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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the type of attitude that makes me dread the future. Why invest in technology at all?

Wires are great, honestly. Easy to debug and use. The original zero config.

I can't agree more. Wires are the best. Unfortunately we're in the rapidly shrinking minority. Most people would rather put up with regressions in reliability and debugability in the name of ease of use.

I lived in a house with several roomates for a year or so, and I never ever had a problem with the internet because I used an ethernet cable. My roomates went through 3 wireless routers and a wireless repeater and they were never able to completely solve the myriad of issues that comes with wireless technology on a congested spectrum.

It really boggles my mind that they'd allow themselves to be frustrated, waste many combined hours of their life troubleshooting, and spend hundreds of dollars on network hardware when the solution is SO SIMPLE and dates back to 1970s.

I can tell you never used token ring. :)

Ha! Even Ethernet used to be a lot fiddlier in the '90s, when you had to worry about crossover vs patch cables.

How about trying to find the PC with the beaconing condition? That shuts down the entire ring? Usually someone copied another DOS PC configuration that uses the same Token Ring address. Engineers were good for that. 1994 or 1995 and they bought a new PC and instead of filling out sheets to have IT set up the PC they tried to do it themselves.

Technology in this context isn't an investment. Wires aren't investments. Wires are a cost. Imagine if your kids grow up and never have to buy a single cable for anything. How much money would that save them over their lives? What if these kids grow up in a world where things are connected, seemingly alive, because they just know about the presence of other things and can "talk" to those things and do your bidding?

This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.

This is only going to happen in the professional audio world if you can build wireless protocols with sufficient reliability in terms of latency - bandwidth isn't the problem, latency is. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are designed for guaranteed latency. Firewire was designed explicitly for it. USB not so much, but it can be adequately faked. But wireless? I don't see that happening anytime soon. Right now, I can't get my computer to reliably do Bluetooth from ten feet away to handle a single one-way stereo stream. That's crap.

So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.

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