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Post by Lokifan on Mar 24, 2017 17:55:23 GMT
This thread is dedicated to anything that makes you say "Welcome to the 21st Century"... For example, every now and then, I get a reality check when I read an article whose title would probably be gibberish before the year 2000 Such as: Lice-Hunting Underwater Drone Protects Salmon With LasersOther weird WTT21C moments: When you read an old ad in an old magazine, and suddenly notice the lack of a web address. When you hear serious discussion about Facebook, Twitter, or other social media posts. Anyone else have similar reactions? |
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 24, 2017 19:03:57 GMT
Lack of web addresses?
How about welcome to the 20th Century.
I remember when zip codes were only two digits and phone numbers started with an exchange name rather than all numbers.
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Post by ironhold on Mar 24, 2017 22:02:27 GMT
"Modern living / in the eighties / this is the future / that you're seeing."
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Post by the light works on Mar 25, 2017 2:14:25 GMT
for me, it's watching sci fi movies (or reading books), and realizing our tech level has already gone past their imagination.
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 25, 2017 3:08:14 GMT
I remember for years and years they talked about the picture phone. Other than some demo units, it never materialized.  When it finally arrived as facetime on the iPhone, everybody yawned. And for years we were promised a TV you could hang on the wall. Now it's like, "What? Only 65 inches?" |
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Post by silverdragon on Mar 25, 2017 9:23:51 GMT
"I remember when"....
I was here before they invented the internet.
This is a phrase that make many under 20yr olds look at you with confusion, amazement, wonder, and a little bit of scared.
How the hell did you manage?.
I was here before we had Mobile Phones.
Same as above, exactly, but more so, "How the heck did you talk to anyone"?..
Well, there is the problem, we DID talk to each other.
Quite a bit.
We didnt sit around staring at our hands all day, we spoke to the other people in the room.
When I was a kid, we had only THREE TeeVee stations.
"Why?.. were you that poor you couldnt afford any more?."
No, there just WASNT any more than those three.
And then you have to try to make them understand that there wasnt anything like Satellite TV, because there wasnt even any satellites to carry that signal, nor any people making that kind of teevee show anyway.
I was here before MTV.
I have albums of Dire Straits that were made and sold before that infamous first broadcast of Money for Nothing on MTV, I was here before they even HAD a Video of the songs.
You had to just listen to the radio to hear the music.
I was here before they even had colour TeeVee.
...And in those days we didnt even miss the colour.
Take the whole of the above, and try and make the kids of today understand how "Basic" our lives were... and they just cant.
Show a kid an old "Dial" telephone and they just dont know how to use it.
Tell kids that I could go for days at home without even one telephone call as well, and they have no idea how.
Tell them that we arranged "See you 8pm on saturday" when you saw them last, which may be a week in between, and thats the last time you talk to them because we just knew they would be there, and they stare at you with amazement...
Then you explain that the modern chat room aint nuffin new, because we had that back then, it was just it was the local Public House, and thats where you went to meet up with friends, and they start to wonder a little.
But didnt we "Miss"....
Erm, what was there to miss?.. we didnt know anything of the future at all, so do I look back and ask if my life would be better with all this new stuff?.
Nope.
I have a Nokia 3210.
Thats about as far as I need to go with a Phone.
I do not spend the whole night staring at it, the battery lasts about a week, and I dont take txt mssgs, "If I am busy I will call you back", and you will have to wait.
If I am doing something important I dont suddenly drop everything when my phone starts to wail.
You can wait, this conversation I am having is just as important as you.
My kids see me as a dinosaur at odds with technology, because, as of yet, it hasnt made my life "better", easier, maybe, faster, maybe, but I miss the days when just NO ONE was invited to contact me at a drop of a hat because I was "Out" and not taking messages for the day.
And then I say I was at a certain place at a certain time, and someone asks where the pictures are, and I didnt take any, and then they start looking like they didnt believe me?..
Welcome to the 21st century, the time when you have to have "Proof" that you were nowhere at all doing nothing.
And the time I look at the top of a mountain and say "I have been there", the kids ask if I took photographs, and I get out the Album and show them photographs from old Film based camera...
