Posted on 05/13/2012 10:12:38 PM PDT by DemforBush
From the moment that I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child, a son, I’ve thought of his development in terms of tech...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
It’s all getting more and more impersonal.
People are becoming more robot/zombie like.
When July rolls around and the RIAA/MPAA starts shutting down accounts for illegal downloading and they find many of those accounts are "Hacked" wireless routers owned by people who wouldn't know the first thing about downloading an illegal copy of Avengers from Pirate Bay you'll see a fast switch back to "wired" internet in lots of peoples homes.
The guy is trapped into thinking everyone is like he and his five friends.
I remember my grandfather chatting with me about all of the technical innovations that had emerged during his lifetime. This would have been about 1980 or so.
He was born in 1906, and witnessed the advent of nearly every technology of our modern world. He told me that when he was a boy in Sardis, Mississippi, the kids would chase any car that happened down the street, because it was so rare to see one.
He talked about how flying machines, submarines, computers, televisions, the power grid, satellites, manufacturing, skyscrapers, and men on the moon, had all been considered science fiction when he was a boy. He honestly marveled that all of those things, and more, had come to pass, and that they were now the common building blocks of our world.
It was quite a perspective, and made me stop and wonder how things would look to me when I was his age.
I tell you, I’m getting there. Today, I tell my own kids about the differences between the technologies of my youth, and those of the present day. The technologies of my childhood are actually beginning to seem a bit primitive to me now. I can only imagine how they’ll look to me in another twenty years.
My grandfather was born 1899 and grew up in a world where people were not assigned numbers. Telephone calls were made by asking for the Smiths in such and such town, postal service had not yet assigned street addresses, I don’t believe there were social security numbers yet.
I strongly disagree with the wired vs wireless internet.
Wired will provide a substantially faster experience, despite the limitations to location.
For example, I get a solid 12 Gb down on my wired connection, while getting about 4Gb down on 4G. If I wanted to pay more, I could get 4 times faster speeds on the wired connection while the wireless is at its limits.
Wireless does provide a full-time connection, unlike wired, but speed makes a huge difference, especially when dealing with video.
The whole article (like almost anything on Yahoo) is just
a pathetic advertisement for the reader to “read more” on
a different link which explains the top 10 this or that
gadget,so other probably paying companies can tout their
wares. What a pile of crap writing.
He didn’t mention that folks are doing research on using
the electron spin states on electrons as carrying information.
it would be (I believe) base 16 instead of base 2(binary..
on/off model)...much faster.
He forgot to mention brain implants or sensors on the
head which could be controlled by thoughts and made
to control computers, or devices, or cars, etc...
He didn’t mention cloaking devices, hypersonic planes,
genetic therapy, etc....he didn’t even mention pico-
projectors which will probably get rid of TV sets, or
glasses with monitors built in, or even 3-D projection
devices that aim the image onto your retina...
Clearly a crappy commercial feeder article...so typical of
Yahoo with it’s pathetic Top Ten Cities to find jobs
in, or Top ten diets, or Top Ten things not to say
at your job interview...etc., ad nauseum
Our grandfathers grew up in the same world.
My granddad didn’t get his first ride in an automobile until he was almost grown. Electricity and indoor plumbing were something that only well to do folks had in their homes. Clothes were washed on a washing board by hand, and no one in their neck of the woods had a gas burning stove. Refrigeration was an ice box, and a sit down meal in a restaurant was considered a formal occasion.
My granddad was a builder during his working years. He spent decades as a master carpenter, running his own construction business. He had every tool under the sun, but the most interesting ones, were the old tools he’d used when he was young. All of them were hand-powered, manual types.
It was fascinating to think that when he first learned the trades, everything was done by hand. Those old fashioned ways came through in all of the work he did, too. It was all sturdy, and built to last. Wonderful stuff.
Wired Home Internet
HTRN says that noisy and metal-laden electrical environments still make WiFi iffy. Maybe there will be a better generation of wireless, but for sheer reliability wires still rule. Ethernet over powerline is neat and those wires aren’t going away any time soon.
Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders
HTRN says that you can always get more guts in your camera if you don’t have to worry about packing a cell phone in it too. Now wireless cameras, we’ve already got.
Landline Phones
HTRN is bemused at how the quality of cell phone communications still ranges from barely tolerable to stink. Wires are old fashioned but they still rule when the quality of your call matters. Even semi wired services over the internet often beat the quality of cell phone communications.
Slow-Booting Computers
HTRN says this technical problem should have gone away a decade ago with the advent of the reliable flash drive if it were only the OS loading up into main memory that mattered. However, as long as peripherals have to be initialized the OS has to bring each one up every power cycle. Engineering will eventually solve the problem, but it will take a new generation of peripherals.
Windowed Operating Systems
HTRN says that until the greasy fingerprint has also been outmoded, people won’t want touch screens unless the format is so small there is no choice.
Hard Drives
HTRN says that the sheer capacity of electromechanical drives will continue to beat the pants off of anything solid state. The future will have a mix of both.
Movie Theaters
HTRN thinks the nostalgia factor will probably count for a lot. Operations that manage to be economical will survive.
