[HN Gopher] Technologies I thought my son would never use
___________________________________________________________________
Technologies I thought my son would never use
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 388 points
Date : 2021-04-11 16:41 UTC (1 days 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?
| donatj wrote:
| It's honestly really hard to find less well known movies of
| more than a few years old. Torrents really aren't what they
| used to be. There were a handful of movies I'd seen in my
| teens I could not find anywhere. I ended up importing DVDs
| from Japan and manually aligning some awful fan subs I'd
| found.
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably depending upon how hard you want to look and how
| many compromises you're willing to accept in terms of
| quality.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Yes, it is still true if you include piracy.
| Narishma wrote:
| Optical discs are still very popular for console gaming.
| SilverRed wrote:
| They are basically a legacy mode now. The playstation offers
| an option with no disk drive and I imagine the next gen will
| have no disk drive option at all.
| Narishma wrote:
| Not as long as physical games remain cheaper than digital
| versions.
| sumedh wrote:
| > They are basically a legacy mode now.
|
| Console makers want it to be legacy because they can charge
| a higher price for a game when there is only one store in
| town compared to multiple stores when it comes to discs.
| rblatz wrote:
| I bought one physical game for the x box one, the rest have
| been digital.
| Matrixik wrote:
| I buy only physical for PS4 because after playing I
| exchange them with other people.
| homero wrote:
| I buy physical because they're cheaper and can be resold.
| It's weird digital is more expensive.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Me too! I don't understand why a music CD on Amazon is
| cheaper than an MP3, particularly when the CD also comes
| with a free MP3 download!
|
| Both are digital, of course.
| DerekL wrote:
| > Both are digital, of course.
|
| By the way, it annoys me that the word _digital_ is used
| to mean "downloaded over a network".
| f6v wrote:
| The digital prices are insane, I see games north of 80
| EUR now.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 1. Mechanical hard drives. These have become a bit more niche
|
| No, they're still pretty mainstream. When someone runs out of
| disk space (e.g. with media files), they tend to buy a large
| HDD (whether external or internal), not a second SSD.
|
| So, your point about HDDs is even stronger, and the author's
| son will definitely get one.
| einpoklum wrote:
| ... to put some numbers on this:
|
| * In 2020, non-enterprise sales were 330 Million SSD units,
| 260 Million HDD.
|
| * In 2020, non-enterprise users bought 5 times more capacity
| on HDDs than on SSDs.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/fun-fact-ssds-outsold-hdds-last-
| year...
| megameter wrote:
| If we define hard drives and optical media as "memory based on
| periodic rotation" then the technology has been around for
| generations, in fact, with specific materials and mechanisms
| serving to update the paradigm. Tape, drum memory, magnetic
| discs, and optical. Periodic rotation trades blows with
| periodic refresh - tubes, DRAM - and phase-change - relays,
| core, flash - as the prevailing memory paradigm, with
| hybridization of features often occuring.
|
| Von Neumann wouldn't be too surprised at the memory paradigms
| in use now, because they haven't changed, even though the
| implementation has become considerably more sophisticated.
|
| But, of course, that can't dismiss the idea that a better
| implementation is a substantial technical advance either.
| Grustaf wrote:
| The article is about technology his son would use, presumably
| in daily life. Not technology that someone somewhere might use.
| donatj wrote:
| Call me crazy but I actually recently switched back to DVD
| Netflix. The selection is way better than any individual
| streaming service and I have this timer ticking in my head that
| makes me actually watch what I rent instead of wasting my life
| watching reruns of comfort shows. It's been fantastic.
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| One place I still see point-and-shoot stand alone cameras is in
| construction/contracting.
|
| When I've had companies come and bid on things like roof repair,
| for example, the person that comes to access the job and prepare
| an estimate will use one. During the job I see the workers using
| them to document what they are doing.
|
| I know they have modern smart phones, because I see them use
| them.
|
| My guess is that they use the stand alone camera because of the
| better interface. Smart phones can be a pain to operate while
| wearing heavy work gloves, or to operate one handed.
|
| Just this afternoon I wanted to take some photos of the gutters
| on my front roof to see if they needed cleaning. That section of
| roof is only about 7.5 ft above the deck, so it is easy to just
| reach up to where the camera has a view of inside the gutters.
| Except on about half the shots, some part of my hand would hit
| some on-screen control and do something to mess up the shot, such
| as changing the mode from photo to video.
|
| It would have been easier if I had used my old Sony DSC-P93 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dscp93
| Syonyk wrote:
| There's also the "rugged camera" aspect. Some of the ruggedized
| point and shoots are designed to be used in the wet (most are
| rated for limited underwater use), to withstand drops from
| "chest high or a bit higher" onto hard surfaces without
| breaking, and generally tolerate levels of abuse that a
| smartphone, even with a case, usually won't put up with. I'll
| let my toddler run around taking pictures with a rugged point
| and shoot without worrying about anything beyond "Where on
| earth will they hide it when they're done?" I usually get
| something resembling a low FPS video of the house, mostly
| blurry, but they enjoy it!
|
| There's also the aspect that, for construction documentation,
| _everything is on the camera card._ You don 't have to pay
| attention to who has which photos, but, oh, their phone won't
| run the uploader app right, or their home ISP is slow, or...
| whatever. You use the camera, you take pictures, they're there.
|
| And I'm still inclined to use a camera for documenting a number
| of my projects around the property. I don't have to worry about
| it getting beat up, I can use it in gloves, etc. Plus, the lens
| is better.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Maybe those guys use them because they can or that they haven't
| caught up with the trend.
|
| In my country, _everyone_ uses a smartphone (practically
| speaking). Delivery, repair, inspection people, all use their
| smartphones to take photos and upload to destination via an
| app.
|
| Apart from being convenient, this has a side effect that the
| organization can push device cost onto individual contractors
| and lay people. I'm fully certain western countries will catch
| up with this trend just to save a buck.
| ElectricMind wrote:
| I could not read more than 10 sec after clicking the link. I mean
| for God's sake how many ads on single page? I suggest move
| content to static site for better readability.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| I'm an industrial electrician. Changing well-embedded standards
| and technology is _extremely_ difficult, except over the course
| of decades to century+. Locomotives use 64 volts for control
| voltage. Eight 8-volt batteries. (Drive voltage is 500-750,
| usually 600.) Why? Because they settled on it when locos were
| first electrified, long before 12 volts was a standard (or other,
| now common voltages). Many steam engines had 32 volts; 64 was an
| easy doubling to handle higher power start loads. They will
| continue to be 64 volt until the end of time.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| 1 "No More Wired Home Internet " aww isn't cute when subs don't
| have a clue about internet / telecoms technology.
|
| Would have expected better from a supposed tech mag.
|
| FTC or FTH is still l going to beat wireless connections - "you
| cane change the laws a physics" as Scotty used to say.
| 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.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > That being said, VoIP landline phones are still a part of many
| peoples' lives. Cable and fiber optic providers continue to offer
| these services and many people, including my mom, still have
| them.
|
| I work from home and I still use a land line phone. I bought the
| best quality speakphone I could find and I don't regret it a
| minute. Cell phones just don't have the same voice quality,
| especially for speakerphone, as a land line. And I avoid doing
| voice over the computer because my computer is busy and I don't
| want to sound like a robot because it can't handle the workload.
| 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.
| luord wrote:
| Well, as an avid movie watcher who absolutely _loves_ the theater
| experience, I truly do hope they never go away, and that my
| hypothetical children get to experience them too.
| 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.
| movedx wrote:
| > 4. His Computers Will All Boot Super Fast
|
| Well of course this isn't the case. I've banged on about this a
| lot, but we've given up on optimising our software and have just
| opted for making the hardware faster instead.
|
| This is the result.
|
| /shrug
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| We have gone in the opposite direction because now my TV takes
| a minute to boot. Earlier that used to be a 3-4 second process.
| For this reason, we just leave the TV on throughout the day.
| Massive wastage of electricity, so I'm trying to not fall into
| this habit.
| movedx wrote:
| Yeah ours is the same. I can Siri to turn on our AppleTV and
| a few minutes later we get to watch something. I mean it's
| only a few minutes but the question, "WTH is this thing
| doing?" is very valid.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > In 2012, I predicted that point-and-shoot cameras and
| camcorders were so dead that my son would never use them.
|
| Point and shoot digital cameras are interestingly bad compared to
| cellphones nowadays. The camera will generally have better glass,
| better sensor, beefier battery, more space to house the
| components, but will get beaten by a 7mm thick phone in most
| circumstances. Amazing how much can be done just by crunching
| numbers harder and faster.
|
| On the contrary, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have held their own
| against camera phones. The hardware advantage is too vast to be
| bridged by software right now. Or maybe the camera manufacturers
| are starting to use some software tricks themselves in their
| newest stuff.
| 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.
| heletoto wrote:
| The longevity of these technologies amuses me. I'd say that some
| of the technologies listed are in demand right now, and I don't
| see signs of it changing soon. Slowly but surely, new
| technologies will replace them both faster and have more extended
| longevity.
| jefurii wrote:
| I love this little eggcorn from the article: "abject lesson".
| 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:
| Adding to my first reply: if Trinitron displays were gone (it
| appears they aren't), and some newer tech isn't, that would
| NOT contradict the Lindy effect.
|
| If you already KNOW that Trinitron displays are gone, then
| there's no uncertainty. The Lindy effect is a heuristic for
| making decisions under uncertainty.
|
| The relevant situation is if you have two things that still
| exist, and you want to guess which one will last longer. This
| doesn't override other facts about the domain -- it's SOME
| information in the absence of any other knowledge. It's for
| poker players, not scientists.
|
| The example I gave was the new cloud blog startup vs. the old
| hosting platform. Which one would you put your blog on if you
| wanted people to read it 5 years from now? All other things
| being equal, I'd take the old hosting platform. But if you
| think the startup has a really good business model or you
| like the founders, maybe you choose that one. It's just
| common sense.
|
| Another example might be cold-blooded crocodiles vs. a warm-
| blooded mouse as an example. All things being equal, you
| could guess that the crocodiles will survive further into the
| future, since they were here first. But someone with a
| specific theory or expertise could also argue that the bigger
| animal is less likely to survive, etc.
|
| Similarly, we already know that dinosaurs are gone. This
| isn't a situation where you need to act or make a prediction.
|
| Someone who understands Bayesian statistics can probably
| explain it better than me, but you have to take into account
| existing knowledge, and update it with new knowledge. Picking
| out something that you know is obsolete isn't relevant.
| 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 :)
| wiml wrote:
| Big CRTs are pretty much gone as far as I know, but 1-micron
| ICs are all over the place. They're just not interesting any
| more.
| 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.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I run a retro games business.
|
| Trinitrons are still to this day the best tech for displaying
| old games, and people will pay over $100 for even a consumer-
| grade unit without SCART.
|
| For the professional grade PVM and BVM monitors, people will
| pay thousands for a large (21"+) one and they sell like
| hotcakes.
| crubier wrote:
| Wow, given the answers to that thread, it seems that the HN
| crowd has either no notion of conditional probabilities or that
| their "future is better" mindset is clouding their rational
| judgement.
|
| The Lindy effect makes perfect sense has an heuristic to
| evaluate the remaining lifetime of technologies and species at
| a given point in time. It's trivial to prove that it works for
| anything whose survival curve is convex.
|
| Despite its apparent love for rationality (which I enjoy), it
| seems like a large part of HN is just as subjective as anyone
| and unable to accept things that don't fit their mental model.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| > Wow, given the answers to that thread, it seems that the HN
| crowd has either no notion of conditional probabilities or
| that their "future is better" mindset is clouding their
| rational judgement.
|
| I mean it's a tech entrepreneurial news aggregator on a tech
| incubator's website. Their whole raison d'etre is that
| "future is better buy my technology so I can get $$$" --
| that's why this site exists.
|
| Is it that it doesn't fit the mental model, or is it failing
| to read the room?
| EliRivers wrote:
| This field also seems to attract (or foster) a particular
| mindset that we might call "I am smart and hyper-rational",
| which then adds an additional set of blinkers and an enhanced
| ability to discard and ignore evidence, and an enhanced faith
| in one's own powers of deduction.
|
| All people have that skill, of course, but this field seems
| to have more than its fair share of such.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Humans.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| humans...
| crooked-v wrote:
| When can we expect horse-drawn carriages to replace automobiles
| again, then?
| majewsky wrote:
| It's a heuristic. A single counterargument does not disprove
| it. It just shows that it's not a law, which was obvious to
| begin with.
| pixl97 wrote:
| When? If we experience a civilisation collapse.
| csomar wrote:
| It's the same thing. horse-drawn carriages are automobile.
| Today's car is a more advanced version. In a sense, today's
| laptop is a spaceship comparing to the first laptop.
| aksss wrote:
| Technically, a car is a spaceship compared to a carriage..
| one Tesla in particular.
| ben_w wrote:
| Now I'm wondering if we should differentiate between
| "spaceships" and "space boats" by whether or not they
| hold air...
| 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.
| edanm wrote:
| This might be obvious, but... the reason we have a special name
| for things that behave that way (Lindy effect) is because this
| is usually a _terrible_ heuristic. Most things are
| "perishable", as the article puts it - past a certain age, the
| older a human is, the shorter their life expectancy. This is
| true of most things.
|
| The Lindy effect talks about the _rare_ cases where this isn 't
| true.
| ramblerman wrote:
| > The Lindy effect applies to "non-perishable" items
|
| It's the 2nd sentence in the article. So not sure using
| examples of perishables shows it is a terrible heuristic.
|
| It applies to ideas/cultures/technologies.
| edanm wrote:
| Well yes, but not only. I think there are examples where it
| applies to living organisms too. E.g. a few hundred years
| ago, a human who lived past the age of 5 would be more
| likely to grow to be 40, afaik.
|
| I was mostly pointing this out because a lot of people in
| the comments seem to be talking about this as if it's some
| kind of universal law, or a proposed universal law, when
| really this applies to only exceptional circumstances.
| mellavora wrote:
| It is just a natural case of the exponential distribution,
| which is widely used to model expected waiting time. I
| wouldn't call it 'rare'.
|
| Absent other observations and/or priors, the best estimate of
| your expected waiting time is the amount of time you have
| already waited.
|
| So if you've been waiting 10 minutes for something to arrive,
| your best estimate of how much longer you have to wait is 10
| minutes.
|
| If you've been waiting 10 years for a tech to become
| outdated, your best estimate for how much longer it will take
| is 10 years.
|
| People usually use buses as an example. So it makes sense: if
| the bus is supposed to come every few minutes, and it hasn't
| come in the last 15 minutes, then odds are something is wrong
| thus increasing the prob that the additional wait will also
| be 15 minutes.
| rapnie wrote:
| A sextant (1731) vs. GPS (1973, fully operational 1993). Most
| large ships still have sextants as backup.
| greedo wrote:
| And the US Navy, after a hiatus has started training officers
| and crew on how to use a sextant since modern warfare will
| probably result in GPS being either jammed to oblivion or
| shot down.
