2021 will put everything we currently own in the antique shops! Upgrading our PC’s…

Let us start with HDMI 2.1. This technology is promising 48 gbps! What does this mean? Get ready to throw out all your existing monitors for the new 4k 120fps monitors ASUS currently is releasing. Of course we will need new graphics cards to match our typical 3 27 inch monitor setups on our desk.

What does this all mean? We will need new PCIE 4.x motherboards, CPU, ddr6 memory, Nvme SSD’s and everything else to match! There are currently not enough motherboards out yet, so I would estimate everyone should start their builds fall 2021 or early 2022. An ultimate setup for new build would be CPU with overclocking ability past 5ghz with many cores. Fastest DDR6 memory you can get, high end graphics card to support 3 HDMI 2.1 outs for the 3 27 inch monitors 4k at 120fps+. There is no reason to have a 1080p monitor on your desk anymore, they belong in antique shops as of 2021, especially with ps5 supporting 8k!

What has been the most depressing part about CPU technology is that it has stalled for nearly 2 decades. We should be way beyond 5ghz processors by now at base clock speeds, but industry chose to add more cores/threads instead. If you remember back in 90’s on with our blue screens of death from windows 3.1/windows XP, a lot of that was solved with adding cores to CPU’s. So if you had some process running out of control maxing your CPU out to 100%, then your PC would not freeze anymore.

So why did they only continue with cores only? Well then internet developed into using virtual hosting, things like KVM on redhat/centos, that allowed you to add more operating systems to existing systems without requiring a whole new PC/server. If you had a lot of memory in your system(32 or 64+gig) you could run many different operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Solaris, Irix and many other unix flavors.

But isn’t increasing core speed a good thing? Of course it is, better the core speed, faster the CPU can run return to us to do other things. Transcoding for example requires a high clock speed, IE converting a video stream from one format to another on the fly. The reason we have stalled so much is adding transistors to CPU chips is not an easy task, they can only get so small. GPU’s( graphic card processors) actually are faster, because this CPU industry has stalled so much on increasing clock speeds. Reality is with only INTEL and AMD for competition, there just wasn’t enough competition, we should be at 10ghz base clock speeds by now. We are more likely to see quantum computer chips now before we can expect INTEL or AMD to actually produce a 10ghz chip. Then with invention of smart phones it stalled it even more as we went back in time once again using old school ARM CPU chips to increase battery life in phones instead of developing better battery technology.

5g smart phones

All our pixel 4XL’s down or anyone with a phone not made fall of 2020 on belong in antique shops as of 2021! What is a 5G phone? It’s the next version of cell phone tower technology. We had 3g, 4g, LTE and now 5g. Why would you want to have a phone that is stuck back on 3g technology!

The good thing about 5g, is it will empower self-driving cars, AI, and faster and more reliable internet with our phones. The only case I can make about not upgrading is if you live in a rural area, then don’t bother till 2022 when your phone contract runs out, every phone that year will support it, so the google pixel 6XL should be your first upgrade!

Why do I prefer google Pixels? Longer support, quicker updates, more secure(google makes android, so you really want 2 companies running around your phone, or just google) and if you ever plan on making an android app in your life, that is the phone you need. Have fun learning java! Ohh god back to 90s again! Why don’t we just program them in assembly language already instead of using perl or python lol. Don’t worry, when quantum chips arrive, we will have updated programming languages finally. Programmers can just go to sleep for next 5 years till physicists release a chip with 2000 qubits. Look on bright side, at least you’ll have a ps5 to tide you over along with an 8k TV before that happens.

Laptops with PCIE 4.x, HDMI 2.1 support

These will command a premium price tag, your better off building a desktop off newegg.com/ca with prices they will charge. I would not waste my money on a laptop period without HDMI 2.1 out support to a 4k TV or you would be stuck watching a movie in 1080p in your hotel room, what a disgrace that would be.

These days laptops are fast enough for all your daily needs, to buy new I would wait for graphic cards that support HDMI 2.1 out to 4k TVs so you can watch a good quality movie. They have them right now, but I would wait till they have PCIE 4.x motherboards in them so your future proof for awhile and your SSD’s run blazing fast in them.

Home Living Room Setup

NOTE: I am using ps5 and new xbox releasing late 2020 as minimum test scenarios we need to stay compatible with for upgrading old technology.

This is tricky, the first thing we need before we do any upgrades to our existing living rooms is a receiver capable of HDMI 2.1 that is compatible with latest ps5/xbox etc and supports 6+ HDMI ports. Currently there are only a couple available, costing thousands. I would wait till Black Friday 2021 and look if you can snap one for $350 from bestbuy. Then the upgrades can begin. After buying receiver finally, you should head over to monoprice.com and pickup as many HDMI 2.1 cables as you need. Then we upgrade the TV finally to support latest ps5/xbox specs. As of today’s date there are only 2 models available.

