What are the worst predictions you have made in your life.
Mine?
“iMac??? What a piece of crap! can you believe the damn thing is convection cooled? No fans. Jobs has finally lost it, he is gonna get kicked out of the business world forever after this nail in Apple’s coffin.”
“I can’t believe they picked Manning. Just an overrated chump with a famous daddy. Leaf is the real stud, he has the talent to be the best ever.”
“What is this ‘Netscape’ crap. Nobody is going to use it. Mosiac is the standard and will be forever cause it’s at all the universities. Netscape is a waste of time to learn.”
I remember saying on an E-mailing list something to the effect of “No one will switch over to DVD unless it comes out at the same time with easy recording ability - people are not going to want to ditch their VCRs and VHS tapes for these little discs.” :smack: Yup, DVDs were a smash hit even without recording capacity on the players.
Mel Gibson is crazy! There’s no way people are going to sit through Passion of the Christ!
I guess my Atheistic hubris was misguided. In my defense, he IS crazy, and, when I said that, the word was that it would be in Aramaic, with no subtitles.
ETA : The Detroit Lions are going to be the team of the 90’s! The new 49ers! :smack:
The Manning reference makes me think that the most recent (not necessarily the worst) bad call I made was when the Titans came to Tennessee. I just knew Nashville wouldn’t support a pro football team. Now we have about as strong a fan base as there is, although not as snooty as older teams have.
I guess besides that I figured American Idol didn’t have a chance.
The “me” decade of the 70s was passing fluke. The 80s will be a return to the 60s, complete with free love, music from the heart, and liberal politics.
It’s spring of 1975. I’m working in the dorm cafeteria at Michigan State and the radio station is going on and on about the Spartan basketball program just signed a kid from Lansing Everett, Earvin Johnson. I thought to myself- “so we signed a local kid. Big deal. How good can he be?”
The internet will never last - who will be willing to wait for downloads that long? And if it *does *catch on, the backbone won’t be able to support it!
:smack:
Oh and: If they aren’t selling something, how would anyone make money off a web site?
I figured that using computers you would finally be able to get rid of the massive drudgery of animation, having the computer do all the “in betweening”, and finally freeing up the animators to do what they wanted.
I suspect that they must have made lots of trials of this, from the late 1950s onward (Hanna-Barbera was doing computer-assisted TV toons very early), but that it proved to be unsatisfactory, for some reason. Decades later, well into the modern computer animation era, I still saw bank upon bank of names of animatoes on traditional-style animated feature cartoons. Maybe they were all to jerky, or something.
Computer animation took off in a comletely different direction – the full texturing and 3D rendering of objects, so that nowadays i mostly looks like PIXAR stuff.
Of course, there are plenty of 'fully animated on computers" cartoons, like “Foster’s House for Imaginary Friends”, but I don’t think they ever ended up doing computer-assisted animation quite the way I thought they would.
About 25 years ago, with awareness of Moore’s Law, and just for fun, I calculated that a 3.5 minute, stereo-track pop song could fit on a single computer ROM chip with hifidelity, and drawing a trendline from the prices of common chip sizes at the time to the necessary sizes to store a song, I reached a date in the 1990’s where you could buy one song in a chip that would replace a 45RPM record for about the same price.
I envisioned a music fan carrying around a pocket full of his favorite songs, each in a single ROM, perhaps in some kind of durable package compared with DIP chips used internally in computers.
I never considered storing multi-songs on a hard drive or portable player, and my calculations were off by at least a factor of 10 since I didn’t factor in lossy compression.
Episode III of Star Wars would certainly be completely computer animated since Lucas works so poorly with real actors.
Not a completely horrible prediction since its scope was so small, but it’s one of the rare times I do make a prediction and be completely off.
For instance about the only other thing I remember prognosticating other than stock markets (in which I’m about average,) I bet my step mom $5 that my the time I was driving that cars would not have entirely digital displays – she said they would.
My highschool physics teacher, Mr. Wiggins, predicted in the 1960’s that by the time his students had kids old enough to drive, the internal combustion engine would be obsolete. He thought the most likely substitute would be the gas turbine, and his second choice was electric. Seemed logical at the time.
Alas, the 1980’s came & went and the infernal combustion engine is still with us and going strong.
Even if you stretch his prediction to grandchildren, it didn’t come true.
Last season I said that while the Steelers (my favorite team) had an awesome defense, they did not have a strong enough offense to go to the Superbowl.