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| Nope. If you read an ASCII file with control characters
| in Java you'll get an exception. Also it won't work with
| the 8-bit ASCII variants. Neither are "true Scotsmen" of
| course, but the point still stands that HTML could yet be
| more durable.
| chubot wrote:
| I think you're confusing Unicode and utf8. java uses
| Unicode but not utf8; it uses a 2 byte encoding with
| surrogate pairs by default.
|
| ASCII is utf8, but it's not utf16. ASCII will be around
| for as long as utf8 is.
| rusk wrote:
| I'm almost certain the default encoding for
| reading/writing files in Java is UTF-8 and similarly for
| the source files. I don't think I encounter wide char
| data much really at all day to day ...
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines
| (both in the article), so they will likely outlive fax
| machines.
|
| I'm less sure about this one, because of the relative
| difficulties of replacement. You can replace someone's POTS
| line with VOIP and they'll likely never notice (and this is
| underway). They'll notice if you take your fax machine.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I haven't used fax for at least 15 years. Might be 20, anyway
| so long ago that I can't remember when it was.
| carlmr wrote:
| >You can replace someone's POTS line with VOIP and they'll
| likely never notice (and this is underway). They'll notice if
| you take your fax machine.
|
| The question is if fax on VoIP is still fax in that sense. At
| least the wikipedia article on fax mentions transmission
| through audio-frequency tones [1]. However if you count fax
| over VoIP as fax, I guess you should also count phone on VoIP
| as "landline".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
| sandos wrote:
| Land lines are mostly gone where I live, Sweden. I don't really
| know anyone who uses then, of course they do still exist due to
| some alarm systems and so on.
|
| As for ripping out the physical service entirely, I don't have
| any numbers but I saw the lists from 2020 and 2021 and they are
| huge. So it is clearly happening. And they have been doing this
| for quite a few years.
| teekert wrote:
| Where I live (the Netherlands) all landlines (copper) have
| been replaced by fiber, I still call them landlines. I guess
| OP does too?
|
| If you mean landlines for Phones: The fiber can handle that,
| and does, but people are indeed dropping their telephone-
| number-for-a-house subscription in favor of individual cell
| phones (and my Phone is generally on WLAN-call when I'm at
| home, so it use the fiber as well). My parents in law were
| the last ones I knew with a house-based phone number and they
| dropped it this year. That said, I think you still get a
| house-telephone-number for free with many internet
| subscriptions and the ISP's modems have ports for Phones on
| them, so indeed the landlines as defined still exists, but
| it's a matter of definition.
| tremon wrote:
| _Where I live (the Netherlands) all landlines (copper) have
| been replaced by fiber_
|
| Do you have a source for this? All I can find is this quote
| [0], which is a long way off from "all landlines":
|
| > nearly 1 in 2 homes in the 25 largest cities will have
| KPN FTTH access by the end of 2021.
|
| [0] https://glasvezelnieuws.blogspot.com/2021/04/kpn-op-
| schema-m...
| teekert wrote:
| Maybe I should have specified, "in my city", indeed, when
| the concentration of people drops, people are still on
| copper or on satellite or other wireless alternatives.
| The point is, the country is investing in fiber:
| Landlines. Allthough this may change when we blanked the
| country with 5G towers. Already I have 60/60 mbit in my
| home via 4G, approaching my current 100/100 fiber
| subscription. Not sure which is going to scale better in
| the future.
| 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!
| straws wrote:
| 33 years, if you go by the patent. Lots more fun facts in Tim
| Hunkin's excellent Secret Life of Machines:
|
| https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/0301-The_FAX_Machine.
| ..
| jacobolus wrote:
| Tim Hunkin is recently making new videos!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/timhunkin1
| monocasa wrote:
| Backing up the original point of the parent post's spirit, I
| actually see fax lasting longer. It's special cased in a lot
| of regulatory structures as 'secure' and has quite a bit more
| use than the HN crowd might think.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| Fax is the cheapest way to get forecast if you sail
| offshore through a service called "weather fax".
| Alternatives works through satellite with hefty monthly
| subscriptions. That service is the reason I bought yet
| another raspberry pi with a software defined radio module.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Regulatory structures are not forever and will change.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is, of course, silly but true, because fax has no
| endpoint authentication of any kind.
| rangibaby wrote:
| You could put your fax machines in a locked container
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I was thinking more of SS7-based attacks for remote
| interception.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I was at a DefCon talk where these researchers
| demonstrated pwning a network by sending a fax:
| https://blog.checkpoint.com/2018/08/12/faxploit-hp-
| printer-f...
| emodendroket wrote:
| It kind of makes you feel ridiculous about the amount of
| work that we put into securing even systems that are in
| no way critical and then the world runs on unsecured
| mailboxes, homes which can be broken into by someone
| willing to kick hard enough, Social Security cards with
| no security features whatsoever, funds transfer that only
| requires your account and routing number to withdraw, and
| so on.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's not that ridiculous. Securing stuff on computers is
| more important due to the scale at which attacks can
| occur. On the internet, you can gather information on
| millions of users in little time and without putting
| yourself in a place where you could easily be caught. And
| for a machine that isn't connected to the internet, it
| can still give you far more data than you could get by
| stealing paper that takes up the same amount of physical
| space.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I guess so, but there are many Internet accounts I would
| be way less upset about someone compromising than the
| other things I mentioned.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I'd say most of the parents' comment is applicable to the
| same scale. People can abuse your social security number
| or bank account and routing numbers across the Internet.
| Phone numbers being relatively easy to spoof and/or
| hijack makes fax trivial to mess with internationally as
| well.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think you are understating the extent to which
| mailboxes and homes are secured by men with guns. Sure;
| there's very little preventing someone from kicking their
| way into someone's house, but if someone did so, they
| would very likely end up in a jail cell or even, in some
| places, dead.
|
| Unfortunately, you can't physically harm people over the
| internet, so different security measures must be taken.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Homes are massively protected by people's goodwill, not
| by the judicial system. In most of Europe and more than
| you suspect in US too, if you call the police, they come
| more than 30 minutes later (especially in France where
| they have no right to use their guns and don't risk their
| own security), and if you "handle the matter yourself",
| you are in just as much problems as the thieve,
| particularly in US where you still have to use a lawyer
| to prove your innocence. No, what really holds houses
| from being broken into, is mostly that people don't do it
| (hence the use of a society where people earn enough to
| not be willing to risk physical fight).
| philwelch wrote:
| Most forms of security rely on the goodwill of most
| people in society; the entire problem consists of
| handling the minority of people who lack goodwill. These
| people exist in every society.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Your odds are very good stealing from my mailbox and not
| that bad burglarizing my house. Maybe you have much more
| vigilant police where you live. What's more, unauthorized
| access to computer systems is also a crime.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The odds of getting caught robbing a single mailbox are
| not high, but if you do it on a large scale, it starts to
| get pretty risky.
|
| The odds of getting caught attacking a Russian computer
| from the US or attacking a US computer from Russia are
| essentially zero for any scale small enough to not have
| major foreign policy implications.
| pharmakom wrote:
| > Unfortunately, you can't physically harm people over
| the internet
|
| Yes how unfortunate?
| 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.
| aksss wrote:
| Interestingly, you can still send a telegram..
| https://www.itelegram.com/
|
| I guess these guys took over all the telegram
| infrastructure of Western Union in 2006.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Telegrams were always expensive but the price now is
| outrageous. I followed the link and chose Norway as the
| destination country and was told that it would cost GBP
| 22 + 67p/word! Even worse for Mexico: GBP53 + 67p/word.
|
| It's cheaper to send flowers with a card!
| ant6n wrote:
| That doesnt sound like fax. Or better, if you include this
| and fax together, you'd have to describe it as a generic
| technology that allows sending images remotely. Which may
| actually survive the telephone.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Source?
| theodric wrote:
| Google "fax machine history." This is incredibly trivial
| to verify.
| 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.
| photojosh wrote:
| I recently bought a leaf blower/vac mulcher. Took me way
| longer than it should to figure out that the difference
| between the $50 model and the $100 one was that the
| latter had a metal mulching blade instead of a plastic
| one, and that the former would likely break as soon as I
| vacced up a stick that was a bit too big. Thanks random
| forum poster!
| 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
| hattmall wrote:
| You may want to specify "lawn tractor" as that's not
| really what I was picturing when you say tractor.
| 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.
| nvoid wrote:
| And if you are writing a blog, it should be written in a
| way that it could be read 10 years ago if you want it to be
| read in 10 years if we're following Taleb's thinking.
| repsilat wrote:
| Another helpful angle is to consider things that _aren 't_
| Lindylike. People for example -- we expect older people to
| die sooner than younger ones, not later. And radioactive
| nuclei -- we expect their ages to be irrelevant to their
| expected future longevity.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah there are definitely some subtleties, and they would
| be interesting to tease out.
|
| Older people obviously will die sooner, but having
| survived does give you some information. For example,
| your life expectancy at age 1 is 75 years, but at age 40
| it's closer to 79 years.
|
| e.g. https://www.annuityadvantage.com/resources/life-
| expectancy-t...
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Not if you are looking at motorcycle accidents data of
| older and younger people.
| nvoid wrote:
| Isn't this handled by the fact Lindy-like things have to
| be non-perishable like ideas or technology?
| 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.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| There's a good reason why office chairs have five
| legs/wheels where regular chairs have only four: safety.
|
| Office chairs have a reclining mechanism. If you ever
| leaned back too far in an old office chair with four
| wheels, you would find out the hard way that four isn't
| enough. It's very easy to lean back comfortably and not
| realize you've reached the tipping point, fall back and
| hit your head on the floor or have a close call.
|
| My first jobs long ago had four-wheeled office chairs, so
| you can guess how I found this out.
|
| The fifth wheel goes a long way to preventing this
| danger.
|
| You're much less likely to be leaning back in a regular
| four-legged chair so the front legs come off the ground,
| and if you do you'll probably be more aware that you are
| doing something outside the chair's normal mode of use.
|
| And even if offices go out of style, office _chairs_ will
| likely be around long past then.
| 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?
| fooker wrote:
| Yes, because that's how to transmit electricity.
| thaeli wrote:
| Even for local network cabling, PoE is working to keep
| copper around.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Calculus will die before algebra, will die before geometry.
| 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.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Base64 for the win....
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Fax machines seem long extinct everywhere except in Japan and
| in some hotels. Landlines probably only survive in business
| environments, I hardly know anybody who would have and use a
| landline at home. Also, both businesses and consumers mostly
| use VoIP-based "landlines" employing codecs which can't support
| fax.
| justusthane wrote:
| Fax machines are still widely used in healthcare, at least in
| the U.S. Can't speak for other countries, but I'd be
| surprised if that weren't also the case elsewhere.
| ghaff wrote:
| Landlines are probably more common than you think. I only got
| rid of mine last year. I would have kept it for backup but it
| just cost more than I was willing to pay. Many of us don't
| get great cell reception and WiFi assist isn't always
| perfect.
| sverhagen wrote:
| My employer was moving us to a new office, right before the
| pandemic, it's not seen much action, but... there's a fax
| machine. I doubt any of us would use it, but it comes with
| our corporate really estate package. Just in case you need to
| send a fax to Japan... or some hotel?
| cmg wrote:
| 15 years ago, the office I worked in received daily menus
| via fax from local delis and restaurants with their
| specials, in case we wanted to get lunch. I have no idea if
| this is still a common practice but it seemed to be at the
| time.
|
| This even had the slight benefit over sending email to a
| random address because a fax can just be posted on a common
| board in the office space, rather than someone having to
| take the step of printing the email first.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Perhaps. Whatever, it sounds comforting and fun. I've heard
| they have a colour (!) fax machine at almost every home
| Japan. If I moved into an office which had one, I would
| actually contact somebody there and have fun sending hand
| drawn pictures to each other :-)
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Faxes have become a largely digital thing, as there are
| various digital fax services. Neither side needs to have a
| phone connection that can support it. The fax services just
| need to be able to communicate to each other.
|
| I was in a radiology startup for a bit, and getting people to
| fill out forms on something like an iPad is still a problem.
| You need staff able to help them, and people damage or try to
| steal them. So then you end up with paperwork, and if that
| paperwork needs to move somewhere else, people fax it.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| Technologies never truly die due to outdatedness they just
| become rare. Horse buggies are still used, though rarely, steam
| engines are more hobbies now but still around.
|
| What truly causes a technology to die is when it's kept a
| secret and all those who know the secret pass away without
| passing it on (Greek fire, ancient Babylonian batteries, Roman
| stainless steel). It's the one good argument for having a
| patent system, to keep that knowledge from being lost.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Will HTML or JavaScript last longer? Probably HTML, since it
| came first.
|
| Well, barely. I'd bet on JavaScript for this one; programming
| languages are almost immortal once they reach the popularity of
| JS, while HTML would be easier to replace.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| theodric wrote:
| Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile phones were more
| widespread than you're giving them credit for, as were
| laptops considerably preceding Apple's PowerBook series.
| 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]
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I disagree. I am of the opinion that those form factors
| were inevitable, and would have come along anyway with or
| without Apple's offerings.
| ghaff wrote:
| How is that inconsistent with the parent statement? Even
| if the form factors were inevitable--e.g. _someone_ would
| have decided that smartphones didn 't need a physical
| keyboard--someone had to be first to popularize. (Not
| sure I agree on the laptop but the iPhone pretty clearly
| popularized the modern smartphone form factor.)
