Dead Technology Walking....

[Buffy]

In the "Do you remember..." thread, Jay-qu just wrote:

I can imagine someone finding this thread in 10-15 years and listing DVD, LCD, petrol fueled cars..

....sooooo, what extremely popular technologies today are just about ready to jump the shark?

 

21st Century Nostradamus,

Buffy

[Boerseun]

Hard drives!

 

Okay, they won't disappear tomorrow, but advances in solid-state memory might make access time due to head movement and platter rotation an issue.

 

We now have plenty of Gigs stored on a 2D surface the size of a postage stamp. I predict that pretty soon the matrix it consists of will be accessible in 3D, in other words, instead of a 2D XY-addressable memory module, we'll have 3D XYZ-addressable memory 'cubes'.

 

Say a 1cm square can hold 1Gig.

 

If we make a 1cm cube with the same density, we'll have the cube of the square root of 1Gig available, which is around 31Gigs. And that's one cubic centimeter. How many cubic centimeters fits into an average hard drive?

 

Platters are limited due to their two-dimensional nature.

 

Seeing the future,

Marty McFly

[Buffy]

This one's dangerous because its been predicted many times before: cans for canned food.

 

Have you seen these packets that tuna has been coming in for the past couple of years? I love them because they store easier on the shelf in the kitchen, and if the designers could standardize their size, they'd be great for all kinds of things including soups and such....

 

Efficient pantry space,

Buffy

[Buffy]

Over the air TV and radio (FM and AM) broadcasting.

 

All Sat or broadband wi-fi transmission is here and better, but the greedy folks who own it are too stupid to realize that if they made it dirt cheap they'd kill the competition....

 

Dish on my forehead,

Buffy

[InfiniteNow]

Automobiles powered by combustion engines.

Cable boxes.

Hard line telephones.

Treadmills.

 

 

 

Some other fun ideas here:

NBC.com > Late Night with Conan O'Brien > In The Year 2000

[freeztar]

Telephone Utility Lines (TULs).

For pretty much the same reasons mentioned by Buffy in the post above.

Of course, the mobile phone industry has not helped the over-land-based phone industry one bit (not to mention fiber optics).

 

Hyperterra Telephone Utility Lines still exist because of businesses and rural residents, but they are on the way out, imo. The improved road safety and aesthetic value of removing ubiquitous telephone poles and lines is already a good incentive to do away with this relatively ancient (yet quite ambitious) technology.

 

Goodbye answering machines,

Freezy

[Jay-qu]

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

[freeztar]

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

 

I agree and think that this forms a good correlation with Boerseun's idea.

[Boerseun]

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

Seems like you were on to something here, Jay - went to a store and saw a silly 512MB MP3 player on the shelf, and asked the salesman why anybody would buy such a small MP3 player. Salesman told me that it was old stock, but they weren't gonna stock them anymore, cause nobody's buying them.

[CraigD]

I’ve a superstition that any tech prediction I make is through some mysterious mechanism prohibited from occurring, so won’t make any here.

 

In the early 1980s, I predicted pretty much what Boerseun is in post #2 - that disk drives would be obsolete within a decade, replaced by huge static memories – SRAM - the sort nowadays found in the Caches of most CPUs, and the main memories of high-end beasts like true supercomputer. I predicted that SRAM cost would drop dramatically (has happened), size would shrink to less than DRAM (hasn’t happened), and that magnetic disks would hit a feature-size and manufacturing quality wall (didn’t even come close to happening).

 

Conceding that magnetic disks have reached awesome densities and low costs, I remain amazed that SRAM has not altogether displaced DRAM – it’s faster, now only slightly more expensive, tremendously power efficient, does’t clog up buses and CPUs with computationally valueless refreshes, can be scaled to ridiculous capacities, and architecturally aesthetic. DRAM is … entrenched in computer architecture and manufacturing.

 

Well, OK, I can’t resist declaring a Dead Tech Walking: DRAMs.

[Jay-qu]

DVD and HD-DVD.. I dont think Blu-ray will last too long either, it just didnt seem like a big enough jump in capacity for me.

[Boerseun]

Well, not making a prediction, but more of an observation:

 

CD-ROMs

 

Who buys 'em?

 

DVD's have well and truly snuffed CD's, and I've got a sneaky suspicion that more and more artists will be bringing out albums with bonus content which will require at the very least a DVD - so much cheaper than double-cd albums, productionwise. This will kill the CD's Last Stand.

[Ahmabeliever]

Video/DVD stores, more a business than tech. DVD sales will remain but only for collectors who want something to physically own.

