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Modern Tech Versus the Past
CNETNate writes "Most of us assume modern life is the peak of human achievement, but is it really? CNET decided to take a look at the major technologies of the modern world and compare them to their closest equivalent of pre-digital mankind — Facebook vs. dinner parties, World of Warcraft vs. actual war craft, iPhones vs. hills on fire — and the results are surprising. And slightly dumb, so laugh."
We Have: Putting one page of data on one page
They Had: Dividing data up into eight pages to maximize pageviews
Thanks for finally filing this CNet Crave UK stuff in Idle/Entertainment!
My work here is dung.
Sorry. We geeks playing World of Warcraft would not be engaged in killing each other if not for the game.
True. I wonder how many closet murderers indulge their taste for mayhem in a virtual world but avoid it IRL simply because it's permitted in one place and punished in the other. Or, to put it more plainly, how many would do it IRL if they were guaranteed they could get away with it.
"I once stabbed a man to watch him die. And also for 8 honor points."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Here are some more recent tech most of you have spurned for all the wrong reasons but which I'll never give up and you can pry from my cold dead hands (but you won't want to!!)
We have: Washed out LCD monitors, rubbish refresh rates, pale colours, all reds are orange.
I Have: My 21" newsroom Trinitrons, three of, for a combined resolution of 4800x1200 at 85Hz. Perfect colours, wide viewing angles, annoying bezels. Windows 7 really likes them...
We have: Computer speakers, tiny badly-designed amplifiers, built-in speakers on TV's, plastic "hifi" speakers with metal cones, etc. Plenty of bass, fair enough, but just whisper "dynamic range" and "signal-to-noise ratio" to these people and you might just cause a flamewar.
I Have: Wharfedale Modus Twos and a Rotel RSX-03 amplifier with 6 discrete channels (RSX-03), FLAC, Cds. And yes, decent speaker wire (4mm) I found! I'm not a hifi snob, but I know mine sounds better and with wise buying cost less!
Not all progress is good, only good progress :-)
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
I miss the days before cell phones. Don't get me wrong, cell phones are convenient and allow me to stalk any number of girls that I like, but still..
I remember before cell phones became mainstream, if you wanted to spend time with your friends, you had to tell them where to meet you and when and they had to be there or else you just wouldn't catch up. It didn't matter if you had anything planned or not. There was much less of the, "Well, I might come out, what did you have in mind?" cruft. During lunch at school you would say, "Meet at the pool around 4:00 and we'll figure something out." Then, the evening was yours for adventure or mischief or what have you. Not always having a plan was half the fun. It meant you would all get together and just start talking or walking or going somewhere seeking something to do until someone had a brilliant...or at least intriguing...idea.
I remember how, for the weekend, you and all your friends would be sure to meet Friday night somewhere then spend the whole weekend sleeping on each others' floors and couches because if anyone skipped out you wouldn't be able to find them for the rest of the weekend. I remember girls writing their numbers on my hand in pink gel ink and walking around, intentionally holding my hand turned just out slightly so as to subversively brag about my score. I remember setting up dates and saying, "I'll pick you up at..." and not having the crutch of cell phones to be able to work out the details when the time came.
Yep part of me misses those days. I am only 23 and I feel old writing about that kind of thing....the worst part is I don't even have a lawn yet....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I'm sorry, but just because WoW has "war" in the title does not mean it can be equated to actual war. In real war, you dont run around fighting monsters with other people, buying and selling stuff so you can make that shiny new armor or buy the coolest new mount. If it were like real Middle Aged warfare, you would be running around with a small axe and whatever implement you had on your farm that could do the most damage. You're also probably wearing whatever rags you happened to be wearing at the time, much less plate or mail armor. You have people sitting at home yelling at each other over vent, as compared to people who have either trained for it their wholes lives, or were forced into battle by a lord who just wants more land, so he can get more tax money, so he can live even nicer. Not to mention the fact that the only thing close to someone spewing fireballs is an archer with an arrow covered with pitch and ignited.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Basically what I am saying is that technology makes things less personal. ...it just doesn't have the same feeling.
I think you just summarized every analysis in TFA. "The old stuff is better 'cuz it has an old-timey feel to it." Personally, I appreciate being able to communicate half-way across the country w/o having to run to the telegraph station and blow a half-day's pay even if it's less personal. I like that Swine Flu is less deadly than the Plague, even if that's not as scary. I like that I can re-spawn after dying in some game rather than getting my head lopped off in battle, even if it's less manly.
