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Ten Technologies That Shouldn't Have Died?
Ant wrote to us with an article that's sure to provoke some discussion. The feature highlights some of the technologies that have more or less died off and perhaps shouldn't have.
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Seriously though... The author made some obvious research errors on this. Though many trolley systems were dismantled decades ago, in more recent decades, they've been slowly building them back in places. But the marketing guys now call it... " light rail ". They're still trolleys.
Actually, on several of these things, the technology continues to exist. It just moved on from the original implementation as technology tends to do. Amiga inspired many current desktop video production systems. WordStar is the ancestor of features found in most word processors today.
Then again, he's also getting nostalgic about some technologies that had good reason to fade away. Like airships... Set aside the Hindenburg for a moment and realize that the US Navy had already given up on them before that accident because, even when filled with Helium, they're very sensitive to bad weather. Nearly all the Navy's airships (which were flying aircraft carriers) went down in storms.
I could go on. But it's pretty obvious that the author is calling things dead just because he hasn't followed where the technology went. Or he gets nostalgic about things that he didn't bother to look up the reasons why other technologies left them behind.
It's just another case of a so-called journalist failing to do his homework before writing about technology. Happens all the time.
You forgot, "7. Work's your fat, lazy ass."
What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".
:-)
Fair enough, but you ironically seem to be overlooking that said people's living and travel preferences forces itself on others who have differing preferences, such as to not have people dumping their air pollution all over your property (and everyone elses).
IMHO, the argument that things should not be forced on people cannot easily be used in defense of the automobile, because the choice to use it so extensively by a lot of people has forced considerable and unwanted changes onto a lot of other people.
If anything, I'd argue that the right to choose (extensive car usage) is a lesser right than the right to not to have other people's choices (said extensive car usage) forced upon you.
(And of course, as is usually the case with these things, there are people who quite clearly want to have their cake and eat it too
In my mind, the greatness of WS was the command key navigation that allows one to keep his or her hands efficiently placed on the alpha area of the keyboard. Plus, I like the story about the 4 month development time in assembly...<grin>
What's really cool is the emergency stop mechanism. Which, IIRC, is a big concrete anchor that drops onto the ground, and stops the thing really really quickly.
The first tapes for both were 30 minutes and cost $20. Rapidly 1 hr, 2 hr and 4 hr machines and tapes came out and the two formats were neck and neck. Us copiers for private use were all putting off our next buy when VHS introduced the SLP for six hours until we saw what Beta would do with its 4.5 hour machines.
And sure enough the next Beta release was still 4.5 hours. The cost of blank tapes had gotten down to about $15. Therefore VHS won.
One extra movie per tape when bragging began at having at least 300 movies was real money.
It was not until after the 6 hr machines became the standard that price competition began dropping prices below $1000. One hundred extra movies was $500 savings in tape. Two hundred paid for the recorder.
I truly agree that the Amiga was one of the best PC to hit the market at that time; it was miles ahead of the competition... but, I think the main reason for Amiga's demise was Commodore and nothing else. They just didn't advertise it right! I guess they thought that without any effort in advertising, the Amiga was going to magically obtain the same buying frenzy that their C64s and C128s received previously...but it never happened... Next to Xerox giving away the GUI, this has to be the next biggest blunder in computer history.
Thanks alot Commodore for F#@%king it up!
-slams
See my post below, but it looks like the media guys just wanted to dog on another "outdated" weapons system. The RAM coating works great in rain (after an initial problem with its application).
Bombers are a necessary evil in this world, and I'd just as soon send our warriors into battle with the best available tools. That means expensive ones. It's better than the alternative...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I use pneumatic tubes everytime I visit my Credit Union's motor bank. Sheesh. The "new" rapid transit system in Dallas, Texas is essentially the same as the electric trolley system that once ran from Sherman to Dallas. Only this time, it costs 1000x more to (re)build. Amigas, Apple ][s, and NeXTs liter my house. And they all work. I have my father's 1956 slide rule (and sabre). It is huge, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you that I remember how to use it effectively. But my 1984 HP-15c is the Best Damned Engineering Calculator invented, and I *do* still use it.
The two most common things in the Universe are dark matter and stupidity.
*I* used it. And I use jstar (in *NIX environments) and Qedit (Win/DOS environments) now. Why? Because the control key navigation combos are so efficient. Your hands never have to leave the alpha area of the keyboard. Plus, I'd have to break an 18+ year habit to become efficient with vi!
The why Betamax having better image quality was hit down by VHS is because VHS was an open format to makers.
Imagine a network based on pneumatic tube technologi;
/or Token Tube) based protocol would rule.
You would pack 150 cdroms into a tubeshaped cannister, and then send the round, screaming down the Tube. Sure, latency would be a bitch, but what bandwith!
Pneumatic devices would not only drive the cannisters, but help them deaccelerate, while regaining some of the energy.
Of course, such a tubenetwork could not be based on a optimistisc protocol, like TCP/IP, since 'packet' collisions would be rather messy. So some kind of Token Ring (Broken Ring
Such a Token Tube system, should be implemented with reliable old style, electrical relays (and preferable valves/tubes too). One could of course place an automatic watch on each cannister, as a primitive form of network time protocol replacement; their self-winding nature, would fit
perfectly with a rugged tube ride.
Packet, or rather, cannister sniffing would be hard to do, but experienced network admins, could
press their ears to the tube, listen to the 'clickety-clicks', and muffled 'whoooumphhh's, and say "Thar she blows. I know that sound; thats the spring edition of Dead Rat 2010, being rolled out."
New breathtaking TLA's like T2T(Tube-to-Tube) technologi, would emerge. Users would send wax-cylinders to each other, on private tubes.
Wax-tubes would be easy to reuse (RWT= Rewriteable Wax Tubes): smother the wax, and cut a new track on it, by using their Amigas (Which, would probably rule as a sound wax-cutter too). Buissness men could use the the RWT as dictation systems (preferably using a ribbon mic), and send it by tube to the secretary, who could type the memo, using Wordstar 2000.
Zeppelins? Well, there would probably be problems sending cannisters across the atlantic. So Zeppelins would be an obvious long distance carrier choice; just haul some tons of DLT tapes in it, and send it away.
Trans atlantic network propagandation would be like some extremely slow, extremely high bandwith version of UUCP. (The Zeppelin navigators, would of course use slide-rulers)
"You think I'm some newcomer dotcommie? "
Trying to smoke them out. No worries.
A bit like a Soviet general who was once comparing his country's fighter planes to those of the US - "American planes", he said, "are like fine ladies' watches: drop watch; watch breaks. Soviet planes are like Mickey Mouse clocks: drop clock, clock stops; pick up clock and shake it, clock goes"
There's always a trade-off between performance (Ferrari) and efficiency (Toyota).
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
However, burning data (especially data like CDDA) at speeds above 2 or 4 speed can fail spectacularly for no apparent reason. Discs burned at high speeds are frequently unreadable by anything other than a CD burner. If you want to be very sure that everyone can play what you burn, you must stick with double speed or less. Mind you, double speed is nearly twice as fast as burning a whole CD, but there are other advantages to Minidisc, not the least of which is that a minidisc player is on average about half of the volume of a CD player. Another is that you can treat it like a tape deck, and record to it from an analog source. This is also not exceptionally fascinating, but it does work all right.
I haven't ever seen a consumer-level CD player which used caddies, but there are a number of pro-level decks still on the market which use them. You can also still get caddy-loading CDROM and CD-R drives, most notably from plextor. However, caddies are not cheap. You're probably better off just treating your CDs well and being careful with them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The overwhelming advantage of discs over cylinders is that the disc could be manufactured in a press, which drastically cut their costs. The wax cylinders had to be cut one at a time from a master that tended to wear out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/images/pao/ST S53/100653 90.jpg
It still does, to me. I grew up in apartments, not during any wars or depressions. I hated it - playing in streets, or on rooftops, surrounded by dirty grey concrete and black asphalt, like some kind of Dickensian or Doctorowian urchins. We later moved into the suburbs, and by comparison that little 1/8th acre seemed like heaven on earth.
Yes, I'll admit Wordstar had it's points but I still say Volkswriter was the WP of the time (at least around S.F.U. Comp Sci labs) It was reasonably powerful and easy to use and fit on a single 1.2MB 5.25" disk, two if you wanted the spell checker.
Sadly, it was also crushed out of the market.
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
You know, that is more ironic than I intended.
Trollys didn't die, they are now called Light Rail. If you want to know why they are a bad thing, look at this page on the Monorail site. They deserved to die. Trollys/light rail has killed, and keeps killing people every year. The only safe transit is off-grade transit.
--
Joe Hamelin
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
A technology that shouldn't have died? AM STEREO!!
I surprised no one has mentioned this yet. I hope I get some responses. (Hey, Taco, how about setting the default view to "newest first"?)
(What follows is a brief synopsis. You can find all sorts of information and everything you ever wanted to know about AM stereo by going here.)
Back in the early '80s, there were a lot of AM music stations. AM radio sounded tinny and mono, while FM was crisp, clear, and stereophonic. There was legislation in many countries requiring FM stations to water down their content to help the AM stations compete, but the AM stations couldn't count on that legislation to be around forever. And with so much music on AM, there was a desire from both listeners and broadcasters to have better sound quality.
