For most of my professional life the saying has been “Five years from now”, as in:
- “Five years from now bandwidth will be fast enough we’ll be able to stream HD video.”
- “Five years from now computers will be fast enough to render video in real time.”
- “We need another five years until a small hand held computer is actually a useful thing”
- “We’re still five years out from having a computer that can go all day on a battery charge.”
- We’re about five years away from not needing all of these wires.
- In five years I’ll be able to take a credit card from anywhere.
I don’t know when it happened, but five years from now is here.
I watch HD YouTube streams on my 55″ TV all the time, I beam my desktop from my Mac to that same HDTV without the need of wires. My wireless internet connection is as fast as I need it all the time. I carry around the equivalent computing power to my desktop computer from 1999…in my pocket! I regularly use a tablet that can do 90% of the things I need to do in a day, and which yields me about 8 hours of battery life easily. My laptop gets me a good 5-7 hours of battery life most days. I don’t worry about my data anymore because it’s all around me in the ubiquitous “cloud”. I still carry a USB key on my keychain, but I barely ever use it. I have an elaborate backup system at home, that failed me recently…and which “the cloud” saved me from without me ever knowing that I was in peril.
I get comics, magazines and books digitally, and when I want to read something, I can do so without ever leaving my chair. We don’t have video stores anymore, if you want to watch a movie you rent and download it (either through a device like AppleTV, or your cable box), but more often than not I stream it from a streaming service like Netflix, where for about the cost of a couple rentals a month, I get a firehose of content.
That’s the thing about the future, it kind of sneaks up on you.
This week’s Best of List:
- Album of the Week:
- Comic of the Week: All New X-Men #2 (Bendis and Immonen are revitalizing the X-Men in a big way)
- Book of the Week: Blah Blah Blah – What To Do When Words Don’t Work (Dan Roam)
- Podcast of the Week: Quit from Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network is pretty inspirational
- TV Show of the Week: The Walking Dead mid-season finale once again leaves with a “holy shit” moment.
- Website of the Week: 24 Ways (To Impress Your Friends) – Web Design Tips