Obsolete Technology

[F, Calla & Luca]

This guy is annoying but probably right. I not only have every one, sometimes more than one, of the things he talks about, I still have some that apparently are already dodos. So maybe I should buy nothing for a while.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/top-5-soon-obsolete-technologies/9742-1_53-5...

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

This all makes my head spin. Pretty soon, everything in life will be "virtual". 

[F, Calla & Luca]

Truly. And if the grid goes off everyone will go crazy. Board games, what are those? At least dogs still play with toys.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

Funny you mention board games. My 14 year old GS is about as "connected" as it gets, smart phone, lap top, games on the TV where he wears a headset and plays with (and talks to) people in other places, and yet the other night, he asked his mother and I to play the board game"Sorry" with him. Followed by a couple of hands of Gin Rummy. It was very nice. :)

[F, Calla & Luca]

Oh my doodle I played Sorry when I was a kid : ) and my kids and I used have great fun with games like Uno and Pigmania.

[Jen, Lachlan, and Declan]

Seems like table-top and board games are really coming back into style these days. Pretty much everyone I know has been playing them lately.

[F, Calla & Luca]

My kids played them. Everything old is new again. And I just just dated this on my iPad mini.

[Jen, Lachlan, and Declan]

I have mixed feelings (and opinions, LOL) about most of the things on his list - starting with "yeah, they said that the analog book would be obsolete by now too." Part of this, I'm sure, is pure head-in-the-sand denial.

Personal printers - sure, they don't seem to see much use in households these days. I'll admit that for the last few years I've only fired mine up once a year, just before Christmas to print up address labels. No, I lie - mine was on yesterday to print new labels for spice jars. I haven't needed to print a document in a very long time (at home, at least) but it's the edge cases that keep that sucker around.

Keyboards - He's right in that for most human/computer interactions the traditional keyboard is unnecessary, but there are still quite a few interactions that would be difficult without that keyboard, at least in the immediate future. I've used voice recognition from Apple and Google and will say that it's great for simple interactions, but not so much if I'm trying to write a large amount of text (say, a book - or a research paper - or this forum post) and really, really bad if I know the word I want to use but I'm not sure how to pronounce it - or if it's a new word I've just come across in my reading and have no clue how to pronounce it!  Also, until the desktop computer finally goes away, there's simply no better tools (in my opinion) than the keyboard and mouse for interacting with it. My shoulders ache just thinking about using a touch-screen to type this all out. Oh, and today most really complex software is designed around keyboard shortcuts (Photoshop and Blender come to mind).

Last thought on that one - touch-screen on my desktop monitor? Get'cher greasy hands away from there!

Hard disk drives - he's absolutely right there. Solid-state technology is zooming right along. I have a solid-state primary drive in this desktop and loooooooove it! Can't wait for the price to drop so that I can replace my two-terabyte secondary drive.

Pocket cameras - I think that they fill a great niche between the cellphone camera (fine for snapshots but forget displaying that sucker at anything larger than ~ 4x4) and a DSLR. (I'll attach a pic I snapped with my iPhone 5s in fairly low light this morning.) Don't see them leaving any time soon.

Optical disks - This is the other one that I think he's right on. Most larger companies are pulling hard away from physical copy of their software and pushing digital download instead, and it's easy to get a free Dropbox account for sharing files with friends.

Sorry for the length - didn't really start out intending to go on a rant there!

[F, Calla & Luca]

Nice photo of the gang. I still use my printer a lot aside from business. I print out recipes, and things like that. I often get my laptop rather than my mini iPad, so much easier in many ways.
I use Dragon Dictate for reports and dictation software has evolved to being very good and inexpensive. I sometimes use my iPad dictation too.
I read a lot on my tablet too.
I would like to get solid disc drives too and have to check whether many laptops have them aside from an ancient billing program my laptop has supplanted my desktop completely.
I still like having optical disks but I see the end in sight. I have old VCR tapes around and cassettes but basically they are souvenirs. I remember when a symphony took up a stack of records.

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

OOOOOHHHHH, I am sooooo old!  I read real paper books, not kindles or phones or tablets, I use a pocket camera, CDs, DVDs, printers, a keyboard and a mouse......  I do NOT use a smart phone, but I do wish I could find places, use coupons, get questions that come up on conversations answered....

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

You and I both, Nancy. 

[Lynda Kamrath]

Well, if you want to talk about old!  About thirty years ago, I had an Apple E3 computer with 62 Kb of memory.  We were really up with the times and doubled the memory to 124 Kb.  We sure laugh about that now.  My son, at two years old, was teaching my aunt, who was in her seventies, how to use the computer.  I also have (and use) all of the things that are soon to be obsolete.  We were just trying tonight to make some banners for a fracking meeting on Wednesday and I couldn't get the program to transfer from one computer to the other one that is hooked up with the big printers.  So we went from Adobe Photoshop to Autocad and my husband had it printing in minutes.  OMD - keeping up the technologies is beyond me.  I can't even get my Smilebox posted to my blog here at DK.

[F, Calla & Luca]

: ) I got my first computer in 92. And the internet was so primitive.