Back to the future, then and now…

I was watching Back the Future II, when Marty and the doc fly to the year 2015. Its amazing to see how much they (the movie makers) expected to change by the year 2015. In the future, according to them, we have flying cars, highways in the sky. Waiters have been replaced with automated CRT CGI people. Want a pizza? stick it in the "hydrating machine, 4 seconds later a full size pizza appears. Kids have hoverboards, some hoverboards have rockets. Telephones in your home are video conferenced, and have direct print support to your office. majority of appliances are voice activated. These are just some of the few things we see from the movie. So how much has really changed and been implemented? Well a microwave is still the most conventional way to heat and prepare food (err well at least for a bachelor like me). It IS the fastest way to heat my type of food. We do have flying cars, but there basically small project planes converted to be able to drive, although they dont look sporty when driving on the road I imagine, but at the least, we know were on our way. Nasa is in development of a"Skyway" for flying cars to travel on, but with the addition of the creation of "air traffic laws" that would set us back another 10 years at least. Waiters have yet to be replaced …but in certain parts of the country, KFC, and Del Taco have adopted computers with LCD screens, you just punch in your order and someone prepares the food in the back eliminating the need for a cashier. As for the video conferencing, VOIP companies are taking the home phone market and this is something that will be a joint task for the broadband companies and the VOIP companies working together to provide clean, no stutter, sharp, clear sounding video conferencing to every home in America…were sort of "on our way". We do have some people that take advantage of using video cameras to talk to people, but even with a very fast internet connection, I have yet to see HD quality video, with High def sound over a 30 minute conversation, now add my Web design team in Florida, my Creation & Product design team in the UK, me at my home, and a few of my employees at my office in Irvine, all together, THAT would be impressive…btw that has to be affordable as well, I probably through off any possibilities with that last one. For the rich or Corporate big brother, there is this option, it seems good but is not anywhere near affordable for the average "Best Buy" dood. As for the direct print support from your office, that is pretty easily done with a VPN, or with a program like PC anywhere, or gotomypc, and sharing a printer…although I dont see why you would need to do that, when you could just email, and print from where your at, the application they used in the movie, was for the boss to send Marty Mcfly, a message that printed out in a horrible font "YOURE FIRED", the message then appeared in almost every room of the house through what seems as wall mounted printers. That I dont want to see happening, imagine changing a toner in a printer mounted in the wall, or coming home to a pile of messages from your office, 90% are spam with adds like BUY VIAGRA TODAY! ..I don't want that and I imagine you don't either. Last but not least, the hoverboard, well there are some antigravity devices in theoretical development, and I imagine in some secret undergroundmilitary airbase, the anti gravit idea was "soooo 1990ish" , but for us mainstream people, the closest well get to a hoverboard is this bad boy. These are basically plywood with lawnmower engines attached vertically, filling the material with a cushion of air, so technically, your just riding on a cushion of air, like a puck on an air hockey table.

I dont think that by 2015 that it will be so much different from today, well have some different things, sure, LCDs will be phased out by OLEDs, E-paper may start to become affordable and be used in more practical situations. Hopefully REAL high speed broadband will have been rolled out to every home, I think the highest we have here for home use in Southern California is around 5mb down 256kb upm which is what I currently use, and I think you actually only get around 1.8mb down. Compare this to Japan that has 10mb down 2mb up speeds, we are WAY behind. With the future, certain amenities should get cheaper, your home phone, internet, and television, and cell phone bill, will most likely be all one low payment, for example. We probably wont see the flying cars within the next 40 years in practical use. Computers will be faster, maybe not in raw clock speed, but with more cores, running more efficiently. (I'll rant later about my complaints on the whole "dual core" cpu's and gpu's). By 2015 I imagine well have incorporated some type of "bio material" for use in CPUs, kind of like using actual living cells to transfer data, instead of atomic level pipelines. Anyways before I rant about the futures possibilities, Ill leave you with this, we are in a time of great change and advancement, but compared to what will occur within the next 100 years, what were doing today is barely setting the stepping stones of our technical evolutionary progress. In the last 20 years we have seen the greatest increase in technology, but I can still remember using a green monotone monitor, typing hundreds of lines of code, just to play pac man, which goes to show, that were still very young in our advancement.