In 1982, four competing methods for broadcasting higher-quality stereophonic sound on AM while maintaining backward compatibility with existing AM radios were proposed. But the FCC, instead of quickly deciding on one as the standard, decided to try a "free market" approach. They would allow broadcasters to use which ever stereo-encoding method they wanted, and allow electronics manufacturers to support which every method they wanted. It was felt that after a few years one method would dominate and could be approved as the standard.
However, with no encoding method approved as the official standard, very few AM stereo radios were built. What if a company spent loads of time and money building a radio for one stereo-encoding method, only to have another emerge as the standard?
So, throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, many AM stations pumped out clearer, FM-like sound, but the listeners could only hear the familiar, tinny, monaural squawking they were used to, and probably wondered what the DJs were talking about when they ID'd their station as "The new WQZX, 1530 AM stereo!"
In 1993, the FCC finally approved a standard, but by then it was too late.
I can remember listening, as a kid and a teenager, to my town's top 40 station, which was AM. I always wished I could hear them in stereo. I knew that a handful of car radios supported AM stereo, but I never knew why no home receiver did. Eventually, the FM content restrictions were relaxed, and a top 40 FM station went on the air and quickly replaced my local AM top 40 station as my station of choice.
Eventually, the top 40 AM station switched to an all-sports format, but not before having one last try at keeping their music format: During their last year, they switched to an all dance-music format. They also played a lot of very new music. I always heard the newest stuff first on the AM station. But I always wished they would move to FM so I could hear them in stereo. Why they didn't, I'll probably never know.
Recently, I started working at a radio station, so a lot of my questions about AM stereo, this "phantom technology", were answered. I recently bought an AM stereo radio from eBay. You must realize that AM stereo isn't just tinny, squawking sound in stereo -- normal AM stations have a frequency cutoff at 2.5 kHz. AM stereo stations cut off at 7.5 kHz. It's still not quite as good as FM, but it's a lot better than regular AM. I'm not sure why regular AM radios don't pick up the extended frequency range. Perhaps they filter out anything above 2.5 kHz as if it were noise.
Anyway, there's only four AM stations left in my town, and only one plays music -- oldies. Only one of the four stations (not the oldies one) still transmits in stereo, the others having given up on it due to the lack of support.
The one remaining AM stereo has a news/talk format. It's kind of cool to hear their station IDs in stereo. Every Sunday, though, they send a few DJs to a local record store to play samples of new CDs on the radio for half an hour. This is the one time I ever get to hear AM stereo music, and let me tell you, it's heavenly. If only I had known about all this when I had a top 40 AM station!
It's not quite like listening to a CD, but it's a nice taste of a wonderful technology from the past that just wasn't given a chance...
Once again, go here to learn more about AM stereo radio.
-- Rahoule
It's a pity you don't know how a slide rule works - it gives you enormous insight into logarithms. And you'll actually see (or at least experience in some fashion) the consequences of logarithmic relationships all the time - you probably just don't know enough to realise it. Queueing theory for instance depends on it heavily, and most real operating systems depend on queueing theory.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
This is why 98% of U.S. commuters favor public transportation for others.
Look, you want to know why streetcars died off? Want to know why the US is dominated by suburban growth? Do you want facts?
Now all of the following is paraphrased in the book Perpetual Motion : The History of an Obsession by Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, which is a book I highly recommend.
:)
Back in the 1760's the clockmaker James Cox and his assistant, Joseph Merlin, built a clock that never, ever needed to be wound, and would theoretically run until the parts wore out from mechanical wear. The clock was driven by a series of weights, and all of the moving surfaces were jeweled to reduce wear. The entire thing was enclosed in a clear case to limit dust. The clock was driven by changes in atmospheric pressure, it had a large mercury barometer filled with 150 lbs of mercury. This was more then enough power to drive the clock, a mechanism had to be added to the design to automatically disengage the winding wheel when the clock was wound up. Even without the barometer, the clock was so perfectly balanced that it could run for a year without any power after being wound up. The clock itself still exists, according to the book, it was aquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum where it is on display in one of the public galleries, but it has been drained of all mercury and thus is no longer operating. When the author visited the clock, it didn't even have a label to describe it.
Anyways, its a good book, I recommend it, especially if you find it in the 50% off bin of the local Barnes & Nobels like I did.
After reading that chapter, I had the following ideas:
Mercury may not be the cheapest or the most environmentally friendly material today, but there is nothing to stop us from making clocks and watches that are highly efficient and gain energy by a small change in atmospheric pressure, or even another means, such as an expansion of a metal with a change in temperature. The barometric-driven watches would have the improvement over the kinetic watches of not having to be worn to be kept wound, and we are not to the point of regulating air pressure in our houses and offices yet. The temperature-driven watches also probably could be made efficient enough to "recharge" themselves even with the minute variations of a climate controlled building, but the added efficiency might increase costs. I don't see any reason why neither watch could be made air-tight, although with the barometric watches, the barometer would have to be at least partially incorperated into the casing.
With the advantage that they don't have to be worn to be charged, I think the barometric watches could compete very favorable with kinetic watches.
Actually, one of the major selling points of the Beta format was the tape path: simpler, less twists and turns, which made it much more reliable - both the media and the player. Before "professional/consumer" became a real difference in Beta, you would see the format popping up in all sorts of repeat-play environments, instead of VHS. Airlines have been using Beta for many years.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Another thing is that many artists that were around for the beginning of the tracker scene are still using trackers to do their music, then converting the wave output to MP3.
Ow! My eye! Which one? The one on the floor. ---Action Quake2 exchange, after catching 5 M4 rounds to the head.
I was going to cut you some slack for overlooking obvious counterexamples, but not after you mention toasters. While modern toasters integrate power to arrive at optimal toasting, their springs are weak, often you can't raise the toast extra high, and they only last about 3 years.
;-)
* Every motherboard I've owned with an IDE chipset has given me grief after 2 to 3 years. However, the IDE controller card from my 486 worked at least until I stopped using the 486--for a total of about 4 years. I assume it is still working.
* My Western Digital 9 year-old 80MB hard drive still works, as does my 5 year-old 1.2 GB Connor CFA12xxa (don't remember exactly), but I've had a couple Maxtors fail on me w/in 3 years. The Connor still gets regular use, but the WD doesn't.
* My first pair of Adidas "torsion" indoor soccor shoes had really nice leather and lasted over a year (this was the first generation). The next generation were plasticy and didn't last long (say, half a year).
* Computer cases used to be damn-near bullet-proof (some were, in fact, bullet-proof) and never once cut me. Moder cases get bent when UPS drops them (i.e. every time they're shipped with UPS) and cut me more often.
* The previous generation of Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner were better (less volume went farther, better effects on hair) then the current generation. However, the current generation costs $0.50 more and I haven't seen it on sale once.
* My HP 550c inkjet printer rocked. My HP 612c sucks. Not only is the print quality much lower, and it makes lots of funny groaning noises (as does every other 612c I've heard), but it doesn't have as much manual control.
* Recording engineers have gone down the tubes. Old recording almost always sound better. DDD recordings offer no benefits if the engineer had tin ears. This example even includes the word 'engineer', so it should be doubly weighted.
* I think staplers have mostly gotten worse, but I'm not really sure.
* Bread quality really sucks these days. You have to work damn hard to find good bread in a supermarket.
* CPU fans (socket 7, anyway) are junk. Oh, wait, my 486 fan was junk, too.
* It's hard to get a keyboard (a cheap one, anyway) without those damned Win95 keys.
I guess I've gone a little astray on this. Not all of these are engineering examples, but I feel better having publicly posted this gripe list.
-Paul Komarek
Yeah, so? Does that render AmigaDE more unreal??
Bjarne
Street cars were perfect in that environment. The lines ran from the residential to the working part of town on straight streets. As the city grew the streets were simply extended along with the trolley rails.
But suburbs were designed to get away from the city. They were much less densely populated. They required people to have cars just to get groceries so there were even fewer potential passengers.
Bull. I live in Japan right now. I've yet to see anything betamax, but everyone has a VHS VCR.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
So is this: In my experience, Beta has better image quality, recovers from fast-forward and rewind much more quickly than VHS, and has better sound quality. I have a Beta Deck made by Sony (obviously) which has never been repaired and which works as well as it ever did, which is in fact quite well. Unfortunately, it's now missing the little door that goes over some of the controls, and I don't have the remote. Other than that it's a top-notch deck.
That's true. Then again, its not like I've never had a VHS deck eat a tape.
Thankfully, anecdotal evidence is seldom believed, even by the /. masses.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Germans were pretty stupid to insist on Hydrogen rather than Helium, I agree.
But airships crashed, no mather who built them. One of them, made in Italy, crashed on its way to the North Pole. The USA built two aircraft carrier airships, which carried about ten very small and lightweight fighter planes each. One of them crashed off the Califorinia coast, its debris were found in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean a few years ago, National Geographic reported that. Its twin crashed over land, during a storm.
Remember, airships must be "lighter than air". Even assuming stronger materials are available today, certainly "heavier than air" machines built with the same materials will always be more robust.
Bring Bob Back!
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
The rest, I miss.
John
John
Beta rules.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Seems somer of these devices weren't fully setup out of the box. They needed some calibration such as the mic to keep in proper working order. We also seem to lose some tools because something new comes out. Who in you work area doesn't want to play with new toys?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Where I work, we still offer pneumatic valves for the mobile industrial and marine markets that were designed in WWII. Nobody wants to buy them for a new machine design becuase they are too expensive... but we still sell the serviceable parts for them, because they are still in use, sixty-plus years later! And _that_, Virginia, is why things today seem to be of lesser 'quality' (which is a subjective term to begin with) than these old gems.
