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

[Night Terror]

If there's any single thing that should be nuked from orbit, it's the "Internet of Things," or as I prefer to call it, the "Internet of Dumb Shit."

mere words cannot express just how much i fucking hate the internet of things. even the term itself makes me want to rip my hair out.

 

[Blamo]

It's not paranoid, it's capitalist genius. Why rely on Taiwan shipping a load of parts to Foxconn to make a load of Xboxes to then ship to the west to buy and consooom, when you can just make a shed-load of servers made for a fraction of the cost, sell hardware to 'receive/decode' the stream via TV sticks and sell all the media through subscription. 'They' Can sell it as Green and Environmentally responsible. This is happening right now.

Imagine the Apple fags. Iphone 1G (first generation Green) has the fewest components yet! Everything is streamed via 5G and Wifi. It will cost £1500 per phone, but hey, don't you want to be Green? Save the planet! Buy and Iphone 5G(reen).

As for stopping the production of your own media, Gifs have been under fire for years for breaking copyright infringement. It's only a matter of time before creating a NFT-owned Gif is copyright infringement. Guitar tabs were all but nuked from the internet because the Music Industry decided to cry that Tabs were becoming too close to the actual song, which was a load of shit, and places like UltimateGuitar.com, stopped allowing you to view or download tabs for many years.

Streaming on the surface is already crazy, you re-download the same thing over and over again, and you don't even get to own the licensed copy on your computer. Imagine if all of the Amazon's book are that way because people didn't buy paper books anymore. They will just change books and nobody will know what was changed. lol

This is a pressing issue, that should be addressed now (it would have been 20+ years ago) before it's too late. Call me autistic, but if everything gets locked down, that's the end of the Internet as we know it, and possibly human culture as well. As far as I can tell, the powers-that-be have none of our interests even as a consideration.

 

[AnOminous]

Actually from my experience people just buy junk because it's cheap and don't even think about it.

There's also the fact most of this crap runs on insecure chinkware and with some objects, there are millions of these things that are easily hijacked for DDoS and other nefarious activities, with no manufacturer able to be found to pay for the shit their garbage products spewed out all over the Internet.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Streaming on the surface is already crazy, you re-download the same thing over and over again, and you don't even get to own the licensed copy on your computer. Imagine if all of the Amazon's book are that way because people didn't buy paper books anymore. They will just change books and nobody will know what was changed. lol

This is a pressing issue, that should be addressed now (it would have been 20+ years ago) before it's too late. Call me autistic, but if everything gets locked down, that's the end of the Internet as we know it, and possibly human culture as well. As far as I can tell, the powers-that-be have none of our interests even as a consideration.

This is also why I prefer paper books, music on physical formats, and locally stored digital media for films and TV.

Streaming is the absolute wet dream of the RIAA and other pondlife. They are still butthurt that they wrote off the cassette tape as just a dictation machine with ideas above its station, and when stereo, CrO2 formulations, and manufacturers like Revox and Tandberg and Nakamichi got involved at the enthusiast end and things like the Sony Walkman at the normie end they were pissed. All of a sudden anyone with an off the shelf device could make pretty damn good copies of vinyl records and (later) CDs that were only marginally lower fidelity than the original recordings, as many times as they could buy blank tapes, and worse, share them with others. The only deficiency it had was tape to tape copies deteriorated with each generation noticeably.

This is why when the DCC, Digital Audio Tape, and Minidisc came out, they got out the lawyers and lobbyists and set to nobble it. The result was that the Minidisc, a format that had all the advantages of the cassette tape in terms of shareability and copyability and no loss of fidelity between copies, was strangled at birth in North America.

First-gen file sharing like Napster was sued out of existence. But they got smart. They bought the second generations of file sharing. Rebranded as "streaming services" they now can regulate what you listen to or watch, when you listen to or watch it, make you pay for every play, and pull things that are inconvenient or upset powerful interest groups.

