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Computer Mouse Heading For Extinction
slatterz writes "The computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe. Steven Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow, told the BBC that devices such as Nintendo's MotionPlus for the Wii and Apple's iPhone point the way to the future, offering greater accuracy in motion detection."
But ... but ... I have a relationship with my mouse! It's one of the two things I have my hand on all day long. Oh, behave! I meant my keyboard.
Somewhat more seriously, do you really want your screen to have ... stuff all over it? Personally, I don't let anyone touch my screen. Or imagine an office with everyone yelling at their computer, "No, God damn it! The other left!"
Next up: the combination of both those future bound GUI technologies, The WiiPhone (TM). It doesn't have any screen at all, you just throw it at whoever you want to talk to! Now if all things were that simple...
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Actually it's Gartner so your best bet is to buy stock in Logitech as it's more likely that there will be a great surge in demand for mice in the next 5 years =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If the keyboard could get killed of then why can't the mouse?
People bitch about RSI etc when using a keyboard/mouse. VR or reaching across your desk to operate a touch screen will be far more strain over a day of desk work or a few hours of gaming/emailing whatever.
About the only area where touch screen is practical is in walk-up kiosks and handheld devices.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I haven't had mod points since... ...2003, but if I had some now they would be yours.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
The profession of "analyst" is set to die out in the next 5 years. The use of analysts to predict the future based on unsupportable extrapolation of early technology trends will start to decline in 2008 and the profession will be totally gone by 2014. These analyst predictions will be replaced with predictions from other sources such as Ouija boards, re-purposed water witches, and randomly clicking on a document with a computer mouse and forming a sentence with the words.
Of course, the best way to tell the future is to wait until it becomes the present and then watch what happens. News sources once used that method to report news, but it fell out of favor due to narcissism and delusions of grandeur among journalists. Journalists found that the couldn't always control events that happened or the facts reported. Predictions don't have this limitation because the predicted events are fictional at the time the story is written.
I know what a PS/2 port is, and my father-in-law showed up with one of these so-called "floppy" disks once so I know what that is...
But just what the heck is a parallel port? :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Kids can shuffle papers, pick them up, do all sorts of things. If the screen's built into the desk you're limited to shuffling your arse and picking it up.
Look out!
If their goal is to write a controversial article that will show up on front page of slashdot and drive gazillion of clicks to their site then they are very very smart
If that's their goal, then they don't know Slashdot very well. No-one is going to click the link!
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?