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| To say they are "responsible" for something can be read
| as "allowed to take credit for". Being the first to
| popularize something is a business achievement, which is
| quite meaningless compared to the technical achievement
| of being the first to build something.
| Miraste wrote:
| I can see this in the case of the PC and the laptop, but
| proto-smartphones were around for years before the iPhone
| and they were not developing in an iPhone-like direction.
| Every iPhone-like product that came after was the result
| of copying. I don't think it was inevitable at all.
| ghaff wrote:
| One thing I do think is true is that Apple developed
| sufficient brand permission to be able to do things that
| were definitely outside of a lot of buyers' comfort zone
| and arguably needed some iteration to really nail.
|
| I'm still inclined to think _someone_ would have jumped
| to a smartphone without a keyboard. But it 's also true
| that the iPhone had plenty of critics early on and
| arguably didn't fully hit its stride until the 3GS.
| ghaff wrote:
| Something that's a mainstream business success is far
| more interesting in general than progenitors that never
| really took off for whatever reasons. They're may still
| be important as technical achievements but the history
| books notice those who took things mainstream.
|
| James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine. He
| just came up with an invention that made it a lot more
| efficient.
| josephg wrote:
| > C programming language will be 50 years old next year.
|
| This principle implies the C programming language will
| outlive Rust, Go, Python, etc. I'm not sure how I feel about
| that. There's a good chance its right, but I'm uncomfortable
| imagining my grandchildren learning C's weird quirks.
|
| There's definitely codebases written in C today which will
| outlive me, like the Linux kernel. And most of those
| codebases will probably never migrate to a different
| language.
| chubot wrote:
| I think C will outlive those languages, in the sense that
| it will exist. But it doesn't necessarily follow that your
| grandchildren will have to learn it. There will be some
| other language like JS or foobar 2050 that's just way more
| relevant and popular :) But they certainly COULD if they
| wanted to.
|
| The question of whether a technology simply exists vs.
| whether it retains its popularity is an interesting one.
| Chairs and forks will both exist and be popular. iPhones
| will exist, but they won't be popular on some time scale.
| So it is interesting to think whether C is closer to one or
| the other :)
| d_silin wrote:
| C is the "lawn chair" of programming languages. Sure, it
| is neither particularly fancy, nor most comfortable - but
| beats having no chair :)
| [deleted]
| hvidgaard wrote:
| While C is not perfect, it is in a sense something that
| most other programming languages are not. It's simple and
| if you program in C you probably touch upon the entirety of
| the language on a regular basis. Because it is simple you
| can write a compiler for it with some reasonable effort if
| need be, even for completely new architectures.
|
| In any case, I'd argue that most of the quirks are due to
| undefined behaviour as implemented in the compilers. And 50
| years from now the language have probably evolved some more
| anyway.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| I'm more worried my grandchildren will still be
| learning/using QWERTY than they have to learn C's weird
| quirks :). My opinion is that it's easier to get a group of
| tech people together and gradually replace C (like Android
| Rust development) than getting people to replace QWERTY or
| getting the US to move to Metrics system.
| hattmall wrote:
| what's wrong with qwerty?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Arguments could be made that it's inefficient or un-
| ergonomic, though I'm doubtful how much difference it
| makes on a modern keyboard. There's an oft-repeated story
| about the qwerty layout being designed to keep people
| from typing fast enough to jam typewriters. I can't speak
| to the legitimacy of the story, but I do collect
| typewriters and I can say for sure that there's a lot
| more pressure and key travel (and time!) required to slam
| a type bar into the ribbon than is needed to press a
| modern keyboard key.
|
| I learned Dvorak a decade ago and loved it unless someone
| else had to use my computer or I had to use a shared
| computer. I'm typing this on a qwerty keyboard and I'm
| okay with that now.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Dvorak is actually pretty bad as a smartphone keyboard,
| it's advantages with two-handed typing on real keyboard
| become disadvantages if you type with your thumb.
|
| Dvorak has specialised right- and left-handed layouts.
| Maybe it also needs specialised one finger layouts, too.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I had wondered about phone keyboards. Part of the reason
| I switched back was that I couldn't change the layout on
| my phone and got tired of switching back and forth. (I
| know there are probably some options now, but there
| weren't on iPhone 4, Kindle touch, or feature phones with
| physical keyboards.)
|
| I can imagine you'd need to use both thumbs extensively
| or you'd be jumping back and forth. I definitely found
| that when I was laying on my side on the couch, propped
| up with one arm, qwerty was easier to use with one hand.
| Not that that's an ergonomic or sustainable way to type,
| but I was a lazy college student and I didn't care.
| Xylakant wrote:
| > There's an oft-repeated story about the qwerty layout
| being designed to keep people from typing fast enough to
| jam typewriters.
|
| Typewriter layouts are designed to avoid jamming, but not
| by reducing typing speed. They place letters that are
| pressed in direct succession apart, so that the levers
| don't collide. Trained typists can write pretty damn fast
| on a typewriter.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I thought I remembered something about that, thanks.
| Dvorak does seem to cluster a lot of commonly used
| letters, which would definitely jam neighboring type bars
| pretty quickly unless they used a Blickensderfer-[1] or
| Selectric-style unified type element.
|
| I've always wanted a Blick, their "scientific" DHIATENSOR
| layout intrigues me. They also made a qwerty version and
| I seem to remember a story that their salespeople would
| make you sign a waiver that you were choosing a less
| efficient keyboard if you bought one. That's certainly
| 90% marketing for their layout and maybe 10% fact, but I
| find it amusing (if true, but I can't seem to find a
| reference to it any more).
|
| I'll bet typewriter-trained typists can really move. It's
| definitely a separate skill, at least for the manual
| typewriters in my collection which have about an inch of
| key travel and a heck of a lot more actuation force than
| the gateron red switches I use at work. :-)
|
| Ultimately I find that the fastest layout is the one you
| know.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blickensderfer_typewriter
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > They place letters that are pressed in direct
| succession apart,
|
| ... and that really reduces typing speed. When i switched
| to dworak I was _amazed_ how my fingers just roll on a
| keyboard, forming sentences faster than I even form a
| conscious understanding in which succession should I move
| my fingers. It just happens as if by itself!! Just think
| of a word to type and it is already on the screen.
| Xylakant wrote:
| > ... and that really reduces typing speed.
|
| That may be the effect for you, but it's not a goal. It's
| maybe a tradeoff, but machine writing is a trainable
| craft. Usual results for trained people are at about 200
| - 400 characters per minute measured over 10 minutes.
| Championship results are at up to 900 characters.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Yeah, and all championship results are on Dvorak
| keyboards. [1]
|
| [1]: http://www.recordholdersrepublic.co.uk/world-record-
| holders/...
| Aengeuad wrote:
| There are plenty of unofficial records and leader boards
| for typing speeds where qwerty typists are just as
| capable (more so even due to sheer availability) as
| Dvorak typists at hitting 200+wpm, and while that alone
| shouldn't be used to judge the quality of a particular
| layout it shouldn't be ignored that there's no difference
| in attainable max speeds done in short bursts. That says
| nothing about sustained typing of course, but I strongly
| suspect if you're already a competent and fast typist in
| qwerty you'll be comparably as fast in Dvorak and vice
| versa.
| enriquto wrote:
| > I'm uncomfortable imagining my grandchildren learning C's
| weird quirks
|
| What about them learning English's even weirder quirks?
| Does that make you uncomfortable as well?
|
| I have come to the point that I sort of accept C's quirks,
| and, with the appropriate mindset, I can even love them. I
| certainly see myself as an old man teaching these arcane
| quirks to a young and innocent audience.
| carlmr wrote:
| Also COBOL is still around and most people don't need to
| learn it anymore.
| enriquto wrote:
| Most people don't need to learn C either; or any
| programming language, for that matter.
| carlmr wrote:
| Sure but I think programmers is an implicit assumption
| here when talking about which programming languages to
| learn. We don't need to start splitting hairs here.
|
| And COBOL is extremely niche, while C is still quite
| common and useful to know.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Isn't that the whole worse is better thing in action?
| People complained about C and Unix when they were new, but
| they picked up so much traction, and people invested enough
| effort into working around the flaws, that it just achieved
| critical mass. Same thing with JavaScript; it's never going
| anywhere.
|
| Certainly higher-level languages have edged out C in many
| domains though.
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| That world cant exist. A flaw of anti capitalist
| alternatives is that they're non-natural.
|
| Any alternative where trade didn't follow optimal path is
| due to regulation / force. And in most, the force required
| to steer humans away from their nature also kills
| innovation.
|
| Ergo: you cant have a miracle chip in your pocket with no
| one using it to sell you potato chips.
| vimacs2 wrote:
| 1. Nobody mentioned capitalism or alternatives in the
| parent comment.
|
| 2. Capitalism is not "natural" either and only started
| developing in the post-renaissance world.
|
| 3. Natural selection demonstrates conclusively that
| relying on purely natural processes to drive "innovation"
| often lead to highly non-optimal and harmful trends.
|
| 4. Most of the major scientific and technological
| innovations of the 20th century were either the direct
| result of or funded by "force" which I take to mean
| government.
|
| 5. Advertisement was not the only monetisation strategy
| that the internet and telecommunication industry could
| have taken. The internet could have very easily gone down
| the subscription route and the only reason why anybody
| thinks otherwise is because of the decade long marketing
| that has normalised getting everything for "free".
| 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.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Its still a poor version of the internet when compared to
| a PC (laptop/Desktop).
| usrusr wrote:
| And "first and only computing device" pales to
| insignificance next to "first and only bank account"
| which they also are, in a way. That's huge.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I don't know about you, but a consumption-only "first and
| only computing device" sounds incredibly dystopian. I get
| that they have a positive impact, but it feels like we
| could be doing better.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't know about you, but a consumption-only "first
| and only computing device" sounds incredibly dystopian
|
| Smartphones aren't consumption-only.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Doing anything but consumption and lightweight content
| discovery on smartphones is basically a farce. They are
| not usable as general-purpose creation machines.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Doing anything but consumption and lightweight content
| discovery on smartphones is basically a farce.
|
| I disagree, even when talkingn about a smartphone as a
| human interface device and not, as was the actual context
| of the thread, a computing device.
|
| Having a, say, DeX-enabled Android (or even potentially
| powered by fairly traditional Linux, if one doesn't just
| use a major maker device with stock software) smartphone
| as a _computing_ device doesn't preclude standard desktop
| I /O devices fo interact with it in manner very similar
| to a standard desktop PC.
|
| > They are not usable as general-purpose creation
| machines.
|
| Again, as an exclusive _computing device_ , they are just
| about as much as is any computing device.
|
| Even as an exclusive HID, there's a giant excluded middle
| between "consumption only" and "not usable as _general
| purpose_ creation machines".
