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All posts tagged "future"


Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Future of the Living Room According to Microsoft

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 01:30 PM

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsof...iving-room.aspx

"Summer is a transition time for many people: the break between school years; a vacation before tackling another year of work; and for network television that's been a guest in our living rooms for so long, summer is a time of transition between seasons. It's appropriate then that we are also in the middle of a fundamental transformation of the technology in our living rooms. Traditional broadcast and cable TV are steadily being augmented and enjoyed in new ways such as ‘time-shifted' and on-demand TV via DVRs and other devices like the Xbox, PCs, tablets and even smartphones. Similarly, DVDs are being replaced by on-demand movie delivery via services such as Netflix and Hulu. And the standard 30- or 60-minute commercial program is no longer the only game in town - today's entertainment options are a vast cornucopia of content from ultra-short to full length, all delivered over the Internet."

Over the past decade I've seen a lot of these sorts of things coming from Microsoft - they all look like great ideas, but rarely do they come to fruition. Will this time be different? I'd like to think so - there's some compelling stuff in this video - but I'm not going to hold my breath...


Monday, December 6, 2010

20 Dying Technologies: Agree or Disagree?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 12:00 PM

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/1...ying_tech/1.htm

"All too often, the hottest devices and coolest gadgets of the moment are dusty in the marketplace before the ink is dry on the receipt. And the pace of replacement is getting faster every year. Indeed, there are so many game-changers in the world of technology that the death knell is sounding on many a device that we use every day."

There are some obvious ones on this list - like the fax machine, though that's been "dying" for many years now - but some of them are real head-scratchers. Take gaming consoles for instance; this article says that ten years from now we'll have Internet-connected TVs and, apparently, all our gaming will be done online. Really? Maybe for a quick game of SuDoKu with a friend, but I can't see TVs having the same level of hardware, software, performance, and polish that a gaming console has. I firmly believe in products that are really good at their primary task, not products that are sort of good at a lot of things. And gaming is also about platforms; who really believes that the TV industry will be able to get together and cooperate on creating a unified hardware specification for game developers to target? Not going to happen.

Oh, and point and shoot digital cameras are also on list this of dying technologies - that one's a bit easier to swallow, because cameras on smartphones are getting better, but I think it's going to take quite a few years and advances in folded optics, image sensor quality, performance, and battery life before people won't prefer a dedicated digital camera.

What's your take on the items on this list?


Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Future of Windows

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 12:00 AM

http://technologizer.com/2010/03/08...future-windows/

"Over the past quarter century, Windows has evolved many times, and it will change again in light of Microsoft's investments in cloud services, mobile platforms, and other new technologies. And as the way people compute and communicate morphs faster than ever, the challenges ahead for Windows are huge. With that in mind, Technologizer asked some of the industry's big brains about what Microsoft needs to do to keep its operating system relevant in the years to come."

It took me a while to read this article in bits and pieces, but it was worth it - there are some really interesting opinions about the future of Windows as a platform. Some of the suggestions are old and crusty ("Throw it all out! Start over!"), but some are interesting. The implementation of Project Natal technology in a Windows environment would bring with it some really cool possibilities. What do you think about the future of Windows?


Monday, October 13, 2008

Inventing The Future, 2000-Style

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 08:32 AM

I was posting about Pocket PC Thoughts' 8th anniversary today, and courtesy of Archive.org - I'm so grateful those guys do what they do - I saw this post I made back in October of 2000:

"Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you're shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olymus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them."

I thought that was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because eight years later, we still don't have cameras with rich operating systems supporting third-party software applications for - although we do have some cameras that can do WiFi directly off the camera itself, and of course we have hardware such as the Eye-Fi. We have some DSLRs with expensive add-ons to provide WiFi, but virtually no cameras that bridge into PDAs or smartphones. Read more...


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