What they forget, though, is another one of the reasons why the cassette tape was so popular esp. in the Soviet bloc and the Third World where media was tightly controlled by the state. It allowed for huge distribution of forbidden recordings by hand by almost anyone. I have read some people who blame the cassette tape for Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution in Iran because while he was forbidden from public speaking in the 1970s his followers would tape his sermons and speeches and distribute them with twin decks amongst each other. In the modern era it is a format that is cheap (there are still people making passable Type 1 blanks such as the Maxell UR and nostalgia-market manufacturers such as Recording The Masters who literally bought BASF's old tape factory and moved it to France, and occasionally enthusiast companies like Tapeline or Retro Style Media come across pancake of Type 2 and Type 4 and will custom load it for you) and by dint of being analog is impossible to DRM. It's also endlessly copiable and you can circumvent its natural deterioration between generations by sticking your deck's output into the mic input of a PC, recording it in with Audacity, then play the resulting audio file into the aux input of a deck set to record. And even if it becomes normal for Big Tech to audit your cloud storage or even local storage every so often for wrongthink or forbidden material on the quiet, you've got your airgapped physical media that is impossible to DRM.

I dunno, it's late and I'm feeling autismal, but in the superior future of corporate feudalism, maybe the cassette tape is the new samizdat.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I dunno, it's late and I'm feeling autismal, but in the superior future of corporate feudalism, maybe the cassette tape is the new samizdat.

Why not the good old CD-R? They're lossless, still produced by the zillions, and can be used for data too. Plus, they're read-only, so even if Big Tech slipstreams some renegade drivers into your system they can't destroy your data.
These days even USB sticks are practically disposable, for that matter. Not read-only, but they have the advantage of not requiring any contraband hardware. No one's going to ask "What are you doing with that USB port, Citizen?"

 

[Enig]

Why not the good old CD-R? They're lossless, still produced by the zillions, and can be used for data too. Plus, they're read-only, so even if Big Tech slipstreams some renegade drivers into your system they can't destroy your data.
These days even USB sticks are practically disposable, for that matter. Not read-only, but they have the advantage of not requiring any contraband hardware. No one's going to ask "What are you doing with that USB port, Citizen?"

The CD-R is known for a far less reliable lifespan than tape especially today where manufacturing quality has gone way down, and USB drives are still new enough that no one is completely sure how long they can last between uses/power cycles. Meanwhile I have CCs old enough they still mention how mono tapes can be played in stereo decks and as long as it's a dual motor player they play perfectly even long after the pressure sponge disintegrated. There's a reason CD-Rs are being shoved to a dark corner below the SSDs while you can still find packs of three brown tapes at walmart next to the bluetooth speakers.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

The CD-R is known for a far less reliable lifespan than tape especially today where manufacturing quality has gone way down, and USB drives are still new enough that no one is completely sure how long they can last between uses/power cycles. Meanwhile I have CCs old enough they still mention how mono tapes can be played in stereo decks and as long as it's a dual motor player they play perfectly even long after the pressure sponge disintegrated. There's a reason CD-Rs are being shoved to a dark corner below the SSDs while you can still find packs of three brown tapes at walmart next to the bluetooth speakers.

Yep. Early CD-Rs suffered from disc rot because the dye in them (writeable optical media simulates the pits and lands of a pressed pre-recorded disc by changing the reflectivity of a chemical dye with a laser on high power then reads it back with a low power laser) goes wonky after a decade or so. More recent phthalocyanine and azo dyes don't have that problem so far as we know about, but few are old enough to have that problem. But even if they are kept data side up in direct sunlight they'll start to degrade after a number of weeks.

Given that most CD-Rs and other optical media are now sold on spindles they're less likely to be stored properly.

USB pen drives, if you're willing to pay for reasonable quality ones, are probably likely to last.

