Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

[Falcos_Commisar]

I agree. Newer printers behave more like IOT devices in how they always want to download patches or firmware updates and such.

When I moved out of my office, one of the things I was sure take to my home office with me was an older color printer that was made before connecting to the internet became a thing. All it does it print without the needless bells, whistles, and annoyances found in today's printers. It's a good standby/backup printer and serves as a reminder of the time when devices did only what you bought them for without extraneous bloat and functionality.

The other trend I hate is how color printers need to do periodic "maintenance" even if you hardly use them. All it seems do is deplete the (costly) color ink cartridges at a faster than usual rate. If anything, this feature maintains the company's revenue stream due to all the wasted ink people have to replace.


In junior high, my best friend at the time had a multi-function watch. Although there was no radio a la Dick Tracy, it had the usual options for time, date, and stopwatch along with one other built-in feature I hadn't seen on a watch before or after: the ability to keep score for two entities up to a 99-99 tie.

I see Apple Watch offers this ability as an app, but I haven't seen this feature be offered natively ever since my classmate showed off his watch ages ago.

That is called a "rattrapante" feature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_chronograph

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

Hopefully eventually just converting existing vehicles to electric can be cheaper than teslas are so most just go that route, and they can't be 'updated' without you wanting them to and they don't have an internet connection.

You know what's better than an EV? A vehicle that can be refuelled in 30 seconds from a Jerry can.

 

[Mr. 0]

You know what's better than an EV? A vehicle that can be refuelled in 30 seconds from a Jerry can.

NO NOT THAT

YOUR KILLING DINOSAURS AND THE OZONE LAYER

WE NEED SOLAR POWERED CARS WITH NO AEROSOLS OR CFCs THAT PING THE DEALERSHIP WHENEVER THERE'S A SERVICE ISSUE

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Biosphere 2 showed it IS possible, just difficult.

I thought the experiment where it was sealed off from the outside had problems and couldn't be done?

Anyway it's still an interesting place.

 

[SpacePirat]

I really miss skeuomorphic design in UI.
I know it's a controversial opinion but to me it feels much more welcoming, "real" and nice.

VS

VS

Seriously - I know this is controversial but I really can't see why - how did we go so wrong?

 

[Madre Muerte]

I really miss skeuomorphic design in UI.
I know it's a controversial opinion but to me it feels much more welcoming, "real" and nice.

View attachment 2290319View attachment 2290322 VS View attachment 2290337View attachment 2290338

View attachment 2290328 VS View attachment 2290333

Seriously - I know this is controversial but I really can't see why - how did we go so wrong?
View attachment 2290339

I like 3d designs reminiscent of XP and vista, kinda like what you're talking about here but the flat look with everything staring at you in annoying. I prefer the icons to be shifted away from the viewer

(Example on my desktop)

 

[Blamo]

I really miss skeuomorphic design in UI.

Same here. The only iPhone I owned the, iPhone 3G, had such a comfy feel. Current flat design is just bland.

Seriously - I know this is controversial but I really can't see why - how did we go so wrong?

It is easier to make the flat icons, they are culturally neutral and possibly are better for vectorisation as well.
Also designers are a hivemind. Seriously, I used to be interested in the industry, but they all think alike, it's spooky.
Sometimes I think they are just finding excuse for making junk, because I know they could do a hundred times better jobs if they get a budget and a client who cared.

The same reason for those abhorrent illustration people that keep popping up in websites and ads for the last few years.
It's economical, sure, but ugly and uninspiring as well. You can do flat designs well, without making ugly purple things with asymmetrical limbs.

Autism about design, but tech related:

Spoiler: illustrations

Both can be vectored well. I mean imagine billion dollar companies not caring about their image that not even the biggest video sharing site on the world has a mascot, let alone any identity. Everything is just a soulless white or black box without any human touches.

Newgrounds.com and 4chan.org have a better branding that the top social media sites and consumer products on the globe. Sad, how there is no soul in business anymore. There never was, sure, but at least they could hire some designers who made it appear so.

 

[Cavalier Cipolla]

I really miss skeuomorphic design in UI.
I know it's a controversial opinion but to me it feels much more welcoming, "real" and nice.

View attachment 2290319View attachment 2290322 VS View attachment 2290337View attachment 2290338

View attachment 2290328 VS View attachment 2290333

Seriously - I know this is controversial but I really can't see why - how did we go so wrong?
View attachment 2290339

Perhaps that could be the result of the diversity hire BS where troons, furries, spergs and minorities are pretty much hired ONLY because they fit into one or more of these categories, and their skills are more of an afterthought.

 

[Blamo]

How digital identity can improve lives in a post-COVID-19 world

Industries from travel to health to education will recover more quickly if solutions once primarily associated with the finance sector are harnessed effectively.

www.weforum.org

Yeah, conspiracy shit, but I am tired of all the "digitalization".

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

A bit autistic but I feel the need to share this somewhere.

