20 Comments on “The Fantasy of Modern Technology, and the Reality”

1. Today’s lesson: don’t surf pr0n while videoconferencing

2. But…. where have you been the last twenty years?! I was video-conferencing why back when. Admittedly, it would have been cheaper to get everyone to travel to some central location, and the sound was crap and the picture worse but still: it was the future. And we hated it. Not like now, of course…

3. The lag is much easier to handle if you pretend you really ARE conferencing from the moon. I do it all the time. Fun times.

4. Buffering…buffering…

5. Thanks for the snicker…for me, it’s the reminder that we used to be able to work on only ONE window at a time. Remember that? No switching from one tab or window to another?

   I realised I had finally made my multi-window-tasking threshold when I couldn’t find the window I was looking for, and had to close or hide everything one by one until I got it — kinda like riffling through the paper stacks on my desk to find the right item. Heh.

   Buffering is right.

6. I’m STILL continually amazed at people complaining about how slow their computers are when even the cell phones these days are smarter than anything I grew up with.

   Dude, it’s got more than one color in that display! Shut up!

7. Argh. I feel your pain.

8. I just got a new PC and a new 22″ monitor. Apparently, Hewlett Packard has perfected time travel, because clearly they are BOTH from the future.

9. In other news, your local reporter, (me) has noticed a going backwards trend.

   In the way back old days we had a Mainframe, which was not much by todays standards, and a whole series of “dumb” terminals to input data and work with the main frame.

   Where I work, the latest trend is to have an interface program, like Citrix, and have all of your apps on servers somewhere and work through the interface to do all of your work.
   This includes things like outlook, power point, etc. etc.

   So I have a moderately smart desktop that I’m not really using as anything more than a dumb terminal.

   This is the future?

10. My company uses Genesys Meeting Center for this and it works a treat. It’s sort of a virtual conference room dealie. I <3 it.

11. A lot of smartphones come with two cameras now so you can use them for video teleconferencing or for taking photos.

    What’s kinda cool is we’ve already exceeded the technology of the Star Trek communicator with cell phones and we’re encroaching in on the Star Trek tricorder with smart phones.

    We will be officially living in the future when they get teleportation working.

    Jet cars are old hat. Teleport is where it’s at. then future is now.

12. Greg@11: “What’s kinda cool is we’ve already exceeded the technology of the Star Trek communicator with cell phones and we’re encroaching in on the Star Trek tricorder with smart phones.”

    Yeah, but communicators still work on planets without cell towers. Which is a good thing, because the zoning ordinances on Organia were brutal.

13. Dave, you can go out and purchase a satelite phone right now. Talk time is something like one dollar a minute, but they will work pretty much anywhere on the planet.

    On the plus side, no roaming charges.

14. Who were you conferencing with… and how do you know they were not on the moon. What was that the length of your delay?

    You can easily estimate their off-planet position by measuring the time lag. Say something shocking and time their alarmed expression.

    Geostationary Orbit = 0.5 sec (0.25 sec each way)
    Earth-Moon L1 = 2.15 sec
    Moon = 2.5sec
    Earth-Sun L1 = 10 seconds
    Earth-Sun L5/L4 = 16.6 minutes

15. math error…geostationairy should be 0.125sec one way or 0.25 round trip.

16. Remenber the TRS-80 at the Glendora Library?

17. Tom Z:

    Indeed I do. It was VERY hard to teleconference on that one.

    Also: Hi, Tom!

18. “What’s kinda cool is we’ve already exceeded the technology of the Star Trek communicator with cell phones…. We will be officially living in the future when they get teleportation working.”

    Sounds promising at first, but I shudder to think of what happens when you start getting bandwidth overages. Not to mention the rather more disastrous effects of a dropped call.

19. The 4.0 TS teleporter, now with 60% fewer dropped ports.

    *VT&T not responsible for accidental port merges.

20. Ahh! The old time-lag calculation error!

    You forgot to insert the subtended angle distance and switch-gate delay!

    This is the most overlooked mistake aside from starting a land-war in Asia.

    Ha-ha-ha-HAAAaaaa…

    JJB