Ars's Skeptical Take on Wired's NextFest

jamestech writes "Over the weekend, Wired magazine held its 'NextFest' in Chicago, a demonstration of what the future supposedly holds. Arstechnica's Hannibal visited NextFest, and was not impressed. Regarding a dolphin-shaped water vehicle and exoskeletons for the old, he notes, 'if you're being pursued by a senior citizen then you can use the dolphin to escape.' Wired's been more about style rather than tech since the late 90s, but have they finally dropped science in favor of science fiction?"

Comments

A quick clarification

[Hannibal_Ars]

There was some Wired bashing in the related Ars thread that I didn't really agree with, and it looks like that theme has been picked up by the slashdot poster. Just to clarify before this degenerates into a pile-on, this article was intended as sardonic, tongue-in-cheek humor. It wasn't intended as a slam on Wired or as a slam on any of the engineers whose hard work I ridiculed mercilessly. If it was a slam on anything, it was a slam on The Future, which has never really been all that it's cracked up to be.

Re:Zombie dog is our future

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In my mind, Ars Technica has mainly written articles on two subjects that have had some influence. Spatial browsing and the PS2.

I have heard that the Nautilus developers where inspired by this article when implementing the new spatial scheme in Nautilus. While I'm not sure John Siracusa is very impressed with Nautilus, it is still a testament to the articles importance.

This set of articles describing the design of the PS2 is one of the few overviews of the PS2 architecture available for free on the web, and thus an important resource for people hacking on their PS2 Linux kits.

Ars may not be the most important site on the net, but in my opinion they have _more_ than their fair share of original content.