Technology these days

hardCopy

The next big development that I'm waiting for is some kind of small, light, long lasting battery.

As impressive as current phones are, they don't last more than 12 hours unless you turn off all the features and don't use them.

Colmustard

hardCopy wrote: »

The next big development that I'm waiting for is some kind of small, light, long lasting battery.

As impressive as current phones are, they don't last more than 12 hours unless you turn off all the features and don't use them.

That drives me nuts, my galaxy s2 is impressive in functionality but it absolutely plsses power, its ridicules.

Gurgle

hardCopy wrote: »

The next big development that I'm waiting for is some kind of small, light, long lasting battery.

That one happened already, in 1899 apparently
The various developments since have been incremental: increased capacity, reduced memory effect.

I expect we'll see a smartphone with a colour E-ink display and ultra smart power management on CPU activity before we get a dramatic improvement in battery performance.

Shryke

Ray Palmer wrote: »

A2LUE42 wrote: »

What about the Antikythera mechanism which dates to BC. That was pretty advanced. It has taken almost a hundred years to figure out how complex it actually was.

While very impressive it wasn't really a leap in technology. Gears were known as was the figures for lunar movements.

We are truely inventing new things at the moment. Technology at the moment is inventing things never thought of.

We are living in a time of massive innovation. It is also happening at amazing speed.

That's like saying a car isn't impressive because wheels already existed.
It was a machine that could tell you the phases of the moon. It predicted eclipses. The calculations that went into it required not just to compensate for the moons elliptical trajectory but for the wobble of that ellipse. It is a fantastically ingenious mechanism, the worlds first true computational device.
It mapped the movement and trajectory of the five known planets.
It did all of this in the palm of your hand before christianity existed.
Evidence points toward the basis of the device as coming from Archimedes' workshop, which makes sense considering it is a work of genius in its own right.

InTheTrees

I'm imagining a room full of monks working on copying manuscripts by hand in a cold monestry somewhere, when one monk bursts in "lads, we can get the F out of here, someone's finally invented a printing machine!".

Grayson

Stephen P wrote: »

I remember being told in college in 1999 that a 3GB hard disk is loads and I think RAM was 32MB.

In 99, 10Gb HDD's were standard on all new PC's. I remember cos I bought my first PC in 2000 and it came with a 20gb HDD. And I thought that was loads.



I'm actually rather disappointed with technology. I was on my balcony two nights ago, looking up at the moon, and I thought "There will probably not be a man on the moon in my lifetime"

If you asked people 40 years ago if they'd thought that their children would be able to visit the moon, they'd have probably said yes.

Science and technology has become largely introverted. I say largely because there are exceptions like the LHC. But even those exceptions aren't accessible to the average man. Technological advances are driven by consumerism. So we have PC's in our pockets, which is great. I'm now never bored when I'm taking a dump. But I still cook dinner the same way I did 20 years ago. I still mop the floor the same way. Cars are pretty much the same and so is most of my life. The only big thing to have changed in 20-30 years is the way I consume media and communicate. We have video mobile phones and that probably wasn't imagined 40 years ago. Hell, in star trek the communicators didn't even have video.

Still, I can't help be disappointed that I'll never have a robot slave or visit the moon.

DipStick McSwindler

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Wibbs

Gurgle wrote: »

But these methods have been slow incremental development over thousands of years. Knowledge of improved farming methods migrated across europe for example, but the fine details evolved to suit the crops / animals / climate of the area.

Take the plough for example. This has been around in one form or another since farming began.

The design of the plough would be handed down from blacksmith to apprentice through centuries with small changes here and there when someone had a bright idea.

But those changes wouldn't migrate unless they were exceptional. A plough which allowed a horse to plough 5% more land per hour wouldn't be enough improvement that the blacksmith in the next village over would drop his design and learn this new one.

With mass production, that 5% improvement becomes billboard material. Every plough made after would be based on it.

This.

Plus the pace of social and technological change over the last two centuries has been staggering, particularly in the 20th century. In a single lifetime someone could have seen the first newsreels of the Wright brothers flight and then a man walking on the moon. Someone could witness the first moving pictures and the birth of colour tv. That impacts on all our cultural references to technology. In the past when change was slow and steady there was simply less modern tech to either praise of berate.

That said it did happen at times. I recall reading some ancient Greek dude(whose name escapes) who was complaining bitterly about the sudden fashion for fancy sun dials. Reckoned this was a lot of bollex and we would rue the day! etc. Actually timekeeping has a later example, where people were both praising the new church clocks and berating them in equal measure(using the same arguments as the Greek dude).

The new fangled printing press also had it's share of mostly "jaysus aren't we great altogether" with fewer naysayers. Funny enough one naysayer was Leoonardo Da Vinci of all peeps. Did not trust the device one bit and you would think the concept and process would give him a raging boner. But no. Refused to have any of his stuff printed. He did do a frontispiece for a mates book, but that was as a favour(and he didn't let him forget it IIRC). It would be like a modern Leonardo refusing to go online.

I seem to recall others in the ancient world praising modern technology. Romans and Chinese etc.

Like everything it's not new, the main difference today is the sheer amount of it and the sheer amount of commentary on it.

aido179

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

I never said technology hasn't progressed. Many people ten years ago had a similar feeling of superiority due to modern technology IMO.

Hold on, do you mean feelings of superiority over past generations (or in fact yourself a couple years ago)? Sounds fairly normal to me. It's called progress

mikemac1

I remember the parents ordering a telephone and Telecom Éireann said it would take six weeks. That was considered fast

Back in P & T days it could be a few months before you get a telephone

Nowadays people complain they spent a few minutes on hold with UPC, spoilt pups

Gurgle

Wibbs wrote: »

the main difference today is the sheer amount of it and the sheer amount of commentary on it.

It helps that the advances of the last 40 years are in communications.
It lets us tell the world about our great technology for telling the world stuff

Gurgle

mikemac1 wrote: »

Back in P & T days it could be a few months before you get a telephone

Months? Hah!

My parents ordered a phone connection in 1978.
It was installed in 1986 IIRC.

sink

Gurgle wrote: »

Do you think so?

Name something released in the last 10 years that's really truly new. Not an incremental improvement / upgrade of something older. Something that wouldn't have been possible to build or emulate 10 years ago.

This is just off the top of my head.

Graphene
Synthetic Genome
Memristor

All progress comes from standing on the soldiers of giants.

sink

sink wrote: »

All progress comes from standing on the soldiers shoulders of giants.

wtf brain?

starlit

Technology is great to have but there are better things in life than just technology.

DipStick McSwindler

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