Nella Daren's rolled-up piano. We already have laser keyboards! Who's want to use an unsophisticated clunky old physical object anymore?
Is there any technology in TNG that's already outdated?
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That's what rocked about the Borg in their first episode; try shooting a missile at a hurricane and see if that will slow it down. Now imagine that the hurricane is intelligent and has a mind to obliterate you.
To me, Locutus just gave a voice to the hurricane and it was my hope that we never saw that kind of thing again. Pity.
I've always suspected that the reason Fermat didn't write down that proof he alluded to in the margin note is that after he wrote that note, he thought about it some more and then realized that he'd been mistaken and his "proof" didn't work at all, so he put the idea aside and never bothered to write a retraction because he had no idea that future mathematicians would be poring over his every idle scribble. True, Wiles seems to have found a proof for that theorem, but that doesn't mean Fermat himself found a valid one.
Kurzweil figures about 20 quadrillion FLOPS, but point taken. And not nearly 100 trillion, it's over 1 quadrillion flops now (IMB's Roadrunner). At this rate we should reach the supposed "raw" processing speed of the human brain within the next decade. Pretty cool.
But you're right, if Data were a modern supercomputer he'd be the 64th fastest system in the world.However:
1) Human brains (and I'll assume Data) don't work like modern supercomputers, and they don't use or process information in the same way. We don't know exactly how our brains work and the assumptions we make about the "speed" of the human brain are wild guesstimates based on comparing things like the number of neurons in the brain to the number of transistors on a microchip.
2) I'm sure you're aware of the size and power consumption required for a modern super computer. Something comparable to Data would be one of the weather computers at NCAR which take up 500 square feet of floor space with six foot tall with servers.
On one hand it would appear that Data is indeed less powerful than a modern supercomputer when pushing brute force calculations, however through clever software and hardware engineering he is self-aware even using the "limited" computing power he does have. It's pretty clear that there is something about the nature of his "positronic" brain that grants him consciousness and that's a technology we certainly don't have the ability to emulate at the moment.
We also aren't anywhere near being able to create a portable computer than can perform 60 Trillion OPS. Ten years perhaps.
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Voice-controlled computers.
This new-fangled "keyboard" thing is much more efficient. Or, in different contexts, light-switches.
This new-fangled "keyboard" thing is much more efficient. Or, in different contexts, light-switches.
That looks like a pretty cool accesory, but it's interesting that it hasn't yet become mainstream enough for its sellers to market it in ways other than "Who is good for?!" and other such statements loaded with !!!s.
I wonder if anyone here has ever used it...it seems like a cool idea at first, but would end up like the remote on the Nintendo Wii, where it's not really as useful as you thought because there's zero user feedback beyond little sound effects. How can you type on a wooden desk, even if the laser keyboard is making click-click sounds? Without the physical feeling of a real keyboard, it seems like typing accurately would be very difficult.
That's one of the reaons why I'm not too enamored with the iPhone, as big of an Apple fan as I am...big thumbs = hard to type. Plus I hate things like the T9 system on cell phones that try to "predict" what you "meant to say;" they're almost 100% consistently wrong.
...
The first flip phone was made by Motorola in 1996, and was named.......
....wait for it......
StarTAC. You do the math.
Okay I admit that I worded that wrong. What I meant to say was kinda the opposite.
"I always thought that flip phones were based on the TOS communicator" should have been what I wrote.
No problemo. I only pointed it out because I remember thinking when the StarTAC came out, 'How cool is that. Now I can get a cell phone that looks like a TOS communicator'.
The funny thing is, 13 years later, the technology exists to almost make the TNG comm badges outdated.
You're denying that the greatest TNG villains of all time looked kinda cool?
What does that sentence have to do with the Borg?
The Borg make lousy villains. They aren't even characters; they're a force of nature. You can't really tell more than one story about battling a force of nature. TNG's producers had to start retconning the whole concept of the Borg as early as their second appearance in order to get any more stories out of them. Initially, in "Q Who," they were only interested in technology and had no interest in people. That's dreadful for storytelling, since stories are about people. So they had to retcon it so that the Borg were suddenly interested in people, specifically Picard. And then they had to do a story about a single drone getting cut off from the Borg and becoming an individual. And then they had him turn a whole bunch of Borg into individuals, change their whole nature, in order to get another story. And then in FC they built on the idea of the Borg assimilating Picard and retconned the whole idea of the Borg so that assimilation was a normal practice for them (in TNG, drones were assumed to be incubated rather than assimilated); basically they turned the Borg into zombies. Not to mention retconning the idea of them still further by giving them a Queen to serve as a personified antagonist. And subsequent Borg stories on VGR were about escapees from the Collective or about the Queen as a personified villain.
So really, the original concept behind the Borg produced exactly one story. Everything else required retconning it more and more as time went on. And that means it really wasn't that good an idea to start with.
I have never agreed with you more than I do right now, and I fear I never shall again, so I'm gonna enjoy the moment.
I propose that the changes to the timeline caused by the events depicted in the two-parter "Past Tense" (which is earlier in S3 than Facets where this is mentioned) caused Wiles to solve Fermat's Last Theory 'early' in the revised timeline (which was otherwise pretty similar!). Clearly O'Brien and Kira beaming out with those hippies watching had a butterfly effect
For we know all our current technology may get destroyed along with all the details how they work in WW3. They start a different way of programming to prevent all that started the war in the first place. A lot of inspiration must of been taken to kick start the new age of new earth. A lot of safe guards must be in place yes???
