[HN Gopher] Technologies I thought my son would never use
___________________________________________________________________
Technologies I thought my son would never use
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 117 points
Date : 2021-04-11 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| Zak wrote:
| I disagree with a couple of his verdicts.
|
| 1. Mechanical hard drives. These have become a bit more niche,
| but if you deal with larger files like that movie library the
| author ought to rip from those fragile optical disks he still has
| lying around, spinning rust is the far more cost-effective option
| for storing files you don't use all the time.
|
| 2. Phone numbers. His original prediction is that people wouldn't
| _use_ them, not that people wouldn 't remember them and dial them
| manually. A number of popular messenger services including Signal
| use phone numbers as identifiers, and I wish they didn't.
|
| 3. The fax machine. This absolutely, 100% deserved to be dead a
| decade ago. Perhaps most faxes aren't actually sent using
| physical machines anymore, but a lot of businesses and some
| government institutions treat fax as more _secure_ than purely
| digital file transfers. My vote in the 2020 US election involved
| a fax. I 'm disappointed in the tech community for not producing
| a solution that achieved near-universal buy-in from more
| conservative institutions in the past two decades.
|
| 4. Optical disks. I haven't used one in years, and I suspect a
| lot of other people here are in the same position. There's not
| that much content I want to watch more than once, so the issue of
| streaming non-ownership isn't a big problem for me. The author
| has kids, and kids definitely do that, but there are both legal
| and less legal ways to obtain permanent copies of content by
| purely digital means. Note to content sellers: I'm happy to pay
| for content; don't make it so difficult for me to do so that I
| seek alternatives.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| With regards to optical disks, the number of movies available
| digitally is still much smaller than those available on media.
| Zak wrote:
| Is that true if you include piracy?
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably depending upon how hard you want to look and how
| many compromises you're willing to accept in terms of
| quality.
| Narishma wrote:
| Optical discs are still very popular for console gaming.
| fma wrote:
| I think a lot of these predictions depend on your use case.
|
| Point and shoot...I have DSLR. I didn't have one 15 years ago.
| It's not for every day use, of course but I use it frequently. I
| can do so much more with it and the quality is so much better.
|
| Mouse...my parents/in-laws haven't used one in years since their
| main computer is a tablet
|
| Home phone? I installed one (VoIP) a few years ago. If I need to
| reach anyone at home I just have 1 number to call and I don't
| need to worry about phones having no battery, on silent
| etc...Also my kids (oldest is 4) and may need to reach me when
| they are older and for sure they aren't getting their own
| cellphone for a long time.
| tzfld wrote:
| I'm pretty sure optical media will be around for a long time
| although not as mainstream as was. It's cost is still unbeatable.
| You can get a 25gb brd for less than a $ while a memory card with
| the same capacity is much more expensive. Shelf life is also
| better for optical discs, they are great for create and forget
| backups.
| dehrmann wrote:
| A digitized a bunch of home movies, and one of the formats I
| settled on was DVDs. The latest Xbox and Playstation still play
| them, so I expect to be able to find readers for the next 20
| years.
|
| It's a lousy format, though. For files intended to be played on
| a computer, I used webm/vp9/opus. It seemed like browser-
| supported, royalty-free formats that play on everything not
| Apple would last a while.
| brailsafe wrote:
| The movie theatre prediction seems a bit bizarre, but I suppose
| if you don't do it yourself, you'd have little reason to think it
| would continue. If anything they'll probably be a resurgence in
| demand after they open back up.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Decent article but as a certified life coach I think he should
| have waited one more year to reach a round ten years to write
| this.
| paxys wrote:
| > His Computers Will All Boot Super Fast
|
| I'd argue that this is correct in spirit. Not because operating
| systems boot really fast, but because they have been designed to
| not need to boot at all. The only time I need to cold boot my
| computer or phone is after an update (which is maybe every 2-3
| months?)
|
| > He Won't Go to the Movies
|
| This is not TBD but straight up wrong. Pandemic notwithstanding,
| there is no end to movie theaters in sight.
| takinola wrote:
| I am shocked at how many of his predictions came true. This guy
| needs to start a hedge fund.
| paxys wrote:
| Eh, most of these were already true when he predicted them (in
| 2012).
| morelikeborelax wrote:
| Mechanical storage will probably change first time he builds a
| desktop to play games on. AAA games will require more and more
| space and I doubt SSD space will catch up for the budget of
| kids/teenagers within the next 5 years.
|
| Or when he starts using a computer at school, other family or
| friends.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have circa 1,5TB of SSD storage on my desktop. And I find it
| sufficient for my gaming needs. Fast Internet helps though.
|
| Solid state isn't too expensive now, if waiting for downloading
| is okay. You can get 480GB disks for around 50EUR. That is
| what, less than price of new title? And likely can at least one
| to three of them at one time.
| paxys wrote:
| I just bought a 2TB NVMe SSD for like $160. I doubt I will ever
| use a mechanical drive again for anything other than NAS setup.
| ghaff wrote:
| And even though I have an SSD in my laptop, I have a bunch of
| USB HDDs in my office for things like backup and ripped video.
| I expect my SDD mix to increase over time but I expect to keep
| using HDDs for non-performance critical work for the
| foreseeable future.
| timvdalen wrote:
| >He Won't Use 3D Glasses, Because 3D Will Be Glasses-Free
|
| I got to play around with a 3D-glasses-free display[1] for the
| first time yesterday, and I've got to say, it felt pretty
| magical.
|
| [1]: https://www.dimenco.eu/
| mhb wrote:
| It looks interesting but their web site can use a little magic.
| Would be nice if it explained their technology.
| k__ wrote:
| I guess, most of it is true for poorer folks where children only
| get a smartphone or tablet instead of a PC.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| I'm willing to be called Scrooge, Luddite, &c here, and here I
| go:
|
| > 2. No Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders I'm almost 40. I
| (finally) own a smart-phone. I also own a good digital camera. I
| tested smartphone cameras for "a leading tech company in Mountain
| View" for several years.
|
| I'm fully aware of the saying, "The best camera you have is the
| one you have with you".
|
| One day I saw a coworker pointing to my digital camera and saying
| "That type of camera is obsolete". I didn't feel good about that,
| and I have no regrets owning it and still using it with no issues
| for quality or availability. When I go out for pictures, I bring
| my camera; when I don't, I accept I have to accept smartphone
| quality.
|
| > 7. He Won't Go to the Movies I love movies (and television). I
| watch at home and out.
|
| I go out to the movies for the experience and to get out of the
| living space. No regrets. I'm an introvert.
|
| > 8. He Won't Use a Mouse I cannot stand using a trackpad or the
| "mouse button" [there are more crude words for it, think the red
| thing on ThinkPads].
|
| It is a mouse for me for life because it's actually useable.
|
| > 10. He Won't Use a Remote Control Does a bluetooth mouse count
| as "remote control" for my computer dedicated for watching movies
| and television 6 feet away?
|
| > 14. He'll Never Use a Fax Machine If only some businesses or
| government I need to deal with was the same.
| m463 wrote:
| "His Computers Will All Boot Super Fast"
|
| Booting has disappeared.
|
| Sleep (and hibernate) has made booting and boot times a non-
| issue.
|
| I would be surprised if people boot phones, laptops and many
| desktops more frequently than once a month.
|
| Even rebooting for updates probably happens without anyone
| present.
| NathanielK wrote:
| Anecdata, after a non-techy family member's phone stopped being
| updated, it had an uptime of over 2 years by the time it was
| replaced.
|
| If more people had the option of long-term support releases and
| live kernel patching with computers, I would expect similar
| results with laptops.
| analog31 wrote:
| Well, I'm a bit behind the times. I thought my son would never
| use a viola da gamba.
