The Stage we are at with Tech

A relative of mine was declared in a biography, and by the university of which he was Dean, as the Grandfather of Computer Science in Ireland, a lovely gentleman who was also a friend and a neighbour, and whom I got to know well. A great feminist too, he understood the future of technology essentially had to be implemented by more than one gender in order to progress. Our family followed his progress. I grew up to understand the impact he made on the growth of technology in Ireland and indeed the world.

As an aside, I believe that feminism, such as his, has accelerated the world to where it is presently, although it could be argued otherwise. Now, others may argue whether it is overall is a good or a bad thing, but humans were made for progression and we may argue til the vows one home but we can never ever at any point turn the clock back.

Yeah we can in certain regimes in the world, but….

Getting back to my opening statement, we have come a long way from the industrial revolution through punchcards (well I remember my unsuitability to being assessed for punching!) to now setting our tailor-made computers with all sorts of potential options and variables at our disposal. I’m far from being unintelligent, but my bamboozlement led me to step into a learning curve.

I will draw a parallel. In my childhood my father spent a long time under the bonnet of his car keeping it going, and due to his assiduousness it rarely let him , to service a down, and he put right many a neighbour’s car. He taught me, as a young female teenager to device a car. Lot of knowledge to thank him for.

Presently we spend a lot of time tweaking our home computers. Wasn’t totally easy when I started out in the 90’s, but my 70 something mother figured out in the blink of an eye how to add a hand scanner to my Dell Computer and without too much bother I tweaked the MS DOS. Now to set up likes of VirtualBox, gaming, anything at all really, you have to become a mini-expert. I’m on an accelerated learning path, which is really great for my ageing brain, but a pain in the @rse for anyone just wishing to merely use the technology for what it was destined.

Machine Learning, AI etc are going to make things far more user friendly, but we have a very long way to go in terms of development. However this may be almost exponential. How long does anyone imagine it will be before a basic home PC set-up will again resemble a MAC 2 on ease of use?

tails_naf

Computers are easier to use than ever, but the amout you can do with them is so much more, it may seem as if it is more complex. For example, if you wanted to get online in 1994, then it was a bit involved, installing a modem, drivers, dial up, and the browser wars. Now you buy a cheap smartphone for 30 quid and it works out of the box, the most complex bit is typing in a WiFi password, which you are guided to do step by step. So way easier to use for the same functionality, but.... And it's a big but... you have orders of magnitude more functionality you can use. For example you mention virtualbox, you coundnt use your computer to emulate another system at the same time in 1992, but now a single pc can run mac, Linux and Windows at the same time, it's complex, but more functionality also.

Black Swan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058218313/the-stage-we-are-at-with-tech

Old Microsoft Windows 10.

riclad

Computers are easy to use now , I remember when you had to edit text boot up files to load a pc game, it's pretty easy to install mint Linux on a pc. Mint Linux has menus similar to Windows 10.

In the future computers maybe willmore like phones in that you, ll install apps click a browser or click a icon to load any program

90 per cent of users just run Windows whatever is on the pc they have

In many country's more women go to college than men and they also study science and tech subjects it's pretty easy to service a car if you take an hour to read a book industry needs more workers the days when certain jobs were only for men are nearly gone

Laptops and pcs have more memory now. They only time I use dos prompt is if something go's wrong and Windows does not loaf

Gen z is having fewer children in a few years there will be a shortage of workers in most industry's whether they are male or female

browsers are getting more powerful many programs run in a browser

Linux is good to use if you want more security and privacy and don't want to be getting ads from Microsoft

I don't see the point on installing a mac os on a pc if it has Windows on it unless there's a mac OS program you need to use

Yes, computers are very easy to use when everything loads up fine. But very often things don’t go to plan. Eg, updates can affect Windows 10, there’s many things that can go wrong and you find yourself “going under the bonnet” simply to get your machine back on track. I don’t have to do that with my modern car which I get professionally serviced once a year.

It is the sheer versatility of computers that leads to these complexities. Yes, I don’t have to do anything to tweak my iPhone other than add apps, and I can Google any little issues that might arise and find a solution in moments.

PCs are different. Everybody working from home has to use them to access their work platform, and has to be able to tweak it when things go wrong. Some people I know just can’t get their head around this stuff, or at least don’t want to. When I was working in a small department branch in the public service, I became the default person who was called upon to solve any tech issues. Have to admit I kind of enjoyed being the go-to problem solver and I learned a lot, but found then that others assumed the role of “helplessness” so I ended up doing absolutely everything. All human nature, I suppose. Now that so many people are working remotely I’m really curious as to how these “helpless” are coping if there’s not likes of me right there on the spot. I know things can be fixed remotely now too, but some effort would have to be made by the remote worker. I suppose when people are forced to get to grips they cope! Human nature.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118178774#Comment_118178774

I don't see the point on installing a mac os on a pc if it has Windows on it unless there's a mac OS program you need to use

In my experience it's far more likely to see a mac running windows(and sometimes linux) because of a windows program requirement(usually accounts software). I've set up both types and running windows on a mac is significantly easier than going the other direction and certainly for non techie people. In general macs are easier for non techie people. Windows and Linux are far more aimed at techies, engineers, gamers and computer "nerds", people who have an advantage in the area out of the box. The number of computers you can run on a mac only site without an IT department/dedicated techie is higher than with a windows environment. They need less support. Over time you can see one having that advantage. Go back to the 90's and both platforms, now look to today. Which platform of way back when looks more like platforms today? Similar happened with smartphones. The android prototypes were ripping off Blackberry in look and feel, because they were seen as the better and "business" phone platform. Then the iphone came along.

