What tech has improved slower than expected?

[MYOB]

3D - since first appearing to the mass in the 80s (wasn't one of the Jaws movie in 3D? ), and the push by TV manufacturers in the last decade, it seems progress has been poor.

[Tallow]

Mothersruin said:

Hoverboards - saw them in a 1989 documentary about 2015 and NOTHING!

NOTHING!!!

What he said. Also, no flying DeLoreans.

[Topbuzz]

PH forum could do with an ignore feature.
Most useful on the N,P,E where you have to wade through repetitive bilge.
I’m sure a monthly bulletin goes out on the latest ploy. This month it’s telling everyone they disagree with that they’re Angry.

I realise threads will be a little disjointed but it’ll save on scrolling, as soon as you see certain posters names you know it’s worthless tat anyway.

And phone signal. How can I post video from Chernobyl (6 years ago) or from the top of Hamburger Hill but if I’m 2 miles south of Guildford i have zero signal.

[colin_p]

Multi programmable remote controls !

I had one of these in the early 00's.



It was ok but broke after a few years and I've not bothered since. I tried a few others but was not at all imptressed.

There should (is there / there might be?) be something out there that can genuinely and fully replicate the actual remotes without losing functionality.

[Zirconia]

miniman said:

Can’t quite get my head around the observations on storage - here’s 1Tb SSD for £100. Compare that with 90s-era HDD with, what, 20mb the size of a house brick...

4 TB for the same price (+/- a tad) on a spinning disk. I don't use anything less than 4tb externally, 500-900 quid. I get the impression the prices are held high for some reason.

[HTP99]

MYOB said:

3D - since first appearing to the mass in the 80s (wasn't one of the Jaws movie in 3D? ), and the push by TV manufacturers in the last decade, it seems progress has been poor.

Because no one really wants it?

[theboss]

miniman said:

Can’t quite get my head around the observations on storage - here’s 1Tb SSD for £100. Compare that with 90s-era HDD with, what, 20mb the size of a house brick...

People always go on about GB/£ but what has amazed me about storage recently is the development of ever lower latency, better wearing flash storage which has become mainstream.

1TB of very low latency NVMe is of far more interest to me than 20TB or spinning rust.

[Gojira]

theboss said:

People always go on about GB/£ but what has amazed me about storage recently is the development of ever lower latency, better wearing flash storage which has become mainstream.

1TB of very low latency NVMe is of far more interest to me than 20TB or spinning rust.

Depends how much rubbish you've got stored, doesn't it

I've got 16TB of rust spinning round on line, another 16TB of rust as backup, and a couple of TB of SSD in the PC.

Replacing the on-line with NVMe would be nice, but it'd cost me more than a years petrol money

Oh, and I'd have to upgrade/replace the PC too, as apprently it is too old to talk to anything that doesn't have SATA

Then again, I can remember paying £7.50 for a kilobyte of RAM, back when petrol was £1.50 a gallon...

[Zirconia]

HTP99 said:

MYOB said:

3D - since first appearing to the mass in the 80s (wasn't one of the Jaws movie in 3D? ), and the push by TV manufacturers in the last decade, it seems progress has been poor.

Because no one really wants it?

Glasses I suppose, the Jaws film was the two coloured system, then you have passive and active systems, it is good done well. There was a demo panel back in 2009 or something at one of the expo's and it was a glasses free panel. Chatting to the fellow that saw it, said it was pin sharp HD and 3D, no glasses. Eye watering £££ though and as it was a demo and 3D was fading, never got to market.

8K seems to be the way it can get resurrected but I suspect it will be niche not mainstream.

[Scabutz]

jonwm said:

Norfolk B-roads said:

My immediate thought for slowly improving tech is.... video conferencing.

Why, in 2020, does every meeting still start with 15 minutes of people faffing about with trying to get Skype for Business working properly, or installing software, or trying to get rid of audio feedback from laptop microphones, or dialing in on the phone because the audio doesn't work...

And when you do get everyone in, why can't you hear a damned thing anyone is saying? We have loads of bandwidth, and dozens of audio and video codecs to choose from, and everyone sits there, silhouetted against the room lighting, and pixelated by stuttering mpeg compression, and sounding like they're mumbling underwater.

It's such a simple problem to solve. So many one to one facetime/whatsapp/zoom type things work fine. But get 10 people from 10 companies on a Skype call and 5 of them will have technical difficulties. Because VC tech only works if everyone uses the same system, and everyone uses Microsoft products at work, we are stuck with the absolute clusterfk that is Lync/Skype/Skype for Business version incompatibilities, or occasionally a forward thinking IT director will fork out for Webex, but then all the guests are late because they have to install that and work out how to use it. I hear MS are turning Skype for Business off soon, and so we'll all have to endure the crap that is Teams, which is only about 10 development-years behind Slack...

Honestly, we have iPhones and VoIp and Facetime and lots of cool communication tech. So why is Video Conferencing no better than it was 15 years ago?

Yep this......

Conference call on Skype today with colleagues at 16:30 ......16:40 people are still dialing in as cant get on Skype...

My firm have used loads over the time ut one thing is certain...there is always 1 that has to dial in .

That's not the tech, that's moron users.

Knows as a PICNIC or PEBCAK issue in the trade.

