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In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.
by maxklein 16y ago
In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.
- redthrowaway 16y agoIn 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.
- maxklein 16y agoHow would they play music when jogging or in the train then?
- moe 16y agoEar-implant with wireless streaming, probably.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.
- whatusername 16y agoDo you live in a major US city or Small European or Asian Country? Look at remote places in Canada or Australia. Local data caching is important.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even bother with the whole of Saskatchewan for a number of years. If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.
- kondro 16y agoI live in Australia and already try to live mostly in the cloud. I have more than enough mobile data transferring > 5Mbps anywhere that I happen to be to live completely on cloud-based technologies if such technologies existed for all my requirements.
- rmc 16y agoTheir data connection will still work on the train or out and about. Obviously. It'll be like a mobile phone now, works everywhere (more or less).
- bad_user 16y agoStreaming directly in their brain?
- notirk 16y agoLiving in NYC and traveling almost exclusively by subway makes me appreciate my local storage. In time there will be wireless underground, but for now, it's necessary to store music and podcasts on local storage. The AT&T 2 GB limit per month also encourages the need for local storage.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoPhysical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor. edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
- regularfry 16y agoRelevant: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes."
- waqf 16y agoThat quote has always bugged me. It's dimensionally wrong: a station wagon doesn't have bandwidth. Bandwidth (in the sense intended here) is measured in bits/second: how do you measure that from a station wagon [full of mag tapes]? Now a freeway full of station wagons ... that has bandwidth.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoIf it takes an hour to copy a terabyte of data to a tape, put it in a car, drive to a location and read the tape, you just transported 8796093022208 bits in 3600 seconds, or about 2443359173 bits/second. edit: I always understood the quote as "the [potential] bandwidth"- the bandwidth that can be available using the station wagon as physical infrastructure.
- waqf 16y agoFirstly, that number is a function of how far apart your particular origin and destination are, so it's not intrinsic to the station wagon. And secondly, you just measured latency there, not bandwidth.
- redthrowaway 16y agoUnless I'm wrong, they've measured both: Latency is 1 hour (time it takes a packet to go from source to destination), bandwidth is that number they quoted.