My first time using a computer was inputting data for eventual digitalisation of my work environment. Some time in the 80s, can’t recall what terminal it was but it certainly wasn’t anything resembling a modern PC and the only specific thing I can recall about the then seemingly endless list of commands is typing PARK before attempting to switch the machine off. The boss was adamant that we memorise all the commands, and not refer to notes, when it initially made no sense. Reminded me back then of being forced to learn catechism aged 5. 😅

Then as the first IBM PCs became available, I was sent to learn how to set up databases as these were key to my work. No such thing as a GUI at that stage. I found this stuff overly dry, and an eyebrow was raised over a practice database I set up. My excuse was that I learn best through either necessity or humour. At this point I wasn’t seeing necessity, so the latter it had to be,

In 1991 I had my first encounter with a MAC 2 which had a hard and a floppy drive. It was located in an community arts administrative office, and myself and friend were afforded free use of it during evening hours when staff had gone home. We were writing a biography on behalf of a person who was seriously ill and might not live to see it published, so expediency was essential. My friend had briefly used a GUI and word processor before, but I hadn’t. He gave me a 10 minute lesson and then had to go off to work an evening shift in an office elsewhere in town. So I was left in an office building with this then very expensive bit of machinery I was terrified of damaging. But that first evening I managed to write half a chapter of a book which was later published by a major Irish publishing company. I had learned the fundamental concepts of Save, Save, Save, and Save As. All had to be saved onto multiple delicate floppies as we couldn’t take up space on that organisation’s previous hard drive.

A couple of years later I bought my first Dell. Macs were really expensive, easier to use, but I decided I would like to learn and use the versatility of what was then termed as an IBM format PC. It was run with Windows 3.1 on a platform of MS DOS, which I interfaces with a lot. Would not have been interfacing with the early Mac command system. They were fundamentally easy-to-use Office machines for word processing, in-house publishing, and maybe extended to a bit of spreadsheeting etc.

Early on, I installed a primitive hand scanner on my PC. I was terrified of damaging my expensive machine by fiddling with it, but my mother, then in her 70s, came wielding a screwdriver and said “let me get at that thing”. She had the port installed in a moment, and it took some tweaking at the command prompt to get the operating system to recognise the new addition. No such thing as plug and play.

The latter came with my next PC, which had a considerably better hard drive capacity and better RAM, although I started off with a machine somewhat above entry level as I didn’t want it to be obsolete too quickly. The second machine, iirc, came with a CD ROM drive and I could start playing some interesting games, view galleries of stuff etc.

One Christmas my mother decided I should upgrade to a machine that came with a CD ROM W drive. “Create your own photo albums”, she said, so that came as a lovely Christmas present! The machine was internet ready too, and the family phone went offline a lot of the time. She got the seniors phone discounts, so it was quite handy using the line. I had a very long phone line pinned alone the walls from the kitchen where the line came in, to the dining room where the PC was.

Broadband came next, so my mother could once again make and receive calls, although she was on the verge of getting her own mobile phone. She had given me one of the large early Eircell analogue ones at Christmas, and three months later for my birthday for a digital Nokia for me. Great mother to have! On parallel her sister had set up a pc out of disposed parts she put together, as she was on an extremely sparse budget. The parts had been found in a skip in Tallaght and she had used a library book to see how she might tackle it. She taught her husband to play computer games, and he benefitted from this up to his recent death near age 100. My aunt, in her 80s, had broadband in place before I did.

Since previous PC I just had a laptop, albeit it a then relatively powerful Asus Predator. It did as much as I needed for a while, as I was doing a lot of tasks on likes of my iPhone. However I wanted to do more and recently got a quote powerful gaming machine, to run Microsoft Flight Simulator and bring me virtually back to my days of flying small aircraft. I have set up VirtualBox for online courses etc and am learning coding, web development and more. I have innate design ability and an instinct for data processes, so web development is right up my alley, and I’m having great fun learning. Not everyone’s cup of tea, most just want to use machines to do access online services, send emails, maybe play the odd little game, do social media etc. PCs involve you with more by their very nature, and I’m always curious about how “non tech” people are finding them these days.

timmyntc

As we make things easier to use, productivity may increase initially - until the generation who grows up knowing only the easy interfaces matures and all of a sudden productivity plummets. We are already seeing this today with the smartphone generations.

At 3rd level, many students struggle to do the very basic computing stuff - ideas like folders and directory structures are alien to them because they've been reared on the idea of apps being all in one flat area. Scroll to the next page on your iPad for more apps, that kind of thing. We have made technology so easy to use, that there is no learning curve anymore - and many children are growing up clueless about how computers actually work.

