Slashdot Mirror
12 Crackpot Ideas That Could Transform Tech
InfoWorldMike passed us a link to an entertaining article with a sort of 'top 12' innovative technologies that could change the world. Some of the techs include solid-state drives, holographic and phase-change storage, artificial intelligence, e-books, desktop web apps, and quantum computing/cryptography. For each of these technologies, expert observers weigh in on the potentials and pitfalls of these disciplines. Here are Esther Lim's comments on e-books: "Another issue, besides the prohibitive cost and cumbersome nature of e-documents, concerns the vast portion of the contracts that were signed and agreed upon before e-books came onto the scene ... That raises questions not just in terms of what rights the user has, but what rights the publisher has vis-à-vis the copyright holder." We've discussed almost all of these technologies on the site at one point or another. Which is the most important? Which one do you think we'll never 'get right'?
I agree. We've already seen flash RAM beat the micro drives in CF cards, and the advantages of doing away with moving parts (and with them, the inevitable mechanical failures) are compelling. Moore's law will do the driving, we'll have solid-state laptops in another year or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.
The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.
Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.
Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!
A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)
And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.
So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.
WTF?
ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.
Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the .lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?
I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.
Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.
Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.
This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.
The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, technically the ships would be made of an ice/sawdust mix called picrete(sp?).
Pykrete; the operation was called Project Habakkuk.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.