| chubot wrote:
| Taleb talks about the Lindy effect and some of the surprises in
| this article can be explained it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
|
| The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around,
| the longer it will last into the future.
|
| That is, it's NOT the case that every piece of technology lasts
| roughly the same amount of time, and then is replaced.
|
| For example, a chair vs. an iPhone. Which one will be used
| further into the future? Almost certainly a chair.
|
| ----
|
| Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines (both
| in the article), so they will likely outlive fax machines.
|
| Will HTML or JavaScript last longer? Probably HTML, since it came
| first.
|
| What about ASCII or HTML? Probably ASCII.
|
| These have a "dependency stack" issue, but it applies regardless.
| And I think that is part of the phenomenon -- low level
| technologies that are widely adopted take longer to go away.
| Plumbing, electrical (AC vs DC), land lines, TCP/IP, BIOS, etc.
|
| I can't find a link now, but there was a recent Kevin Kelly
| article about finding farming tools from a catalog in the 1800's
| still in use. I think he said that almost EVERY one was still in
| use, or able to be purchased, which is a nice illustration of the
| point. It takes a long time for old tech to die, and arguably it
| never does.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Where are the Trinitron displays and ICs made with 1 um
| process?
| chubot wrote:
| It's a heuristic. Although I bet you can find those things in
| use somewhere.
|
| This article is a little different -- "things my son would
| use" implies that they're still popular, not just extant.
| Both questions are interesting, and influenced by the same
| principles.
|
| The Lindy effect is one reason I'm working on
| https://www.oilshell.org/, because shell is now more than 50
| year old, much older than Python/JS/Ruby, etc.
|
| Concrete example from the last few days:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746280
|
| i.e. When people want to explain a modern cloud platform,
| they use shell. Go would have been more obvious, but shell is
| clearer. Lindy prediction: shell will outlive Go :)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I think you can argue that its not true for things in which
| item A and item B are members of a broader class of things
| wherein changing from A -> B incurs no or trivial costs or
| little fundamental changes in fulfilling the purpose of the
| class of items and there exists no immediate need to stop
| using A.
|
| For example nobody expects the 2004 Toyota Carolla to be
| forever but the gas powered car will be far harder to kill.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I guess time averages the satisfaction humans have around a
| thing. Fads come and go and attracts towards new sensations but
| over time.. that old thing might be the only one that has the
| right blend.
| guenthert wrote:
| > The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been
| around, the longer it will last into the future.
|
| "The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New York,
| where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where ...
| they conduct post-mortems on recent show business 'action'"."
|
| And no more should be read into that. There are solutions to
| problems which are adequate, e.g. "chair", where further
| changes can be expected to be modest. And since the problem
| isn't going away (unless someday we're told that sitting kills
| us and that we need to stand or lay instead), the solution
| won't either.
|
| Otoh, there are technologies which simply supersede and
| obsolete others. E.g. UTF8 has ASCII as subset and hence I
| don't expect to see the latter around for long.
| chubot wrote:
| That example proves the point. If UTF-8 exists then ASCII
| will exist.
|
| It could have gone the other way: if UTF-16 was the ONLY
| encoding, then ASCII would be obsolete. But that didn't
| happen.
| rusk wrote:
| UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII "as she is spake"
| but not strictly speaking ASCII as any ASCII control
| characters will break UTF-8. It also breaks any 8-but
| extensions/code pages. ASCII vs HTML is a bad example
| though because HTML is used globally and although ASCII is
| too this is more a historical artefact. It's not hard to
| imagine ASCII dying out over the next few years while HTML
| continues to adapt to every encoding under the sun and pure
| ASCII becomes used less and less ...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The C1 block isn't ASCII. UTF8 is a perfect superset of
| 7-bit ASCII.
| flatline wrote:
| A nit, the telephone and fax machine developed more or leas in
| parallel, and the first working fax predated the first
| telephone by 11 years!
| techbio wrote:
| This message is a telegram.
| philistine wrote:
| They were sending drawings through telegram lines for
| newspapers during the American Civil War. Thus, the fax is
| older than the phone. But in terms of general population use,
| of course most people encountered a phone before they
| encountered a fax.
| typon wrote:
| Every time someone brings up the Lindy effect I can't help but
| roll my eyes. It should be replaced with "Survivorship bias".
| Almost every technology that humans used that lasted for a long
| time and no longer used has disappeared and is no longer in
| used, tautologically. The Lindy effect just seems to be a list
| of examples of cherry-picked technologies.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I can see that, I think the Lindy effect needs some
| refinement.
|
| My personal take is that there's a an apex for a particular
| generation of technology, and that is good forever. A 1930s
| Farmall tractor is an example of that... there are improved
| modern replacements, but the 1930 model still does the job
| near optimally. I would guess that a non trivial number of
| those tractors will be in use in 2130.
|
| 1980s/early 90s minicomputers are similar. Many of these
| devices are still in use today, and probably could be kept in
| use for decades to come.
|
| Modern tech is a little harder because we've been in a rapid
| growth phase and the software services based world is more
| aligned with production than sustainment. I'd bet that trend
| will change in 20-30 years.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah I just watched some videos that is extremely related
| by this modern homesteader (and YouTuber! -- apparently he
| was on the TV show "Alone").
|
| He says "one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten
| is: Don't trade a gun for a snow machine". This is exactly
| what you're saying, and it's backed up by a lot of
| experience living without power and water!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH15Kua5P1Y&t=918s
|
| He also says "everyone one of us has to decide when to jump
| ship on a technology"
|
| He says canoes peaked in the 1960's, and you can buy a used
| one for like $125 that's the same as what you'd buy today
| for thousands. Same with hand saws. He maintains old saws
| and chainsaws and uses them:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH15Kua5P1Y&t=746s
|
| _when you look at any kind of manufactured goods a lot of
| things have reached their peak and are either poorer
| quality than they used to be or they 're just the same
| quality as their peak_
|
| ----
|
| I found this channel via a video about building an off grid
| cabin from scratch for a couple thousand dollars:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOXmfkXpkM
|
| It's good -- a lot of it is built by hand with a hammer and
| nails. He even says load bearing screws are too expensive,
| and nails are better!
|
| All of the advice reminds me of Taleb, because it's not
| necessarily trying to be "right", but rather distilling
| rules of thumb from practice.
| ghaff wrote:
| I only somewhat agree with respect to canoes.
|
| Grummans are great and they're still being made (though
| not by the original company).
|
| However, for recreational/tripping/whitewater, Royalex-
| based canoes were better for a variety of reasons.
| Unfortunately the material is no longer being made
| because its intended use (Go Carts) didn't take off to
| the degree planned. The company continued to make it on a
| more or less breakeven basis but upon a change of
| ownership the new owner decided to scrap it. There have
| been one or two efforts to make something equivalent, but
| AFAIK they haven't panned out.
|
| There are still plenty of well-made fiberglass/Kevlar
| boats being made but they're much more fragile.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My favorite example of the quality issue is the "whirly
| pop", a stovetop popcorn maker.
|
| The old one my parents had was aluminum with a metal
| gear. The modern version has been MBAed to death -- the
| gear is plastic, and the lid is so thin that you could
| probably replicate it with 2 plys of aluminum foil. It
| costs more and is measurably worse in any dimension.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| The tractor thing is quite an interesting one( not
| necessarily with just this particular one): the older
| tractors ended up being so reliable that people often try
| to get an older one instead of splashing out on a brand new
| John Deer and this annoys the manufacturers down deep to
| their bones.
| chubot wrote:
| Actually the same video I referenced above has a section
| on tractors! https://youtu.be/BH15Kua5P1Y?t=829
|
| He says _it cost me $100 to get the best that has ever
| been made_ , and it's backed up by a lot of experience
| living off grid
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Yeah and it is tragic in some ways as the thing missing
| from the 1930s gear is safety features.
|
| Many preventable deaths happen every year as a result.