So I scored a gigabyte laptop from a pawnshop for cheap due to bad ram and no HDD.

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Laptop/P55W-v6

Got around to popping it open this morning to replace components and holy mother of god the instant I got the rear case off my respect for gigabyte went up by magnitudes. Fucking everything is just RIGHT THERE on the board and trivial to access/replace, even the things like the display that wire in via ZIF connectors. Even the battery is just a 4S2P 16850 socket with exposed cells and the entire rear case attaches in such a simple way I'm tempted to 3D print a case extension so I can cram a massive homebrew battery and serial breakout (there are labelled RX/TX pins on the board!) inside.

Why the fuck can't other companies do this? This alone has sold me on Gigabyte being the company I want to buy from if I ever get a new laptop; It's such a breath of fresh air being able to to trivially clean/refurb/upgrade a laptop without dealing with a hundred tiny screws. Haven't had this easy of a time doing a laptop upgrade since the brick Thinkpad era.

I'm not a fanboy, I used to scoff at Gigabyte back when computer shops photo-copied the prices of their parts and taped them to street lights, what kind of name is that? What re-seller does that? PC Chips? *snort chuckle*
Brand loyalty is also stupid and I was told that in another thread, and I agree 100%. I didn't know they made laptops but I have ended up with a lot of Gigabyte parts over the years not because I went by brand, they just turned out to fit my autistic needs. Like, I want a passively cooled graphics card that is competitive, oh, it looks like Gigabyte makes one that looks like belgian waffle ice cream sandwich. Nice.

You can go back even further. When I was a broke college kid in the 2000's, I used to do temp labor at these agencies that had us do menial work for minimum wage, and our form of daily payment was either a company debit card (with a $50 service fee to activate), or get our pay from a company ATM that charged us like 10% of our daily pay to withdraw from. I think there was a paper check option, but they took weeks to send out.

Due to how things work here I lived two months on company scrip until I got my first paycheck during my first big boy job. "Company scrip" means I got a card to swipe in different machines to take out frozen food to run in the microwave along with snacks/drinks, it was called "JobMeal" I think. It was registered and deducted from my paycheck that was only 8 weeks away, 7 weeks away... 6 weeks... I spent all the money I had on a commute that wasn't a commute, it would normally be a leisure trip, so there were no commuter price tickets and then there were subways and buses on top of that. This meant that I stole all my toiletpaper from work along with hand soap so I could wash my hair before I got my solid four hours of sleep, every coin had to go to the commute and I had to cheat heavily there, if I got a ticket I had to eat it when I got money.

After a while I went slightly insane but it was kind of nice in that military way. This is why I advocate 6-12 months of mandatory military service for both men and women.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Well, you could give ASCII the middle finger and give 0-9 numbers 0-9 entries in the pattern table. Could save you some cycles by not needing to do addition. And divide by 10 and use the modulo which is the upper word IIRC. Also, it is bold to assume the ST has a blitter. Pretty sure there's a reason ST to Amiga conversions were so dookie.

Amiga to ST conversions could be pretty much identical to play only with chiptunes as opposed to tracker music (and the chiptunes could be good in their own right as well). For instance, Turrican 2, Another World, and everything by the Bitmap Bros or Silmarils. If you had programmers who worked around things rather than throw the hardware at it, that is. For instance, ST ports generally required 1 MB RAM where the Ami only required half a meg; this might be to pre-shift and work around the blitter or lack thereof. This worked because more ST users had 1 meg as most application and productivity software on the system required it or even 2 or 4 megs.

The ST was also better at 3D games due to higher CPU clock speed and often more memory. The Ami's custom hardware struggled with anything in 3D. Midwinter and Carrier Command originated on the ST first for that reason (but Carrier Command's definitive version was the PC DOS one which had superior and more aggressive AI as well as improved explosion graphics; I wonder if someone could patch that back into the ST version?)

Unfortunately a lot of them simply treated the ST port as an afterthought and just didn't care, or they were intentionally gimped by executive meddling. Psygnosis wouldn't make Shadow of the Beast ST a 1 meg only game because marketing, yet modded versions of the game which require 1 meg have surfaced which is just as good (though implying you would want to play Shadow of the Beast in the first place; once you get over the admittedly very nice pixel art it's a bit shit really).

The STE did have a blitter. Unfortunately nobody wanted to make their games STE only because they didn't want to lock out the huge amount of STF and STFM users. In recent years there's been STE upgrades of classic ST games such as Lotus which make use of the blitter and DMA stereo sound. Also there was one bloke who took it upon himself to improve the dogshit port of Outrun (I don't think any of the 8- or 16-bit computers got a competent port of that frankly) by restoring the original arcade assets and use of the blitter (and the chiptune renditions of Splash Wave and Magical Sound Shower were legitimately as good as the original pieces).

Terry Davis could have been a fucking coding god had he got help. The fact that he was able to scratch-build an entire OS in x64 assembly language with his own dialect of C with some legitimate improvements is not the sign of a stupid person. Obsessive, yes, but not stupid. Also, x86-64 ASM always seems to me to be brain damaged.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Yeah, conspiracy shit, but I am tired of all the "digitalization".

