Items here now won't be there then

[Mr Larrington]

Time to SORN the Fast-Appreciating Future Classic and stash it in the back yard until there’s a market for old diseasel Škodas?

[grams]

The bottom end of the secondhand car market is going to get interesting in the EV era. Are you really going to be able to pay £800 for a car with a usable battery, or will the recyclers and off-gridders who just want the battery outbid you?

Some time back a bloke in Brum rented one and turned it into a micro coffee shop. Not sure how successful he was.  I'm guessing not.

There’s several of these in London. They are (or were) reasonably successful.

[FifeingEejit]

Shirley the move towards doing everything on a smartphone/tablet is basically thin clients on the sly.

Yes - and other areas of computing are moving over to thin client.

TBH, I thought that the concept was dead over a decade ago. Desktops had so much processing power. But now the demand is on different types of computing; big number crunching for machine learning apps, specialised number crunching for graphics for example.

This is all much more efficiently handled by specialised shared resources. In a data centre model those specialised resources can be spun up on demand (particularly with the event of VM for everything and FPGA in the data centre). Heck, some of it is even handled in the network cards, never even makes it to the destination computer.

Gaming is gradually moving to thin client model. The uber-powerful graphics cards required to calculate and render games will die out. They are proportionally too damn expensive (compared to the motherboards and CPU)!

I think while broadly true for storage and larger processing capacity, the average cheap laptop already offers more power than most people need, they don't need to offload to the cloud. Certainly for work, we just spin something with the required spec up on Amazon. I think it's probably a case of semantics.

I think what also will disappear is people who complain they don't have a capable smartphone, of course...

The problem is more provisioning and upgrading, its a nightmare enough that we need to finally kill off IE by the end of this year. And the roll out of Windows 7 and 10 took years because desktops needed upgraded.
Being able to have a fairly stable hardware estate that only needs replacing failed systems is one of the dreams of thin client. That sells it to organizations with a vast estate.


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[Morat]

I wonder about rooftop TV aerials and satellite dishes. Won't the future all be streamed to us (& directly into our eyeballs)?

It's all streaming in Yorkshire now - we're ahead of the curve!!

(thanks to a fire at the Bilsdale transmitter)

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Snow

[mrcharly-YHT]

beef-based bovril

Paper notebooks. I think they'll die out and be replaced by something like an e-ink Remarkable tablet.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Paper notebooks.

I am not as optimistic as mrcharly-YHT; I don't think they will be gone completely. Sorry.

Twenty years ago, 'the paperless office' was a really popular concept. Everyone laughed, while trying to find space on their desk for teetering piles of A4.

I worked from home, for 18 month, without access to a printer. Didn't disrupt my work one bit.

Paper, apart from a medium for art, will pass.

It has taken remarkably little time for E-tickets to become commonplace. A bit over a decade of smartphones has achieved that. In another 10 years?

Paper will cease being part of everyday life, apart from something you use to wipe your arse (and not even then, if someone can work out how to use the 3 shells).

[quixoticgeek]

The flaw in that is that unless a remarkable comes down a lot in price, businesses are going to say no.

I have a note book for work. I use it for making notes, IP addresses, connectivity diagrams, wiring lists, doodles. That sort of thing. I got it from the newsagent for about €3. And scanned the receipt to send to finance. It is very hard to compete on price when it comes to "I just want to make simple notes".

Also you'd be surprised how many paperless offices have a printer...

J

[Cudzoziemiec]

I use paper for noting down words I have to remember to spell consistently or need to recognize later: mostly names of people, villages in eg. Uganda, curiously named products (are we going with CamelCase for this? Do they want that capitalized?) and so on. But I rarely use a notebook. I've got loads of paper from envelopes and backs of invoices and delivery notes.

[ian]

I have a wipe-clean (fnarr) notebook, as I'm an inveterate scribbler. I can, should I wish to keep any notes, zap them with my phone to OneNote or similar before wiping the page.

I occasionally print stuff, I just find it easier to deal with text and layout on paper, though there's a big benefit of having a big screen that can display A4 spreads at actual size.

[Kim]

Paper notebooks. I think they'll die out and be replaced by something like an e-ink Remarkable tablet.

I'm sure the arty types and Bullet Journal enthusiasts will ensure a continued market for the things.

Barakta still does the paper notes / checklist thing, but I think that's more about the limitations of $ork's computers than a particular love of the medium.

I occasionally grab some fail from the top of the printer to scribble on the back of when measuring things or working out pinouts or doing Actual Maths With Equations In or whatever, but I'd be happy with an electronic medium if I didn't have to be precious about potentially damaging it.  That said, about 50% of my paper use is to catch drips of glue.


But in general, Covid-19 was a giant leap forward for paperlessness.  All sorts of bureaucratic processes that previously required access to a printer have been quietly modified so they don't.

[davelodwig]

Paper notebooks. I think they'll die out and be replaced by something like an e-ink Remarkable tablet.

I'm sure the arty types and Bullet Journal enthusiasts will ensure a continued market for the things.

Barakta still does the paper notes / checklist thing, but I think that's more about the limitations of $ork's computers than a particular love of the medium.

I occasionally grab some fail from the top of the printer to scribble on the back of when measuring things or working out pinouts or doing Actual Maths With Equations In or whatever, but I'd be happy with an electronic medium if I didn't have to be precious about potentially damaging it.  That said, about 50% of my paper use is to catch drips of glue.


But in general, Covid-19 was a giant leap forward for paperlessness.  All sorts of bureaucratic processes that previously required access to a printer have been quietly modified so they don't.

