Shute's Look into the Future
Monday, August 23, 1999
  - Jason Shute  

Hmmmm let's see now, money, hot chicks and super computers .. WOOO HOOO!!! Hehe Well ok time for me to stop daydreaming and start telling you guys what I think the future will look like for the computer industry.

The Future of Computer Games
I recently purchased a copy of Tribes a few days ago just to give it a try cause everyone seems to love playing the damn thing. I've always liked playing first person shooters online and have been doing so for sometime now. But every single game that I've played seems to be the same in terms of how the overall game feels. You know, you go around shooting whatever moves in a one on one battle even in a team game. Well I don't know about you but when you fight one on one, most of the time during an online game that just isn't a whole lot of fun. But Tribes, which allows who knows how many players in a game at once, is a whole new story. I mean the levels are just so huge and well designed, from the huge playing areas to the small tunnels and for once the word "team" meant more then just not shooting the guy who's the same color as you. Take one of my games for example, me and some of my other 12 or 14 teammates were trapped in this underground building being bombarded by who knows how many people camping outside our only exit. Now for the most part in a game like quake one or two really good players would charge out and blow most of them to hell but with the way the weapons were designed in tribes that tactic was impossible unless we all charge out at the same time and maybe a few of us would make it out alive. Another example would be this one time when I was playing in a outdoors kinda of a map and during the whole game all I saw was explosions all around me. I mean for someone who's played nothing but quake 2 and outlaws this kind of action was unbelievable and even though we were so far part the action was still as intense. It's this kind of action that I believe will be the driving force in Internet games and not the quake 2 one on one kind of games where you walk around for who knows how long to accidentally bumped into a guy who wasn't on your team.

The Future of Computers 
CPU's, video cards, sound cards, SCSI cards, DVD cards and who knows what else. But can anyone here guess what's common in ever chip that's in your computer other then the fact that it has something to do with computers? Give up? Well it's the silicon. Every single chip from the ones in your hard drive to the CPU use silicon! Now silicon isn't cheap and the way to make something that we use a lot less expensive is to not use so much. But how would we do that you say? Easy, single chip solutions. As of right now the concept of a single chip solution may seem kind of odd to most of you right now but let's just all stand back and think for a second. Would you rather have a computer that uses up a ton of silicon or a cheaper computer that performs the same that has less silicon? Now the concept of a single chip solution isn't new, in fact Cyrix has been playing around with the concept for some time now. As of right now they do have a single chip solution the mediaGX which is in many peoples mind a bust. But at least the idea was good and maybe a year or two from now if Cryix doesn't file for chapter 7 first we'll see the Jalapeno which is in my mind a upgrade to the poorly made mediaGX. Now even though the specs of a graphics core that's as powerful as the voodoo2 may not sound all that wonderful to gamers the cost of producing and selling a computer like that would attract a lot of the people in the low end market. But as of right now and anytime in the near future it doesn't look to bright when it comes to single chip solutions having top of the line performance even though I believe that some day every computer would be manufactured that way. Just think there will be no need for PCI, AGP or any other slots, No incompatibly problems and just think what the software developers could do to optimized the game for that one chip instead of wasting time making sure that every other hardware out there works with the game. Just take the PlayStation, N64 or the Dreamcast for example. All their games have been made in a way to take full advantage of what the system can do. Just think instead of the CPU needing special instructions like MMX, 3Dnow or SSE(KNI) in order to optimize itself to run games it could be the other way around. 

Besides the single chip solution I also have another idea for the computer of the future. First of all let's take a look at how fast people are getting on to the internet these days. With the cable, ISDN, ADSL. People of today are able to surf the net with ease. But what else can we do besides looking up information, playing games, porn and who knows what? Well how about video conferencing which is something that has just started to take off because of our access to high speed Internet connections. Just think, if everyone had access to a high speed internet connection at home we could just sit at home and do work, school, meetings, and ect. Now that is an idea which some major companies are playing with right now but when will it be for everyone? And what about computer power or hard drive space? I mean at school I've used computers with no hard drives that just basically gets all the needed info from a server. Now I know that in order to load something like windows over a LAN network at school may be easy enough but as of right now if you were to use a normal phone modem to connect to a server in order to load windows it would take you the whole day. But one day I believe that problem will be solved with higher speed Internet connections. Just imagine if you could use a computer that consists of nothing but a monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound card and a modem of some kind. No need for ram, CPU, hard drives, videocards or anything else. Why not just connect to a server and use it's CPU, it's ram, and it's hard drives instead of you having to upgrade all the time? I mean it would sure save a lot of money for everyone in the long run and your sure to get top of the line performance as long as the server says top of the line and your connection is good enough. 

Anyways I'm sure everyone has their own look into the future but as for me it's Tribe like games, high speed internet connections, never having to upgrade my computer and me sleeping on a big bed on top of a lot of money with lot's of beautiful women. 

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