Why are so many sci-fi's set set close to now, when the technology clearly won't exist?
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 4, 2007 22:12
VIEWED: 12199
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Trying to not veer tooooo far off, or hijack. However, computer technology advancement does not concern software. Software advancement effectively stopped with M$. Computer advnacement refers to the hardware. The software has gone in reverse.
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Quote:Well technological advancement is part software, part hardware. If you've got some new hardware miracle it doesn't mean a thing if the software doesn't support it.
Originally posted by Jewelstaitefan:
However, computer technology advancement does not concern software.
Quote:I'm not going to defend Windows, it's not the best OS by any means, but to say it's not advanced and that software has gone backwards simply isn't true. The current versions of Windows are much more advanced than previous versions, and Windows isn't the only operating system. Sure, we haven't had a version of Windows that lives up to OS/2 Warp until 2000/XP, but we've now got versions that surpass it.
Software advancement effectively stopped with M$. Computer advnacement refers to the hardware. The software has gone in reverse.
If you just don’t like Windows there are options, Mac, Linux, Solaris, QNX, BEOS etc, wait awhile and you’ll even be able to get a decent build of ReactOS. You know, a long while.
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Sometimes authors have been known to update undershot guesstimates. David Gerrold updated his classic "When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One" to allow for advances in computer science & AI (Under "Version 2.0", cute.) And Spider Robinson has edited and reissued his books "Mindkiller" and "Time Pressure", which concerned near-future cyberpunk scenarios originally set in the late 90's/early 2000's to move them to a bit later in the future.
As Poul Anderson pointed out, "It does not behoove a profit to be too specific with dates."
"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn
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Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Trying to not veer tooooo far off, or hijack. However, computer technology advancement does not concern software. Software advancement effectively stopped with M$. Computer advnacement refers to the hardware. The software has gone in reverse.
You're confusing software with "software for desktop home/office PCs".
Things like mobile phone networks, GPS, Digital TV, CDs, DVDs and (not least) the Internet... all rely on a marriage of computer hardware and sophisticated software, and are areas where MS/Intel have mostly been playing catch-up.
We're rapidly getting to the point where most heavy users of high tech toys are probably running Linux on a PPC or ARM chip somewhere - not on their desktop PC, but in their TiVO, their broadband router or their network hard drive. The software in your 'phone or your digital camera is pretty sophisticated c.f. a 1980s PC. Actually, your microwave could probably give Apollo 11 a run for its money...
Back in the 80s, you needed half-inch-thick co-ax with complicated connectors and terminators (to avoid signal reflection) to get a fraction of the data transfer rates you can now enjoy with a flimsy piece of telephone wire. That's largely down to hardware/software-based digital signal processing techniques.
In fact, the only reason that modern hardware os so powerful is that designers rely on sophisticated software to help them design it and can even test it "virtually" before actually making physical hardware.
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Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Well technological advancement is part software, part hardware. If you've got some new hardware miracle it doesn't mean a thing if the software doesn't support it.
This is so true. They've been promising me a personal robot sense I was a kid, just as soon as the computers get fast enough and the bio mechanical hardware comes around. I really thought I'd have my robot by now, but if you'd told me years ago that I would be a able to buy an I-phone like device in 2007, I'd have said you were crazy.
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Perhaps a couple of you are missing the concept of continuously advancing progression of technology. The top post of this thread is asking effectively why are we not yet at the point of advancement that was predicted by past scifi authors/creators.
What year was OS2/WARP released? What year was 2000/ME released? How many years difference? Do you REALLY think it should have taken that meny years to get back to the point we had already progressed to?
By definition, if you have labored to progress to a point you had already reached in the past, then at some point you MUST have reversed the progress or advancement at some point. WE're not really discussing how much progress was made in the lst 2 months or last 2 years, but instead how the overall pace of advancement in the past century has been halted in the past 2-3 decades, and in the case of PC hardware and software, reversed at various points in order to provide better profit margin for certain individuals. And I'm talking $ Profit, not prophet.
For those awed by the Gods of software, it's getting off point to mention how they don't overrule the Gods of hardware.
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Quote:I think you missed the entire point. Windows isn't the only operating system on the face of the planet, Windows not being as advanced as OS2 until recently, but so what; there were other operating systems that were.
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
What year was OS2/WARP released? What year was 2000/ME released? How many years difference? Do you REALLY think it should have taken that meny years to get back to the point we had already progressed to?
In fact most of the advanced features of OS2 had been available to Mainframe environments since the 70's.
Quote:Not really, the wheel is reinvented quite often, its actually a natural occurrence of Capitalism.
By definition, if you have labored to progress to a point you had already reached in the past, then at some point you MUST have reversed the progress or advancement at some point.
Quote:You've still not shown that. I don't remember saying Windows was the most advanced OS, I do remember saying that Windows not being the most advanced doesn't mean technology hasn't advanced, and Windows isn't the be-all and end all.
reversed at various points in order to provide better profit margin for certain individuals. And I'm talking $ Profit, not prophet.
