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

[The Real SVP]

I miss all pre-cd tech. CDs are so flimsy and easily damaged, and the repair gadgets never can fully restore them. VHS, cassette tapes, floppy discs, video game cartridges, all sturdy and reliable technology.
A great compromise was the original PSP discs, which had badass little cases around a mini cd.
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Nowadays tech just feels so fucking flimsy, a lot of it breaks with the slightest mishandling. I remember dropping my SNES down a flight of stairs onto concrete and it wasn't even phased. Do that with a modern console and it's probably fucking dead.

I wonder why optical disk in caddies, with a ROM chip in the caddie did not become the norm for gaming consoles, when they switched to optical media. They could have had the best of both worlds: a durable medium with DRM and fast access on the chip and lots of inexpensive storage on the disk.

 

[Never Scored]

The other day my sister pulled out some old walkie-talkies that my folks found in an old junk box. Back in the olden days before cell phones, that was how my parents would communicate across the road while they drove different cars.

I began to realize that walkie-talkies are a lot more practical to use than cell phones in certain situations, such as two people driving somewhere in different vehicles. Walkie-talkies don't rely on cell towers or Internet connection for example, so as long as you're in range with the other person you don't have to worry about the call dropping out. Plus you don't have to fiddle around with the walkie-talkie if you need to call back the other person; usually with a cell phone you have to navigate a couple of different screens just to call the person back, and voice control can be fiddly to use, especially if the software has a hard time understanding you. Meanwhile with walkie-talkies, as long as you're on the same frequency you don't have to worry about wasting time with the process of calling the other person; just press a button and bam you're talking again.

Granted, walkie-talkies have their limits, but when it comes to short-distance communications I think they can more useful.

My dad worked in construction for years, and they used to have these CB radios(Which we always called a walkie talkie) on the dashes of their pickups with these big ass antennas on the truck and they worked all over town. They were in use right up until around 2000 when cell phone reception got good enough in these parts to reliably replace them. There was cell service here before that point but it would cut out if you went under a bridge or down in a valley or whatever. Of course the downside was anyone could tune into the channel you were using and hear what you were saying.

 

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My dad worked in construction for years, and they used to have these CB radios(Which we always called a walkie talkie) on the dashes of their pickups with these big ass antennas on the truck and they worked all over town. They were in use right up until around 2000 when cell phone reception got good enough in these parts to reliably replace them. There was cell service here before that point but it would cut out if you went under a bridge or down in a valley or whatever. Of course the downside was anyone could tune into the channel you were using and hear what you were saying.

Often these commercial VHF/UHF systems would be augmented by repeaters where the LOS transmission wasn't good enough. I believe regulators in many countries are now reclaiming some of that space on the spectrum for new digital wireless services. Sad

 

[Never Scored]

Can you imagine a government just taking a swath of the spectrum and turning it over to regular people to use in this day and age? No that shit would be auctioned off to big tech. It's amazing the contempt regulators have for the average person now as opposed to 50 years ago.

 

[Ahriman]

I haven't used a Blu-ray disc because I am a PC fag who downloads all his shit, but I was under the impression that they are more resilient to scratches, certainly a lot more than the old 700Mb CD-Rs I used to use back in the day. Is there any truth to that?

A world where solid plastic cases have ensured the survival of millions of VHS tapes for decades while a single good scratch can make a DVD unwatchable garbage.
Imagine DVDs in cases similar to those little PSP game cases. They'd be fucking glorious because you'd have the superior tech mixed with the superior protective design.

Agreed.

The best of both worlds, for sure.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I haven't used a Blu-ray disc because I am a PC fag who downloads all his shit, but I was under the impression that they are more resilient to scratches, certainly a lot more than the old 700Mb CD-Rs I used to use back in the day. Is there any truth to that?

Agreed.

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The best of both worlds, for sure.

The PD, Phase Disk, 650MB of re-writeable storage permanently trapped in a shell since 1995. It was actually really good for the time and it was sold in the west so it's not just some weird Japan thing.

Another dead and grayt format was DCC(Digital compact cassette).

