Sunday, July 24, 2011

Being up to date is hopeless

I sent this lovely and clever T3 cover (below) to some friends, and Ian said:

I have just been looking through a catalogue of the latest cellphones that have Android OSv2.3.3,  Android, Gingerbread, Froyo, Snapdragon, e-reading, Capacitive Screen etc., and Cloud Computing is coming fast!   I don't know about you but I am getting more and more lost... Us oldies are going to fall through our own ar$$e$ with all this stuff!

Indeed. And not just us (nearing fifty I'll have to get used to being "middle-aged"). William Gibson said "To some extend it's a universal situation (feeling confused and out of date as to what technology can actually do now). There are probably 15-year-olds right now who don't suffer from that. ... By the time they're 16, they're slightly behind the curve."

I guess we'll just have to live with it, and realize that not even people following it 24/7 can know it all. And just try to keep your foot in with the stuff which is helpful or interesting to you. Although it's tough... there is so much hype about everything. Would it be helpful to have video chat on your phone? And will it actually work? (For example, Apple's Facetime works beautifully, but it only runs (so far) on wifi networks. Some other phones have video chat over the phone networks, but they generally don't work.) Does your friend/family member need to have the same phone? Etc etc.


By the way, technically, this photo may have been tricky to make. Especially lining it up exactly. I suspect that she was actually holding the iPad, and then an assistant pulled it away and they took the second picture, which was then photoshopped into the photo later. Would be the easiest. But it certainly could be done exactly like it looks if one wanted to fiddle with it for sport's sake.

... Aha, it could also be a fake iPad: they could have made the frame, and stretched a mesh over it to look like a screen showing everything behind it. That would make the photography a doodle.

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