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

[AnOminous]

Those aren't issues inherent to digital media, they're specifically issues with streaming.

I disagree. The fact that I have a nearly 10 year old phone (that I spent less than $100 for) with 64 GB of storage and if I were insane and wanted to spend over a grand, I could purchase one with absurdly low storage is objectively true. I could (and would if I were forced to) spend upwards of a grand to get a phone that could do less than the one I have now, which is ten fucking years old.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

but my tapes and records won't be available either because they'll have degraded into a recording of a blizzard.

That's not true. If stored correctly (and on good quality stock in a humidity-free environment), magnetic tapes can last for ridiculously long periods of time. That is why they use it for long-term backups. Ditto vinyls, if stored correctly and handled correctly, can last for literally centuries. There are videos on Youtube of people playing acoustically recorded 78s from the 1900s.

Even the humble cassette tape is more robust than you might think. I came into possession of some old tapes from my parents' cupboards, a mix of pre-recorded and me-recorded from about 30 years ago. Stuck them in the Brixton Briefcase and with one exception, which was visibly dirty (and loosened itself up once it had been rewound forwards and backwards a few times), they all worked. No warbling, spaghetti spilling, or fading there (and spaghetti spilling in cassette tapes is usually associated most with shitty car tape decks that are difficult to clean, if they ever are; the pinch roller gets gummed up and next thing you know it's all WWRMRMRMMMMGGG and you're fighting with 90 metres of gunked up ferric oxide.)

CDs and optical media do have an issue with "disc rot" though this doesn't really apply to pressed discs (and they are more fragile than either tapes or vinyls because a scratch can completely demolish the encoding whereas vinyl simply gets a locked groove which can be resolved by fiddling with the anti-skating). It's an issue with the dye in first generation CD-Rs that is most susceptible to disc rot. Later CD-Rs and DVD-Rs is less likely to succumb but some of those dye formulations aren't old enough to know for sure.

The biggest failure mode of analog media is not the media itself but the gear used to record or play it wearing out. Mechanical parts intrinsically wear out over time and replacements can be increasingly hard to come by. Usually the belts; the rubber after about 25 years or so tends to decay into this evil black slime. Also the power supplies. Capacitor plague is real. Thankfully capacitors are still made in huge quantities and standard capacitances so it's a case of snipping off the old caps and soldering in nice fresh ones.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

Yep, I have a personal anecdote about this exact problem:

A few years back my iPod Classic finally died, and none of the Apple repair shops in my town would fix it. I decided to just fork the money over and get a new one, so I went to Best Buy. The teenage clerk didn't know what I was talking about, and instead kept coaxing me to buy an iPhone. I told him I specifically want a regular iPod, and he said they stopped selling them because iPhones are now the default MP3 players. When I asked him how much space they could hold, he said some insanely low amount like 8GB or something, and his reasoning was that modern Apple products barely have any hard drive space because they want you to use streaming services and the cloud. The whole fucking point of why I needed an iPod in the 1st place was for driving or riding on trains when I used to commute to work -- both of which give me shitty cell phone reception. I couldn't get a signal in a subway train, so why the fuck would I stream music? Just give me my damn iPod with 120 GB of storage, damnit.

Another thing that everyone seems completely fucking ignorant of is that the iPod's hardware and software interfaces were one of a kind. The scroll wheel was an absolute stroke of genius in its ability to function as a means to rapidly but precisely scroll through lists, allow fine grain control of things like volume or track seeking, etc. It afforded digital convenience anchored in physical reality, making it approachable on a damn near instinctual level. I fear that's been lost with all of this "just touch the rectangle bro" bullshit.

They still sell them on used markets apple discontinued them due to low sales. Although with the low microsd card prices you can get a good sized card and a cheap phone with a built in headphone jack for less than 60 dollars or a genaric mp3 player for less than 20 with expandable memory.

Big brain version: Hunt down an iPod with a failed hard drive and/or dead battery, or just comb charity shops until you find one. I picked up a pair of them on shopgoodwill.com a while back for under $50. Then, you can pop them open and replace the battery with a new one and install an iFlash to replace the mechanical hard drive with flash memory. Boom, instant 512gb+ iPod Classic with your entire music collection. Other cool mods I've seen iTists come up with include USB-C mods, bluetooth mods, and larger backs so you can install bigger batteries and get through a full day or more of constant use (or several days of light use).

