Pressure started in fourth grade or so, which was where interests began to become defined and divergant for a lot of kids I knew (eg, reading versus sports versus video games). The pressure slowly cranked up until eighth grade, give or take- at which point my school system split the kids into Academic and Commercial (bigger districts would have had college prep and vo-tech)- the A kids shit on the C kids because they were "dumb" and the C kids shit on the A kids because they were "geeks". Things naturally continued to fragment and fork into sub-niches (like the *box window managers...), hitting another BIG bump in tenth to eleventh grade, when the cliques got split AGAIN by drivers licenses....
So much pressure to BELONG. Makes me wonder what teenage sociological patterns would be like if we weren't forced into white-collar sleep-at-home concentration camps for five days a week during out formative years.
If memory serves, it didn't become Cool To Be Stupid until I was in eighth or ninth grade, which would have been the mid nineties: at which point even the smart kids I'd been in the gifted program with were acting like complete fucking retards because it was the in thing to do.:|
I'll take 4.7g over 650m for data storage any day of the week. DVD-R has replaced CD-R at the workplace and at home, and we couldn't be happier. Yeah, they take longer to burn, but when you're looking at burning off twelve gigs of data, you want it on as few chunks of plastic as possible.
For video, it's a leg up from VHS in that it doesn't decay with age and has happy-fun chapter skipping and menus and so forth. Laserdisc still rips the shit out of DVD, though- especially for cartoons.
v.1 = SHIP! OUT THE DOOR! v.2 = features MS wanted in v1, initial bugfixes, etc. v.3 = where user feedback starts getting implemented.
90% of the CRAP in Windows is there because people want it, requested it, or bugged microsoft for it at some point, or MS had to slather it in to make something that people wanted actually Work (re: DOS compatability in NT4+).
The FF series is made by Square, now Square-Enix (or Squenix). Nintendo was, iirc, the publisher for the first one in the states.
The first three FF games were for the NES. 4-6 were for the SNES, and 7-9 for the Playstation.
Square jumped the nintendo boat because they wanted to do tons of cinematics and FMV and stuff like that, which wouldn't have been possible on the N64.
And cartoons, by their very nature, are produced very differently.
For example, Disney's Beauty and the Beast was screened incomplete. Several scenes were animatics.... several scenes were pencil tests, some scenes were inked, some were inked and had paint but no backgrounds. Being a Disney production, the audio track was complete, but they were still busting their butts to get the visuals finished when it was previewed at a film festival (in NYC, I think).
In the case of Advent Children, I imagine "incomplete" would mean sections of black with audio, sections of animatics, possibly renders without textures or lighting... things like that.
Can we? Can we PLEASE? Huh? Can we?
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Using a linux desktop is like using Win3.1 or 95 hyped up on really lame raver drugs. I've always found it sad and extremely frustrating that a venue with MASSIVE potentiall for innovation has instead been spending its time reimplimenting Windows Explorer.:|
I'm down with anything that makes the linux desktop experience a real linux desktop experience- not a pissass wannabe win95 experience or a solaris experience. There's so much cool stuff going on under the hood... but the thin candy shell feels like GPX or Coby* slapped onto BMW internals. I know it's possible to do better.... but after years of seeing Windows and MacOS features reimplimented (not nearly as well in most cases) in linux, I'm starting to lose faith.:-(
*GPX and Coby make shit electronics that are cheap and break very, very easily. Coby specifically, in that their products (and LOGO!) are modeled after Sony... and the best they can do is to come across as a cheap ripoff.
People want to keep their jobs. Gainful employment within the skillset isn't exactly going to fall in your lap in this country.
As a rule, only shitty-paying, shitty jobs drug test. (as well as a few areas where it makes some degree of sense, like pilots...). A former roommate was a stockboy at a drug store and got tested at random. I subtitle video and I've never, ever been tested. I've also had a few drinks on the job from time to time, but it's usually on the boss's dime.:)
My job doesn't even come close to paying well, but I'll take a good amount of vacation, minimal responsibility, and a few weeks of OMFGWTF a year over being too OMFGWTF!!!!1ed to enjoy the paycheck. I like having enough energy at the end of a day to work on my own shit, and haven't been able to keep any job that takes that away from me.
I mean, the latency for dumping a few gigs of pr0n or restoring a backup from an asteroid full of storage is gonna suck, but hell- you don't have to worry about weather. You don't have to worry about atmospheric contamination. This shit's still going to BE THERE in a few thousand years, in some capacity.
