, but i have this little obsession with backing up the OS since i can't be arsed to reinstall everything everytime it might break. this i guess originates from Win98 days when that shit would break on its own :D