Being amazed with technology etc

Heartfeltdawn

RaymondLin said:

Well we are like living in Star Trek universe almost.  I TELL my house to turn on/off the lights, I can tell my hifi to turn up/down volume, my phone is like out of Star Trek, web, emails, music, video, I can control my computer with it half the world away, it's my boarding pass, I can use it to pay for food, I can do my banking, it's also a phone and much more.

Star Trek universe without the peace, tolerance, lack of war on Earth, and eradication of hunger and poverty. Sadly. 

I will never get my own holodeck. 

Axe_meister

Imagine a holodeck with porn!

Ravenous

Stevepage said:

Any one else sometimes get amazed at how technology has changed in their life time? 

I vaguely remember about 15 years back debating with someone that digital photography would never become mainstream. The cameras were be fine, but the average person on the street would never pay serious money for a PC to handle the photos on, never mind learn how to use paintshop, etc.

I was talking rubbish of course. Both cost and expertise problems were solved pretty quickly, by richer and more clever people than me

Danny1969

I remember thinking what a waste of time the iPad was .... no one had a use for one, they will never sell many of them!

Flanging_Fred

Strangefan said:

Virtual reality is the future and what will probably come with the is even more laziness from the masses, I love tech but it seems all geared to time saving and convenience,...Apart from my fitbit thats great 

Im not so sure. I worked for a very forward thinking Virtual Reality company 20 years ago.  The same overiding issue that plagues VR still seems to be relavent - it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. 

One day someone will find a really compelling reason to use VR but as yet,  it has not lived up to the promise.

stickyfiddle

Flanging_Fred said:

Strangefan said:

Virtual reality is the future and what will probably come with the is even more laziness from the masses, I love tech but it seems all geared to time saving and convenience,...Apart from my fitbit thats great 

Im not so sure. I worked for a very forward thinking Virtual Reality company 20 years ago.  The same overiding issue that plagues VR still seems to be relavent - it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. 

One day someone will find a really compelling reason to use VR but as yet,  it has not lived up to the promise.

Yup this. 

Modern VR is very very clever, but until we can fully "plug in" and feel like we're "there" (wherever that is) without getting tired running around doing whatever we're doing, I just don't see the point. 

ICBM

It's the ability of computer-based technology to design and build complex machines which are far beyond the ability of humans to do by hand or using directly hand-controlled machines - including the computers themselves of course - which is the biggest change in my lifetime, and has moved technology on an order of magnitude at least.

This of course also means that we're now totally dependent on the same technology...

professorben

Axe_meister said:

Imagine a holodeck with porn!

Since Dianna Troy and Tasha Yar I've thought of little else. 

FX_Munkee

Flanging_Fred said:

Strangefan said:

Virtual reality is the future and what will probably come with the is even more laziness from the masses, I love tech but it seems all geared to time saving and convenience,...Apart from my fitbit thats great 

Im not so sure. I worked for a very forward thinking Virtual Reality company 20 years ago.  The same overiding issue that plagues VR still seems to be relavent - it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. 

One day someone will find a really compelling reason to use VR but as yet,  it has not lived up to the promise.

I was doing it 10 years ago and again 3 years ago, and yes, it's a flawed solution to a question nobody's asking.
Augmented Reality on the other hand may yet deliver something of use.

Strangefan

Sambostar said:

I'm not big into tech nor watch TV, all I know is that the computer takes up more of my time, modern vans are rubbish and the automated voice on the diesel pump is extremely annoying and I'm addicted to masturbation.

Their is no way you have time to masturbate, you clearly spend 24/7 hunting for terrible youtube videos, and posting them on here

menamestom

Sambostar said:

I'm not big into tech nor watch TV, all I know is that the computer takes up more of my time, modern vans are rubbish and the automated voice on the diesel pump is extremely annoying and I'm addicted to masturbation.

If the voice is that annoying, have you thought about not masturbating at the pump and waiting until you get home?

Axe_meister

All this technology is great but we really need massive advancement in Energy technology, be it storage, renewables, nuclear or fusion.
we've done bloody well at micro technology but not so good on the macro side.

Myranda

Strangefan said:

Virtual reality is the future and what will probably come with the is even more laziness from the masses, I love tech but it seems all geared to time saving and convenience,...Apart from my fitbit thats great 

It is... but is this current iteration of VR the future, or will it die like the last few generations did, only to be replaced by something better?

A couple of years ago the head of AMD said that for fully immersive VR we need 8K per eye at 200Hz which is several years of computing power off... headsets tend to be heavy and cause your face to sweat after a while making your face uncomfortable, and it's bloody expensive for even OK stuff ... all these things will be overcome, but I wonder if they will be overcome in time for VR to stay this time, or if it will be a further generation maybe 5 years from now - time will tell.  We adopted mp3 when it was appreciably worse than CD (at the bit rates people used), we adopted streaming when unless you live in Netflix HQ the bitrate varies enough that poor quality picture doesn't make us switch off and buy the bluray. We flocked to tablet computers when virtually no one had a good use case for them*... so maybe the poor picture quality, long cables, heavy headsets and crappy implementations wont hinder widespread adoption

Tech might be coming along quickly, but we adopt stuff slowly when it's good, but adopt hard when it's marketed - whether good or bad... I'm yet to see decent marketing of VR

* People still try to explain how holding a tablet on your lap in bed is better than a TV in the room and a remote,sit on the train watching video vertically... we have found uses for the things we buy rather than bought things we need with tablets... 

