Dvorak on Our Modern World 420
DigitalDame2 writes "If people from the 1920s suddenly landed in the here and now, they'd probably find modern technology a bit weird. Take digital cameras for instance. Nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures by holding the camera out in front of them and look at the preview screen to frame a shot. Then there's the iPod phenomenon. Is anyone's music collection that interesting? How many people are being deafened by these things, and what kind of a public health disaster is this? Take a stroll through our modern world with John C. Dvorak's hilarious take."
Mislinked? (Score:5, Funny)
Take a stroll through our modern world with John C. Dvorak's hilarious take.
Darn, the summary is mislinked to typical Dvorak filler. Where's the 'hilarious take'?
Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Funny)
I don't even know where he is coming from on this. Do people really take pictures using the preview LCD? You can barely even see those things in the sunlight (not to mention you are limited by the terrible resolution). I still use the viewfinder, and it seems like most of the people I see taking pictures do too. Unless of course they have one of those awful cameras that doesn't have one.
Don't get me wrong though, I like Dvorak. Everything he says is so forcefully opinionated I can't help but laugh. It doesn't matter that I rarely agree with him. He is entertaining none-the-less.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife's goddamned finger. Until I turned the LCD on, half the pictures had her fingertip in them.
The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Women in the workforce? Dressed like chippies? With skirts above the knee?
Kids with metal stuck through their skin?
Dude! A magic talking box would be the LEAST of the shocks that person would have.
Camera posture = sweeping societal change, eh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Camera posture = sweeping societal change, eh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, the way that guy holds his camera while talking on the telephone and listening to music is about the weirdest thing.
Re:Camera posture = sweeping societal change, eh (Score:3, Funny)
Man Lands on the Fucking Moon!
It's amazing how mundane that seems now. How it fulfilled *thousands of years* of human hope and effort.
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:3, Funny)
Also... (Score:3, Insightful)
"$2.50 a gallon?! I'd have to work a week to fill my tank! What? You make how much?"
I think the value of the dollar would be one of the most shocking things someone from the '20s would notice. Back then, $25,000 a year was a nice executive salary, not what a retail clerk would make.
And if anything, they would be shocked at the lack of expected technological advances. "Where's your flying car? You were supposed to have them in 1999! And where are the moon colonies? Eighty years and all you've com
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:4, Insightful)
More shocking that women working would be women in positions of authority.
> I don't know what a "chippie" is...
A whore.
>
More shocking would be women in trousers.
> I'm still a little shocked today. Actually, grossed out.
Then you don't want to read about the equally stupid things people did to themselves in past ages.
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not someone who works in a chip shop then? Oh well.
Well, considering that in the 1920s the Great War was a very recent event, when women had to wear trousers as they worked in munitions factories, I think they wouldn't be so shocked by the idea.
I'm shocked by the idiots that think we're all so advanced nowadays.
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:5, Interesting)
There never were any 'good old days'.
Now if you were to go back to any time prior to the Industrial Revolution, people from that period would be amazed at what they saw in 2006. They'd be equally amazed at what they saw in 1906. To take it a step further, if you were to take pre-agrarian people and drop them in the Middle Ages, they'd be hornswaggled as well.
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:3, Informative)
"If you came from space and you saw a man walking a dog what would you think? The dog is walking ahead of the man, the dog shits, the man picks up the shit and carries it. Who would you think was in charge?"
Re:The "hilarious" is what he missed. (Score:3, Funny)
>> I don't know what a "chippie" is...
>A whore.
Now, do you know what a midget prostitute is called? A microchippie.Not exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they "mixed" in public. But they ate in different restaurants, used different water fountains and had different public restrooms. "Chippy" is 1920's slang for "hooker". And while the hems did reach the bottom of the knee in the later 1920's, it would be a shock to see:
#1. A woman working as something other than a typist or secretary.
#2. Said woman's dress reaching above her knee.
