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"A what pod?" (Or, Being stubbornly old-fashioned when it comes to new technology)

Started by Emergency Lalla Ward Ten, April 16, 2005, 04:59:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Do you still use cassettes?

Yes, it's nature's way
20 (31.7%)
No, I'm from space
43 (68.3%)

Total Members Voted: 63

Voting closed: April 16, 2005, 05:08:07 PM

chand

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"I genuinely don't know what a 'bluetooth' is though. I Googled it once,and all I got was website which...um, assumed you already knew what they were. Is it a mobile phone-cum-palmpilot thing? I've no idea.

It's not a physical thing, I think it's a system by which different electronic gadgets can connect. Like, if you have a Bluetooth phone you can get a Bluetooth widget for your PC which lets you wirelessly connect them so you can, say, download your phone pictures to the PC.

It;'s wide open to abuse because it transmits wireless signals to other Bluetooth devices in the area, so many people have had their Bluetooth laptops hacked in restaurants by guys sitting outside.

chand

Quote from: "Clinton Morgan"Taken from http://booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1580
Quote from: "Harold Bloom"The other day, I read somewhere something that delighted me. The
suggestion that how wonderful it would be if we had had e-books for
many centuries now, and suddenly, we had that marvelous great
technological advance, the printed book. You know, how wonderfully we
would welcome the printed book. You don't have to plug it in, you
don't have to worry about whether your machine is operating properly
or not. You don't have to download it. You just have to pick it up,
poor dog-eared thing that it frequently is when you've read it enough,
and carry it along with you and settle down in a corner with it.
How--what a marvelous technological advance we would celebrate it as
being.

Yeah, there was someone who made a similar comment about phones and email. Like, if email was invented first we'd think phones were AMAZING. You can talk to people and actually hear their voice, in real time, instead of sending out messages into the ether to be ignored, read by your boss or whatever.

lazyhour

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"You know that joke Peter Kay used to do about how, on the first day of the autumn term, everybody had forgotten how to write? That annoyed me, the idea that kids never write anything in their spare time - when I was a kid, that's *all* I did.

Well, I'm sure the average small-to-medium child doesn't write very much in the summer holidays.  They're all outside looking at trees.  So it works splendidly as a joke about yer average kid.

Seriously, though - did it really annoy you?

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: "Lewis"I used to use cassettes to record everything up until a couple of years ago. I stopped using them for two reasons; firstly I've got hundreds of tapes here and another few hundred back in my parents attic and they just get on my nerves to be honest as they take up too much space...

...and even if I had the time to convert them all I still couldn't bring myself to throw them away.
Ditto.  I've hot hundreds, probably thousands of them.  They're everywhere and I'm beginning to hate them.  I did begin to transfer some of them to mp3, then sold the tapes to people for a quid each or something.  It ties up the pc for hours on end though so I rarely get a chance to transfer any tapes now.  I've got a whole box of tapes I've transferred sitting in the corner which I'll probably bin when they get on my nerves too much.  I've transferred a few entire series of things which sadly I can't copy for anyone for fear of them ending up on ebay.

Whenever I record anything now it's either on minidisc, which then gets transferred to mp3, or straight to mp3.  When I started doing this I noticed the shitload of hiss you get with cassette that you take for granted and don't even notice.

As for a point raised by Timmay about having so many you don't get time to listen.  I've listened to the vast majority of them once and only once.  Why keep them then?  Probably because if I ever want to listen to something again if I don't have a copy I'm screwed.  You'd have to either ask if someone had a copy, or hope it's repeated, or ask the bbc for a copy (Yeah, right!  Even if they'd let you have it they probably burned the tapes years ago.)  It's thanks to hoarders that many "lost" recordings still exist.

terminallyrelaxed

Heh, I used t have a huge suitcase of cassettes, even took it on holidays, but I used them less and less as I bought or copied CDs, and inthe end got tired of carting them around. I kept the dozen I thought would be hard to come by again and bunged the rest out. Two or three years later when I hadnt listened to that dozen either I threw them out too. Even started to get rid of CDs now. Keeping my meagre collection of Vinyl that hasnt been heard in a decade, though.