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| What makes a smartphone a smartphone is the ability to
| use it with just the touchscreen. A smartphone with
| desktop peripherals is just that, a desktop. What I am
| arguing is that a bare smartphone (aka what most of those
| people in the developing world can afford) cannot
| meaningfully serve, due to being a form factor with a
| very imprecise input method, as a creation platform for
| any sort of precise content.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What makes a smartphone a smartphone is the ability to
| use it with just the touchscreen
|
| You seem to be conflating the _ability_ to be used with a
| limited interface with a restriction to be used with only
| a particular interface. I desktop PC has the _ability_ to
| be used without a graphics tablet. It would be a much
| more limited creation device if it were _restricted_ to
| being used without one. And the same is true of
| everything that isn't a touchscreen, microphone, or other
| built in human interface and smartphones. But a
| smartphone as an exclusive _computing_ device does not
| imply the limitations of its built-in interfaces, since
| having external interfaces is also a standard feature of
| the class.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| While I agree with your definitions of what a computation
| device is, I also don't see Android being developed on
| Android in the near future. So many UX conceptual
| problems won't allow this, so I think that as long as
| computers are required to build smartphones, they cannot
| be described as "general purpose" machines.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > Laptops (since first Apple Powerbook) - 30 years.
|
| That kind of Apple revisionism is not correct. The NEC
| UltraLite predated Apple clamshells by 3 years (1988), and
| luggables with a battery configuration have been available as
| early as 1981 (Osborne 1 with an aftermarket 1 hour battery
| add-on).
| ghaff wrote:
| The Grid Compass was probably the first true laptop in
| 1982. But it ran a proprietary operating system by default
| and costs about $8,000 in 1982 money. The Data General-One
| came out in 1984 and might be a better candidate. But
| neither of those were really mainstream.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Don't neglect the Model 100...
|
| "The TRS-80 Model 100 is a portable computer introduced
| in 1983. It is one of the first notebook-style computers,
| featuring a keyboard and liquid crystal display, in a
| battery-powered package roughly the size and shape of a
| notepad or large book."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
| ghaff wrote:
| It wasn't a laptop in the modern sense though.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| For any reason other than it doesn't fold in half?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Laptops existed far before the Powerbook.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It really depends on how you define laptop. There was this
| sort of thing in the 80s,
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100), of course.
| And there were a couple of laptop-shaped laptops from 1988
| on, but they were either spectacularly compromised (the NEC
| Ultralite had a max of 2MB of storage, for instance) or
| spectacularly expensive or both. In terms of laptops that
| were shaped like laptops as we know them, and that were
| actually usable outside of very specialized applications,
| the Powerbook 100 and Thinkpad 700T could be reasonably
| claimed to be about the first.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| There's also the TRS-80 Model 100, launched in 1983
| taneq wrote:
| > The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been
| around, the longer it will last into the future.
|
| This doesn't make any sense because it maps trivially to "any
| technology still around will last forever."
| xwolfi wrote:
| This logic makes me fear for the metric system
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I curse the Imperialists every time I come across the cursed
| measurements.
| mdoms wrote:
| I don't agree about cameras. Take a look at your favourite
| youtubers - for the most part anyone who is even half way serious
| about making videos has moved past the limitations of phone
| cameras.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The market has bifurcated, I switched to using my phone because
| it was good enough.
| 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.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I always wondered what makes some businesses so inflexible that
| they still require faxes. It's getting rarer these days but I'll
| still hit it once a year.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That seems a bit harsh, considering that the 3D versions of
| major blockbuster movies do well in theaters. It doesn't seem
| unreasonable to expect that quite a few people would want to be
| able to get the 3D versions of those movies for home viewing.
|
| A 3D TV is not much different from a 2D TV. Doesn't it mainly
| just need a higher refresh rate, and for some 3D technologies a
| higher vertical resolution? The higher end TVs from most
| manufacturers already often have twice the refresh rate of mid
| end TVs, and higher resolution (e.g., there are 8K TVs out now,
| even though most programming is 4K or less).
|
| I'd have expected TV makers to continue offering 3D, but only
| on their high end models. It wouldn't really cost them much,
| and it would get those people that watch 3D movies in theaters
| and want the same version at home to buy a higher end TV than
| they would otherwise need.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > the 3D versions of major blockbuster movies do well in
| theaters.
|
| Did well, past tense. 3D movies peaked in 2010 and box office
| sales declined annually. By 2019 they were less than 50% of
| their 2010 peak. TV makers stopped making 3D TVs after 2016.
|
| You're right that 3D TVs were just high refresh rate TVs but
| they have to sync with shutter glasses so you can't easily do
| 3D without TV support.
|
| The latest HDMI spec supports variable refresh rate so in
| theory you could now make a player capable of handling the
| shutter sync.
|
| It was a fad just like in the 50s and 80s. It lasted longer
| this time but yeah 3D is dead.
| mgerullis wrote:
| > Did well, past tense. 3D movies peaked in 2010 and box
| office sales declined annually
|
| Which is around the time the author wrote the first article
| cptskippy wrote:
| The first article was written in 2012, box office numbers
| peaked in 2010. Everyone was wowed by Avatar in 2009, and
| then less impressed when the best 3D movie of 2010 was
| Avatar: Special Edition.
|
| Almost no one cared about 3D movies in 2012 and it was
| only industry momentum and sunk cost fallacy that kept
| things going for as long as it did.
| crtasm wrote:
| Also how many of those 3D ticket sales came from people
| who'd be fine with/prefer 2D but didn't have the option.
| massysett wrote:
| I'm a lawyer in a government agency and never once in my
| 20-year career have I sent or received a fax. The only faxes
| that come out of the machine are junk faxes. People have been
| emailing scanned PDFs for at least 15 of those 20 years.
| mgerullis wrote:
| Here in Germany, lawyers offices and public offices still
| rely quite heavily on them.
| asdff wrote:
| Clearly you haven't had to change your benefits in your 20
| year career. I briefly worked for the state 5 years ago, and
| had to fax them my social security number to elect for
| benefits. No receipt at the other end other than benefits
| being successfully pulled the next paycheck. Fax works its
| way in to some roles where it is entrenched, namely HR.
| massysett wrote:
| Clearly I have changed my benefits many times in my 20-year
| career. Most of the systems to do this in my government are
| Web-based. For those that aren't, I email a PDF form to the
| appropriate personnel.
| asdff wrote:
| Weird how different these systems are. Anything involving
| something like a social security number could not be
| emailed. HR would be explicit telling you not to reply
| back with the filled PDFs via email.
| cptskippy wrote:
| And yet it's ok to email PDFs containing all the bank
| verification info to transfer your retirement account.
| Ask me how I know...
|
| We have software installed in our email gateway that
| detects key words like SSN or 16 digit numbers that look
| like credit cards and blocks them from being sent.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Weird, maybe it's just real estate and medical then but
| several times we've been unable to get around it.
|
| I initially wrote a fax App using the Twilio API to send some
| medical forms that could only be faxed. Since then I've had
| to use it for the sale of two homes, and this past summer it
| was augmented to receive faxes for closing on a home. My
| partner ask me for the number just last week to request some
| medical records from out of state.
| Izkata wrote:
| On the flipside, at least as recently as last year they were
| using faxes to apply for unemployment in New York:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-
| ny-u...
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| Really got click bait vibes from this.. Wish I had not clicked
| and red it..
|
| Maybe we could just sum alot of the assumptions to.. Smart phones
| will replace X predictions. Seems like where it all originated.
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Yup. I've always questioned people who think wireless can
| replace a wire at scale. It just can't.
|
| That being said I can browse most sites and do 90% of my
| internet just fine either on my phone or tethered to my phone
| using my data plan. So maybe I'm wrong!
| elil17 wrote:
| As someone working on 5G, I disagree strongly. 5G supports up
| to 1 million devices per square kilometer (the most dense city,
| Manila, in the world has about 50k people per square
| kilometer). My understanding is that you can have about 100k
| devices per square kilometer before speeds drop below ideal (20
| gigabit). So even if everyone in downtown Manila wanted stream
| seven movies at once they could all do it. As other commenters
| have said, that's because of clever techniques like beamforming
| and OFDMA.
|
| But cities aren't really the area where 5G home internet
| provides an advantage. Sure, the protocols more efficient than
| WiFi - the tower allocated bandwidth and time blocks to
| coordinate transmissions instead of having everyone's router
| blast away on the same hardcoded WiFi channels. But it still
| achieves those high speeds and great connectivity through
| having a bunch of small cell towers - hardly much different
| than wired internet.
|
| The real advantage is suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.
| You solve the last mile problem for cables, eliminate outages,
| and you do it all with a couple large cell towers.
|
| Yeah, people (or more likely businesses) with high throughput
| needs will still use wired connections. But it will be because
| the electricity costs of transmitting from a 5G tower are high
| enough that there's always a base cost per GB, not because
| there isn't enough bandwidth to go around.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _eliminate outages_
|
| Why do you expect 5G to eliminate outages when we can't
| eliminate them with existing LTE towers, with home wifi, or
| even with direct ethernet connections to modems?
|
| As of now, my _least_ reliable network is always my cellular
| network.
|
| > _you can have about 100k devices per square kilometer
| before speeds drop below ideal (20 gigabit)_
|
| When, though? We're far, far from this at the moment. What is
| going to fix it and when?
| brigade wrote:
| Each cable node shares ~1GHz of bandwidth among all the
| separate runs to individual houses. Relative to that, 5G has
| similar local bandwidth, given the low propagation of mmwave.
|
| It's not going to completely replace hardwired internet in
| suburbs/cities, but it might just kill last-mile fiber rollout
| short of new construction.
| 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.
| syoc wrote:
| Not trying to prove you wrong, just asking. Can a service like
| starlink not deal, in some hypothetical configuration, replace
| cabled internet?
| henrikeh wrote:
| Can it exist and provide a usable service to some? Yes,
| probably.
|
| Can it replace cabled internet, period? Can it replace
| terrestrial cellular? Unlikely:
|
| Mobile internet is constrained by the capacity and coverage
| of the cell. "Capacity" being the practical sort of what the
| maximum achievable information rate is, given the available
| receivers and transmitters. Satellite links are a bit
| complicated, but essentially the Shannon-Hartley theorem
| holds and you either have to increase bandwidth or increase
| signal-to-noise ratio to provide better data rates within a
| cell. Bigger cell, more users, less capacity per user, worse
| data rate per user.
|
| I don't know what the cell sizes Starlink will use are, but
| I've read numbers around 200 km^2. My hometown of 10000 homes
| is 21 km^2. If they were to provide 100 Mb/s just to my
| hometown, they would need a 1 Tb/s capacity in a much smaller
| cell. Of course, not everybody will use 100 Mb/s all the
| time, but it illustrates the problem.
|
| This is why SpaceX is mainly focusing on low-density areas in
| places where the infrastructure is less-
| developed/monopolized. The capacity / coverage problems works
| much better to their advantage.
| 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.
| jetrink wrote:
| Video calls too. I just got back from visiting my in laws
| since everyone is now vaccinated and one of my projects while
| I was there was running ethernet lines to their work areas.
| They're both on daily video calls now and poor wifi
| performance was driving them crazy.
| thiht wrote:
| > since everyone is now vaccinated
|
| You don't need to justify yourself. I see this more and
| more and it's honestly just annoying.
| majewsky wrote:
| I see frustrated WiFi users all the time, but I've never seen
| a frustrated Ethernet user.
|
| If I had a dime for every WiFi user in a video call who's
| "breaking up", I had a whole bunch of dimes.
| themulticaster wrote:
| Exactly. I have a suspicion that a large part of people
| complaining about "Internet issues" are faced with WiFi
| issues. Apparently many struggle with the concept of
| separate links that make up a connection (LAN vs WAN).
|
| But the reverse mix-up also happens: Hotels, restaurants
| and the similar businesses like to boast their "included
| free WiFi" when they really mean complimentary Internet
| access, provided with an AP.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| I'd take that as a given for 99% of cases. As fibre takes
| over from piggybacking off copper, IME actual internet
| issues seem to be pretty rare: [UK and] I haven't noticed
| that kind of service issue for a few years now, whereas
| used to be _relatively_ common.
|
| Happy to keep the pretence up though -- what else is a as
| neutral and widely understood as "internet issues"?
| Whoops, seems as if my connection has dropped out! Yes, I
| was very interested in that discussion over sales targets
| that's been going on for the past half an hour, please
| email me a summary! Bloody internet, always dropping out!
| moftz wrote:
| I always laugh when I see Comcast commercials for
| "fastest in-home Wifi". An 802.11ac router isn't going to
| help anything when you can only get 10/10 bandwidth on a
| good day.
| nly wrote:
| I use a set of G.hn ethernet over powerline adapters in my
| (small, rented 2 bed) flat. I can get 200 Mbps with no
| latency, packet loss or drop outs from the modem in the
| living room to the office upstairs.
|
| This is a distance of about 10 meters with 2 brick
| Victorian internal walls in-between. No matter how much you
| spend on WiFi equipment you can't get more than 20 Mbps
| with high packet loss here.
|
| Even downstairs, with no walls to worry about, only 5 Ghz
| is usable. 2.4 GHz is completely occupied by neighbours,
| and the lower 5 Ghz channels are all crowded out because of
| compatibility too.
|
| I hate WiFi with a passion.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| Mind sharing which adapters you are using? WiFi works for
| my situation at the moment but would be useful to know in
| case I need an upgrade.
| nly wrote:
| These: https://www.devolo.co.uk/magic-2-wifi-next
| moftz wrote:
| I have four adapters in my house, I have one TL-WPA7510
| and three TL-PA7010. They are sold as pairs so when I
| wanted the version with an access point built-in, I had
| to buy another wired version. But, you can add them
| individually to an already existing network. The Homeplug
| protocol is a standard so as long as you buy the right
| versions, you get max performance. These things are
| great. I have one in the basement for the Verizon router
| to plug into, one on the second floor for my PS4, the AP
| version behind the 4K TV in the family room, and another
| at a desk in the guest room. The Verizon router has a lot
| of interference nearby so quality is poor in some spots
| in the house. Quality is good, it sometimes reaches
| gigabit speeds but it's way more robust than wifi
| extenders. The apartment I lived in previously was built
| like a brick shithouse so wifi dropped off pretty fast
| once you got to the other end.
| superkuh wrote:
| I hate high rate data links over power lines. Power lines
| are not impedance controlled. At every bend, every
| approach to some metal in the building, they are going to
| radiate interference and accept/receive interference from
| their environment. Using powerline networking is
| irresponsible and rude. The fact that any are approved by
| the FCC at all is entirely due to contrived testing
| setups that are never replicated in real building wiring.
|
| If you use real transmission line like ethernet cable
| (~70 ohm twisted pairs) or coax the impedance remains
| constant and they might even have a bit of shielding.
| You'll get faster, more reliable speeds and pollute the
| radio spectrum significantly less.
| SSLy wrote:
| Sometimes you can't do that if you don't own the tenement
| you're living in.
| superkuh wrote:
| That doesn't prevent you from running cable along the
| walls and under/over doors.
| nly wrote:
| - It's fiddly and ugly compared to hidden cables. I
| wouldn't do that in my own home, I'd run them in the
| walls.