It's like if you grow up learning only automatic transmission cars, you may well have no idea how the concept of gears in a car actually works - god forbid you ever set foot in a manual. Whereas those raised on manual, have a steeper learning curve but then are infinitely more suited to driving any kind of car. Automatic transmission makes it easier to drive by abstracting away some of the harder parts, but in doing so you remove a requirement for people to learn.

Same thing could be said for things like calculators, no longer need to learn much arithmetic (mental or otherwise) because calculators are such a crutch - however the benefit they add is massively outweighed by any loss in ability to do you 12 times tables in your head. But the concept is the same as with modern computing - make it easier to use, and the users knowledge in the field reduces.

Yes you are so right about people not understanding directory structures. Actually the managers in my workplace had not a clue about how to organise directories, and I used to be constantly tidying them up and finding files. This happened was non-stop. I used to be asked how I was able to do it, but as I said owning your own PC from an early stage forced my mind to understand directory structures. I do that to some tiny extent even on my iPhone with my well organised folders and with my email folders, where with some effort I’m usually able to find old emails.

The fact that my managers were so incredibly inept at this stuff puzzled me because their training was in organisation. I would find a letter to a cultural organisation in the middle of a cash management folder I had set up. Spent my time relocating files into relevant folders simply because the managers couldn’t not figure out how to save files in specified locations.

But there was a limit to my knowledge & training, which the managers could not appreciate. As far as they were concerned I was the tech person in the office.

One time the the tech department in HQ phoned asking for the local “Unix administrator”. HQ did not appreciate the staff structure or training at my local office level, and the manager put the call through to me, having told them I was the Unix admin… she had just imagined I must have a better understanding of it than I did. The person in HQ was absolutely furious that I did not match up to what she had expected and was spitting feathers at having to tell me what to do our side of things, and advised I remember all this stuff for future use. That was my Unix training, and again I became to go-to person to patch things up when they went wrong, as well as doing all my other work. But it was way better than being relatively idle. Many of the others better liked to chat to the members of the public who were customers in the premises.

Montage of Feck

Technology has become too available; so much the dictatorship of the proletariat it now a dictatorship of mediocrity propigated through a technology that was promised to free us.

Wanderer78

our problem truly isnt with the advancement of tech, but the fact, we dont truly know how to share the wealth that is created by these advancements, if we dont figure this out soon, it wont matter a jot how advanced we ll become, cause we ll probably blow ourselves up.....

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179890#Comment_118179890

There was a book on this very topic published a good long time back called “Information Anxiety”.

dxhound2005

Artificial intelligence will never be a match for human stupidity.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118180815#Comment_118180815

We actually need to have the capacity for stupidity to come up with good ideas.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179742#Comment_118179742

It's like if you grow up learning only automatic transmission cars, you may well have no idea how the concept of gears in a car actually works - god forbid you ever set foot in a manual. Whereas those raised on manual, have a steeper learning curve but then are infinitely more suited to driving any kind of car. Automatic transmission makes it easier to drive by abstracting away some of the harder parts, but in doing so you remove a requirement for people to learn.

I do hear you, but where do you draw that line? My dad learned to drive in the early 1930's on non synchromesh gearboxes(He married late, I'm not that old 😁) and because he taught me the basics I can double declutch with ease(though rarely do tbh) and heel and toe on the downshift(I do that every time). Neither of those are required with gearboxes built since the 1960's and some modern cars even automatically blip the throttle on downshifting. Am I better driver than someone who doesn't know any of that? Not a chance. I am a safe enough driver, but would be decidely mediocre if not a mobile roadblock around a racetrack. I also know how to adjust points in an ignition system, again because my dad taught me back in the day before electronic ignition systems took off(90's on really), can even adjust a carb. Again this doesn't make me any better at doing the car thing.

Just like with computers, the vast majority of people just want a thing, a car, to get them from A to B with the minimum of hassle and as safely as possible. They also want a computer/phone/whatever to just do what they want to do in the easiest way possible. Petrolheads and nerds in general want all the toys and options and boxes to tick. They like the complexity of choice(though rarely enough use it). Steve Jobs though a right wanker as a person by many accounts understood that and that's what made him a marketing genius. When Apple were developing their CD burning software the techie guys had come up with a very fancy interface and procedure with loads of cool and elegant options and presented it to him. His response was to ignore all that and told them he wanted just to drag and drop files onto the CD icon and click "Burn" and walked out. He was right. The Microsoft MP3 player was a far better bit of kit(and there were others too), the ipod was considered too simple and locked in by commentators at the time. Which won?

Like I say the average person doesn't want to learn, they want to do. Whatever that may be. They want a tool to do it in the easiest way possible. And that's progress. When you pick up a pencil to draw or write you don't have to make one, you don't have to know how to make one, you don't have to configure it beyond using a pencil sharpener, you just write. A few centuries ago you'd be running after a goose with a scissors and evil intent and then you'd have to prepare the feather to fashion it into a quill. Does that make a quill writer better? I think not. It also means the bits of grey matter you might have wasted on learning the art of quill making can be now used for something else.