Regards, timf.
super beta is like super vhs. I think what you meant was betacam ?
A German company produces Airships for cargo transport. Their website is here.
Arleo
There are 3 companies making them, now: Royer (as mentioned), Beyer and Coles. That's more than there ever were.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Does anyone else find this as cool as I do?
Perhaps Hydrogen wasn't as dumb an idea as it seems.
We drive about in cars filled with nasty exploding or burnable gasoline. You take a risk with any form of energy, or transport, and you try to pick the best you can. Go back to 1960 detroit and say "plastics are the future, or and so are carbon" and you'd get laughed out by the engineers. Or, how about the concept that the lowest voltage you can effectivly switch a transistor for computers was 5 volts. We today may think hydrogen is a dumb idea, but it MAY be the way we'll move about in the future.
points out how hydrogen is not what was the inital problem, but how it was the 'skin'.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
In france, they are rebuiliding streetcar : They near completly desappeare in 1966 (only 3 town had still one) but reapeared since 1986 in 8 twon at least (Nantes, Grenoble, PAris, Rouen, Lille, Strasbourg, Saint-Etienne and recently Lyon). They have discover that : there cheaper to build than subway, and better for the environement than bus and car.
Comparing Minidisc to MP3 is like comparing your hard drive to warez. MP3 is a file type; Minidisc is a storage medium. Apples and Oranges, don't you see??
A look back at the past 15 years of development and I get depressed. Disclaimer: I developed on Macs and alternative micros; my company was squashed by MS (our scroller mouse); I'm an inventor currently paying the bills working in marketing (gaagh!)
1. the Dream: OpenDoc
the Killer: Microsoft OLE
a Saviour: ??
2. the Dream: common sense
the Killer: (any) Microsoft product
3. the Dream: universal HTML
the Killers: Microsoft, Netscape
4. the Dream: universal Linux usability
the Killers: Linux own success
5. the Dream: free, knowledgeable Tech Support
the Killer: ridiculous price wars
6. the Dream: reliable, low-bug-count software
the Killer: the Microsoft upgrade cycle
7. the Dream: alternatives to MS Office
the Killers: Microsoft, IT managerial greed
8. the Dream: IEEE-1394 on PCs
the Killers: Intel, USB, and Apple!!
9.
(excuse my poor grammar and boring presentation, but I'm a highly educated American, but lazy as sin.)
More like 120MB - MDs use a fixed, 224kbps ATRAC encoding scheme. Unless, that is, you have one of the newer crop of decks (JE440, JE640, whatever) that supports 'long play', in which case it can also use the so-called 'ATRAC3' to allow MP3-size files and thus around 2-4 hours on a single MD at ~MP3 quality (128kbps).
I say so-called because it's not really ATRAC 3.. that was released quite some time ago, and has since been superseded by ATRACs 4, 4.5, and Type R (the latest). IIRC, the only real reason for calling it ATRAC3 was to leverage the public knowledge of the MP3 name. *shrug*
Incidentally, there are a few MD products around that do allow data, but at the expense of audio *sigh*, including the MD Mavica (uses the MD Data2 disc, 640 MB, built in web server, java, etc.. cool stuff), a nifty looking dual MD book-sized PDF reader, and a couple of other things, which you can't get outside Japan.
The only MD drive for PCs that was ever released required odd-looking and rather incompatible MD Data disks.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake..
Namely The Amiga, which I used faithfully (and profitably!) for 5 years, just about every single model manufactured for the U.S. market, Zepplins, which I have a special love for, perhaps because I'm a big Miyazake fan, and push mowers, which my dad used exclusively to mow the lawn at our house.
What I didn't see was anything remotely controversial, such as the works of Nikola Tesla. Over half of his research papers are still classified by the U.S. government. The man did amazing and revolutionary things with energy conversion, and we have yet to see the benefit of many of his ideas. Food for thought...
Mike Massee
what?!
clay in a sword? no.
damascus type blades are made by either alternating layers of high and low carbon steel, or layers of steel and some other metal, which are then hammered and folded repeatedly. (this isn't taking into account wire damascus, which is made by hammering wire rope).
japanese blades are typiclly folded more than damascus, to create more layers.
the clay used when making a japanese blade coats it during heat treating as insulation to create a differential temper. the edge is hard and will stay sharp. the back of the blade is softer and will flex to keep the blade from breaking.
There's no way a reel mower makes even close to the same amount of noise a gas one does. One of the reasons I use the reel is that I can talk on the phone, or to my kids, while I mow. Makes a big difference.
The safety thing with the kids is a big deal for me, too. (Mom's a doctor, and has seen her share of lawn mower injuries.)
New phones, TV's and such seem to all have crappy RF shielding. Sure, they've gotten tons cheaper, but when you have to buy and return a bunch because they either emit tons of RF or can't handle being within a few miles of a transmitter...
People can still fix their own cars, it just takes a few more tools and books. (I'm currently replacing a head gasket on one of my cars instead of my mechanic, partly to save money, partly because I want to see what else I think should be fixed while I'm in there...)
I saw a program on it recently. Some ex-NASA guy did some research into the Hindenburg crash. He reckoned that the pictures of the explosion didn't look much like a hydrogen fire; hydrogen burns with a fairly dim blue flame and the pictures of the Hindenburg are a good deal more dramatic than that. He came up with an alternative theory.
He claims the canvas skin of the Hindenburg was coated with aluminium powder to reflect sunlight and stop the tanks heating up. There was also iron oxide present (I can't remember why). The Hindenburg landed in the middle of a storm so it must have been carrying a pretty big charge. When it dropped its mooring ropes, only part of the structure was earthed and an arc was struck between the earthed and unearthed parts of the ship. The thermite ignited. Instant firework.
The programme claimed the Zeppelin company knew about this all along and told no-one for dark insurance reasons of their own; this was probably the ObConspiracyTheory most modern science programmes feel obliged to include to keep Joe Sixpack tuned in.
It was on TV so it must be true!
Boogie nights isn't porn. It's about porn (at the start of the video era).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Pneumatic tubes: Still in use in the drive-up teller lanes of almost every bank in the country.
Amiga: Great technology -- for 1984. But software availability, not hardware or OS, are what sells computers. And as the author himself says, the Amiga IS making a comeback, at least in name.
WordStar: The user interface SUCKED! But I'm sure there are still editors out there that will emulate it for you.
Wax Cylinder: Forget to open your windows in the summer, and the damn things MELT! Can anybody name even one thing that a wax cylinder does better than digital media? Anybody out there wanna back up their hard drive to a wax cylinder? No, didn't think so.
Slide Rule: Offers much less precision than a microprocessor, but it sure is slower AND harder to learn to use! In side-by-side compairison, skilled abacus users were able to add columns of numbers faster than hand-held calculator, so I can see still using those (and some people still do). I can't imaging ANYBODY prefering a slide rule to a digital computer.
Reel Mower: Used one; didn't like it. Simple to difficult to push to mow more than 100 sqare feet or so, and, due to the complete lack of sheilding on the blades, probably more dangerous than a power mower. And, does it mulch or bag your clippings for you? Don't think so. Wanna go back to old tech, try using sheep or goats instead...
Automatic Watch: Ever seen the Seiko Kinectic watch? It's self winding... and also about 3 times as large and heavy as your basic quartz electric watch.
Airship: Ok, of the ten of these, this is the only one I actually agree with! These could be used for selective logging, instead of low earth orbit satellites, as construction cranes, to replace most of the low-speed applications of helicopters, etc. instead of just as advertising billboards. With new materials and solar technology, these could be much cheaper than heavier than air planes. However, their performance in high winds probably still leaves something to be desired.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
And you always tried to keep the files as small as you could.
Well why not implement a MODule format where the instruments would be encoded in mp3 ?
No more restriction on the sample size! I Think for techno or dance it would be great, as those are pretty deterministic music. Back then, dance MODs were limited in accuracy because the samples of the girl singing bullshit a la "Talata the real thing..." were just too long. With mp3 compression no more problem such problems, and modern CPUs are largely capable of decompressing multiple samples at the same time.
As a matter of fact cities not giving in to the rise of the subway system are real happy campers today, since it's sorta nice not being damned to a filthy, smelly underground when using public transport and it's also good for tourism. Problems such as clogged streets where solved with dedicated tracks and clever traffic flow control systems. Zurich, despite the fact that it relies mostly on street cars, is considered the most punctual and reliable public transport system in Europe (yes they really do run according to time tables).
The automatic watch has'nt and quite certainly will not go away. Especially in the medium to high price sector buyers scoff on quartz watches. This makes sense when you consider coughing up 2'000$ to finally get the same $1.75 watch mechansism as you have in a Swatch.
A few of the most reputed Swiss watch manufaturers (i.e. Vecheron Constantin) never did and (according to their marketing spiel) never will manufacture a quartz watch.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I thought thats why we pay such high taxes on gasoline purchases....
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
The Germans were pretty stupid to insist on Hydrogen rather than Helium, I agree.
Nope. At the time, the only source for helium was the United States and the US government wouldn't sell it to Germany. Thus, the Germans had no other choice but hydrogen.
What about games on PDA's? I enjoy them greatly, and going back to a black and white screen with a very low resolution is like playing games on black and white PCs with CGA graphics. Hey, they're even the same games! Frogger, Digger, etc... :-)
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Calculating by hand is what you should be doing until you start getting into some fairly advanced mathematics at university. I'm in third comp. sci., having completed 7 mathematics courses, and it is only very rarely that I've actually had to use my calculator.
