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the Digital Age...how is it for you ?


impactcrater

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I wish to do a straw pole...would you rate the Digital  Age one of the following in terms of reliability ?

I bring this to your attention after my scopes digital input failed and I have had trouble finding a repairer and my five year old desktop failed leaving me with lost email addresses and lost music albums....you may see bias....not to mention a new version of a well-known computer operating system.....

 

reliable, good, unreliable, hopeless and frustrating.

 

You may wish to use your own descriptions,,,,

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Unreliable.

Recently 'converted to digital' gadgets in our house include the landline and the TV. These are now extremely unreliable and extremely complicated when, previously, they just worked.

I used to pay my French Social Security by filling in a paper form and sending a cheque. It has recently become a paperless internet system and even though the website tells me my payment has been successful I get paper letters telling me I have not paid and am liable to a fine. I do not pay these fines, needless to say, and they are later withdrawn. This time I have taken screen grabs of my payments, printed them as proof of compliance and sent them to the tax authority. Once, when paying to talk to their helpline, I was told that their website often failed to work with Google Chrome. I am not making this up.

I think it frankly laughable that we are still powercycling, rebooting and plugging-unplugging USBs every few minutes in the golden age of IT. It is a very long time since I went outside and kicked my car to make it start.

Olly

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One recent incident sums up everything I think on digital.

Recently arranged to have a day at Bletchley Park, the one place that proved that computer power was the way forwards.

Tried for hours to book a ticket online on my wife's Mac using Chrome, with no luck at all. Got through at the first attempt from Chrome on my Pc.

The irony of this tickles me.

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Hi Impactcrater

I welcome all new technologies that are actually advances, but rue the unreliability that comes with them.

Scopes and almost all electronic devices have few or no repairable components, the price of getting so many bangs for your bucks I'd say.

Your 5 year old PC , I assume you lost all your data due to harddrive failure? Definitely time SSD's rippled down to the masses - but of course you had backups didn't you.........?

Recently introduced PC Operating System problems? Surely there's enough hindsight to know you must wait at least a year while the bugs are mostly sorted out - and a free system means that they didn't even half sort it before releasing to the Beta Testers I mean The Whole World? My Observatory runs on XP without problems (Canon 500D, Canon Utilities, ASI120MC, LX200GPS, PHD2, etc) and W7 64 bit indoors handles the processing. Why this incessant rush to change things that already work? Sort out the rubbish first.

Olly's points about USB etc - USB works 100% indoors, but so often fails miserably outdoors over longer distances. Bin there, Dun that. Buying cheap didn't help, I got it sorted in the end, but I'd guess it just wasn't meant to be used that way.

So Good, Unreliable, Frustrating for me.

Michael

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Very, very mixed. People seem to expect a system to do everything - I have lost count of the imes where someone has asked a basic question to then wait for someone else to go to google, look it up and enter the reply. Years back someone did this toa simple search. Myself and Brandt did identical actions both googled the question, both looked at Wiki, both did a cut and paste, both posted the reply. All within about 3 seconds of each other. Another sasked what they could look at, 5 hours later a reply was posted, the OP immediatly thanked the replier and went off to look at the suggested objects. They waited 5 hours and did not go look themselves.

On a gardening forum one person got fed up and started to prefix their reply with: LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You, basically get off your butt and do it your self.

Usually very few problems, but I am not using a PC in anger. May well be that software has become overly big and complex, there is bound to be a bug in there somewhere. Find that image processing software falls into either nothing or something highly complex.

Smartphones are mainly a status game these days.

On a got scope this seems about right: Alignment of goto's is not automatic, we actually have to do some of it ourselves, worse still we have to actually have some idea of what we are doing.

Many have the idea that adding another piece of software will solve their problems. Starsense seems a prime example of where this does not quite work. It is really that difficult to learn 3, 4, 5 stars every 3 or 4 months in the sky and do the alignment manually ?

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I grew up in the digital age.  There are a few facts of life that you need to live with - backups are needed just in case.   Also computers are not magical devices that can do everything.   They can be made to do anything.  It's best to limit what they do to a few tasks and let them do it well.  before any purchase I do my homework, this way I purchase the quality kit.  When I buy cheap, it normally falls apart, expensive can be a waste of money.   There's normall a sweet spot of quality v cost, that's where to pitch for the best experience.

 

ill never buy an album, I've got a music subscription.  Same for tv.  Buy I do buy film, of course this is digital, so I stream them - my machine breaks, it doesn't matter as I can download everything.

 

its also important to know and respect the limits of the devices...

network cables - 100 meters per run, that is 100 meters between switches (router).

serial cable 100 meters per run

usb 5 meters from device to primary port.  Anything more you need repeaters.  There's also a max bandwidth. Dot bother putting two video camera on the same USB port (by that I mean the port closest to your computer) you will likely saturate everything and nothing will work properly.

 

theres no secrets to making stuff work well, it's more a case if knowing that everything has limits and sticking to them.