 

[Un Platano]

That's not true. If stored correctly (and on good quality stock in a humidity-free environment), magnetic tapes can last for ridiculously long periods of time. That is why they use it for long-term backups. Ditto vinyls, if stored correctly and handled correctly, can last for literally centuries. There are videos on Youtube of people playing acoustically recorded 78s from the 1900s.

Even the humble cassette tape is more robust than you might think. I came into possession of some old tapes from my parents' cupboards, a mix of pre-recorded and me-recorded from about 30 years ago. Stuck them in the Brixton Briefcase and with one exception, which was visibly dirty (and loosened itself up once it had been rewound forwards and backwards a few times), they all worked. No warbling, spaghetti spilling, or fading there (and spaghetti spilling in cassette tapes is usually associated most with shitty car tape decks that are difficult to clean, if they ever are; the pinch roller gets gummed up and next thing you know it's all WWRMRMRMMMMGGG and you're fighting with 90 metres of gunked up ferric oxide.)

CDs and optical media do have an issue with "disc rot" though this doesn't really apply to pressed discs (and they are more fragile than either tapes or vinyls because a scratch can completely demolish the encoding whereas vinyl simply gets a locked groove which can be resolved by fiddling with the anti-skating). It's an issue with the dye in first generation CD-Rs that is most susceptible to disc rot. Later CD-Rs and DVD-Rs is less likely to succumb but some of those dye formulations aren't old enough to know for sure.

The biggest failure mode of analog media is not the media itself but the gear used to record or play it wearing out. Mechanical parts intrinsically wear out over time and replacements can be increasingly hard to come by. Usually the belts; the rubber after about 25 years or so tends to decay into this evil black slime. Also the power supplies. Capacitor plague is real. Thankfully capacitors are still made in huge quantities and standard capacitances so it's a case of snipping off the old caps and soldering in nice fresh ones.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on the tapes lasting a long time. Perhaps this is where the differences between VHS and cassettes are made more apparent. I have lots of VHS tapes dating back to the 80s and they've suffered horribly over the years. VHS never looked very good to begin with, but a lot of them are simply unusable now. I live in a dry place too, so unless "humidity free" means stored in a sealed box with dessicants, that's not the problem. Even tape manufacturers plainly state that their tapes will degrade over time. And that's not even considering the degradation that takes place from actually using them.

The technology used with magnetic tape archival storage is not the same as what is used in audio and video tapes. Archival tapes are digital, whereas VHS and cassette are analog. What this means for archival tapes is that tiny changes in the magnetic strengths of the tapes don't have any effect on the signal they put out, because digital storage media is binary. Every bit is either on or off, there's no in-between state for a bit. This does not apply to analog systems, where changing the signal in a tiny way can have significant impacts on the rendering of the signal. That's true of any analog vs digital system, and that's why everything has gone digital now, because it's a much more robust system.

And finally I don't think it's fair to compare a technical issue with early versions of a technology to another technology that had been around for decades. Early records from the 1900s definitely had issues of their own, but as those problems arose they fixed them in later iterations, because that's how all technology works, and optical storage media has done the same thing. Consider Blu Ray discs. They're much more resistant to scratching than earlier discs to the point that I have never once scratched a blue ray disc, and they eliminated the issue of disc rot because they now use a silver based dye which doesn't oxidize like the aluminum based dyes in old discs. And this is all whole being able to hold over 50 times as much data as a CD. Meanwhile the issues that are present with tapes and records are the problems inherent with the system, and they're not going away.

All this talk of disks is irrelevant though when it is cheaper and more practical to put all the data on a hard drive, and if you're worried about the hard drive dying, copy it to another hard drive, and another one after that. That's where the real strength of digital media lies.

 

[Jazz never died!]

Honestly when I first watched this episode I literally fell out of my chair laughing. Where can you get comedy like this these days? It's apparently illegal.
View attachment 1922679
And of course the humor depends on the context.

And yet, despite the fact that the comedy in Fawlty Towers comes from most of the characters being absolute, utter assholes, the mere fact that goose stepping is referenced, or that a known asshole, who you aren't supposed to approve of, is racist, fuck it, cancel it all, throw it in the bonfire.

Fuck the BBC.

That is why people who want good comedy go on the internet these days. Archival is very important especially when we have acceas to the greatest invention the Internet. Everything gets bad legaly speaking when the people who owns the rights don't like what they made in the past so they censor it or remove it entirely and because they own the rights they can legaly wipe the net of any and mention or clip of it.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

hey @Un Platano

Do audio cassette tapes fare better than VHS or Betamax tapes?

 

[Un Platano]

hey @Un Platano

Do audio cassette tapes fare better than VHS or Betamax tapes?