Then I pick up my DSLR, and "Work it like a pro"
Then I pick up my Pentax ME Super and handle that as an old friend, and tell them that is the camera I used to take those old photographs.
Can I handle technology?..
Welcome to the 21st century, where people like me exist, that can handle analouge technology without a screen.
Just last week, the kid of a friend turns up and starts with the "There is a lot of Albums making their way to the shops, I must get a turntable"
I take them to the end of the room, press a button, a small "whoomph" announces the Creek 40/40 amp and the AR22bx speakers are clearing their throat [..anti-static blast on startup..] I blow the dust off my Dual 5052 Delux turntable and bring up "Sultans of swing" in flat-black-and-plastic being the largest track I can see on the surface of the album Telegraph Road, and the kid is amazed.
He is then "Blown out of the water" by the sounds he is hearing, and goes away wondering what the hell just happened, as that 40 amp sound system just blew the boots of his mates 400watt system, as I keep telling him, its not quantity, its quality.
He is now looking for a decent system...
Unless he can fork up a Grand and trawl the audiophile specialist system shops, he aint getting close to what I have, but I hear that what I have, is worth its wait in Gold..
Yeah, not a typo, "Wait" in gold.
It took time to get this system set up, and it does CD's as well.
I now have a sound system that is the envy of all the kids on the block...
Who me?..
This is just what I had as a Kid.
Yet its considered a "Must have" in this time?..
Yeah, Welcome to the 21st century, just the same as the 20th century, its just things get done faster now.
Not better, just faster.
And thats progress?..
BTW, I am planning a visit to a certain shop that is selling old LP records, well, old and new, because certain artists are releasing new albums on LP.
I sort of remember halcyon days spent thumbing through Album covers, the smell, fell, and the looks of the album art, and I remember that with fondness...
I am planning to re-live those days, and bring out my Audiophile Geekness and wear it with pride.
Put on an LP, sit back, enjoy... thats what I used to do with my time off when I was younger.
I am also working on a project to string together all my collections of Digital music onto one single one-terabyte external hard drive.
Then put it on "shuffle", and send it out the plug I just got that makes my Laptop output "Analogue" and turns it into something my old Creek amp can play with.
I may have to get my old speakers cleaned first, they did kinda displace some dust through the dust covers....
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Post by the light works on Mar 25, 2017 10:09:03 GMT
we had the weather channel. as in, if we had a TV and turned it on, we'd get snow.
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 25, 2017 14:23:57 GMT
we had the weather channel. as in, if we had a TV and turned it on, we'd get snow. Loss of signal was a lot more entertaining back then. Now all you get is a blue screen. And no sound of a waterfall running in the background. |
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Post by the light works on Mar 25, 2017 16:22:08 GMT
we had the weather channel. as in, if we had a TV and turned it on, we'd get snow. Loss of signal was a lot more entertaining back then. Now all you get is a blue screen. And no sound of a waterfall running in the background. and remember back when you used to adjust things to make them work better? |
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 25, 2017 16:49:12 GMT
Loss of signal was a lot more entertaining back then. Now all you get is a blue screen. And no sound of a waterfall running in the background. and remember back when you used to adjust things to make them work better? I don't know if that hasn't gotten worse. The old 10" RCA TV we had when I was a kid had 3 picture adjustments on it. Brightness, Horizontal Hold and Vertical Hold. The new LCD TV I bought has about 80 things you can adjust contain in 10 menus. It seems that anything you try to adjust just makes the picture worse. |
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Post by the light works on Mar 25, 2017 18:44:53 GMT
and remember back when you used to adjust things to make them work better? I don't know if that hasn't gotten worse. The old 10" RCA TV we had when I was a kid had 3 picture adjustments on it. Brightness, Horizontal Hold and Vertical Hold. The new LCD TV I bought has about 80 things you can adjust contain in 10 menus. It seems that anything you try to adjust just makes the picture worse. right. you just let the machine optimize itself. |
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Post by ironhold on Mar 25, 2017 21:13:02 GMT
Everyone remember when that was the future?
Also -
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Post by ironhold on Mar 25, 2017 21:24:34 GMT
That being said, I was helping my mom with her errands today and so we had a chance to talk.