The women going to work wore VERY conservative dresses. They might have worn a dress that touched their knee at night in a speakeasy, but not to the office.
Remember, this was when the Women's Temperance League was gaining political power and pushed Prohibition (Jan 1920).
Re:Mislinked? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mislinked? (Score:3, Funny)
He's obviously using the subdermal geriatrical form of "hilarious," which is Latin for "things that only old farts find funny." Here's another example of the subdermal geriatrical "hilarious:"
I was waiting for the bus, and some young buck stepped in front of me! I said, "Sonny, in my day we let the old farts go first!" and he said, "Sorry, mister." Then I said, "Don't use that tone of voice with me!" and I done sma
Re:Mislinked? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mislinked? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mislinked? (Score:4, Funny)
Great! If you're really done with them, you could donate them to a new fund I'm setting up: the Trust For People Who Clawed Their Eyes Out Reading John C. Dvorak.
Re:Mislinked? (Score:3, Funny)
To the future! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To the future! (Score:5, Funny)
*cough*
Re:To the future! (Score:2)
No more than rock concerts or boom-boom cars I would suspect; this has been a standard worry since the begining of rock&roll, that the kids are damaging their hearing by turning up their personal music devices too loud. There may be some truth in it, but I don't think a large enough percentage of the population does it to worry about.
Re:To the future! - Hear, hear! (Score:3, Insightful)
The last line is the best part (Score:4, Insightful)
I am so tempted to mention in his forum that he left out "asking a bunch of random monkeys to type in comments on stories through the internet" but I decided to be a Slashmonkey today instead.
Re:The last line is the best part (Score:3)
Then write an "ebook" about the whole experience and sell it with a MLM scheme using a mass-mailer.
Go Home (Score:3, Funny)
Ancient (Score:3, Funny)
Have Things REALLY Changed All That Much? (Score:5, Funny)
No not really. (Score:2)
Of course technology is incremental... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to even mention al the medical technical innovations that have come along. Another person's heart in someone else?!? Impossible, he would say. Twenty years ago that was a VERY (as opposed to today's very) risky operation. Yet it's a common operation now. If I were f
A minor correction (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest change might be widespread cheap refrigeration. In the 20s people didn't have much fresh foods year round. They'd be staggered by the variety of foods in any supermarket in the winter, and grateful that food was plentiful and cheap.
Re:Of course technology is incremental... (Score:3, Informative)
Pharmaceuticals, lithotripsy, CAT scans, MRI, plastic IV lines, angioplasty
These are nothing short of magic. The technological advancements in medical care have far outpaced other areas. You can have major work done with only a few stiches. Removing kidney stones would typically require a cut 1/4 the way around your torso, today you can get some stents placed in your body (no cuts) and get the stones blasted out as you sit in a tub of water
Re:No not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you need to go take some history classes. Cars were fairly common in the 1920s, especially models like the famous Model T. People from the 20s wouldn't be surprised at all by modern cars, except maybe that some of them are so ugly, that the brands they know from the 20s (Ford, Chevy, etc.) are all teetering on bankruptcy, and that all the good ones are made overseas.
Someone from the 20s would probably be more surprised that we're still using gasoline-powered engines and cars which really aren't that different from those 85 years ago, instead of cars that fly.
Re:Have Things REALLY Changed All That Much? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Rick
Re:Have Things REALLY Changed All That Much? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Have Things REALLY Changed All That Much? (Score:2)
On the Value of Research (Score:5, Informative)
Except that lots of cameras have had little glass screens [tlr-cameras.com] that you looked at while focusing the cameras. Dating from oh, the late 1800s.
Re:On the Value of Research (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait. With the readability of some of those LCDs in bright sunlight, that is not a bad idea. Coming soon to a Best Buy near you...
Re:On the Value of Research (Score:5, Funny)
Re:On the Value of Research (Score:2)
Re:On the Value of Research (Score:2)
I don't remember the model, but with our first camera you framed the shot by holding it at chest level and looking straight down into the viewfinder. Not that much different from today's method.
