Topic: tech 'stuff'

[Sarah90]

Extracts from: What To Do When Technology Passes You By http://gizmodo.com/5577652/what-to-do-when-technology-passes-you-by"When did I get so old?...For years, parents have relied on their younger, more digitally savvy children to solve their tech woes. Mom and dad buy the game system, Junior hooks it up-usually with a thinly veiled contempt for the electronic idiocy of their elders. ("It's so simple! How can you not do this?") ... ... ... When you've never had to replace the needle on a turntable, burning rewritable CDs comes a little more naturally to you. But now I'm the one who has never had an HDTV. 802.11n, b and g? I'm supposed to play video located on my computer's external hard drive on my TV ... using my XBox? I'm in my 30s and I'm not sure I'm qualified to buy my next telephone. How did this happen?"... ... ... I know how CSS styles work and can usually spot errors in the code if I had too. PHP? I sort of get how WordPress works. Java? No clue. Ajax? Gimme a break! There's an HTML 5 now?......As time slowly marched on, technology has marched much faster than I can keep up.... ... ...When searching for answers, I found that there is one thing you can count on. You will never find the solution from the company that sold you your problem. Owner's manuals are practically non-existent these days. Electronics store employees? Mostly hired goons that aren't even allowed to work the cash registers. Phone support? Online support? Forget about it. ... ... ...You must go online to seek out other nerds-slightly smarter than yourself, but not so smart they talk over your head-and pray that one of them deigns to answer your question. And they will. Solving each others' problems is what geeks do, even if they occasionally mock your ignorance while doing it. Not unlike the precocious child who helped you hook up your internet connection in the first place. And you don't even have to feed them dinner."Well, laugh, but I'm still working with37 gigs,and the slowest speed you can imagine.  But I have 5 sites working and ...sort of...doing ok'ish.  BIG GRIN!

[Orstio]

Owner's manuals are practically non-existent these days.

That is, in fact, a direct result of things moving so quickly.  By the time an owner's manual is written for a piece of software, the manual is obsolete!

[Sarah90]

Bummer !  Meanwhile, someone sent me this one from:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/07/2946631.htm?site=thedrum (extracts, but worth a full read):  "There's a battle raging at the moment among the internet literati about what being connected to the web is doing to us - to our social habits and even to our brains. Back in 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which summed up the fears of many of the internet doomsayers. "Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." ... ... ...Now Carr has a new book, The Shallows, which expands on the ideas of his essay, though as some have complained it does not expand very much. He argues most explosively that recent discoveries in neural psychology suggest that the internet is literally rewiring our brains. The result: a distracted, fidgety, addiction to picking up small pieces of information before clicking on to the next thing; and an inability to concentrate for very long on more substantial work... about which the comment is:"This is a superficially seductive argument, but it's already meeting a backlash from some of the people who actually study brains. For instance, the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, who wrote recently that: "Cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it's not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."Personally, I can't get enuff!