so i'm not exactly a technophobe, although i had no internet/computer at home til 2001, or smart phone in my pocket til they got small enough that you could still keep it there and cycle.
however, i do find the "advances" of tech over time pretty annoying more than half the time. lets give 3 examples, from recent upgrades...
cables/connectors - so here I Have to say that SCART TV plugs were one of my all time hated things, so when we got past the SCART/RGB cabbles for games consolves and went to HDMI, the world did actually improve (mostly).....even connected laptops to TVs and digital recording boxes got a lots less horrible....so I finally threw out all but 1 SCART thing (coz I still have one VHS video recorder/player for all the kids Disney tapes they still occasionally want to watch in genuine lo-res glory...but why isn't it all just wireless? oh, and reliability - i have a box full of broken ipods and phones - but the walkman tape decks still work after 30 years - digital built in obsolence back with a vengenece - where's Ralph Nader when you need him....
data storage - just binned a bunch of CDs but still have drawers full of USB sticks. have on my desk two "floppy" discs just to show incredulous kiddies - and also two sony walkmen tape players and data things for them....ha ha ha....so am i better off paying for cloud storage? hmmmm...i do have 2 terabyte SSD boxes which are quite ok, but they are USB and half the people in the house just upgraded phones and laptops so have lightning and USB3 sockets/chargers, so welcome to dongle hell (and expensive hell too)
television/music tech - so while the screens got bigger and higher res and crisper and lower energy and cheaper, the idea of a smart tv is completely daft - i don't want some bunch of bogus apps running on the tv's meagre ancient slow processor - i just want a nice display. while we're about it, i don't really want the screen to have speakers - i think people that make good audio gear really know what they are doing - but if I disaggregate all these components, i go back to a cable & wireless mess again - in fact I have both so i have the annoying (but least bad smart tv, and every screen on the house has an old mac mini and then there's wireless adaptors for the hi-fi - so now I have an interconnection management nightmare - perfectly smart and non-technophobe members of my household cannot figure out how to just turn on and watch BBC1....without just unplugging everything and starting from scratch - not good - another lesson for why the internet-of-things is a quagmire....plus despite aforesaid HDMI, half the time, half the TVs are left in the wrong resolution/aspect ratio by the last thing that was connected and someone has to manually reset things...
I'm not grumpy about any of this at all, no really...
here's some historical artefacts mentioned above:
however, i do find the "advances" of tech over time pretty annoying more than half the time. lets give 3 examples, from recent upgrades...
cables/connectors - so here I Have to say that SCART TV plugs were one of my all time hated things, so when we got past the SCART/RGB cabbles for games consolves and went to HDMI, the world did actually improve (mostly).....even connected laptops to TVs and digital recording boxes got a lots less horrible....so I finally threw out all but 1 SCART thing (coz I still have one VHS video recorder/player for all the kids Disney tapes they still occasionally want to watch in genuine lo-res glory...but why isn't it all just wireless? oh, and reliability - i have a box full of broken ipods and phones - but the walkman tape decks still work after 30 years - digital built in obsolence back with a vengenece - where's Ralph Nader when you need him....
data storage - just binned a bunch of CDs but still have drawers full of USB sticks. have on my desk two "floppy" discs just to show incredulous kiddies - and also two sony walkmen tape players and data things for them....ha ha ha....so am i better off paying for cloud storage? hmmmm...i do have 2 terabyte SSD boxes which are quite ok, but they are USB and half the people in the house just upgraded phones and laptops so have lightning and USB3 sockets/chargers, so welcome to dongle hell (and expensive hell too)
television/music tech - so while the screens got bigger and higher res and crisper and lower energy and cheaper, the idea of a smart tv is completely daft - i don't want some bunch of bogus apps running on the tv's meagre ancient slow processor - i just want a nice display. while we're about it, i don't really want the screen to have speakers - i think people that make good audio gear really know what they are doing - but if I disaggregate all these components, i go back to a cable & wireless mess again - in fact I have both so i have the annoying (but least bad smart tv, and every screen on the house has an old mac mini and then there's wireless adaptors for the hi-fi - so now I have an interconnection management nightmare - perfectly smart and non-technophobe members of my household cannot figure out how to just turn on and watch BBC1....without just unplugging everything and starting from scratch - not good - another lesson for why the internet-of-things is a quagmire....plus despite aforesaid HDMI, half the time, half the TVs are left in the wrong resolution/aspect ratio by the last thing that was connected and someone has to manually reset things...
I'm not grumpy about any of this at all, no really...
here's some historical artefacts mentioned above:
1 comment:
As for paying for cloud storage—yes, I think this is/would be a good deal for most people. Personally I decided a few years ago to start paying Google 2 EUR/month to get 104(!?)GB rather than the 25 gratis GB. Even though I *still* haven't reached the 25GB limit, I happily pay this just for peace of mind, i.e. not having to worry about when I have to start cleaning stuff up. Anyway, I'm sure that Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos etc. have saved many people grief they would have had by storing their family memories on USB drives and finding out years later that those drives have become unreadable. And even though (or maybe because) I run fancy distributed storage systems for a living, I'm glad I can leave that responsibility to street-credible professionals for my personal files.
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