Technology: what's next for the extinction list?

[dellstart]

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/techno ... 1qczz.html

dial up phone anyone , records , change on buses?

[Spec8472]

In Sydney at least, paying for Bus fairs is going strongly towards prepaid.
It's more ecnomical, flexible (multi-trip, multi-mode), and faster.
My monthly ticket allows unlimited train use within a wide area, and unlimited use of any bus, ferry, or light-rail(tram).

Removable media (cd, dvd, bluray, and usb drives) will be gone in 5-10 years where sufficient broadband is available.

Spinning rust, also known as hard drives will be gone in 5-10 years too.. replaced with solid state storage for local use, and online stores for everything else. exception will be server farms or those with big-data requirements.

[Fel]

It's the march of advancement.

Here in America, they wonder where all the jobs are going, when all they have to see is that advancement means less people needed to do even more overall work.

We're advancing ourselves into massive unemployment :/

[Phantom]

Makes you wonder what US companys will do

when no one in the US can afford to buy their products any more.
because there are no longer any jobs.

I guess Greed always out shines Balance.

I think i even heard they are outsorceing farming now!
Maybe we should Outsorce Congress!.


Wonder when we will first start seeing Jobs Outsorced to the US?



Phantom

[Spec8472]

As much as it sucks to be on the receiving end of a redundancy, it's the price of progress.
We don't mourn the loss of buggywhip manufacturers, or telex operators.

[zedd]

Removable media (cd, dvd, bluray, and usb drives) will be gone in 5-10 years where sufficient broadband is available.

I am not sure if you are saying that actual removable formats will be gone or all removable medias. I think there will always be removable medias. For some information people want to keep a backup/copy themselves not depend on 3rd parties (or they don't trust companies/gov with it). so I think there will always be some sort of removable media.

[Spec8472]

Removable media (cd, dvd, bluray, and usb drives) will be gone in 5-10 years where sufficient broadband is available.

I am not sure if you are saying that actual removable formats will be gone or all removable medias. I think there will always be removable medias. For some information people want to keep a backup/copy themselves not depend on 3rd parties (or they don't trust companies/gov with it). so I think there will always be some sort of removable media.

Perhaps. But with universal high bandwidth fiber to the home, the uses for removable media will dwindle to edge cases.

Already people are switching to online backups (eg crashplan), and automatic syncing of data (eg dropbox) instead.

With appropriate protection you can ensure no other can decrypt your data.

[kal]

Wonder when we will first start seeing Jobs Outsourced to the US?



Phantom

Ive already seen this. in my company we have outsourced production of raw parts to china for several years now, but now are seeing that bring these parts to American manufacturers is cheaper.

[dellstart]

Reminds me of the convo , I had with my daughter.she was asking what folks used to do( ie in the days before mobile , cell phones ) , when they went to the store and forgot something.
Replied, my dearest daughter guess what? they forgot it

[flash]

Perhaps. But with universal high bandwidth fiber to the home, the uses for removable media will dwindle to edge cases.

The problem, in my opinion, is that widespread and high-bandwidth Internet access is far from a worldwide reality. For some specific uses - mainly those where the file-size hasn't grown parallel to the capacity of storage media - the Net can be a perfect replacement to removable media, even today. But it's impossible to generalize that, because for every use you can name, I can counter with two that wouldn't work in many ways. I'd even go so far as to accuse, that the average broadband connection speed has in many cases grown much slower than the amount of data that needs to be transferred.

I obviously have no idea about the situation overseas - be it in the US, Asia or the rest of the world - but broadband access here in Europe isn't developed as far as one would guess. Yes, there are currently 75% of all households in my native country of Austria that are presently subscribing to a broadband access to the Net, but that number doesn't tell the whole story. It's all in the definition of the word "broadband"!

For example, the 32% of households who access the Internet through mobile technology (3G) all count as having broadband Internet access, no matter their actual connection speed. The fact of the matter is, that the mobile Internet speeds are so poor that they're on average below 3 MBit/s. While the bandwidth is higher for fixed connections (DSL, cable, fibre, public WiFi, etc), the average Austrian will still have to be happy with only about 4 to 5 MBit/s. Myself, I started out with a perfectly working 8 MBit/s connection via DSL almost ten years ago, but with no improvements in technology since and a much higher number of subscribers, the quality of my DSL connection has actually gone downhill to about 6 MBit/s nowadays.



Anyway, I'm expecting that the current generation of gaming consoles (anything from XBox via PlayStation to the whole Nintendo stuff) will be as good as it will ever get. The whole gaming industry has been changing in the past years, casual games have become hugely popular, most successful games have either a multi-player component or feature an entirely online-based experience. So far we've seen, that one doesn't need a dedicated gaming console to play a casual game, because they're fine with your average smart-phone or tablet and may even be run in your browser. In the future, I expect to see more changes along the same path, with the way clearly pointing towards fewer full-prize games and a much larger variety of smaller games both in cost of development and complexity.

[Spec8472]

Perhaps. But with universal high bandwidth fiber to the home, the uses for removable media will dwindle to edge cases.

The problem, in my opinion, is that widespread and high-bandwidth Internet access is far from a worldwide reality.

Yes, and that's what I said
"Removable media (cd, dvd, bluray, and usb drives) will be gone in 5-10 years where sufficient broadband is available."

I'm well aware that broadband isn't as well developed as we might like, but this is changing.
In places where Governments or Private organisations are going ahead with large scale fibre roll-outs, the speeds are leaping.

For instance, at the moment my home connection is a 100Mbit down, 8Mbit up Cable connection (Optus HFC network).
This is a significant jump from the 8Mbit down, 1Mbit up ADSL connection that my flat mate had on prior to me moving in, and the

When the Australian Federal Government's NBN scheme rolls out, it'll be delivering fibre which in the trial areas today is delivering 100Mbit down, 40Mbit up (depending on the service level you go with) - but is provisioned to be able to switch to 1Gbit down, (and I believe 400Mbit up) - assuming an ISP is willing to offer that. That NBN scheme will cover 98% of the population - the remaining 2% to be delivered a minimum 12Mbit service via Fixed-Wireless (LTE) or Satellite.

At work, we've got some sort of Fibre connection provisioned at, I believe, around 500Mbit symetrical. (Up from 100Mbit symetrical last year).

Already one of the things I've noticed is that rather than having local file servers, people are using cloud based products - even for designers working with large files.
Dropbox and services like that work brilliantly - because there's no need to be on a specific network, it works great from home or work.

Yes, there are edge cases - anyone working with files over about 500MB in size will still deal with those files separately from their normal cloud-synced folders.

I personally sync about 30GB of music between my phone, work laptop, and home laptops using Dropbox.
Almost all of the content I listen to, read, and watch is delivered over the internet - books, "radio" (live, and podcasts), tv, movies.

At least one Australian ISP has a product out that lets me record or watch live Free to Air TV *without needing a TV tuner*.
In addition there's about three or four providers in Australia who provide live subscription TV channels over the Internet.
These last two are designed to work with a 3-6Mbit ADSL connection and deliver DVD quality streams.
It won't be long until we see 1080P high bitrate streams for those whom do have the bandwidth.

In terms of Wireless - our three major Wireless carriers all have 3G HSDPA services delivering 3-14Mbit asymetric (reliably 1-6Mbit), and for the most part provide decent coverage. Some are better than others, because they have different build/sell tactics.
Telstra is rolling out LTE (4G) which is reliably delivering 30Mbit symetrical - and will quickly expand that coverage. Additional spectrum with the switch-off of Analog TV will be freed up and used for LTE too.


To quote William Gibson: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."