Google.org made big headlines recently with a 10M USD investment into Enhanced Geothermal Systems. In 2006, MIT estimated that 100GW of EGS could be developed within the US over the next 50 years. The future for EGS looks bright, especially when you consider some of the other factors currently in play.
So the launch of the iPhone3G has come and gone. The activation process was broke for several hours and frustrated lots of line waiters as they couldn’t manage to activate their shiny new hardware. While I was always skeptical of the whole in-store activation process, I didn’t think it would become this much of a train wreck. And a few days before the launch, after reading some reviews from the NYT and WSJ, I decided that I wouldn’t get the new iPhone. After some more research though, I’ve changed my mind.
Oddly enough, two nights ago I blogged about the possibility of the announcement of OSX 10.6. Apparently I’m partially psychic because today the news exploded all over the web about 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) being announced at WWDC next week and shipping in January at MacWorld SF 2009. The biggest bombshell would that it would be Intel64 only, and a heavy emphasis on the Cocoa API (probably deprecate the Carbon UI API but not eliminate it from this release).
My take is still that I’m right (mostly). I think we’ll see the announcement next week at WWDC, but the launch wont be until March 2009 (18 months after Leopard). And it wont drop Intel64 support, but that perhaps most (all?) of the enhancements made will only benefit Inte64 users (making it a useless upgrade for Intel32 and PPC users).
There are a few contingency points I want to mention - one is that if the rumors are completely true (which isn’t likely with Apple - usually some of the details get mangled but the overall gist of the rumor is correct), the January 2009 Intel64-only release could have a similar effect as 10.0 in the sense that it is more experimental and geared towards developers. No major new features for end users, just a ton of under the hood changes. Maybe what 10.6 is really a transition to OS X 11.0 (yea yea yea don’t get me on the name semantics) for the first half of 2010. The 11.0 OS would drop Carbon support completey and be Intel64 only, with many new features like Cocoa Touch. The reasoning behind this lies in the details of the rumor: that the next release is really a stability and speed release. To make the OS work better (I think it works fine now, but I don’t push it too hard). If Apple is going to gut one of the big APIs and improve the other, I wouldn’t be surprised if its more in the experimental category.
There is an alternate (or possibly additional) factor in play as well. Intel launches their Nehalem (Core 3 or whatever it gets called) architecture in late 2008 with the transition of the entire product line over to the Core3 chip throughout 2009. Snow Leopard could be an OS that only ships on new machines that have the Core3 chip installed and wouldn’t be available for sale to the general public. Developers would still get copies through the developer network to make sure that their applications work properly on Snow Leopard, but with various features tweaked so it would work on Core2 chips. These two factors could even combine - developers get Core3-based Macs at MWSF to test 10.6 for a release in Q2 or Q3 when Core3 chips become more available for Apple’s product lines (which use mostly mobile CPUs anyways).
Finally I want to note that when it comes to Cocoa Touch, its really worthless on any PC, at least with the tools and technologies available today. I don’t know about you, but I dont want to have my arms outstretched to my monitor at work for 8 hours a day to do stuff. Even 2 hours over the course of the day would probably be too much. Granted, I write code for a living and I really don’t see the pounding out lines of code on the keyboard paradigm going away anytime soon. There would be room for a touch API for a UI designer perhaps, but even them I’m skeptical.
I’ll wrap it up there before it goes into a long discussion on the merits and pitfals of a touch-based interface in everyday computing.