Bill gates said that not only is the world of paper and pencil going down but so is the world of cd and dvds.
What does this mean. If he said WORLD of CD's then that must mean the whole generation of computers.
Please post with any further information you have on this issue.
I need to know what it means..

This post has been edited by microscopic^earthling: Nov 1 2005, 12:55 PM

He was, in all probablity referring to a completely inter-networked & diskless world. A lot of people have visualized that in near future, the need for transferrable storage media would be completely done with, as communication technology progresses and individually we'll able to upgrade to extremely high-speed high-bandwidth connections.

Once we reach such a state, it would eliminate the need of cds/dvds altogether, as then we'd be able to purchase software online and never need to download it to our local disk for installation/running. We'd be able to run them directly over these high-speed networks and wouldn't even notice the slightest lag as the whole data is sent over to our personal systems and executed. The same would be applicable for our own file storage too - we'd probably stash away all our documents on some remote file-server and be able to instantaneously fetch them as per demand. The access speed would be comparable to that of a fast hard drive or even faster.

Of course, one can immediately see through the pitfalls of such a scenario (such as no privacy of data, increased hacking etc.), but keep in mind that this is only a "paradigm" and if it ever works out, I'm sure it'll be tested and counter-tested thousands of times against all such measures in order to guarantee us as much security as there can be.

M^e hit it on the head.

With the way Gates is going, there will be no more Microsoft, however this is not the point I am making, moving on.

I personally believe that with the increase of technology, society will eventually go down on itself. I have noticed that, throughout the past decade or so (through hearing and seeing instances of socialism) that the world is on a rapid slope. Downwards. Soon, we will be beating each other with clubs, not becuase we had a nuclear war, as that guy depicted (I think it was Einstein, but don't hold me to it) destroying everything, but because people are becoming insesantly pathetic. While technology rises, social laws lowers.

So what am I getting at? Technology may become that advanced that we will no longer use CD/DVD etc, but with the way things are going, no-one is going to use the new interfaces anyway. Am I saying that there is no point? No. I am simply stating that society has to move on with technology, not against it.

Eh. I probably wouldn't do that, being a security/privacy freak and all. I'd keep all my stuff safe on a hard drive or two.

Oh! Cool!
That really helps things! I understand now!!
I can now surprise my friends with everything i have learned!!

Thanks everyone!

Okay first of all, the news came out ages ago, so everyone already knows. Also Bill Gates made the statement that news wouldn't be on the newspapers anymore but on a virtual way of communication. I think by this he probably does mean CDs and DVDs but also on like flash screens and things like those.

News is still news, it has no time limit. This may have come out ages ago, but I think it is still important.

You may be wright about the idea of not having newspapers, but I think traditionalists will not agree with you, in fact they would be dead against it. And he said that there will be no more CD/DVD (in sort of speak), as for the screens, Siemens have developed a paper-thin screen (see forum post somewhere).

Yeah! guy 'hit it on the head!'
XD
I think its very important becasue otherwise, MY SITE WILL CEASE TO EXIST!!..(it already has!! ><)

It will take quite a bit to render obsolete the reading off of a hard copy on paper. People on subways and whatnot don't want to carry around a portable LCD monitor to read the news... unless they were foldable and near unbreakable.

They said the same things about the Internet... it would make Books Obsolete. HAH, not quite

I'll be happy to unbelievable extents once they rid the world of disks and cds and the like. All that 'portable' storage just annoys me. 50TB hard drives and blistering fast data trasnfers are more my style. Gates has a good idea YAY