Nine Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime

[AlanHo]

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them.
But, ready or not, here they come.

1. The Post Office
Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Cheque
Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with cheque by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process cheques. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the cheque. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper
The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book
You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book.. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone
Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes

6. Music
This is one of the saddest parts of the “change” story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalogue items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. Television
Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The "Things" That You Own
Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy
If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again. All we will have left that can't be changed are "Memories".

And then probably Alzheimer’s will take that away from us too !

[catgate]

I just look in from time to time, but now being a Linux user I feel a little bit like a gate crasher.

However this topic of Alans certainly makes a lot of sense and runs parallel to something I started thinking about a few years ago.

Technological Progress

Several thousands of years ago a little “old stone age” man was sitting on Ilkley moor chipping away at a rock with a piece of antler. He was carving “cup” and/or “ring” and/or both into a piece of rock. He, and his buddies carved many of them...they are still there to be seen today. These marks meant something, and were of great importance, otherwise why take so much time and put so much effort into their production. The popular theory is that it was something to do with the stars and their apparent migration round the sky.

At a much later time in a much more easterly direction someone realised that it was possible to use hard stone to make marks and indentations into softer stone for recording important information.

Then one day a fellow who was daubing daub on to a shed got the idea of making a pattern on the mud and did so. Some time later (about half an hour after he finished his pattern) the shed caught fire (a carelessly dropped fag end?) and the daub was baked hard. Suddenly clay tablets and styli were all the rage for recording important information

This was followed in the same quarter of the globe by another method of recording information. Someone just happened to come across a chunk of dry weathered goat skin lying hair side down, and upon it was a dirty mark which looked like one of the symbols used on clay tablets. A little more tinkering with dead goats and cuttlefish and parchment and ink had arrived. These were easier items to use for recording important information and soon took over.

One school say Far East and another says Middle East but where ever it was reeds were woven into a thin sheet hammered and rolled out thinly and then dried, to form a very rudimentary thick paper/board material. It could be used in the thick for making canoes or rolled into the very thin as a substitute for parchment. It was soon discovered that it was ideal with some of that ink stuff for making Dead Sea Scrolls.

Some smart fellow came along and realised that if sawdust/wood shavings were stewed up, under pressure, with some caustic material (to saponify the lignins and remove them from the wood) the vegetable fibre that was left, when bleached and then rolled out and dried under great pressure, would make a very much cheaper, and in many ways superior, material on which to store important information. Using ink of course.

The inks had improved too over the ages and no longer faded in a few years.

A chap came along and invented a thing he called a typewriter, which was a way of recording information on paper using ink and standard letter shapes. This was an indirect development from the work of German fellow called Gutenberg, who had started printing books many years before.

Then another cleverer and greedier man realised that if he gave the shavings and sawdust a much more savage mechanical treatment, and no stewing up with caustic, what would be produced would be a similar paper, in initial appearance, to the bleached type but which would gradually go brown due to the action of oxygen and sunlight. But, what the hell, it was much cheaper to produce, so he would make more profit and so would the publishers of cheap books and other goods, because he could sell it to them at much less than the price of good quality stuff.

To make things easier, and thus allowing a person to do more, (reducing the cost of course) a new type of typewriter, electrically driven, was devised. This meant that the person using it now only needed to lightly touch the keys, instead of giving them “a sound thrashing” in order to print letters and other documents.

Hot on the heels of this development came the computer. This, of course, needed input from a key board, but as the technology developed it eventually became possible to just speak to it and it would convert the spoken word into the printed word.

Because the entire document needed to be prepared and presented to the printing section of the computer as an edited, complete item, ready to be printed, there needed to be a temporary document storage facility built into the computer. This was called the memory, and once the letter had been printed this memory could be wiped clean of this item. Alternatively the document could be transferred on to another permanent memory that became the electronic filing cabinet.

There was also another labour saving development, and that was the electronic filing away of copies of printed documents.

Because of the cost of the type of memory used within the computer small discs of specially coated plastic were developed which would hold the electronic charges “for ever” and these then became a means of storing or distributing vast quantities of information world wide. These disks are fragile and need storing carefully. Just like the memory inside the computer. The slightest exposure to anything magnetic could have very serious consequences and render the discs unreadable.

As time has passed the relative cost of making the memory which stores information inside the computer has fallen and as a result much larger internal fragile storage discs have become commonplace.

However with the coming of the electronic revolution in communications there have been more and more gadgets and devices made. The aim of the manufacturers seems to be to manufacture a portable communication tool with added facility to make his product an absolutely essential possession for every man woman and child on the planet. (The only thing that the current mobile teletabletpodbox lacks, in order to take over the world, is an “app” to brew tea whilst on the move.)

