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Universal Remote's Days Are Numbered
theodp writes "While the universal remote has served humanity with distinction, its days are numbered, and your smartphone is to blame. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there's probably a solution using your phone. Try as it might, the universal remote simply can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can — it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa."
But a smart phone has limited "hard" buttons. .. and as nice as touch screens are.. it's hard to operate them lying in bed through one half-open eye.
Personally I`m waiting for voice recognition to become practical. I think that's more the future of how we control our devices.
If I want to change the channel on my TV I'm not going to muck around with the 'remote' app on my smartphone. I'm going to pick up an actual remote and press the button.
Smartphones are great for a lot of things, but proper remote controls have a set of fixed, tactile buttons that respond instantly. Versatility isn't worth much if it's a pain to use.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Phones are for PHONING!!!!! not texting, not taking pictures, nor playing mp3s, nor controlling radio controlled cars or anything else..
I hate having to learn to use my new nokias as it is, without piling in more crap.
Whatever happened to "Do one job and do it well".. Seems nowadays it's lets cram as much crap into something that half works.
If you had the faintest idea of the network requirements to do that, you would understand why broadcast TV (and radio) are going to be around for a long, long time.
Today, people can pretend that broadcast radio might die because they can stream content to their phone. And as long as they can do this, they think "this must be what the future looks like". It doesn't, it won't and as soon as 10-20 people in their physical area try to do the same thing they will discover the truth.
The bandwidth requirements of feeding individuals their own streams at 1080i (or even 720i) would require pretty much dedicated fiber home-to-provider. No, that doesn't exist. You can get fiber to a local node that is dedicated but then you are competing with your neighbors for bandwidth on a shared resource. And that shared resource does not have anywhere near the aggregate capacity to handle the sum of the fiber coming in to it.
When will it? Probably never. Dreaming that broadcast will end when it does is fine, but keep in mind someone has to justify the costs. A local node may serve 1000 homes. Getting fiber that will support 20MB/sec is no problem but getting a channel from the local node that will support 20Gb/sec is another proposition entirely. And at the head end where 100 of those 20Gb/sec fibers come together to compete with the incoming bandwidth now ups that requirement to 2Tb/sec.
2Tb/sec? And that is merely a small town with 100,000 homes.
Broadcast TV is going to be around for a long, long time. As will broadcast radio. The bandwidth requirements of a broadcast are so incredibly modest compared with individual streams that it is a no-brainer for anyone.
Will the bandwidth exist someday? Maybe. Will it be used to replace broadcasting? Doubtful. There will be some other use for it which will once again mean broadcast content is the only practical way to do it.