Skip to the Future

There are several "hot" technologies out right now that I'm making a conscious decision to avoid. The problem is that they're not really innovative, and will soon be subsumed by other, better technologies. Let's examine a few, shall we?

Apparently the Blu-Ray media format recently won the next-format wars. Actually, both formats were losers. That's because the "HD" (high-definition) was the real key, and not what it was being stored on. In fact, physical media is going to become increasingly irrelevant as downloads take over as the primary means of content distribution. I'm not going to buy a Blu-Ray player. Partly that's because they're so insanely expensive still. And the prices went up once retailers knew they had the consumer by the short and curlies! I'll build a home media computer with networked storage and streaming instead.

And then there's those new "energy saving" compact fluorescent light bulbs. They're significantly more expensive than the regular incandescent light bulbs. So they're energy savings take quite a while before they pay off the difference. And then there's the fact that their light isn't appealing to everyone. I'm going to hold off and wait for LED light bulbs to come on the market. LEDs consume little energy and they're not toxic waste. Yeah. Compact fluorescent require special handling and disposal methods. Oh, and don't break one on the floor!