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The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

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Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#121

Post by AznHisoka »

viach wrote: post #26
AznHisoka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably.. suppose... it seems to me.. I hate it when people try and hedge their opinions.

You are right. I could re-phrase my comment - all statements about the future which don't contain notion of probability are pure gambling.

I totally agree. except "probably" contains a weak notion of probability . What does probably mean? 51% likely? 55% likely? 90% likely? If you're going to attach a probability to an opinion, use "most likely", or "almost certainly", or "unlikely". That to me, isn't hedging an opinion. That's attaching a real probability to the outcome.

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#122

Post by AznHisoka »

alecbenzer wrote: post #68
AznHisoka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably.. suppose... it seems to me.. I hate it when people try and hedge their opinions.

Why? Hedging is fine. I think it's important to accurately communicate how certain you are of a thing. Constant hedging is annoying, but so is stating everything as if it's a fact, despite how sure you really are. Communicating confidence is useful.

I totally agree. My beef was with people using vague words like "probably". What does probably mean? 51% likely? 55% likely? 90% likely? It contains no sense of probability, that can be agreed upon.

If you're going to attach a probability to an opinion, use "most likely", or "almost certainly", or "unlikely".

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#123

Post by dredmorbius »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #112
marcosdumay wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike? I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but t…

Just as a side note: the Internet was not actually created to organize US troops in the event of a nuclear strike. The Internet, the one initially birthed by ARPA, initially had academic and civilian aims. That said, some of the early research on networking was developed to aid the military in case of nuclear war. In particular, Paul Baran invented package switching explicitly to help the US air force maintain its de…

That was in fact the impetus:

While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.

https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html

Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND:

"On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

(This and the others are listed at the first link.)

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#124

Post by repsilat »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #110
minitoar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which I'm not sure is really classified as a smart home thing. This is amusing to me, I think as soon as something becomes somewhat common it will no longer be classified as "smart home". Sort of like how the definition of AI is a moving target.

It's definitely a smart device. But to me a smart home has a central system that can monitor a variety of inputs and, in response, control a set of things to accomplish some goal. We have a robot vacuum and robot mopper. Me going over and pressing the robot vacuum button, then once its done, placing the robot mopper in position and pressing the start button, is using smart devices but isn't a smart home. If I can tel…

> it starts the vacuum, and when that's done dispatches the mopper

Great point -- outsourcing control leads to logic that can improve and be coordinated between unrelated systems.

> If I can tell a central system

Or better yet, not need to tell it, and have your kitchen cleaned while you're at work, possibly with a phone notification if you really want it. Probably just a passive history+status interface normally, though, once you trust it.

Obviously a vacuum cleaner could have heuristics to tell when you're out (clocks and radar etc) but that's just a dead-end solution when your thermostat and your lights and your curtains and your security system all want to know too.

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#125

Post by dredmorbius »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #64
DoreenMichele wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.leaderherald.com/news/local-news/2019/07/when-au... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/toys-rich

Your first link is blocked for me by the website owner. The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time. It's really not cl…

https://web.archive.org/web/20190722171109/https://www.leade...

Internet Archive mirror, should be accessible.

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#126

Post by dredmorbius »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first link is blocked for me by the website owner. The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time. It's really not cl…

From the first piece: The oft-printed statement that early automobiles were ‘playthings of the rich’ until Henry Ford’s super-cheap Model T started rolling off the assembly line in October 1908, is easily proven by scanning the makes of high-priced chariots and their wealthy owners who participated in the Amsterdam Evening Recorder’s Saturday, July 10, 1909 “Sociability Run” from Amsterdam to Lake Luzerne. Everything…

Even more so when post-WWII cheap petrol made cars affordable, and suburban living made them essential.

Half of all households (based on ~4 persons per household) didn't own an automobile until between 1945-1950. Ownership didn't cross the 10% threshold until the 1930s.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cy898/durin...

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#128

Post by dwd »

grumpy8 wrote: post #42

I have a question for those who were there at the very beginning of the internet. I heard that many were skeptical about both personal computers and the internet.. did it feel the same as it does right now with crypto-currency/quantum-computing? I wasn't there, but on my side, it feels like people were able to use internet right from the beginning, whereas there's a bigger leap to using crypto/quantum. Is it just tha…

The skepticism in the PC was well dead by the 90s. I had access to BBC micros in the early 80s and my own C64 in '84. Two years later and I was using WordStar on a PC to type all my school assignments and learning MsDOS BASICA, Turtle Graphics and DB2.

Computers were very much about creativity and doing work.

I used an Apple Macintosh in 89/90 to access Usenet and it was a whole other world and the flood of information that came with the web took it to another level.

Crypto/Quantum don't really have the same impact for the average person. Quantum is just different hardware to do the same thing (though make some calculations feasible to execute in hours/minutes rather than the users lifetime)

Crypto will probably stay niche like other alternate payment methods like barter cards or the technology becomes part of the underlying mainstream infrastructure that no one sees along with all those billions of lines of COBOL.

Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)

#129

Post by nine_k »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #119
mdorazio wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your last sentence is perhaps the most important - timing the "Toys to Big Thing" transition is really hard and leaves a lot of dead companies in its wake. For example, at some point in the future, VR and AR will probably be in this category, but who knows how long it will actually take (basically-modern VR has been around since the 80s!) or what will cause the shift. Meanwhile, VR has left a decades-long tra…

Augmented reality is a great example. Everyone knows that it will become a "Big Thing" in the future. Like why would smartphones be the final form factor of personal computing? Of course there will be something that will dethrone it. But despite every big company throwing a couple billions at the problem for the last few years (Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of oculus, Google's $500 million investment into Magic L…

Remember the PC revolution.

Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore.

From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets.

Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began.

It took mere 20 years, say, from 1980 to 2000.

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