Absolutely accurate predictions
 

What's going to happen in the next four?

Well, I'm not expecting a huge amount of change in basic hardware capabilities.

When I wrote Ground Zero #1, a 1.33GHz Athlon was the god of all PC CPUs.

Disappointingly, today's three-point-whatever gigahertz P4s and two-point-whatever gigahertz Athlon 64s only manage about four times the performance of a 1.33GHz Athlon, tops, for optimised code. They beat the old Athlon by a factor of three or less for other tasks. To avoid disappointment, expect only twice the performance.

That's worth having, certainly, but not nearly as exciting as the change from 1995 to 1999. Over that period, we stepped up from the Pentium 200 to the Pentium III 800EB; the clock speed factor increase was bigger, and the performance increase was, generally speaking, commensurately bigger.

Software radio can receive video transmissions, data transmissions, encrypted satellite TV that you're meant to be paying for, anything. And send it too, of course, if you've got a transmitter. You need an RF front end to feed high frequency signals to a software radio board, but apart from that all you need is appropriate antennas and the board, and that's just DSP hardware that's already available to enthusiasts for less than a thousand bucks Australian.

http://dansdata.com/gz047.htm