And I know you want to lay the failure of the PS2 at Bills feet, but it has nothing to do with him. He had a stake in it, he would have wanted it to succeed. The PS2 failed because it was a bid by IBM to get a stranglehold of a market they didn't fully understand. The failure of the PS2 was solely to do with IBM.
Quote:Well you actually bought up Hardware you know.
For those awed by the Gods of software, it's getting off point to mention how they don't overrule the Gods of hardware.
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Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Perhaps a couple of you are missing the concept of continuously advancing progression of technology.
If you look closely at a large river, you are sure to find swirls and eddies in which some of the water flows slowly, or even backwards.
(Sorry - had a bit of a Grasshopper moment there)
In the early 80s, someone gave me a 5.25" floppy disc for my BBC Micro which (after loading for about a minute) played about 3 seconds of very grainy footage, little better than ASCII art, just recognisable as a digitised clip of the Millenium Falcon speeding away from an exploding Death Star...
Around 1990, I went to a conference where the industry were showing off jerky, postage-stamp style video running in software on Macs and Acorns (there were PCs there as well but they mostly needed special hardware to do the same thing). You mostly had to send off your tapes to get them digitised and compressed (it took hours). One firm had an "offline" editing system that let you do serious video editing on a personal computer - the quality was poor but what you got out was a "rough cut" plus an "edit decision list" which could be sent off to a professional editing suite to automatically produce a broadcast-quality version. It was jolly impressive - but you needed expensive magneto-optical disc drives (holding about 600MB) to hold the (grotty) video.
In 1993, this show called "Babylon 5" started in which all the space shots and a lot of the other special effects had been done on computer - and not the big iron used to do "Tron" but a roomful of cheap Commodore Amigas...
Around 1996 (I think) I used a $200 card for the PC that could grab video from a camcorder to disc, let you edit it freely, add titles, soundtrack etc. and squirt it back out to tape. If you started with Hi8 tape then the end result was better than VHS. Of course, crappy Windows couldn't handle files over 2MB, but those clever software writers just worked around it.
Now, any half-decent PC can play Star Wars in full-colour widescreen and comes bundled with enough software to turn your digital home movies into professional looking DVDs. Add a measly few Kbucks worth of hardware the only thing stoping you from making a better film than Star Wars* is finding enough talented people willing to work without pay for a year...
Sounds like progress to me - and none of this is entirely attributable to hardware: it takes some very clever software as well.
Sure, for much of those 20+ years the Windows/Intel PC has sucked at video and audio - so what? the innovations just happened on Apples, Amigas, Ataris and Acorns instead (and Unix, but that would spoil the aliteration) - and when they started to take off, Wintel just updated the PC to cope with them.
And the best news: despite all this progress my PC has never tried to kill me by shutting me out of the airlock. Heck, and HAL sung "Daisy, Daisy" like a bad audition for Pop Idol - a modern Mac could do that in Dolby surround, with an 80-piece orchestra and a fractally-generated techno-thrash bridge while simultaneously syncing the stargate sequence to the music.
The problem with Operating Systems is that they're only ever as successful as their applications software base - its no good producing a new cutting-edge OS if the 100,000 software titles for your old system don't run anymore. Whats starting to ease that is that hardware is now fast enough to support more portable programming (higher-level languages, virtual machines like .net and Java) or simply to emulate or virtualize the last generation (which has got Apple over at least 3 big transitions).
* Episode 1, of course - perfection can't be improved upon (can it Mr Lucas
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Sometimes technology gets lost too. For example in the 1970s the United States had a nuclear rocket which would take in atmosphere until that gas reached critical mass,(didn't matter which gas) and the rocket was supposed to take off and land on Mars and then return, but the Congress was scared of a nuclear accident happenng on launch so they scrapped the rocket. Sure it probably was a good thing that they didn't try a launch to Mars in the 1970s because now we know there are other dangers involved with a rocket leaving the Earth's Magnetic field which we had no idea of back then, but now that we know those dangers a rocket like I described would be great, but npobody remembers how it worked and we are unable to make it.
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Quote:I assume you're talking about NERVA:
Originally posted by rallem:
Sometimes technology gets lost too. For example in the 1970s the United States had a nuclear rocket which would take in atmosphere until that gas reached critical mass,(didn't matter which gas) and the rocket was supposed to take off and land on Mars and then return, but the Congress was scared of a nuclear accident happenng on launch so they scrapped the rocket.
Quote:
From the beginning the program had a number of problems. It was very expensive. It never held much public support, owing to the growing anti-nuclear lobby in the United States in the early 1970s. There were environmental concerns and the test engines themselves never managed to produce more than 40% of their theoretical thrust, which made them far less powerful than contemporary conventional rocket engines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
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