The Stage we are at with Tech

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

Sonics2k

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118209108#Comment_118209108

See this is kind of an old misnomer that stems from Apples "Mac's don't get virus' campaign in the late 90's and early 00's.

Windows OS gets more virus' for the simple reason that far more people use Windows than Mac OS, Chrome OS or the 9 million Linux variants, therefore it's more common for virus makers to work on creating exploits for Windows than other systems. It's similar in that Android phones are more commonly vulnerable to compromise as more virus' are made for that system.

The fact is that any software, literally any, that's connected to the internet and is vulnerable to attack. Mac OS and iOS have both had a number of serious security issues over the years that people have found and reported on.

seamus

It's pretty much a given with all technology that the user moves further from the underlying processes all the time.

Abstraction is the entire point of technology. It's not just computing, it's all forms of technology.

A millstone turned by a water wheel abstracts the baker from having to crush their own wheat. A whole generation of bakers growing up not knowing how to press their own flour with a pair of flat stones.

Same with cars. Not just servicing them, but driving them too. How many people know what a choke is? Or what it does? How many drivers under 35 have ever driven a car without power steering? How many of us have had to manually wind an engine to get it started? These have been automated or abstracted away.

Technological development is the process of continuous abstraction and automation to reduce the effort required to accomplish a task. We're 500 layers deep in abstraction and going faster and faster.

It's not really something to be excessively worried about. For the most part once you understand the basics of any system (say how an internal combustion engine works), then you don't need to know all of the abstractions and automation or how they work.

When it comes to computers, once you understand the basics of logic gates and assembly programming, then you don't need to know the 1,000 layers of abstraction that bring you a mobile phone to still grasp how it all hangs together.

Glaceon

My peak Windows OS was XP. Everything after that just dumbed the user-facing side down to a level of being ridiculous. Meanwhile, the complexity in the backend became too much to work with, so it's now simpler to wipe and reinstall the OS than to fix an issue in many cases. From working with the Azure Virtual Desktop platform, there's numerous issues that even Microsoft can't seem to fix, and stuff that should "just work" simply doesn't anymore.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118210204#Comment_118210204

Yes and no. Windows was certainly easier to exploit for a virus builder. The MacOS bits and bobs are more closed off, so if you do get an exploit in one area it's much more difficult to get it to propagate into the rest of the system and would almost certainly require the end user to enter their password in to do it, which many if not most would likely do. The biggest security issue is the user. This was even more the case in the 90's and early 00's. Plus Microsoft has the disadvantage that their code has to run on any number of different PC's and work with lots of third party hardware and software. Apple runs on their stuff alone, so it was always easier for Apple to cover their arses that way. The MacOS also insists(unless you bypass it in Terminal) that installed apps are signed from their App store or approved third party developers. Both platforms are certainly open to attack and a virus checker is a must on both, but overall and over time Macs were and are less vulnerable and not just because of smaller market share.

There's also the privacy angle. Microsoft tries to track and collect more information from the users than Apple does out of the box. Anything running Google software is even worse in thsi regard.

McGarnigle2020

We have quite honestly reached a stage whereby all of the practical use tech is now in use- there is very little use for anything new left.

Stuff like Alexa is niche, it is used by techy types but most people rather switch on their telly the old fashioned way, rather than have a voice activation do it.

Barely anybody actually uses Siri or OK Google.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118218375#Comment_118218375

For most purposes voice activation is pointless and quite often hit/miss. The only time I use it is for essential hands-free situations like in my, eg when entering my underground car park I hit a button on my wheel and call “iPhone Gate Park” and that activates the gate via phone network.

Blows my mind, in the best way possible, that we don't even know exactly how we got to where we are at when it comes to deep learning and neural networks. The results can be great, but how neural networks learn and produce these results remains something of a mystery.

McGarnigle2020

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118218447#Comment_118218447

Most people I reckon were put off for life by early attempts at voice automation by call centres around 2010 or so. Absolutely archaic first draft tech that just couldn't understand Irish accents.

Revenue still uses one, still can't differentiate me saying N and M re my PPS number.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118218709#Comment_118218709

On one of my early machines I installed first generation voice recognition, just out of curiosity, and attempted to dictate text, some hilarious results. My mother’s friend had Motor Neurone Disease and had lost use of her hands but still had her voice and was fascinated by my description of the tech that could some day be of very practical use to people like herself.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118218465#Comment_118218465

Parallels our mysterious brain function. Some day we will be able to upload our brain contents into a virtual machine before we die, but how sentient the thing could be in the use of its memory and decision making remains to be seen and is potentially very scary. Like imagine uploading Grandad before he dies to have him still around, kind of forever, and backed-up on various servers, to switch him on and off to save on electric bills, and at times have a couples of instances of him running on several machines.