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, you'll also see people arguing that you
| shouldn't be driving a 10 year old car for the same
| reason. There's some level of tradeoff where using an
| older product without the latest safety features makes
| sense.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Survivorship bias is when you draw conclusions about _all
| members_ of a certain class of things based only on the
| surviving examples.
|
| The Lindy effect is a theory about the _surviving examples_
| specifically.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think the idea is if you randomly sample a range you have
| weak evidence as to the size of the range. For example if you
| randomly sampled and got "2" it would be more likely the
| range had a span of 0 to 4 than 0 to 100,000 though either
| are possible. On average your random sample will be at the
| halfway point of the range.
|
| The Lindy effect is the realization that your encounter of
| something is like a random sample. "How old are chairs when I
| exist?" "How old are iPhones?"
| p1necone wrote:
| Except the Lindy effect _does_ hold even when you use it as a
| predictor of the future, rather than just analyzing
| historical data.
| dnautics wrote:
| It's exactly survivorship bias, but the contextual usage is
| different. Usually you use survivorship bias to discredit the
| relevance of an observation. You should think of the lindy
| effect as survivorship bias as a supporting heuristic for a
| prediction.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Based on your eye rolls and subsequent "explanation", it's
| clear that you don't understand the Lindy Effect. It's not
| about listing examples of things that have been around for a
| while. It's about predicting the likelihood that something
| will continue to be around given how long it has already been
| around. This effect is well studied and just a cursory glance
| at the Wikipedia page will give you some solid sources for
| more rigorous understanding.
| chubot wrote:
| I think you could mount some interesting objection to the
| Lindy effect, but this isn't it. I'm not really sure what
| you're trying to say.
|
| It's not claiming to be a scientific law; it's a heuristic
| for making decisions. The rest of Taleb's books are also
| about making decisions, not "being right" (whatever that
| means).
|
| A concrete example is if I'm writing a blog, and I want
| people to read my posts in 5 or 10 years. Do I go with the
| cloud platform that just launched or an older hosting
| provider? This is a decision people make every day. Of course
| there are many people who don't care if their blog is
| readable in 5 years; this isn't a judgement.
|
| The Lindy effect is not about what's "better"; it's about
| what lasts longer. It's also not making statements about the
| present, which is what survivorship bias typically means.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I think the difference is that survivorship bias applies when
| the difference between winners and losers is mostly due to
| chance. I don't think the fact that we use 4-legged chairs
| and not 5-legged is survivorship bias. I believe the Lindy
| effect's prediction that 4-legged chairs will be around a
| long time. Of course, whether it's survivorship or not is
| case-by-case.
| nayuki wrote:
| But every standard office chair with wheels is 5-legged.
| Kliment wrote:
| Yep, and those are a recent development and much less
| likely to last than 4-legged chairs. So are, for that
| matter, offices.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Let's apply this to the future: so just like fiber came before
| 5G so we are going to lay way more fiber after 5G fizzles out.
| dnautics wrote:
| Is it also true for copper, though?
| julienfr112 wrote:
| Is ASCII really still alive ?
| [deleted]
| hyakosm wrote:
| ASCII is still alive in UTF-8 and other extended encoding
| systems. :)
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if there is any systems using 7-bit ascii in
| production... Or extended code pages...
| lanstin wrote:
| EBCDIC is still in use in production.
| d_silin wrote:
| It is an interesting observation to compare longevity times for
| current widely-used IT tech:
|
| Smartphones (since first iPhone) - 14 years.
|
| Laptops (since first Apple Powerbook) - 30 years.
|
| PCs (since first IBM PC) - 40 years.
|
| C programming language will be 50 years old next year.
|
| SQL will turn 50 in 2024
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| The iPhone was definitely not the first smart phone.
| Sargos wrote:
| No, but it was the first wide spread smartphone and the
| first one most people used. This is the only practical
| starting point.
| Zak wrote:
| Nor was the Powerbook the first laptop nor the IBM PC the
| first PC. Those are all, however arguably responsible for
| popularizing the technologies in something resembling their
| current form.
| [deleted]
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The mindblowing part about these kind of numbers for me
| always is the sheer amount of smartphones out there.
|
| I mean, imagine a parallel world where those smartphones
| weren't designed to shove ads down your throat and where they
| could be used to be as productive as with a laptop, and where
| people could help to automate their lives on their own with
| it.
|
| That would be so amazing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Smartphones _are_ a huge productivity tool, that 's why
| they took off in the first place. Especially Blackberry,
| which offered the magic technology of accessing your email
| and calendar from anywhere. The ads are not an obstacle to
| this, especially not on iPhone.
| LASR wrote:
| They are far more than that. For a large number of
| people, the smartphone is their first and only computing
| device. Enabling internet access is like rocket fuel for
| advancing socioeconomic conditions for those in
| developing nations.
|
| Entire generations have been lifted from poverty due to
| it.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I really hate this sort of breathless futurism (and futurists)
| that dismiss perfectly good tech because it seems outdated. I am
| glad author is pretty much wrong on most counts!
| nine_k wrote:
| He listed quite a bunch of tech that has no reason to die (like
| mice), and often has a good reason to live (like wired ethernet
| or windowed desktop environments).
|
| Some of the technologies hi lists are indeed are on its way out
| from home experience, like HDDs and landline phones, but it
| does not mean they do not have niches where they are doing to
| linger for at least a decade.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Idk, this and the original article are just clickbait. Most of
| the predictions on that list were outright silly. Anyone who
| thought 3DTV was anything more than a fad is delusional, a better
| prediction would have been that his son would never have to
| experience 3DTV. Wireless will never replace wires and the same
| goes for desktop PCs, sure their market share will reduce but
| their demise is greatly over exaggerated.
|
| Most of his predictions were based in fantasy desire.
|
| I would argue that while his son will probably never use an
| actual dedicated Fax Machine, he will probably have to figure out
| how to send a fax at least once. Lawyers just can't seem to get
| away from those damn things.
| superkuh wrote:
| His #1 can not and will not ever happen. The radio spectrum is a
| shared resource. The total information capacity of the usable
| spectrum, say from 100 KHz to 100 GHz, is massive but most of it
| has terrible propagation and all of it can only be used once at a
| time. Massive MIMO helps in dense city cores with lots of
| independent paths reflecting everywhere but it's still just one
| spectrum in practice.
|
| Whereas with physical transmission lines, be they cables, fiber
| optics, or whatever, each run can re-use the entire spectrum.
| ghaff wrote:
| Intel was so pushing WiMAX at one point. I really irritated
| someone there when a wrote something critiquing their efforts.
| We are seeing wireless technologies (including satellite)
| starting to handle some use cases where it's hard to wire. But
| I do expect denser areas to remain mostly wired.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I'm surprised his #1 is still TBD. To me, ethernet lines have
| become _more_ important in the last 5 years as competitive
| gaming /esports has completely taken off. Latency is a far more
| prevalent in gamers minds today, I'd argue moreso than
| bandwidth and the first networking related advice a gamer
| receives to make sure you are on ethernet.
| Retric wrote:
| Directional antenna completely break those bandwidth
| limitations. It's not currently practical for hand held devices
| to make significant use of it, but ultimately everything is
| point to point.
| gumby wrote:
| Beam forming, phased array antennas, sophisticated coding
| (CDMA) and "time slots" (TDMA) will provide a lot more
| availability than purely looking at bandwidth available.
|
| I still agree wired/optical is best for most fixed
| installations both LAN and WAN, but people are getting more out
| of wireless than I would have predicted. And the "last mile"
| capacity of today's technology far exceeds what people seem to
| want even looking forward a decade...which paradoxically
| suggests that wireless might be adequate in the interim for
| some use cases.
