Prediction of the future is a stupid business sometimes...

I came upon this article: "50 technological advances your children will laugh at" on the website of The Daily Telegraph. The guy have tried to put together the list of technologies that will be obsolete soon... showing in the process his own ignorance. I gather from the text of the said article that he lives in the big city (London?) and never has to go anywhere where there's no easy access to the technology and electric power. Also his understanding of some things is, at best, incomplete.

First thing that caught my eye was that stupid idea that keyboards may have to go. The man shows no understanding of touch-typing (I happen to write texts in English, Chinese and Russian on the same keyboard which – surprise! – hase no Cyrillic or Latin characters on it. And I feel quite comfortable doing this. And I never even learned touch-typing. And if you try to write something even a bit longer that "LOLWUT?" on the virtual keyboard (in two or three languages, as is often the case for me) you're going to curse all the way through. You see, you need to:

1. Look at the virtual keyboard
2. Check that you have touched the correct letter
3. Turn down that helpful "predictive input" suggestion
4. Pray to gods that you have not made any mistakes in the previous word as you'll never position the goddamn cursor precisely where you need it
5. Swithch the input language (which takes longer on the virtual keyboard)
6. Take in the new layout
7. Start typing it (using your thumbs indtead of all your fingers, so it's slower)
8. Notice a mistake made at step 2
9. Forget about it and turn on your laptop

I guess unless we all turn into masochists with a specific twist, the keyboard will live for the long time...

Next there's suggestion that the landlines are useless. Well here's the news: roadband is often delivered via it. It's cheaper (the infrastructure is already there), it's more reliable than long-range wireless (and the bandwidth is higher), and the speeds are higher. In fact, I do not use the landline, only the ADSL service. And when there's something big happening (like that earthquake we had back in 2003) there's a risk that the cellular network will be overloaded. If you rely only on the cellphone for your emergency services... well, good luck.

And then there's that stupid notion that GPS can replace maps and road signs and compass and whatnots. No, it can't. You may have no signal (A-GPS will try to find your position, but the circle with 1 km radius saying "You're somewhere here... maybe" is not what you need). The maps used by GPS units may be ureliable as well. There was that guy... well, he was British, actually... who drove right into the lake and kept driving because it was what his GPS was telling him. The guy survived, the car (and GPS) did not.

Oh, and in China you'll find that Google Maps give you your position with a random error, it may be on spot or off, like, 500 m. Nobody knows why.

By the way, if you go to the woods in Russia, you'll need a paper map as well, as software vendors see no point in proucing maps for it – no cities, no roads...

But what strikes me as the stupidest idea is that the author is trying to peddle the cloud storage ang cloud computing as a solution for everything. Was he ver stuck in some place he can't get online? Like airport with a screwed-up Wi-Fi which insists you have to be a subscriber of one particular mobile phone network. Or at the factory where nobody saw it fit to provide Wi-Fi to the assembly line workers. On the train maybe, where the speed of 250 km/h prevents the use of 3G connection? If all your data, music and software is in the cloud, you're screwed. If you bring it along on some storage medium you can still access it. And when you remember some cloud storage screw-ups...

Next, passports. Well, I hate to break the news, but реу author of that article have never visited China. That's the country where scanners at the border checkpoint routinely fail to read machine-readable text in my passport and as routinely fail to read biometric data from those newfangled "biometric passports". Also, the idea of using just your retina and fingerprints as a passport means the creation of the international database to which every government would have access. Identity theft, anyone? Or how about those nice secret police guys tracking down some dissident and bashing his head in? And you know that the password that British civil servants would use will be 12345, right?

I could go on and on, but I do have a life. So, to sum it all up: Anither failed prediction that will be funny to read some years in the future. At least it was mildly amusing.