What is Digg?208 Comments
- snakesonasam, on 10/11/2007, -3/+407he asked for brazil and they showed all of south America without defining where brazil is, Does this mean that in 2010 brazil will hvae conquered South america, does apple know something we don't?
- knightblade2oo4, on 10/11/2007, -7/+272must be awkward to watch porn on that thing.
- gmprunner, on 10/11/2007, -8/+245"must be awkward to watch porn on that thing."
Man: Oh yeah, check out this babe. My God that's hot. I swear man, Playboy is worth every freakin' penny.
Mom: Rick, I'm still here.
Assistant: Richard, your mother is still on the line.
Man: Oh crud...um...hang-
Assistant: Would you like me to hang up, or shall I wait until you finish?
Man: Yes, please, God, hang up.
Assistant: Would you like to archive this video chat? - wwwdot1jesdotus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+180Where are all the ads and spam?
- blueracer6, on 10/11/2007, -6/+173The device is great and all, but could they produce a more boring advert?
- specialK16, on 10/11/2007, -8/+144lol at that gui...
- SpaceMonkeyZero, on 10/11/2007, -2/+129I hate how every thought (and some still think) the future is all voice recognition. ***** a. My office is loud enough. The last thing I want to hear is my neighbor coding by voice.
FOR LEFT PARENTHESIS INT LOWER CASE I SEMI COLON LOWER CASE i IS LESS THA...
*BANG* my brains are dripping off the cube wall. - Quix, on 10/11/2007, -3/+113"The device is great and all, but could they produce a more boring advert?"
Hey, just be glad they didn't rap, like Microsoft did for an early Windows 386 promotional video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-rGzIOEIJE
*shudder*
I wish I could purge that from my brain... - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -5/+114are you kidding, in 1988 this probably blew people's minds. i mean the first real personal computer had launched just a few years prior. it's boring to us now because it's really not that unrealistic....
- NintendoFan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+99Apparently in 2010, Finder has evolved into Bill Nye.
- mc7winkie, on 10/11/2007, -6/+88Damn, everyone in 2010 just whips out some maps and everyone is like "oooh Ahhhh" WTF!
- mattcoady, on 10/11/2007, -0/+73oh boy, looks like late 80's retro clothing will be making a comeback in two and a half years. Better start feathering my hair...
- MackPrime, on 10/11/2007, -0/+66if my PC ever says "EXCUSE ME" i swear to god i will turn amish.
- TiMMY8765, on 10/11/2007, -2/+58I just kept waiting for that computer to say "I'm sorry Dave"
- SpaceMonkeyZero, on 10/11/2007, -0/+55Bow Tie guy looked like a Screech Bill Nye love child.
- praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -0/+54Are you telling me feathered hair went away?
- brianboyko, on 10/11/2007, -3/+53I think you all are missing the point.
Sure, it's funny to see the talking computer guide.
But let's talk for a second.
Was there anything that that guy actually DID in that video that wouldn't be feasible today? Sure, the voice interface probably won't work today, but Find articles on deforestation from the past 10 years? scholar.google.com. Talk to co-worker in video chat? Skype. Have that face show up on the big screen in class? Skype again - and I've been in classes where that's happened. Reminding you of your appointments? Outlook. Even "Fletcher something" would probably return a positive result if you searched for it in Google. "Did you mean *Fleming* Deforestation 2006?"
It is absolutely amazing how much of that stuff he got completely right. - TheWorm, on 10/11/2007, -17/+66Very rarely is it a good idea in the tech industry to make predictions far into the future. This one turns out to not be too far off of the mark though.
- wonderchemist, on 10/11/2007, -3/+52Hey, they did sort of get iChat AV and Google maps (Wellen's Linked Aerial Maps) right.
Remember this was 1988, when we were using Windows 2.0 or System 6. The interface looks GREAT compared to at least Windows 2.0. - Alegoo92, on 10/11/2007, -19/+68I guess they were trying to say that computers would make people boring, self-concerned, cynical individuals who all but had given in to corporate tyranny.
That's apple, thinking different. - AceTracer, on 10/11/2007, -1/+46This was not Apple's predictions of anything, this was John Sculley's obsession in a device that he wrote about in 1987 and harped on for years afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator - psygnisfive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+45The problem isn't with Moore's Law and raw computing power at all, it's with software design, especially when it comes to natural language processing. You see, an overwhelming amount of human speech depends on more than just grammatical rules: a lot of it depends on mutually shared knowledge to understand certain references. Humans also have to make educated guesses about how to decide the ambiguities within sentences. Context plays a large role in that too, so do things like intonation and whatnot. It's not the computers, it's the software designers that aren't up to task.
- cptn_cardboard, on 10/11/2007, -0/+43I predict that by the year 2007 people will make phones so small they just put them in their ear. The only drawback is that they will look like total jackasses.
- turpenine, on 10/11/2007, -5/+47they could have made it black and white to really crank up the boring.
or done it in french with subtitles. - leffunov, on 10/11/2007, -1/+43the first 5 seconds reminded me of Grey Poupon
- Xenogis, on 10/11/2007, -4/+45They actually were pretty close. Depending on software advances most of this might even be possible in 2010
- Ireland, on 10/11/2007, -0/+38Here's Apple's 2006 WWDC conference: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc06/ (Quicktime required)
Go 1Hour, 17minutes, 25 seconds in... look familiar? ;) - russellnation, on 10/11/2007, -0/+37hey man we still have 3 years to go.