| paul_f wrote:
| You can add in quadrature amplitude modulation. Reusing
| bandwidth is a a fascinating field. It's not as simple as 1
| bit per Hz
| yarcob wrote:
| None of these technologies allow you to exceed the available
| bandwidth. They just make use of the shared bandwidth more
| efficient. It's still a shared medium.
|
| Where I live, a lot of people have 3G internet because mobile
| data is pretty cheap and the companies advertise it as an
| alternative to cable. And now they all have really crappy
| internet. In the evening when everyone watches youtube you
| get a fraction of the advertised bandwidth.
|
| With fibre, every customer gets the full spectrum. And since
| the frequency of light is a lot higher than radio frequency,
| you also get a lot more bandwidth. At radio frequency we're
| already hitting the physical bandwidth limits; with optical
| transmission there's still a lot of bandwidth left.
|
| Thinking that radio frequency transmissions are an
| alternative to cable / fibre is pretty short sighted
| thinking. Data usage is going to grow, more devices are going
| to use data, and wireless transmission is going to seriously
| limit us.
| vel0city wrote:
| A bit of a nitpick, but most residential fiber deployments
| are PONs. With a PON, a single fiber gets split into a lot
| of separate wavelength channels with prisms. It's still
| tons more usable bandwidth available than wireless.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network
| ksec wrote:
| >Where I live, a lot of people have 3G internet.
|
| Well, yes 3G is Shared Spectrum.
|
| >None of these technologies allow you to exceed the
| available bandwidth
|
| Exceed available bandwidth of what? Per Spectrum? Shannon-
| Hartley theorem?
|
| The whole point of 4G, and 5G, mentioned in the GP as
| Massive MIMO was that we could workaround those limits with
| more Antenna. Everything we are doing today and aiming to
| do in 3GPP Rel 17 in a few years time are literally
| impossible to even infer about in the early 2000s. When
| Massive MIMO, or it was known as Very large Array of
| Antenna was first published people called the idea "crazy".
| And CoMP, whether the marketing decide to call it 5.5G or
| 5.9G along with distributed antennas being worked on in 6G.
|
| There are no fundamental technical reason why we cant have
| a fully wireless Internet. Although there are _many_
| business and economical reason why this may never happen.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You are dead on. We are still transitioning from HD to 4k
| with 8k coming eventually. The difference in HD to 8k is
| 17x the bandwidth.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Unless you're displaying on movie theatre sized screens,
| 8K seems like a waste of space/bandwidth. Even 4K is
| generally overkill for the typical living room.
|
| I think we're hitting the point with video resolution
| that music CDs hit with audio, where improvements in
| fidelity are largely outside the range of human
| perception. It's one of the reasons the music DVDs and
| SACDs never really caught on.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| 1080p at 65 43ppi
|
| 4k at 65" 65ppi
|
| 8k at 65 135ppi
|
| This is well within what someone with good vision can see
| at for example 6-8 feet
|
| For a personal reference I could tell the difference in
| clarity at 8 ft between a 1080p 24" monitor and a 28"4k
| monitor. That is 157 vs 92 ppi on a screen a fraction of
| the size 5 minutes ago.
|
| I must imagine people making such claims have poor
| eyesight or are using optimum viewing charts as a proxy
| for distances wherein human vision was sufficiently acute
| instead of looking for themselves.
| ksec wrote:
| >The difference in HD to 8k is 17x the bandwidth.
|
| The pixel is 17x, not bandwidth. Even Compressed RAW size
| dont scale linearly with pixel count. I dont have any
| experience with 8K, but compressing / encoding 4K with
| HEVC or AV1 tends to easier with fixed VMAF score than a
| comparatively low pixel count of 2K / 1080P. I would
| imagine the same if not better for 8K. And that is
| discounting the use of much better video codec like VVC
| which brings another 40 to 50% reduction in bitrate.
| mcny wrote:
| Level 3/CenturyLink/Lumen CEO reassured panicked investors
| and employees scared that their company would be worthless
| with 5G and beyond by basically saying that the last mile
| will increasingly become the last tens or hundreds of
| meters and that fiber is still the infrastructure on which
| these increasingly dense base stations depend on. And that
| the "edge computing" will likely live on the cabinets owned
| by the fiber provider.
|
| It makes sense to me. Just add more fiber and let people
| access them over whatever.
|
| My biggest gripe is we could choose to do away with
| licensing fees and spectrum auctions and open mm wave 5G to
| be something like Wi Fi but we are shortsighted as usual.
| tdeck wrote:
| This comment betrays a lack of understanding of some of these
| multiplexing technologies. They minimize wasted bandwidth due
| to signal collisions and interference, but they don't
| increase the overall bandwidth available.
|
| Let's take TDMA as an example. TDMA means that instead of
| using the available bandwidth continuously, each participant
| only gets to use that bandwidth for a fraction of the
| available time. Saying that TDMA helps us increase the
| available bandwidth is like saying queueing up at the
| restroom will "provide a lot more availability than purely
| looking at the number of stalls".
|
| CDMA is more complicated but it's still a similar story. Look
| at this diagram of a CDMA signal:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Generation_of_CDMA.svg
|
| Notice how the "data" actually being transmitted is only a
| couple of bits, but the CDMA signal includes many more
| transitions. CDMA is essentially using N bits of transmission
| bandwidth to send a signal bit of data signal, the benefit
| being that if multiple signals interfere it's possible to
| extract one of them using some complicated math. It's like if
| 10 people were sharing a phone line, and instead of taking
| turns talking they all spoke at the same time, but repeated
| themselves 10 times so you could pick up enough snippets from
| one speaker to understand what they were saying if you
| concentrate hard enough.
| kylec wrote:
| Well wireless won't ever replace wired for _every_ use case, I
| don 't see why we can't get to a point where 90% of households
| are provided internet service via cellular technologies, either
| to a MiFi-like device or with cellular built into the computer.
| If my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch have cellular built in, why
| not my Mac too?
| [deleted]
| eloisant wrote:
| Wireless makes sense in the country side, because it's
| expensive to pull optical fiber for just a few houses.
|
| In cities however, where most of the population is:
|
| - Bringing optical fiber is cost effective because of the
| population density
|
| - Wireless gets clogged very quickly (also because of the
| population density). Additionally 5G is even worse than 4G at
| going through walls.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The radio is the most trivial part possible in fact computers
| with cellular radios have been a thing for a very long time.
|
| The little micro cell tower alternative arrangement exists to
| support devices that expect to communicate with a cell tower
| where cell service is poor. You normally actually plug them
| into your wired router so they are actually for areas where
| relying on wireless would be the worst possible experience.
|
| Fiber is able to provide Gbps to for example all homes in a
| square mile where they each get Gbps and can indeed fairly
| heavily use it. Cellular internet isn't actually wireless you
| run fiber to the towers and then everyone in that square
| mile.
|
| Urban areas where 80% of people live have a high density so
| for example in New York City that 1 sq mile contains 27000
| people.
| rusk wrote:
| I think you're imagining some centralised MMDS type
| architecture but with cellular architecture this is a reality
| in many places. Even in modern settings if you have WiFi you
| need never even be aware that there is a wire there feeding it.
| Indeed to many of my younger contemporaries it can take a
| moment to explain the difference ...
| superkuh wrote:
| I understand there's a horizon for cells (vhf and up isn't
| going to be reflecting off the ionosphere) but a whole lot of
| people can exist within a single cell. My argument is about
| the informational capacity per cell.
| rusk wrote:
| Well cells are getting smaller all the time and currently
| there is enough capacity available in an optimally
| configured network to provide all the services one could
| possibly need. Of course you've got physical cable tying it
| all together but the "experience" is wireless.