For our television upgrade this is personal choice on size etc. One thing you absolutely need to make sure is that it is ps5 etc compatible. I would say 4k TV would be better choice right now, as the new consoles have lower frame rate on 8k, that is not very good for gaming. Another thing you need to consider is gamer input lag. The lower the gamer input lag, the better the TV will be. This does not mean if you have the money don’t get a 8k TV, I certainly would, I would just play games at 4k on the 8k TV, then I’d still be able to watch movies at 8k whenever they come out plentiful like 4k movies are now.

My recommendation for price/performance/cost factor is largest TV you can get 65+ inches at 4k with ps5 support and 3D support because new avatar movies will be releasing in next few years and 3D only looks good on 65 inch+ TV’s. I prefer 73 inch range. If on a really tight budget just snag a 55 inch 4k TV when you can, but who likes sitting that close!

For non-gamers you won’t have to worry about gamer input lag as much as someone raiding online say in Final Fantasy 14 on ps5, but my advice on getting a large enough TV for new console support with 3D as large as you can stands. For non-gamers the fastest possible Netflix experience you will get will be running netflix etc on ps5/xbox new consoles when they come out late 2020, no other device will match it’s speed, not even your brand new smart TV.

Technology Updates in retrospective

Gamer is a funny term to begin with. In reality all humans are gamers. Your just an extension of your smart phone these days till maybe one day your able to use Elon Musk’s neural link to even come close to be as smart as AI. As much as you may not think you are a gamer, reality is on consoles you get many lives, in real life you only get 1, and one day you will be walking around with virtual reality glasses before you die whether you like it or not, resistance is futile.

If you choose to resist new technologies, you will never be apart of the real resistance team against AI and quantum computers one day, knowledge of underlying technologies in #1 in 2020. Even Bill Gates predicted one day we will all work from home one day in virtual reality, the only resistance currently is governments not wanting to give everyone a universal income, so there will be a sars version 3 4 5 who knows till this happens. With new technologies like CRISPR anyone could release a virus on world anytime they want now. Over next few years we will see governments adopt crypto currencies, currently central banks have it, and a couple countries, and we know central banks control US/CANADA anyways so just a matter of time. I predict USA will adopt it first, they always behind Europe lately, then Canada is so passive they only do things after USA does them, so they will follow suit, just like legalization of marijuana.

What if you are young in your 20s or 30s?

If you are just coming into all this new technology, follow Elon Musk, see where the world is going. Understand physics, understand his projects of Starlink, Neural Link, and what is involved in inhabiting Mars. Project Mars that has been worked on for a very long time, just launched this year and should hit mars by February.

What should you study in school? Physics right now is #1. To put it simply my parents came from industrial age, in this age the baby boomers grew up in an age where they could have worked same job all their life in some store or factory where only 1 income was required to support a family. Industrial age meant women stayed home, men worked, women took care of the kids and a family could survive just off one income, unlike today.

The next stage after industrial age was computer age. This is my age, currently 44 years old. I like this number a lot it was the number of Stephane Richer when the Montreal Canadians won the Stanley Cup 🙂 Anyways since the 90s computers have evolved so much, my generation improved the computer technology greatly, so much in fact that is where you have your smart phones you can’t get off these days.

The age we are currently coming into is called the space age. Your age group. Physics and engineering are #1 right now. As more and more missions go to Mars, quantum computers become a thing, and artificial intelligence will mean everyone works from home one day, as much as governments resist to give people a universal income, rest assured it will happen one day as AI replaces 80% of jobs in next 10 years.

This is a great time to become an engineer. Engineers will always have a job. While my background was computer science from the 90s, if I was currently your age, I would instead be studying physics and getting an engineering degree. You can still pursue computers but do it from the engineering side. Besides their side is much funner you can build robots, all computer scientists can do is build cryptography, I would pick the robot side 🙂 Will give you the base foundation for understanding more about the space age as it becomes relevant to you. I hear Elon Musk even setup a school, explore that idea as well.

But what if I like to help people? One word, “CRISPR”. Study biochemistry and learn CRISPR as soon as you can. Hell even get petri dishes at home and learn from online kits available. This is the future of medicine, if you want to help people, use it for good like curing cancer and not releasing viruses on the world. Word of warning we do not know enough about human body right now to be playing god with CRISPR. For example the inventor of it ended up in jail for 2 years in China for modifying embryos with it so they could never get HIV for example. Here is the problem, we do NOT understand enough about DNA to just randomly snip at DNA. For example if you take CRISPR and modify the DNA strand so you cannot get HIV, you make the person more susceptible to things like diabetes. It’s like you shut one thing off, you accidentally turn another thing on. I don’t think till quantum computers arrive and analyze DNA that we will have a better understanding of it, so be prudent and don’t play God, learn from your teachers and classmates and join mailing lists for researchers.