This has called for more storage space Such is the demand for more and more storage space that currently there are storage facilities being offered which are called “Clouds”.

Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation. These clouds are spaces, in the storage infrastructure of large service providers, which are rented out on a subscription basis..

So.....if we look proudly back at the progress we have made, since the time of the man chipping away on Ilkley Moor, recording information that is still in existence today, to the almost instantaneous production and storage of information electronically in or on some ephemeral material who knows where, we can be fairly certain which information is going to remain accessible the longest and whose information can so easily be lost into the ether, or disseminated world wide either by accident or by intent, or even just evaporate away in a shower of electrons.

And this is progress??????

I am not sure if it natures way of ensuring that information that is dangerous to the continued existance of mankind does not survive too long.

[AlanHo]

That's a bit thought provoking. You may not use Windows - but you have opened one..............

[Belatucadrus]

If we're on the storage space issue, why the ludicrous Megapixel race in cameras. Unless you're looking at your pictures on a huge widescreen TV there's no point to it. Most people end up looking at them at a ratio of 1-6 or worse on a laptop screen and once perused most just end up swallowing gigabytes of data in a My Pictures folder never to be printed and in most cases almost immediately forgotten.

[rong]

If we're on the storage space issue, why the ludicrous Megapixel race in cameras. Unless you're looking at your pictures on a huge widescreen TV there's no point to it. Most people end up looking at them at a ratio of 1-6 or worse on a laptop screen and once perused most just end up swallowing gigabytes of data in a My Pictures folder never to be printed and in most cases almost immediately forgotten.

This is one that I find stupid but people buy them on the amount of Mega-pixels they have so the makers put more in, I have been led to believe (by someone with knowledge) that the image capture device on the majority of the instant type cameras don't have room to use all the information supplied to them so it is/used to be wasted when you get much over 6 Mega-pixels. If this is so there are allot of gullible mugs (as in idiots (for Maneman)) around.

[AlanHo]

If we're on the storage space issue, why the ludicrous Megapixel race in cameras. Unless you're looking at your pictures on a huge widescreen TV there's no point to it. Most people end up looking at them at a ratio of 1-6 or worse on a laptop screen and once perused most just end up swallowing gigabytes of data in a My Pictures folder never to be printed and in most cases almost immediately forgotten.

This is one that I find stupid but people buy them on the amount of Mega-pixels they have so the makers put more in, I have been led to believe (by someone with knowledge) that the image capture device on the majority of the instant type cameras don't have room to use all the information supplied to them so it is/used to be wasted when you get much over 6 Mega-pixels. If this is so there are allot of gullible mugs (as in idiots (for Maneman)) around.

You must have some reason to refer to maneman as an idiot - I wonder what it is?

I have met him - he aint a man to be messed with believe me and he is the opposite end of the spectrum to being an idiot............ :lol:

[catgate]

This business of mobile 'phones, and several other multi facited devices, amuses and irritates me.

I can not see the logic in buying a multi purpose device that will need to be ditched when one of its functions goes belly up (O.K. I am a Yorkshireman). I can see the logic from the manufactures point of view, he is much like a drug dealer who knows that if the punter gets hooked he has yet another customer by the nadgers.

We had a to discard a combi microwave because, despite the grill and the normal oven being if full working order, the microwave magnatron dept. had gone pop and the repair was more than the cost of a new microwave.

As "long service award" (a good many years ago) I was given a fancy Teasmade with a built in radio alarm. I never even used it because it was a prime example of a broken teapot lid necesitating the throwing away of a radio.

[Belatucadrus]

Permit me to mount my hobby horse again, multi mega pixel cameras pointless, multi mega pixel camera phones EXTREMELY pointless particularly if supplied with lousy lens, in most cases they're only viewed on the phone screen or maybe e-mailed to a friend who'll look at it on the same puny little viewer. It may if it's lucky get viewed on a 7" tablet.

[AlanHo]

Permit me to mount my hobby horse again, multi mega pixel cameras pointless, multi mega pixel camera phones EXTREMELY pointless particularly if supplied with lousy lens, in most cases they're only viewed on the phone screen or maybe e-mailed to a friend who'll look at it on the same puny little viewer. It may if it's lucky get viewed on a 7" tablet.

I take your point but.........I have a Samsung Galaxy smart phone with a 5 Mp camera which I rarely use.

However - we are currently looking to move house and we went to view a property the other day. I always take my camera with me but sods law hit, and after 2 pics the battery was flat. Hence I resorted to using the phone camera. I am very surprised at the quality of the phone pictures - even those taken with the built-in flash. When when printed A4 size they are very good and almost as good as those taken with my camera. Hence it was useful to have a phone/camera in my pocket - you never know when you might need one. The one thing missing of course is a zoom lens on the phone camera.