One of the things I foresee happening sooner rather than later is the elimination of private ownership of entertainment media.
Older people are often collectors of their personal entertainment, whether it be books, magazines, CD music, DVD, BluRay or compressed video downloaded from the Internet. Younger people prefer the streaming/ subscription model, often because of the physical space needed to store hard copies.
I recently bought a new laptop computer, and there were no new models available which had a CD Read/ Write drive. I had specifically requested that, and the compromise my geek had for me was a separate CDR drive which plugs into a USB port.
It's very difficult to find blank CDs for burning audio or video data these days. Previously burned disks don't last forever. The first sign of loss is that the data can still be read, but it cannot be recopied from the burned disk to a hard drive.
Most software can no longer be purchased as a physical disk; it's often sold by download only, and more often than not, an annual fee is required to renew the subscription; it's no longer owned by the user, it's only rented.
At some point not long after my own death, I see a future world where all print and video data can only be seen on a pay-per-view basis. In addition, the choices of which media are available may be severely limited, and there will be no guarantee that older media will still be available in its original form - ie: children's books by authors like Dr Seuss have already been 'updated' to remove stereotypical depictions of certain ethnicities, or the occupations of book characters have been 'modernized' to reflect current opinions of the past.
Younger people who never got into the habit of physically collecting media items will one day find that they own nothing which has any value to someone else in the secondary market. Any older people who have ever been short of money have probably learned the importance of possessing items which have value to other people, and can be converted to cash in an emergency.
The end result will inevitably be that those at the lower end of the economy will have vastly reduced options as to what they may read or view. These same people will have fewer options to contemplate new ideas, because they will not have the same information database from which to receive inspiration.
I see a huge shift in computing in the 21st century, both in terms of software and in operating systems. Windows XP was the last Microsoft operating system in which a computer behaved like a well-trained dog, obeying the commands of its master. Much of the software developed in the 1990's is also more versatile than what is marketed today. In many cases, however, the 1990's software could be cloned for free distribution with a burned disk, often with a crack or patch file which bypassed security features contained on the disk. This was a bane to the corporations which not only sold products, but frequently updated those products so that people who owned them already would have to buy them again.
Beginning with the Vista versions of Windows in 2007, security protection for non-registered software increased significantly, and the focus of commercially sold software changed as well. A greater emphasis was placed on features which did 'most of the work', and in many cases, the human user's role was reduced to choosing from among the menu of options provided, rather than exploring the full capacity of the app. Many young people today don't even own a computer that isn't used almost exclusively for schoolwork. Their phone alone provides them with as much information as they choose to digest. Many of them have never created a document with MSWord, or made a spreadsheet with Excel, or created a simple image with MSPaint from scratch. If they don't do that when they're young, they're that much less likely to do it when they're older.
I make computer fonts as a hobby. I use an app named ScanFont3, released around 1995. It won't work with a Windows operating system more recent than XP, and my cracked version won't work with an installed Windows update from January, 2014. People using the most recent and most expensive font editing software cannot reproduce some of my results.
I got around the problem of the 2014 Windows update by having my geek install Windows XP and service packs 1, 2 and 3 only onto older laptops which had had their hard drives formatted, (ie: erased). I have several such machines, none of which have ever been connected to the Internet since the operating systems were installed. I move data from them with a portable USB drive. The processing speed is amazing; Internet slows everything down. I can also take advantage of features which have been eliminated from later versions of core apps. For example, MSPaint no longer has the option of inverting colours on an image, and Windows search no longer allows the user to specify certain search parameters, such as files created or modified between two specific calendar dates. On a Windows 10 computer, a search of the contents of one large folder might take several minutes, and several minutes more if I want to sort the data in a different sequence. On an XP computer, each of those tasks is completed in about one second.
According to my geek, laptops which have motherboards compatible with Windows XP are increasingly difficult to find. Most are probably in landfills. I can still use mine to play DOS-based games like Wolfenstein3D, or to create animated .gifs with software I didn't have to buy.
This video on YouTube:
is an animated .gif I made in 2015, saved as a video. I don't think I could have made it without the features available in the XP version of MSPaint. It's 80 seconds long at four frames per second, and I think 320 frames is at or near the frames limit for my .gif animator.
Several years prior to that, I attempted to make a .gif which would have taken about an hour and ten minutes to view in its entirety, but it exceeded the app's limits. That one was similar to a slot machine, where there were frequent small rewards and six big rewards spread out over the full 70 minute length. I had seen it as having potential to be used as a drinking game. Ultimately it was a waste of many hours of time, but in the process, I discovered the limits of the .gif animator, which could only be learned through trial and error. Often more is learned from failure than from success.
