Today's blog is concerning technology and how it just keeps going and going and going! My example here is graphics cards (PC). When I first started becoming interested in upgrading computersI started off with a Radeon 9200 128mb card. At the time, this card did the trick; it ran games like Joint Operations, The Sims 2, Neverwinter nights; games that probably didn't require extremely powerful graphics, but were quite demanding at the time. Throughout that particular year, new cards were coming out each month, the 9800 being the most desirable. When I got my newest computer in 2004, I started off with, and still have, the Radeon 9600, which still runs the games I used to play, and various others such as World of Warcraft, which are clearly more demanding! Okay so the game doesn't run as smoothly as I'd like it to, or on the highest graphics settings,so I could easily upgrade to a better graphics card for about £40, which would last me quite a while and would do the job neatly.
If I wanted to upgrade to a graphics card that would easily run the highest performance current PC games, I could spend a minimum of £100 (E.g. for the Nvidia 7900) which is used for the recommended specifications for Bioshock. If I bought this graphics card, it would easily get me through a good stack of new games, running them at a smooth performance, letting me stick with that grahpics card for a good couple of years. Which makes me wonder why people spend £500 on the latest graphics card, only to play a game on their PC? Even with a £100 card, you could play games on their max graphics settings with no lag time at all. It just makes me wonder whether things like this will ever come to a stop? Will we keep having to spend £100's on components that we don't really need; as technology advances even more will there become a point where nothing can become more powerful? Or will things just have to become bigger to allow room for technology to grow; will we end up with PC's the size of our desks?!
It frustrates me that to keep up to date with the latest technology, we would have to spend thousands of pounds each month to own the newest gadgets, and upgrades to those too!
I'd also like to quickly write about my views on mobile phones. Mobile phones started off with being able to call and text people (fair enough they looked like bricks and had aerials the size of your middle finger, but they did what they were designed to do! When phones were able to display colour and allow the taking of photo's, phone users did become quite excited! It's nice to be able to take photo's of things on the go, perhaps you're walking past something and you'd like to remember that moment... in colour! But are mobile phones as they are today, really necessary? Now we can browse the internet, make video calls, have iTunes on our phones, listen to music, watch videos, take photo's in near digital camera quality, and upload it all to our computers! Are mobile phones really phones anymore? Do we need all this extra stuff to keep us happy? I personally like a phone to have the ability to text and call, perhaps taking photos is a nice extra, but I have no need for any of the other features! I can listen to music on my iPod (which was designed for listening music on), I can watchmovies on my DVD player, I can access the internet on my computer, I can do everything a phone can do on a different piece of technology; so perhaps I'm just not seeing the need for mobile phones to contain all of this stuff? Perhaps I just like to use technology in the form it is meant to be used in; does that make me 'old fashioned'? No, I'm nearly 19, I just like to be able to use technology to it's full, rather than have it all crammed into one object, where the performance is less than what it should be!
So my question to you all is...Will there ever become a point where it stops?
Log in to comment