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People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy' (medium.com)
Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, has cataloged how often game-changing technologies have been derided as toys. Some of the things he has included in the list include a PC, C programming, PC networking, GUI, color screen, AI, and internet video. He writes: As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as "toys" or "incapable" of doing "real work" or providing "real entertainment." Of course, many new inventions don't work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing. This got me thinking about all the conferences, trip reports, and new products I have looked at over many years. Sure turns out that a huge number of things in my own career were labeled as toys -- not just by me, but by an industry at large. Check out the list on Medium.
If something is not fun to use, then it isn't a toy.
If something isn't fun to use, then it is likely to never go anywhere, no matter how much people think it is important to their personal product/use.
But merely being fun does not mean it is also useful.
To be a game changer, it must be useful, and also fun. Then people will use it. If it isn't fun, someone will find a better way.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Which is very often the problem when people make these claims about being The Next Big Thing.
Often the technology IS just a toy, and is a proof of concept of something which might be useful in a bunch of years.
So, yeah, you have a seed of a kernel of a nugget of an idea which points to some Really Cool Things down the road. But your cobbled together demo which doesn't, at present, actually DO anything is a long way from changing the world, and you'll excuse us if we roll our eyes and think that you're getting a little ahead of yourself.
I mean, the flying car has been coming Real Soon Now since, what, the mid 60s? Nuclear fusion as cheap energy? Routine trips to space for all of us?
He, we want the cool new future. We're just seldom convinced when the guy in marketing tells us that he has it; because we pretty much know he's full of shit, and he will claim to have The Next Big Thing pretty much for everything he ever tries to tell us about.
By about the 10th time, you stop listening.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Being considered a toy is a requirement for being a game changer. If a technology is taken seriously early on, it's inmediately locked down with patents and pricetags by big business. That's why toys always win in the long run.
iPhone? Toy. Who want's that? ... Whooops.
PC? Toy. Here are the specs and the architecture, for free. Go play. We sell real computers. 20 years later x86 is all there is.
The Web? A toy.
PHP? JavaScript? Toy languages, laughed out of the room, even still yet. While everybodys laughing, they're taking over the web. Well, PHP at least.
WordPress? Yet another shitty CMS/bloggin engine by someone who can't programm. Toy. Oh. 102 Million active installs. 25% of the web. Mmmh.
Toys win, because they initialy aren't taken seriously and thus have room to get adopted by those who want to build stuff without being at the mercy of some psychopath corporation. Once they've gained traction it's to late to box them in and everybody has to follow suit to stay in the game.
It's that simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I had used Windows 3.x before, but it was complete shit and didn't give me the level of control, stability or compatibility that DOS did. Win9x offered one thing that I wanted: a web browser (Arachne was never very good). The first version of Windows that I installed on one of my own PCs was Windows 95, but I still had it set up to boot directly to DOS and I treated Windows as the DOS program that it was, starting it manually and quitting back to the DOS prompt when I was done. I continued to use Windows this way until Windows 2000, which not only didn't run on DOS any more, but was much better than Win9x. The problem is that Windows 2000 and every subsequent version of Windows is still crap compared to other operating systems. Versions of Windows can only be considered "good" when compared to other versions of Windows.
I had other PCs running everything from FreeBSD to OS/2 to BeOS to various Linux distros and greatly preferred (and still prefer, the case of BSD and Linux) using those over Windows. It's a shame that OS/2 and BeOS didn't really have a chance to grow due to the MS monopoly. I know Haiku is being worked on, but it still has a long way to go and very little hardware support (although BeOS never supported a lot of hardware). FreeBSD has supreme stability, Linux has a very active developer base, OS/2 had compatibility (completely surpassed by Wine now) and BeOS has superior performance and UI. It would be wonderful to see the strengths of each combined into a single, super awesome OS.
New technology usually are toys. They are immature and not road-tested. Hobbyists fortunately don't mind taking the proverbial arrows in the back to find the kinks and build/find uses for them.
The first photographs required sitting perfectly still for 5 minutes; the first phonographs had the quality of rusted tin cans with a nose plug; the first cars broke down often and required lots of fiddling to keep going, their starter mechanisms often braking arms; the first electronic computers took more time replacing vacuum tubes than computing; the first satellites kept blowing up on the launch pad; the first PC's had crappy software, unreliable storage, and crashed often for no reason; the Newton was bulky and slow; the Lisa & Mac were too expensive for most home/biz users and lacked useful software until desktop publishing matured years after release; the first online services made molasses look fast; both Java and JavaScript were buggy and inconsistent upon release; and HTML 5 is still buggy and inconsistent. And node.JS? I still don't know what the fock that's all about, I hope to finally "get it" before I die, or maybe dying is preferable?
Table-ized A.I.
Really? Who's definition is that? Does your hammer become a toy if you repair something in your house with it? You should look up the definition for the word "toy". A hobby is not "playing" with something.
It's a Stratasys uPrint Plus. In the specifications page, it says "Layer thickness: .254 mm (.010 in.) or .330 mm (.013 in.)"
It depends. If it takes hours of setup every time you print one item, it's just an unreliable tool, but still not a toy. If it takes hours of setup to properly calibrate once in a while, it's just normal wear and tear. We're talking about fractions of millimetres here.
Of course the quality from higher-end 3D printers will be much better, but so will the cost. If we're talking precision alone, an FDM from Stratasys won't stand a chance against a Polyjet from the same company.
But comparing the output quality of a Stratasys FDM vs a well-calibrated RepRap? You'd be surprised which one you'd pick and the price difference between the two.