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

[ToroidalBoat]

(the tech the weather channel used to use for local forecasts)

Remember the Forecast Channel on the Wii?

I miss online Wii channels, like Everybody Votes, the weather, the non-Current Year news channel...

Aside from the not-exactly-good idea to use a remote to control stuff, the Wii isn't too bad a console.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

With how a lot of people drive that is a good thing,

Yeah, the driver was always the weakest link in a flying car hypothetical future. Navigating in three dimensions is intrinsically harder than navigating in two. Most people are not qualified to be pilots. Hell, there are way too many people who aren't even technically qualified to drive but do anyway, which is a large part of why car accidents kill more people in the US every year than we lost in the entire Vietnam war. But because driving is so utterly necessary to function in society, you're crippled if you can't drive, which is why officials are so reluctant to yank anyone's license no matter how bad they are.

Of course, there are other safety considerations too. You are more likely to survive a mechanical malfunction or running out of fuel if you are already out of the ground. Imagine a Fifth Element-style flying car scenario with a heavy traffic jam that keeps you in place for long periods of time, but you can't shut off your engine to save fuel because you'll fall out of the sky. Eventually you run out of fuel and fall out of the sky anyway, plummeting through a dozen lanes of traffic on the way down before hitting the ground below at high speed. Now combine this with the dumbasses mentioned above; people who ignore their car's 'check engine' light until it dies, people who drive drunk, senile old people. It would be catastrophic.

 

[Michael Jacks0n]

Firefox updated and it's like Chrome now, the "view page info" on right click is gone. It was really useful to download images and videos from sites that really didn't want you to be able do that, like Instagram(hoping to get a photograph in a nice resolution but jokes on me) and other places that hijacked the right-click in some way.

I noticed that too, because a girl I know IRL shares some lewd stuff on her IG that I often extract for my private spank bank, and I had to do workarounds to get them.

Here's a site I found which can extract peoples Instagram videos/pics directly:

Instagram Video Downloader | Fast, Free, Anonymous

🚀Save IGTV, download IG profiles and videos in a heartbeat. Premium quality, no registration – try now.

ingramer.com

 

[AnOminous]

I'm young enough to recall buying these phone tape decks and you'd plug in your phone and have it play through the speakers.

I actually liked these. They were just a neat kludge around incompatible tech.

I'm old enough to remember waiting for the song to come on the radio and recording it with a separate tape recorder. We won't even talk about my parents huge record collection or my grandparents 8 track collections

I remember when it was a thing to take those Certron cassettes you bought by the dozen and get a recorder that could record at half speed so you could double the storage. And then you could use your library to make mixtapes to give to girls or whatever.

Now combine this with the dumbasses mentioned above; people who ignore their car's 'check engine' light until it dies, people who drive drunk, senile old people. It would be catastrophic.

That's why you'd really need autopilots that could talk to each other and cars that would refuse to fly if in unsafe conditions. You'd probably still have more of these things falling out of the sky than the number of cars we have crash, and they'd cause more damage when they landed. Usually if your car fails, it just stops moving, no real danger unless it's on train tracks or some shit.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

those Certron cassettes you bought by the dozen and get a recorder that could record at half speed

And it would sound like arse because those bag of three tapes are truly shite.

I mean, come on, a TDK D or Maxell UR was not that much more expensive and sounded way better.

 

[Pissmaster]

A few pages ago y'all niggaz were talking about your first USB drives, and I actually found mine a few months ago:



Though I only had the orange 256mb one (lol smallest). Plugged it in, and it worked just fine, with the last files on there being from 2007. Remarkably fast, too. Somehow, the bigger ones never price dropped though:

And that's a shame, because I really liked that form factor. They're easy to grip and pull out of the thing, and you can spot at a glance which direction is the right way to plug it in.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

the "view page info" on right click is gone

Does Ctrl + I still work?

miss: how browsers gave one more options like disabling JS and viewing info to bypass BS messages

diss: how browsers are getting dumbed down and more corporate friendly

Plugged it in, and it worked just fine, with the last files on there being from 2007.

Flash memory is definitely more reliable than floppy disks.

Floppy disks may be nostalgia, but they are slow and the memory is low.

 

[Enig]

Flash memory is definitely more reliable than floppy disks.

Floppy disks may be nostalgia, but they are slow and the memory is low.

Sad part is floppies didn't have to be so small but IBM had to be cunts and hold 2.88MB hostage for muh PS/2 which just led to 1.44 stagnation until CDs and flash storage became affordable. We could've had a timeline where all of shareware Doom was on one floppy, think about how much of a bragging point that would've been.

 

[Kosher Dill]

which just led to 1.44 stagnation until CDs and flash storage became affordable.

You weren't into Zip drives, I take it.

 

[419]

I really can't overstate just how much of a fucking blight on society "gaming app" developers are.

Here's a recent example. The gaming peripheral company SteelSeries have recently made an... upgrade to their config software, SteelSeries Engine. And by that I mean they superseded it entirely with a bloated sore of a program with even more obnoxious EPiCZ GAMING BROO!!!!! branding calling it SteelSeries GG. If you happened to have updated to it - and I do mean "happened" since this thing immediately gets shoved in your face upon updating the existing Engine software without so much as a nod of approval from you - you'd be greeted with these lovely screens.