Re:On the Value of Research (Score:2)
Yeah, whatever. Most people didn't take pictures by holding cameras out in front of them like the trend is to do with digital cameras, whatever may have been available or theoretically possible.
(Then again, I find it baffling that people compose pictures at arms lengths so much even with preview screens -- its useful sometimes, but mostly it seems easier to take good pictures using the viewfinder on most digital cameras, and it saves battery life.)
Grandma's Junk Closet (Score:4, Insightful)
My first camera had a viewfinder like a door on the top of the box that you looked down into. My grandma let me have it when I found it in her junk closet. Film was impossible to find in that size any more but I was just using it as a toy anyway. My next one had the little hole you look through. Then I got the digital with the screen on the back. All that in just 40 years. Big deal.
I'm it total agreement that this guy missed all the really major things that would shock someone from the 1920s.
Or socially...
More telling, I think, would be the developments that people in the 1920s thought were "just around the corner"... but weren't.
quick quiz (Score:3, Funny)
Smokers outside the building is weird? (Score:5, Insightful)
Go back another few decades, and you'd probably find smoking a cigarette inside a building would have been weirder. Or only bring the time travellers in from the 1960s -- they'd be the ones weirded out.
Ubiquity (Score:2)
Of course, nothing could be weirder than the emergence of Web addresses on business cards and their ubiquitous use. Nowadays a company without a Web site is in loser territory--out of touch. This all happened around 1998, and we now take it for granted.
Web addresses are everywhere and on anything. You do have to wonder about any company/organization that doesn't have website and/or email addresses. Of course you have to wonder even more about a company where everyone's email address ends in "@aol.com" o
Re:Ubiquity (Score:2)
I have to say this is a strange article. Most of that conduct seems pretty reasonable and normal. Of course people are going to want to share their pictures with others as they are made. Natural human desire, for sure.
Now, maybe blowing out your ears with an iPod isn't so reasonable. B
Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've often thought about the new commonplace practices in society that someone from 1920 might find odd"
Umm, get more basic, complacent geek! How about:
- women having equal rights, being paid the same as men.
- ethnic groups treated equally in many countries (people were still being burnt alive in the USA in the 20s for being the wrong colour, right?)
- people living for much longer
oh... too many to mention, even before you talk about the minutae of technological habits...
quiet day at the office Mr Dvorak?
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:2)
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:2)
Fsck Zimbabwe! See downtown Detroit!
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:2)
Lynched yes, burnt alive no. Even the KKK didn't burn people alive.
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:2)
Uh, try again. Most women make ~75% of what a man makes. See or just google for 'gender pay gap'. [bls.gov]
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:3, Funny)
1920's nerd - "This computer is the bees knees, I can find lots of information from around the world, and it makes my job more productive. I don't need to do mechnical drawings of my drafting projects, the Computer will do it for me. This is wonderfull"
2000's nerd - "Yeah, cool, want to see my case mod and have a Mountan Due"
1920's nerd - "Wow you
Re:Umm, some more basic changes... (Score:2)
I think the parent poster is referring to the Ku Klux Klan, which, while most of its victims were hanged or shot, some were actually burned alive.
Psych! (Score:2)
Re:Psych! (Score:2)
Re:Psych! (Score:5, Insightful)
If those minutes of your life were so important, you shouldn't be reading slashdot anyway.
What a moron... (Score:4, Informative)
I stopped reading after that. I assume it kept getting worse?
Re:What a moron... (Score:2)
Re:What a moron... (Score:2)
In somewhat more seriousness, what happens is that people assume that a better camera will let them take better pictures. THey don't realize that the bottleneck is not the technology, but their creative power. They think that spending all that money will make them take better pictures.
Re:What a moron... (Score:2)
Nobody (Score:4, Insightful)
If Dvorak was born in 1920-s I bet he would've predicted it.
