4 ms·
I disagree with a couple of his verdicts. 1. Mechanical hard drives. These have become a bit more niche, but if you deal with larger files like that movie libr
by Zak 6y ago
I disagree with a couple of his verdicts.
1. Mechanical hard drives. These have become a bit more niche, but if you deal with larger files like that movie library the author ought to rip from those fragile optical disks he still has lying around, spinning rust is the far more cost-effective option for storing files you don't use all the time.
2. Phone numbers. His original prediction is that people wouldn't use them, not that people wouldn't remember them and dial them manually. A number of popular messenger services including Signal use phone numbers as identifiers, and I wish they didn't.
3. The fax machine. This absolutely, 100% deserved to be dead a decade ago. Perhaps most faxes aren't actually sent using physical machines anymore, but a lot of businesses and some government institutions treat fax as more secure than purely digital file transfers. My vote in the 2020 US election involved a fax. I'm disappointed in the tech community for not producing a solution that achieved near-universal buy-in from more conservative institutions in the past two decades.
4. Optical disks. I haven't used one in years, and I suspect a lot of other people here are in the same position. There's not that much content I want to watch more than once, so the issue of streaming non-ownership isn't a big problem for me. The author has kids, and kids definitely do that, but there are both legal and less legal ways to obtain permanent copies of content by purely digital means. Note to content sellers: I'm happy to pay for content; don't make it so difficult for me to do so that I seek alternatives.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoWith regards to optical disks, the number of movies available digitally is still much smaller than those available on media.
- Zak 6y agoIs that true if you include piracy?
- ghaff 6y agoProbably depending upon how hard you want to look and how many compromises you're willing to accept in terms of quality.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoYes, it is still true if you include piracy.
- donatj 6y agoIt’s honestly really hard to find less well known movies of more than a few years old. Torrents really aren’t what they used to be. There were a handful of movies I’d seen in my teens I could not find anywhere. I ended up importing DVDs from Japan and manually aligning some awful fan subs I’d found.
- Narishma 6y agoOptical discs are still very popular for console gaming.
- rblatz 6y agoI bought one physical game for the x box one, the rest have been digital.
- homero 6y agoI buy physical because they're cheaper and can be resold. It's weird digital is more expensive.
- zabzonk 6y agoMe too! I don't understand why a music CD on Amazon is cheaper than an MP3, particularly when the CD also comes with a free MP3 download! Both are digital, of course.
- DerekL 6y ago> Both are digital, of course. By the way, it annoys me that the word digital is used to mean “downloaded over a network”.
- f6v 6y agoThe digital prices are insane, I see games north of 80 EUR now.
- Matrixik 6y agoI buy only physical for PS4 because after playing I exchange them with other people.
- SilverRed 6y agoThey are basically a legacy mode now. The playstation offers an option with no disk drive and I imagine the next gen will have no disk drive option at all.
- einpoklum 6y ago> 1. Mechanical hard drives. These have become a bit more niche No, they're still pretty mainstream. When someone runs out of disk space (e.g. with media files), they tend to buy a large HDD (whether external or internal), not a second SSD. So, your point about HDDs is even stronger, and the author's son will definitely get one.
- einpoklum 6y ago... to put some numbers on this: * In 2020, non-enterprise sales were 330 Million SSD units, 260 Million HDD. * In 2020, non-enterprise users bought 5 times more capacity on HDDs than on SSDs. https://www.pcgamer.com/fun-fact-ssds-outsold-hdds-last-year-but-not-in-total-capacity/ https://www.pcgamer.com/fun-fact-ssds-outsold-hdds-last-year...
- megameter 6y agoIf we define hard drives and optical media as "memory based on periodic rotation" then the technology has been around for generations, in fact, with specific materials and mechanisms serving to update the paradigm. Tape, drum memory, magnetic discs, and optical. Periodic rotation trades blows with periodic refresh - tubes, DRAM - and phase-change - relays, core, flash - as the prevailing memory paradigm, with hybridization of features often occuring. Von Neumann wouldn't be too surprised at the memory paradigms in use now, because they haven't changed, even though the implementation has become considerably more sophisticated. But, of course, that can't dismiss the idea that a better implementation is a substantial technical advance either.
- Grustaf 6y agoThe article is about technology his son would use, presumably in daily life. Not technology that someone somewhere might use.
- donatj 6y agoCall me crazy but I actually recently switched back to DVD Netflix. The selection is way better than any individual streaming service and I have this timer ticking in my head that makes me actually watch what I rent instead of wasting my life watching reruns of comfort shows. It’s been fantastic.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoOur household doesn't have any optical drives. We have an xbox360 and a blueray/dvd in storage that hasn't been used since before our last move 3 years ago. So, essentially it's non-existent. Actually, I'm wrong wife's desktop does... and our car does...but I mean the frequency of use is like twice per decade...