Doing calculations by hand forces you to actually know how to compute stuff.
Well, trollies were definitely pushed out of a few cities by force from GM and others. Minneapolis is one example. I guess I don't know how loud the trollies were, but I'd bet they were quieter than the diesel junkers that rumble past my apartment at all hours of the day.. Hopefully, more buses will run off of `quieter' fuels or electricity in the coming years..
Pneumatic systems are pretty neat, but e-mail and alphanumeric pagers are wonderful things..
I understand that the Amiga was pretty good, though I don't really understand the idea of hooking a computer up to a TV as the primary display..
The ribbon mic sounds pretty cool..
Wax cylinder? Hah! You couldn't even stamp them out, could you?
Slide rules should probably be a little more common. Heck, with all of the calculators these days where you can store notes within them, slide rules are a good way to make sure that nobody is cheating..
The reel mower sure looks cool, but I have my doubts about it.. My family just got an electric mulching mower, which is quite a bit quieter than a gas-powered one (though not exactly whisper-quiet..), and it seems to do the job. (I haven't tried yet, but I think it's actually quiet enough to listen to a walkman while mowing..)
The automatic watch is not a bad idea, and there are new designs that use the same technique to charge a battery which runs a quartz movement. Still, most watches will last a few years on just one battery..
Lastly, the airship is coming back, last I heard.. However, they're using modern materials like carbon fiber. Maybe hydrogen should come back too, but perhaps not in the US (where gun nuts are happy to shoot at anything.. NASA has to cover their parts, including stuff for the shuttle, with bullet-proof cowlings whenever they are transported by train..)
--
As long as you are messing around with small prototypes you are stuck with crummy lift.
But once the breakthrough is made and they start building BIG ones then the lift REALLY starts to get impressive.
They might never be great for shipping bricks
But for moving massy, yet light things around quickly they might well prove to be big winners
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
are spreadsheets and wordprocessors two things that haven't really improved due to GUI's?
What you see is what you get is very nice, as is the ability to see good representations of graphs that you make in spreadsheets. However, if you really mastered the keyboard controls of WordStar, WordPerfect, Lotus123, or Quattro, then you could fly around those things like crazy.
In days long gone, I used both push-type and electric-powered reel mowers on Bermuda and St Augustine grasses. No problem as long as I didn't catch a stick or a pebble.
I wouldn't do it again, though.
Yes, but it is still being used in those markets where it was succesfull, so that doesn't change a single bit. Beta is not dead, neither has it died in the past.
Electric buses (which the Municipal Railroad calls trolleys) are used extensively. There are 173 miles of overhead lines for these busses (source). In addition, there is an under- and above-ground light rail system which serves many parts of the city. The system is underground along market street, and above ground everywhere else. Finally, surface street cars are operated on Market street. This is known as the "F" line, which employs many historic street cars retired from other cities' transit systems.
Given that the article doesn't mention Toronto as a user of streetcars, what credibility does it have?
BUZZ, try again. Tools are of higher quality today then they were 50 years ago. Do not compare the junk of today (Which won't last long before being thrown out) with the quality stuff of yesterday. Rest assured they made junk before WWII just as much as they do today. The junk didn't last and so you don't see it. The quality stuff did last and you can see it today.
Compare a modern Snap-On or Chraftsman wrench with one from 75 years ago and you will be ahrd pressed to find any difference. This is one however: the old tool has sustained some wear which could be measured. (The new tool will do the same them over 75 years)
Likewise for the rest. Modern manufactureing has brought down the price of junk significantly, but the cost of quality hasn't been impacted much. Thus the old Crafdtsmen table saws were expensive but affordable quality compared to junk, but todays chraftsmen table saws are affordable junk while todays much higher quality table saws are expensive but affordable.
There is a saying in third world countries that product most of this junk: Only amercians can afford to buyn junk. Thus the person in those countries who needs a tool is more likely to buy the quality tool (Often made in the US, but not always) or do without.
I piss of all my co-workers by doing it, but i do all my editing in joe or jed set to wordstar mode. When i was a kid i had a Franklin Ace 1000, and the word processor i had for that emulated wordstar in one particular mode. Then when i learned C, Borland Turbo C 2.0 had wordstar commands, and now i'm still using them. So fast, so nonsense free.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Well, WordStar's still my favorite word processor.
Vi's a necessary evil, but it works and troff's ok.
Remember Ctl-hjkl is just there because those were the cursor control keys on an ADM3A.
Wordstar lives. Too bad MicroPro didn't open source it.
Wordstar on Unix with an X previewer.
Yyyyeeessss.
--Bill
Even though I inherited it (and maybe because) it's the best watch I've ever had.
If some street thug tried to mug me for it I'd die first. I also know 3 other people in my office that have Omega Seamasters. Theirs are new ones though so I don't know if they're self-winding anymore.
One jewler I took my watch to to be valued thanked me profoundly for letting this watch pass through his hands!
I definitely do not think automatic watched should have been on this list.
The Rev.
Yeah, its pretty nice. I use vnc constantly. God bless AT&T! (well, when they're not screwing up my long distance bill, anyways).
...the Compaq Concerto! The best non-server computer Compaq ever made. Designed beautifully: use it a tablet, use it as a normal laptop, attach a monitor to it and you can make annotations on the screen using the laptop...It never found its niche. I still carry one with me when troubleshooting at some client's offices downtown, loaded with diag tools I'll need and many times I've walked into some VIP's office who has the up-to-the-second technological this-week's-wonder and he'll see me operating it with its RF-based pen and he'll say "Where can I get one of those?! Looks like something out of The Jetsons!" and sadly I'll tell him it got discontinued many years ago.
There's a fan club for the Concerto somewhere on the net which has tips for running Linux and Win95 on it. I think that if Compaq were to dust off the molds and fit it up with a color screen and a contemporary processor it would fly high.
And there's no better way to avoid wrist injuries and strain from repeated movements than use a pen on a screen that's responding to you directly.
I wish they were still available! or barring that, some similar design at a reasonable price.
You can get a sharpening kit for a reel mower that isn't expensive... It consists of an abrasive paste and a hand crank to spin the reel. I have a postage stamp yard, and the reel mower is perfect. Meanwhile, my neighbor (with an equally small yard) justifies his gas mower purchase by mowing the front yards for half the block. I approve heartily, because I hate yardwork.
I agree. The Newton was too big and too expensive, but it was way ahead of its time. The first time I used a Palm Pilot, I was floored to find out that you couldn't just write anywhere on the screen, but rather had to write in one little box and only one letter at a time. This is probably why I still haven't bought a Palm. There's no way to take notes on it, as far as I can tell.
With the Newton, you could just start writing and the thing would do handwriting recognition for whole words or sentences at a time. The original model (MessagePad 100) didn't do this version well, but the model I had, MessagePad 120, did a quite amazing job of it. And you wrote normal letters, not Graffitti-speak.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
They are building this Airship in Friedrichshafen, a town at the lake of constance where they also built most of the great Airships of our century, including the Hindenburg. And this Airship has the same name as all his ancient brothers: ZEPPELIN.
for further information take a look at the hompage of "Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH".
philipp
For the most part I would agree with you. Though I think you have missed one additional problem with the initial cost of public transportation. In most cities that grow without enough forethought, the private roadway system will have been established for decades before a public system becomes needed. Then in order to retrofit a public rail or similar fixed system onto the existing infrastructure, you have the cost to both build the new system and rebuild the old. Private transportation is a fact of American life which, at least for the meantime, will have to be accepted unless there is a major social change in people's travel habits.
You can't burn anything without oxygen, anyway. That's a known quantity. This is not a shock. I can, however, assure you that gaseous hydrogen will burn quite nicely when you have oxygen around to combine with it.
Technically, fluorine can support combustion, too. IIRC, this works:
H2 + F2 -> 2HF
Boo-urns.
Yeah, I did the same KOTR - Counter-Mime trick as well. I also hooked up Phoenix to a Final Attack, just in case. It helped me out against Ruby.
Hey, do you know what that sleeping guy in the cave through the mines past the midgar zolom (whew, that's a mouthful) does?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Steetcars didn't die all over the world!
Nearly every European city too small or cheap to have a subway system has an extensive "tram" or streetcar system. Zurich has possibly the most efficient system. Amsterdam the most extensive. Milan the cutest. Strasbourg the most slick/modern.
Most of these cities also suppliment the streetcars with a modern trolly-bus fleet. Some cities like Luasanne and Montreux have a trolly bus only transport system.
As well as being quick and reliable most of these systems compete effectivlely against cars because there is simply no b*****d place to park in older cities.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
>I think we should stick with horses: they are pretty harmless and they eat grass that's available everywhere.
Which then produce gas we can run our cars on!!!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
"...it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth."
And the same 10 minutes of casual research can unearth mountains of material that support it too. It's all a matter of what you choose to believe.
"Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s."
Yes this is true, but what also happened in the late 1920's hmm? Don't you think more people would be riding the streetcars if they actually had a job to go to? An important point to remember about this time is that the streetcar companies were not allowed to raise their fares either. Therefore, with ridership going down and fares staying the same the revenue goes down. When revenue goes down there isn't enough money to maintain and upgrade the system. When this happens people start to view streetcars (and interurbans and steam railways that had the same problems) as seedy and run-down. They then think that these shiny new buses are the wave of the future. Everything was against the streetcars in the 30's 40's and 50's. Also, during the war the systems couldn't extend routes or improve service because of materials shortages. I could be wrong about this, but I think at least one streetcar line in Cincinnati was coverted to trolleybus simply so they could pull up the rails and melt them down for the war.
"Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered."
This is both a good and a bad thing. Because of all the infrastructure needed for streetcar lines, it instills a sense of permanence and investment in the community. These days it's no big deal if a bus runs through a neighborhood, in fact it's probably a NIMBY situation. When a streetcar ran through on the other hand, it was a big deal. The presence of a streetcar line built many inner city and near suburb business districts. These places worked, because the streetcar was reliable, and it (seemed) would always be there. With buses, there's none of that security. A major bus route can be re-routed almost at whim, and since many fewer people ride the bus than streetcars, it doesn't really matter anymore where it goes.
Forgive me as I start to digress.
It could almost be argued that the demise of streetcars was just as important as the building of highways in destroying American cities. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, but in most cases they were. Think about the situation for a moment. After WWII the streetcar systems were in disrepair after being forced to make due with what they had. The systems needed overhauls and expansions to serve the new suburbs that were being built. Instead, the government decided that new highway funding was the way to go. Funds were focused on these new roads and on the new car suburbs they were subsidizing. Because the roads allowed people to spread out much farther there wasn't enough population density to support streetcar lines anyway. These highways cut through the older streetcar suburbs and the inner city, thus breaking apart a lot of that feeling of community investment and stability. As the streetcars continued to decline, so did the areas they once supported. Ridership went down further and eventually the lines were replaced by buses. Unfortunately buses don't have nearly as much appeal as streetcars, so most people who can drive will drive, instead of taking the bus. This disrupts old streetcar line business districts. Since people aren't taking the streetcars or buses, there are fewer people to support the stores. There's also competition from malls and new strip shopping centers. Stores in the old business districts start to close, or be replaced with less appealing tenants. Since most people have to drive there now, there's a lack of parking and traffic gets congested. The people who lived in the streetcar neighborhoods pack up and leave for one of the new suburban developments in hopes of escaping the traffic congestion of the now seedy neighborhood.
"Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles."
That's not true. Light rails, commuter rails, rapid transit, subways and the like require dedicated rights-of-way. Streetcars share the road just like buses. Why do you think they're called STREETcars? I will agree that this is a problem for both, as they are subject to the whim of traffic. However, since a broader range of people tend to ride trains than do busses, there would be fewer people driving on those streets that have a streetcar line. Hence, it's not as big of a problem.
If American cities didn't place such a focus on highways and kept investing in the streetcar systems we wouldn't be having so many problems with sprawl, traffic and urban decay. Los Angeles used to have a great streetcar system, now look at it. Many people today stress that the current way of development epitomizes the American way of capitalism with the private automobile and the freedom to live however you choose. The problem is that this view is blind. Streetcar systems were run by private companies with private investment and supported mostly by fares and parent companies. In many cities, there were a handful of companies running different lines. It wasn't until the Depression and after that many of them started consolidating and being taken over by the government. It took the massive Interstate Highway Program, government subsidization, buying out of lines and strict zoning to give us the so-called freedom of today. But what if you want to live near the city and don't want to drive to work? Good luck. Nice city neighborhoods tend to be expensive, and while buses do tend to run over old streetcar routes, the service is certainly not what it used to be.
You can cry conspiracy or debunk it all you want, but the fact remains that streetcars were better, and there was an effort by the powers that be to eliminate them.
Jeffrey Jakucyk
jeffreyjakucyk@flashmail.com
Running "forward" (forward being an arbitary direction) blindly is usually not progress.
More often than not, you'll run into a tree, off a cliff, or into someone else.
Addison
Well, I grew up in city where the tramway was never given up. And your point about the density of population is good : for example, in europe the problem is totally different.
Go look into a history of rebirth of the tramway in france (babelfish required). To summarize up : the tramway and related transport died in the 50th because the personnal cars and other related transport where more politically correct, and because the public network was old (pre WW-II).
But at the end of the "glorious 30th", the oil crisis triggered a new interest for electric public transports. Since 1974 the number of electric streecars has been growing. Nowadays, the number of towns equipped with electric ground transport is around 10, counting major players like Paris, Lyon, Strazbourg, etc. The number of people deserved by those transport by well account for half of the french population.So, the electric car is dead ? Surely not, even in the US.
For those of you interested here is a list of links to rail transportation-related museums, in various languages (keep that slippery fish handy !)
[Pruneau
Dear Anonymous, Would you like to hire some people from overseas (Chinese, Indian, E-European, Japanese)? I work for an outsourcing company based in Japan (www.ebusiness.co.jp) and will be in the Philly/NY area next week. Steven Paiano paiano@ebusiness.co.jp
While Amiga folks have been talking about resurecting their platform for ages (to the point of appearing as a User Friendly joke about UFO and Elvis sightings!), Atari never stopped moving forward because Atari-licensed clones were developped and the OS constantly upgraded.
The current state of Atari is abundantly documented at Atari.ORG's community website.
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Benvolio
Try a 65 Volvo 1800S owned by Irv Gordon. Going on 2 million miles, on the original engine. Mine only has 300,000 miles. They just don't make them like that anymore. Here's a link..
Irv's Volvo
OK thanks, I didn't know that.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
And no, I'm not under 40. None of you youngsters even know what it was like to wait for a radio to warm up. (Which reminds me, why weren't vacuum tubes on that list?)
My parents have an old radio like that. It's packed away now, but I remember that it took a few seconds to warm up. Also, I have a modern equalizer for my stereo that has tubes.
Vacuum tube: "I feel happy! I feel happy! "
Whack!
BTW, I'm 16.
Ahh i see your idea: replace overhead electrical distribution with fuel cells or whatever in each individual vehicle. Sounds like a good plan :)
Betamax is technically superior to VHS. This was never disputed. It had a shorter recording time per tape, a failing addressed by Sony a little too late. And, according to an engineer at an ATT booth at a state fair, Sony took a strong stand against porn on their tapes. The engineer said this was the final thing that guaranteed the faiure of Betamax. People wanted their racy movies, and were intolerant of prudes saying,"You can't have them on our system. We won't allow it!"
I'm still a pretty avid s3m/xm/it listener, retaining mods from many long-dead groups. In the hopes that you might want to further re-kindle the spirit.. here's some more information.
:)
http://www.modarchive.com has a huuuge database/archive of mods, going back a good 10+ years. All your favorite artists are probably there.
irc.scene.org is a great place to meet up with some of the musicians from yesteryear. It's strange actually talking to people whose music you've listened to more faithfully than any one 'modern' artist.
http://www.kosmic.org is still around, and their music is still great, even after the conversion to mp3. Some of the guys hang out on irc.scene.org too!
I've also taken the liberty of dumping my current mod playlist on my site. Check out http://www.redcoat.net/mods/ and feel free to download everything.
Don't let the nostalgia kill you.
-- remove 'spammed' from my email addy to mail me
* Horse carriages - well I'm not a big expert here, but I would bet that you can't get as nice ones today as you could 100 years ago.
I'm not an expert either, but I'd be willing to bet that you are wrong. There are currently many people who have taken up horsemanship as a hobby. These are rich folks, who instead of spending weekends in their yacht spend weekends on the horse, many own the horse, and take care of it themselves. (100 years ago a rich person wouldn't think about touching manure if there was a way around it, most of these folks take care of it themselves). They have money, they have an expensive hobby, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to get the best.
When the carriage was the dominate means of transport I'm willing to bet that most folks had a long lasting carraige. Today carriages are still long lasting, but the people who buy them are rich. 100 years ago cheep was the norm beccause poor people were buying carriages. Today rich people buy them and expensive quality carriages are the norm.
Money is what it comes down to. Mechanical watches are expensive today because the only people who buy them are rich (since the quartz watch is cheaper to make in quanity. Thus the cheap watches of yesterday are not made, and so the only ones made (not many) are the works of art. IF the person buying a mechanical watch cares about accuracy, an accurate watch could be made today, since they mostly care looks, the looks are what is made. (Very few people need to know time to withing more then a minute, and 5 mintues off is okay in most cases, those who need better pay for modern clocks with better accuracty then a watch)
Modern lens can be high quality, just ask any astronomer, who pays for it. When I buy a cammera I care about cost, and in most cases the lens on a disposable cammera is plenty good. A quality camera was more expensive in the '70s then it is today. Of course in the '70s you got SLR, and now you get who knows what autofocus with large zooms. Turns out that the cheaper lens takes better pictures for all but experts since few people knew how to focus a cammera properly. In this case need for quality is key.
So if you want qualtiy you can get it, you just pay for it. We can do everything the Romans could, but we have colors they didn't as well so it goes both ways.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Funny that, as AmigaBASIC was written by Microsoft.
but it served much the same purpose as Perl does on a modern Linux box -- a general-purpose scripting and system-automation tool.ITYM "AREXX". HTH. HAND.
Cheers, Robert.
And if you use a scythe and wear a big black cloak you can scare the shit out of your neighbours and any passers-by...!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
I agree, slide rules are very important. People would understand Logs a hell of alot better if the slide rule was still used instead of a calculator which prevents you from learning the hard way. as far as using logs well good luck making it through a Computer Science degree without the knowledge of logarithms.
