Technologies: death and rebirth
Every day we are faced with new devices and applications, which according to the plans of the creators should completely change our life. But what to do with technologies of yesterday, which of them will get a rebirth, and which ones will disappear forever? Let's figure it out.
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According to NetMarketShare, the share of active users of Windows XP has even slightly increased compared to the end of last year. There are about as many people who still use this system as Windows 8.1 and 10 users.
The operating system, which this year marks fifteen years, is no longer supported by developers and fewer and fewer applications are released for it. But it still holds the mark of a reliable high-speed product. But even ardent supporters must admit that XP is a system of the distant past, which has a place in the present only thanks to the senseless pursuit of software manufacturers for beauty.
First, Microsoft promised a revolution, a new mobile platform with an incredible graphical environment and user-friendly applications, which will get the same popularity as a computer counterpart. Then he was told that the tenth version would erase the boundaries between smartphones, tablets and PCs, and cross-platform application development would solve the problem of the scarcity of the range of applications. In fact, all this resulted in a sad report from Microsoft, according to which WP sales in the last quarter of 2015 fell by 57%. Is it time to end up with experiments?
On the other side of Silicon Valley, Apple should finally stop rebuilding the iPod Touch.
Yesterday you downloaded music from your computer there and could not part with your favorite tunes for a second. But then someone needed to add an accelerometer there, then a video player, games, then it turned out that the Internet is necessary for constant access to music services, which means you can use instant messengers.
What is the point of Touch now, if the difference with smartphones is so small, and streaming services are becoming more and more popular? Good old Nano and Shuffle is enough.
Anyway, all these electronic media, like CD, DVD, Blue-Ray, are just interior details. It's great to have at home a whole rack of CDs with your favorite movies and music as a reason to invite your favorite girl to your home or the opportunity to show off to your friends. But no practical sense. Therefore, let's stop pretending that modern society really needs this.
According to IDC and Gartner analytical agencies, sales of desktop computers fall by 10% annually, which means the steady decline of the PC era. No, where large computing power is needed, the usual boxes will not go away. But for the vast majority of tasks they are simply not needed.
As a gaming machine console already look more attractive, both for developers and for users. At work, they continue to equip your place around the PC, but as soon as it comes to the need to do work on business trips and free time, a powerful modern laptop appears in its place. And at home, where half of the devices are actively working with Wi-Fi, it’s just blasphemy to create a whole altar for a computer. Admit, in the modern world, where you can not turn off for a second, it is just ridiculous to cling to such stationary habits.
Even before the official presentation at the CES-2016 exhibition of a refrigerator with a function to control the quantity and shelf life of products, we knew that home appliances can be truly smart. Back in the early 2000s, microwaves appeared capable of calculating the time and power of cooking of a selected dish, and washing machines have long adjusted the water consumption to the tank load.
But only today, household utensils have at their disposal artificial intelligence. Vacuum cleaners independently drive around the house, much better than the owner knowing where the dust was lying around. The dishwasher analyzes the degree of contamination, the quantity and the subject composition of the load. The oven will not only tell you how to cook this or that dish, but also tells you what you can serve at a dinner party. And when you open your smart fridge and find that the milk is over, do not worry - it has already been ordered and in a few minutes the courier will ring the doorbell. It remains only to stop being afraid that the equipment will be smarter than you.
In 2010, Laszlo Khanech bought 2 pizzas for 10 thousand bitcoins. However, even six years later, the cryptocurrency was not widely spread, only having made a historic leap in cost in 2013 and became a favorite means of payment for not quite legal transactions.
Meanwhile, with the help of bitcoin today, you can buy Microsoft and Dell products, fly with AirBaltic and Air Lituanica, book reservations at BTCTrip and go to a concert in London, thanks to UK's Theater Tickets Direct. And there are dozens of such services. Why should go far: the online stores serving the smart refrigerators mentioned in the previous paragraph are also ready to sell food for bitcoin. Considering that all these offers have appeared on the market only in the last year and a half, we can safely say that 2016 should be a historic breakthrough for cryptocurrencies.
Just as 3D technology was reborn in cinema, virtual reality glasses are ready to make a new qualitative breakthrough. Yes, in Russia, eyewitnesses of the first wave can hardly be found, but the Internet remembers the brainchild of Nintendo, the 1995 Virtual Boy. Look at Youtube: outwardly those glasses are practically indistinguishable from modern Oculus Rift, Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap and plastic-cardboard adapters for a mobile phone.
