Obsolete Technology

[grahf]

What type of technology do you think need to be updated/replace with a newer/better format?


Floppy/Zip drives for USB mobile drives or flash cards

CDR for DVDR

CRT monitor for LCD monitors

Narrowband for broadband

Ball mouse to optical

[Gamer1]

tv... i think all tv's should come with vga connectors, same quality as a pc monitor and can watch 4 channels at the same time (1 for playing a games on, 2 for cnn/fox news, 3rd screen is for History Channel, and the other one is misc.)

or i could just go for a pc with an all-in-wonder?

[scottlc]

Originally Posted by grahf

Floppy/Zip drives for USB mobile drives or flash cards

I'd hardly think so. To a certain extent, these formats have already been replaced by CDRs. Flash cards cost about £140 for a 512MB card, CDRs cost about 30p each. There is absolutely no way that Flash cards can compete with CDR.

[n_w95482]

Well they are smaller and are easily erasable/(re)writable and are much more practical than cd's in digital cameras (both in size and in power consumption).

Ball mouses are disappering, so i guess thats settled . CDR >> DVDR will take some time , but its easy to understand .. as 700mb isnt much anymore the CDR are going to slowly disapper IMO .

Broadband has come a long way i think, even here in israel it just doesnt pay to get narrowband as a 256k "broadband" costs the same or even less .

my 2 cents :o

[scottlc]

Originally Posted by n_w95482

Well they are smaller and are easily erasable/(re)writable and are much more practical than cd's in digital cameras (both in size and in power consumption).

So you are saying that a storage medium more that 100 times the cost of a CD is more practical.

Id say that flash has some usages , while the CDR's have another . Flash is more geared towards quick and repeatable moving of files , while CDR is tending to be for long term backups .

[n_w95482]

I wasn't saying that flash cards are practical compared to cd's (mostly the opposite). I'm just saying flash cards have their merits. I have a digital camera with a 16mb compact flash card and it is very easy to erase or transfer pics to or from a comp (and ppl like how small the cards are). Flash cards are still expensive compared to cd's but the price for them has gone down a lot fron a couple of years ago. But try to put a cd-r drive into a digital camera (I think its already been done). Digital cameras by themselves suck up a lot of juice and adding a cd-r drive to it isn't going to help. Even tho my camera has compact flash, it EATS thru batteries. I ended up getting 2 sets of 4 AA size 1500 mA NiMH batteries just so the dam thing can last longer on a set. Whenever I need to take more than 15 pics or the camera sez 1/2 life left (has 3 energy levels: full, 1/2 and empty), I bring the extra set with me just in case the batteries die right when I need to take a pic. If I put in freshly charged batteries and take 2-3 pics with flash the battery display goes to 1/2. I wonder how much lower it would go if it had to burn each pic to cd-r every time I took one. CD's do seem like they work well in digital camcorders tho.
Sry for my long rant

[scottlc]

I have an 8MB and a 32MB CompactFlash card for my digital camera and it's very convenient. It's not a replacement for a floppy disk as grahf said. Zip disks suffer from that awful click-of-death. Steve Gibson's "Trouble in Paradise" utility diagnoses that.

[Galway no Sora]

Hei scott_uk5, USB pen pretty usefull when you got nowhere to write the CD, such as in internet cafe or go to friends house. Hell, I use my Nomad MuVo 128 100% for files transfer, not MP3 , is that waste or not? I think not, I still can play 2-3 songs from it .

[Chrono Archangel]

Floppy/Zip drives for USB mobile drives or flash cards (NO me likes folppy)

CDR for DVDR (NO DVDR too expensive)

CRT monitor for LCD monitors (YES only if CRTs disappear and LCDs are cheaper)

Narrowbaod for broadband (YES )

Ball mouse to optical (YES have no objection to that)


thats what i think

[Demigod]

Originally Posted by n_w95482

Well they are smaller and are easily erasable/(re)writable and are much more practical than cd's in digital cameras (both in size and in power consumption).

But we're not talking about digital cameras, are we? We're talking about PCs and replacing floppy/ZIP with flash cards. With the current price of the technology it is not anything of a viable data transfer solution. It's significantly cheaper to just move data with CD-RWs or through a network (for broadband users anyways).

Floppy/Zip drives for USB mobile drives or flash cards

Nope, too expensive. Although floppy technology should be replaced flash cards are not it. CD-RW are the most practical way of transferring large amounts of data between two computers (they're cheap, hold large amounts of data and are standardized). For large data transfers in the future I would rely more on hot-swappable hard drives.

CDR for DVDR

Not anytime soon. DVD writers are a rarity these days and we still haven't decided on one standard format for them. I estimate it'll take at least a couple of years before DVDRs replace CDRs. As we have more and more demanding data transfer requirements DVDRs will eventually take over but currently CDRs do just fine.

CRT monitor for LCD monitors

Prices of LCDs have gone down a lot in recent years and I do think more people are buying LCDs. I don't see it as a real need though. CRTs are still good and many prefer them over LCDs.

Narrowband for broadband

As internet content becomes more saturated with graphics and multimedia broadband connections will become a requirement. More and more people are switching to broadband (once you go broadband you never go back) but most people still use narrowband connections. Modem users are still a major concern for website designers.

Ball mouse to optical

I think most places have optical mice as the default selection over ball mice. They're more-or-less the same price so there's no reason to get a ball-based one. Don't know if this is a real need though.

Aside from the ones grahf listed above the only thing I can think of that needs replacing in PCs is the PCI and AGP bus. PCI Express should allow a lot more bandwidth and flexibility for PC components. I also think we need some sort of standard graphics architecture for GPUs. It's time to let go of the old Direct3D function/OpenGL extension legacy and move towards something a lot more flexible and powerful.

[Razor Blade]

Well TV is changing into HDTV. It may not be super high resolutions but its a start.


How bout Standard TV - Holographic TV. I would like to see that. Good points Demigod.

Demigod, care to explain about the PCI Express ? ive heard alot about it .. but no one really explained its meaning to me .

[Demigod]

PCI Express is a new I/O technology designed to replace the 20-year old PCI bus. It'll offer substantially higher bandwidth capabilities (PCI = 133 MB/s, PCI Express = 4 - 16 GB/s) and it will be serial technology, which means that it's composed of multiple independent channels so devices won't have to share the same bus. It'll offer enough bandwidth for virtually any device and will also be able to replace the AGP bus. AGP texturing may actually become a viable feature (the system RAM will be the bottleneck then, not the graphics bus).