|
| - It's disruptive and time consuming. It would likely
| take me a whole day
|
| - I don't see why I should invest further in improving
| the property when I will likely move out in 1-2 years
| time and won't reap the long-term benefits. I've done
| that already in other areas.
|
| - It's hassle. My landlord could protest that I've done a
| shitty job when I move out, or, even if I haven't, make
| me remove it.
|
| - I need multiple WiFi adapters anyway to cover both
| upstairs and downstairs effectively.
|
| - It's not as flexible (in terms of moving things around)
| as plugging an adapter in to any electrical outlet.
|
| - I needed a quick solution when I moved in so I could
| work.
| SilverRed wrote:
| I love cables while I'm using them. I hate cables while I'm
| cleaning. It seems almost impossible to have a clean cable
| setup that doesn't become a rats nest behind the desk.
| yarcob wrote:
| Velcro cable ties can help.
| rahimiali wrote:
| A lot of confusion in the replies below. Here is an
| illustration of this point: Suppose you've saturated your
| communication bandwidth between two points, sending bits
| through the entire 500 Thz spectrum. If you have a wired
| connection, you can lay another set of cables between these
| points and send more bits. With wireless, there is nothing more
| you can do. No amount of beam forming helps you.
| 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
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Current laser com systems are getting multiple bits _per
| photon_ - it seems that the communications field will keep
| pushing the limits until there is simply no business case,
| and then push some more. Really, the only limit is Shannon
| 's limit, but that's only concerned with data rate. The
| modulation schemes that sit on top of the raw data is where
| all the capacity magic happens.
| henrikeh wrote:
| > the only limit is Shannon's limit, but that's only
| concerned with data rate.
|
| But that limit, the capacity, is also the maximum
| possible limit of information transfer on the channel.
| Modulation schemes don't increase it or change it, they
| just push the achievable information rate of the system
| closer to the capacity.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Modulation is definitely the wrong word in this context.
| I was thinking about channel coding and compression
| algorithms that increase the efficiency of the system
| without requiring additional capacity.
| XorNot wrote:
| I assume you're referring to something like this: https:/
| /www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170203102740.h...
| but this isn't a scalable transmission system since it's
| based on single photon detection, and single-photon
| detection is not a high bandwidth communications ability
| because you have to discriminate the photons. It's a far
| cry from "current laser communications".
|
| AFAIK the fastest IP network speed at the moment if 44.2
| Terabits/sec for a single light source (https://www.scien
| cedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200522095504.h...).
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| I'm talking about the laser communication satellites that
| NASA et al have launched into orbit, which are supposedly
| around 3-4 bits per photon.
|
| These are hitting upwards of 10Gbit speeds (not quite
| 44.2 Terabits) but still impressive nonetheless.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_communication_in_spac
| e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_PAyload_for_Laser
| comm_...
| 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.
| gumby 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.
|
| The beam forming and such slice bandwidth availability
| spatially (that's what the cell network does too) so more
| people can use the shared medium by...not sharing it! It's
| not like AM radio that gets sent in all directions
| regardless of whether there is someone in a given direction
| to listen.
|
| > With fibre, every customer gets the full spectrum.
|
| Well by definition that's true whether fibre or copper, but
| that fibre or copper is itself aggregated into connections
| to upstream provider, so you're just kicking the problem
| down the road. You don't really get the full bandwidth end
| to end.
|
| As I said I think fixed wireless is an acceptable
| transitional technology but wired makes more sense longer
| term for most locations.
| defterGoose wrote:
| >The beam forming and such slice bandwidth availability
| spatially (that's what the cell network does too) so more
| people can use the shared medium by...not sharing it!
| It's not like AM radio that gets sent in all directions
| regardless of whether there is someone in a given
| direction to listen.
|
| Nope. In theory yes, but unfortunately diffraction is
| going to get you every time if youre not transmitting in
| deep space.
| 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.
| yarcob wrote:
| >>Where I live, a lot of people have 3G internet.
|
| >Well, yes 3G is Shared Spectrum.
|
| Sorry, I think I meant 4G, not 3G. It's marketed as LTE
| here.
|
| > Exceed available bandwidth of what? Per Spectrum?
| Shannon-Hartley theorem?
|
| No, not Shannon-Hartley. That's just a mathematical
| model.
|
| When EM waves propagate, they are subject to diffraction,
| which limits both the amount of information that can be
| transmitted per time interval, and also the spatial
| resolution of the transmission. Even with antenna arrays
| or distributed antennas you can't get past diffraction
| limits; you can just get closer to them.
|
| To get around diffraction limits, you need to use higher
| frequencies / shorter wavelengths. (Which has the side
| effect that you loose the ability of signals to go around
| / through obstacles, so you need a lot more cell towers.)
|
| We're at a point where new technologies just make
| different trade-offs (eg. shorter wavelengths for areas
| with lots of wireless clients vs. longer wavelengths for
| sparse areas).
|
| With a fibre connection, you don't need to make these
| tradeoffs; you just need to dig up the ground and you can
| have as much bandwidth between two points as you want.
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > The difference in HD to 8k is 17x the bandwidth.
|
| Not practically. NetFlix will just compress it down to
| 3Mbit anyway like they do with 4k, but be able to call it
| "8k content!" and (probably) charge a premium for it.
| 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.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Not sure about that. With large screens 55" at home and
| over I can see a difference between FHD and 4K, enough to
| know I am having network problems when the streaming
| service starts to downscale the resolution in a 4k video.
| leetcrew wrote:
| that could be the bitrate more than the resolution.
| streams are highly compressed. would be interesting to
| see whether you prefer 1080p bluray over a 4k netflix
| stream (I suspect yes).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| 1080p at 65 34ppi
|
| 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.
|
| For reference someone with good vision ought to be able
| to distinguish up to about 115ppi at 8ft according to
| this source.
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-resolution-
| humans-...
|
| The source seems valid despite the mixed bag that is
| quora. Especially since I and many others can verify this
| in 10 seconds.
|
| Edit: I wrote 43 instead of 34 by accident. 65" and 1080p
| = 34ppi
| Syonyk wrote:
| > Especially since I and many others can verify this in
| 10 seconds.
|
| Try it with a high resolution video you've transcoded
| locally (so you're not dealing with streaming quality
| differences) at various resolutions. The human visual
| system is a lot less precise with video than it is with
| still images. A paused DVD frame often looks like a
| blocky, terrible mess, but it's perfectly fine when
| displayed as video.
|
| I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully,
| and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the
| difference. But, practically speaking, most people
| watching a decently encoded video won't see a huge
| difference from 1080p to 4k at typical screen sizes and
| viewing distances, and will see even less difference
| going to 8k.
|
| I honestly can't tell you if I'm watching 720p or 1080p
| content on our TV without looking at the source file
| info.
|
| You're confusing "What can be perceived" with "What
| actually matters." I'd argue 4k was a bit of a stretch to
| sell new TVs, and 8k is going to be even more so.
|
| We've hit, as someone else said, the 44kHz/16bit point of
| video. Encoding quality and bitrate matter a bit, just
| like mastering does with audio, but we're past the point
| of diminishing returns at this point.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you can't tell the difference between 34ppi and 65ppi
| and typical viewing distances your eyes just don't work
| very well and you just literally don't realize most
| people see better than you even if they need glasses to
| do so.
|
| We aren't talking about near the limits of human
| perception we are capable of perceiving 115ppi at a
| typical 8 ft viewing distance. 8K for a 65" screen is
| about the limit. 4k is itself about 1/4 the resolution we
| can perceive and 1080p is 1/16. You are saying that
| people can't on average distinguish between 1/4 the
| resolution we can perceive and 1/16th.
|
| The link I posted was the informed opinion of an
| electrical engineer that worked in display tech. If
| people really can't tell the difference between 4k and
| 1080p shouldn't there be scientific research by this
| point to show this? You can't because there isn't.
|
| You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is no
| difference between green and red! There is.
| Syonyk wrote:
| ... wait, _what_? 8 foot viewing distance with a 65 "
| screen? Ok, we have very, very different definitions of
| "typical" here. You're using a 50% larger TV from half
| the distance.
|
| I just measured our living room. We have a 43" (4k) TV at
| about 16' viewing distance. Just about every chart I can
| find on TV resolution vs viewing distance (assuming 20/20
| vision) indicates that I'm in the "720p is fine" region,
| on the border of "You really won't notice a difference
| from 480p." Which is consistent with my experience. I can
| see the difference between 720/1080/4k if I'm right on
| top of the TV, but once I'm back where I actually watch
| from, anything I notice is more a factor of bitrate than
| resolution - I can certainly tell the difference between
| a low bitrate MPEG2 source and a high bitrate h.264
| source, but that has nothing to do with the resolution.
|
| I don't really have the motivation tonight to pull out my
| trig tables (I'm about to watch a movie instead, of what
| resolution I honestly don't know), but... at least for my
| case, yes, I'm saying I can't tell the difference. And
| it's entirely possible my glasses need updating (quite
| likely, honestly), but the "TV size vs distance" charts
| I've found say nothing of what you're claiming either.
| And they're by people trying to sell TVs!
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Samsung says suggested diagonal size = viewing distance
| /2. So at 16 ft 96".
|
| To get a more precise fix you can break out a calculator
| or use this one based on THX recommended viewing angle.
|
| https://myhometheater.homestead.com/viewingdistancecalcul
| ato...
|
| It suggests that your tiny tv ought to be optimally
| viewed from 4.8 feet away and at 16 feet away you really
| ought to have a tv greater than 100 inches.
|
| Of course most people don't have 100+ inch tvs but they
| also don't watch tv from 16 feet away unless they are
| watching a 45-60 FOOT theatre screen. Play with some
| values in the calculator if you want to see how other
| people use tvs.
|
| People normally sit 8-10 feet from 60-75 inch tvs and use
| 40 inches for smaller rooms like bedrooms where they are
| 6 foot away.
|
| To be clear about the whole picture you are a fellow with
| bad vision watching a small tv from nearly 3 times
| further back as the rest of planet earth.
|
| At that distance your tv literally does already exceed
| average visual acuity and for your usage you are
| absolutely correct.
|
| Meanwhile the rest of us will benefit from up to 8k in
| the future.
| jen20 wrote:
| > Samsung says suggested diagonal size = viewing distance
| /2. So at 16 ft 96".
|
| Now I wonder what Samsung's motivation for this could
| possibly be?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You've a reasonable point but the other poster said
|
| >but the "TV size vs distance" charts I've found say
| nothing of what you're claiming either. And they're by
| people trying to sell TVs!
|
| The people selling TVs actually say you ought to buy a
| big ass TV.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > To be clear about the whole picture you are a fellow
| with bad vision watching a small tv from nearly 3 times
| further back as the rest of planet earth.
|
| My vision is perfectly fine, thank you very much, as you
| seem to insist on going on about how horrid it must be.
| The difference is entirely explained by the fact that I
| watch a reasonable sized TV from a perfectly sane
| distance in a living room that isn't a home theater room
| and has space for plenty of other activities. No idea how
| you get a TV 6' away in the bedroom, though, unless it's
| literally at the foot of the bed. I've never had one in
| there and never intend to.
|
| Your linked calculator suggests that the "optimum"
| distance for my TV is about 6' away, which I find quite
| absurd (having just tried it). I'm watching movies, not
| programming on it.
|
| We appear to have rather divergent views (and social
| group priorities, if yours has 60-70+ inch TVs at your
| suggested 8-10 foot viewing distance) on the nature of
| television viewing, and, as such, there's not an awful
| lot more to discuss.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think its a matter of divergent priorities. The
| argument up thread was that we had reached the zenith of
| resolution based on visual acuity. What we established is
| that this is almost entirely true or false based on the
| persons vision, size of screen, and viewing distance.
| Based on how the majority of the public uses TVs we have
| provably not reached such a point.
|
| In point of fact a medium sized living room is 12x18 with
| a TV on either a stand or the wall along the longer wall
| and seating that is around 2 feet deep and off the wall
| by at least a foot. This means that in an medium size
| living room there is 8-9 foot between seat and screen. In
| a large living room 15x20 there is still only 11-12 feet.
|
| People actually are putting 60-75 inch screens therein so
| we can support the position that the figures given by the
| calculator represent how people actually use TVs and
| supports the position that HD -> 4k -> 8k will be
| perceptively still beneficial given the constraints of
| human eyeballs.
| elyobo wrote:
| I'm interested in sources that establish "how the
| majority of the public uses TVs". I've personally _never_
| seen anyone use TVs in line with the recommendations from
| TV manufacturers screen size and viewing distance. Maybe
| this is a USA cultural thing (or, contrary, maybe my own
| observed viewing habits are a cultural AU /NZ thing).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What about a house size and falling TV prices thing? Half
| of the US couldn't sit 16 feet from their TV if they
| tried.
|
| 1/3 of the US lives in apartments and 80% live in urban
| area where housing is comparatively more expensive. Even
| for slightly larger houses its common to have a living
| room and a family room and give up a lot of space to the
| individual bedrooms. It's supper likely that the TV is in
| a room that is between 12-18 and 15-20. With the TV on
| the long wall.
|
| Also for some reason sticking your TV on a stand is still
| pretty popular vs putting it on the wall. This means that
| in a 14' room your tv is between 0' and 1' off the wall
| and your rear end is 3' off the wall. This puts as little
| as 8' between viewer and tv in 12-18 and as much as 12'
| in the larger room if they hang it on the wall.
|
| How the US population is distributed is kind of
| interesting.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/03/ho
| w-s...
