I never said MP3 player helped poverty, and I never said new technology should be developed solely for the purpose of helping poor people. I don't have a MP3 player at this point of my life as matter of fact. I still use the cell phone I bought 5 years ago. I am willing to argue a mug with a temperature display and a digital boarding pass are no more than fancy toys. Dragging and dropping stuff on a touch screen is not on the same level of discovering x-rays.
I was just giving a touch of reality. Not saying MS should position itself to lift many from poverty in the future. The stuff shown in that little clip are hardly innovative. It tries to sell a lifestyle IMO, a life style out of touch with the reality.
Check with me 10 years later. There might be less than .1% that will be reality. They better fix the damn Vista first.
No, but you are dismissing the early stages of technological advancement as being trivial by adding "we still have large % of people on this planet living under poverty". So what is your point there? Either you made some random statement about poverty or you were trying to say inventions should aid the elimination of poverty. Explain. I'm willing to bet someone said TV was just a fad. What's your point? lol. I'm willing to bet that after the first graphical interface was created in the 60's, we went 20-30 years before it became popularized... popular enough to be used as an interface for those x-ray machines that became important. The first computer GUI was theorized in the 40's, yet its usefulness wasn't realized in the public until decades later. And now where is the GUI? It's ubiquitous... in just about every building you enter, running mission critical applications and those x-ray machines you hold dear. Here, let me make you feel better, though, since you apparently wanted to see everything possible in the future in a 5 minute video, but couldn't : Microsoft's Surface technology (the basis of many of the things you saw in the video) is being used by a health provider here in the Dallas area to interface with patients via tablet pc's. A bunch of doctors got together with the health provider and Microsoft to come up with possible applications. This is just the start... now we need to get rid of the tablet pc or make it wafer thin and slam it into somehing like flexible OLED. If you guys just see something shown and say "it's just eye candy", you're not understanding that this is just the start and you're killing the idea before it's even had a chance. Technologies aren't always invented to solve the problem - it often takes many people to arrive at uses for the technology.
1993 AT&T "You Will" commercials... <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TZb0avfQme8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TZb0avfQme8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Come on, Clutch. None of that stuff saves mankind. I don't see Sally Struthers in that commercial anywhere. I call, Fad!
pretty cool. i don't know what will come true from that Microsoft commercial, but 10 years for technology is an enormous amount of time. i mean 10 years ago the internet barely existed. i think we had just gotten dial-up in our house in 1999. and now look at it. everyone is on the internet, every company has a website, there is virtually nothing you can buy or do that can't be bought or done on the web. and we've got cell phones that are practically computers when they were barely going strong back then. it's always funny watching tv shows from the late 90's and seeing no one with a cell phone and never a mention of the internet. people still had to use landlines and payphones. although somehow in a 1995 episode of the Fresh Prince a woman mentioned her daughter wrote a children's magazine on the internet. that always seemed weird to be written in back in '95.
I'm still waiting on flying cars so, we can drive flying around like in Disney movie Wall-E. Plus my laptop can do almost all of that nothing special. I'm sure MAC will have something even BETTER than Microsoft they always do.
The displays are already created, it called Flexible Display. It will avaliable to military in 2 or 3 years. Here are videos of that technology and test video done on June 2008: Spoiler <object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4yrNhRnp0Dk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4yrNhRnp0Dk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object> <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/IVJCOAFLHJA&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/IVJCOAFLHJA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> <object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/R2pV-SArGSM&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/R2pV-SArGSM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>
Yes, almost all the technology is already here. When the costs of the hardware go down this will be more commonplace. As for selling a lifestyle, etc...well a young Bill Gates envisioned a day when computers would be in every home and people laughed. This is just a progression where technology will be even more embedded in our everyday lives. Seamless, ubiquitous, easy-to-use GUIs are how these things become more and more mainstream. If we were stuck using command line MS-DOS until today there would be a lot less computers in households. It is 'eye candy' in the sense that MS is advertising something that isn't here yet. Just like concept cars at auto shows. But it is also demonstrating a company's future plans.
