Predictions for the future – Technology your kids will laugh at
Shane Richmond, our Technology Editor, recently asked for ideas about “Technology your kids will laugh at”, here’s mine.
Edit: Here’s the story – 50 technological advances your children will laugh at.
Hard Disks Drives:
HDDs they represent the last vestiges of clumsy mechanical devices within a computer/computing device. They are slow, very heavy, power hungry and prone to failure. Solidstate and flash memory driven devices are the only way forward. Currently expensive and not able to store then same amount of data as exists HDDs, but then again so was the 32Mb Winchester Drive I had 15 years ago.
ADSL/ADSL2+
8Mb ADSL is the new dialup. 100Mbit and Gigabit connections to the home will become de facto, see Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html)
DVDs
Expensive, clunky, ‘meatspace’ media distribution model. Net-connected DVD models with HDDs (see above) already exist and with distribution/download methods such as that used by the Steam games network help by keeping an account with your purchased programmes which can be ‘installed’ over and over again on whenever and wherever you want.
Storing content locally (music,. photos. film etc…)
Dependent on hi-speed network connections (see Nielsen’s Law) why run your own RAID/storage solution when you can simply store it in the cloud. Already limited P2P solutions exist for unlimited storage such as Wuala, expect low cost commercial versions which merge both P2P and professionally managed storage/cloud solutions.
Having to pay for content access
Sky/Virgin/whoever will provide you greater access to content or features by having you provide personal information available to advertisers, this will lead to ads being delivered to your TV based on your preferences/propensities ie; we’ll all see different ads when watching the same programme.
Not getting paid for doing nothing.
Distributed computing system will allow you to rent out your own processing power to the highest bidder or exchange it for content/services.eg; currently Easynews (a usenet provider) gives you extra download bandwidth if you join their World Community Grid Team (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/).