We'll see satellites tailored to do this first, though.:|
They want all that shit, and they don't want to pay for it.
I'm a sysadmin, video editor, subtitler, web bitch, mac tech support and DVD/multimedia author. All one job. Pays less than 25 a year.
Of course, the local economy sucks a rancid, pus-filled testicle. I'm happy I have a job. Happier still I have one that keeps me more or less too busy to spend the pitiful amount of cash I'm making. (I priced it out and anyone who does ONE of those things on my little list gets at LEAST 10k more a year than I do.)
On the one hand, I find it amusing that a couple of term windows running irssi and tcpdump makes me look extremely busy on otherwise slow days.
On the other hand, I have a very narrow, very easily broken attention span. You might call it a "one track mind", whereby I can only give one thing my full attention at once. Can't background processes. One of the reasons why I fucking HATE the telephone- not only am I talking, I have to figure out how to manage a banana-shaped hunk of plastic.... and I can't fucking DO anything. I get a phone call and I'm stuck staring at my monitor, unable to get anything done. I can't. The conversation competely disables that part of my brain.
Naturally, I have a concentration-intensive job in an open, too-accessible office. I have afternoon and evening hours (12-8 compared to the usual 9-5), and I get damned near all of my work done between five and eight. Assuming my coworkers actually leave. The last year or so, they've been hanging around after work more and more and more because they're somebody THERE to hang out WITH (even if I have my headphones clamped on blasting Whitehouse...).... which pushes the hours I can actually Get Work Done to past ten PM, or on certain weekends, or when certain people aren't in the office.
Most work shit I can handle, but subtitling (pacing/keying) requires a level of focus I can't get most of the time.
As for the phone.... I pull the plug on it after five, and plug it back in before I leave. That's a relic of giving my work number to the wrong people a long time ago more than it is work sanity.
I've noticed that for a lot of people, Work Is Life.:|
Some people might consider a full inbox, answering machine, PDA, etceteras to be bragging rights. Good for them- I put it in the same category as the hundreds of people I overhear in Pittsburgh whining "I'M SOOOO TIRED...." on the street, on the bus, etceteras. I don't fucking care. You're tired? DRINK SOME COFFEE. STOP WHINING.
It's a "look at me!" sort of thing. If they were in my office and doped up on coffee, they'd be whining about how much spam they have in their inbox.
Me, I get too much email for it to be useful anymore. I can't run AIM without getting all three of my monitors loaded with messages within minutes. The desire of people to communicate with me and my desire to be communicated with, I've found, are inversely proportionate.:|
My dad gave me that story to read when I was a young, unproductive slacker. Now I'm an older, wiser, and productive slacker. Go figure.
Re: your coworker- I have the dubious joy of suffering two of those, both prone to mood swings and verbal ejaculation at me of shit that has nothing whatsoever to do with me... because I'm THERE. I have another "friend" who has anxiety attacks and psychotic episodes if he's alone for more than a few hours- his deal is if he doesn't have anybody to hang out with, then NOBODY LIKES HIM. Weirdass worldview if you ask me- and calling me at work at ten PM to whine me questions that are in the documentation is a great way to prove your paranoia.:P
People who have a seemingly inconceivable NEED to communicate annoy the everloving SHIT out of me, since this is largely not my personality type. The proposal bit you mention is definitely related to productivity- the leghumping need for communication, on the other hand, I believe is a psychological issue.
As for free time... I wanted some more of that, so I quit smoking. Gave me an extra seventeen hours a week.
Man, my shit hasn't fit into four gigs since 1998. By which I mean my shit. Not mp3s, or divx, or warez, or operating system CDs or any of the other STUFF that accumulates over the course of seven years of hardcore machine immersion.
Hell, I've generated something like sixteen gigs of data in the last ten weeks. Which is slightly above average, but not by much. As a digital (and video!) artist, I eat hard drives, and backups are something of an annoyance- more for the tedium of the burn or tape time than anything else.
The biggest problem with backups (imo) is keeping them organized and clearly detailed. Mild annoyance to, say, try to find something on a CDR from 1997.
The state of graphical FOSS being what it is, I think there's a giant hardon for web-based solutions because the browsers are the most useable FOSS gui apps.... and because, ultimately, things are slowly drifting back to the mainframe model. All the data on the server, manipulated from a client/terminal.