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The positive side AND negative side of digital is that it is just that, digital, i.e. on or off.  Older systems typically were just as, if not more, unreliable, but were made up of far fewer components, meaning there was less to go wrong, and when it did, you could change one individual bit.  Look at digital radio; with an older analogue radio you could have the signal going in and out, but still just hear it.  Not so with digital, where it's on or off.

Look at an IC now and you'll see it's made up of hundreds, thousands or even up to millions of individual components all wrapped up in a single package, with not one of these components able to be changed in the event of a failure.

I think if you look how much more modern digital systems do you begin to appreciate just how good it is, and I'm sure every single one of us would struggle to go back entirely to a life before digital.  Just look at cars by way of example.  Cars are more reliable now than they have ever been, but they rely heavily on software and the digital age (fly by wire accelerators and braking, ABS, ASP, traction control etc.).  My SkyQ now records 4 channels while I watch a 5th, something not possible without digital signals.

I see what you mean about reliability, but things like unplugging USB's is generally due to hardware/software compatibility rather than failure.  I have a 5k Mac which has never had a single issue since I've had it as the software and hardware are designed to work together, which isn't the case with MS run equipment as it runs on so many different hardware configurations.  However, like many here I am of an age that I remember very well the time before the digital age, and I personally think my life now is waaaaaaaay easier (note this is not saying necessarily better) than it ever was.   I can sit in my house in Kent, watch live CCTV of my house in Spain, and turn on any of the lights or pool pump etc. or event water the land instantly, all of which would be extremely difficult, if possible at all, without digital technology.

Back to your original question, I personally think it is much more reliable, but often not as easy to repair if it goes wrong.

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1 hour ago, ChrisLX200 said:

I think there is a danger because of the heavy reliance we put on it all continuing to work, it's a house of cards. One big EMP and we're back in the Stone Age and no-one (from this generation) will have a clue how to do anything!

ChrisH

Quite right, when was the last time you saw anyone actually write a letter? Ask any teenager to do that now and you would be confronted with a barrage of procrastination! :D

I found there something to be quite special and unique in receiving something that has taken time to neatly compose and create without errors.

There is also an over-reliance on smartphones, you'll never see me doing any banking on one of those things.... as the recent Tesco hack demonstrates.

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30 minutes ago, Uranium235 said:

There is also an over-reliance on smartphones, you'll never see me doing any banking on one of those things....

I'm waiting for the Sun to shoot out a big CMD, frying lots of the infrastructure modern technology relies on....

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I treat my computers as if they are likely to fail totally at any time (and in the past they have - MBs, system drives and PSUs have all realeased their magic smoke). I keep multiple disk image backups, and daily incrementals of everything, on several different machines (data transferred overnight). If this C Drive died whilst I was typing this post I would be back up and running within 30minutes :)

ChrisH

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It's actually also quite ironic that we now take such care over all our data, when historically we had shoe boxes (filing cabinets if your were proper posh) with everything in, and absolutely nothing backed up.  If your house burnt down you lost the lot.

Like you I do multiple back-ups, both at work and home, local and remote, but it does show our absolute reliance on the digital world, but also what is fast becoming an obsession with data protection, and not just because of potential fraud, but because we would struggle knowing what to do if we lost it all.

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A quick net search revealed that the most common cause of warranty claims on cars concerns gearboxes. (A bit of a surprise to me.) In a close second place came electronics. I'd expected electronics to win, but second is good enough to make my point...

:evil4:lly

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On a related note this reminded me of the following article:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster

The gist being 'the paradox of automation' i.e. efficient automated systems (e.g. modern autopilots, nuclear reactor control systems etc) are likely to fail only in extreme circumstances which will accordingly require highly skilled operators to rescue the situation (but the skill of the operators is eroded by their lack of regular input due to high levels of automation). So the more reliable these computerised systems are the more dangerous they can be in the long run unless they are perfect!

 

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Just watched one of those Air Crash Investigator programs, pilots crashed the plane because it was going too slow and fell out of the sky because the computer thought it new best and no one looked out of the window.

Apparently Airbus have a policy of letting the computer fly the plane and Boeing have a policy of the pilot flying the plane helped by the computer.

Dave

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The older I get the more of a digital Luddite I become I fear.

The digital age has brought mixed blessings here

The pros speak for themselves, I am still impressed with how much more we can do in this hobby and my other (photography)

However communications are the downfall in the digital age with us, here is just one example from our friends at the tax office

We only got fibre broadband last year in the village plus mobile phone reception is a joke.

So what do the tax office do, they communicate to us via email, great less paper, save the planet etc

However the email is to say that a message is on our account page on tinternet and allw e have to do is log in, enter a security code and they will text us with a pass code.

Yep you guessed it, we don't get the texts so we cannot get to see the messages.:hmh:

 

Also another pet peeve with digital technology is what worked on the PC yesterday doesn't mean to say it will work today, due to some sneaky upgrade in the night of the software, so nothing communicates anymore. You knew where you were with a simple switch:icon_biggrin:

 

switch.jpg

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1 minute ago, RayD said:

Surprising all those millions of people even get on planes and risk their lives each year given how unreliable modern electronics apparently are.

Not to worry, every time one crashes "lessons are learned" unfortunate if you're a beta tester passenger.

Dave

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