Worst and Best Predictions on Technology

prostoalex writes "Dow Jones News asked several mahor scientists and technologists about their worst and best predictions of the future. The story, republished at Yahoo! Finance Singapore quotes Lester Thurow, Professor of management and economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management; Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; Glover Ferguson, Chief scientist, Accenture; Alan Nugent, Chief technology officer, Novell; Peter Cochrane, Director, ConceptLabs; Michael Earl, Dean, Templeton College, University of Oxford. There seems to be a common agreement on having overrated the ability of machines to talk back to users and vice versa."

Comments

Re:Overrated

[GigsVT]

Why do you think style sheets make web pages unreadable? Do you even know what style sheets are?

Stylesheets are overrated as well

[Snaller]

>Why do you think style sheets make web pages unreadable?

You wouldn't be a young fellow with an expensive monitor would you?

>Do you even know what style sheets are?

Of course, how else would i know they are the bane of the WWW today:

Because most webdesigners use absolute font size, which means you can't resize it in browsers. Ie, you are stuck with a font size which is often too small (it is for me most of the time).

Jakob Nielsen (who you should know if you are a regular slashdot reader, if not search the slashdot archives), the man CNN calls "Web usability guru" (ironically they do it wrong as well), will tell you why Stylesheets "reduced readability of an increasing number of websites" - He will also tell you how to do it right. - Basically doing it right is to specify percentage weights so that the stylesheets DO cascade, instead of taking over.
Some sites who do it wrong:

http://www.cnn.com
http://www.microsoft.com
ht tp://www.nvidia.com
http://www.asus.com.tw/
http ://www.wiseeye.com/
http://www.syfyportal.com/