Word of advice though. Those bagged Walmart tapes? No. Just no. You're better off going to someone like Tapeline or Retro Style Media and getting a custom load - I believe Tapeline's tape is Maxell ferric of some sort. They occasionally find chrome or metal pancake laying around (their custom loaded metals I believe are the tape used in the Maxell METAL-CD because they were made in Telford, UK). I believe that there is still proper quality pancake being made. RTM for one (theirs is basically the old BASF Ferro Extra tape because they moved BASF's entire plant, I heard) and also Maxell are still making the UR, and also there's ATR Magnetics as well.

 

[Trapitalism]

You need 5G for the Internet of things, smart cities and self driving cars. It can also more accurately triangulate you. The amount of data that will be moving around, and the latency will be crucial considering self driving cars etc. will constantly talk to not only each other but the street etc as well.

TL;DR 5G is only necessary in a cyberpunk dystopia.

 

[Blamo]

TL;DR 5G is only necessary in a cyberpunk dystopia.

Well, the whole having only mobile phones and no home phones is pretty much help people to be always on the move and never settle down. People don't really have anything that's not on a centralized server somewhere else.

As the meme says, we get all the downsides of said dystopia and none of the good parts. Instead of cool guys and femma fatales fighting the megacorps, we have androgynous sludge bullying the people and enforcing the megacorps' will without anybody doing anything against them.

 

[Gamepad]

I have to say that using non-optical media (and therefore, avoiding all the problems with scratched discs and loading times) is what convinced me to buy the Switch, the first new non-portable-only console I have had since the N64.

Eh, loading times aren't exactly amazing.

Gone are the days of the cartridge being part of the console's memory map, and said carts are now big enough that the data being moved around is non-trivial.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Well, the whole having only mobile phones and no home phones is pretty much help people to be always on the move and never settle down. People don't really have anything that's not on a centralized server somewhere else.

As the meme says, we get all the downsides of said dystopia and none of the good parts. Instead of cool guys and femma fatales fighting the megacorps, we have androgynous sludge bullying the people and enforcing the megacorps' will without anybody doing anything against them.

Also let's be honest. When Gibson, Dick, Pondsmith, et al were codifying the cyberpunk aesthetic, they never expected that the omnipotent megacorp would be a fucking friending network or a search engine, did they. They thought they'd be in weapons, robotics, or heavy industry.

 

[Blamo]

Also let's be honest. When Gibson, Dick, Pondsmith, et al were codifying the cyberpunk aesthetic, they never expected that the omnipotent megacorp would be a fucking friending network or a search engine, did they. They thought they'd be in weapons, robotics, or heavy industry.

Yeah, now even robots are gay and friendly looking iplastic.

 

[AnOminous]

What's FLAC, chopped liver?

 

[Ginger Piglet]

What's FLAC, chopped liver?

Free Lossless Audio Codec. Basically, digital audio that sounds uncompressed like God intended, not that tinny mess that is 128 kbps MP3 that all the streaming services like.

 

[AnOminous]

Free Lossless Audio Codec. Basically, digital audio that sounds uncompressed like God intended, not that tinny mess that is 128 kbps MP3 that all the streaming services like.

That was kind of my point. Also another primitive digital method was saving digital-to-analog on VHS or Beta tapes using PCM. A problem with that is if you did it and no longer have the equipment to do it it can be a real bitch to restore, and VHS tapes have a bad habit of deteriorating in storage.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Some of the best and worst programmers I've ever known were pajeets. The best would obsessively comment their code, make it coherent, one of them I knew even wrote a fairly well known theory of programming type book.

The worst aren't necessarily even bad coders, but they often deliberately obfuscate their code so only they can possibly understand it and thereby guarantee their continued employment, or they're just hacks churning out utter shit in mass volume like they're getting paid by the line, which some of them are, I think. The latter category has a lot of the H-1B types we need to stop importing.