 

We'll just get it all streaming online from firms that own the rights to have hard drives full of digital files to view. Every series you ever wanted to watch, every game, documentary, eventually it'll be in one place with one price to view or listen to all you can.

 

Of course, this backwoods will want better connection speeds for that.

 

Streaming could stop copying too, to an extent. It would reduce piracy by having far less actual hard copies out there to copy, and access to view/listen being streamed can be encrypted???

 

I'm a computer tard, so correct me where I'm wrong.

[CraigD]

Streaming could stop copying too, to an extent. It would reduce piracy by having far less actual hard copies out there to copy, and access to view/listen being streamed can be encrypted???

 

I'm a computer tard, so correct me where I'm wrong.

What Ahma’s describing, far from being ‘tarded, is pretty much the holy grail of digital rights management, a mingled legal-technical concept commonly called such things as “Trustworthy Computing” by its proponents, and “being ownzed” by its opponents.

 

Technically, trustworthy computing involves such things as embedding decryption programs into devices that can’t be reprogrammed, like a DVD reader or a display screen, and getting rid of simple, unencrypted outputs like headphone and standard video jacks – a strategy commonly dubbed “analog sunset”.

 

Socially and legally, it broaches profound questions, with which (though it would likely take him a few days to get up-to-speed on the technical language) a reincarnated Adam Smith would feel right at home, and about which hoards of techy-legal types, such as Lawrence Lessig, have and write volumes of strong opinions now, questions that IMHO can be distilled to a single essential question: Should people be allowed to own valuable things, or only be allowed to rent them?

 

I’ll use Lessig’s terms here, simplified from the full context in which he frames them: a culture that presumes that people should be allowed to own is a Freedom Culture; one that presumes that people should be required to rent, a Permission Culture. The roots of this distinction goes back to old questions about class-based society, mostly involving land, and distill down to something like: should the person who farms the land own it, or pay rent to a landlord for the right to farm it? The modern, steaming video-relevant version is something like: should I be able to buy a copy of a movie or a song, or only rent the right to use it to use it?

 

This is not, I think, a question likely to be clearly answered soon or ever, so I’m personally content to try to be an informed spectator, reading folk like Lessig and trying my hand at some of the underlying technical issues and merrily shelling out whatever $$s it takes to see and hear what I want to see and hear, confident that I’ll not be dragged off to federal prison for an IP crime.

[Buffy]

A not completely separate issue with Permission Culture, is *production* of content. One of the things that really killed DAT tapes (anyone here old enough to remember them?), was that in order to create tapes that were copyable more than a handful of times required "professional DAT" equipment that cost about 10 times more than a standard DAT recorder. Those of us who wanted to consider it as a possible format in the Garage Band segment of the market (which the folks at Guitar Center will tell you is 90% of the market) took one look and said "you've got to be joking," and it died a horrible death in just a few years.

 

If you're going to have a Permission Culture, there's an assumption that there's a "priesthood" that is allowed to bless content for distribution by allowing the "keys" to be used to grant "distributability" to a particular work.

 

There is no "trusted computing" without this "priesthood" because it allows any nefarious person to widely distribute untrustworthy content. On the other hand, we all know what happens when such absolute power is granted...

 

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent, :)

Buffy

[Ahmabeliever]

Hmm. Theorising follows...

 

I think it is possible ( and perhaps the only way round the level of piracy practised today) to put central distribution together, the legal structure ie: who gets the money, formed in such a way that the studios and artists are paid for their works sidestepping many of the current pen pushing middle men.

 

Artists like Radiohead and many others have shunned their recording companies and distributed music on the net. It is only a matter of time before many more follow suit. note - Start-ups could easily emerge today having lots of local music content for sale. 2-3 people promoting hundreds of acts.

 

The fact that very little management could supply a vast amount of entertainment is not a bad thing at all. It's managing that management.

There should be no favouritism or sleeping your way to the top type behaviour in this way too, the viewers get to say who's best through the hits they log, reviews, and ratings.

 

Everybody, every act, show, etc, gets to be seen, within the legal limits of the region.

 

We in New Zealand and Australia have a group called APRA. APRA collect fees from every public performance of another musicians (registered) material. Be it radio, played in a pub, club, a covers band... APRA then redistribute this money to the artists.

 

A non profit organisation sponsored by government should get the distribution rights to 'the big database'.

 

Public pays per view, or they pay a lump sum and it is divided between the material that customer watches over the time frame of the contract. This way, despite it being a potential monster, a big database is like our APRA, giving the money to the artists and programming we actually want.