That wouldn't be very efficient for physical training (a necessity for Starfleet), and there's no reason to assume that vr technology will be that far along by the 24th century. It may simply be that holodeck technology is more advanced than vr by the time the Enterprise D is built. There may also be cultural reasons why vr technology is deemed unacceptable by the Federation (ala the ban on biological enhancements post-Kahn).
I haven't noticed anything that's "outdated". Not holodecks, why the heck would you want VR?; not Data, how many of our "supercomputers" could pilot a jet fighter and actually think and make command decisions? Not communicators that can reach lightyears, or tricorders that can scan for all kinds of variables. Least of all, not computers that can think, analyze, and talk back.
It's not that Data himself is obsolete, it's that there's a function within Data that's implied to be super-impressive, but these days it's not. There's a difference. Clearly it was a case of the writers not thinking very far enough or doing enough research: designs for modern supercomputers are released farrr in advance of the actual product.
So the writers say he's got 60 trillion operations per second, but in Trek reality it's probably many many times that, most likely beyond the human brain's quadrillions.
*****
Anyway, while this doesn't pertain to TNG, I think it pertains more to DS9/VOY/ENT: phaser misses. TNG's phasers almost always hit their targets, so it's not a complaint against them, but it happens semi-frequently in the other three spinoffs.
To wit, here's a Youtube video of the Air Force testing a laser mounted on a flying Boeing jet with a surprising amount of accuracy. Suddenly all those misses by super-destructive weapons aimed by hyper-advanced targeting systems seem a bit ridiculous. (and who wants to bet that the plane was several miles up and perhaps several miles away ahead or behind the target? Compare that to when phasers miss despite ships being only a couple kilometers apart!)
http://www.geekologie.com/2009/10/wow_planemounted_laser_burning.php
Well, it depends on the function. The voice interface on the Enterprise is very sophisticated versus anything we have today, and could almost carry on a conversation with you. There were many times when a voice interface was handy and efficient. Imagine, for example, if Beverly Crusher had to stay still as she was searching for answers in "Remember Me," instead of being able to chat with the computer as she moved about the ship. OTOH, we saw the TNG people using keyboard-like interfaces on many occasions. The voice control of the computer hasn't replaced other methods of input; just supplemented them.
The visual effects in Trek always have to be taken figuratively. There have been occasions where ships have been depicted as being only a few ship lengths apart while spoken dialogue placed them thousands of kilometers apart. If they're far enough for lightspeed time lag to be a factor, then missing is certainly a possibility, particularly since phaser beams are particle beams that travel slower than light.
The episode where the Enterprise is stuck in a deadly asteroid belt and cannot escape no matter how fast it fires the engines. They were caught because Captain Picard wanted to investigate an ancient alien ship never before seen.
Anyway, an away team had discovered "Data Discs" on the alien ship, which turned out to be CDs. From there, Captain Picard was able to view the alien captain's logs and discern that the asteroid belt was a trap. He then piloted the Enterprise out of the asteroid field.
Long story short, CDs are the "obsolete" technology considering thumb drives are more compact and can hold more data these days.
Anyway, an away team had discovered "Data Discs" on the alien ship, which turned out to be CDs. From there, Captain Picard was able to view the alien captain's logs and discern that the asteroid belt was a trap. He then piloted the Enterprise out of the asteroid field.
Long story short, CDs are the "obsolete" technology considering thumb drives are more compact and can hold more data these days.
How figuratively would be my next question. I'm aware of dialogue saying one thing and visuals saying another, so there's a natural conflict between script and FX. Which one do we take?
I'm wary of manipulating figures for the sake of trying to get feats (positive or negative). The one thing that supremely irks me about Star Wars expanded media is how everything we see on screen is retconned, whether they be good or bad. Example: In Return of the Jedi novels and comics, we find that several fighters crashed into the Death Star before Lando and the fleet swerved to avoid it. However, in the movie's visuals themselves, the entire fleet is comfortably far from the Death Star, to the point where you can see the whole thing (it's no moon, but still), and there's no evidence whatsoever of a collision.
Trek has a good habit of not doing that sort of thing, but whenever someone says we have to take the FX figuratively, then I have to wonder just why FX were depicted in such ways in the first place.
Regardless, I'm still very unsure as to how both a Cardassian warship and a Breen vessel seem to miss the Defiant (MUCH bigger than a pick-up truck!) at near point-blank ranges and at matching speeds.
Small targets can be a bitch to hit.
We have a Boeing that can fly at hundreds of MPH and hit the hood of a pickup truck miles away, but we've got ships that can't hit a 5-deck vessel that's less than a ship's length away from a weapon whose discharge is a significant fraction of the target's size. Oh, and both ships are traveling at the same speed, too.
*For reference, I'm citing visuals from "Defiant" and "What You Leave Behind," and in both cases the Defiant is being chased
We also have present-day targeting systems that 'lead' the target (aim ahead, compensate for speed and distance) for improved accuracy, which makes the misses even more suspicious in the Trekverse.
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