EDIT: 2.5 years to go. - mrASSMAN, on 10/11/2007, -1/+34We've actually already reached this era at the present, aside from the natural voice recognition and artificial intelligence... but hey, we've got 3 years to develop that!
- ChaosSeven, on 10/11/2007, -5/+34Lol this reminds me of so many sci-fi films...
- tim620, on 10/11/2007, -1/+30@Quix
OMG. Now I have to try and purge it from my brain as well....agggg... - retral, on 10/11/2007, -0/+28They got touchscreen technology right, as well as thin display technology (folding super-thin display technology is on the verge of being available), it's just a ways off at how 'perfect' the computer seems at interpreting what the user is saying and a couple other things
- Quix, on 10/11/2007, -2/+30"Are you telling me feathered hair went away?"
Everywhere but the Midwest.... - PDelahanty, on 10/11/2007, -0/+27Don't we all?
- guybrush, on 10/11/2007, -0/+26Well, in three years brazil will be destroyed by deforestation and apple's professor guy will be like SEE!
- bionerual, on 10/11/2007, -6/+31wouldn't that be something more like.. vui? vocal user interface?
- clone206, on 10/11/2007, -6/+31I don't know who I'd like to punch in the face more; the bow tie guy or the professor.
- newbill123, on 10/11/2007, -1/+26@snakesonasam: The problem with not seeing Brazil highlighted was due to the encoding. If you look at other sources of the same video, you'll see that when it brings up the map of South America, the area of Brazil is highlighted in yellow and flashed a few times. This effect was apparently not high contrast enough and was eaten in the downsampling and encoding. But it was there.
- zolaar, on 10/11/2007, -1/+25> oh god, people are still snotty self absorbed technocrat a**h***s in the future!
What do anthills have to do with any of this??? - Cojawfee, on 10/11/2007, -3/+26I like how some jackass professor figured out how to save the rainforest in some random conversation.
- Yang1205, on 10/11/2007, -4/+27I was reading an article in Mental Floss that really caught my eye about computers and language. According to Norm Chomsky (expert linguist), computers still can't understand a single word we're saying to them. This really got me thinking about Moore's law and how far computers still have to improve to get to where they are in this video.
Haha, though it would be cool to have a Bill Nye look-a-like telling me about my mail. I think we are still at least a decade from this kind of technology. - Sevenfeet, on 10/11/2007, -1/+24This video was made for internal consumption only for Apple employees. As a young field tech, I remember seeing it for the first time at a sales conference in 1988. As it was explained back then, the idea was to do a fanciful look-ahead to the future on what computing might look like based on research going on in Apple's labs at the time. Back then Apple was making large profits and could fund all sorts of research. The bad 1990s forced all of those projects to cease. I do remember that we were told that all those things we saw in the video were possible...except the folding screen! Of course, now we know that OLED screens like that may not be science fiction after all.
If you look at the video, you can see a lot of tech that has definitely come to pass, some that has sort of come to pass, and the rest that is still being worked on. Let's start with the device itself....a laptop! Computers the size of a book that you could take with you that ran on battery power and hooked up to wireless networks were complete fantasy for most people...although the Powerbook 100 was on the drawing boards then. All of us use such devices every day. The laptop had a video camera....all MacBooks and many PC laptops have this feature now. Touch screen computing would be possible in the future....Microsoft now has Tablet computing and the new Surface. Vast data stores that carry archived, indexed and searchable data either locally or all around the world were envisioned....today we have Google and Google Desktop among many technologies and buying a terabyte networkable storage device is just up the street at Best Buy, cheap! How about flash memory cards? In the video, they looked straight outta Star Trek. Now we use that stuff for everything from PCs to cameras to cell phones. We do collaborative computing now everyday with a wide variety of products on PCs and Macs. The video showed user friendly statistical simulations...hell, we do that in The Sims and that's a game!
The hardest tech is still the personal assistant itself. Oh sure, producing a 3D face with natural expressions seemed like science fiction then, but graphics cards and tech pioneered by Pixar and many gaming companies made this possible. Vocal recognition and speech is a long way away from 20 years ago. And even the Personal Asisstant's search engine corrected the user for "spelling"...Google does that everyday. The hard part is still the artificial intelligence that allows you to converse with this thing like a real person and have it function as such....in real time. That will still take some time to get here. But it will get here eventually. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+22Where's the guide to hitchhiking the universe, hmmm?
- CBTF, on 10/11/2007, -3/+24Hey, you leave Clippy out of this!
- thomas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+23This was made after they removed Steve Jobs as CEO so what do you expect.
- cesclaveria, on 10/11/2007, -1/+20dugg because I'm from Guatemala :D
*we rarely get named anywhere. - cyclox, on 10/11/2007, -2/+21That was about 5 minutes too long.
- gmprunner, on 10/11/2007, -4/+23Excuse me?
^ just put that into some online text-to-speech program and you're good to go. See you in the horse-drawn carriage! - yensed, on 10/11/2007, -0/+18I'm surprised they didn't assume in 1988 that by 2010 everyone would have a cellphone or some type of portable device.
- MaikuSan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+18I'd scatter my report all over her disk.
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