3 ms·

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the w

by nzmsv 17y ago

And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.

emmett 17y ago
Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
  - michael_nielsen 17y ago
    What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.
  - mquander 17y ago
    I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s? Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.
abstractbill 17y ago
Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity. There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand. Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  You could watch high quality streaming video from the internet in 2000, (and download and watch movies illegally), on internet connections comparable to the speed of today. Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.
MikeCapone 17y ago
People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back. You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices. Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently. Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has. Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently. We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly. But people still think nothing is changing.
- jrp 17y ago
  What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
  - rglullis 17y ago
    10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started. 10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke. 10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space. 10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete. 10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
      For a decade of advancement, your examples are very weak. Compare 1970->1980 or 1980->1990 for the change in everyday technology! I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available. I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.
donaldc 17y ago
Not decided on whether change is accelerating, but a very significant improvement in my own life is the market availability of an automatic vacuum cleaner (i.e. Roomba). Much like the automatic dishwashers and clothes washers of yore, this is a huge time-saver. God, I hate vacuuming...

by nzmsv 17y ago

emmett 17y ago

Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
- michael_nielsen 17y ago
  What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.
- mquander 17y ago
  I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s? Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.

abstractbill 17y ago

Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity. There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand. Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.

WilliamLP 17y ago
You could watch high quality streaming video from the internet in 2000, (and download and watch movies illegally), on internet connections comparable to the speed of today. Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.

MikeCapone 17y ago

People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back. You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices. Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently. Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has. Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently. We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly. But people still think nothing is changing.

jrp 17y ago
What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
- rglullis 17y ago
  10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started. 10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke. 10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space. 10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete. 10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    For a decade of advancement, your examples are very weak. Compare 1970->1980 or 1980->1990 for the change in everyday technology! I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available. I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.

donaldc 17y ago

Not decided on whether change is accelerating, but a very significant improvement in my own life is the market availability of an automatic vacuum cleaner (i.e. Roomba). Much like the automatic dishwashers and clothes washers of yore, this is a huge time-saver. God, I hate vacuuming...