But you want to do nothing, maybe be a pornstar? Remember no matter how attractive you think you or someone else is, everyone gets old! Relationships are built on trust and having things in common. This should be the basis for everything you do in life. Find a passion and explore it, it takes 10k hours to master anything in life, this is why you need to find it and put the time in. Go game on twitch if you need to, just find that passion, 10k is a lot of hours and you need to put it in somewhere. Trust me time goes by quickly if you find people who share your interest.

Before you leave this world you want to leave something behind that future generations can carry on your work, if you do not do this your life will feel empty all the time. You always want to be accomplishing something that betters humanity, physics/science will give you the basis to do this.

Develop the mentality, “Nothing is impossible, just hasn’t been done yet”. Throughout my programming years, that is all I heard from developers, “That’s impossible”. And the more they thought it was impossible, the more it challenged me to make it possible. I did a lot of late night coding sessions, even slept on some possible algorithms in my head for it before I went to bed and woke up with the answer, then implemented it and proved everyone wrong. Nothing is impossible, its terminology for lazy people unwilling to do any research or testing. The key is to know every possible human available tool for it and try them in different ways. Don’t be afraid to fail, I needed to fail 100 times at everything I tried at first to finally have something that worked, never give up! Sure give up on bad partners or people from non-science fields, but never give up on science! There is always a way!

Remember to always be nice to non-science people, by transitive property people fear what they do not understand. Don’t spend a lot of your time hanging around non-science people because you’ll waste so much time on their fears and conspiracy theories, let someone do it who is bored 🙂 Get on IRC, mailing lists, and talk to people smarter than you always or you will never learn anything. If your having creativity issues, go teach at the university for awhile then return to your field later, students can teach you a lot and give you your passion for field back. I think the saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” only applies to Arts people anyways, cause you can get research grants and further research when you get your creative itch back.

If you ever get a chance to run a business, the right business partner is key. I must have ran 5 different companies in my life, the right partner is the hardest thing to find. You need to find someone who has all your weaknesses as their strengths, maybe that’s marketing, sales, accounting, programming, taking a company public on stock market or whatever, you can’t do it all! My average was I found one good partner every 3 tries. Treat your partner with utmost trust, have mentality you want to have exact same money as them and be sipping martinis with them in Caribbean one day. Never do anything without integrity when running a company or skim off the top, your only hurting your partner and you sharing that martini! You will never find him/her first try, you have to understand your weaknesses and personalities well first.

Treat your sales team like gold, they pay your programmers their wages, take their families out on trips, make it fun, that is your blood line! You will suffer mental collapse many times and feel like throwing in the towel, that is the time to push harder to succeed. The difference between people who succeed and fail is the ones that pushed through it when it happens. I do not wish a startup on anyone, its mentally exhausting, I suffered programmer burnout many times doing this, remember balance is key. Have a whiteboard and draw out ideas, it helps to keep things in perspective.

My goal is not to dis-encourage you to running a company. There are many positives. You will learn so much about how valuable inter personal relationships are, you will become very wise on how to deal with people, merchant accounts, marketing, sales, programming, or whatever your strengths are. Just have a marketing plan upfront, no product is worth anything if no one knows about it, so if one of your strengths is not internet marketing, find a partner.

When I started out first time in my 20s, I was weak at sales, lacked people skills, weak at marketing. I was strong at programming, and technical side of things, but it wasn’t enough skillset. So I then became stronger at marketing, and people skills. Now with a strong tech background, people skills and marketing abilities, I was able to get a partner with good people skills and strong sales skills. That partnership worked really well, I focused more time programming for marketing purposes, and my partner would close the deals as sales just wasn’t my thing. It was a beautiful partner ship and we complemented each others strengths and weaknesses perfectly. I developed enough people skills I could talk tech in terms people understood, I was contributing on marketing, and that helped my partner close sales. That’s how you do it, the motivation from each other is what keeps things going, and that my friend is why finding right partner is important.

The coolest part about it is it’s the only job in the world where you want to make yourself dispensable, so you can run off and open other companies down the road 🙂 Put the programming time in , build it and they will come 🙂 Or if your on other end, find a programmer and support them contributing ideas.

On a funny note: when I was in university, science students would run over to Arts faculties wearing shirts that said, “Friends don’t let friends take Arts”. I hope this make sense to you one day…(Would you rather marry a doctor or lawyer? Would you like to have a BA and work at a gas station?)

Always remember, intelligent people talk about ideas, others talk about other people constantly. Use this knowledge to help you pick a good partner one day, don’t stress yourself out with people where you feel you need to defend yourself all the time. Stress will kill you faster than anything on this planet.

Good Luck,

Dan@SunSaturn