As for the "generation" coming along that don't know about the minutiae. So what? Again they don't have to. Never mind that no matter what the generation we point to, the vast majority of people who ever lived don't really amount to much as far as innovation, art, science etc. They get born, they grow up, they become another cog and push out more cogs into the next generation. Rinse and repeat. Indeed the explosion of connectivity means that we'll get a higher percentage of people who are innovative coming to the fore. People that in another time might otherwise be eking a living from ploughed fields. We have democratised access and simplicity of that access is a huge part of that.

igCorcaigh

Interesting thread, but I have to comment on it to bookmark it. Boo!

I guess my point is that many difficulties people face using computer technology is about poor design choices in the makers of the software. Speaking as a software developer, ahem.

Technology has improved general safety to a huge extent. Take aircraft, which are largely controlled by computers now, and even basic light aircraft now employ some form of modern tech to make the flying process easier.

I learned to fly light aircraft when I was a teenager, which I sadly had to give up within a few years due to eyesight limitations. However I continually follow aviation matters and occasionally get to fly an aircraft under supervision. Back in early 80s when I was actively flying there was no autopilot, no fuel injection, no GPS, and the flight planning was done with a type of slide rule navigation “computer”. Didn’t even have a basic electronic calculator to hand. Mid flight I had to make calculations in a bouncing aircraft with pen & paper, I used an awkward paper map, although I did have access to a radio navaid in the form of VOR which intercepted radials from transmitters sporadically located where I could triangulate my position, my own brain doing the CPU work.

Commercial airliner pilots of older craft especially were working in parallel off technology not that very far advanced from what I had, except autopilots were available. Flight management systems were not quite at the stage they are at today, and pilots had to manually reference data to make take-off calculations etc. Air travel has become much safer as a result of tech data development.

By the same token modern pilots tend to be less skilled at hand flying, although the best pilots literally like to keep their hand in when workload permits. Some of the disasters which have happened in modern times are the result of an over-dependence on the onboard tech, with the Sukhoi Superjet tragedy at Moscow being an example where the pilots were unable to fly in direct law and crashed the site raft on landing. Subsequently the airline has implemented a program of having their pilots able to hand-fly and a second such event was avoided not that long ago.

The 737Max is an example of poor design (extending a very old platform for a much greater payload rather than starting a new design from scratch) and inadequate compensatory coding to react to an approaching stall, coupled with modern piloting practices which are so dependent on the on board computer systems.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118182576#Comment_118182576

I enjoy insights from people like you at the coal face of design.

Taking the loss of mathematical ability due to the rise of the calculator analogy a bit further, when (not if) people starting relying on AI for ethical decision making we will be in dangerous territory. At that point, we will not just be at risk of losing our ability to think seriously about ethics and values, but because we would have no real ownership over the decision (which belongs to the AI not to us) we risk severing the connection between ethics and conscience... and shame, and guilt, and reward.

We are hierarchical pack animals, these feelings and experiences are central to that collective experience and what it means to be human and to the social order. People incapable of feeling guilt or shame are often referred to sociopaths or psychopaths, but we could easily sleepwalk into sociopathy and psychopathy by handing off human responsibilities (e.g. taking ethics seriously, considering and caring about the consequences of actions, taking ownership of decisions) to a machine.

Unless the machine can also cook, in which case that's fine. :D

riclad

I read gen z find it hard to read cursive handwriting because they are use to reading on phones on tablets 4 year olds are given tablets to play games now to keep them quiet I think in 10 years it'll be hard to buy anything if you don't have an app or a smartphone I never used a mac pc, why buy a mac apple device when it's 3 times the cost of a Windows laptop I used an iPhone it has mostly the same apps as android apart from facetime imessage app I like android phones as you can buy one for 100 euro with a headphone jack and also you can sideload apps on it eg emulators etc

Also Theres a very limited range of games that run on mac pcs there's loads of free games on pc steam store epic

I'm not interested in take 4k hdr photos so I don't care if the iPhone has a great Camera and photo design apps I think apple is like a cult eg they look down on us basic android users

I can't see the point of paying 1000 euro for a phone whether it's apple or android

Also putting mp3s or mp4s on a iPhone is a ffing pain in the neck, as it has no sdcard slot

That airplane is an example of bad software design plus the pilots that flew it did not recieve proper training and did not understand how the new software worked especially

We have a new generation who just grew up using apps tablets and smartphones the first gen to grow up using the Internet from an early age

timmyntc

The pilot case is a good one which encapsulates the issue I think - 90% of users its fine to just know enough to get by with modern systems (pilots relying on various electronic "crutches"), but without a proper knowledge of first principles and all the underlying theory thats involved in making the nice easy interface you get to use (flying by hand/directories, command line, etc/principles behind gearing, torque levels, speed/how to do calculations sans calculator) you cannot truly excel, and should a disaster scenario happen whereby you cannot rely on those aids, then you're really in trouble.