One idea I've been having is for what I call the Museum of Kitsch. Everything from "found" art to "artifacts" of bygone eras. One interactive exhibit could be people using one rotary phone to dial another rotary phone on the other side of the facility, and another exhibit could involve trying to type a basic sentence using a manual typewriter.
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Post by ponytail61 on Mar 25, 2017 21:32:14 GMT
and remember back when you used to adjust things to make them work better? I don't know if that hasn't gotten worse. The old 10" RCA TV we had when I was a kid had 3 picture adjustments on it. Brightness, Horizontal Hold and Vertical Hold. The new LCD TV I bought has about 80 things you can adjust contain in 10 menus. It seems that anything you try to adjust just makes the picture worse. And it had one channel tuner knob. If you wanted to watch UHF you had to set the knob to U and there was a dial around the knob that you used to "try" and find any UHF channels. |
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 25, 2017 23:57:04 GMT
I don't know if that hasn't gotten worse. The old 10" RCA TV we had when I was a kid had 3 picture adjustments on it. Brightness, Horizontal Hold and Vertical Hold. The new LCD TV I bought has about 80 things you can adjust contain in 10 menus. It seems that anything you try to adjust just makes the picture worse. And it had one channel tuner knob. If you wanted to watch UHF you had to set the knob to U and there was a dial around the knob that you used to "try" and find any UHF channels. When we had that old 10 inch RCA, there was no UHF. When UHF finally became available, they sold set top converter boxes to receive it. That old RCA didn't have UHF, but it did have a channel 1. |
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Post by Lokifan on Mar 26, 2017 3:29:51 GMT
Ever notice that the time it takes to warm up an old TV is about the same time it takes for a current one to "boot up"?
Maybe a bit slower, but not by much.
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Post by GTCGreg on Mar 26, 2017 6:13:54 GMT
Ever notice that the time it takes to warm up an old TV is about the same time it takes for a current one to "boot up"? Maybe a bit slower, but not by much. I really don't understand why it should take more then a second or two. The OS can't be that large and it's already in flash memory. Many of the newer vacuum tube sets only took a couple of seconds. That's because they left the tube filaments on low power all the time while the set was "off." |
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Post by Lokifan on Mar 26, 2017 7:11:24 GMT
TV processors are pretty busy, it turns out. A lot of the processing is done by dedicated HW, but there's still a lot going on, according to this.A 1080p set has about 3Gb of memory in it, while the new 4K sets have up to 16GB, according to that link. They also have at least as many interfaces as your laptop. Basically, 2 megapixels vs. 8 megapixels. Come to think of it, my TV and laptop both take about the same time to boot (once I put in the SSD instead of the HDD). The TV might be a bit faster. |
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Post by silverdragon on Mar 26, 2017 7:31:18 GMT
My Laptop takes "seconds", I did manage to get my old XP machine to turn on from unplugged complete off status in less than 120 seconds, but that was a stripped clean slipstream version of XP I use for backups purposes using the last official updates, nowadays, I use hibernate, and that takes about 30 seconds.
Worst offender was [ spit spit] vista that took over 3 mins to find a stable state.
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Post by silverdragon on Mar 26, 2017 7:41:49 GMT
Welcome to the 21st century... Yesterday I used the Car park in Ashton-u-lyne above the shopping centre.
The signage was bloody awful, so we had to ask, how do you work the parking meters as we couldnt see any as we parked up, as the barrier just raises and you see a sign saying "Cash only", and not much else.
But, the barrier raises, and it lets you in.
What it hasnt told you, is that its using ANPR technology to take a picture of your numberplate. [try as we might, you cant see the camera on the way in?..]
The pay machine, hidden just inside the door to the shopping centre, you puts in your numbers from your plate, it tells you how long you have been there, and you pay, then just exit, because again, there is a camera looking at your numberplate to let you out that raises the barrier.
This of course relies on you remembering your numberplate.
The signage could have been better, because we spent a while looking for a "pay and display" machine in the actual car park, or any sign of instructions as to how this was working, because it didnt in any way tell you how the system works until you see the pay machine inside the shopping centre, and even that has no instructions of how the system works, or if you pay first or later.
However, I was left thinking, no ticket to loose, no token to miss-place, no need for a warden to wander about checking you havnt exceeded your parking time... this is a good idea?.
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