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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.
...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"
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 ?
For a number of us, the mobile phone is now the primary communications medium. I'm a student and in many halls of residence landlines aren't even an option so everyone needs a mobile if they wish to communicate.
The majority of people talking on mobiles are doing mundane things, the exact same mundane tasks that you do on your home phone. If I'm phoning up my housemates to tell them I'll be back late and will meet them at the pub, that's not a deep or meaningful conversation, it's not even that necessary, but in a world where such a communication is available to me at almost no cost, is it not considerably ruder not to make it? Mobile phones do occasionally intrude too far into our lives as Richard Griffiths recently discovered, but to resist them because you consider their use impolite is to miss out a whole variety of ways in which we can be more polite through their use.
My wife and I switched to cell phones for one very simple reason: it's illegal for spammers (telemarketers) to call us on those phones, at least in the state where we live (don't really know if that's a federal law). It got to the point where the number of advertising calls we received on the landline outnumbered personal calls nearly 10:1; apparently our various services (especially those bastards at AT&T) sold our information to anyone and everyone who had the money.
How many spam calls do we get nowadays? None: we don't have a landline anymore. Haven't had a single advertising call in years now. The convenience of being able to carry the phone with you wherever you go is secondary and wasn't even part of our initial rationale for getting cells, but we can't imagine not having that convenience now even though we don't actually use the phones that much. They also have other benefits, e.g., if I don't return a call right away I can claim I turned the phone off and 'forgot' about it. My wife's favorite (especially when conversing with relatives) is that her "battery is about to die".
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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.