Small player, digital cassette, a fuckton cheaper than DAT. Plug a microphone in the portable player and it was suddenly a very affordable way of digitally recording interviews in the 90's. Can also play regular tapes.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

I already miss the Kinect and the shovelware Wiimote games, alot of that shit was just hilarious. The kinect games aimed at really little kids you could talk anybody into playing and use that as a gateway to real gaming. There was one called Kinect Party that was just interactive screen savers, a high friend freaked out at the lava one.

After an hour of Dance Central I talked this girl into trying rocket league, which lasted 6 whole minutes until she remembered I had Peggle. I tried.

 

[Gamepad]

I haven't used a Blu-ray disc because I am a PC fag who downloads all his shit, but I was under the impression that they are more resilient to scratches, certainly a lot more than the old 700Mb CD-Rs I used to use back in the day. Is there any truth to that?

Agreed.

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The best of both worlds, for sure.

Considering MD is a magneto-optical medium, it's far more resilient than both CD and DVD, at the very least it's not prone to rot like them.

As for BD, the early generation was actually less resilient since the data layer was closer to the surface (It wasn't in the center like DVD). Hence why they were in caddies originally, and it's only after developing a protective coating that they started showing up as bare discs.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Even domestic brands are getting in on this with non-serviceable transmissions. What does this mean? Basically the manual tells you that the entire transmission is "sealed", and should last throughout the lifetime of the car. How long is that lifetime? 90k? 150k? fuck knows! You can't even run a dipstick into the tranny to check the fluid for levels and discoloration, which will give you important information that it will grenade soon.

And some of those modern-day car transmissions won't even make it part way to even 90k these days. Nissan's CVTs (continuously variable transmission), and Ford's infamous PowerShift Dual-Clutch Transmission, come to mind.

Speaking of CVTs, I don't like how they're becoming more and more commonplace with cars these days, because of how much cheaper it is for manufacturers to make one, compared to geared transmissions. Most of the Japanese automakers use them now, with Mazda thankfully not jumping on the CVT train yet (at least for their cars that they sell in the US), GM is guilty of using them as well, and even the Koreans are starting to put CVTs in their cars. And the stepped CVTs, where the transmission "fakes" gearshifts to make it feel like a regular automatic transmission, are even more pointless, as it defeats the whole purpose of having a CVT in the first place, to keep the engine at a certain RPM while accelerating.

And having a CVT in a luxury car (Lexus and Infiniti are guilty of this) is just a complete facepalm in terms of design.

 

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the stepped CVTs, where the transmission "fakes" gearshifts to make it feel like a regular automatic transmission, are even more pointless, as it defeats the whole purpose of having a CVT in the first place, to keep the engine at a certain RPM while accelerating.

I kind of understand why the car manufacturers do this- it probably increases wear and tear to ensure that the CVT doesn't last beyond the first couple owners- but do they at least offer actual rational modes like 'max economy' or 'max torque' that you can switch to?

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

I kind of understand why the car manufacturers do this- it probably increases wear and tear to ensure that the CVT doesn't last beyond the first couple owners- but do they at least offer actual rational modes like 'max economy' or 'max torque' that you can switch to?

Oh its also most likely because "Hey why isn't my car shifting" and complaints about the car not shifting would be a major issue for the car model.

People are stupid remember, and things like this in the past have happened.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I haven't used a Blu-ray disc because I am a PC fag who downloads all his shit, but I was under the impression that they are more resilient to scratches

Not at all, back in the day when I used to rent discs from Netflix most of the time DVDs would work but almost every single Blu Ray disc I got was busted.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Not at all, back in the day when I used to rent discs from Netflix most of the time DVDs would work but almost every single Blu Rau disc I got was busted.

Honestly, the fragility of the early Blu-Ray discs in the late 2000's is probably why it never fully supplanted DVD in the same way VHS was replaced and why DVD's still around despite the existence of Blu-Ray and streaming (though part of that also has to do with TV shows and older titles not transferring as well to Blu-Ray and streaming becoming fucked by copyright complications and corporate consolidation to become Cable 2,0)

 

[Thiletonomics]

I kind of understand why the car manufacturers do this- it probably increases wear and tear to ensure that the CVT doesn't last beyond the first couple owners- but do they at least offer actual rational modes like 'max economy' or 'max torque' that you can switch to?