| cphoover wrote:
| I'm curious about the raspberry pi pc build kit for kids. I think
| that's a great way to get kids introduced to technology and
| hardware, do they make dedicated kits for young kids?
| gambiting wrote:
| "On the bright side, you can replace almost any remote with a
| smartphone app, depending on your TV, cable box or streaming box.
| You can also use voice assistants such as Alexa or Google
| Assistant to control your home theater. "
|
| I fail to see how this is the bright side. Both of those ways are
| worse at interacting with literally anything, especially compared
| to a dedicated remote for a TV. I'd try a foot controlled pedal
| for my TV before I'd be ok with using voice controls.
| kelnos wrote:
| I have two remotes: one for my TV, and one for my AV receiver.
| I realized I generally only need four buttons: the power button
| on each, and volume up and down on the AV receiver remote.
| Arguably that could be compressed to three; I very rarely want
| the AV receiver on and TV off, or vice versa (unfortunately
| neither remote supports programming it for the other device, so
| I can't use the "system on/off" functionality).
|
| So for my regular use, I wouldn't mind voice control for this,
| though voice assistants have trouble hearing you when there's
| extraneous loud noise, so volume control (especially when a
| really loud scene comes up and I want to lower it) would be
| difficult.
|
| I don't like the idea of a smartphone app, because there's the
| hassle of unlocking my phone and finding/switching to the right
| app.
|
| The author also mentions using gestures, which also seems very
| error-prone.
|
| So I guess a dedicated remote control is the way to go, though
| I wouldn't mind having a single bare-bones power+volume remote,
| so I could toss the full-featured remotes into a drawer and
| only pull them out when (rarely) necessary.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I remember when someone brought an Amazon Echo Dot to a party
| to play music. It ended with a bunch of drunk guys desperately
| shouting what music to play next, with Alexa getting it right
| maybe half of the time.
| hyakosm wrote:
| With my new TV, I have a "modern" remote with few buttons
| because everything happens in the UI. When I watch TV I need
| sometimes to enable subtitles (only on non-French speaking
| channels). With a traditional bulky remote I had a subtitle
| button: simple and straightforward. With the new remote I must
| click on a menu, navigate through items, select subtitles, and
| close the overlay window. It's really annoying. I miss old big
| Sony remotes with a lot of options for subtitles, image ratio,
| sound, speed control...
| adeelk93 wrote:
| "Alexa, watch Daredevil" is much easier than turning the TV on,
| opening Netflix, and searching for the show. The remote can
| then be for just pause/play or volume.
| vharuck wrote:
| Search is the only time I use voice commands, and it's only
| because "typing" with the directional pad sucks. If my remote
| had a mini keyboard instead of buttons for rarely used
| features or specific channels, I'd never use voice.
| allenu wrote:
| I recently decided to install smart bulbs in a couple of lamps.
| I set them to "on" permanently so that I can exclusively use
| the app to turn them on/off and adjust their brightness and
| warmth.
|
| After having them installed for a few weeks, their benefit is
| mostly a wash. I'd rather just flip them on/off, but
| unfortunately one of the bulbs doesn't retain its "memory" of
| the last setting this way, so to use the features, I have to
| use the app and keep them on. Additionally, the app sometimes
| takes a second or to to connect to their service, so I'm
| standing in front of the lamp waiting several seconds just to
| be able to turn it on/off. This is definitely a case where a
| manual switch is so much better. It. Just. Works.
| easton wrote:
| If you are on iOS and your bulbs work with Apple's Home app
| (which most seem to these days), you can set that up and just
| swipe up from the bottom of the screen and use the quick
| controls. Works quite well. I think a similar thing is
| possible on Android with the Google Home app, and more
| vendors seem to support that.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I recently bought a few smart bulbs for my desk, which are
| always connected to power. But I also bought a physical
| switch that controls them. It's instant and turns them all on
| or off simultaneously.
|
| To be honest I almost always use the switch, including
| changing the color. Cycling through colors with a button is
| still more convenient than opening an app and picking one. I
| really only use the app when I need to control individual
| lights.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _but unfortunately one of the bulbs doesn 't retain its
| "memory" of the last setting this way_
|
| Yeah, my last smart light setup a few years ago had this
| problem too. I ended up running a script on Raspberry Pi that
| detected when a light bulb appeared on the network again and
| reconfigured it immediately.
|
| But my ultimate conclusion from that setup was, smart lights
| make no sense without smart switches. You want to be able to
| _both_ actuate physical controls and switch the lights
| through software.
| theklub wrote:
| Most of these assumptions seem crazy to me and this just feels
| like blog spam more than truth.
| allenu wrote:
| I agree. It's quite clever, though. You have the benefit of two
| "engaging" articles: one for the initial predictions and one
| for the results years later.
| gumby wrote:
| Crazy? A lot of them came true.
| drloser wrote:
| Less than 50%. His predictions would have been more accurate
| if he had flipped a coin.
| hellisothers wrote:
| Not sure why this is getting downvoted, he got like 2 out
| of 15 "right" considering he changed the definition of #2
| so he could mark it "right".
| jayd16 wrote:
| Because the parent implied fair odds when that's not the
| case.
| aqme28 wrote:
| That's not how predictions work though. He didn't come up
| with them by flipping coins.
| Aengeuad wrote:
| It's easy to predict things correctly when you control what
| your son will use, e.g., 'my son won't use a landline', well
| yes, you cancelled your home landline before your son was
| born. The original prediction was that most people and _most
| businesses_ would stop using landlines but he concedes his
| son might still use a landline in an office some day and yet
| still considers the original prediction to be correct. The
| same is true for phone numbers, dedicated cameras, mechanical
| harddrives, arguably prime time tv but I can 't really blame
| him here. Theatres are considered TBD but it took a pandemic
| that also shut near everything else down for much of the
| world, many businesses are in for a rough shake up.
|
| The crazier predictions are ones that didn't come to fruition
| line no more floating window managers or mice and people no
| longer building desktop pcs, or ones the author still thinks
| are going to happen like no more wired internet connections.
| totalZero wrote:
| Among the ones he claims as having come true, a couple of
| them didn't. Physical media like HDD has greater permanence
| than SSD, so it isn't going away yet. But his son also used
| it in gaming consoles, which (it may come as a surprise) are
| computers.
|
| Also, you can't use whatsapp without a phone number. Several
| apps and services require a phone number for sign up or 2FA.
| So that one is bogus too.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Most - not all - of these feel obvious. Land lines? Fax machines?
| They were already niche in 2012. IDK, these weren't (bold)
| predictions, as much as already established market trends push
| out 10 years and then deciding how dead they'd be or not.
|
| Side note: In the late 80's, I worked for AT&T in the consumer
| marketing dept. I remember there was a manager who repeatedly
| said, "Someday our phone numbers will follow us no matter where
| we live." Now, he was _not_ predicting the mobile phone, only
| that if you moved you wouldn't have to change numbers. But that,
| even then, he was viewed as a mad man. I wonder that he'd say
| today.
| nerdponx wrote:
| None of them feel obvious. I never would have made these
| predictions in 2010, 2015, or 2019, and I wouldn't feel
| comfortable making any of them out until 2030 at minimum (and
| only for fax machines and spinning drives on consumer PCs).
