Technology amazes me

[BENZOOKA]

I sometimes like to wonder how mankind has progressed to this stage from times when the most complex tool was a club you could use to smack sense to your fellow cavemen.

As well as wondering how things have changed in a mere 100 years, or even 50, or 20.

So: many things. Geforce 3D Vision probably being the latest.

 

[bojackx]

Everyday I'm amazed by technology.

How intricate appliances are nowadays, all the tiniest parts need to be in the most precise of places for an item the size of your hand to perform the simplest of tasks, like a calculator. And yet we have smartphones and supercomputers and all of that stuff which will be thousands upon thousands of times more complicated and intricate than the calculator. How mistakes aren't happening 99% of the time leaves me dumbfounded...

 

[SenseOfTumour]

I'm currently reading Charlie Higson's (Yes, the Fast Show guy) trilogy where there's a disease outbreak that kills off most people past puberty, and mutates a minority into mindless cannibalistic freaks. It's essentially a zombie story, but a bit like the Walking Dead, it's not really about the zombies, it's about how the kids deal with the changes to their society.

Made me think tho, how fucked would we be if 99% of us was wiped out overnight? No electricity, no running water, etc. You'd have to use every laptop you found to go print out important stuff from the internet, because once all the laptop batteries are drained, that's it, no more internet.

Anyone hear know how to run a power station? A water filtration plant? Hell, fix a car, now they're so full of computerised bits?

It's wonderful, but it's kinda scary how so much stuff is beyond our ability to do anything with it.

 

[him over there]

to solve all your math needs with a program and a solar battery. Effort in and Quality out is totally backwards.

Whoa whoa whoa. Do you KNOW how they wrote the first programme ever? Ever wondered how they did it? 1's and fucking zeros manually entered as machine code. That programme was used to programme other programmes until today you can code a "calculator" in python (with interface) with about 200 lines of code. The first calculator... fuck me that was insane amounts of effort, its easy now because we used previous technology to make it happen but coding the first EVER programme? Insanely hard. I dont know how they did it, who went out and went "Lets use a BILLION transistors to solve a problem". Imagine coding a MILLION 1's and 0's onto a magnetic strip. In sets of 8. To perform the smallest addition. THATS what we were talking here. And to use it you had to use a punchcard with the bineric value of your numbers on to enter it. Calculators are fucking amazing and the effort put in to have the one you hold today is... staggering. Thank alan turing you get to use one.

What you see today is easy to make because entire languages have been coded and re coded and coded again on that old code to give you easy to programme tools and tiny calculators. Shoulders of giants. If you weigh up all the work put in a calculator took more work than the cell phone. Well they both trace back to computing so roughly the same effort.

Computing course has humbled me by showing me the titans of technology. The people who took a load of electrical componants, nothing fancy, nothing sauve, nothing already made amazing by people before them and went "Lets use these in a way the world has NEVER seen before". Its amazing. The very first building blocks set down apon which we create all our new and flashy techology from.

Well of course the first calculator took tons of effort, I was speaking within the context of the present day. All I was really trying to get across is that effort going in to something and what you get out of something is often lopsided. Like you said, first calculator took huge amounts of effort but it's regarded as nothing special.

 

[teqrevisited]

I'm amazed that in the year 2012 I'm stuck with the internet equivalent of paper cups and a length of sodding string. 128 kilobits per second. If it were any slower I'd actually be peeling my eyes out and eating them just to find out what they taste like.

As for positive amazement: I recently toured a prospective place of employment. The machines they have there cut parts with a tolerance of 5 microns, without fault and without a moment's rest for hours on end. The precision and consistency these kinds of things work to just astonishes me.