By the way, we found it crazy that people talk "to themselves" on the street (actually to their cell phones) on the street and we though this makes you look insane. This wasn't 1920, it was 1995. So, things change.
One thing Dvorak is wrong about though:
Whatever the case, it appears as if we are now stuck with these new archetypes.
We're all but stuck with anything. In just 20 years we'll discuss how having rotating mini satelite dish on your head would've looked strange to someone from 2006.
But things change so fast, you just become accustomed to seeing odd stuff at home and on the streets. We no longer see strange as strange.
My wifes grandfather (Score:5, Interesting)
I could tell from his voice when he was talking, to the kids- something was getting to him.. I asked my wife later.. he was simply flabbergasted.. he couldn't believe he could watch on 'tv' (he knows it's not tv- but he refers to it as such) his great grandchildren from 6,000 miles away..... he was talking about what an amazing world it was.
I find more spooky though, trying to imagine the world I'll be failing to comprehend, when I make 86 (if I do)
People won't change (Score:3, Insightful)
When you turn 86, even if the technology is faster-than-light telepathic holograms, you'll be using it to see and talk to your grandchildren.
Technology takes time, a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
I read that Discover article and the point seemed to be that since modern gadgets are based on 40-year old discoveries we aren't implementing new technologies anymore.
But I think that 40 years is how long it takes to move from scientific discovery to mature, widespread adoption. Many modern gadgets were prototyped in the 60's and 70's (cell phones, satellite communication, networking, UNIX). Likewise the technological boom around World War II was based on discoveries from the 1890's and 1900's (radio, atomic energy, pharmaceuticals).
I think that more recent discoveries are being commercialized at least as quickly as before. But it will be 2020 before we see the cutting-edge discoveries of 1980 widely available, and 2046 before today's ideas are fully realized.
AlpineR
Re:My wifes grandfather (Score:3, Insightful)
Telephones where invented around 1875. It took atleast 75 years before most households had one.
First television-signal was transmitted 1925. 40 years later the majority of households had a tv.
First geosynch communication-satelite goes up 1965, 20 years later it's perfectly common, a large fraction of households have satelite-receivers. (would've been majority if not for competition from cable)
Tim Berners Lee makes the first prototype web-browser and web-server at
30 years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be before your birthdate yes?
Viking- Mars-- not fiction.. look it up and be amazed..
Dvorak's never seen a twin-lens reflex? (Score:5, Informative)
How is it weirder than the practice of looking down toward your waist to frame the shot in a twin-lens reflex... like the Rolleiflex [wikipedia.org], available since 1928, wildly popular from the 1920s well into the 1970s? Cheap consumer versions of this camera style were popular, too. In the 1950s my mom took pictures with a "Brownie Reflex," Kodak's cheap twin-lens reflex which used 127 film, was fixed focus, had a fixed aperture, and exactly two shutter settings ("Instantaneous" and "Bulb"). I remember seeing someone with a Bolex 35 mm twin-lens reflex...
How is it weirder from the practice, from the turn of the century at least through the 1990s, if not today, of framing shots by tossing a black cloth over your head and starting at the ground glass in the back of your 4x5 view camera? (Or larger, in the case of Eduard Weston or Ansel Adams?)
Re:Dvorak's never seen a twin-lens reflex? (Score:3, Insightful)
The meaning of Dvorak changed (Score:4, Funny)
Ready for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon. It's not hard to figure out that the technology of the '20s would have looked strange and magical to people of eighty years previous to that: airplanes, automobiles, tractors, radios, light bulbs, motion pictures, telegraphs, trains, steam engines, and the list goes on.
Nothing to see here... (Score:2, Insightful)
why I don't do that.. (Score:2)
This is basically... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wake me when this vaunted pundit has an original thought.
Looking around for my hover car. (Score:2, Funny)
carnage
1920? Try 1970. (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember thinking about "the future" (i.e. AD 2000) back then. Mostly it involved flying cars and jet packs. I couldn't comprehend the astounding amounts of data that would fit in the palm of your hand, and judging by the science fiction I used to read, most of the authors of the day couldn't either.