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Anyone from the UK who remembers the TV program "Tomorrows
| World", is wise to predicting the future!
|
| They kind of predicted a few things right-ish
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vix6TMnj9vY
|
| Although I think the technology that exists now is much better
| than what I thought it would be like as a kid. Except for flying
| cars, I still want one
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I'm _fairly_ sure theaters won 't be going anywhere. You can't
| have the ability to watch a 20 foot by 20 foot projection of a
| movie at home, no matter how cheap the technology gets unless you
| have a massive backyard and a projector or a huge room in your
| house you weren't using anyway.
| somethingwitty1 wrote:
| It isn't just about the giant screen for everyone. For many in
| my circle, the only reason they still go to the theatre is
| because you can see things when they release. If they had an
| option for same day streaming (as covid has provided in some
| cases), they will drop the theatre completely. The quality of
| TVs and sound systems at home can provide a better visual/audio
| experience than many theatres.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >14. He'll Never Use a Fax Machine
|
| This one being in the list surprised me. I was born more than 20
| years earlier and I don't think I've ever seen a fax machine in
| action, let alone used one.
| cptskippy wrote:
| That's because dedicated fax machines mostly died out in the
| late 90s when multi-function machines and software modems
| arrived.
|
| I was working at Office Max at the time and the transition
| happened fast. We went from having more than eight dedicated
| fax machine models down to one or two.
|
| The first multi-function machines looked like fax machines and
| could function without a PC but we're so much better when
| connected to a PC.
|
| Cheap software modems allowed people to send and receive faxes
| without owning a dedicated machine. I remember eMachines
| bundled software with their PCs to make them effectively behave
| like a fax machine. Later they pushed the eFax internet based
| fax software.
|
| It's crazy that many business transactions still require Fax
| but the machines don't really exist. We needed to send/receive
| faxes to purchase a home last year as PDF/email was
| unacceptable. I was able to create a virtual Fax Server using
| Twilio in a couple hours and deal with these silly
| requirements.
|
| Sadly Twilio is shutting down their Fax service later this year
| and the suggested alternative is vastly more expensive.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I had the same thing with a refi. They said they needed to
| send me a fax, have me sign it and send it back. I asked them
| what millennium they thought it was. They looked at me for a
| second, then said "We can send it as an email attachment".
|
| So I suspect that they don't _require_ fax. Fax is their
| normal way of operating, but it 's not a legal requirement or
| something. It's just their default, and they'd rather not
| have to deal with changing it for you.
|
| But who's paying who? Oh, I'm paying them? Then they can
| forget making me jump through their obsolete technology
| hoops. No, they can figure out a way to send me the documents
| that I'm already set up to handle.
| kelnos wrote:
| I was born 30 years earlier, and I have used a fax machine, but
| only a few times, and interestingly only within the last 15
| years.
|
| You're fairly likely to have to use one even today if you end
| up in certain places (Japan, Germany) or in certain businesses
| (medical, restaurant delivery). Then again, I bet many of these
| have the physical fax machine replaced by digital fax services.
| It's ironic, because a PDF would obviously be higher quality
| and faster to transmit, but some places still require fax but
| will accept you "faxing" a PDF via an online service, which
| then gets received by a fax-to-email service.
| ghaff wrote:
| Doctor's office or lab in the US. Although this is slowly
| changing. And I did have to fax something a few months ago,
| albeit using an online fax service.
| allenu wrote:
| I sadly had to use one recently and it was to fax documents to
| the IRS. Their only two options were fax or mail the documents.
| No email. Thankfully I had a scanner (in a box somewhere) and
| found an online service that faxes PDFs on your behalf.
|
| I've also had to fax documents to immigration (again,
| government). I guess my point is if you're dealing with the
| government, you'll probably have to fax something at some
| point.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| If you have a landline, you can send a fax from your PC with
| just a $15 USB fax modem. Windows has built-in faxing
| software (Windows Fax and Scan) that is dead simple to use.
| Have you ever noticed that "Fax" is also one of the default
| printers? Yeah, me neither, until I saw a YouTube video on
| it.
|
| Just plug a phone line into the modem, print to "Fax" from
| any program, enter the fax number, and hit Send.
| allenu wrote:
| Heh, I don't have landline today, but I do remember having
| a fax modem in the '90s and using it once before.
|
| Before WFH I would normally just use the office's fax
| machine but because of the pandemic it wasn't an option.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I hope hope hope that the death of theaters never happens.
|
| > In my original article, I said that a confluence of factors
| would kill movie theatres: the improving quality of home
| theaters, the eventual death of the 90-day theatrical window and
| the cost and hassle of the movie-going experience.
|
| I mean, I appreciate being able to just have a nice quiet evening
| watching Netflix, but if anything after the pandemic I _yearn_ to
| see a movie in the theater. This type of commentary rarely
| mentions the social aspect of going to the movie theater,
| watching with friends or a date, etc. It always goes with the
| "going to a movie theater is not efficient" take, which makes me
| think that people's brains just must be wired differently. I
| consider myself an introvert but I'm so excited about being able
| to have normal in-person interactions soon.
| IanCal wrote:
| Watching with some friends in a room seems hugely more social
| than sitting next to each other quietly so as to not disturb
| the strangers behind you.
| snazz wrote:
| In a way, yes, but the _outing_ of going to the movies with
| people is a different social experience that many people are
| missing right now.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Personally,both do appeal to me. Some beers with friends,
| relaxing on a couch and watching some easy going film sounds
| like a nice Saturday night.
|
| On the other side,I love going to cinema- the smell of
| overpriced popcorn, big screen and the same exciting feeling
| I get when I see a studio logo and know that the film is
| about to start. And I can always throw some popcorn at those
| who think having their phones on is a good idea:)
| crocodiletears wrote:
| It's differently social, at least in my experience.
|
| Getting the boys together to watch a film at home usually
| means playing MST3K all night while we pound beers and
| butcher a pizza.
|
| Hitting the movie theatre means we keep our mouths shut,
| focus on the film and the experience of being in the theatre,
| and the compare notes over dinner/beers after the fact.
|
| It's like comparing going to Easter Mass with watching a
| televangelist over public access on Easter morning. The two
| are vaguely analogous, but experientially incomparable
| because of the environments and framings in-which they take
| place.
| Grakel wrote:
| As a live theatre industry professional, movie theaters will go
| the way of theatre, once it stopped being the main form of
| entertainment, it didn't die, it just became an occasional,
| expensive treat for lovers of specific genres.
|
| Hollywood may die, but you'll go to a movie theatre just like
| you may go to see a Broadway tour or a regional Shakespeare
| once in a while.
|
| Films might actually get better when the demand to crank out
| the most popular drek for box office bang fades away.
| spullara wrote:
| At some point theaters and movie studios need to have
| variable pricing for movies. All first run movies being the
| same price is silly and leaves a ton of money on the table.
| May be one way it gets to be more like theater.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I expect it's not so simple. People aren't rational about
| pricing. I expect a lot of people would be outraged if you
| tried to charge more for a movie expected to have a popular
| open.
|
| They already do a lot of price variation in the release
| process, by the time it gets to cable their marginal
| revenue is something like a few cents.
| lumost wrote:
| I'd be really curious what the margins on the in theater
| experience break down as. I wouldn't be surprised if big
| crowd pleasers take a bigger cut then small time films
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think the vast majority of ticket price goes to the
| studio. The theater makes money off concession sales.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Films might actually get better when the demand to crank
| out the most popular drek for box office bang fades away.
|
| I think we have been at this step for decades already. Look
| at what is featured and promoted at the Sundance festival and
| what Annapurna produces and what others do: we already have
| such movies without the marketing and production budgets of
| Marvel or Disney or big budget producers.
| onion2k wrote:
| Going to a movie theatre is a _really_ variable night out. The
| quality of the experience hinges on so many factors that it 's
| practically a lottery whether it's good or not, especially with
| a cinema chain movie theatre and a mainstream film. It doesn't
| take much to tip the balance from a great night out to one that
| feels like a waste of money. A mediocre film, unbalanced sound
| mixing, noisy or phone-using people within a few rows, stale
| popcorn... Any number of things ruin it.
|
| I much prefer arthouse cinemas (my favourite has a bar, and you
| can take a bottle of wine in to the theatre) these days. They
| cost a bit more but the experience is usually pretty good.