I don't think it's a conspiracy.

The powers that shouldn't be really do seem to want the "little people" in a cybernetic hive of tyranny.

Also I don't like how there doesn't seem to be much "real life" left because tech oversaturation.

 

[Blamo]

https://www.pcmag.com/news/peloton-axes-free-just-run-feature-from-treadmill-bricking-it-for-non-subscribers

Peloton has removed a free feature from its treadmill products—the ability to just run. Instead, the company is requiring owners to pay for a monthly subscription to get the function, though it says it's working to once again allow the Just Run option.

Progress is always good.

Spoiler: Louis Rossmann talking about it

---

I don't think it's a conspiracy.
The powers that shouldn't be really do seem to want the "little people" in a cybernetic hive of tyranny.
Also I don't like how there doesn't seem to be much "real life" left because tech oversaturation.

Yeah, all the nonsense in the last year or two made me a neo-luddite boomer.

 

[Toolbox]

You know what's better than an EV? A vehicle that can be refuelled in 30 seconds from a Jerry can.

Yes technically, but the power in torque and control you can get from an EV simply cannot be replicated in current ICE technology if ever. Efficiency rates are poor too for gas to power conversion. But yes the only way to actually make an EV faster "in charging" than an ICE vehicle would be to have quick swapping battery stations, which would probably easily break down and gum up. It would also require a complete standardization of EV batteries, cutting the cash that could be made from proprietary solutions for chargers and battery packs which manufacturers love and won't stop loving because it means they can trap you in their walled garden.

 

[Blamo]

Yes technically, but the power in torque and control you can get from an EV simply cannot be replicated in current ICE technology if ever. Efficiency rates are poor too for gas to power conversion. But yes the only way to actually make an EV faster "in charging" than an ICE vehicle would be to have quick swapping battery stations, which would probably easily break down and gum up. It would also require a complete standardization of EV batteries, cutting the cash that could be made from proprietary solutions for chargers and battery packs which manufacturers love and won't stop loving because it means they can trap you in their walled garden.

Having easily changeable generic batteries would really be a good improvement for the EV concept, but that would be actually consumer friendly. Bad for profits. Gotta throw out the entire car, to save the environment. Or you buy the car and pay a separate subscription for the battery so they replace it regularly. Never mind making the freaking car into a service on the top of leasing it. lol

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Having easily changeable generic batteries would really be a good improvement for the EV concept, but that would be actually consumer friendly. Bad for profits. Gotta throw out the entire car, to save the environment. Or you buy the car and pay a separate subscription for the battery so they replace it regularly. Never mind making the freaking car into a service on the top of leasing it. lol

Or the Apple solution. You can replace batteries yourself, but if it detects you did so it bricks itself with the next software update.

 

[Toolbox]

Having easily changeable generic batteries would really be a good improvement for the EV concept, but that would be actually consumer friendly. Bad for profits. Gotta throw out the entire car, to save the environment. Or you buy the car and pay a separate subscription for the battery so they replace it regularly. Never mind making the freaking car into a service on the top of leasing it. lol

The major thing is you could have a part of the gas station lot you pull up to, it pulls your battery out, and replaces it with an identical but fully charged set. It would make 'charging' practically instant, and completely skip over the issues with speed. But it will never likely happen because of the corporate issue compounded with figuring out how to store batteries properly under hot concrete and having the loading mechanism not constantly jam or run out of usable batteries.

 

[Blamo]

Or the Apple solution. You can replace batteries yourself, but if it detects you did so it bricks itself with the next software update.

The possibilities are endless!

The major thing is you could have a part of the gas station lot you pull up to, it pulls your battery out, and replaces it with an identical but fully charged set. It would make 'charging' practically instant, and completely skip over the issues with it. But it will never likely happen because of the corporate issue compounded with figuring out how to store batteries properly under hot concrete and having the loading mechanism not constantly jam or run out of usable batteries.

It is certainly a mess. Maybe they will put wires under the road, to make a kind of trolleycare system. the soycrew will say it's free electricity because tax money pays for it, and you can only go where the wires are. At this point I could imagine anything.

 

[TenMilesWide]

The possibilities are endless!

It is certainly a mess. Maybe they will put wires under the road, to make a kind of trolleycare system. the soycrew will say it's free electricity because tax money pays for it, and you can only go where the wires are. At this point I could imagine anything.

Inductive micro-charging for (compatible and paid up) EVs in road surfaces (maybe around intersections) seems like something they'd try to do.

 

[Toolbox]

Inductive micro-charging for (compatible and paid up) EVs in road surfaces (maybe around intersections) seems like something they'd try to do.

The amount of energy waste from inductive charging a car while it's driving. It hurts to think about. That's why I can imagine green retards attempting it. Just look at how many people fell for solar freakin' roadways.