Tavernor

dindude said:

No hoverboards. No amazement.

Always used to say I only learned to skate in anticipation of hoverboards! One day...
It is amazing how quickly technology moves on though.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/tav397/Memory-Card.jpg
This is a good example, a better one would be with a floppy disk next to its modern equivalent but that's the first image Google spewed up. A comedian, can't remember who, talked about how it was incredible that pretty much all the knowledge available to mankind was literally at everyone's fingertips but most use it to watch funny videos of cats.
When an iPhone for the first time I had an app which showed a virtually live stream of the world from space using satellites, you could follow weather and that. Ever so exciting waiting for a big hurricane/tornado to wreak havoc somewhere so I could look at it. Mind blowing stuff. I was bowled away at being able to play THPS2 as well, it was identical to the PS version from when I was about 13.

ICBM

Tavernor said:

It is amazing how quickly technology moves on though.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/tav397/Memory-Card.jpg
This is a good example, a better one would be with a floppy disk next to its modern equivalent but that's the first image Google spewed up.

Go to the National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park. (Not the Bletchley Park House museum which is next door.)

It's chock-full of this sort of stuff, from the first days of computing - they have a part-replica Colossus - via the first transistor and integrated circuit computers up to the present day. The size (physical) and capacity (miniscule) of early data storage is almost hilarious, and the rate of shrinking of it is staggering - not to mention the equivalent costs in today's terms.

They have a Cray supercomputer from the early 1970s - which has about the same computing power as an iPhone 4S.

The most important technological development in the history of the last hundred or so years I think - more than flight, nuclear power or space travel even.

beed84

Technology certainly has it's merits, and I make use of what's useful for me. However, a lot of it is unnecessary and I remain skeptical that the idea that technology is a good thing holding the belief that certain aspects of it has more adverse effects on a person's wellbeing than good. Essentially, whether we like it or not, we're all in one way or another 'electronically tagged'  thanks to silicon valley, support coming from consumerism and planned obsolesce. 

boogieman

robgilmo said:

Tech is shit, it seems information tech is moving onwards leaps and bounds but everything else is getting left behind, the important stuff. So what if I can ask my phone how tall Everest is, we still haven't found cures to diseases because we seem to invest in info tech rather than the things that matter. Our planet is dying around us and all we give a shit about is Facebook updates and checking our EMails every half an hour, amused to death? I think so. 

I asked my wife about the medicine issue you mention, her being an ex cardiac nurse specialist. We've actually made huge leaps in treatment of all sorts of things in the last 20 years with better and more efficient operations, treatment and drugs. The chances of people surviving things like stroke, cardiac arrest, certain types of cancer, premature birth, liver and heart transplants, brain injuries etc etc are massively increased nowadays. Then there's things like bionic limbs, giving  speech to people like Stephen Hawking ...a hell of a lot of tech research goes into these things. 

My grandmother died in her 50s, before I was born. She had a weak heart valve that eventually lead to complete heart failure. Nowadays they would've replaced it with a pig valve or artificial one. A simple and quick op that gives excellent results. Things HAVE moved on massively. 

JezWynd

Tavernor said:

dindude said:

No hoverboards. No amazement.

Always used to say I only learned to skate in anticipation of hoverboards! One day...
It is amazing how quickly technology moves on though.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/tav397/Memory-Card.jpg
This is a good example, a better one would be with a floppy disk next to its modern equivalent but that's the first image Google spewed up. A comedian, can't remember who, talked about how it was incredible that pretty much all the knowledge available to mankind was literally at everyone's fingertips but most use it to watch funny videos of cats.
When an iPhone for the first time I had an app which showed a virtually live stream of the world from space using satellites, you could follow weather and that. Ever so exciting waiting for a big hurricane/tornado to wreak havoc somewhere so I could look at it. Mind blowing stuff. I was bowled away at being able to play THPS2 as well, it was identical to the PS version from when I was about 13.

IBM deliver 5mb hard drive in 1956...

Ravenous

JezWynd said:

IBM deliver 5mb hard drive in 1956...

Sure it's not one of Donald Trump's Coke deliveries?

olafgarten

Tavernor said:

dindude said:

No hoverboards. No amazement.

Always used to say I only learned to skate in anticipation of hoverboards! One day...
It is amazing how quickly technology moves on though.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/tav397/Memory-Card.jpg
This is a good example, a better one would be with a floppy disk next to its modern equivalent but that's the first image Google spewed up. A comedian, can't remember who, talked about how it was incredible that pretty much all the knowledge available to mankind was literally at everyone's fingertips but most use it to watch funny videos of cats.
When an iPhone for the first time I had an app which showed a virtually live stream of the world from space using satellites, you could follow weather and that. Ever so exciting waiting for a big hurricane/tornado to wreak havoc somewhere so I could look at it. Mind blowing stuff. I was bowled away at being able to play THPS2 as well, it was identical to the PS version from when I was about 13.

I found an old Canon SD card in my Camera Bag the other day, it said 16 on it and I assumed it meant 16GB put it into my camera and it couldn't even store 1 picture.