Sunday, January 30, 2011

“TechMan: Goodbye hard drive, mouse, camcorder, DVD”

“TechMan: Goodbye hard drive, mouse, camcorder, DVD”

TechMan: Goodbye hard drive, mouse, camcorder, DVD

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 09:51 PM PST

Their burned-out husks lie by the side of The Road through technology -- VHS players, Betamax decks, HD DVD players, pagers, dial telephones, typewriters.

And there are those among us right now who will end up in progress' landfill.

So, TechMan presents his first gallery of Doomed Technology:

Stand-alone GPS -- GPS, the Global Positioning System sprung in 1973 from the brow of the U.S. Department of Defense. Initially it was for military use only.

In 1983, after Korean Airlines Flight 007 strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down, President Ronald Reagan ordered GPS to be made available for civilian use. In 2001, President Bill Clinton ordered the military to stop degrading civilian GPS to make it less accurate than the military version.

This created an explosion in GPS use. There were the Garmins and Magellans and Tom Toms. Then GPS showed up in cell phones and in new cars.

Now standalone units are redundant since most people are walking or driving around with GPS. Goodbye Garmin, ta-ta Tom Tom.

Hard drives -- When the Apple iMac came out in the late '90s with no floppies, hard drive storage seemed the wave of the future.

That wave is about to crest.

Flash memory-based hard drives, also know at solid-state drives (SSDs), appeared in 1995.

The hard drive's Achilles' heel is that it is one of the few mechanical parts in a computer, and a fragile one at that. An arm flies a tiny distance above a rapidly spinning disk and if the two meet, bye bye data.

Solid-state drives have no mechanical parts, thus they can be smaller and ultimately cheaper to make. Initially they were slower than mechanical hard drives, but that is being resolved.

Last year Apple introduced a MacBook Air laptop that had only an SSD drive and no hard drive.

An initial problem with the SSD drive was that it did not have as much capacity as a hard drive.

Hard drives still have an advantage with storage of 2 to 3 terabytes. But 512 GB SSDs are not uncommon, and there are solid state drives up to 2 terabytes. Victorinox offers a Swiss Army knife with a 256 GB SSD drive so you can whittle while downloading an HD movie.

SSD drive storage is expensive right now, but that will change. You won't see hard drives vanish right away, but their days are numbered.

Camcorders -- Video cameras have been around a long time and the modern camcorder made them small and digital.

But the camcorder is being replaced by smart phones and still cameras that shoot video of increasing quality.

A breakthrough of sorts was made recently when the season finale of the TV show "House" was shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II still camera.

Granted this is a high-end camera (more than $3,000) but it can capture high-definition video of broadcast TV quality.

In fact, even compact still cameras in the $200 to $300 range can shoot 720p high-def video. The iPhone 4 can shoot 720p video that can be edited on the phone.

Stand in front of your camcorder and wave goodbye.

The mouse -- When the first Macintosh computer came out in 1984, it had this funny little thing with a humorous name that you pushed around on the desk -- the mouse. The mouse is a middleman between you and the computer. Called a pointing device, it allowed you to do things on the screen.

But we already have a pointing device, in fact most of us have 10 of them.

First the iPhone, then the iPad had no need for a mouse. Touchscreens are the poisoned cheese and mouseicide will be complete as touch screen technology comes to all computers.

HP already has a touch-screen desktop computer out called the HP TouchSmart PC and there are persistent rumors that touchscreens will replace trackpads (just a mouse of a different color) on laptops.

DVDs -- What do we use DVDs for? Playing movies, loading software mainly.

Look around and see movies streaming over the Web and software being downloaded from App stores like the new Mac App Store. Look around again and there won't be a DVD in sight.

It's no coincidence that NetFlix now offers a streaming-only membership that doesn't involve sending DVDs back and forth by snail mail.

So when you use these devices, treat them with compassion for they are not long for this world.

Read TechMan's blog on post-gazette.com/techman. Watch TechTalk at post-gazette.com/multimedia or listen at post-gazette.com/podcast. Follow PGTechMan on Twitter.

First published on January 30, 2011 at 12:00 am

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