I can't speak to it beyond personal anecdote from myself and others and I've not owned enough cassette tapes to tell you everything about them, but what I am entirely sure of is that VHS does not fare well in any regard, and Betamax fares even worse than that. Beyond the issue of data loss over time, the process used to read the tape is destructive. The tapes get pulled and bent around the read head in what can only be described as a torture device (especially the Betamax-it has to pull out twice as much tape relative to a VHS because it folds the tape around the read head and then back again from where it started), and it's no wonder that causes tapes to degrade or break. Cassette tapes don't have to move the tape around as much so that could lend to them being more durable.

There's also a difference in perception between the two. In general it's a lot easier to see a flaw in a video than to hear one in audio. It takes a very discerning ear to hear flaws in audio and most people aren't nearly as good at it as they think they are, but it's easily apparent to even a casual observer when there's something wrong with a picture. That makes VHS more susceptible to degradation not because it doesn't happen in cassettes, but because you're more likely to notice it on a video.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

hey @Un Platano

Do audio cassette tapes fare better than VHS or Betamax tapes?

Yes, is the short answer to that. There are two main mechanical problems with magnetic tape - they stretch over time, and they can tangle and break. The latter can be mitigated by cleaning your mechanisms regularly. The former happens over time the more you play it. However video tape suffers more from it.

Notwithstanding the mechanisms of VHS / Betamax / V2000 machines basically being the equivalent of a rack, while audio tape simply pushes the heads and pinch roller into the exposed area of the tape, they are also encoded differently. Audio tape stores a signal in a linear manner. But VHS stores it in a series of parallel diagonal stripes and uses a rotating head at an angle to read them.

Basically audio tape is like this :

==================

While video tape is like this:

////////////////////////////

Therefore as the tape stretches a cassette will "warble" or have bits that sound slower than they should, or have dropouts. But stretched video tape will result in the stripes becoming all out of alignment and the picture will therefore be invaded by interference as the heads don't sweep over the recorded areas quite right, or at the wrong angle, or similar.

All this talk of disks is irrelevant though when it is cheaper and more practical to put all the data on a hard drive, and if you're worried about the hard drive dying, copy it to another hard drive, and another one after that. That's where the real strength of digital media lies.

Oh I don't disagree. And hard drives are cheap and reliable enough that there's no reason not to shun streaming in favour of a proper media library on drives.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

[...]

[...]

I guess one tech trend I don't miss then is the dependence on magnetic tape and floppy disks (wow are those things vulnerable to data loss). At least now there's flash memory and optical disks.

Although nothing material is eternally safe from the lord of decay...

 

[Un Platano]

I guess one tech trend I don't miss then is the dependence on magnetic tape and floppy disks (wow are those things vulnerable to data loss). At least now there's flash memory and optical disks.

Although nothing material is eternally safe from the lord of decay...

Gold is, but unfortunately it's too prohibitively expensive to use in a lot of industrial applications because of that 'intrinsic value' meme that some people keep harping about.

 

[AnOminous]

Speaking in terms of analog in general, there is nothing that compares to the warm hum of vacuum tubes, like in a classic Mesa Boogie amp. Point me to any digital amp that gives you the same feel, and makes you want to curl up and sleep right next to it.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Gold is

Not if proton decay is a thing.

 

[Un Platano]

Not if proton decay is a thing.

Have you ever seen a proton decay?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I don't want to put everything in the cloud. Three reasons:

3. Memory holing - your data can be tweaked or bowdlerised or baleeted whenever it becomes inconvenient to the powers that be

I think people using SkyDrive that put porn on their cloud drive, personal or commercial, had it deleted or blocked. That was interesting.

Googling it I found this from a MS dude in 2014:

Some poster: Thanks for your reply. That fills me with a little more confidence. However, elsewhere in this thread someone else raised a valid question:
How do you handle child porn filtering?
I have three children and take photos of them. I am worried about false positivies.


MS dude: There are 3 processes: PhotoDNA hashing [1], automated flesh tone detection, and manual review.
1. PhotoDNA runs on every upload. It's only used to identify known child pornography that has already been reported, to make sure it can't be re-uploaded.

2. Automated flesh tone detection only runs when a photo is shared. (This is a change in policy; it used to run on upload.) There are heuristics that try to measure whether it's personal sharing or broad sharing, and we're continually improving those. The goal is to make flesh tone detection only run during broad sharing.