Thats what some lecturer friends are seeing now in current generation computing - in subjects where computer use is not the main focus but is necessary, students have no idea how to do simple things like navigate directories. It makes using 3rd party tools for assignments incredibly difficult, and they have now since had to introduce some basic computing skills into the curriculum because so many new entrants no longer have these.

Its all well and good if all you use is specific "Apps" per function, but once you get into the academic world you cannot rely on iPhone and tablets for productivity.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118184664#Comment_118184664

...but is the world of academia itself keeping up with societies demands and needs, and changing accordingly?

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118182737#Comment_118182737

There was a plane crash a few years ago(it might have been the Air France incident where the aircraft stalled all the way down into the atlantic) and investigators got current air force fighter pilots into a simulator and ran the same scenario. They all recovered the aircraft. They flew the aircraft first, rather than fly the systems that flew the aircraft. They went back to basic airmanship and flying. On the other hand commercial flying has become safer and safer with the decades because of those systems.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118183942#Comment_118183942

It depends on what you want to do and of course what someone is used to. If you're a user who types letters, emails, browses the web then either OS will be fine. Windows is better for single app custom uses and certainly much better for gamers and if you want to build a custom machine and they're cheaper. No contest there.

Having used both platforms(and Linux) over many many years, I would say the Apple OS is more consistent and easier to get around, especially for the non techie person. They're also better if you're moving across different apps on the regular(and those apps are also more consistent). They were the multimedia platform long before PC's got into that arena and it shows even today. While Windows has come along in leaps and bounds over the last decade plus, they were a thundering pain in the arse to do basic things like join networks, add printers etc without some pet nerd to sort things out for the non techie. And while they can certainly get viruses, they're not as vulnerable out of the box compared to Windows, though again the latter has come along in a big way over the last decade with things like Defender.

Yes they are more expensive and not nearly as easy to repair(anymore) either. They're also more delicate and IMHO deliberately. They leave the keyboards about as waterproof as a teabag, yet go to the trouble and expense of having little moisture indicator dots on the main board so they can tell you to feck off if a drop of water fries it. They're also pretty much non upgradeable anymore. A sealed unit that you can only specify the spec when you buy. They certainly weren't like that in the past. Tossers.

You can certainly get a Windows laptop for a lot less than a Macbook, but if you compare like with like that difference is less clear. I've used 400 quid PC laptops and the cost cutting showed, not least in the quality of the screens(pure shíte) and general sluggishness. A 1000 quid Macbook air was streets ahead. The equivalent PC laptop would have been around the 800 quid mark. Apple kit also tends to hold its value in the secondhand market, whereas Windows kit tends to depreciate faster. Their OS upgrades are also free and have been for donkey's years and one size fits all. There's no Home or Pro versions. And those OS's tend to have longer backward compatibility. Their latest offering can run on some Macs that came out in 2013 and most that came out in 2015 and all since 2016. Could any PC's from 2013 run Windows 11? I don't know, genuine question. Linux is great can run on damn near everyting and is very customisable and has gotten so much more user friendly, but still has a fairly large element of Pet Geek Required. Plus if you want to run all the OS's on the one machine a Mac is daftly easy to setup to do so. At one stage I had a Macbook Pro with four partitions running two different MacOS versions, Windows 10 and Linux(interestingly the fastest by quite a measure was the older MacOS, followed by Windows, then the newer MacOS, with Linux coming last). It's not nearly so easy going the other way.

As for phones... Android kit is pretty much always way ahead on leading edge stuff. It's also cheaper and more customisable and way easier to repair. To get into an iphone you need to be both a watchmaker and a gorilla. On the other hand they're less private, more open to dodgy software and more disposable in many ways(then again, everything bloody is these days. A rant for another time). And of course you have to rely on and trust Google, which I personally don't and avoid like the very plague. As far as dropping MP3/4 onto an iphone it's a doddle, literally plug into a Mac and drag and drop, in the last couple of MacOS's you do it through another window on the desktop, no need to have itunes or any of that.

I would also agree the Apple environment can be a fanboy cult. Very much so and there can be a snobbish element too alright. AKA Wánkers. On the other hand you can get the reverse snobbery with PC/Android types too. The "apple isn't a real computer" nerds who only think a command line is proper computing and hate that they're not needed as much anymore and the "oh you think you're so great with your overpriced mac" types. AKA Wánkers.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118187806#Comment_118187806

Very interesting commentary. Re iPhones I watched a video on Twitter recently which demonstrated the sheer difficulty of getting inside an iPhone13, which is of course what Apple intends.

There was always the Mac versus PC thing going, way back when I was deciding my first purchase. Same arguments exactly. Got the Dell PC and as I said above first thing I added was a hand scanner which meant playing around with the command prompt, and believe me I was clueless… yet triumphant when I got the thing to actually work a day later with vague hints included in scanner lack. It was obsolete in no time when flatbed scanners were integrated with printers.

The little greyscale scanner I used to capture text and images for family history archives. One of the tasks I did at work was digitising stuff, so I was kind of simulating what I did at work in my home for my genealogy hobby.