Lt Plonker

Quote from: "Lee"No rubbers, no tipp-ex, no scribbles, just write straight over it.

Don't forget ink erasers! Cor, that takes me back.

My dad says he'll quite happily use a computer, so long as you tell him where he sticks the punch cards. Bless him.

Bogey

Quote from: "Lt Plonker"Don't forget ink erasers! Cor, that takes me back.

Eraser pens? They smelled rather unpleasant I seem to remember, and they only worked on fountain pen ink; fountain pens being the only writing impliment we were allowed to use at school, with their messy cartridges and the stabbing potential, and this was before we even went to Big School.
Do nine year olds still use these, I wonder.

Frinky

Today's nine year olds write in the blood of the other nine year olds they stabbed for drug money.

Ambient Sheep

I've got lots to say on this thread if I get round to it, but just to pick up on this fascinating handwriting thing.

If, in my day (God that makes me feel old typing that) anybody had submitted a typed essay at school, they would have been assumed to have been cheating, i.e. that someone else wrote it for them.  Teachers wanted to see it in your own handwriting so as to prove that it was you that actually wrote it (even if perhaps the words themselves still came from somewhere else).

Besides, word processing in the home environment was pretty much in its infancy then.  I left school at 18 in 1983, and the first mass-market word processor (the Amstrad PCW 8256) didn't come out until September 1985.  I suppose someone with a BBC Micro / Commodore PET / Tandy TRS-80 / Apple II and a printer could have knocked something up though.

In those days you had to get special dispensation to submit typed / printed work...and now it's the other way around!  I wonder what year they changed the rules to forbid handwriting?

Not that I'd want to use it, my own handwriting has definitely deteriorated over the years.

Lee

Quote from: "Bogey"fountain pens being the only writing impliment we were allowed to use at school, with their messy cartridges and the stabbing potential
Six years on, and I still have the scar. Alex O'Keefe, if you are by any chance reading this, you are a massive cunt and you should have died by now.

[/offtopic]

Bogey

Quote from: "Frinky"Today's nine year olds write in the blood of the other nine year olds they stabbed for drug money.
So they do still use fountain pens! How heartening.

Suttonpubcrawl

I think if I lived just 10 years ago I might have had serious trouble passing my exams. I get to do all my exams on computer because my handwriting really is that bad. I get to do them on computer because my handwriting is so bad that when writing I find myself concentrating almost entirely on the physical process of writing rather than the content of the writing. Imagine the horror of seeing handwritten versions of my posts! I'm actually so reliant on computers that for things I have to write by hand (even just postcards!) I'll type out a version beforehand and copy it down.

I remember in 1998 word processing something for a teacher and handing it in. He commented that it was nice of me to have gone to the extra effort of word processing it, something that didn't make sense to me because even then I found word processing to be the easier way of doing things.

yak

I used to be of the opinion that using some kind of modern technology to do the most minor of tasks was a perfectly reasonable thing, but since I've started writing more I find that if I type stuff straight into Word then it quickly becomes meaningless jibberish (this'll probably explain the majority of my forum posts).

On the other hand if I take the time to jot it down on a couple of sheets of A4 then type it up it becomes that little bit more easier to understand. Its mainly because I'm so used to using OpenOffice and Thunderbird to write the most dull and meaningless of memos, yet paper and pen tends to remind me of what it was like to write stuff as a kid. Maybe its to do with keying in certain parts of your brain; being hunched over a pc being most associated with the most dull and uncreative time of my life.

Haven't a clue why anybody would still bother with cassette tapes, horrible little things. Vinyl yes, c90s no.

Mister Six

Quote from: "Suttonpubcrawl"I think if I lived just 10 years ago I might have had serious trouble passing my exams. I get to do all my exams on computer because my handwriting really is that bad.

What, you sit in the exam hall with a PC? How bizarre.

Consignia

Quote from: "Mister Six"
What, you sit in the exam hall with a PC? How bizarre.