3. If the broad sharing criteria is met and automated flesh tone detection triggers a positive result, that is the only case in which an item is anonymously sent to manual review. It's some highly controlled clean-room environment where a dedicated team tries to determine whether the content is a legal risk or not. Clear cases of shared child exploitation porn are reported. (A parent's "baby in bathtub" type of photos are not the target here.) In most cases, it's adult pornography or family photos. In those cases, the folder is marked as porn and simply can't be shared again. (There's a user-visible message on the web UI.) It's not deleted, and it continues to be fully accessible to the owner across all machines.

The scanning policy used to be more aggressive and didn't exclude content that was unshared or only shared to a small set of people.

Your girlfriends tits has been sent to manual review. Don't worry, it's anonymous(you won't know who's looking at your pictures).

 

[Cool Dog]

Where do I begin?

I hate how the cloud is killing normal affordable storage. I wish there were 100GB floppies and that BDRWs were as cheap and common as CDRWs were so I could just store the shit I want outside an HDD thats gonna crap itself at any time. I want to keep my data myself, I dont want to give it to corporations that are going to datamine the shit out of it, and I cant afford stuff like LTO tapes

I hate how the entire HDD industry is basically seagate and wd, two shitty companies whose disks have always crapped out on me and that have no interest in improving reliability because the longer an HDD lasts the less new HDDs they can sell

I hate how every company has to copy the shitty trends apple does, not even talking headphones jacks but all the way back to phones not having replaceable batteries at all anymore. I hate how you cant even get new batteries from the OEM most of the time and have to go with other brands which are most likely shit. I hate how phones are basically unrepairable unless you bring it to some kind of lab where they still cant get it 100% back, just hold it together with tape so it lasts a little longer

I hate that laptops no longer have socket CPUs, bad enough you cant change the GPU now you cant upgrade the CPU either and some have soldered RAM so fuck, its a phone with a keyboard. Also been a while since I saw a laptop with a removable battery, its all internal now, another shitty trend apple started

I hate that all software is spyware now. You cant get out even if you pay for this shit, win10 is spyware no matter how much you paid for your license

I also hate that all software phones home now and some dont even work if you're offline, fuck you adobe

I hate SaaS, I hate subscriptions, I hate content disappearing just because of licensing, I hate that some corporation can on a whim delete all my data and backups something thats linked to the first point I made but I'm a poorfag living in a shithole country so I cant afford a homelab with multiple redundant backups like those richfags on reddit

The moment Apple decides to make proprietary storage cards ala Playstation Vita, I'm clocking out forever.

They wont, their business is to get you to pay far more for the same product but with additional storage

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Where do I begin?

I hate how the cloud is killing normal affordable storage. I wish there were 100GB floppies and that BDRWs were as cheap and common as CDRWs were so I could just store the shit I want outside an HDD thats gonna crap itself at any time. I want to keep my data myself, I dont want to give it to corporations that are going to datamine the shit out of it, and I cant afford stuff like LTO tapes

I hate how the entire HDD industry is basically seagate and wd, two shitty companies whose disks have always crapped out on me and that have no interest in improving reliability because the longer an HDD lasts the less new HDDs they can sell

I hate how every company has to copy the shitty trends apple does, not even talking headphones jacks but all the way back to phones not having replaceable batteries at all anymore. I hate how you cant even get new batteries from the OEM most of the time and have to go with other brands which are most likely shit. I hate how phones are basically unrepairable unless you bring it to some kind of lab where they still cant get it 100% back, just hold it together with tape so it lasts a little longer

I hate that laptops no longer have socket CPUs, bad enough you cant change the GPU now you cant upgrade the CPU either and some have soldered RAM so fuck, its a phone with a keyboard. Also been a while since I saw a laptop with a removable battery, its all internal now, another shitty trend apple started

I hate that all software is spyware now. You cant get out even if you pay for this shit, win10 is spyware no matter how much you paid for your license

I also hate that all software phones home now and some dont even work if you're offline, fuck you adobe

I hate SaaS, I hate subscriptions, I hate content disappearing just because of licensing, I hate that some corporation can on a whim delete all my data and backups something thats linked to the first point I made but I'm a poorfag living in a shithole country so I cant afford a homelab with multiple redundant backups like those richfags on reddit


They wont, their business is to get you to pay far more for the same product but with additional storage

Software as a service is acceptable for business software where you are paying for support because the cost of a monthly subscription is less than the lost revenue if it shits its pants and you can't fix it quickly. But for normies it really isn't. I believe you can't get anything by Autodesk that isn't on a fucking subscription these days and Autodesk are particularly aggressive at policing their licences.

