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Tech Punditry In 2005
Wired has an article looking back at some of the most obvious, some of the most topical, and some of the least accurate predictions for 2005. From the article: "Wireless will continue to replace land line at a faster pace: Internet telephony pundit Jeff Pulver's prediction seems somewhat obvious, but nonetheless accurate. In 2005, personal calling on wireless phones in the United States exceeded that on residential land lines, even though 35 percent of the U.S. population doesn't have wireless, according to the Yankee Group."
Nobody saw this one coming. The invention of blogging.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Amazing, a Wired story that isn't credited to Roland Piquepaille's blog cut and paste.
"You can make phone calls without wires. We'll show you how at 11"
-nick
...is the link to Art Bell's predictions. The man never found a conspiracy theory/alien abduction/perpetual motion scheme he didn't like. But for laughs, here it is - it does illustrate the principle that if you guess wildly about enough crap, by sheer luck you'll get something right.
e ar.html
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/aspie/trueorfalse/newy
Yeah right. Wake me up when wireless is faster than gigabit ethernet. :P 802.whatever is great for web, streaming video and other reasonably lightweight tasks, but just try pushing a a few hundred gigs over a wireless link and see what happens.
Serious amounts of finger-tapping, that's what.
Conversely (upside!), in my experience, wireless isn't replacing land lines, it's creating new networks where land lines would be inconvenient, inadvisable or flat-out stupid Coffee houses, bars, etceteras - I can pop open my laptop in my WAP-free house and at the right time of night pick from three different WLANS. Do you really think the local bar and the houses on either side of me would be willing to run cable? No. So Zee Wahrluz is creating networks, not replacing them. My laptop can talk to the bar WLAN while staying tethered to the home LAN - it can pr0n off of the bar and still ing the media box and the workstation without the bar ever being aware of either of my G4s.
Woot, yay, doom, etc.
so "cool"
Sorry but predictions seem rather pointless most the time. So many are made that of course most are wrong and of course some are right. Yet the correct predictionners are still treated as somewhat intelligent?!
That statements of the obvious with respect to perceived technology trends will continue throughout 2006. More daringly, I foresee the emergence of recursive self-referential statements of the obvious with respect to technology trends.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
1. The EU Commission will make a new attempt to introduce software patents in Europe.
2. They will lose, again.
3. The top gadget of 2006 will be the portable video player, specifically aimed at TV downloads.
4. Music sales will fall and the RIAA will blame piracy.
5. Apple shares will rise by 100% over 2006.
6. Neither Linux nor Apple will make much inroad into Microsoft's PC market in 2006. The public has learned to live with viruses and spyware.
7. Apple will announce deals with several more broadcasters and become the premier online distributor of TV shows.
8. Microsoft will not buy Google.
9. Google will not buy Sun but at least one Industry Pundit will suggest this.
10. The big Internet technology of 2006 will be Ajax applications.
11. The big Internet business of 2006 will be spyw^h^h^h^h Personal Data Security and Collection services.
12. Someone will say, "the Internet is a terrible system but it's better than all the alternatives".
13. Oil will hit $75 per barrel and there will be minor riots in several countries.
14. Most of the rioters will be returned unharmed from police custody.
15. The War on Terror will continue, unabated.
16. Security services and telcos will gang up on free wifi, which will become known as "the service of choice for pedophiles and terrorists".
17. At least one EU country will attempt to ban unmonitored access to web-based email services, and be roundly ridiculed for the attempt.
18. China's economy will grow to be number 3 in the world.
19. The USD will continue to prosper, as people realise that it's a terrible currency, but better than all the rest.
20. Many of these predictions will be proved wrong.
My blog
he is the only pundit that i feel is ballanced, (reasonably) impartial, does his research well, and most important: is not afraid to admit when he is wrong.
/. , ars or digg, but cringely is the only one who deserves a bookmark. most other guys seems to be industry whores, riding on hypes and/or cutting and pasting company's press realeases as if they were prophecies of the next Big Thing(tm).
i read some of the other guys, usually when thy're linked in sites like
cringely's column is here
What ? Me, worry ?
