When Was Your Last "technology Is Amazing" Moment?
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You can call me Dave Join Date: 2002-12-11 Member: 10593Members, Constellation
You can call me Dave Join Date: 2002-12-11 Member: 10593Members, Constellation
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">Because it seriously is the win.</div> I don't know about you guys, but every so often it dawns on me just how cool technology is. So I thought we should all take a moment to share the experience of the last time it happened to any of us. And if you feel the need to share more than one, that's fine, but please only use specific recallections instead of just vagueries.
To start it off, I have 2 of my most recent experiences of the sort. Going in reverse chronological order.
About 5 minutes before I started writing this post.... I was getting bugged with the bottom left corner of my monitor shaking because my new speakers apparently cause some kind of interference with my monitor. So I decided to rearrange the power structure and placement of my two front speakers. This also gave me a chance to place them in a much more open position so that the sound would carry a bit better.
After I got them all setup, I decided to test the setup by playing some tunes in winamp. I spent all of one song getting the front/rear balance right (I have a quadraphonic setup). After the balance was right, "Disco Science" by Mirweis came on and I just started getting into the beat.
About 1:03 into the song, there's like this odd sounding guitar coming out of only the right channel. Right at that moment, I realized..... winamp...the mp3 encoding....the creative labs soundcard....the 4 speakers in precise balance all around me..... All of it, just to create this more than perfect sound that I'm listening to. The kind of sound that would make 80's hair bands hang their heads in shame.
The moment before that, last week. I decide on a whim that I need to upgrade my processor and motherboard. So I go to newegg.com at 1 in the morning and order some parts. I thought to myself "I'm just clicking around with my mouse, and in 2 days I'm going to have parts on my doorstep that will make my computer run faster than even the supercomputers from the early 90's."
It's a high tech world out there.
To start it off, I have 2 of my most recent experiences of the sort. Going in reverse chronological order.
About 5 minutes before I started writing this post.... I was getting bugged with the bottom left corner of my monitor shaking because my new speakers apparently cause some kind of interference with my monitor. So I decided to rearrange the power structure and placement of my two front speakers. This also gave me a chance to place them in a much more open position so that the sound would carry a bit better.
After I got them all setup, I decided to test the setup by playing some tunes in winamp. I spent all of one song getting the front/rear balance right (I have a quadraphonic setup). After the balance was right, "Disco Science" by Mirweis came on and I just started getting into the beat.
About 1:03 into the song, there's like this odd sounding guitar coming out of only the right channel. Right at that moment, I realized..... winamp...the mp3 encoding....the creative labs soundcard....the 4 speakers in precise balance all around me..... All of it, just to create this more than perfect sound that I'm listening to. The kind of sound that would make 80's hair bands hang their heads in shame.
The moment before that, last week. I decide on a whim that I need to upgrade my processor and motherboard. So I go to newegg.com at 1 in the morning and order some parts. I thought to myself "I'm just clicking around with my mouse, and in 2 days I'm going to have parts on my doorstep that will make my computer run faster than even the supercomputers from the early 90's."
It's a high tech world out there.
Comments
Everything Else: When I first saw the game Aquanox.
Next Moment This Will Occur: When I ride a jetpack.
Well, that's all well and good; but then he steps back from the machine (as the machine says out a quip like "NanoMed, healing your wounds since 2013"). The model looks just like Vin Diesel in those moments. It's like..watching TV, from my Xbox (especially when he has the cool outfit on at the end). During some of the cut scenes the player models have some clipping problems, but they look nice then too (not as perfect as the healing, but still really nice).
...makes me wish I had an HDTV to get some more anti-ailasing (...I can't spell right now, pffft), so the needles didn't look sortof stair like.
Aside from in game technology. Well, I ordered FO1 and 2 from interplay, and then 3 days later; the game was at my dorm. Now, for an out of date game, ordered online - that was just amazing.
...If only mail travelled that fast to and from Eastern Europe.
[I also think the whole "Almost anyone can talk to almost anyone for cheap - anywhere on the planet" now - woot, satellites]
i go home, and play ns (what did you expect?) and i start thinking about what's going on inside my comp. and i realize: a guy wrote some code, that code was compiled and stored on a magnetic disk. the compiled code was then sent to another disk (porbably via landline) after being encrypted/decrypted. and it was then sent to me in a simmilar manner. after being stored on my hard drive, bits and bytes were read from the drive and stored in my RAM to be processed by the cpu and sent to my video card for drawing ... after all that, not one bit was "dropped" without being "picked up" again. when you think about how small an actuall bit is (a bit is either a surplus or a lack of electrons in a given area of a wire/disk/blarg) ... yeah
i go home, and play ns (what did you expect?) and i start thinking about what's going on inside my comp. and i realize: a guy wrote some code, that code was compiled and stored on a magnetic disk. the compiled code was then sent to another disk (porbably via landline) after being encrypted/decrypted. and it was then sent to me in a simmilar manner. after being stored on my hard drive, bits and bytes were read from the drive and stored in my RAM to be processed by the cpu and sent to my video card for drawing ... after all that, not one bit was "dropped" without being "picked up" again. when you think about how small an actuall bit is (a bit is either a surplus or a lack of electrons in a given area of a wire/disk/blarg) ... yeah <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
I too am in awe at th workings of a computer; especially the whole: millions of transistors and capacitors filling with electrons (and slowly emptying as they drain away, only to be refilled to keep the data)...and that they're such small capacitors that they draw so little electricity (well, compared to other things).