And recently there was a presentation from Microsoft, where they quite clearly told about the replacement of dull black panels with a bunch of wires in your home. Add another version of Google Glass here, and you will understand - the revolution is near.
It is difficult to determine exactly what is the rebirth of mobile payment technology. If you take only the computer world, in 2011, Google launched the Wallet service, which was supposed to simplify the payment procedure, in case there is no plastic card or cash at hand. But the scandals and imperfections of the system led to the fact that the creators literally had to pay extra for each transaction.
Everything changed with the advent of NFC technology in 2014, when the Apple Pay service first started, and then Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Now you just have to have any modern gadget - a phone, a watch or even a ring, and you will not be lost anywhere. Is that in Chertanovo.
Finally, let's leave the talk about money and entertainment, devoting a few words to what is really important - health. Imagine that a person paralyzed from birth can start moving again, go to a favorite football match, go shopping with her family. This happy story happened in 2014 with a small Brazilian boy with quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs). Thanks to the invention of Professor Miguel Nickelis, he not only attended the opening match of the World Cup, but also made the first symbolic kick on the ball.
The technology, based on reading motor signals from the brain and transmitting them to robotic mechanisms, has been trying to get green light for mass use for many years. For example, the first experiments on monkeys showed positive results back in 2008. A year later, in Hollywood, the film Surrogates was made based on the work of Nicolas. This made it possible to attract large grants and international grants to the project, thanks to which the very same legendary costume became possible.
In the yard in 2016. Billions of dollars invested by IT giants in gesture recognition systems and movements, predicting further user actions, detecting his vital signs, already today are able to make Nicolelis's creation much easier, cheaper and more perfect. Things are easy - to unite efforts for the implementation of a simple human mission.
Anyone with a life experience will have a couple of stories that the grass used to be greener, and Google Glass will never replace a paper kaleidoscope. However, if you are still able to read this text, it is too early to be nostalgic. As practice shows, no technology is a thing of the past irrevocably. She only takes a short break before conquering the world in a new guise.
And for what things do you nostalgic?
Article author: Ilya Bubnov, GeekBrains.ru
A quick death
')
Windows XP is still popular
According to NetMarketShare, the share of active users of Windows XP has even slightly increased compared to the end of last year. There are about as many people who still use this system as Windows 8.1 and 10 users.
The operating system, which this year marks fifteen years, is no longer supported by developers and fewer and fewer applications are released for it. But it still holds the mark of a reliable high-speed product. But even ardent supporters must admit that XP is a system of the distant past, which has a place in the present only thanks to the senseless pursuit of software manufacturers for beauty.
Windows Phone does not shine?
First, Microsoft promised a revolution, a new mobile platform with an incredible graphical environment and user-friendly applications, which will get the same popularity as a computer counterpart. Then he was told that the tenth version would erase the boundaries between smartphones, tablets and PCs, and cross-platform application development would solve the problem of the scarcity of the range of applications. In fact, all this resulted in a sad report from Microsoft, according to which WP sales in the last quarter of 2015 fell by 57%. Is it time to end up with experiments?
Do I need an iPod Touch
On the other side of Silicon Valley, Apple should finally stop rebuilding the iPod Touch.
Yesterday you downloaded music from your computer there and could not part with your favorite tunes for a second. But then someone needed to add an accelerometer there, then a video player, games, then it turned out that the Internet is necessary for constant access to music services, which means you can use instant messengers.
What is the point of Touch now, if the difference with smartphones is so small, and streaming services are becoming more and more popular? Good old Nano and Shuffle is enough.
Discs from the past
Anyway, all these electronic media, like CD, DVD, Blue-Ray, are just interior details. It's great to have at home a whole rack of CDs with your favorite movies and music as a reason to invite your favorite girl to your home or the opportunity to show off to your friends. But no practical sense. Therefore, let's stop pretending that modern society really needs this.
Desktop PC
According to IDC and Gartner analytical agencies, sales of desktop computers fall by 10% annually, which means the steady decline of the PC era. No, where large computing power is needed, the usual boxes will not go away. But for the vast majority of tasks they are simply not needed.
As a gaming machine console already look more attractive, both for developers and for users. At work, they continue to equip your place around the PC, but as soon as it comes to the need to do work on business trips and free time, a powerful modern laptop appears in its place. And at home, where half of the devices are actively working with Wi-Fi, it’s just blasphemy to create a whole altar for a computer. Admit, in the modern world, where you can not turn off for a second, it is just ridiculous to cling to such stationary habits.
