What I don’t like about modern technology is that it appears to evolve rapidly giving us so much more and more but in reality due to laziness and inefficiency of people (programmers) all the advances are lost. Examples:
Memory and storage in my new mobile phone is twice the amount of what I had in my old phone. Great, I have so much more! But… no one advertises that the new app versions take 4 times as much storage and require 2 times as much memory, and the OS requires more… I’m back to the same performance as years ago!
I had Win 7 on an HDD and it booted in 30 seconds. Win 10 was advertised as working better and faster on old hardware, great, I upgraded and it booted in… 45 seconds! A freash new install didn’t change anything. For a long time I tried to persuade myself my perception was wrong but eventually I had to admit that my stopwatch was telling the truth.
SSD make loading everything so much faster! Replaced my HDD with an SSD and OS boot time dropped from 45 to 22 seconds, fantastic! Almost 2 years passed and I’m back to 33 seconds… well, didn’t my Win 7 boot in 30 seconds with a HDD??
All software companies want to make me happy by providing latest and greatest updates. Google is one of them, for sure. A year ago I took the offer from them and upgraded their Google Maps app on my phone - there was a long list of what better stuff I would get. I found out that it made my phone almost unusable due to its high requirements, thank God I was able to restore it to the factory version - and I know few people get this kind of privilege these days!
Nowadays, when I ask developers and programmers how i can turn off automatic updates they don’t understand me. I hear all kinds of why’s and why it’s very bad for me and I should just forget it. I’m feeling more like mentally ill to not want automatic updates of every piece of my software.
Every time I get a new and bigger monitor I am happy because I get so much more space to fit all kinds of programs. Only to find after some time that developers make the UI of everything larger and I again I can fit the same amount of stuff as I could with my old monitor.
Internet speed above 10 Mbit/s is quite common nowadays. I remember browsing news sites in year 2000 on a 56 kbit/s telephone modem - it is 178 times slower connection! Then why was the loading time of a typical home page of a news site the same as today? Also considering how many cores our current computers have… Maybe I wasn’t flooded with all that junk but just important information?
Release notes of all kinds of sortware often boast of bug fixes and speed improvements. Then why does software require more and more powerful computers to run? No one told me that for one speed iprovement there are two speed degradations in a new version. I wonder why!
One of the most demanding computer program types are games. I remember ejoying playing games on Atari in 1986 - some games were fantastic and I couldn’t get enough. I wonder, if now young people have hardware that is, say, 10000 times more powerful than Atari, does it offer 10000 times more enjoyment? An average gaiming computer today has maybe 16 GB of RAM? Atari had 64 KB, which was 262,144 times less…
I’ve read so much about how the new light bulbs are more cost-efficient. Why no one told us that we would get twice as much increase in electricity costs so that we would never experience any money savings?
I remember discussions from a few years back saying software writers get lazy when they have larger memory etc. to work with and do not have to be so particular with their code.
One of the main problems I see is including so much rubbish by default. It should be the minimum installation and the use can build onto it. For instance in my latest reinstall of windows 10:
3D viewer, connect, feedback hub, films and TV, groove music, mixed reality portal, mobile plans, money, people, phone, Skype, Skype for business, Video editor, voice recorder, weather, xbox
These are just from the start menu I will never use any of these. They would be easy enough to install later and some like xbox actually have six different programs when you look deeper.
Phones are just as bad; I keep getting a warning saying the battery is low and the phone will close 76 apps. I have no idea what they are; I have installed 2 apps. I had another one added this week when I turned the phone on; a music app. There was no way to decline it and I could not use the phone until I accepted.
I also hate modern technology. Not only does it waste time, but harms our social skills. i dont know about you guys but i am very worried for my children that are infront of a screen the whole day.
Totally agree with you! Only one advantage of ebooks that is you can take hundreds or even thousands book with you. With paper books you can’t do that(
Technologies have changed our world, and now they prevent people from live communication and waste our time. Thus, I read e-books, but all of my friends are in social networks.
It’s not technology that I hate - it’s the loss of control of that technology that I hate.
Back in the day, it was a dot prompt and you had total control over your computer, you set things up the way you wanted, and your online experience was yours and yours alone - you could even be anonymous.
Now, it’s Microsoft’s or Google’s or Apple’s, (to name a few), idea of what your set-up should be, how your computer / phone should look, how your browser should look, the type, the background, some defaults, but a pain to change and not always changeable, and if you do, watch out for any updates. (And don’t get me started on Microsoft’s em and en dashes - totally awful from the start.)
Then onto the Internet, which has given everyone a voice and therefore no one listens, facts are dismissed and rumor is truth; Twitter the popular clique that it is; Facebook which wants us all to be friends as long as we go along with the status quo, and AI which now tells us how things should work, what news you should see, what ads you should see, and what you should click on, which sites to visit, or movies to watch, or books to read, - all based on your search and browsing behaviour, and whatever personal information is considered legal for the moment (and some that isn’t) - it’s why I try to be as eclectic as possible when online - trying to confuse the AI behind it all and prove that there’s a human being that doesn’t want to be categorized - but knowing how it all works, that probably is my categorization, and I know I can’t win.
“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman indeed. (I am still missing you Mr. Ellison)