Regarding the latter, I set up a family history website in late 90s/early 00s to try and connect with potential relatives overseas and dig deeper. Pre Google of course, so I had to get website to work with other search engines and be discoverable. I was completely chuffed when a Belgian historian was trying to research my great-grandfather and came upon my website and through that invited my whole family to an official history society ceremony attended by dignitaries. One of the relatives was styled Father of Computer Science in Ireland and he was thrilled with my efforts at achieving new family connections through the very means that he had fostered knowledge of and helped develop through innovative research companies in this country. A relative in California likewise came across my pre-Google website, came over to visit, and filled us all in about a family mystery.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118188018#Comment_118188018

There was always the Mac versus PC thing going, way back when I was deciding my first purchase. Same arguments exactly. Got the Dell PC and as I said above first thing I added was a hand scanner which meant playing around with the command prompt, and believe me I was clueless… yet triumphant when I got the thing to actually work a day later with vague hints included in scanner lack.

The first scanner I got was in the mid 90's, like yours one of those greyscale hand scanner yokes. But I had a mac, so it was install driver from floppy(jaaaysus) and off it worked in all the apps that could handle the output. It's hard for younger viewers to understand today, but they were significantly, daftly simpler to use compared to PC's back then. Same with adding printers, connecting to networks, getting online(my first foray was apple's own eworld. 😮) and they came with sound and multimedia stuff without taking the back off and installing cards and flicking microswitches. I'd been using them since the late 80's and that far back the difference was even starker(I had an SE and then a Quadra). Even into this century that still held. When the imac first came out a US magazine got one and a PC from Dell IIRC and gave the mac to a high school kid and the PC to a professional computer tech and the kid had set his up and connected to a printer and the interwebs before the pro did. Though back in the day they were even more crazy expensive than today compared to PC's. Like a Dell might be 900 quid, the Mac could be at least double that. Though at least back then they were truly innovative. Take this laptop

It has the keyboard near the hinge with palm rests(others had the keyboard at the front), sleek design and a trackpad(the first to have one and they were the first to have a trackball before that) and stereo speakers and the same i/o ports as a desktop at the back under a flap. That's the basic design language of pretty much every laptop today(minus the flap) and that came out in 1994. Nearly thirty years ago. Put that 94 design on a diet, slim it down, fill the bezel with a screen and make it from alloy and you could flog it today and nobody would look sideways. Try the same with an IBM or Dell from that time, though again the Dell would be half the price(not so much the IBM but they were of a far higher quality than the Dells ever were). Apple can be utter overpriced wánkers with equally pretentious fanboys, but if they'd never existed the IT biz and the user experience might look very different.

riclad

Iphones are made to be hard to repair ,many android phones are made from standard parts and theres plenty of info out there re how to fix them.for gamers mac apple computers are the very last choice .pcs are made to be fixed,taken apart and upgraded .

I have a historic Dell laptop hiding somewhere… under my bed I think!

My ancient Dell Inspiron. Came with a rubbish power adaptor I had to hold together with string.

My latest machine… a bit more up to date.

gormdubhgorm

I agree with what a few posters said in that tech is much easier to use than years ago. But the smartphone although handy on the face of it has virtually consumed people and society.

I was going along happily with no smart phone. Texts did me grand. Had a radio in phone for matches. Changed bank was basically forced to buy a smartphone. Rushed brought second hand iPhone.

Realised credit eaten by background apps that were supposed to be off. Realised it had no radio.

Had to buy portable radio for matches as online was way behind.

Realised when battery dies on iPhone would likely mean new phone. As it is made extremely difficult to change.

-

In general I see so many people walking around like zombies locked into thier own world few make eye contact and look at the world when out and about.

I don’t think technology can get much more instant now. But in a few years I expect major push back from consumers. Data collection, privacy, targeted marketing, apps designed to keep you on phone. People will eventually literally switch off. And their eyes will be opened. Who knows they might even look up when they are walking.

riclad

I think gen z are spoiled computers are so easy to use now, in the 90s you had to know about dos prompt commands, installing drivers for new devices, most games were installed from cdroms or dvdrom to use a pc in the 90s you had to learn alot of basic tech how to backup files using Napster etc

Now most people use steam or app stores to get new programs or games the problem i see is most people don't realise how much data big company's are collecting on users big company's are hacked every year your private date go's to hackers who may use it for ID fraud

If a service is free it's because you are the product

I wonder what ll happen to future Politicans in 10 years time when someone can go back and look at the stupid things the uploaded to YouTube tik Tok social media as the average teen is usually stupid and reckless

Every pc now has chrome Edge browsers media players music players installed on it

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118189412#Comment_118189412

Back early 00s took 4 CD ROMS to install an early version of Flight Simulator, but it had start to become very realistic. So much so, that I managed to convince my mother, then in her 80s, that she was watching a webcam at a remote airport, one which she was to visit in a few days. I operated an aircraft deliberately carelessly, making an appalling landing in simulated dreadful weather conditions. She was just appalled, and de later the airline e should be shut down, and was very uneasy about the prospect of flying with them next day!

