It’s because Google Voice is some arcane virtual reality phone number to them.. “What if it doesn’t work?”

I loved that little number proxy when it came out. Got an invite first thing. Awesome idea.

@Luke:

Oh, they can try to stop people playing games, by blocking the sites, blocking people opening .exe and .swf files and so on, but there’s always a way round that. At the moment, they still can’t seem to find a way to stop people just going to the embedded flash file instead of the actual page – then it works fine. Super squeaky fun time! To be honest, I spend most IT lessons working out ways to circumvent their filters and stuff, then never actually using them. I guess I’m too much of a geek to like the end more than the means. :)

@Luke:

Oh, they can try to stop people playing games, by blocking the sites, blocking people opening .exe and .swf files and so on, but there’s always a way round that. At the moment, they still can’t seem to find a way to stop people just going to the embedded flash file instead of the actual page – then it works fine. Super squeaky fun time! To be honest, I spend most IT lessons working out ways to circumvent their filters and stuff, then never actually using them. I guess I’m too much of a geek to like the end more than the means.

Well I was a little late for dial up, but I loved floppies. Part of me died, when I had to abandon them. I remember using them quite a lot.
I don’t use thumb drive, I prefer dropbox to store my documents.
I never owned a mac.
Wifi section made me lol.

@ Lily:

Yeah, high schools are a little bit different. First off, there is no way to stop students from playing games in class when there is a computer in front of them. I spent most of my lab sessions on newgrounds back in the day. :P

In most classes we didn’t use computer so I just sat there playing Tetris on my TI calculator. Good times. :)

Re: calling – college students used to use the phone system quite a bit back in the day. Mostly begging for grades, asking for extensions or telling you how their grandmother died for the sixth time this semester and they had to attend yet another funeral which coincidentally was on the same as the final exam. Now all of that is handled through text and email apparently.

@ Victoria:

Wow… Look at how times changed. I wish ISP’s would give you free service for actually utilizing the connection to it’s full extent. These days if you rank third in their monthly traffic in your city, you will get bandwidth severely throttled or your account suspended altogether. Sigh…

Oh, I feel like such a dinosaur right now :) I had dialup for years. At some point I even got half a year free internet because I was rated third in monthly traffic in our city.

Also floppies, yeah. The first computer I got that didn’t have floppy drive was my MacBook Pro and it was like January 2008.

I like to see the progress in work :) it’s especially funny to see old mobile phones in movies, they are huge! And I got my first one in 2002 and there were almost no people around, whom I could call from it.

@ Steve:

Yeah, I can imagine the dialup situation is different around the world. I live in the Tri-State area – one of the most densely populated regions of the United States so we do get pretty good broadband coverage.

@ IceBrain:

Interesting. Here Facebook chat pretty much replaced IM although sometimes people use Skype (or whatever else seems popular) if they want to use cams.

As for VCS stuff – story of my life pal. I had the same problem when I was in college. This is sort of a standing tradition at my CS dept that the smart student working on a Masters thesis sets up some sort of version control system on the lab machine and uses it for the entire project. The reasoning is that the next person working with the same mentor will likely be expanding or building upon this thesis, and the code will be right there.

Invariably when the thesis is complete the mentor usually asks the student to “burn them a copy of the code to a CD for archival purposes” which is actually a code word for “I have no time for your version control sorcery, just give me the code”. The code then gets either forgotten forever, or improved upon and eventually given to some brave soul that will try to take it to the next level.

That brave student eventually inherits the lab machine and goes “Oh… Look, there are 3 SVN repositories, and an old CVS here, all containing obsolete versions of this code. Fuck it, I’m just going to start a new repository for this. :P

@ Douglas:

Yeah, it amazes me how a person can email the same word document to their Gmail accound 15 times over the course of 3-4 days, but they will never actually consider working on it in Google Docs even though there is a button in their webmail that allows them to open an attachment in Google Docs with one click.

@ nicholas:

A lot of this is just fads and new emerging UI paradigms – but the underlying technology tends to remain the same so I’m not that much worried.

@ ths:

Very true, but I think that when we say dialup we specifically think about the slow, “plug it into your phone line” modems.

I’d like to make a few comments on this from a (British) high school student’s perspective.

We’re a bit behind college/uni students, I guess. Partly because of the younger age of the pupils but also because of a lot of artificial restrictions placed on us by stuff like the censorware the school has in place (can’t access Yahoo! mail, Gmail or whatever).

Even with students as young as thirteen a good few of them will have used dialup – the ones with geeky families, mainly, who had Internet back when less people used it – but the ones who only got computers in the past few years never.

You’re right about the floppy disks – a lot of my classmates don’t even know what they are if they see one. We do still have a few lying around, though.

Thumb drives are in. The school keeps trying to ban them because they occasionally bring viruses onto the computers and can be used to play games during lessons, but the alternative is laughably bad – the school’s online-accessible file system is down all the time and even when it works has a lot of interesting glitches. They banned memory sticks for a while, but had to let people use them again within a couple of months.

The mac users used to be the kids who had graphical designers for parents. Now all the cool kids have them. And don’t understand why their file formats won’t work and have never had a technical problem in their life they didn’t just pay someone else to fix.

They don’t know much about Wifi security, or security in general – hence their really irritating belief that anyone who can bring up a command prompt is a hacker :roll:

Phone calls? Like our teachers would want to talk to us outside of lessons!

… and nobody seems to notice that (A)DSL is still an analog technology. It’s just a very advanced kind of modem which beeps and whistles, but it does so with incredible CPU power. The big jump in speed came when signal processors became so cheap that they could remove signal disturbances by sophisticated calculations. Imho this was first introduced when modems with 28k8 were introduced around 1995.
The only difference is that “dialup” is not initiated by the user but by the modem, since everyone has a flatrate today. Some years ago German telecom used to sell time- or volume-based DSL contracts, and you could configure a timeout in the DSL modem for hangup.
BTW: the UK flag is wrong, I’m in Germany ;)
thanks for the banana. oook!

Constanly shifting preferences in the way things are said and done with computers worries me, not because I’m afraid of new things but because I think that over-specialization is a harbinger of weakness and failure. Alot of these new fancy things don’t really add anything to the experience of using what came before it, and before you know it there is a newer fancier thing that renders what you have obsolete even though it performs the same exact function only marginally faster or larger. Thus older tech can be used to do all kinds of nefarious things without anyone noticing because the have moved on to “better” things.