Second birth
Smart technology is even smarter
Even before the official presentation at the CES-2016 exhibition of a refrigerator with a function to control the quantity and shelf life of products, we knew that home appliances can be truly smart. Back in the early 2000s, microwaves appeared capable of calculating the time and power of cooking of a selected dish, and washing machines have long adjusted the water consumption to the tank load.
But only today, household utensils have at their disposal artificial intelligence. Vacuum cleaners independently drive around the house, much better than the owner knowing where the dust was lying around. The dishwasher analyzes the degree of contamination, the quantity and the subject composition of the load. The oven will not only tell you how to cook this or that dish, but also tells you what you can serve at a dinner party. And when you open your smart fridge and find that the milk is over, do not worry - it has already been ordered and in a few minutes the courier will ring the doorbell. It remains only to stop being afraid that the equipment will be smarter than you.
Cryptocurrency
In 2010, Laszlo Khanech bought 2 pizzas for 10 thousand bitcoins. However, even six years later, the cryptocurrency was not widely spread, only having made a historic leap in cost in 2013 and became a favorite means of payment for not quite legal transactions.
Meanwhile, with the help of bitcoin today, you can buy Microsoft and Dell products, fly with AirBaltic and Air Lituanica, book reservations at BTCTrip and go to a concert in London, thanks to UK's Theater Tickets Direct. And there are dozens of such services. Why should go far: the online stores serving the smart refrigerators mentioned in the previous paragraph are also ready to sell food for bitcoin. Considering that all these offers have appeared on the market only in the last year and a half, we can safely say that 2016 should be a historic breakthrough for cryptocurrencies.
Virtual reality glasses
Just as 3D technology was reborn in cinema, virtual reality glasses are ready to make a new qualitative breakthrough. Yes, in Russia, eyewitnesses of the first wave can hardly be found, but the Internet remembers the brainchild of Nintendo, the 1995 Virtual Boy. Look at Youtube: outwardly those glasses are practically indistinguishable from modern Oculus Rift, Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap and plastic-cardboard adapters for a mobile phone.
And recently there was a presentation from Microsoft, where they quite clearly told about the replacement of dull black panels with a bunch of wires in your home. Add another version of Google Glass here, and you will understand - the revolution is near.
Very mobile payments
It is difficult to determine exactly what is the rebirth of mobile payment technology. If you take only the computer world, in 2011, Google launched the Wallet service, which was supposed to simplify the payment procedure, in case there is no plastic card or cash at hand. But the scandals and imperfections of the system led to the fact that the creators literally had to pay extra for each transaction.
Everything changed with the advent of NFC technology in 2014, when the Apple Pay service first started, and then Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Now you just have to have any modern gadget - a phone, a watch or even a ring, and you will not be lost anywhere. Is that in Chertanovo.
Body robots
Finally, let's leave the talk about money and entertainment, devoting a few words to what is really important - health. Imagine that a person paralyzed from birth can start moving again, go to a favorite football match, go shopping with her family. This happy story happened in 2014 with a small Brazilian boy with quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs). Thanks to the invention of Professor Miguel Nickelis, he not only attended the opening match of the World Cup, but also made the first symbolic kick on the ball.
The technology, based on reading motor signals from the brain and transmitting them to robotic mechanisms, has been trying to get green light for mass use for many years. For example, the first experiments on monkeys showed positive results back in 2008. A year later, in Hollywood, the film Surrogates was made based on the work of Nicolas. This made it possible to attract large grants and international grants to the project, thanks to which the very same legendary costume became possible.
In the yard in 2016. Billions of dollars invested by IT giants in gesture recognition systems and movements, predicting further user actions, detecting his vital signs, already today are able to make Nicolelis's creation much easier, cheaper and more perfect. Things are easy - to unite efforts for the implementation of a simple human mission.
Anyone with a life experience will have a couple of stories that the grass used to be greener, and Google Glass will never replace a paper kaleidoscope. However, if you are still able to read this text, it is too early to be nostalgic. As practice shows, no technology is a thing of the past irrevocably. She only takes a short break before conquering the world in a new guise.
And for what things do you nostalgic?
Article author: Ilya Bubnov, GeekBrains.ru
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/276995/
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