Unit 4 Part III

What will PCs look like in the year 2010? How fast will they be? And what will they do?

Andy Grove, Intel's chairman, once said that fast means that whatever happens happens in the blink of your eye. Even as today's PC approaches 500 MHz, anything other than the simplest tasks take longer than that--long enough to interrupt your concentration.

Come 2010, most things will happen in the blink of an eye, and it won't matter if the data is on your hard disk, on the network in your building, or on the other side of the globe. Even when you're connected wirelessly, on the road or in a plane, everything will happen just about instantly.

Sound like magic? Well, some of the technologies described in the article are already here, with others just around the corner. Read on for some good--and bad-- technologies that you'll be using soon.

We know someone whose favorite thing is to read it in bed, because her eBook has its own light and her husband doesn’t snarl that she’s reading too late when she uses it. Many of the newest bestsellers as well as tens of thousands of classic books are available in the electronic book format, and Microsoft and others have made software add-ons that allow you to read on your laptop or desktop computer as well.