As regards MS Office, there has been very little difference in any of the versions since 2007. On my PC I still use Office 2003 because that was the version I used at university and throughout the first few years of my working life. You can get NOS copies of Office 2007 for cheap and you will actually have it and be able to use all its features.

Laptops being sealed devices is something I utterly hate. Throwaway clown society. A laptop should be as maintainable and fixable as a desktop PC, only powered down to cope with being smaller. IBM ThinkPads were perfect - expensive, and less powerful than equivalent desktops of the time, and I couldn't stand the nipple mouse, but you paid for the build quality and reliability. They were designed to be bashed around from meeting to meeting to meeting for years while running MS Office. As a student I had the best laptop of my life in the form of a Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO from 2004. It had shit battery life but used desktop-class parts and was built really well.

The cloud is a bad idea all round.

Today's tech is insubstantial throwaway shit. Do you think people in the 2050s will be collecting "classic" Bluetooth speakers and smartphones the way they collect 1970s hi-fi gear and 1980s retro computers nowadays? I don't think they will.

 

[Never Scored]

Software as a service is acceptable for business software where you are paying for support because the cost of a monthly subscription is less than the lost revenue if it shits its pants and you can't fix it quickly. But for normies it really isn't. I believe you can't get anything by Autodesk that isn't on a fucking subscription these days and Autodesk are particularly aggressive at policing their licences.

As someone who works for a firm that makes extensive use Autodesk software, I assure you we would simply buy Autodesk products and just upgrade every 3-4 years if we could. This is what we did for years if not decades. Their system now is a complete scam.

 

[AnOminous]

I hate how you cant even get new batteries from the OEM most of the time and have to go with other brands which are most likely shit.

This sucks but in my experience the replacement batteries are actually better. The one time I had someone else do it they explained why their batteries were better with some rigmarole I don't remember but the replacement lasted a couple years longer than the original even though I overclocked it subsequently (or technically just removed the software cap that reduces its speed below what it is rated to run at).

Software as a service is acceptable for business software where you are paying for support because the cost of a monthly subscription is less than the lost revenue if it shits its pants and you can't fix it quickly. But for normies it really isn't.

If you have an actual support contract you have someone to sue if they renege on it, but consumer level shit? They can just cancel it entirely leaving you high and dry with more or less no recourse except possibly arbitration which is usually going to be in some shithole you don't have the money to fight it. Usually the contract even explicitly says so.

The cloud is a bad idea all round.

This. I generally won't even trust it for vidya game saves. It sucks.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

If you have an actual support contract you have someone to sue if they renege on it

Unless they go bankrupt. But with software as a service if the publisher falls over you don't got your software any more. At least with a big upfront payment in exchange for support you can still use the software afterwards.

You will own nothing, and you will be happy. Right?

 

[AmpleApricots]

I miss hardware looking beefy like this:


There's something about a whole bunch of discrete THT components that's somehow sexy. I actually like soldering SMD more and find it quicker to do but yeah. Hardware these days just doesn't look like this anymore. You have some piddly ASIC or FPGA somewhere and it does everything including giving you a handy while brewing you coffee but eh. It just doesn't have the same feel about it. Maybe it's just my age. This card is some old piece of tech I took home from one of my first working places ever. First time I held it I was still a young man. I have shelves of that stuff I browse through every few years to go onto some sort of trip of the past and marvel at memories and every time I think about selling some I just cannot do it. It's too fun to look at.

Spoiler: Description of the hardware

This particular thing is a so called "Bridgeboard". It calls itself an "Emulator" but actually contains a full 286 on this board. (Half of it including the 286s CPU [second sourced by German Siemens] and the Chipset is under the "Sandwich board" I didn't pull out, sorry for that but I remember it being notoriously hard to plug back in without bending stuff, you can probably find pics online if you're interested) The Amiga 2000 used to have an Inactive ISA Backplate that took up half of that gargantuan case. You'd plug one of these babies in and could run a full-featured PC inside your Amiga, and could even use ISA cards like graphics- and sound cards and such with it. This was done to "Bridge" so to speak the worlds of AmigaOS and DOS, for increased compatibility. Old 68k Macs had similar stuff. I think you needed a dedicated harddrive for the PC part or could optionally use sort of Harddisk image from the Amiga side. I don't fully remember. We used these for hardware for very early CAD CNC machines that'd only run with DOS stuff. I remember the Software for the Amiga side to initialize the PC side being notoriously glitchy and shitty, you used to leave the computer running when you finally got it to work. I figured some of you would get a kick out of it.