Web "terminal" frontends happen to be (bar none) the easiest to develop. Target Mozilla and suddenly just about every operating system in the world can be considered an option for data input.:)
WE'LL INTEGRATE THE WEB BROWSER INTO THE OS AND FORCE THE USER TO UPDATE THE SYSTEM THROUGH THE BROWSER SO THEY HAVE TO HAVE OUR BROWSER OR SUCK.
Yes, it's a Microsoft example, but I'd consider something like that to be evil AND stupid. Google, imo, hasn't done anything befitting either category.
...and we DON'T like MS or AOL. Watching MS and AOL gets screwed with and/or fail gives slashdotters wood.
Conversely, Google is useful and cool and pretty much none of the things that MS or AOL are. Geeks are favorably disposed to Google because Google hasn't done anything abysmally STUPID.
I know this is OT, but this has bugged me for YEARS.
When the Playstation came out, I creamed my pants at the potential of memory cards- finally, a company could make an RPG.... and release "add-ons" or "expansion packs" that would be new games or side games but which would use your already existing character. Or a sequel to a game that was ACTUALLY a SEQUEL- picking up where you left off... exactly where you left off, levels, equipment, and everything. I figured games like this would be out within a year.
Boy, was I FUCKING WRONG. Aside from some in-game tricks in games like Metal Gear Solid, memory cards are basically just an itty hard drive that serves as a dumping ground for save data that doesn't overlap or play between games.
WHERE IS THE INNOVATION IN THAT?
Shit, if I knew I could move my NWN character into NWN2 (without, you know, creating a new one...), I'd spend a couple of weeks prior to release leveling like a bastard. And if the game's built right, it should be just as challenging at level 20 as it is at level 3.:P (the fact that NWN characters can be ported- gear and all- between NWN expansions is a major bonus. It's things like this that have completely killed console rpgs for me.)
Too bad they forgot the "discard formatting" option.:| The fact that modern Word does this at all is one of the reasons I've switched to TextEdit for most of my writing, and Dreamweaver for things that require bullets.:P I haven't actually needed Word in a really long time.
Unless you want an HTML document that looks EXACTLY like your Word document. Fonts. Spacing. Whitespace. The whole nine yards.
Word98 for the Mac wrote out font tags and break tags and paragraph tags and stuff- you could clean it up and make it useable for CSS or some such in short order.
The current Word html converter writes out the fucking style-sheet inline... making for a nasty, hugely bloated and nigh-unuseable MESS. Easier to just cut and paste into a CMS and go through and manually add your italics and bold and what have you.:|
Heh. I went to a real school and played on a real playground. I got made fun of, beat up, harassed, tortured, lacerated... nevermind the physchological treatment lavished on me by my so-called "peers."
Homeschooling wouldn't have been much better- my mom was a die-hard christian and I never was. Took her until I was twelve for her to start listening. I got shit on and beat up more at church than I did at school.
I've had my nose rubbed in the worst of human sociology for the majority of my life. The public school system is not the answer.
(Saying basically the same thing as the parent, with a "I've been there and that shit is responsible for neo-nazis, rednecks, thugs, gangsters, columbine, teen pregnancy and hemmerhoids" spin. Been there. Hated every. Single. Second.)
That always irked me about concepts like intelligent contacts- the power source. I mean, you could hyothetically power an artificial retina by plugging some itty flywheels into the bloodstream and make up for it that way... eyephones could easily have their own internal power packs....
And hey, people blink. A lot. With the right advances, the act if your eyelid passing over the contact might be enough to generate just enough juice to make it Go.
Something that size would, by design, have minimal power requirements... and they already have kinetically powered watches (last I heard...), so. That bit is at least possible.
I thought that pretty much any forward-looking predictive "LIFE IN THE YEAR $NOW+$TIME" was satire.... I mean, you know, flying cars, suborbital commutes... Joe Average having his bills paid and being able to eat well and put food on the table....
Sci-Fi authors have, in my experience, historically seen technology's potential, and neglected things like the economics of deployment, the size of the installed base, the fact that the vast majority aren't going to pull in enough to make frivolties like this monetarily feasable, and.... oh yeah, greed.
We'll get Weyland Yutani or the equivalent for sure. Starfleet and the Federation (aliens aside, I'm talking concept) are a frigging pipe dream.
Slashdot Mirror
Pressure started in fourth grade or so, which was where interests began to become defined and divergant for a lot of kids I knew (eg, reading versus sports versus video games). The pressure slowly cranked up until eighth grade, give or take- at which point my school system split the kids into Academic and Commercial (bigger districts would have had college prep and vo-tech)- the A kids shit on the C kids because they were "dumb" and the C kids shit on the A kids because they were "geeks". Things naturally continued to fragment and fork into sub-niches (like the *box window managers...), hitting another BIG bump in tenth to eleventh grade, when the cliques got split AGAIN by drivers licenses....