| paul_f wrote:
| This! I only go to a theater if there is no risk it will turn
| out to be a dud movie. For me, I am mostly just waiting until
| Christopher Nolan's next movie.
| brightball wrote:
| I seriously miss movie theaters. The movie theater experience
| is such a great group of friends activity.
|
| Plus, Marvel has gotten so good at turning it into a crowd
| participation activity. It's almost like going to a sporting
| event from a crowd energy perspective.
|
| During the pandemic I've watched those "Audience Reaction"
| videos on YouTube a lot just because I miss it so much.
| ksec wrote:
| I am thinking if we might get different form of theatres? Not
| everyone has a house, not every teens can watch movies on their
| date in their "parents" house. Unless there are much better
| things to do in 20 years time than going to see a movie
| together on a date I dont see theatre every going away.
|
| I do wonder if we get smaller, private space theatre in less
| prime locations. Basically these rooms could be used to watch
| latest movies, live sport, or other things where a group of
| people can stay together and socialise. You still get a 90 days
| theatrical window with much higher quality stream than you
| would be renting on Netflix 90 days later.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I love movie theaters, but I think they'll die because they are
| mostly anchored to malls, and our development patterns make
| standalone theaters difficult.
|
| Online ordering and increasing poverty makes the mall a
| declining asset where the movies are one of the last big
| drivers of demand.
| kortilla wrote:
| Poverty in the US isn't increasing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
| mcphage wrote:
| > because they are mostly anchored to malls, and our
| development patterns make standalone theaters difficult
|
| Interesting--what part of the country do you live in? Where I
| am in the North-East, movie theaters attached to malls is
| more of a minority. Not non-existent, but not at all a
| majority.
| darkwater wrote:
| I don't think movie theatres will ever go away, especially
| after the pandemic they got for sure 10 extra years anyway. The
| social aspect is so important, it also means doing something
| else (like eating at a restaurant), there will always be people
| preferring them.
| ghaff wrote:
| I rarely go to theaters but then I own a house with good movie-
| watching options. Personally I tend to do live theater rather
| than going to movies with folks. But it seems as if going to
| the movies will remain a fairly popular option for younger
| people at least.
| benja123 wrote:
| The older I get the more I realize how incredibly hard it is to
| predict anything about the future, especially when it comes to
| technology.
|
| Growing up in the 90s I thought virtual reality was just around
| the corner - only now 30 years later are we starting to see
| virtual reality.
|
| 5 years ago it seemed like 100% self driving cars were just
| around the corner. You can argue we are much closer than we were,
| but it still seems like we are pretty far away.
|
| 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today
| hardly anyone believes apps are the future.
|
| I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it
| was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years
| later and neither one of those came to fruition.
|
| The reality is tech is incredibly fast moving, which makes it
| hard to predict, but still not as fast as we think it is.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I think the people who were marketing/hyping VR and self-
| driving cars for their own gain made it seem like those
| technologies were just around the corner.
| moosey wrote:
| > I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like
| it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50
| years later and neither one of those came to fruition.
|
| It was just around the corner. The grand arc of human life
| altered course, and it took the market 50 years to catch up to
| collective action.
| benja123 wrote:
| Well, war and the resulting competition drove the space race.
| Once the Soviets and Americans decided that space wasn't
| worth fighting over they spent their money elsewhere and we
| stopped advancing in that direction.
|
| I usually give a lot of the credit for the recent push back
| into space to private companies like spaceX, but, now after
| making this comment part of me is wondering if I am just
| being naive and the real reason for space becoming a priority
| again is because China has started to make significant
| progress in their space program.
| Ekaros wrote:
| SpaceX is doing things, but I wonder if that is just result
| of excess capital we have on markets... Because no one
| honest can really calculate reasonable return of investment
| on things like colonisation of Mars...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't think so, in this case. Their initial starting
| capital though, that was won on tech startup lottery...
|
| As for the Mars thing, SpaceX is funding it with their
| profits from boring commercial launches, and I don't
| think that is driven by excess capital on the market.
| solidist wrote:
| "only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual
| reality"
|
| As Tom Hall said (paraphrase) "No one wants to strap shit to
| their face". I'd bet it's still very much a novelty in 30
| years.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I don't think people will even want to wear glasses. 3D TVs
| were hyped for a while a few years ago but died off quickly.
| benja123 wrote:
| I am not sure. In the past year I have actually started to
| see quite a few non techie friends buy the oculus quest and
| are avid users.
|
| I do feel like we are at a turning point where VR will become
| the dominant non mobile gaming device of the future. If it
| will be used much outside of gaming is the big question.
| toxik wrote:
| And jesus christ the motion sickness is just unbearable for
| me. It can ruin me for an entire day.
| benja123 wrote:
| Try games where you are static (beat saber, table tennis
| etc.).
|
| Do not play games where you are in any vehicle or need to
| walk around.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, I really wish people qualified where they're having
| the problems.
|
| Seated experiences where you use smooth locomotion are
| bad. Aircraft (or spaceship) cockpit type experiences are
| even worse because not only do you have translation
| that's out of sync with your inner ear and sense of
| movement, but you have rotation as well (which is much
| worse).
|
| also, newer headsets are much, much better than in the
| 90s.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| It's bizarre how inverse-correlated motion sickness
| susceptibility vs VR sickness appear to be. I don't get
| motion sick at all, but even a few minutes in a poorly-
| designed VR experience makes me want to puke. Some of my
| friends are complete opposites. Most people I know are lean
| one direction or another, usually pretty strongly.
|
| I do wonder if this is a simple statistical fluke, or if
| it's pointing at some deeper aspect of our biology.
| s1mon wrote:
| I worked on a relatively compact head mounted display
| that the company thought would be successful for 3D
| movies (this was 2005/6). They also imagined that users
| would want to watch this content while traveling on
| airplanes. We did some (cheaper) user testing by putting
| people in the back of a limo and driving on highway 280
| in the bay area. One of the users had to pull over to
| vomit. He was an ex-fighter pilot.
|
| I still question if VR will ever truly take off.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I get very motion sick, but I do fine in VR. The only
| time I get sick with VR is when the motion is not
| correlated with my head movement.. for example, if you
| turn the camera with a controller.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But motion sickness is when there's acceleration. That
| is, the physical acceleration is the cause of the
| sickness. It's not the visuals.
|
| VR sickness is when there's somewhat equivalent visuals,
| but _not_ acceleration. So I could see motion sickness
| and VR sickness being essentially opposites.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Exactly so. What I find interesting is that folks seem to
| be naturally prone to one or the other, but not both.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I've got a long-standing bet with a friend that 'VR' will
| take off as soon as it becomes 'AR', ie transparent glasses
| that overlay information on the real world.
|
| That, IMO, is the killer feature, and once it hits takeoff,
| the headset era of VR will be looked back at as a necessary
| stepstone that was ultimately completely replaced with what
| ultimately will be used.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| But there are already glasses like this? Google Glass,
| Epson Moverio, Magic Leap are the first few that enter my
| mind. And none of these seem to really be "taking off".
| Sure, there are niche applications that match the
| constraints of these, but it's not clear to me at what
| point your bet would be considered to have failed because
| of a lack of "taking off"...
| Baeocystin wrote:
| The only thing that comes close is the Hololens, and if
| you ever get a chance to play with one (which I do
| recommend!) you'll see immediately why it Isn't There
| Yet(tm). The biggest killer is that the field of view is
| tiny- think a single A1/Letter sized sheet of paper held
| at arm's length. It feels less like AR and more like a
| view portal, and since it currently has no way to block
| light behind its projections, everything is washed out.
| Not to mention that it's closer to the headset side of
| things than regular glasses.