Now, of course, everything is downloaded online and is that much more powerful. But even then MS FlightSiM was reasonably powerful and had very serious users, including real life pilots. I had Professional versions of some aircraft installed with entire functionality of the real aircraft and which could not be flown on gaming shortcuts.

Yes, back around 90s everything involved command prompt, creating batch files, installing drivers, creating a method of backups. I still have an old Zip drive with disks. Kept one floppy as a museum piece. I remember not being too impressed at an early Mac that was operated through two floppy drives, one with the driver software, the other for saving files.

I remember having to put in a new battery for system tIme too at any early stage on my home PC. At my workplace I used to admin the local network of PCs and was forever having to update times on them as that was quite crucial to operations. There was subsequently the option of doing Unix admin (public service, no difference in salary) for the entire branch network in the authority, but that would have initially meant travelling all over the place every day mainly by bus (some offices had no parking spaces) to troubleshoot before eventually things could be done mostly remotely. Those who opted for this spent half their day commuting.

My overall job was a general administrative one, co-managing a premises open to the public. As a public servant I was sent on courses with the IPA, eg Advanced Excel, and others. Some of these were optional but they encouraged those who had an interested to pursue training as a lot of systems were being developed in-house by the staff. I subsequently was able to create a neat cash management system to cope with the increased requirements of cash control and new VAT requirements at HQ.

cj maxx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118187587#Comment_118187587

I saw the aircraft investigation show on that Air France crash. The co-pilots at the controls , while the captain was on his break, misread what the computer was telling them .

Regarding aircraft, I am really interested in imagining what the future will be regarding on board systems after progression of A1. Remote control of an airliner is an interesting concept, but remote hijacking would then become a thing. For a start there would be the odd experimental hacker who might endanger an aircraft just to show how they could temporarily take control and feel they were going a service by exposing the vulnerabilities. Then there’s be the terrorist and rogue state hackers-hijackers. Would require an entire extra layer of piloting-security experts.

For airlines to have the possibility for ground-based pilots to interact with the cockpit environment there would be benefits in certain emergency situations. As always it would be a double-edged sword. Don’t know if pilots working remotely would become the norm!

riclad

I prefer old laptops they have 3 usb ports ,vga ports, replaceable batterys ,then a brand new slimline thin laptop that has only 1 usb port . i prefer phones that have replaceable batterys .i think vr could be very popular in 5-10 years time when headsets will be cheap and light ,more like sunglass,s .if you look at half life alyx on youtube .i think there may be some virtual characters that,ll you can use in many games in a coop mode, eg play coop mode in borderlands 4 with alyx vance ,she ,ll use different weapons keep talking to you as you go from place to place .some phones seem designed to only last 2 years . i think game streaming will get more popular on phones, there,ll be a nintendo app, you,ll be able to play switch games on a phone if you own them and login to your user account.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118182737#Comment_118182737

737 Max was a commercial decision to make it behave like an old 737 in order to avoid having to recertify the plane and pilots. It has bigger engines so they can't fit as far under the wings as the previous ones did so the thrust doesn't come from the same place.

Overall it's a tiny bit like taking a front wheel drive car with a decoupled steering wheel programmed to pretend to behave as if it's still a rear wheel drive car. Normally there's no difference.

Unless you skid going around a corner when your rear wheel drive reactions tempt you to steer the wrong way but you've had the training so you follow the instructions to steer the way they told you, but the car decides to pay about with the clutch and breaks and you physically don't have the strength to bypass the steering wheel because no one does and there's alarms going off and the anti skid sensors have a problem and the backup safety system was an option extra because Boeing is more concerned with profit (IMHO) etc. etc.

The deaths could have been avoided if they'd fitted a second sensor. Or done a proper walk through possible safety issues. Or given the pilots proper safety instructions. Or if they'd made the landing gear a bit longer to mount the engines so the thrust was at the same point it's been for the last 60+ years. Or if they had not tried to fool the pilots into thinking that the plan behaved like older 737's and just given them a few more hours in the flight sim to learn the differences.

Recent quality control on new aircraft and the debacle of the space capsule suggest that Boeing have lost their soul. It's got to the stage that I'd feel safer on a 20-30 year old Boeing flown by a reputable airline than on a brand new one.

riclad

The engineers are no longer in charge at Boeing the 737 was a new design but to avoid the large expense of getting it tested as a New plane software flight control programs were installed to make it behave like an older model but pilots were not giving the Training to fly it and to respond if it stalled in an emergency and they did not understand who the software worked in certain situations most pilots are trained and are used to flying 747s and certain planes in flight simulators

Most people just install apps on phones and use a browser on pcs Windows is designed to be easy to use for non experts i presume people buy macs to run certain programs 3d design video editing photo editing as they are more expensive than standard pcs

I think young people now use gaming as a social space with so many free to play online games being available with voice chat

The time when you needed to be a tech expert to use a pc is long gone

Re iPhones, funnily enough they are being used as productivity tools in industrial collaborative robotics. Complex robot programming pendants are starting to be replaced by simple smartphone apps. The idea is to lower the barriers to automation adoption by making robots easier to program. Previously, only engineers and highly-trained technicians could program and operate industrial robots.. now you can quickly upskill a factory operative to become a robot operator. Is this form of 'dumbing down' good or bad? I would say good.. it's an equalizer. (Also, we have to bear in mind that the people that come up with these 'dumbed down'/equalizing systems do indeed tend to have PhDs.)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118195258#Comment_118195258

We have ever increasing programs to program programs, as Joe Duffy might say, so to speak.

iPhones are powerful, and of course when we have ever more powerful connections to big servers, processes could be rapid and smart phones will become ever more potent. I’m stunned at the rendition of a little flight simulator app on my iPhone, fecking amazing.