Makes me wonder how we got there from punch cards and vacuum tubes. Or how the motherboard could be hardcoded to know where to send data...
Or the fact that in the last 40 years we've gone from slide-rules to fully functional, solar powered graphing calculators...Back to zee abacus! <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
How does this crap evolve so fast?! <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif' /><!--endemo-->
[crazy corporations with their, "Make more money, now!" policies - my guess.]
Last night I just looked at my TFT screen and for the first time thought to myself. "how do they make it so thin"
It was just a weird feeling while I looked at the monitor casing and the picture <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Music: the most resent bit of music that has really affected me was Nightwish - Planet Hell
Who here has a Tivo? Greatest.invention.evar. Can't watch TV without it <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
/me begins to tear up again
It blew my mind that on my server, at the same time as me, there were probably 2,499 other people playing. At the same time. I couldn't see them all, but if I really wanted to, I could've taken a trip around the world and said hi to every one of 'em.
Seeing pictures of their server farm even amazed me more. <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Technology moment: eleectronic music as a whole; how I can use a program to manipulate any sound I record or sample to be exactly the way I want it to be, and the bring that sound in with other sounds to create music. Being a producer is the best thing ever: I'm a sound engineer and a composer!
Technology moment: Seeing the Matrix: Reloaded scene w/ the incredible fight between the many Smiths and Neo, and knowing the whole time that it was almost entirely computer generated, but being able to tell almost no difference between the real actors and the CG ones.
Agreed. We're in the era of telecommunications. Control your house's cameras with your phone, control the appliances, have video conferences on a cell phone, etc... <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
toothing?
For me it's probably.. heck technology hasn't suprised me that much. Still waiting for those coin sized 200GB hdd's (if anyone remembers what they're called).
And its all because the computer is adding 1+1 really, really, really fast.
Because that's all it can do, is add 1+1. It actually can't even subtract, it just adds the inverse. Can't do anything else.
Yet it adds 1+1 so freakin fast that we can practically mirror reality inside this little electronic abacus...
Also, I'm still amazed w/ some of the older aspects of technology, like when they just discovered stuff back in the 50's and then the 70's. Neat stuff.
I'm with Doom. They're pieces of silicon smaller than my palm, and with a little help from some PCB and a few other chips they can display everything on my monitor, play everything through my speakers, and burn it all to a piece of plastic that will work in thousands of other computers everywhere. And nothing's abstract: it's all just... stuff. I mean, try to take a thought and send it to someone: no way. But anything you see on your computer can be transmitted with no loss to another one. Wow.
Last tech moment, humm, probably the thought that computers will eventually take over everyones job, and we'd be left in who knows what...
That got me thinking...how the hell did someone think to get metal out of rocks, or plant crops, or make beer (an extermly important one that). It all seems so obvious now, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to think up some of this stuff out of the blue...
And its all because the computer is adding 1+1 really, really, really fast.
Because that's all it can do, is add 1+1. It actually can't even subtract, it just adds the inverse. Can't do anything else.
Yet it adds 1+1 so freakin fast that we can practically mirror reality inside this little electronic abacus...
Also, I'm still amazed w/ some of the older aspects of technology, like when they just discovered stuff back in the 50's and then the 70's. Neat stuff. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
actualy, a computer can compare 1s and 0s and store
a computer has three base functions
add
compare
store
every cycle it can either perform 32 or 64 of those functions (32 for 32 bit, 64 for 64 bit)
... or so my books claim (and everyone knows how accurate textbooks are <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->)
Feel sorry for those guys who worked on the latter though....
And it's all 1s and 0s.
Was it a loud bang? That would be typical of a "metal filament in glass tube"-style fuse getting very solidly blown. I think the rectifier diode broke and went open circuit, that should cause the fuse to be blown.
Was it a loud bang? That would be typical of a "metal filament in glass tube"-style fuse getting very solidly blown. I think the rectifier diode broke and went open circuit, that should cause the fuse to be blown. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dude, you said practically the same thing in some other thread, only about 10 times longer. Are you some sort of technician? No offense man, you know your stuff.
Anyway, my own "wow" at technology came when, after spending years on 56k dialup, I switched to 256k adsl. It was an incredible feeling.
Downloading a 500KB/s at university.
--Scythe--