[Scabutz]

jonwm said:

Norfolk B-roads said:

My immediate thought for slowly improving tech is.... video conferencing.

Why, in 2020, does every meeting still start with 15 minutes of people faffing about with trying to get Skype for Business working properly, or installing software, or trying to get rid of audio feedback from laptop microphones, or dialing in on the phone because the audio doesn't work...

And when you do get everyone in, why can't you hear a damned thing anyone is saying? We have loads of bandwidth, and dozens of audio and video codecs to choose from, and everyone sits there, silhouetted against the room lighting, and pixelated by stuttering mpeg compression, and sounding like they're mumbling underwater.

It's such a simple problem to solve. So many one to one facetime/whatsapp/zoom type things work fine. But get 10 people from 10 companies on a Skype call and 5 of them will have technical difficulties. Because VC tech only works if everyone uses the same system, and everyone uses Microsoft products at work, we are stuck with the absolute clusterfk that is Lync/Skype/Skype for Business version incompatibilities, or occasionally a forward thinking IT director will fork out for Webex, but then all the guests are late because they have to install that and work out how to use it. I hear MS are turning Skype for Business off soon, and so we'll all have to endure the crap that is Teams, which is only about 10 development-years behind Slack...

Honestly, we have iPhones and VoIp and Facetime and lots of cool communication tech. So why is Video Conferencing no better than it was 15 years ago?

Yep this......

Conference call on Skype today with colleagues at 16:30 ......16:40 people are still dialing in as cant get on Skype...

My firm have used loads over the time ut one thing is certain...there is always 1 that has to dial in .

That's not the tech, that's moron users.

Knows as a PICNIC or PEBCAK issue in the trade.

[Scabutz]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

There was an article on BBC recently talking about AI winters and summers. A summer is where AI appears to be progressing at a fast rate and a winter is where nothing seems to move on.

The Boston dynamics stuff is advanced but progressed as stalled.

We are still a long way off from artificial general intelligence. The biggest risk from AI to humans is not robots taking over but run away algorithms that the engineers cant control or understand.

Still really interesting stuff and I'm sure the next decade will bring some progress. Especially with self driving vehicles. The number of trains I've got that have been late or cancelled because of no driver available means I hope they start looking at that.

[menguin]

pip t said:

Driver101 said:

Printers have come along way. For £40-50 you can get a Wi-Fi enabled printer with all functions and scanner.

I can remember spending 7x that for a very basic black and white printer.

Oh sure, they're cheaper. But nobody's managed to create a paper feed that doesn't jam, a printer that prints quietly *and* quickly (especially double sided - good Lord the paper reverse mechanisms are loud).

I'd happily pay more for a printer that I could walk away from having clicked print on a 100 page document and come back to find it printed, instead of returning to find it's jammed after the second page.......

Of course they could create something that prints quietly and quickly. The demand isn't there, though. Do you sit next to your printer? Normally it's in a corner of a corridor, so the noise simply doesn't matter. I also never have issues with jams. But then I prefer marmalade.

[rdjohn]

Driver101 said:

pip t said:

Printers. For the love of goodness.

Noisy, slow, frequent paper jams - they don't seem to have improved at all, apart from possibly the quality of the print. That and the networked ones seem to frequently throw wobblies.

People mention batteries - I think this is improving. iPhone 11 Pro Max happily lasts two days for me, based on the fact I get to the end of a day with more than 50% left most days before I put it on charge overnight, and I'm a fairly heavy user.

Printers have come a long way. For £40-50 you can get a Wi-Fi enabled printer with all functions and scanner.

I can remember spending 7x that for a very basic black and white printer.

Edited by Driver101 on Wednesday 22 January 06:13

You obviously don’t remember Daisy-wheel printers - like living with a machine gun and dot-matrix were a pain as well. In comparison my B/W laser printer is magnificent.

[cuprabob]

The paperless office

[TheJimi]

paul.deitch said:

AI has not met any of the hyped expectations for me.
Yes it can do some limited things very quickly, but can it make me a cup of tea?

You’ve not spent much time digging into current AI capabilities, then.

AI, even right now, is *seriously* impressive/scary, and in the grand scheme of it, the tech is at the fledgling stage, which makes it all the more impressive.   It’s not “flashy”, so it doesn’t get a lot of coverage beyond tech & science based mediums, which is why it seems like the tech hasn’t progressed very quickly.

The reality is that the opposite is true

[Pat H]

I find it staggering so many motorcycles still use a chain to transmit drive from the gearbox to the rear wheel.

[Rotaree]

Aviation – I still find it amazing that Concorde used to cross the Atlantic in an average time of just under 3.5 hours and now the usual flight time is about 8h 10mins. I appreciate there have been advances in safety and capacity but I'm surprised that we haven't got back to supersonic travel.

[HTP99]

Rotaree said:

Aviation – I still find it amazing that Concorde used to cross the Atlantic in an average time of just under 3.5 hours and now the usual flight time is about 8h 10mins. I appreciate there have been advances in safety and capacity but I'm surprised that we haven't got back to supersonic travel.

I have seen this discussed elsewhere, I think the reason is that ultimately the cost involved just doesn't make it worthwhile.

[MYOB]

Pat H said:

I find it staggering so many motorcycles still use a chain to transmit drive from the gearbox to the rear wheel.

Keeps the weight down.