|
| Regarding the question of average living space in the US
| people in the US almost universally prefer single units
| detached housing but as the song goes you can't always
| get what you want. Many for example would prefer to be
| close to urban settings with more jobs. Others can only
| afford to rent.
|
| Among renters, around 1/3 of the population, half live in
| 111 sq meters or less
|
| 1/3 of owners live in domiciles of 167 sq meters or less
| and and 60% of owners live in domiciles 222 sq meters or
| less.
|
| Combining renters and owners 77% of Americans live in 222
| sq meters, 54% live in 167 sq meters or less, 25% live in
| 111 sq meters or less. Some rounding and conversion
| between sq ft and meters.
|
| This means about a 1/4 each live in
|
| <= 111 sq meters
|
| 112-167 sq meters
|
| 168-222 sq meters
|
| > 222 sq meters
|
| https://www.frugalfringe.com/calculators/compare-your-
| homes-...
|
| The people paying lots for tiny apartments in the city
| think your 16' of open space in your living room is as
| unusual as you think they are with their relatively giant
| TVs in smaller spaces.
| elyobo wrote:
| I'm not the person 16' from their 43" TV ;)
|
| Interesting, but doesn't tell me much - I live in an
| apartment, well under 111sqm, and have a 55" TV around
| 12' from the couch - so still too small / too far away,
| according to recommendations. People with even smaller
| living space (at ~80sqm, my apartment is reasonably large
| for a two bedroom unit where I live) _may_ simply get
| smaller TVs to compensate, still being "too small".
|
| These are anecdotes. I'm curious about what people
| actually do, I don't know, and (contrary to your
| assertions about what most people do) it doesn't sound
| like you do either.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I showed with data how many people live in relatively
| small spaces and asserted but didn't prove that Americans
| often devote much of their space budget to bedrooms and
| houses which have both a living and a family room wherein
| they had more budget to spare. This last shouldn't
| require a ton of proof.
|
| My assertion is that due to the above asserted space
| constraints the majority of people in America are 8-12'
| from their TV. I also assert that the same people are
| buying 60"+ TVs
|
| I linked a source that suggested that people could
| distinguish up to 115ppi at 8' If I understand correctly
| that means they ought to be able to distinguish about
| 90ppi at 12'.
|
| If these assertions are correct most people would benefit
| from 90-115ppi and based on THX recommendations would
| benefit from the increasingly popular and cheap large
| screens that people are provably buying despite living in
| not so huge spaces. In fact tv size purchases are
| trending upward based on what people can afford.
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/lcd-led-oled-tvs/tv-
| trends-t...
|
| A 60" 4k screen is only 73 ppi meaning we aren't beyond
| human visual acuity yet and 4k at 75" we are down to
| 59ppi.
|
| The majority of consumers will based on good visual
| acuity be able to distinguish between 4k and 8k in the
| room sizes and screen sizes where such products would be
| relevant and applicable and a median American would
| benefit.
| majewsky wrote:
| I agree with Syonyk here. And since you bring up quality
| of vision, I'll note that I do have 20/20 vision because
| I'm wearing prescription glasses.
|
| > You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is
| no difference between green and red! There is.
|
| You're arguing against a complete strawman here. The key
| point that Syonyk was making is this:
|
| > I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully,
| and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the
| difference.
|
| If you're watching a nature documentary or anything else
| that puts an emphasis on the visuals, people are going to
| notice the difference by themselves. But most of the
| stuff we watch doesn't focus on visuals, it focuses on
| narrative. If I'm watching a legal drama, I don't really
| care if I can count the hairs in the lawyer's nostril or
| not. Again, I'll probably be able to tell apart the 4K
| version from the 1080p version from the 720p version of
| the lawyer's face's closeup, but even if I watch just the
| 720p version, it won't significantly impact my enjoyment
| of the narrative.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Although its not one singular person arguing I can't help
| but feel like the goal posts are pretty mobile here.
|
| First goalpost high dpi video is already outside the
| range of human perception.
|
| > 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.
|
| Second goalpost ok its not but its really close
|
| > I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully,
| and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the
| difference. But, practically speaking, most people
| watching a decently encoded video won't see a huge
| difference from 1080p to 4k at typical screen sizes and
| viewing distances, and will see even less difference
| going to 8k.
|
| Third goal post ok its actually clearly discernible but I
| mostly care about the story anyway.
|
| > But most of the stuff we watch doesn't focus on
| visuals, it focuses on narrative. If I'm watching a legal
| drama, I don't really care if I can count the hairs in
| the lawyer's nostril or not.
|
| Believe it or not but some people said the same about HD
| vs SD towards the beginning. It was complete bullshit
| then too. I too enjoy the story and psychological drama
| but its not books on tape. Film and TV are a visual
| medium wherein being able to see the world more clearly
| adds to the experience.
| Talanes wrote:
| Well of course presenting three seperate people's ideas,
| some of whom are refuting each other, as one continuous
| argument will come out looking ridiculous.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The first guy is a gentleman with bad eyesight watching a
| 43" tv from 16 feet away. If he watches it from any
| further away he wont be able to tell if its on. The
| second is inaccurate. The third is a complete cop out.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| It remains to be determined.
|
| Quadrophonic sound did not replace the "good enough"
| stereo even though humans can move their heads. Of course
| an 8K TV is just as easy to set up as a 4K one, unlike a
| quadrophonic stereo. And the functionality of
| quadrophonic records became available as "surround sound"
| which some people do have.
|
| It's possible there are enough people who will appreciate
| the difference for 8K to become established. Personally I
| doubt it, but it's certainly possible.
|
| Another possibility is that your TV watches you and
| provides just a 4K or 4K-ish image unless you walk close
| to your TV at which point it displays a higher resolution
| image where you are looking. Possibly with some hint-
| driven mix of AI upsampling and more image data.
|
| The opposite could be true of course with 8K VR rigs in
| every home. I also doubt it, but it's quite possible.
|
| The 8K-production -> 4K result is well established and
| will remain even if my guesses above turn out to be
| correct. That needs a lot of bandwidth but not at the
| point of viewing.
| 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.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Good point.
| 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.
| Sanzig wrote:
| TDMA/CDMA don't bypass information theory, though. Shannon
| always wins in the end.
|
| You can improve the situation with spatial beamforming,
| polarization isolation, mmWave bands, etc, but there
| eventually comes a point where the added complexity doesn't
| win over just hiring a few guys with a backhoe to run fibre
| down the street.
| tdeck wrote:
| Not sure why this is responding to my comment, but I was
| basically making that same point.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Oops, I meant to respond to the grandparent post. Sorry!
| tdeck wrote:
| No worries!
| 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]
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Does energy cost come into play here?
|
| Quality of Service is definitely one of the metrics ISPs
| track, wired is a more reliable way to guarantee service than
| wired in a fixed setting, upto the house.
| themulticaster wrote:
| But why would you want to have that? Simply put, with
| wireless you are trading the convenience of having no cables
| for essentially _everything_ : Wired has better throughput,
| lower latency, lower bit-error rates resulting in less
| retransmissions (better goodput).
|
| I'll admit there is one aspect where wireless might be
| interesting: Comparatively lower cost of initial set-up,
| especially when infrastructure is lacking. In other words, if
| you're trying to provide Internet access to a developing
| country (little existing cable/telephone infrastructure),
| wireless might be an interesting intermediate option. But if
| you're looking at a industrial nation where (rough guess)
| more than 90% of households _already have_ some kind of cable
| /telephone/fibre infrastructure, wireless would be a
| downgrade.
| esclerofilo wrote:
| This sounds like a very "faster horses" kind of comment.
|
| Simply put, with SSDs you are trading the convenience of
| having faster boot times for essentially everything: HDDs
| have (a lot) more space, lower prices, longer lifespans.
|
| Simply put, with electric cars you are trading the
| convenience of charging at home for essentially everything:
| Gas has higher range, maintenance is easier to find,
| filling your tank takes 2 minutes instead of hours and that
| tank's capacity doesn't diminish over time.
|
| Simply put, with screens you are trading the convenience of
| not having to deal with paper for essentially everything:
| Printers have better resolution, paper is easier on your
| eyes, it's more portable.
|
| I guess people just like convenience.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| Wireless is a worse product than wired, but you trade the
| worse product for the convenience of not having the wire.
| None of the examples you give match that pattern.
|
| SSDs are a better product than HDDs, they trade capacity
| for speed, but if you need capacity it's likely you don't
| really need the extra speed, and you're likely running
| into other bottlenecks anyway (a HDD can still saturate
| 1G Ethernet)
|
| Electric cars are a "worse" product, but for most use
| cases they're functionally equivalent. Most people don't
| drive farther than the range in a day, maintenance is at
| the same place as ICE, slow recharge times are easily
| negated by just plugging in every night and charging
| while you sleep.
|
| Paper is a worse product than a screen because a screen
| can be updated. It's about as easy to read, the
| resolution is about the same, they're equally portable
| (see a cellphone), but you can put just about anything on
| a screen and update it many times a second. You can't do
| that with paper, which is why screens have mostly
| replaced paper.
| XorNot wrote:
| You connect literally all those things to a wifi hub in your
| house most of the time, and the likelihood of big data
| consumption on all of them is quite low.
|
| It's a huge difference to think you're going to be servicing
| _all_ rather then _some_ user workstations data requirements
| with just todays celltowers - which isn 't to say you
| couldn't make it feel similar, but at some point you're
| cramming a 5G tower into every apartment and those still need
| fiber backhaul.
| 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...
| axaxs wrote:
| While I agree with you in principle, I don't in practice.
|
| The whole problem is that TV remotes keep changing. My TV now
| we have two remotes, one that came with the TV and one for
| Google TV.
|
| I used the TV remote the other day out of necessity...and it
| took me about 20 seconds to find the mute key. On the GTV
| remote, it's one of like 5 buttons.
|
| I'll always prefer physical buttons to menus, but not when
| the layout and meanings of said buttons change every year.
| Dort wrote:
| Our new* black TV remote includes a big, white with red
| text Netflix button. We don't have Netflix and thus will
| never use this button. The rest of this remote is fine.
|
| *a few years back now
| 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.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Also going down the smart device route. Recently tied 2
| switches and a remote fan into a single action. I've setup a
| time filter too and now my lights can be shut off and fan
| turned on when I go charge my phone before going to bed. I'd
| always wanted a "light alarm" to wake me up, now in the
| morning I set my lights to turn on if I'm not out of bed
| (phone still charging).
|
| Are there better places you could use the lights? Where the
| flexibility is more useful?
| aksss wrote:
| For this, I can't recommend and isy994 controller and Insteon
| light switches and outlets enough. You get physical control,
| automation via scripting and events, app control, and I've
| never had a (noticed) problem with the devices remembering
| state.
| 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.
| dpatterbee wrote:
| I think standing in front of the light is somewhat missing
| the purpose of it being connected to the network.
| Grustaf wrote:
| What is the point then? I'v never understood it, except as
| a novelty (my kids think it's cool).
| allenu wrote:
| I agree. I can't even turn them on and off away from my
| home for some reason. That was the main reason I bought
| them. The other reason was for the color temperature and
| dim control.
| 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.
| bspammer wrote:
| Voice controls via Alexa or any other home assistant actually
| work pretty well for smart lights. No fumbling with a device,
| just tell the lamp you want it off. You can also group them
| together usually to turn off multiple with a single command.
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| I find it interesting that the author is only considering optical
| media, and streaming media from a third party. If the only
| concern is about owning a copy of the content, then why not ditch
| the optical disks and go fully digital? If you set up your own
| cloud storage for them, you'll even get the benefit of being able
| to stream your media anywhere you have an internet connection.
| Plus with good data storage practices (e.g. protection from
| bitrot, off-site backups, etc.) your media will be safer when
| digitized than it could ever be when stored on optical disks.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I had to use a fax machine a few years ago because the university
| I was attending (UC Merced) would only accept some documentation
| in person, or by fax (waiving the annoying-to-opt-out student
| medical insurance). Why you couldn't submit it through the
| student web portal is beyond me.
|
| It was a bit of a hilarious experience plugging a VoIP box into a
| ~2010 Brother MFC printer/scanner.
|
| It might be the only time I've ever sent a fax in my entire life
| (and I'm 28).
| 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.
| sellyme wrote:
| > 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.
|
| For what it's worth I'm 15 years older than his son, and
| haven't used a landline in over a decade. I'm typing this
| from my office desk that _has_ a landline phone on it, that
| as far as I 'm aware has never rung.
|
| It's not an unreasonable conclusion to mark that prediction
| as correct.
|
| EDIT: actually upon closer inspection it appears that the
| phone on my desk might be VoIP, so I've not only not used a
| landline phone in a decade, I haven't even seen one.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > For what it's worth I'm 15 years older than his son,
| and haven't used a landline in over a decade
|
| In a similar boat. Last time I used a landline was about
| 20 years ago.
|
| In fact, in India the landline has all but vanished.
| asdff wrote:
| I actually do have a landline. My internet company told
| me my bill would go up by $10 a month if I dropped the
| landline service from my internet+landline combo. Welcome
| to the free market where I have this or DSL. I don't have
| a phone hooked up to it, nor do I even know the number.
| 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).
| sellyme wrote:
| I was born in 1996 and have never used a fax machine. Unless
| you live in Japan, you are being extremely conservative with
| not being comfortable predicting that until 2030.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Let's run them down one by one from the top.
|
| 1 - Effectively, ubiquitous wifi - The obvious direction of
| technology + market. Something Comcast / Xfinity was offering
| and expanding.
|
| 2 - Mobile devices with better cameras - Both were handheld
| with similar and overlapping technologies. The obvious
| direction of technology + market
|
| 3 - Landlines - The obvious direction of technology + market.