So much pressure to BELONG. Makes me wonder what teenage sociological patterns would be like if we weren't forced into white-collar sleep-at-home concentration camps for five days a week during out formative years.
If memory serves, it didn't become Cool To Be Stupid until I was in eighth or ninth grade, which would have been the mid nineties: at which point even the smart kids I'd been in the gifted program with were acting like complete fucking retards because it was the in thing to do. :|
Stupid conformity.
I'll take 4.7g over 650m for data storage any day of the week. DVD-R has replaced CD-R at the workplace and at home, and we couldn't be happier. Yeah, they take longer to burn, but when you're looking at burning off twelve gigs of data, you want it on as few chunks of plastic as possible.
For video, it's a leg up from VHS in that it doesn't decay with age and has happy-fun chapter skipping and menus and so forth. Laserdisc still rips the shit out of DVD, though- especially for cartoons.
MS operating practice. This is Known.
v.1 = SHIP! OUT THE DOOR!
v.2 = features MS wanted in v1, initial bugfixes, etc.
v.3 = where user feedback starts getting implemented.
90% of the CRAP in Windows is there because people want it, requested it, or bugged microsoft for it at some point, or MS had to slather it in to make something that people wanted actually Work (re: DOS compatability in NT4+).
Out of everything on the list, BackOffice and BitTorrent are the only two with syntax-deferrable functionality.
;-D
Though as a graphic artist, I do have to say that The Gimp is very aptly named.
As for the rest, I'm biased because I already know what all the soft does....
The FF series is made by Square, now Square-Enix (or Squenix). Nintendo was, iirc, the publisher for the first one in the states.
The first three FF games were for the NES. 4-6 were for the SNES, and 7-9 for the Playstation.
Square jumped the nintendo boat because they wanted to do tons of cinematics and FMV and stuff like that, which wouldn't have been possible on the N64.
And cartoons, by their very nature, are produced very differently.
For example, Disney's Beauty and the Beast was screened incomplete. Several scenes were animatics.... several scenes were pencil tests, some scenes were inked, some were inked and had paint but no backgrounds. Being a Disney production, the audio track was complete, but they were still busting their butts to get the visuals finished when it was previewed at a film festival (in NYC, I think).
In the case of Advent Children, I imagine "incomplete" would mean sections of black with audio, sections of animatics, possibly renders without textures or lighting... things like that.
Using a linux desktop is like using Win3.1 or 95 hyped up on really lame raver drugs. I've always found it sad and extremely frustrating that a venue with MASSIVE potentiall for innovation has instead been spending its time reimplimenting Windows Explorer. :|
:-(
I'm down with anything that makes the linux desktop experience a real linux desktop experience- not a pissass wannabe win95 experience or a solaris experience. There's so much cool stuff going on under the hood... but the thin candy shell feels like GPX or Coby* slapped onto BMW internals. I know it's possible to do better.... but after years of seeing Windows and MacOS features reimplimented (not nearly as well in most cases) in linux, I'm starting to lose faith.
*GPX and Coby make shit electronics that are cheap and break very, very easily. Coby specifically, in that their products (and LOGO!) are modeled after Sony... and the best they can do is to come across as a cheap ripoff.
People want to keep their jobs. Gainful employment within the skillset isn't exactly going to fall in your lap in this country.
:)
As a rule, only shitty-paying, shitty jobs drug test. (as well as a few areas where it makes some degree of sense, like pilots...). A former roommate was a stockboy at a drug store and got tested at random. I subtitle video and I've never, ever been tested. I've also had a few drinks on the job from time to time, but it's usually on the boss's dime.
My job doesn't even come close to paying well, but I'll take a good amount of vacation, minimal responsibility, and a few weeks of OMFGWTF a year over being too OMFGWTF!!!!1ed to enjoy the paycheck. I like having enough energy at the end of a day to work on my own shit, and haven't been able to keep any job that takes that away from me.
I mean, the latency for dumping a few gigs of pr0n or restoring a backup from an asteroid full of storage is gonna suck, but hell- you don't have to worry about weather. You don't have to worry about atmospheric contamination. This shit's still going to BE THERE in a few thousand years, in some capacity.
:|
We'll see satellites tailored to do this first, though.