-David

43 Folders, and thanksno

We can thank Merlin Mann for his social experiment of "thanksno" . Sum it all up to this question: Have you ever recieved an email from a friend, co-worker or family member that was forwarded from a forwarded ….so on and so on, email? Well I dont like my personal email being exsposed to strangers, and I have 25 email accounts just to circumvent and somewhat limit my spam intake. So the next time you get an email thats just a stupid joke thats been forwarded, or one of those really stupid and gay "If you forward this prayer to 10 people you know, all your prayers will come true, if you don't forward this email, you will die a burning death in hell you asshole" emails, just reply back with this link, or copy and paste it into your email, and its the nicest, and funniest way to attempt to stop it from happening again. Then again, they just might get to offended and not email you…ever again. Id rather risk it.

rant

And heres a funny page about Myspace, this guy goes into funny rants, but all in all, its all true. I've watched friends get onto myspace years ago, before it hit the mainstream crowd, now its just ridiculous. With the advancement of technology and the wider use of high speed internet and its acceptance, I do understand that web socialization will occur, and that yes, it is most likely a healthy and productive thing. However I do think that myspace exploits this idea and curves it into the wrong direction. Basically bad use of technology. I think the best thing that members of myspace tend to say is, "if it sucks so bad then why are there millions of people on it?", well there are several contributing factors to this. First off, people of this day and age are very trendy, and this is a trend that is being followed. Before myspace, there was friendster, and geocities, and before that, aol chatrooms, and shitty aol webpages, this is just the latest installment. Secondly, there was 34 million AOL users at their peak, thats 34 million idiots who overpaid for a shitty, spam & popup packed ISP, which 90% of them now realize how stupid it was. AOL actually made number 1 on the 25 Worst tech products of all times! I wont say much more against myspace, I think almost every single one of my friends actually use this on a daily basis. They figure that since Im so much into technology that I would be the forefront on the myspace bandwagon. But nope, I refuse to post comments to my friends, or send several text messages on my cell back and forth I just pick up the voip phone, and call them, its much faster.

Myspace Sucks..

As qouted and blogged by "alexm" of www.moundalexis.com

MySpace Sucks

MySpace sucks. Without mentioning the maturity of the users or the continuing controversy, here are a few reasons why MySpace sucks.

MySpace lacks structure.

Because MySpace allows users to customize the appearance of their page, the result is a clusterfu… oops, I meant a browsing nightmare. For example, take something as simple as a profile photographs. There doesn't appear to be any limitations on dimensions. Some people's photos are mere head shots; others are full body shoots that you need to scroll to see all of. As a result, some profile pages (and especially those with few than a handful of comments) don't flow too well. This is just one example of how quasi-free-form profiles can be a bad influence on page structure.

The brain needs structure. When we visit a structured site we expect structured content; when information isn't where it is expected to be, frustration sets in. You would think that the comments on one profile would bear a resemblance to comments on another profile. When this isn't the case, it distracts from the overall experience in a negative way.

MySpace is gaudy.

I am not a designer. I know this. I know that I have zero design skills. I don't attempt to make up for this shortcoming by plastering animated imagery on my page. Nor do I embed loud and poorly sampled audio clips which blindside potential visitors. It is a shame that others — specifically at least half (if not more) of all MySpace users — find this sort of thing necessary.

It reminds me of Geocities, circa 1998. Or was it Tripod with its 9MB quota, circa 1999? Or was it Angelfire in 1997? Either way, it was quite the debacle. Hundreds of thousands of people who just discovered how to use HTML, coming together in order to create the most hideously colored and flashing web pages in the not-so-quickly maturing online world. Had none of the above-mentioned companies offered free (with advertising) web pages, none of this crap would have ever happened. It took years of insults and coordinated jeering to get rid of them. The guilty parties growing up probably helped too. Just as we thought that all the gaudy personal web pages were fading away, MySpace re-introduces them… then gains an obscene amount of popularity just to spite history.