| I haven't had one since early 00's, and that was strictly as
| a back up for business purposes.
|
| 4 - Instant on - Who wouldn't want that? TVs do it. The
| obvious direction of technology + market.
|
| 5 - Non-UI UX - The obvious direction of technology + market,
| ask Siri or Alexa.
|
| 6 - SSD / Cloud - HDs are the fax machine of storage. The
| obvious direction of technology + market
|
| 7 - Movie theaters - The obvious direction of technology +
| market.
|
| 8 - Mouse? - See above about voice, and of course there's
| touch. The obvious direction of technology + market
|
| 9 - 3D glasses - Been hyped for the longest. The obvious
| direction of technology + market.
|
| 10 - No remote - Remember the infomercials, "the clapper"?
| Also, back to voice, or mobile device (see cameras). The
| obvious direction of technology + market.
|
| 11 - No desktops - He was midtaken.
|
| 12 - No phone dialing - Most comms aren't via phone number,
| and if they are no one dials. Ever since mobile devices -
| even flip phones - fewer and fewer were dialing. Again, the
| obvious direction of technology + market.
|
| 13 - Won't watch prime time - I owned a TIVO (DVR) in the
| late 90's and the promise of 500 channels is as old as cable
| TV. The obvious direction of technology + market.
|
| 14 - No fax machine - Never really a consumer product. Why
| would a 9 y/o need one in 2021? The obvious direction of
| technology + market
|
| 15 - No optical media - See SSD / cloud. The obvious
| direction of technology + market.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Almost all of these were overly optimistic bandwagon riding
| on replacements for things that already work fine and most
| people don't care about replacing.
|
| Fax and optical media are the big exceptions; good
| riddance. SSD/Cloud are being pushed by an oligopoly of
| mega-corporations and people don't have a choice. And even
| then, it's not like CDs are _rare_ like Betamax tapes.
|
| And almost of these are "obvious" directions with respect
| to _adoption_ beyond enthusiast types who like cool high-
| tech shit (with the above exceptions). They are niche, not
| poised for total takeover so complete that a child born in
| the 2010s would literally never experience them once ever.
|
| Don't confuse "hype in tech magazines" with "things people
| care about or want". And don't confuse "fun and/or useful
| technology that will gradually increase in popularity over
| time" with "overnight society-transforming".
| 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.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Bigger screen isn't attracting for me. Just sit near TV or use
| HMD is fine. Additionally, I won't see other people's head or
| blink smartphone.
|
| The only reason go to theater for me is great sound especially
| bass. Huge bass is really impossible at home but not all
| content requires such bass.
| 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.
| antihero wrote:
| > 7. He Won't Go to the Movies
|
| The reasoning behind this, that everyone is going to have a place
| big enough for a great home cinema setup is laughably privileged
| and off the mark. Such a huge amount of people live in absolutely
| tiny places with neigbours that mean the audio and video could
| _never_ be a decent home cinema.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Our 55" TV with a 5.1 sound bar setup is more than enough.
| Unlimited pee breaks, snacks and comfy seating. No need to
| dress up (or at all).
|
| Compare that to a 20-30 minute car trip one way + parking +
| walking to theatre, expensive snacks, loud-as-shit misbehaving
| kids interrupting the movie etc.
|
| We've paid for every single Disney+ "premium release" and
| haven't regretted a second. I don't think we're going to a
| movie theatre as a family ever again - as long as there's a
| simultaneous digital release.
|
| I'll go solo to see my AAA R-rated blockbusters if cinemas ever
| open again.
| leetcrew wrote:
| so for one thing, it really depends whether "great" means
| "loud" to you. I personally find the levels in most theaters to
| be uncomfortably loud, but maybe I'm just lame. unless you need
| to feel the floor shake, it's totally doable to have a great
| home theater experience in an apartment. $2000 can get you a
| pretty nice 55-60" tv and a capable audio system to go with it.
| $2000 is a lot of money for some people, but each movie outing
| for two is going to run $25+ these days. and this is for
| enthusiasts. a "just okay" HD setup is more like $500.
|
| I kinda suspect it will be more like a CD-quality audio
| situation. is 1411 kbps PCM better than a 128 kbps AAC? yes,
| but for most people it doesn't outweigh the convenience of
| being able to stream on your phone. and people have shitty
| earbuds anyway because they don't care.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Hard disagree from me. Large TVs have gotten so cheap and
| movies are so expensive. We found one of our TVs on the curb
| for free, and it's miles ahead of what we watched tv on when I
| was a kid. Who can afford to go to the movies on the regular
| but not afford a tv?
|
| And I know, cheap TVs aren't what you meant by "decent home
| cinema" but for many people a 60-75" tv with a midrange
| soundbar (or decent headphones) is plenty. Both those things
| can be had secondhand. Obviously below a certain income level
| it's still not doable, but I can't imagine being so poor I
| couldn't afford a secondhand tv but still willing to drop $15
| on admission then pay $8 for a popcorn.
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| Don't you have to pay extra for the movie anyways? I recall
| Disney recently charged a movie ticket price for the showing
| of their latest princess movie.
|
| At that point, you are really only saving on snacks. I agree
| that that's not thing, but its not as if buying the TV grants
| you the cost of admission to the movie as well.
|
| I don't own a TV and I still go to theaters for the
| occasional movie. I've always felt that I got my moneys worth
| when going out to the theater. Plus, having a large TV
| mounted somewhere is just another piece of furniture that I
| have to account for.
|
| I think a home theater system makes sense for a diminishing
| segment of the population. A theater is cheaper if you are
| only interested in major releases.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| > Don't you have to pay extra for the movie anyways?
|
| If you want to watch relatively recent movies you might
| have to pay extra, but not per viewer as you do in a
| theater.
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| I guess it does bring down the cost of the movie ticket
| overall.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I think this prediction is laughable. There are many people
| around the world who absolutely cannot afford a high quality
| picture and sound system at home, but can easily pay the
| occasional price of a movie ticket.
|
| Example in India. The average ticket price in a high-end
| movie theater is [?]239 ($3.18), most tickets are priced way
| below that [1]. The cheapest 4k 55" TVs I can find on
| amazon.in cost around [?]35,000 ($466)[2]. And these units
| will have the absolute crappiest screens and even worse
| sound. Anything smaller and you won't have a screen big
| enough to replace the theater-going experience.
|
| I think your perception is distorted by the extreme high
| price of movie tickets where you live ($15 would be insane
| here). However TV prices are comparable. So obviously the TV
| looks more attractive to you.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319496/movie-ticket-
| pric...
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.in/AmazonBasics-127cm-inch-Ultra-
| Smart/dp...
| donatj wrote:
| I have a 65" TV and a great 5.1 surround sound system and
| it's still incomparable to the feeling of actually being in
| the cinema with my vision filled and body rumbling, it's like
| comparing the experience of an electric bicycle to a Harley.
|
| What's more, the context switch alone is worth it. In the
| cinema my job is to watch the film. At home I'm thinking
| about chores and checking my phone. It's not remotely the
| same.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I don't think going to the movies is mainly about the pictures
| and sound. At least it was never for me. I think it's about the
| atmosphere and the event with friends, family or partner. It's
| just different watching a movie in the theater vs watching it
| at home.
|
| That's why I don't think it will go away anytime soon.
| 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.
| presentation wrote:
| Since moving to Japan I am so grateful that every convenience
| store has a coin operated fax machine!
| 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.
| porknubbins wrote:
| This list seems to have been written by a journalist type
| extrapolating from very visible consumer trends and completely
| uninformed by actual engineering or physical realities. I'm no
| expert but from what little I know about how complicated wireless
| standards are and the ever increasing bandwidth demands I can
| predict continued wired communication. And the mouse and keyboard
| vs touch thing should be pretty obvious for anyone who has done
| office work.
| twic wrote:
| Calling the camera prediction as right seems dubious. Smartphones
| have replaced low-end cameras, absolutely, but have not and will
| not replaced high-end cameras. At age nine, it's no surprise that
| his child has not used a high-end camera. It would be more of a
| surprise if he makes it through adulthood without ever using one
| once.
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| Folks already pay different prices for different movies
| on the streaming services. I don't think it is a big
| stretch to think that they would pay more for better
| movies.
| 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.
| wott wrote:
| > As a live theatre industry professional, movie theaters
| will go the way of theatre,
|
| They've already gone that way, in part, particularly during
| the 60s, 70s and 80s when a large share of cinemas closed.
| Then it sort of stabilised, at least in terms of screens:
| while cinemas kept on closing, some others got bigger. But
| those bigger ones rely on the business of blockbusters.
|
| Maybe it will start dropping again and turn the way you
| foresee, I don't know.
| 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.
| wingerlang wrote:
| Maybe this depends on country but I don't even remember
| having a bad experience due to any of this.
| 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.
| goda90 wrote:
| I think millennials will be the last major theater goers. We
| grew up through a time when the social pressure to ignore your
| phone was stronger than phone addiction, so theaters still
| serve as a place where we go and have an uninterrupted group
| experience. But phone usage during movies hurts that, and
| unless future generations can kick the addiction, then theaters
| will start to feel pointless as everyone is on their phone.
| 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.
| loughnane wrote:
| I'm optimistic that some theaters will survive. I think a good
| analogy is bookstores.
|
| In the 90s there were all sorts of bookstore chains, now it's
| pretty much B&N. At the same time, at least here in Boston,
| there are several long-standing bookstores (Harvard, book
| smith, trident, etc.) that still get a ton of traffic and are
| local institutions in their own right.
|
| So when I think of local independent theaters that already have
| a dedicated following (thinking mostly of Coolidge corner
| theatre) I think they'll find a way to thrive.
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| The 3D TV phase was so odd. It really seemed like an
| inevitability: there was a technological breakthrough, it was
| genuinely much better than what came before (the red and blue
| stuff), it was relatively inexpensive, and on paper it seemed
| like a strict improvement on the status quo (flat TV).
|
| But... somehow, I never actually found myself wanting it that
| badly at home. And I guess everyone else agreed because one day
| it just vanished.
|
| So few technologies follow a trajectory like that. Usually you
| either get a success or a failure, where successes only end once
| they're replaced by something new and strictly better. But this
| was truly a fad; it was kind of successful for a minute, and then
| everybody lost interest.
| brigandish wrote:
| Football (real football, the one with actual kicking) was
| pretty good in 3D. Occasionally it got a bit weird when the
| ball would move in a certain arc relative to the camera but
| mostly it was an improvement, and the crowd scenes were kind of
| mindbending[2].
|
| It's how I imagine football would look if the animators of the
| original Paddington Bear series[1] were rendering it.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mClA14WQFu8
|
| This is the best example I could find. Like 2D cutouts set out
| in 3D.
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnSGffAmFGk
| nly wrote:
| Bitcoin...
| taneq wrote:
| I'm still salty about that. I love 3D movies, even with the
| fuzziness and the glasses (I wear glasses anyway so, I mean,
| what's the big deal?) but nobody else can be bothered, and now
| you can't buy them any more. I really hope my current TV
| doesn't die.
| thiht wrote:
| Do you mind sharing what you love about 3D movies? Even
| ignoring the glasses and the fuzziness (and the headaches and
| the blurry vision in my case) I can't find one positive thing
| about it.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| I found 3D TV broke the experience. I'd get into a movie, then
| at some point into where the 3D effect would get shown off, and
| it would pull me out of the movie entirely. Perhaps that is
| more about poor usage of the technology than a problem
| fundamental to 3D TV.
|
| For a while, it was really hard to go to the theater.
| Everything interesting was only in 3D. I didn't want to pay
| more for an experience I liked less than the previous status
| quo.
| dandanua wrote:
| It's because of the lack of 3D content for TV. Occasional 3D
| movies, that you'd better watch in a cinema, is not a very big
| incentive. For games there are VR helmets.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| It wasn't just the content. It was the glasses weren't
| included and were almost always super expensive. Or at least
| costly enough to make it something you'd have to really
| really want.
| dandanua wrote:
| I guess it depends on the technology. Passive glasses
| (polarizers) shouldn't be expensive.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I'm convinced 3d tv/movies only had that resurgence because
| movie theaters were using the '3d' (along with some other
| gimmicks') to raise the price of tickets.
| SilverRed wrote:
| I wonder if we just hit a technology wall. The glasses were a
| pain, the non glasses ones didn't work so well and nothing else
| better could be found.
|
| People were willing to put up with the inconvenient version for
| the novelty but they quickly wanted something better and no one
| could provide better. 3D video may come back with mobile VR
| devices.
|
| I don't think that people simply didn't like 3D video, only
| that we weren't able to give a good enough experience for it
| and one day if someone invents something that does it better,
| it will come back.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't think it was ever about technology.
|
| Or perhaps you expected sculpture would have supplanted
| painting?
|
| 3D isn't really what we want for every medium. I would argue
| the same is true for VR.
| SilverRed wrote:
| I don't think 3D video was really a different class of
| media. 3D would never replace animation but imo real 3D
| would replace 3D projected on to a 2D screen just like 4K
| replaced FHD and FHD replaced HD.
| syoc wrote:
| Might have been the wrong form of 3D. VR has arguably been
| a larger success, even if it is exponentially more
| inconvenient to use.
| k4rli wrote:
| VR seems more promising than AR for consumers. Do regular
| people really have valid AR use cases?