I work in an environment where those sorts of tablets or e-ink pads are forbidden.

We all use paper notebooks, some with different classifications than others that never leave the building and end up in a shredder / incinerator eventually.

[ian]

I find the act of writing does something with my brain circuits that better installs the knowledge. There's some science behind this (forcing your brain to do something with the information rather than passively skim over it). The result is that I mostly wipe my notebook after a week or two. (I use a Rocketbook thing, which is overpriced for a notebook, but does what it says, and the scanning app is quite decent, even manages OCR, and is simple to wipe clean with a damp cloth.)

[mrcharly-YHT]

Paper notebooks. I think they'll die out and be replaced by something like an e-ink Remarkable tablet.

I'm sure the arty types and Bullet Journal enthusiasts will ensure a continued market for the things.

Barakta still does the paper notes / checklist thing, but I think that's more about the limitations of $ork's computers than a particular love of the medium.

I occasionally grab some fail from the top of the printer to scribble on the back of when measuring things or working out pinouts or doing Actual Maths With Equations In or whatever, but I'd be happy with an electronic medium if I didn't have to be precious about potentially damaging it.  That said, about 50% of my paper use is to catch drips of glue.


But in general, Covid-19 was a giant leap forward for paperlessness.  All sorts of bureaucratic processes that previously required access to a printer have been quietly modified so they don't.

I work in an environment where those sorts of tablets or e-ink pads are forbidden.

We all use paper notebooks, some with different classifications than others that never leave the building and end up in a shredder / incinerator eventually.

Ditto

I was surprised to find that a senior design engineer used a Remarkable and hadn't thought of the implications of his notes being stored on the cloud. 

[Kim]

I find the act of writing does something with my brain circuits that better installs the knowledge.

Lots of people find this, but it's by no means universal, and there's a circle of hell for educators who believe otherwise.

I find that the act of drawing characters distracts me from whatever it is I'm supposed to be paying attention to.  Typing is somewhat better, as I'm not struggling to keep up.  But in general I find taking notes is fine up till the point where I lose the plot, then all the effort goes into making notes in the hope that I'll be able to go back and make sense of the material later (which is often doomed, as the notes were made without the benefit of understanding).  If I devote all my attention to the subject matter, I'm less likely to lose the plot in the first place.

It's also a lot easier to hear someone when you can look at them.


On which note, may I propose the lecture as a prospective future item of yore.

[Tim Hall]

I find the act of writing does something with my brain circuits that better installs the knowledge. There's some science behind this (forcing your brain to do something with the information rather than passively skim over it). The result is that I mostly wipe my notebook after a week or two. (I use a Rocketbook thing, which is overpriced for a notebook, but does what it says, and the scanning app is quite decent, even manages OCR, and is simple to wipe clean with a damp cloth.)

I do this when I write my shopping list (BEER, pies and Marmite) then accidentally leave the list at home.  By magic I remember what I need.

[Kim]

I find the act of writing does something with my brain circuits that better installs the knowledge. There's some science behind this (forcing your brain to do something with the information rather than passively skim over it). The result is that I mostly wipe my notebook after a week or two. (I use a Rocketbook thing, which is overpriced for a notebook, but does what it says, and the scanning app is quite decent, even manages OCR, and is simple to wipe clean with a damp cloth.)

I do this when I write my shopping list (BEER, pies and Marmite) then accidentally leave the list at home.  By magic I remember what I need.

I have a similar system where I tell the computer to remind me of something when I'm next in a given room, and when it whistles at me I remember why without looking at the display.

[Mr Larrington]

I use a paper notebook for jotting Stuffs down while in Abroad, where the FOREIGNS come from, and bits of scrap paper that have been through the printer for Stuffs at home.

[quixoticgeek]

I work in an environment where those sorts of tablets or e-ink pads are forbidden.

We all use paper notebooks, some with different classifications than others that never leave the building and end up in a shredder / incinerator eventually.

I'm in a similar situation. The notebook has to be locked away at the end of the day. We also have to <redacted> as well as on occasion <redacted>. :p

J

[FifeingEejit]

I use a paper notepad all the time.
I can't read my own writing...

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[L CC]

Writing cements knowledge for me.

Except the term for the reading/writing learning style. Which I failed to regurgitate under exam conditions.

[Polar Bear]

The magnetic strip on bank cards. And probably bank cards themselves.

Inevitably.

[ian]

Bankcards, I've not taken my wallet or cards out of the house for about 18 months.

[Polar Bear]

Bankcards, I've not taken my wallet or cards out of the house for about 18 months.

I use  ank cards and cash on a regular basis.  I see many customers doing likewise at the places that I frequent.  Only a very few of us proles in the provinces around Rugby seem to use phones or watches.

[Kim]

Bankcards, I've not taken my wallet or cards out of the house for about 18 months.

I use  ank cards and cash on a regular basis.  I see many customers doing likewise at the places that I frequent.  Only a very few of us proles in the provinces around Rugby seem to use phones or watches.

To be fair, the people not using cards and cash will mostly be doing so from the privacy of their own web browser.

In the last 18 months, I've made in-person transactions at supermarkets, petril stations^[1], a couple of DIY shed visits and, erm, that's it.  I've simply not been doing the sort of activities that result in the small in-person purchases where cash or contactless might normally be used.


_{[1] And this was with a fuel card, the associated money transaction happening automagically without requiring the physical presence of my dredit (TBAGO) card.}