MySpace uses distracting advertising.

Naturally you've got someone else's advertising slapped up on your page, banner-ad style. In the case of Geocities, it was the annoying three-clicks-to-get-rid-of-it sidebar. For some Tripod accounts, it was a pop-up ad. MySpace uses the flashing, animated, and otherwise obnoxious banner ads to detract from the user's profile.

I don't have a problem with advertising, so long as it doesn't detract from the experience; my choice is Google's AdSense program. Not that you could run AdSense on a MySpace profile anyways. I've yet to read any MySpace profile that could yield intelligible text for Google to parse. I don't even know what sort of ads could be contextually relevant to the gibberish that today's teenagers type.

MySpace reserves the right to your content.

I know that no one reads the terms of use or privacy policy, but they are important documents if you contribute anything to site that you don't own. The following is an excerpt — emphasis mine — of the MySpace.com Terms of Use and Agreement, as of March 17, 2006. This excerpt is from the section entitled "Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com."

"By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services."

There are a lot of bands on MySpace that post music files to play/share. It shocks me that any band's agent would allow their clients to go anywhere near MySpace, considering the emphasized portion above. They could use a band's music in TV ads without attribution or compensation, or further sublicense said content to another organization for the same purpose. A band would have no legal recourse for receiving royalties or other fees for their part.

Should MySpace ever be purchased by a major label or perhaps a large conglomerate with a label other its wing (Time-Warner, anyone?), the license would probably be transferred to the new owner. That could make getting a contract with another label problematic.

That used to be the end of it, but then the following was added:

"This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the Content posted by you may remain on the MySpace.com servers after you have removed the Content from the Services, and MySpace.com retains the rights to those copies."

At first that sounds fine… except that they retain the rights to their "archival" copies. There's no telling how long their backups are kept until they are disposed of permanently, if ever.

MySpace friends are cheap.

MySpace "friends" are a dime a dozen, cheap to add, maintain, or ignore. At some point, the word friend became a verb. People "friend" others that they don't even know. People "friend" others solely to increase their friend count. Some actually friend people that they do know and have met in person.

Some people actually have used the service to keep up with old friends, continue to keep in touch, and meet up outside of the MySpace arena. Of the people I talk to, this isn't too common. There's usually a reason that people part ways in the beginning; most of the time the original reason isn't circumvented by a trendy web site.

Of the friended people whom a user knew in the past, most will never make an attempt to catch up offline. The majority will be content to leave brief messages on each other's profiles, as opposed to email which requires a bit more interaction and care. I think that the leave-a-quick-one messaging culture has caused quality conversations to decay, affecting the way we relate to others.

Flickr! and you

I can't repeat this enough, if you take photographs, professionally or just for fun, share them with flickr @ www.flickr.com . Account creation= free, upload pics of any size = free, share with your friends/family/internet pals all over the world. Only catch is for the free accounts (paid account is something like $20 a YEAR , cmon thats cheap) , you have a megabyte download limit per month, which isnt to bad considering I have uploaded 117 pics and still didnt reach my monthly limit my first month. (used a 3 megapixel canon camera) and flickr uploader to resize the pics (MAC).

Something Ive found a little fun is if you own a motorola phone, you can buy motorola phone tools for your phone ($10 on ebay.com) or if your familiar with bittorrent, well then its there as well (the guy selling em on ebay just cloned his original, CDstomped a label on it and sells it), and with the included data cable, sync all your pics and vids from your phone to you flickr account. I know I have some priceless photos on my phone, which I can now backup to my lifedrive and laptops. My Flickr account can be found @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/exempt/

Welcome visitor!

I have a few other blogs, so I may tend to get behind every now and then on posting. Anyways, I have been playing with the google beta page creator, which is linked from my flickr! account, [search for people = exempt] and I noticed that the page was getting views just from the simple weblinks I posted on there, and the helpful hints. Well anyways I figured it would be a whole lot easier to just start another blog. This is more in depth tech related, as opposed to my personal blogs, with pictures of family and friends, and all that crap.