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I honestly think AR is poised to blow up, there has been
| a lot of sustained activity in the space for years -
| including lots of exploration of business/industrial uses
| - and we haven't even seen a true consumer device yet
| (Google Glass doesn't count). It's going to
| simplify/streamline a decent subset of the top uses for
| smartphones, while also providing novel experiences.
|
| I do believe VR is here to stay, but I really think
| that's going to be more gamer-centric. The 'social'
| aspects of VR seem to be very, very niche; most of what
| users are talking about (and spending time/money on) is
| games.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I think that is a good take. It is a technology wall, but I
| have no idea what technology would make truly painless 3D.
| axiolite wrote:
| > I have no idea what technology would make truly painless
| 3D.
|
| Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.
| philwelch wrote:
| It's honestly just more trouble than it's worth. I have a 3D TV
| (by relative accident) and I've never used the 3D
| functionality. Even going to the movie theater it was honestly
| never a big draw once I got over the novelty of it, which
| happened approximately 2/3 of the way through Avatar. That was
| almost the only content that was ever specifically made for the
| 3D format--a quickly forgotten, crappy science fiction movie
| that wasn't even that much better in 3D compared to 2D.
|
| VR _might_ be another story, since VR content has a much more
| convincing 3D effect. But that entails pretty fundamental
| changes to cinematography, and requires the viewer to wear a
| massive headset that blocks out the real world; having some
| friends over for a movie night is virtually impossible.
| m12k wrote:
| As someone who had had a surround sound setup, but then not
| even bothered to set it up after moving, it was pretty
| obvious to me even back then that 3D TV was in the same
| category of "technically better but practically pointless"
| for the vast majority of movies, which people would forget
| about as soon as the ads for it stopped.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Avatar never impressed me with 3D. Honestly I don't think any
| 3D has "wowed" me since Captain EO at Disneyland ;)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| VR movie watching is surprisingly good, works well with the
| few 3D movies that exist too because it can just send a
| different frame to each eye rather. Definitely can lose
| yourself in the film in the same way you do at the cinema.
|
| Check out Big Screen too, lets you watch movies together with
| people in the same virtual space, might not be great for an
| IRL movie night but its great for a remote one.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Check out Big Screen too, lets you watch movies together
| with people in the same virtual space, might not be great
| for an IRL movie night but its great for a remote one.
|
| I've had enough of that remote shit over the past year and
| I don't think I'm the only one.
| piotrkaminski wrote:
| > Avatar [...] --a quickly forgotten, crappy science fiction
| movie
|
| I mean, you're not wrong, but I think it's fair to note that
| yours is not a popular opinion [0]. :D
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56397511
| philwelch wrote:
| I saw it in theaters because it was advertised to be the
| best use of the new and improved 3D film technology at the
| time, so I was part of that high box office gross. Despite
| the strong positive reception at the time, though, the
| movie didn't really seem to achieve a lasting legacy.
| slavik81 wrote:
| Avatar 2 is scheduled for next year, and there's a movie
| every second year until 2028.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It's been 'scheduled for next year' for almost a decade
| now. ...
| slavik81 wrote:
| It doesn't sound like they really started until 2017, but
| the movie appears to be in post-production. I think the
| delay from 2021 to 2022 was about finding a good release
| window.
| widforss wrote:
| How are they going to sell tickets to a sequel to a movie
| nobody remembers anything about except "blue creatures"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxp1IBK1OPI
| colinmhayes wrote:
| They just made king kong vs godzilla. Plot doesn't matter
| in action movies.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Spoiler: King Kong outlives Godzilla.
| ghaff wrote:
| It was an outstanding technical achievement for the time.
| And enjoyable enough. But it really wasn't a great movie.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Hmmm, highest grossing film. Crappy, quickly forgotten.
|
| That everything above is true I can easily hold in my mind.
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| Only movie I saw that was good in 3D Imax.. Yeah. Not the
| business at home model of today, but worth something at
| the time.
| condemil wrote:
| Resident Evil: Afterlife was good in 3D, cannot tell the
| same about other 3D movies though.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I was buying a TV at the time and got one that
| supported 3D. I have maybe a half-dozen 3D movies and I'll
| pull one out once a year or so. Gravity is probably the best
| example of using 3D.
| hannob wrote:
| Like 3D cinema.
|
| I found it interesting 2 times, then annoying, and then just
| started avoiding cinemas that didn't show the movie I wanted to
| see in 2D.
|
| Or the Nintendo 3DS. I quickly found the best thing about its
| 3D feature was that you could turn it off.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| My dad has a 3d TV and I found the main issue was just the
| fundamental physics - like unless the TV is absolutely massive
| like a cinema then there are fundamental limits on how "3D" it
| can appear.
|
| This meant that even the relatively small amount of 3D content
| didn't really feel that 3D, it just felt like more realistic
| 2D.
|
| And if there's only a small amount of content you might as well
| just go to the far superior 3D cinema for the experience.
| 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.
| aksss wrote:
| And also just boring, mundane "futurists" - it's not as hard
| to predict the direction of technology as the timing.
| Futurism is a kind of inspiration porn, I'd say.
| 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.
| bemmu wrote:
| Agree with you. I think we've just entered a period of
| rapid adoption, and the driver is FB making better and
| better low-cost entry level devices, hopefully pulling
| along more and more competitors.
| 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.
| toxik wrote:
| Right, but as I'm sure you realize, if that's the case,
| then mass-adoption of VR is a non-starter. We /love/
| games and movies that transport us to places. There are
| very very few movies with a static camera, though I do
| happen to like them.
| 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.
| toxik wrote:
| I was "walking" around in some VR meeting thing called
| RecRoom, I wanted to throw up. If I was teleported, it
| was mostly okay, still nauseating but holy cow it
| physically hurt to move like that.
| 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.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Arm-chair psycho-psychologist: Extra attuned to your
| eyes, and you get VR sickness because your body keeps
| refusing to follow what your eyes are telling your brain.
| Extra attuned to your body, and you get motion sickness
| because your eyes keep refusing to confirm what your body
| is telling you.
|
| Anecdotal evidence: if you get motion sickness, you can
| help mitigate it by focusing on the horizon (ie, feed
| your eyes what your body is already telling you).
|
| If you get VR sickness, maybe you can concentrate your
| focus on your body/breath to mitigate.
| 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
| 174SIGSEGV wrote:
| As an aside, there are also ISO B and C series paper,
| although I believe that the C standard was withdrawn
| somewhat recently. The area of B_n is the geometric mean
| of that of A_n and A_{n-1}, while the area of C_n is the
| geometric mean of that of A_n and B_n. Without context,
| C4 paper sounds quite scary, until you realize it's
| probably related to A4 paper in some way. As to why it
| isn't just called A3.75, I have no idea.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Shoot, missed the edit window. Thanks for the heads up,
| though.
| 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.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >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 is true, at least in part, because Zoom meetings
| allow this, not necessarily because this is the behavior
| that an employer views as ideal. If VR technology was
| well-developed, I think its likely that many employers
| would hold VR meetings for the very reason that employees
| would be forced to give 100% of their attention.
| Certainly this is true when it comes to schools, which
| have done everything possible to ensure that students are
| paying 100% attention all the time, aren't using
| supplemental materials during tests (cheating), ect.
|
| >When North Carolina A&T State University junior Arielle
| G. Brown took her International Marketing exam in
| September, a cheating-detection program analyzed her
| behavior through a computer webcam the entire time. After
| the test, her associate professor fired off a furious
| email ripping into her class for some "negative behavior"
| the software had flagged.
|
| >"A STUDENT IN 6 MINUTES HAD 776 HEAD AND EYE MOVEMENTS,"
| she wrote, adding later, "I would hate to have to write
| you up."
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/12/test
| -mo...
|
| We may not all end up choosing (or be forced) to hold VR
| meetings in cyberspace, but to seems virtually (pun
| intended) certain to me that many will.
| majewsky wrote:
| After having spent one year in home office, there is
| literally no household chore that I have not done during
| a meeting yet.
|
| Easy tier: folding laundry, cooking, most other things
|
| Medium tier: doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom
| (need to have a towel at the ready if I need to unmute)
|
| Hard tier: vacuuming (makes it hard to listen to what's
| being said, so I've only done it once very briefly until
| now)
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Vacuum robot FTW! Can set it going from the web
| interface, direct drive it or detail zones.
| 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.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| I doubt anything like Emacs will be the future. Emacs was a
| fluke as were the PCs of a peculiar time where the stars
| aligned for brief moments.
|
| Commercial interests play opposite to creation of anything
| like Emacs, where everything is customizable and anything
| can interact with everything.
|
| Unless interoperability is mandated somehow, I do not see
| anything like Emacs in our future.
| Sargos wrote:
| This is exactly what I want to build and think it's one of
| those foundational building blocks that we can't believe we
| lived without. Files stored on IPFS with their hash being
| their universal ID. Metadata would be associated with that
| IPFS hash such as name, maintainer, description, etc. The
| storage would be a smart contract on Ethereum with the key
| being the IPFS hash and the value being the current
| metadata. It's basically a distributed web app store. Throw
| on a Sybil resistant voting mechanism and you have a
| discoverable shared and programmable dataset of
| applications and modules.
|
| If a project like this exists I unfortunately haven't come
| across it.
| young_unixer wrote:
| > 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future...
| today hardly anyone believes apps are the future.
|
| I'm still torn about this. I hope the web wins, but I don't
| really know if the average mobile user even uses a web browser
| anymore.
|
| And PWAs have been a failure so far, maybe Svelte or
| WebAssembly could fix this, but I wouldn't put my money on it.
| Tepix wrote:
| I avoid apps whenever i can. A web based solution often
| provides better privacy.
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| I still use safari on an iphone6 to browse youtube, reddit,
| and whatever else.
|
| I like that it saves my tabs for me. I have old ones sitting
| from nearly 5 or 6 years ago that I still go back to
| occasionally.
|
| I also like purposefully obfuscating browsing social media
| and youtube so that I spend less time there and am less
| inclined to use it all day. I can even have a reddit account
| without ever getting any kind of push notifications. Its
| great!
|
| That being said, I am probably going to get a linux phone
| once this one finally leaves me, so I do not represent a
| large segment of the consumer base.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Browsers aside, a very large number of apps embed web content
| 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
| Tepix wrote:
| With 3D printers, it's not so much the price that's an issue.
| It takes away a lot of space and it needs calibrating,
| adjusting etc.
|
| To me (very occasional user) it seems like going to a fab lab
| and using their $3000 3d printer is the better option.
| asdff wrote:
| Sure, things that were produced by teensy niche companies got
| cheap when the met the economy of scale. That's true for
| everything, not just tech. On the other hand, phones are way
| more expensive today than when the original iPhone came out
| for 'just' $499, while wages have held steady over that time.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The iPhone SE is $399 and is a massive improvement over the
| original iPhone.
|
| What has happened over that period is people's expectations
| have inflated (with some help from the marketers).
|
| Oh and wage growth over that period has been reasonably
| strong (until 2020): https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/
| embed/?s=unitedstawagg...
| Aachen wrote:
| DRAM would like to have a word with you. And I can't say
| laptops have improved much for a _decade_ now (you 'll see an
| increase in quality per euro still, but it's very marginal
| and not a single component made leaps), I was rather
| disappointed when getting a new one after my 2011 model. Back
| in the good old days, three years would go by and I'd love
| the speed of a new one, or of ssds, or the gigabit ethernet,
| or the 802.11n.
|
| Smartphones too. 2011->2017 changed big time - in hardware at
| least. But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a
| 1000 euro phone. You'll get a better camera and some gimmicks
| like oled (objectively better, I went from oled to lcd and it
| bothered me for weeks, but honestly I'll use a phone for
| years, I'm used to it now, and don't miss it at all anymore)
| or usb-c. Can't do much more without reducing battery life or
| other aspects. And sometimes they do -- make a worse phone
| with better specs I mean. People don't mind because it's all
| the same anyway, the tech is stagnating there.
|
| As a rule, you're right, but the exceptions and limitations
| are also everywhere.
| fomine3 wrote:
| > But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a
| 1000 euro phone.
|
| That's the OP's point.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| My 11mo will never replace a lightbulb.
| mhb wrote:
| Get a taller ladder.
| peanutz454 wrote:
| I am interested in the kids raspberry pi setup.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's a Kano Computer Kit.
| 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
| Narishma wrote:
| Isn't that because the OS is in ROM?
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| It helped at the time, certainly. An SSD in a modern
| computer is much faster than ROM from back then, though,
| and instead of an 8Mhz CPU we have 2000+ MHz CPUs.
| pmyteh wrote:
| For the early versions on Archimedes hardware, yes. Later
| versions had increasing amounts on disk, which increased
| the boot time from 'nearly instant' to merely 'fairly
| quick'.
|
| Although recent versions of RISC OS are now entirely
| softloaded, the increased speed of the Raspberry Pi and
| other modern hardware platforms has cheerfully reduced boot
| time again: by modern standards RISC OS is tiny!
| 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.
| sellyme wrote:
| Depends which country's side, I guess.
| ironmagma wrote:
| I think it will be decades before self driving cars replace
| humans entirely. The transition from 0 to "some" is happening
| at snail's pace, and even once the cities are conquered, there
| is the enormously long tail of edge cases like countryside
| driving that will not be ready for a very long time, if ever.
| Even a 2020 Roomba can't vacuum your entire house.
| [deleted]
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| So stop making useless predictions then
| impalallama wrote:
| > "by the time my son enters grade school," remote controls would
| be replaced by either smartphone apps or gesture / voice
| commands."
|
| I do not and hope I never will live in this man's future
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| My TV's, garage, and ceiling fans can and are controlled via
| Apple TV remote app and Home app. If the remote doesn't happen
| to be near us, we don't see a need to reach for it. My toddlers
| even know how to use it, so I can see them using apps most of
| the time instead of dedicated remotes.
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