But that's just me... Now, I'm off to take a leak in the street because that's more neighborly than "modern" sanitation.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
MP3s vs. 1 Man Bands
Twitter vs. Bathroom Walls
Science vs. Alchemy
Fixed that for ya
Thats the keyword that matters more there. Global communications (in particular with cellphones), and internet (with all the tools described in the article) have global and instant access from all the world. If you want to put in a word the difference between past and present, "World" will be what we have now, in this instant, all of it (including the bad parts, as globalization and properly named pandemic diseases)
Science vs. Mad Science
Wait, which one is the "modern" side? ;-)
Let the older times be in the past. People don't realize how smelly and unsanitary streets were when horses and carriages were the mainstay of transportation. There was no fire, police, or EMS. If you came down with something, hopefully your immune system could take care of it, because there was no penicillin or other medicines to clear up even the basic infections. Most of America at that time was living in hovels or tenements and barely making a sustainable living. Any police protection were for the businesses like banks. If you were an individual, you packed heat or you were dead.
Even those smelly, slow diesel cars that foreign automakers want to push on the US again (anyone above 20 remembers the Mercedes turbo diesels that people ended up passing on the wrong side of the road or breakdown lanes due to their sulphur belching stench and multi minute 0-60 times.) are far better than what horses were like in cities. Horses needed fed, they had to be rested, they were often stolen, turned streets slick with manure if the weather was wet at all.
Going further back, war in the Middle Ages sucked. There were no medics back then, so if you got a good nick, you ended up dying of blood loss right there, or an infection before a week.
As for the plague, people don't realize that it was the massive die-off due to the plague that got Europe out of the groaning slavery it was in for almost a millennium. The loose systems of dukedoms that used to have peasants to spare now actually had to seek people out, and forced warring mini-kingdoms to band together. Fields which had to be used to provide the bare necessities for an overpopulated Europe could be used for things like olives, grapes, hops, and niceties.
Yes, modern life is boring, but compared to how life was before refrigeration, basic sanitation, running water, clothes washers, literacy, fire/police/EMS presence, modern medicine, I'll take it over any time in the past.
Can I use all of my moderator points to rate this article as -10 extremely stupid.
1968 was one of the worst years of the last century for this nation, despite the Apollo mission at xmas time.
The Vietnam War kept raging well until 1975, with some of the worst death tolls in the late 1960s to early 1970s. There were reasons reason we left after that.
Just because we tend to gloss over the dark days, doesn't mean they didn't happen. And a music festival for a bunch of hippies in upstate NY doesn't make it all better either.
One day we will consider modern chemo to be just a step above savagery and will also say that unlike ancient chemo, our modern remedies work. We'll say that because there won't be questions of survival rates over 5 years or so, just which one will cause complete remission the fastest and keep it from coming back.
Notably, some of the big medications and surgical procedures out there today have an effect, but evidence is growing that the effect they have is useless. One day we'll see those as no better than bloodletting for a broken leg. It's easy to make fun of the old state of the art in hindsight, sorta like all that advice to just relax, drink milk and perhaps see a shrink to treat a simple H. Pylori infection looks kinda silly now.
Our modern state of the art psychiatry won't likely fare much better than the mid-20th century use of insulin coma and lobotomy. We'll likely look back on ECT and wonder why the doctor didn't just break a 2x4 over the patient's head.
Somebody thinks the police offer protection, rather than response. When you need heat, police won't be there to protect you.
As an example, if you think about the medieval era and how you moved around, there we're basically two options:1) by horse
2) by walking
This meant that every business had to own a horse and feed it to move around.
It meant that you had a tight little monopoly in your own neighborhood .
The handsome brick structure on on our village main street was originally a three story department store that served a population of less than 1000. The alternative, if you wanted to shop for a set of dishes, a mattress or sofa, would be to take a train into Buffalo and pay the freight back.
There's a lot less tuning than you think and still not a decent theory of why or how it might work and when. There is also evidence that the only reason cognitive and memory deficits aren't reported is that nobody's looking for them anymore.
I can understand it's use as a treatment of last resort especially for suicidal patients, but there are still a few psychiatrists that seem a bit trigger happy with it. Why TMS isn't tried first every time is beyond comprehension.
I still find it annoying as hell that you can't capture RGB at each pixel (except for foveon) and so have to choose which kind of degradation/approximation of reality to use. I keep finding myself buying cameras and then returning them because they're just never up to what i'm expecting. Beats sniffing all those chemicals though and much easier to dodge and burn, though i have really fond memories of the dark room. Still, I'm more content with pencil and paper than most digital cameras for capturing a scene. Then again, i'm just like those grammar pedants.