15 technologies today’s infants will never use
Except…I suspect he’s just plain wrong about a lot of it. The first four technologies he claims are dying:
- Wired internet
- Dedicated cameras
- Landline phones
- Computers that you turn off (as opposed to putting into sleep mode)
Wired internet is not going away anytime soon. People have been touting WiMAX and other wireless technologies for years and still can’t get them to work. You will have a wired connection to your home for many years to come, at least partly because you will never be able to get the wireless bandwidth to stream video or VOIP reliably, and at least partly because wireless is so fickle. (My wife has a hard-wired connection for her laptop at home because it doesn’t stay connected to our wireless access point, and even when it does her throughput is for crap. She doesn’t have this problem anywhere else, and I don’t have the problem with my own wireless devices at home.)
Dedicated cameras….maybe. But I hate cell phone picture quality, even the picture quality of Sally’s new Droid Bionic with its 8MP camera sucks a pretty good vacuum compared to my 6MP Nikon D70, especially in low-light conditions where the so-called flash on the phone is more of a nuisance than a help. And yes, when I know I’m going to want to take pictures, I lug the D70.
Landline phones are not going away. You can call us Luddites all you want. But I like the idea that I can call 911 and they know exactly where I’m calling from without me needing to tell them. I also like a phone that doesn’t drop connections because the nearest cell tower is blocks away and I get only a single bar on my cell when I’m at home. Hey, Verizon: I can’t hear you now.
Cold-booting computers…well, all I can say to that is that I haven’t turned my computer off since about 1996, except when I’ve replaced components or rebooted for patch updates. The only way you’re ever going to avoid boot-up time on a cold restart is if you swap your boot drive out for an SSD.
OK, the next four.
- Some screed about the “windows” metaphor going away
- SSD drives completely replacing standard hard drives in laptops
- The death of movie theatres
- Mice and touchpads going away in favor of touchscreens
He says “But, in the next few years, we’ll say good bye to the window metaphor where each application you run is displayed in a draggable box that has a title bar and widgets.”
Er. Dipshit. THAT’S A WINDOWS METAPHOR. Click the box, OPEN A WINDOW.
I’ll buy what he says about SSDs, but only if the price goes down. SSDs of any size at all are horrendously expensive (in a dollars per gigabyte sense) right now.
I’m not sure about the death of movie theatres. There’s something about going to the theatre and seeing the movie larger than life. Although I have to admit that we probably haven’t been to the movies once a year since we got married. What is actually killing movie theatres is the price of tickets and the price of concessions. When it costs $40 just to go to the movies and have a couple of drinks and popcorns, thanks, I’ll stay home and watch on my big screen TV.
Mice and touchpads are not going away. They will still be needed for precision pointing. And who wants to wipe greasy fingerprints off the damn screen all the time?
Next 4:
- The end of 3D glasses
- Death of the TV remote
- Death of the desktop computer
- Death of the phone number
In order:
- So what? Who cares? I don’t watch 3D movies anyway; they give me a headache.
- I doubt it; I’m not going to use my smartphone to change channels on my TV.
- Maybe…but people will still be using laptops…but laptops don’t have big enough screens to make the touchscreen technology he pimps, above, work properly. And besides, this guy works for a publication that’s about, hmm, laptops. Could he possibly be biased a little?
- Say what? You still have to have an address to go with that userid you’ve asked the pretty girl for. Unless someone comes up with a universal PNNS (phone number name system) that works like DNS, you’ll still need her phone number.
Finally:
- Death of prime-time television
- Death of the fax machine
- Death of the optical disk
Prime-time television is already dead. Even the cable companies get this; for instance, Comcast has its on-demand channel where you can catch up with your favorite shows. But prime-time has been dead since the 1980s and the advent of the VCR, so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Fax machines…maybe. The technology for digital signatures needs to get better and easier to use, as well as a hell of a lot more secure. I’m still uneasy about signing my name on a screen when I use a credit card. I know at least one guy who just scribbles on them, for the same reason.
And while I figure at some point there will be something that comes along to displace the optical disk (after all, CDs and DVDs and flash drives have essentially replaced the floppy disk, which itself went through a number of design iterations), he makes what I consider to be a terribly bone-headed statement:
[W]ith the growth in downloadable and streaming video services, all physical media is on the fast track to extinction.
I think this is just flat wrong. I distrust the cloud and I will always want to have some sort of physical backup of my files. If I don’t have a physical copy of the data, or the movie, or whatever, then I’m just renting it; I don’t actually own it. (Of course, you don’t actually “own” movies anyway; you buy a license for personal use of the media.) I don’t leave my Kindle books in the cloud for this reason. And I back my Kindle up on my computer fairly regularly.
Bottom line, I think this is a pretty sad excuse for an article from someone who writes for a computing publication (although I have to say I’ve never read that publication myself, so I have no idea if it’s normally this bullshitty or not).
[AFTER MORE THOUGHT] Is it just me, or do other people get irritated with these “10 things” type of “articles” that are really just slideshows with captions that make you click click click to read them? I really prefer articles to pithy captions. I also prefer transcripts over video, because I CAN READ THE TRANSCRIPTS IN LESS TIME THAN IT TAKES TO WATCH THE VIDEO. If slideshows and video are the future of Internet-based news, you can count me out.