|
| It's certainly a _start_ , but there's a long way to go.
| robocat wrote:
| Nitpick: you mean A4. As an aside to those who don't get
| to use ISO A paper sizes, they are tres cool. The x/y
| edge sizes are the (edit) square root of two. A0 is 1
| square metre in area. Each step (A1, A2, A3, ...) just
| chops the sheet in half.
|
| Edit: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
| type0 wrote:
| Here's fun video about metric paper
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
| ghaff wrote:
| VR by itself is probably a thing. There are times when you
| want an immersive experience such as gaming or virtual
| exploration. But I expect it's a niche. I'm not wearing VR
| to your virtual meeting.
|
| AR, in the inobstrusive/genuinely useful sense is harder
| but seems far more interesting. Yes, there are social
| factors to deal with as well, but I can certainly see worn
| information displays becoming a thing.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >I'm not wearing VR to your virtual meeting.
|
| Can we be so certain of this, especially given the events
| of the last year? If VR technology had been perfected at
| the time, it seems very likely to me that instead of a
| shift to Zoom at the outbreak of the pandemic, many
| companies, government agencies and (especially) schools
| would have made the move to VR. It will be interesting to
| see how VR is integrated into our every day lives (both
| voluntarily and otherwise) as it is perfected.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because that's not how people attend meetings. Meetings
| are mostly not-full focus events. That's not to say that
| VR couldn't have a role in, say, an in-depth review of a
| hardware design. But, the typical meeting? People are
| turning their cameras on and off and are probably
| spending about 50% attention depending upon how relevant
| the current topic is to them. This of course happens in
| the physical world as well.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I don't disagree! Rather, it's just that I expect AR
| glasses to have a fully-blacked-out mode when necessary,
| and those full-immersion times will just be one (small,
| I'm willing to bet) mode of the overall headset.
|
| As a side note, my friend and I first made this bet back
| in the DK2 days, and I was ~60% confident I was correct.
| What pushed me in to the 90%+ region was playing with an
| Oculus Quest. The guardian mode, freedom from wires, hand
| tracking, pass-through mode, etc... Everything that felt
| like a real step forward was also something that will
| ultimately apply to AR glasses. It really made me think I
| was on the right track.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think the other things that's happened with VR is just
| the quality/size of TVs generally. No that doesn't deal
| with a few specific aspects of VR like flight simulators
| and FPS. But having a high-res 75" or whatever screen in
| front of you basically handles "virtual reality" for
| anything that doesn't involve looking around.
| Strilanc wrote:
| I think VR headsets are within a factor of 10 of the cost of
| a good monitor, and within a factor of 5 of the angular
| resolution of 20:20 vision. It seems very plausible to me as
| the resolution goes up and costs come down that e.g. a
| company would start pushing employees towards a headset
| instead of multiple monitors within the next decade.
| retube wrote:
| > today hardly anyone believes apps are the future.
|
| oh really? what are people thinking the alternative is?
| akvadrako wrote:
| I personally think it's going to be more like Office/Emacs
| with lots of plugins and a distributed content-addressable
| data store in the background.
| fma wrote:
| I vividly remember in high school in the late 90s...the Prius
| was out. I thought the first car that I buy (with my own money)
| would be an electric vehicle. Though EVs have been around, they
| aren't mainstream.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| The one thing that is consistent about tech is that prices come
| down.
|
| A 3d printer in 2012 was $2000... a 3d printer that can be that
| printer is about $300 today.
|
| A decent drone was about $3000 back there... $400 can you get
| you a decent drone today.
| benja123 wrote:
| This is true. Another thing that drove the prices down is the
| fact that the countries where we outsourced manufacturing
| have built up their own industry and know how. They are now
| selling the same products for half the price directly to the
| consumer.
| tartoran wrote:
| And $20 can get you an amazingly fun kiddie drone. Got for my
| son a HS drone and was amazed at what you can get for 20.
| Yes, prices' drop is a big one on technology evolution
| zeckalpha wrote:
| My 11mo will never replace a lightbulb.
| mhb wrote:
| Get a taller ladder.
| vmception wrote:
| Most of these are debatable and even some of the bets would need
| arbitration to determine if this was a prediction market (never
| sending a fax - wrong - vs never using a fax machine - right),
| but nice time capsule and fun list
| gumby wrote:
| > His Computers Will All Boot Super Fast
|
| Seems pretty true for the non-Windows uses cases at least, in my
| experience (iOS, Android, Linux, macOS).
| kylec wrote:
| Focusing on boot times is weird though, it used to be important
| when you would boot up your computer in order to use it.
| Nowadays everything is always sleeping, and can be woken up in
| an instant to be used, so how long things take to cold boot
| aren't relevant anymore.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| I miss the cold boot time of RISC OS on Archimedes hardware:
|
| https://youtu.be/oKrEH8U-xOI
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Not that I turn my devices off very often, but I'm pretty sure
| my Windows laptop boots faster than any Android device I've
| ever had.
| ghaff wrote:
| 2 seconds was probably an unrealistic goal. Probably more to
| the point is that I _rarely_ need to reboot a system and coming
| back from suspend almost always works quickly and reliably. In
| fact, I 'd probably argue that's the more relevant metric at
| this point.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Agreed. And even if the computer booted in 2 seconds, you
| would still have to start all the programs you had running
| again.
|
| I am super happy that my computer unsleeps quicker than I can
| move my hand from the finger print sensor to the keyboard,
| but I also basically never reboot it.
| city41 wrote:
| And I'd also argue Windows update being so bad is an outlier. I
| now have one Windows machine in my house and I'm astonished
| updates still take so long and also prevent you from doing
| anything else while they install. This is one area that
| Microsoft really lags behind the competition.
| type0 wrote:
| > This is one area that Microsoft really lags behind the
| competition.
|
| What competition? If you need to run Windows you'll run
| Windows. Mac and Linux don't compete with them, these are
| alternative products but not competing ones.
| cloudking wrote:
| ChromeOS is probably the fastest (Linux based)
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Chromebooks were already that fast at the time he made the
| prediction, mostly because they were designed to use coreboot
| instead of the usual bloated uefi/bios.
|
| The only reason wee don't see coreboot everywhere is that
| motherboard manufacturers refuse to adopt or even allow it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, ChromeOS downloads and applies updates unobtrusively
| and raises a notification to reboot, which takes a few
| seconds. macOS takes half an hour to update even if you have
| an M1 and their fancy SSD. Android takes about the same time
| and their handsets will get scalding hot during the process.
|
| ChromeOS is also the fastest of the non-mobile operating
| systems to wake from sleep. It is up and running and on wifi
| before I can raise the lid to its normal position.
| rusk wrote:
| Android in my experience takes aaaaages. By far the biggest
| boot slouch in modern times.
| papaf wrote:
| That might be hardware related. Android-x86 in a Qemu VM
| boots in under 3 seconds.
| rusk wrote:
| Maybe that's the case in theory but in practice I have
| never had a fast booting android device and some of them
| have been pretty good. Pretty much any other OS is fine. I
| guess in a virtualised environment you don't have the same
| challenges regarding integrating a disparate hardware stack
| ...
| kelnos wrote:
| Booting an Android emulator is a benchmark that only an
| Android developer would care about, though. It isn't
| directly comparable to booting real hardware, anyway.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I imagine the typical user initiation on Windows is also super
| fast, just not a cold boot.
| darkwater wrote:
| When my first daughter was born, 6 years ago I thought "she will
| never need a driving license, even if we live in the
| countryside". Now, I'm not that sure.
| awillen wrote:
| This is the one I always go with in terms of things my kids
| won't do, but I'm a couple of years away from having them, so
| I'm pretty confident.
|
| You'll probably be pretty close in any case... a decade is a
| lot of time.
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