It’s not a very green agenda, but I’m taking a look at acquiring iPhone13 in late January, when I’m due an upgrade. I like the idea of having a splendid camera as I’m a very keen photographer.

bnt

I'm perfectly happy that computers are pretty easy to use now. I would compare computing to driving: wanting your "daily driver" to be painless is normal, and you can have that now, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun with cars if you still want to. Or (as in my case) crack up at the 24 Hours of Lemons videos on YouTube. If I was a car driver, I might be in to racing under the appropriate conditions: on a racetrack on a weekend, not on the public roads while trying to get to work.

So I can use an iPhone (my "daily driver") and come home to an older gaming PC that's usually reliable ... and a little RaspberryPi that I've had to re-image a few times after I managed to bork its Linux setup in diverse ways by experimenting. Then I can shut those down and watch a few YouTube videos on an iPad that still looks and functions almost as new, three-and-a-half years after I bought it.

Montage of Feck

For me PC's peaked at windows 98, other than USB and SSD's...oh and wifi, has there really been any worthwhile advances that benefit society?

Wibbs

On the Mac side I'd have the peak to a large degree around High Sierra as the OS(2017 so recent enough). SSD's were a game changer. Slapping one into an old machine makes a massive difference and a noticable one, not the usual IT article benchmarks where in actual use you'd barely notice the difference. Wifi on the macs was around since 99 and USB since 98 so that's going back a bit.

I have two SSDs, love the lack of irritating clicking of traditional old HDs, and they are the only thing really to deal with modern processing. I’ve 32RAM, so plenty spare to allocate as needed. Of course when selecting a build there were some economic considerations but inevitably there’s going to be some redundancy in the selection. With my latest spec I can’t believe the speed at which everything happens compared to previous machines.

riclad

pcs are more powerful now, they have more memory, i would not want to go back to windows 98, with internet explorer, IE wa full of bugs and was not secure you can install mint linux or another os on any pc if you want more security and privacy , one drawback windows 10 and 11 sends you ads,they are trying to force everyone to use the edge browser, microsoft collects an awful lot of data what programs you use, browser info etc most programs are more secure ,theres lots of great free software out there .if you use windows 11 you,ll have to sign up for a microsoft account unless you pay for the pro version.you can play pc games on 4k hdr if you have a hdr monitor. windows 11 has hdr support.

i would not upgrade to windows 11 unless theres some thing specific you need to use, just keep windows 10 update d with the latest security updates.standard hard drives are large and cheap ,eg 500gig plus the average win98 pc had maybe a 80 gig ide drive.

dxhound2005

Beautiful HD and 4K pictures on big TV screens. Superb music quality on high end speakers and headphones. But a lot of people prefer to use tiny screens and earbuds.

In TV news, the picture is often the news. Some dramatic footage e.g. a tsunami where there were no fatalities will be repeated for hours on end. Just because some people happened to record it on their phones.

Just completed an interactive online web development course which covered JavaScript, CSS, HTML, also completed a short SQL course, and have most of a Python course covered. Good step-off for further practice and improvement, and great to have had a lot of the mysteries of coding nicely unlocked. I’m getting more adept by the day, and my overall tech knowledge is increasing almost exponentially. It’s very good to take this up at any stage of life. I’ve always been the type who likes to see how everything works literally from the inside.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118201622#Comment_118201622

NASA TV It's a 4K channel showing badly scanned 1960's documentaries in 240 pixels.

And here's the thing, those were made on real film which easily had 4K resolution if scanned properly. But that channel looks like it's run by transition year students killing time.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118201622#Comment_118201622

The day of the catastrophic Tsunami in Asia I was in Edinburgh, on a Christmas Day in the noughties. Saw it on the largest TV screen I have ever seen in a hotel room. Ridiculously large, spread almost the full extent of the wall and I would have had to look in through the window to get the benefit of it, but saw the destruction emerging very close up.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118194860#Comment_118194860

A good analogy. I hadn’t quite grasped there was only one AOA sensor. 😱

riclad

Why is an mac pc easier to use than pcs ? 90 per cent of the time people on computers use a browser , europe has gdpr privacy laws, American user data is sold to any company that wants it there's almost no laws on privacy.

I think chromebooks might become more popular as they are more secure than a Windows pc and company's are constantly getting hacked every week there seems to be vulnerabilitys being found in the windows os and company x hacked millions of user files exposed by hackers its becoming a cliche