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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."
As you can see, ancient life beats modern life in all respects. Modern life doesn't even come close, scoring a rather embarrassing nought out of ten.
I would have to disagree. Sure you can pick a few things which outcome is that, but you really have to look at the larger picture.
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. For a real world example, it also created problems for pizzeria's home delivery, because the horse would eat the pizza.
But one must also note that some things actually were better on older times. When you ordered a pizza, you knew it would be baked for you with love and it would be delicious to eat. Now someone justs sends me a pizza gift on Facebook. Thanks for the mockery, I say.
Basically what I am saying is that technology makes things less personal. The same way that salad is shit compared to Pizza Hut's delicious pan pizza, e-card is shit compared to a real postcard because it just doesn't have the same feeling.
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. WoW is the low tech equivalent of jumping out from behind a rock with a stick and shouting "bang bang!". And the WoW forums are the equivalent of "I shot you your dead! Am not!" arguments.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
i represent the duke of america and recently a $25,000 sum of pirate spanish gold seized off the coast has been placed in our care.....
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
Endless useless meetings and reports vs forging and basic survival
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!
Craftsmen's Guilds come to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild. "They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society . . . tended to form associations based on their trades . . . each of whom controlled secrets of traditionally imparted technology, the "arts" or "mysteries" of their crafts."
They had bizarre initiation rituals, We have goatse.
They had secret phrases. We have, "in Soviet . . . X, Y's you!"
They had a monopoly on their trade. We get outsourced.
Oh, I guess they won.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The Apollo program and moon landings were surely the peak of the USA.
...which is what much of modern chemotherapy amounts too will be looked back on like we look on bloodletting to keep your humors in order.
Except for the little fact that, as much as chemo sucks and as much as it closely resembles taking just enough arsenic mixed with mercury topped with cyanide to wish you were dead, it is backed up by clinical studies and has been found to work.
Chemo: sucks but works
Leeches: suck and don't work except in special cases as temporary therapy for reattachment of fingers and toes
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Telegraph vs internet: If you wanted to, you could use VOIP to send the right audio dots and dashes in morse code only this time there's nothing stopping you. The major draw for the author seems to be the scarcity of such communication back in the time period when telegraphs were the big thing.
Twitter vs gossip: gossip isn't dead. There's no evidence that Twitter destroyed gossip, it just went online. A far more efficient means of spreading rumors.
Facebook vs Dinner party: Same as above. The author seems to pine for a time when the world was very disconnected.
World of Warcraft vs Actual war craft: Iraq? War isn't anything to be pinning for.
Swine flu mass-panic vs The plague: not a very good comparison. Try AIDS and the plague.
Iphone vs fire on a hill: Same scarcity makes it cool argument.
Viruses vs the Trojan horse: not really a fair comparison. There's tons of military strategies that put that horse to shame.
MP3s vs Tribal chants: We still have those. Heck, my friends and I went to Denver just to see a few.
Post-Enlightenment scientific rigour vs Superstition and quack doctors: Yeah that living to the old age of 30 sounds great. Get me a piece of that action... We've still got voodoo nonsense and you're free to go get "treated" by one if you wish.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Can I use all of my moderator points to rate this article as -10 extremely stupid.
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.