I too have to sit my exams on a computer because of my handwriting, and in school, I had too sit at the front of the hall with a laptop, in the special seat, A0, to single me out.

However, now at university, I take my exams in a seperate room, with other computer needing people, and it's much calmer than a crouded exam hall, with less people shitting themshelves about how they know nothing.

terminallyrelaxed

Exams are a load of wank, school's pants, and work's no better.

I don't like Mondays.

Jemble Fred

I just voted for cassettes, but it seems, to no avail.

I don't understand how people afford so much new technology, that's the point. I mean, I'm lo-fi in practically every way, but not because I'm afraid or incapable of using new stuff – I just can't fucking afford any of it!

Oh, and most people I went to school with are complete strangers to the internet, preferring the Sun and the Pub.

What Fred said, I'm exactly the same. I ain't no technophobe, no sir, but I AM as poor as a church mouse which precludes me from owning any fancy gadget type of stuff.

Rest assured though, could I afford it, I'd own one of every gadget in every colour so I could berate them endlessly too.

RFT

I still have quite a few cassettes, and recently changed my car audio head unit back from CD to cassette. the main reason? CDs are rubbish for using in cars. A CD, without packing, will very quickly get scratched to fuck. Cassettes will quite happily rattle around a footwell for years and survive. plus it means that were my car to get nicked, i'd only lose copies of my CDs, not originals (as I can't burn my own).

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Jemble Fred"I just voted for cassettes, but it seems, to no avail.

I don't understand how people afford so much new technology, that's the point. I mean, I'm lo-fi in practically every way, but not because I'm afraid or incapable of using new stuff – I just can't fucking afford any of it!


Me too. Although maybe half the people who put 'no' to cassettes don't record anything at all?

I think if I had CD burners and the like, I'd still make back-up copies on cassette. I like the idea of the recorded material existing on a physical thing like tape - how do people *trust* digital recording? Isn't 'Oh bollocks, it hasn't come out' the cry of the lesser-spotted minidisc user?

When I did a course in radio journalism in 1999, we had to put together a news report and this had to be submitted on cassette. So I did this the easiest and best way I knew how - I edited it on my 1989 midi system. One with PROPER BLOODY CHUNKY MANUAL PAUSE BUTTONS THAT SEEM TO HAVE DISAPPEARED THESE DAYS*, of course. Nobody was any the wiser and the tutor kept asking me awkward questions about what 'software' I'd used.

* The kind that meant you could do compilation tapes for people without nasty 'cur-chick' sounds between the songs. This to me was known as 'doing edits', and I was always annoyed that other people didn't make the same effort. Now with Cool Edit Bollocks or whatever it's called, everyone 'does edits', but only because mp3 files don't make cur-chick sounds anyway. Well, they do if you throw the computer down the stairs.

Consignia

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"

Me too. Although maybe half the people who put 'no' to cassettes don't record anything at all?

I think that's quite right. I never record off the radio, as I don't listen to it much. However, if I did start doing it (ignoring the fact that I have inherited a massive tape separete for my hi-fi), I would probably look at a cheap option, and it seems that audio tapes are dissappearing, so I might end up with a CD/MD writer or a digital radio with a RAM card.  It's not really the snubbing of tapes, but more of what's easy to access.

lazyhour

Quote from: "lazyhour"
Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"You know that joke Peter Kay used to do about how, on the first day of the autumn term, everybody had forgotten how to write? That annoyed me, the idea that kids never write anything in their spare time - when I was a kid, that's *all* I did.

Well, I'm sure the average small-to-medium child doesn't write very much in the summer holidays.  They're all outside looking at trees.  So it works splendidly as a joke about yer average kid.

Seriously, though - did it really annoy you?

Yo yo, any chance of a response, Lala?  Just curious to hear your thoughts.

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: "Mister Six"What, you sit in the exam hall with a PC?

No, I've always done it in separate rooms because of the computer.

EDIT:
re: Recording on minidiscs, I've always found them very reliable.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "lazyhour"

Seriously, though - did it really annoy you?