It seems to me that a lot of people who own cell phones talk on them just to be seen talking on them. "Hey everybody, look at me! I have a cell phone. I'm important! The person on the phone is more important to talk to than the other people I'm with!" Obviously, it's not the case with everybody. My wife has a cell phone (I do not), and we typically only use it for minor emergencies. Has this been others' experience?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
..is they don't extrapolate from past experience. Your focus defines your reality as Yoda would say. Most predictions are wishful thinking based on the hopes and fears of the few least informed but most vocal. Many become self fulfilling prophecies or trips up the garden path to nowhere. Like terrorism, a self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
In 5 short years we've manufactured the fear, the response and the counter scenarios merely by wishing it so. For every useful and worthy dream mankind has there are 10 nightmares he seems to dwell upon. Take copy protection, something all us computer scientists know is an impossibility and yet the sheer desire, pure lust for it by a few powerful people has almost wreaked an entire industry. There never was nor ever will be any theoretical or technical basis for copy protection and yet they push and push the dream. Those with the money and the power are the least creative, least visionary, most fearful of change. My prediction is humble - more of the same suprises from unheard of individuals and small groups quietly getting on with revolutionising the world, meanwhile the giants will sit scratching their heads on the sidelines paralysed by inertia and saying "Why didn't we think of that? Let's buy it! Let's control it!"
So, where do you live exactly?
In most of the Western World, almost everyone has a cellphone. The only 'coolness' to be had is from the style/brand/features/color/smallness of the phone.
Even my dad has a cellphone and he's 78!
He hangs around the old folks home saying to himself "hey! look how cool I am dude!".
Clue: cellphones are actually very useful if you have any friends, family, a job or something.
- It's always right there.
- It stores phone numbers in a semi-convenient menu system. It can speed dial many of them.
- It remembers my recent calls for an easy redial.
Now, if only it would let me play video games and talk to my wife at the same time.It is pretty disgusting how cellular phone companies are trying to jump on the wireless bandwagon and misuse the term "wireless" for their 3G and legacy cellular phone service. Wireless means primarily WiFi/802.11/4G (and other new standards in wireless internet and communication) and not legacy cellular phone service.
Even the exceeding residential land lines part seemed surprisingly backwards to me. My mother is the only one I know of who doesn't have a cell phone. Having a cell phone hasn't been unusual or a status symbol since 1996.
This Business Week article from 1999 claims cell phone penetration was 58% in 1999 in Finland. Apparently 96% of the population had a mobile subscription in 2004. The US isn't that much behind, is it?
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Yeah right. Like I wasn't thinking of it already.
As a member of the 35%, I predict that I will continue to buck the trend in 2006. I have no desire for a cell phone, mostly because the people that use them are asses. Yeah, that's you, 65%. More to the point, having a cell phone transforms perfectly nice, bright, able, considerate people into asses, and I don't want to be one of them. I have yet to meet a person, even a few of my closer friends, who have not been thusly transformed after getting a cell phone.
My definition of "asses"?: people who are walking down the street with you, or sitting down to a cup of coffee with you, or come over to your home for lunch, dinner, whatever, and all the while take calls on their cell phones. I'm not talking emergency calls (as in, "I apologize, but I need my cell phone on right now because my mother is in the hospital and the doctor is supposed to call me," or "My wife is coming back from a trip today and was expecting some travel delays, so I need my cell phone so she can call me when she is sure about her arrival"), I'm talking everyday, garden-variety, hi-how-are-you? calls, or even calls with a more specific purpose that nevertheless doesn't need to be addressed at that very moment (i.e., a message would be just fine). People who have cell phones seem to lose all perspective about when it is appropriate or necessary to have the damn thing on. They seem to think it's perfectly okay to have it on always, except in a theatre, and interrupt whatever they are doing with whomever they are doing it to take any ol' call that comes in. That's an ass, and that, in my experience, is about 99% of cell phone users.
No thanks.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
2005's list is a real low-light. The opening paragraph of the Wired article is like a kick to the groin. Dvorak was right! Neener neener neener. Nevermind that he got the timing wrong, and just about everything else he says never comes true. Is it really predicting when you just throw as many possibilities out there as possible, and ignore the 99% failure rate?
For your New Year's schadenfreude entertainment, be sure to catch Robert Cringely twist and turn his predictions ikn an effort to make himself look insightful in hindsight. Last time he claimed a 70% accuracy rate, or some bullshit figure.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/
His New Year column isn't out yet, just some ramble about advertising killing print media. But he's always at his most hilarious when trying to justify his predictions.
... and then they built the supercollider.