I have to admit to riding them a lot less frequently since I bought my bicycle. :(
Any idea when they're bringing the Ws back? They were supposed to be back in service in October. I think they're hoping that everyone will forget about them.
--
You're a suburbanite.
>is a technically superior platform, Linux has large operational tolerances. It's very resistant to crashes because of the way it's designed.
>However, this fault-tolerant design comes at a price: by separating the 3D libraries from X, by separating X from the kernel, etc., you introduce lots of
>hidden latencies.
Actually, the latencies that matter in this situation are caused by the scheduler, can be drastically reduced with a patch now and eventually reduced in the main kernel flow. This yields latencies significantly better than Windows or Mac, taking things down to roughly BeOS levels. The view just propounded above is quite common, but fallacious, I fear.
See this link for more detailed information: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/11/17/l ow_latency.html?page=1
Savant
Slide rules are better & faster than calculators for many things, but they take training to use. They're laid out in such a fashion that the common sequence of actions just rattles off--calculators do not have this advantage. Calculators are exact to significantly more places, though.
you mean i.e. or e.g., right? ;)
Tram systems, more correctly light railways, have been in use in Sheffield and Manchester (both in UK) for about five years (IIRR).
Grenoble (France) has had a network longer (it was the inspiration for the two UK cities cited). St Denis (Paris satellite town) got one line recently, I believe
Telex is still wodely ised in several industries.
Most hotels will still accept reservations by telex.
Oil and shipping companies use still use telex extensively.
Banks, wierdly use vast amounts of telex. I was involved in replacing a banks telex server with a Y2K compliant one last year!
All these have several things in common, they are geographically widespread, they have lots of small operations in strange out of the way places, there is MONEY involved.
To hook up telex you need little more than an Olde Worlde telephone line (Pulse dialing -- no problem!). The answerback protocol give you some sort of confirmation of reciept, and, there is an international standard/protocol which puts legal enforocable obligations on the sender, carrier and receiver.
They have been hacked. In a famous early eighties scam in london some unknown "diggers" as opposed to "hackers" dug up the road outside a bulleon dealer and hooked up thier telex machine directly to to the dealers. They sold the dealer several consignments of non existent gold, and , passed on the resulting bank trnafers to thier bank! As the deals were slightly dodgy anyway the dealer had no choice but to shut up and accept the loss.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
If the FAA will let it. There've also been some experiments to build unmanned high-altitude drones that could circle over a large city for several months.
;)
Personally, I like the blimps though - particularly if they run ads for Mars colonization on them
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Betamax died because Sony didn't license the proper video titles. Panasonic(I think, or whoever developed VHS)got all the good titles, i.e. E.T., Star Wars, etc. Sony had all the crummy movies. I still have a Betamax player and I still use it to watch my old copy of Pee Wee's Big Adventure that i bought from Erol's when it went out of business. I personally think the quality is great. Super-Beta on the other hand....Now That is where it's at!!!!!
i havent watched anything on it in years (as i was a youngin when we got it, the main things on tapes were cartoons)..the last thing i did was hook it up to a vhs vcr and put a copy of wargames that i had on beta (one of the very last thing i recorded on it) and put it on the vhs. A prized movie indeed :)
-
They went out of fashion, like the hindenburg, after an "explosion". A steam car was being used to attempt to break the world land speed record, but the beach was slightly uneven, it had ribs in the sand that set up a vibration that cracked a steam pipe. The damage was minimal and not dangerous, but it let out a great cloud of steam, and was reported in the press as having exploded, and that was that for steam-powered cars. Petrol engines are more practical nowadays only because they've had most of a century of development, and steam has been largely ignored. There's a swiss company that's making steam engines for locomotives, they've got ultra-efficient gas burners, and are 99% insulated, so they stay hot overnight and don't need 2 hours of warm-up in the morning, it's more like 10 minutes. Here's some info I just found: http://www.steam.demon.co.uk/trains/modern10.htm
I was reading the John Deere lawn care catalogue (a whole new way to be geeky!) and they had reel mowers for professional use. These were enormous, consisting of 5 and 7 of the individual reels configured in two rows of two:three or three:four , with the first row in front of the gaps between the units in the second row.
These are obviously meant to be pulled by a tractor. They are kinda neat, though!
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
One of the promises of hydrogen is that it can be produced in large quantities in regions that are otherwise unproductive. All you need is sun or another source of energy and water (even salt water will do). Methanol, on the other hand, needs to be produced from coal (resulting in a net release of greenhouse gasses), or various forms of agriculture (taking up arable land).
My problem with AC is you see the various trolls and fools who get on and post stupid crap..i'm sure that would happen anyways if you werent anonymous, but i think it would be alot less common. I rather like kuro5hin's way, where you have to login to post. It may not give everyone their say, but in reality, you have to show yourself if you stand in the middle of the street giving a speech too.
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But the B2 isn't that stealthy in the dry!
A couple of years ago, a B2 was sent to do a flypast at the Farnborough air show. They agreed to open the bomb-bay doors and turn on a transponder when they entered UK airspace to show on radar.
However, it was revealed that RAF radar had picked them up quite clearly a long way outside of UK airspace while they were still in full stealth mode.
Had it been an enemy aircraft, Rapier missiles could have shot it down, no problem.
Strangely, the B2 has never been to a UK airshow again. Couldn't be the USAF were upset when the RAF boys pointed and laughed, could it?
B2 - Never used in anger (kept out of the gulf war as they were too expensive to risk in action!) and a waste of 2 BILLION dollars each which could buy NASA over a dozen Mars probes!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
I guess that is one way to get longer playing records on wax cylinders. I imagine that for home machines (which I think the one I saw was, since it use cylinders about the diameter of a soup can, and about twice as "tall"), bigger diameter cylinders might cause "fit" problems, as in the cylinder wouldn't fit the machine.
I was thinking "taller"/"longer" cylinders, of the same diameter, or (as regular LPs do), a slower RPM (at the expense of music quality).
When you mention up/down motion - my history teacher never mentioned that, but I am sure I read it somewhere - it is nice to be reminded. Maybe this was also a problem - maybe the needle could "pop" out of the track, causing scratches and such?
Very interesting devices, at that - if only for their simplicity...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
In any case, really, I prefer riding in a comfortable train for an hour to driving a car for an hour. Most Americans would probably feel the same way if they ever had the experience. Instead, they get a rundown, dirty, and messy public transit system, and it is no surprise that they don't want more of it.
So, you're right. thats a downside, but is it that hard to accept cookies? they're really not that bad..you can always use a proxy which lets you choose which cookies to filter also.
-
Melbourne, Australia, has a thriving network of trams (street cars) operating in the inner city areas. Some of the old ones are still running for historical purposes, but the majority are modern. ie. less than 10 years old.
I don't believe the city is thinking of removing them any time soon.
The worldwide market may not be what it was, but they still exist, and they're updated on a regular basis.
'sapientia potestas est'
almost every US mass transit system was in public recievership by the early 1970s anyway.
That's because most politicans have looked at transit companies as being the same as any other kind of business. This sort of thing is happening to Amtrak right now. Congress wants Amtrak to lose their subsidies and become "self sufficient" by 2004. Like they are going to be able to do that without cutting back service even further.
Imagine if some senator said the same thing about the interstate highway system, or tried to remove the programs that keep gasoline so cheap. Every road funded only by it's own tolls and gas at the world average of $4.50 per gallon would certainly make transit look like a bargain!
Oh no! Paying taxes into transit is an evil, anti-free-market socialist subsidy. Propping up cheap gas and paving evermore countryside, why that's good for EVERYONE!
Don't get me started on "Interstate" 99 (The Bud Shuster Porkway).
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Don't use gas powered mowers, that's crazy.. I didn't think anyone did that anymore. Come on, electrical mowers came into use, what, 15 years ago? I don't know anybody that owns a gas powered anymore. Well this is Europe though.
TA
First off, I don't have acres of grass. And I'll be losing grass eventually to gardens, so I'll have even less to mow.
Secondly, I'm in a middle unit, which means the "side" of my house is the side of my next-door-neighbour's house as well. I can't just wheel a mower around the side, I have to go through the gravel laneway and through my garage. That would really SUCK with a Briggs and Straton.
And of course, I really, REALLY like the fact that when I mow the lawn, I'm not spewing out pollutants, spilling gas, or leaking oil. (Well, I may be emitting gas, but that has nothing to do with mowing.) And as a HUGE bonus, I don't wake up the entire neighbourhoor, or let them even know I'm out there. I wish the dude down the street with the horrendously gnashy-sounding electric mower would take a page from the book of Reel Mowers. Eeek.
Mr. Ska
Thanks alot Commodore for F#@%king it up!
As a matter of fact, if you hold both Shift and both Alt keys on an Amiga running WB 1.2 or earlier, and insert, then eject a disk, you'll get almost that same message to appear at the top of the screen -- (insert) "We made the Amiga" (eject) "They [Commodore] f#@%ed it up".
I hope that was supposed to be a clever reference, but I thought I should clear it up for all of those who didn't know. =)
Best sig I've seen in a long time. Had me rolling on the floor.
Over here in the Netherlands and more in particular in the larger cities, money is not the only factor deciding who uses the bus/tram/trolley/. Especially here in Den Haag the tram is a very good option if you want to get somewhere fast and don't want to be stuck in traffic. You have to keep in mind that cities over here have not been build around cars.
Yes and the average speed of cars in the cities runs at about 8 MPH during rush hour periods.