The Mouse
HTRN thinks people will still prefer mice or track balls to a greasily fingerprinted screen.
3D Glasses
HTRN predicts a eyeglass version of the movie screen that is light enough to comfortably put on. The visual equivalent of stereo headphones. Don’t walk around with these on, though.
Remote Controls
HTRN wonders what a TV that reads gestures would do if a pet wanders into the room. Or one that listens to voice commands would do if it overhears a phone call. However there ought to be a universal remote control that knows what to do in a roomful of equipment without being programmed — it would recognize what’s there and configure itself. (If it’s any consolation you can get programmable ones from the dollar store today. $1 at Dollar Tree.)
Desktops
HTRN says that probably the works of what we call a desktop now will fit into a pill bottle by that time. But there’s still the screen, keyboard, and loudspeakers which can’t be equally lilliputian.
Phone Numbers
HTRN says that until the whole globe gets its phone system Internetified, people will still be dealing with phone numbers. How else does someone in Outerghanistan call you or vice versa?
Prime-time Television
HTRN agrees, TV on demand will eventually make scheduled TV obsolete. How soon that happens is anyone’s guess. Large swaths of the country still do not have practical broadband.
Fax Machines
HTRN already scans stuff and emails the graphic files to those who would have otherwise gotten faxes, and there are free or cheap services on the internet that make and receive fax phone calls. Still, scanning could stand to be made much more of a standardized task (as, for that matter, printing). You ought to be able to plug anybody’s scanner (and printer) into anybody’s computer and voila, they auto configure to one another. None of these proprietary drivers.
Optical Discs
HTRN says that these will still prove useful as storage media for loading things offline. And how will you watch a movie in Timbuktu where you can’t get at the cloud?
That is cool, unless you hit a website that is bandwidth limited to 325K upload. You only can receive as fast as the other end can send.
I can watch video on a local intra-net link running at 100Mbps without any problems.
Having owned and run networks, I'm not impressed with a single download number. Not many sites can deliver 12Gbps regardless of what you can do on your end.
/johnny
It is. It wasn't that long ago that people weren't known by a 'screen name'. Anonymity = impersonal.
you have a 12 GIG pipe? I doubt it. you have a 12 MEG pipe I’d bet.
And 4G cel is not limited to 4 meg down. I got close to 8 doing a speed test on my 4G phone.
wireless is making headway in the speed department. They will likely do it with multi channel/multi radio combinations as we are seeing the the N network stuff.
Although directional.. Laser wireless will blow the doors off your wired network. up to 2.5 Gbps.
That was an interesting list and he played it safe. The real question to ponder is the technologies that will change the world that have not yet been invented. As Asia becomes more prosperous and free market oriented it will more than double the number of brilliant people who invent new technologies or perfect existing ones. The next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or that facebook guy is quite possibly alive now in India or China.
One of the most fascinating things that I observe in our modern day discourse - like peak oil for example or electricity production - is the failure to account for new technologies that we can’t even imagine. People talk about peak oil as if all locomotion will one day cease. This is a false argument for the obvious reason that new sources of oil are found all the time and new technologies are coming online now that can produce fuels out of other materials such as biomass. However, the main fallacy of the argument is that it assumes new sources of locomotion will not be invented. We have a tendency to think inside the framework of the known world until some brilliant person comes up with their own idea that changes everything.
Computers have changed just about everything in our lives and they grow in capability exponentially every year. Every computer at Best Buy is obsolete before they even sell it. Even as computers get faster and faster our ability to link them together in networks increases their ability to process information. Computers themselves may make the next great invention and can certainly perfect existing technologies.
We live in very interesting times for many reasons. Politicians who pass laws today that negatively impact our economy in order to prevent some potential shortfall decades down the road represent ignorance of the highest order in my opinion. Even the peak food argument is a complete crock! The world would never run out of room to feed people as long as the sun shined. Don’t believe me? Go online and see the amount of food that people are producing in their backyards or greenhouses with a combination of new technology and old. Read about hydroponics, aquaponics, stacked beds, hugelkultur, etc etc. We will never run out of room to make food. I can grow crops on the roof of my house for crying out loud or perhaps battery and photovoltaic technology will improve to where I can run my own indoor greenhouse using the sun’s energy from my roof! There is no limit if we free the imagination.
Peak water is another fool’s argument - with a cheap source of electricity we have an infinite supply of water in the oceans and desalination technology already exists. The government continually tries to improve efficiency by levying taxes and penalties on current wasteful water use. All that does is grow government and stifle the free market and innovation.
We use t-tape in our garden and soil beds that emphasize water retention (lots of mulch/fiber underneath and mulch on top). Some of this is even recycled cardboard (worms love it). We have cut our water use in the orchard and garden by 90% and it saves us money and water.
We are told the world will end because of a lack of x. Rubbish. The world is a finite amount of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc etc. Our ability to utilize and reclaim the finite elements here on Earth are infinite. Beware of anyone who tells you differently.
...anyone else find it interesting that the CDC KNOWS THE NUMBER OF homes with landlines?
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