Well I didn't lose sleep over it or anything, but it irked me a little - it just reminded me that, in Kay's cheeky chappie, voice-of-the-Sun world, kids only ever write stuff when they're in school, and only a middle-class weirdo swot would use a pen at any other time. Even when I was very tiny, I was putting my own comics together or attempting to write "books". And I kept a diary when I was 11 or so.

So maybe it just annoyed me because it reminded me of what a freak I was.

Can you really do exams on computers now? When I was at school it was considered tough shit if you had terrible handwriting - you had to either get it neater or lose marks.

I remember at my primary school you were allowed to graduate from writing in pencil to writing in pen *only* if your handwriting was neat. I wonder if that still hapens?

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"Can you really do exams on computers now? When I was at school it was considered tough shit if you had terrible handwriting - you had to either get it neater or lose marks.

As far as I'm aware you can't just say "I want to use a computer", you do have to have a sort of 'legitimate' special needs type reason, confirmed by various letters from people (educational psychologists, that sort of thing). This does seem a bit unfair to me because I'm sure that people without any particular disorder could still benefit from doing their exams on computers, but there you go.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

To make it fair, you'd have to have some programme that didn't allow you to move text around, and would only allow you to put a line through words rather than delete them. So that the only advantage is the non-handwriting. Otherwise it's ridiculously unfair.

I'd love to have done all my exams in a little room away from the main hall - I'd have got much better marks if I had. I *hated* the atmosphere in big exam halls - it used to give me agoraphoboia-related panic attacks, a whole extra thing to worry about beyond the exam itself.

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"To make it fair, you'd have to have some programme that didn't allow you to move text around, and would only allow you to put a line through words rather than delete them. So that the only advantage is the non-handwriting. Otherwise it's ridiculously unfair.

I'm glad they don't do that! I'd find that impossibly confusing. I that it would actually make things more difficult, because the way people work on computers and the way they work on paper is rather different, and you'd have to learn an entirely new way of working on the computer just to make typing more like writing on paper.

QuoteI'd love to have done all my exams in a little room away from the main hall - I'd have got much better marks if I had. I *hated* the atmosphere in big exam halls - it used to give me agoraphoboia-related panic attacks, a whole extra thing to worry about beyond the exam itself.

I'm fairly certain that these days you could do your exams in a separate room if you had that sort of problem with exam halls.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Why don't they just give you typewriters? All the advantages of  neatness but none of the unfair advantages of being able to edit text around.

You'd have to have the room a long way away from the exam hall, mind.

Saturday Boy

Cassettes reliable? I'm twenty-two, so I have used the things. The number that got mangled in the sort of tape-recorder or cheap walkman a 13 year old could afford was infuiriating.

I've got something on a CDR or DVDR I can toss off a copy which is identical in quality. Loads of times. I remember having a 3rd Gen audiotape once. It wasn't the most pleasurable of listening experiences.



We had to move from pencil to pen only when allowed. I still do exams handwritten. My handwriting is still apalling, and, two hours aside in May, I'll never have to write any handwritten work to be assessed ever again in my life. I can't wait.


We had to submit a fake news report too at school back in 1993/4 odd. I'm just thinking how much easier it would've been with a computer and some CDRs now...

Saturday Boy

Quote from: "Jemble Fred"I don't understand how people afford so much new technology, that's the point. I mean, I'm lo-fi in practically every way, but not because I'm afraid or incapable of using new stuff – I just can't fucking afford any of it!

Well, It's not that expensive, especially if you're youngish and buying equipment for the first time and not replacing anything else. A DVD-RW drive I bought last September cost less than forty quid odd, which is cheaper than most VHS recorders have ever been, and cheaper than a good quality tape-recorder.

I had a load of cheap walkmans when I was a kid which cost £5-20, and they all died remarkably quickly. My 256mb mp3 player cost about £35, and it's already outlasted half my cheap walkmans. Also remember that I never have to buy an auidocassette, or replace worn out ones. I can pop the music on the flash drive a good x hundred times without any deterioation.