They want all that shit, and they don't want to pay for it.
I'm a sysadmin, video editor, subtitler, web bitch, mac tech support and DVD/multimedia author. All one job. Pays less than 25 a year.
Of course, the local economy sucks a rancid, pus-filled testicle. I'm happy I have a job. Happier still I have one that keeps me more or less too busy to spend the pitiful amount of cash I'm making. (I priced it out and anyone who does ONE of those things on my little list gets at LEAST 10k more a year than I do.)
On the one hand, I find it amusing that a couple of term windows running irssi and tcpdump makes me look extremely busy on otherwise slow days.
:|
On the other hand, I have a very narrow, very easily broken attention span. You might call it a "one track mind", whereby I can only give one thing my full attention at once. Can't background processes. One of the reasons why I fucking HATE the telephone- not only am I talking, I have to figure out how to manage a banana-shaped hunk of plastic.... and I can't fucking DO anything. I get a phone call and I'm stuck staring at my monitor, unable to get anything done. I can't. The conversation competely disables that part of my brain.
Naturally, I have a concentration-intensive job in an open, too-accessible office. I have afternoon and evening hours (12-8 compared to the usual 9-5), and I get damned near all of my work done between five and eight. Assuming my coworkers actually leave. The last year or so, they've been hanging around after work more and more and more because they're somebody THERE to hang out WITH (even if I have my headphones clamped on blasting Whitehouse...).... which pushes the hours I can actually Get Work Done to past ten PM, or on certain weekends, or when certain people aren't in the office.
Most work shit I can handle, but subtitling (pacing/keying) requires a level of focus I can't get most of the time.
As for the phone.... I pull the plug on it after five, and plug it back in before I leave. That's a relic of giving my work number to the wrong people a long time ago more than it is work sanity.
I've noticed that for a lot of people, Work Is Life.
Some people might consider a full inbox, answering machine, PDA, etceteras to be bragging rights. Good for them- I put it in the same category as the hundreds of people I overhear in Pittsburgh whining "I'M SOOOO TIRED...." on the street, on the bus, etceteras. I don't fucking care. You're tired? DRINK SOME COFFEE. STOP WHINING.
:|
It's a "look at me!" sort of thing. If they were in my office and doped up on coffee, they'd be whining about how much spam they have in their inbox.
Me, I get too much email for it to be useful anymore. I can't run AIM without getting all three of my monitors loaded with messages within minutes. The desire of people to communicate with me and my desire to be communicated with, I've found, are inversely proportionate.
My dad gave me that story to read when I was a young, unproductive slacker. Now I'm an older, wiser, and productive slacker. Go figure.
:P
Re: your coworker- I have the dubious joy of suffering two of those, both prone to mood swings and verbal ejaculation at me of shit that has nothing whatsoever to do with me... because I'm THERE. I have another "friend" who has anxiety attacks and psychotic episodes if he's alone for more than a few hours- his deal is if he doesn't have anybody to hang out with, then NOBODY LIKES HIM. Weirdass worldview if you ask me- and calling me at work at ten PM to whine me questions that are in the documentation is a great way to prove your paranoia.
People who have a seemingly inconceivable NEED to communicate annoy the everloving SHIT out of me, since this is largely not my personality type. The proposal bit you mention is definitely related to productivity- the leghumping need for communication, on the other hand, I believe is a psychological issue.
As for free time... I wanted some more of that, so I quit smoking. Gave me an extra seventeen hours a week.
Man, my shit hasn't fit into four gigs since 1998. By which I mean my shit. Not mp3s, or divx, or warez, or operating system CDs or any of the other STUFF that accumulates over the course of seven years of hardcore machine immersion.
Hell, I've generated something like sixteen gigs of data in the last ten weeks. Which is slightly above average, but not by much. As a digital (and video!) artist, I eat hard drives, and backups are something of an annoyance- more for the tedium of the burn or tape time than anything else.
The biggest problem with backups (imo) is keeping them organized and clearly detailed. Mild annoyance to, say, try to find something on a CDR from 1997.
The entry-level G5 is cheaper than the original iMac was when it was introduced (at 2k$ or 2200, I forget which) in 1998.
Macs have been getting cheaper. If anything, it's Apple's raging hardon for flat panels that's keeping the prices up.
The state of graphical FOSS being what it is, I think there's a giant hardon for web-based solutions because the browsers are the most useable FOSS gui apps.... and because, ultimately, things are slowly drifting back to the mainframe model. All the data on the server, manipulated from a client/terminal.