The article talks about trolley buses, not trams.
(Trolley buses are ordinary buses powered by overhead electric cables; trams are light rail systems usually similarly powered.)
But it's right these things still exist; the article mentions the ones in Vancouver, which I've seen and seem to work pretty well.
- Alan
Maybe we can ship you some "tree-huggers" ;-)
In some cases this isn't an advantage. Look for example at household goods. We see that a vast majority are built with planned obsalecence. About ten years ago the BBC did a history series on household goods which I unfortunately cannot remember the title of. The two presenters spent much of their time ripping apart washing machines, fridges etc. and then showing you how they worked and how the design had changed during the years. (and some of the time building Huge sculptures out of them. At one point they did say that Every household item now had less lifespan than it's counterpart from ten years ago, apart from the Television, Which was now far longer lasting and more reliable.
What about the flip side?
QWERTY keyboard: 90% of my bugs are typoes due to the existence of this horrible unergonmic, wrist -smashing, finger - biting monster.
Intel CPU architecture : Well, do you really think 8 registers is enough, and how long is
it before the 4GB address limit begins to suck
as bad as the 640Kb limit did? The Motorola 68k
chips were so much nicer..
Pascal, Basic, C# : Please somebody, put these out of our misery.
Pylons & overhead cables for power delivery : Blots on the landscape, and Telsa's wireless power transmission would have worked.
Space Shuttle : Still a disaster waiting to happen, an ablative shield around a bomb with 1,000s of tiles to stick on..only one tile has to fall off.
Gopher : Didn't we have this one disinterred recently ?
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
H2 + F2 -> 2HF
You might want to be carefull with this one. The energy to start this reaction can be provided by a flashlight beam. You can mix the hydrogen and florine in a ballon IN THE DARK and then set it off by shining a flashlight on it. BANG!
BugBear (owner of a 1950's petrol reel mower)
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
burning data (especially data like CDDA) at speeds above 2 or 4 speed can fail spectacularly for no apparent reason. Discs burned at high speeds are frequently unreadable by anything other than a CD burner. If you want to be very sure that everyone can play what you burn, you must stick with double speed or less this is simply untrue. I've burned many cds at 8x with absolutely no problems with any non-cdrs reading them. several of my friends have 8x burners as well, and none have had problems in fact, just yesterday I burnt a music cd at 8x; oooh, in fact, I OVERburned it! and it played perfectly in my 25-disk cd changer hooked to my amp, and the Pioneer deck in my car
turbine can't speed up.. no problem.. use CVT (continuous variable transmission). No need to change the turbine speed. You can just keep the turbine at its optimal speed.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
>How is a slide rule superior to a scientific calculator?
Solving proportions. A/B = C/D with one of A,B,C,D an unknown. Immediate readout with no multiplication or division involved. Only slide-rule accuracy, but the knowns are not that accurate anyway.
It takes a lot of heat to touch off a reaction between the two, but once it's going, it'll BURN. It's the same stuff used to weld railroad tracks together, burn holes through tank and automobile engine blocks to disable them, and to weld underwater. Supposedly, the stuff will even burn though concrete.
the reaction taking place is a transfer of oxygen from the iron to the alluminum and can probably be thought of as the combustion of alluminum. The resulting slag can be in excess of 5000F.
---
But for some applications, the closed/open bit is a question of merit. It's not a big deal for everything of course, but when it comes to storage, I'm a no-hostages kind of guy.
Even though minidiscs are a good product in many ways, one of the strikes against them happens to be an important one, to some people.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
burning data (especially data like CDDA) at speeds above 2 or 4 speed can fail spectacularly for no apparent reason. Discs burned at high speeds are frequently unreadable by anything other than a CD burner. If you want to be very sure that everyone can play what you burn, you must stick with double speed or less
this is simply untrue. I've burned many cds at 8x with absolutely no problems with any non-cdrs reading them. several of my friends have 8x burners as well, and none have had problems
in fact, just yesterday I burnt a music cd at 8x; oooh, in fact, I OVERburned it! and it played perfectly in my 25-disk cd changer hooked to my amp, and the Pioneer deck in my car
(note to self: use the preview button)
I think ridership is quite central to decline of streetcars. What would you have had the companies do? Maintain their investments in an inflexible, aging technology that was clearly falling by the wayside? I'm curious.
I did incorrectly label them as "dedicated" rights-of-way, however, I would still contend that in the peak period of streetcars, service had to be so frequent and they stopped at such short intervals that the street space they occupied was essentially exclusive.
There was a period in the 1920s where buses were competing with streetcars, and gaining ridership while streetcars were losing. People liked them better--they got places faster, and routes could alter if people's habits and settlement patterns changed.
As for cost, strictly in terms of operating costs, streetcars were probably superior. But streetcars required high capital costs--rails, street improvements, overhead wires--that add to the total. Companies were responsible for carrying out street improvements. Don't forget about those costs, they are substantial and very much a part of the story.
Many bus routes do run on old streetcar lines, that's a fact, and it makes sense. But this ignores the fact that bus service is far more widespread than that. Extending service when it became necessary was far less expensive than it would have been if streetcars were still around.
I would add that roads, when they wear out every 20 or 30 years or so, are also replaced by taxpayers--at a MUCH higher cost. So I don't see the point of your assertion about the replacement cost of buses.
GM was not involved in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Even supporters of the conspiracy theory acknowledge this.
Two important questions Slater poses, and I'd be interested to hear your responses: How does one explain the cities that replaced streetcars with buses without the influence of GM (i.e., GM was not involved in the acquisition of the systems), such as San Fran and Honolulu? How does one explain the worldwide abandonment of streetcars? GM's influence back then was not nearly as global as it is now.
This was a technology that had had its day. They were nice, people liked them, and they contributed enormously to the development of the modern city. But then the world changed. Insistence on a fashionable conspiracy theory is to utterly miss the point of the big picture--people's preferences, activities, and the nature of the economy was not going to stay the same forever. The undeniable involvement of a major corporation in the drastic changes does not, by rule, imply the use of dirty tricks.
There's always (sigh) going to be a debate about this. Get the facts. Inspect contemporary sources. Read the hearings. Decide for yourself.
BTW, many of Minneapolis' streetcars are still in use in Mexico City.
What about Procomm Plus?
BBS'ing was fun. I used to love hosting doors with games like Tradewars or that Risk look alike. Got some great electronic mail management experience out of FidoNet and echomail when I was 14! Those were the good old days. =]
You could say that the SysOps of the BBS days were the equivalent of web site administrators and SysAdmins of today...
Chris
My friend, you have the buggy before the horse...the trolley, especially in the interurban form, created the suburbs at the turn of the centuary. Look at a trolley map of any eastern state (my town in CT has one in town hall) and observe the maze of lines. Those lines originally existed to connect small towns to big cities, but in the process allowed some workers to live in those small towns and work in the big cities.
As has been pointed out, the bus had a big advantage of not requiring a separate infrastructure. The car, having the same advantage, would ACCELORATE the creation of suburbia by requiring just a strip of asphalt to connect suburbians to the city as opposed to a new station or even new tracks.
Herb
Herb
Again, feel free to sentence me to death if my questions annoy you. I'll come back in 5 minutes anyway. -Sythi
not dead... yet.. Cuba bought some of the old super-4's, and they're still in military use because of their amphibic capabilities.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
If you want to dismiss my points, feel free to, but you're going to have to do a better job than merely telling me I'm on crack.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Are you trolling or what...
Apple will be releasing it's first preemptive multitasking OS for public consumption next year
To moderate or to reply.... That is the question.
. A big advantage of traditional mowers is that the air currents suck the grass upward before the blade comes around.
You make some valid points, but I have to disagree. I'm not a big fan of Reel mowers. Although great exercise (you missed that one), I happen to prefer modern non-human powered mowers.
Why you may ask?
The quality of the cut. Any human powered mower I've ever tried just doesn't work as well. Human powered mowers suck because they don't suck
I'm not much of a fan of Mulchers either, but I suppose that argument could be made as well.
Frankly, I'm hoping for the arrival of a simple & cheap battery powered "MoBot" that cuts the grass for me.
I guess all this is fine from the american point of view. Stainless Steel is so extensively used in Asian Countries. Coffee is served in Stainless Steel tumblers. Food in Stainless steel plate. Longevity is the main consideration.
All the people here seem to respond to the "remote GUI login" with the fact that Windows 2000 terminal server has it. ;-).
What about Unix and Linux?
As far as I know neither is dead, there are even plenty of companies and people around trying to achieve "Total World Domination" for Linux
Besides, an operating system achieving something 20 years after another is sort of like the comment the author of the article had about "preemptive multitasking".
I owned a Sony Magic Link (still have it) as well as many of the few accessories and software packages for it. It was a pretty cool device for it's time, but there was a good reason that it failed. Magic Cap was unbearably slow and, for all it's icons-up-the-ass cutesiness and so-called simplicity, it was a pain in the ass to use. It also made the assumption that all users are complete morons who shouldn't have any control over how their files are stored.
Often times, you'd be sitting waiting for minutes while Magic Crap performs garbage collection, eating up valuable battery time, not to mention the fact that getting to some particular tool or app often required jumping to different scenes, then maneuvering left/right to find a particular building or door.
I was looking forward to an update that would fix many of the significant problems with the OS, but it never came. They originally had planned to include an app building tool, but that never came either. Instead, they tried to market Magic Crap for Windows (Why???).