Older people are often collectors of their personal entertainment, whether it be books, magazines, CD music, DVD, BluRay or compressed video downloaded from the Internet. Younger people prefer the streaming/ subscription model, often because of the physical space needed to store hard copies.
I recently bought a new laptop computer, and there were no new models available which had a CD Read/ Write drive. I had specifically requested that, and the compromise my geek had for me was a separate CDR drive which plugs into a USB port.
It's very difficult to find blank CDs for burning audio or video data these days. Previously burned disks don't last forever. The first sign of loss is that the data can still be read, but it cannot be recopied from the burned disk to a hard drive.
Most software can no longer be purchased as a physical disk; it's often sold by download only, and more often than not, an annual fee is required to renew the subscription; it's no longer owned by the user, it's only rented.
At some point not long after my own death, I see a future world where all print and video data can only be seen on a pay-per-view basis. In addition, the choices of which media are available may be severely limited, and there will be no guarantee that older media will still be available in its original form - ie: children's books by authors like Dr Seuss have already been 'updated' to remove stereotypical depictions of certain ethnicities, or the occupations of book characters have been 'modernized' to reflect current opinions of the past.
Younger people who never got into the habit of physically collecting media items will one day find that they own nothing which has any value to someone else in the secondary market. Any older people who have ever been short of money have probably learned the importance of possessing items which have value to other people, and can be converted to cash in an emergency.
The end result will inevitably be that those at the lower end of the economy will have vastly reduced options as to what they may read or view. These same people will have fewer options to contemplate new ideas, because they will not have the same information database from which to receive inspiration.
I see a huge shift in computing in the 21st century, both in terms of software and in operating systems. Windows XP was the last Microsoft operating system in which a computer behaved like a well-trained dog, obeying the commands of its master. Much of the software developed in the 1990's is also more versatile than what is marketed today. In many cases, however, the 1990's software could be cloned for free distribution with a burned disk, often with a crack or patch file which bypassed security features contained on the disk. This was a bane to the corporations which not only sold products, but frequently updated those products so that people who owned them already would have to buy them again.
Beginning with the Vista versions of Windows in 2007, security protection for non-registered software increased significantly, and the focus of commercially sold software changed as well. A greater emphasis was placed on features which did 'most of the work', and in many cases, the human user's role was reduced to choosing from among the menu of options provided, rather than exploring the full capacity of the app. Many young people today don't even own a computer that isn't used almost exclusively for schoolwork. Their phone alone provides them with as much information as they choose to digest. Many of them have never created a document with MSWord, or made a spreadsheet with Excel, or created a simple image with MSPaint from scratch. If they don't do that when they're young, they're that much less likely to do it when they're older.
I make computer fonts as a hobby. I use an app named ScanFont3, released around 1995. It won't work with a Windows operating system more recent than XP, and my cracked version won't work with an installed Windows update from January, 2014. People using the most recent and most expensive font editing software cannot reproduce some of my results.
I got around the problem of the 2014 Windows update by having my geek install Windows XP and service packs 1, 2 and 3 only onto older laptops which had had their hard drives formatted, (ie: erased). I have several such machines, none of which have ever been connected to the Internet since the operating systems were installed. I move data from them with a portable USB drive. The processing speed is amazing; Internet slows everything down. I can also take advantage of features which have been eliminated from later versions of core apps. For example, MSPaint no longer has the option of inverting colours on an image, and Windows search no longer allows the user to specify certain search parameters, such as files created or modified between two specific calendar dates. On a Windows 10 computer, a search of the contents of one large folder might take several minutes, and several minutes more if I want to sort the data in a different sequence. On an XP computer, each of those tasks is completed in about one second.
According to my geek, laptops which have motherboards compatible with Windows XP are increasingly difficult to find. Most are probably in landfills. I can still use mine to play DOS-based games like Wolfenstein3D, or to create animated .gifs with software I didn't have to buy.
This video on YouTube:
is an animated .gif I made in 2015, saved as a video. I don't think I could have made it without the features available in the XP version of MSPaint. It's 80 seconds long at four frames per second, and I think 320 frames is at or near the frames limit for my .gif animator.
Several years prior to that, I attempted to make a .gif which would have taken about an hour and ten minutes to view in its entirety, but it exceeded the app's limits. That one was similar to a slot machine, where there were frequent small rewards and six big rewards spread out over the full 70 minute length. I had seen it as having potential to be used as a drinking game. Ultimately it was a waste of many hours of time, but in the process, I discovered the limits of the .gif animator, which could only be learned through trial and error. Often more is learned from failure than from success.