Can confirm from my IT days. One of my projects had a native of India who was so good at what he did he was probably second only to the owner in terms of his skill and knowledge.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who care only about getting their paychecks and code in a minimally tolerable fashion knowing that nobody else would ever make sense of their spaghetti code should they leave or be replaced/dismissed.

H1-Bs have been a hot issue for well over 20 years now. It was one thing when demand for IT pros exceeded the number of graduates looking to work in the field. Between recession(s) an the pandemic, companies should be looking to hire domestically and not rely on imported labor, but it's easier to pay foreign workers lower wages (which seem lucrative when compared to the average pay in their home countries) and require job candidates to relocate on a whim -- something easier to do for someone coming into the country than it is for someone who already lives here in a different location.

Internet of Things? Great, so someone can steal your identity by compromising the fridge or the toaster. Fuck off with that.

If that's not scary enough, the local news some years back had a story where the automotive news guy went to a test track where someone showed him how easy it was to hack into a vehicle's computer system with a laptop and the right hacking tools/software. To prove they got in, they activated the vehicle's brakes without the driver stepping down on the pedal. The idea that everything should have internet connectivity should also be tempered by the idea that insecure devices are a way for hackers to cause havoc, steal one's identity, etc. Sadly, nobody cares about privacy concerns until after a data breach. At that point, the horse has already left the barn and it's too late for those already victimized.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

If that's not scary enough, the local news some years back had a story where the automotive news guy went to a test track where someone showed him how easy it was to hack into a vehicle's computer system with a laptop and the right hacking tools/software. To prove they got in, they activated the vehicle's brakes without the driver stepping down on the pedal. The idea that everything should have internet connectivity should also be tempered by the idea that insecure devices are a way for hackers to cause havoc, steal one's identity, etc. Sadly, nobody cares about privvacy concerns until after a data breach. At that point, the horse has already left the barn and it's too late for those already victimized.

Oh joy. So your expensive Tesla Model S can be immobilised by order of the state by way of a backdoor (which will also be used no doubt by criminals to invent the cyber carjacking).

Stop the planet, I want off.

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

Oh joy. So your expensive Tesla Model S can be immobilised by order of the state by way of a backdoor (which will also be used no doubt by criminals to invent the cyber carjacking).

Stop the planet, I want off.

Why do you think EVs are being pushed so hard? They can shut off everyone's cars during the next plandemic and force you to stay home.

 

[Flavius Claudius Julianus]

iPod classic. Fuck, just something without a touch screen that has no internet capability to distract me with.

Up until last year I used a cheap, super basic mp3/video player that I bought off Amazon like 10 years ago. Can't remember the brand off the top of my head, but it was some small independent company that appeared to be a one man show sort of deal.

Anyway, this thing was the size of a pack of a gum, was indestructible, and had such a simple interface that I had zero complaints about it whatsoever. Literally cost me something like 20 USD. I later bought one for my then girlfriend like 3 years later, and was similarly pleased with the updated product.

Thread tax: I fucking hate how modern phones have so much fucking bloat on them. I bought an older Samsung last year with 32gb storage on it. Despite routinely emptying out my phone of media, most of the space is taken up by app bloat and other meaningless bullshit. Even when disabling and clearing the data of unused apps, they continue to use space and size. Infuriating.

Edit: this is the one, AGPTEK. They've climbed in price a little and got a little fancier, but you can still grab them from eBay for less than 25 USB.

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

It was one thing when demand for IT pros exceeded the number of graduates looking to work in the field.

Only there really hasn't been a lack of IT Pros, it has been a lack of companies 1) wanting to train Americans (We need 5 years professional experience, an advanced degree) and 2) Not wanting to pay American wages (5+ Years experience, advanced degree, entry level or less pay).
Why hire an American who expect to be able to pay off thier student loans, have a family, and a life, when you can hire pajeet who is willing to do the needful for less then peanuts and live with 5+ others in a 1 bedroom apartment.