Not to mention that the transmission fluid changes for CVTs have a hefty price as well, i.e. with Nissan's CVTs.

 

[AmpleApricots]

If I had to pick a place to store very sensitive data for decades (with the rule that the storage space is inside a comfortable climate and never encounters extreme temperatures or excessive moisture) I'd pick tape. (honestly, any tape.) Failing that, I'd pick 5,25" 360 kb floppies. Both I'd pick over any optical medium or flash any day. I have an obscene amount of these floppies that have been written to a few times in the 80s and remained with their data intact to almost this very day. When people see failures in them it's usually sub-optimal storage conditions and drives that are actually but unoticeably (on a software level) not working correctly who are to blame.

Especially optical media IMO has been always complete garbage. Touchy storage mediums who self destruct and touchy drives which do the same by design and that are also impossible to maintain properly. If you don't give me government-agency budget give me consumer-grade old-school magnetic any time of the day.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Failing that, I'd pick 5,25" 360 kb floppies.

Why not just go back to cuneiform tablets at that point? We've got some real high-res media now, it's not your Grandpa Nebuchadnezzar's baked clay!

 

[Dante Alighieri]

I miss having an iPod Nano and Classic. You know, the one with the wheel controls. There was something nice about having a dedicated music device, and having my entire library available to me.

 

[AnOminous]

older computers would legit have "drop computer 2 to 3 feet" (e.g. Mac III, hard drives from the 90s, other older computers) instructions (well maybe not the HDD but it fixed a common issue).

I actually miss the sound old hard drives made, those giant Micropolis and so on drives where they'd make a sound like a helicopter revving up when you turned them on. They were like 20 MB and weighed as much in pounds. And they'd have handwritten stickers on them so you could enter the bad sectors into the FAT on the command line. At the time, nearly all hard drives had bad sectors straight from the factory.

The best of both worlds, for sure.

I miss these. My favorites, though, were the flopticals the NeXT had. I loved those machines.

 

[heyitsmike]

Honestly, the fragility of the early Blu-Ray discs in the late 2000's is probably why it never fully supplanted DVD in the same way VHS was replaced and why DVD's still around despite the existence of Blu-Ray and streaming

I think it's primarily that most people could see a significant difference between VHS and DVD, but not so much between DVD and Blu-ray.

What percentage of people even change their television's default picture settings? Maybe 5%? The rest are rolling with color temperature way too blue, every picture "enhancement" turned on, watching the SD versions of channels available in HD and using the internal speakers.

Most people simply cannot tell a difference between an upscaled 720x480 DVD on a 1080p television and a 1920x1080 Blu-ray playing at native resolution.

 

[stares at error messages]

Spoiler: Image

Someone got me a set black air bod knock offs as a gift. I've never been a fan of ear buds. They always end up making my ears feel sore from the sound vibrations. Ear buds also tend to get really unhygienic with people sharing them around in different peoples' ears. I wanted to be optimistic and give these things try. I open them up and everything... They don't fit in my ears. The dubs are larger than the space between the trangus and concha where they are supposed to fit. As far as I can tell they make very good ear wax shovels. There blue-tooth too, so I'm not really looking forward to the concept of having Li-ion batteries in my ears. (Li-ion are the exploding kind)

I wish I could be more positive about this stuff, but there is too much positivity already. It's like with a lot of these gadgets there is no adult in the room who can think about what the end product will be like and cancel the idea before the company is over invested in making garbage. Electronics have become a complete fashion, no different form leisure suits or women's every-day play suits form the 1970s. I'm really burnt on it all. Maybe I'm globalizing, but even video game graphics aren't that impressive anymore. Technology has stagnated and we just keep getting sold repackaged versions of the same stuff.

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I miss being able to record TV to VHS. I guess https://youtube-dl.org/ is like that now. But it was nice having a phyisical collection of movies you had saved. Now it's all just some byte in some hard drive somewhere; doesn't feel the same.