10 Failed Technology Trends of 2005

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Loyd Case muses on ten trends of 2005 that never panned out. He points the finger at analysts like himself for waxing glowy-eyed at technologies like the BTX form factor and the 64-bit version of Windows XP. On DRM and the Sony rootkit fiasco: 'Hint to the music publishers: It's not going to work. There have been easy workarounds to every system that's been tried, and the more stringent the copy protection, the greater the risk of having angry customers who won't buy CDs. I suggest you start investigating new business models, as the old ones ride off into the sunset.'"

Comments

Save yourself the trouble...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the list:

•      The BTX Form Factor
•      High-Definition Video on the PC
•      High Fidelity Digital Audio
•      Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
•      High Definition Optical Drives
•      Copy Protection for Music CDs
•      iPod Competitors Emerge
•      The Digital Home
•      Google's Gmail Service
•      Dual Graphics Cards

Failed!

[The 13th Duke]

Spreading a rather thin article over a multitude of pages so we can be sure to see all the ads.

No lossless?

[outZider]

He makes a jab at the iPod by talking about how larger capacity players add video capability, while ignoring fidelity by not offering lossless. While it isn't the longer-running FLAC format, the iPod does support Apple Lossless, which is just an extension of the standard MPEG4 Lossless Audio format. It works great, and my iPod Video certainly doesn't have a problem playing those as well. :P

Dead on: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

[cvd6262]

As it turns out, driver availability has been the main Achilles' heel. While graphics cards, chipsets, and audio drivers have been readily available, drivers for newer printers, webcams, and other common peripherals have been MIA.

I bought a laptop with a Turion64 processor and secured a copy of XP64 Pro from my work (the surprised tech had to dig in his desk for it). I got it up and running, but....

No drivers. No trackpad driver, no video driver, no sound, nada. Not even on the manufacturer's site.

Well, good thing Ubuntu64 works just fine.

Re:Multiple Standards for DVD

[georgewilliamherbert]

If you RTFA a bit more carefully you'd notice that they contrast DVD (the ROM format) with the various DVD writeable formats, pointing out that DVD ROMs caught on with now nearly 100% market penetration (prerecorded VHS delinda est), but instead of DVD writeables killing off VHS for recording, Tivo did. And basically because of too many DVD writeable formats.

The original CD (ROM), and original DVD (ROM), were both excellent, universal, and well liked formats.

What happened with the writables in the DVD space is an object lesson. Unfortunately, one now being emulated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks.

Re:Why rag on Gmail?

[emurphy42]

No you can't:

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer. py?answer=27440

Does creating a Google Account give me a Gmail account?

Unfortunately not. Gmail is currently in a limited release, so you need to get invited by another Gmail user in order to sign up. If you are interested in Gmail, you may want to check the About Gmail page periodically for updates. If, on the other hand, you already have a Gmail account, you can use your Gmail username and password to sign in to your Google Account.

Re:Why rag on Gmail?

[Mark J Tilford]

I think GMail checks the contents of a .zip for executables.

At least, I had trouble mailing inform source code (.inf) because gmail thought it was a Windows registry file (also .inf); trying to hide the file in a .tar.gz or .zip didn't work; I ended up having to compress it then rename the executable. (Though compressing it twice, and passwording the latter might also have worked.)

A pro audio engineer writes . . .

[ElephanTS]

I can tell the difference between the two easily. Cymbals particluarly will warble and shimmer - you can hear the resolution of the limited audio bands in the top end. Bass response of mp3 at any rate is always bad, careful A/Bing should show that. Having said that I archive non-important stuff at 224kbps AAC and can detect practically no audible difference between that and master (perhaps something in the bass-end but hardly anything). Mp3 is just not as good as AAC anyway. Of course iPods can play lossless audio (ALE) with no problems. The article misrepresented the difference between audio compression and digital compression. This seems to be a hard concept for people to grasp and the author doesn't seem to either. Clue: audio compression affects the dynamics (squashing all the ampliudes to the same kind of level), digital compression reencodes the signal into freq bands but doesn't (usually) affect the dynamic range. 16bits is completely adequate for a master recording and no real difference can be noted at 24bit in any normal listening environment. What would be good though is a higher sampling rate like 96KHz. People would notice that. On 96KHz systems the filtering can be soft slowly tapering down to nothing to prevent aliasing. At 44.1KHz a 'brickwall' filter has to be used which tends to produce a constrained sound.