Right off the bat, begs you to register for a SteelSeries account. You don't need this. You don't want this. Nobody needs to fork over their fucking email just to change the colour of the fucking LED on a mouse or whatever. BUT WAIT, surely you'd want to do more than just configure some hardware, right? No, I wouldn't.



Brilliant, now I'm totally sold on making an account just to use a stupid video-sharing feature that I can use on my own with however many other gaming company solutions (nVidia Shadowplay et cetera) and save a database folder to the cloud instead of locally in like two clicks. It's okay though, even without an account I can still get the most of other features I never asked for, like a news tab to incessantly remind me that my headset fully endorses men who fuck each other in the ass. The Engine tab is also at least still there, but they also made that just as ugly and lazily-designed as every other modern UI turd today.



It did thankfully take them about a day or two to add the proper legacy installer for the existing Engine 3 and cut the silent auto-updating, but not before a fair share of complaints from other users on the SS subreddit.

Spoiler: leddit

Regardless, it would have been much nicer if they just didn't bother with this shit to begin with, let alone force it on users without so much as asking for any of it. Feels like every single one of these just has to provide some kind of wannabe Twitch clips bullshit just to appeal to ADHD-riddled teenagers among a whole host of other intrusions. And of course it has to be built on some kind of shitty gimped framework like Electron.

Fuck "gaming", fuck Twitch, fuck Electron and fuck niggers.

 

[AnOminous]

And it would sound like arse because those bag of three tapes are truly shite.

I mean, come on, a TDK D or Maxell UR was not that much more expensive and sounded way better.

Dude I was a kid. I sometimes got those but I was constantly recording shit from the radio. Every penny counted. Bigot.

 

[Pissmaster]

View attachment 2256438

u/GazSchlaughwe in 2006: "Wow, all of these games are so amazing, I can't wait to see what they'll have 15 years in the future! It's going to be incredible!"

u/GazSchlaughwe in 2021: "I spent nearly $100 on a mouse just to have it not even allow me to access my mouse profiles, macros, etc? I am forced to constantly reinstall SteelSeries Engine because it inevitably updates to GG and breaks compatibility"

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Does Ctrl + I still work?

Thank you! I expected that they would have gutted it completely and not just removed it from the right-click menu. That's a real Microsoft move.

 

[Kosher Dill]

There's also a Firefox config preference you can bring back: set browser.menu.showViewImageInfo to true.

 

[Blamo]

@419 That Steel Series software totally looks like Discord.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Dude I was a kid. I sometimes got those but I was constantly recording shit from the radio. Every penny counted. Bigot.

I never taped off the radio but the local library lent out vinyls and CDs. We had a dual deck mid tower hi-fi. I sailed the high seas for music a lot in my youth, at least until 2000 when we got our first PC with a CD-RW drive. The cost of CD-Rs at the time and the fact that older or cheaper CD players wouldn't necessarily play them discouraged that.

Our normal go to tape was the Philips FS because that was what was cheap round where I lived. Also being a Britbong both Woolworths and Boots sold own branded tapes. These were actually BASF and Maxell respectively in disguise, but for ultra cheap, even their chromes. There was a bloke on the market who always had a box of "damaged in transit" That's tapes as well. I never bought any because neither me nor my family had heard of That's tapes and so thought they were shitty knockoffs of something, mainly because none of us ever went to the posh hi-fi stores that they were sold in. Also they were probably stolen. Taiyo Yuden, the company behind That's, later went on to produce CD-RWs in the 1990s and early 2000s, usually branded I think Verbatim in the UK.

That's another thing I miss about cassette tapes. There were so many variations on the form factor. From the late 1970s / early 1980s black screwed shells with a little window, the 1980s variations and appearances like Maxell oval-window jobbies, funny shaped windowed BASFs, That's tapes with their triangular window, the unbelievably expensive TDK MA-R with the slab of metal for a body with clear plastic screwed to it and reversible write protect tabs, the even more unbelievably expensive Sony Metal Master made of ceramic tiles, and then the decline in the 1990s where everyone just did boring clear shells all the time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The cost of CD-Rs at the time and the fact that older or cheaper CD players wouldn't necessarily play them discouraged that.

My first encounter with Acer was buying tons of their 80min discs. Still works, I've been pulling scene releases of shitty games from them for a while.

 

[Herrinnert_U_zich_Jezus?]

I miss music from sea. from 1960 till 1991 various rust buckets broadcast from the North Sea i the medium wave band. Salt water was ideal for that, with a 50Kw transmitter they broadcast pretty far in to Europe. The only thing that came close in the USA was the MV Sarah where Radio New york International broadcasted from.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I miss music from sea. from 1960 till 1991 various rust buckets broadcast from the North Sea i the medium wave band. Salt water was ideal for that, with a 50Kw transmitter they broadcast pretty far in to Europe. The only thing that came close in the USA was the MV Sarah where Radio New york International broadcasted from.

Pirate radio stations, literally, because they were parked offshore in international waters.

 

[Blamo]

I miss music from sea. from 1960 till 1991 various rust buckets broadcast from the North Sea i the medium wave band. Salt water was ideal for that, with a 50Kw transmitter they broadcast pretty far in to Europe. The only thing that came close in the USA was the MV Sarah where Radio New york International broadcasted from.

Only Actual Boomers remember that.