:)
Web "terminal" frontends happen to be (bar none) the easiest to develop. Target Mozilla and suddenly just about every operating system in the world can be considered an option for data input.
WE'LL INTEGRATE THE WEB BROWSER INTO THE OS AND FORCE THE USER TO UPDATE THE SYSTEM THROUGH THE BROWSER SO THEY HAVE TO HAVE OUR BROWSER OR SUCK.
Yes, it's a Microsoft example, but I'd consider something like that to be evil AND stupid. Google, imo, hasn't done anything befitting either category.
...and we DON'T like MS or AOL. Watching MS and AOL gets screwed with and/or fail gives slashdotters wood.
:P
Conversely, Google is useful and cool and pretty much none of the things that MS or AOL are. Geeks are favorably disposed to Google because Google hasn't done anything abysmally STUPID.
Yet, anyway.
I know this is OT, but this has bugged me for YEARS.
:P (the fact that NWN characters can be ported- gear and all- between NWN expansions is a major bonus. It's things like this that have completely killed console rpgs for me.)
When the Playstation came out, I creamed my pants at the potential of memory cards- finally, a company could make an RPG.... and release "add-ons" or "expansion packs" that would be new games or side games but which would use your already existing character. Or a sequel to a game that was ACTUALLY a SEQUEL- picking up where you left off... exactly where you left off, levels, equipment, and everything. I figured games like this would be out within a year.
Boy, was I FUCKING WRONG. Aside from some in-game tricks in games like Metal Gear Solid, memory cards are basically just an itty hard drive that serves as a dumping ground for save data that doesn't overlap or play between games.
WHERE IS THE INNOVATION IN THAT?
Shit, if I knew I could move my NWN character into NWN2 (without, you know, creating a new one...), I'd spend a couple of weeks prior to release leveling like a bastard. And if the game's built right, it should be just as challenging at level 20 as it is at level 3.
Woo. Rant complete.
Oddly enough, that makes perfect sense.
:| The fact that modern Word does this at all is one of the reasons I've switched to TextEdit for most of my writing, and Dreamweaver for things that require bullets. :P I haven't actually needed Word in a really long time.
Too bad they forgot the "discard formatting" option.
Unless you want an HTML document that looks EXACTLY like your Word document. Fonts. Spacing. Whitespace. The whole nine yards.
:|
Word98 for the Mac wrote out font tags and break tags and paragraph tags and stuff- you could clean it up and make it useable for CSS or some such in short order.
The current Word html converter writes out the fucking style-sheet inline... making for a nasty, hugely bloated and nigh-unuseable MESS. Easier to just cut and paste into a CMS and go through and manually add your italics and bold and what have you.
Heh. I went to a real school and played on a real playground. I got made fun of, beat up, harassed, tortured, lacerated... nevermind the physchological treatment lavished on me by my so-called "peers."
Homeschooling wouldn't have been much better- my mom was a die-hard christian and I never was. Took her until I was twelve for her to start listening. I got shit on and beat up more at church than I did at school.
I've had my nose rubbed in the worst of human sociology for the majority of my life. The public school system is not the answer.
(Saying basically the same thing as the parent, with a "I've been there and that shit is responsible for neo-nazis, rednecks, thugs, gangsters, columbine, teen pregnancy and hemmerhoids" spin. Been there. Hated every. Single. Second.)
That always irked me about concepts like intelligent contacts- the power source. I mean, you could hyothetically power an artificial retina by plugging some itty flywheels into the bloodstream and make up for it that way... eyephones could easily have their own internal power packs....
:)
And hey, people blink. A lot. With the right advances, the act if your eyelid passing over the contact might be enough to generate just enough juice to make it Go.
Something that size would, by design, have minimal power requirements... and they already have kinetically powered watches (last I heard...), so. That bit is at least possible.
Feasable's another matter.
I thought that pretty much any forward-looking predictive "LIFE IN THE YEAR $NOW+$TIME" was satire.... I mean, you know, flying cars, suborbital commutes... Joe Average having his bills paid and being able to eat well and put food on the table....
Sci-Fi authors have, in my experience, historically seen technology's potential, and neglected things like the economics of deployment, the size of the installed base, the fact that the vast majority aren't going to pull in enough to make frivolties like this monetarily feasable, and.... oh yeah, greed.
We'll get Weyland Yutani or the equivalent for sure. Starfleet and the Federation (aliens aside, I'm talking concept) are a frigging pipe dream.