And smokers were everywhere even back in the
Things haven't changed a lot... (Score:2)
Dvorak's usual inanity. (Score:3)
And the obvious answer: yes.
I yearn for the day when Dvorak's dribble is no longer posted to /.
Misquote... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you mean "Take a troll through our modern world with John C. Dvorak..." ?
The Andy Rooney of the net (Score:5, Insightful)
Dvorak is not wrong that the modern world would look alien to someone from a long time ago---it's just a truism, so trite as to be banal. This kind of comparison, when done well, can put much-needed perspective on current developments. When done poorly it just sounds like an old man at the park.
Re:The Andy Rooney of the net (Score:3, Insightful)
YMMV. Just my $0.02US.
--
Only filtered sigs for me, please!
Observations about nothing (Score:2, Funny)
The microwave oven (Score:2, Insightful)
At least he's consistent. You know you like it. (Score:2)
After he's dead, there will be a thick compendium of his writings, and the pundit industry will hail him as a brilliant prognosticator, acerbic writer, and deep thinker. Luddites and the tecnologically incompetent throughout the
Only posted to annoy /. readers (Score:3)
Posting articles simply to generate annoyance is bullshit.
Frazz - Live at Bryson Elementary (Score:3, Informative)
I like to think of this comic as a sort of sequel to Calvin & Hobbes.
Last week, there was this strip: http://www.comics.com/comics/frazz/archive/frazz-2 0060603.html [comics.com]
For the benefit of those reading past the 30-day limit:
Not terribly historically clued in.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Typical Dvorak; talks a lot, knows a lot less. I think maybe he should look at how cameras were built more than 20 years ago.
The very earliest cameras, from the 1800s, were mounted on a tripod, and in place of film you put a ground glass, and you looked at that "preview screen" to frame and focus the shot. Then you replaced the glass with film and took the shot.
Later on came the development of thet Twin Lens Reflex camera [wikipedia.org]. In the early development of them, say, around 1920, you held it in front of you and looked at the "preview" screen to frame and focus, and then took the shot through the 2nd lens. Later on with the addition of a mirror they were generally held at the chest.
Pro cameras still use an optical viewfinder, and for good reason.
If you really want to scare someone from 1920, put him in a car and hit the expressway. They'd faint dead away.
Re:Not terribly historically clued in.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I was just thinking about a comment my father (born in 1921) once made, that when he was kid it was a commonplace to believe that high speeds alone could have deadly effect. He knew people who literally believed that when someone fell from a height they were dead before they hit the ground, killed by the speed of their fall.
Despite the fact that trains had exceeded 100 MPH in the late 1800's
And In 2020... (Score:3, Funny)
Dvorak stories . . . when will it end? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I know, why should they be treated differently than everyone else, but still didn't the comments of these profesional blow-holes become irrelevant years ago?
Its his little secret. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Missing some other stuff from the 1920's. (Score:2)
Re:Missing some other stuff from the 1920's. (Score:4, Funny)
no thanks, I'm trying to quit.
Re:Missing some other stuff from the 1920's. (Score:4, Informative)
Even nostalgia ain't what it used to be ;) (Score:3, Interesting)
And the same happens with these "waah, we've become dependent of X" complaints. Every single bloody
A visitor from 1970 (Score:5, Funny)
We have smokers outside the buildings.
Ah... is there someone else I can talk to? I want to know the interesting stuff that's changed.
Perhaps the weirdest societal change has to do with digital cameras and the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself.
OK...perhaps I'm not making myself clear. Do we have vacations in outer space yet? Human clones? Gay marriages?
The second big change is people walking around town or in the store with cell phones up against their ears, talking loudly into them.
Oh. Nice. Walkie-talkie phones. That's just great.
Wait, I have more! Blackberry Thumb punchers! E-mail addresses! Loud music!
Bye now!