Now Hertzfeld and Co. want to do the same thing for Linux [ http://www.eazel.com/ ]. From what I've seen of it, it looks like they may actually have some good ideas about how to make Linux accessible to general users. Personally, I think KDE 2.0 is just fine.
STratoHAKster
I commute to 69th streen on an Electric trolley every day. I catch the El to Center City and back on the same route. The trolley stops at all traffic lights for right of way. It is very convenient and such an ideal mode of transportation. It is extensively used by SEPTA in addition to the Buses for Suburban traffic.
Lucky you. I've had mine for four years, and now it won't hold a charge, no matter how many naked jumping jacks I do.
Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.
Methinks REVOLVER OCELOT would agree with you.
Does my bum look big in this?
The wonder vehicle that never should have failed?
Just think what a paradise the world would be with roads full of quiet little plastic three-wheelers.
I agree wholeheartedly. I loved my VideoGuide! I could queue up recording for a week at a time with just a few clicks on the 'mote, and it would handle turning on/starting/stopping/turning off the VCR. All I had to do was feed tapes into the VCR. My wife hated the fact that I'd come home and read the news on the thing for half an hour or so then pick the next day's recording. I had hoped that whomever bought them out would enhance and re-release it, but no joy.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
And what kind of crack were you smoking when you decided to give up your 500 series printer? I'm still using my Deskjet 500 and will continue to do so until I can no longer get replacement cartridges for it. Yeah, it's only 300x300dpi but that's pretty good quality for B&W text and it never jams, prints fast. That was just a great product.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Well good for you , what I'm saying is if you want to get a respectable CS degree then you must understand logs. that's your own choice if you'd rather bypass the degree. It also depends on what type of work your doing. there are alot of real world jobs that use heavy algorithms and beleive me I know there are plenty that don't, I used to work for one
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
We have a Ralley (sp? light, made in Sweden) self-sharpening reel mower we've used the last 5 years on our 1/4 acre lot: works wonderfully, and gives us a good work-out while we're at it. And the neighbor kids love to come over and try their hand - it takes a certain level of strength to actually get it to cut, so it's a bit of a test for them. And it seems to compare favorably to their dad's riding mower that he is usually cursing at because it got stuck in the mud on his front slope, or something of the sort. Everybody should own one of these things!
Energy: time to change the picture.
The airship should not have died, as an article in Discover, November 2000 edition, says.
There is utility in using large, slow moving aircraft for doing stuff like moving heavy machinery, taking tourists on joy rides and even acting as a single mobile phone tower for an entire city.
The last bit was particularly interesting for me. Just imagine - a big blimp parked 10 miles overhead can replace hundreds of ugly mobile phone towers on the ground for a large city. hmm...
Yup, 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this would-be debunker.
First off, your basic premise is flawed. The pros and cons of streetcars has nothing to do with whether or not GM systematically aided their destruction. Streetcars may or may not have been on the way out regardless of GM's actions -- but it's irrelevant to the question of whether or not GM did some nasty business.
Which they did.
Slide rules are still manufactured, and although they don't know it, probably every journalism student has used one. Except in that field, the device is called a "photo wheel."
I recall in my early college days taking a class in which the photo wheel was used. All students had to buy one (available in the arts section of the student store, and normally made of cardboard or plastic). The professor spent the better part of a three hour class repeatedly explaining how to use it, prefacing each time with "It's a little complicated, but you get the hang of it." This scene was remarkably disturbing for me (as was the computer-aided design & layout class), because it took me less time to do the necessary math in my head in less time than it took these media lackeys to do it with a tool specifically designed for the problem. (Which of course is why I soon changed majors.)
But I guess it just wouldn't do to have a scientific calculator in the newsroom. Though it would certainly help demonstrably in the accuracy department.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Pantene was a good product back in the 70's when it was strictly marketed as a man's product. (Square dark blue plastic bottle). It was also more expensive than the other stuff on the drugstore shelves and harder to find, although it actually lasted longer so the price wasn't as bad as it seemed. Then they decided to go after the mass market with something that was like what everybody else was selling. Neutrogena was good until a few years ago, also more expensive but lasted longer as well, then they decided to go after the mass market with something that was like what everybody else was selling. I think I detect a trend here and I don't really care for it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I do believe that hydrogen always burns with a pale blue flame. What you're referring to are the burning of hydrocarbons. That's a different kettle of fish. Hydrogen contains no carbon (duh). It either burns or it doesn't. It does not burn with "much non-consumed fuel".
I don't know much about an unregulated hydrogen flame, but when a "cloud" of hydrogen flashes it produces some orange. Admittedly it does tend burn blue-ish, but that is related to the weight and density of hydrogen and the oxygen already present in the air.
Carbon appears black, which is what appears on things you place over a candle.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Divx movies were not competition for DVD's. If that were the case, why were Divx machines DVD-compatible?
I still have a bunch of movies to watch before the June, 2001 deadline. Sniff, sniff..I miss my Divx!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
50 years ago $10 was real money. Unfortunately, if you build a toaster that'll last for 50 years you have to wait 50 years for that customer to buy another one.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
no you just built them before us..
They just could put a small (very small) sign over the door to the observation area that read, "If you are afraid of heights, please close your eyes while in this room."
Free Hans!
Actually, the original Amiga only had 12bit (4096)
color and that was only in a special HAM (Hold and
Modify) mode. No fancy animation or anything else
while in that mode.
Yes, the correct answer is all three. National City Lines was a holding company formed mainly by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. Here's the story from my hometown of Philadelphia's point of view.
----
grep -ri 'should work'
What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't count). People still don't know that they should be able to log into their home computers wherever they are.
Um, Citrix has been around for almost a decade. And what abuot Windows Terminal Server? A standard feature of Windows 2000 servers.
If consumer windows has remote gui login, you'd prolly be complaining about how insecure it would be.
dairyless milkshake??? Here in Finland, where a good proportion of people have lactose intolerance, a dairyless milkshake would actually be a good thing. I wonder when the local McDonalds gets that on their menu.
Ah. That brings back memories of my first stereo. I wonder how it would have altered our current expectations of technology, if instead of transistors we had developed a way to make ever smaller vacuum tubes, but they still took time to warm up.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Wordstart is great. Borland and Turbo PAscal havebeen using those keys for zillions of years, and it is still the default in Joe. Joe is still the editor I use, and I use it because I knew the keys from Borland. Even now I refuse to help my assistants when they did not install joe on any of our Linux machines. I REFUSE to work with V-bloody-I. In fact, I wrote a spreadsheet which used Wordstar commands to do as a project 10 years ago. Ran on DOS. Will have to dig it up, port is to Linux and post it somewhere.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
First, you get remote gui as a standard feature in Unix. It's not standard on Windows. MS treats this thing as inovative - what is inovative about a technology that Unix has had for 20 years?
Second, let's talk about cost. TS is VERY expensive. If you were to actually adhear to MS license restrictions, TS is more expensive than stand-alone machines.
Win TS? No thanks...
Woo-Hoo! My little GM-didn't-kill-the-streetcars page got mentioned on Slashdot! Cool. Now let's see how much traffic my little ADSL connection can handle.
Um... The whole point of my post was just to correct the statement that Windows has no X like functionality. I'm not arguing about wether or not it's innovative (It's not, I agree 100%) or cost effective (it can be in the right configurations, but then MS is ALWAYS trying to rape you ;).
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
Congratulations. However, many people do not experience the same luck as yourself. Also, when using "budget" media (like GQ or Hi-Val) one may have poor experiences. I don't buy the super-crappy media, nor do I buy red or green media; Silver/Silver, Gold/Gold, or Silver/Blue only. Even with TDK media, however, "certified" for use at 12X, I sometimes have poor results burning over 2X. I can sometimes push 4X. Also, the shelf life of CDs burned at a higher rate seems to vary dramatically.
At home, I have a philips Omniwriter 2600, which is a nice slow SCSI drive, 6x2x2. This appears to be more or less the same drive used in philips' home CD recording units. It has never made a coaster on me (though the software occasionally will explode, and I've managed to bluescreen in the middle of a burn a couple times.) At work, we have a number of HP 4030i or something, which are IDE. Burning anything over 4X will fail regularly; Sometimes trying to use more than 2X explodes as well. I generally stick with 2X.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
ribbon audio tech is far from dead. Check out these totally killer high-fi ribbon speakers!
Someone you trust is one of us.
Synchronous AC clocks are not dead, at least last time I checked... At one point I built a crappy inverter to power a digital clock, which was AC synchronous. The frequency was way too high, and boy did the minutes go by quickly! From the corded clocks I've seen, they will use the AC as their time base, and then switch to a quartz crystal to maintain time in event of a power failure (if they have a battery backup).
I always thought that they were gonna fly it to the us on hydrogen, dump the hydrogen and fill it up with helium. Wasn't it like that in the movie ?
Audiophiles lament the passing of vinyl, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the compact disc.
Vinyl isn't completely gone. Its just been relegated to a bit of a niche industry amongst audiophiles, collectors and DJ's. I listen to vinyl all the time (on vaccuum tube equipment to boot!) and I still on occasion buy brand new records (I buy mostly used records). Vinyl left the mainstream because cd's were more convenient, not because they sound better.
-JeremyH
The wonder of precise language no?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
by choosing to use voluminous over something definitely "big and heavy" it is, in the context, fair to assuem was are talking about feathers and not bricks
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
OK, so I'm a week late; so sue me :)
Your information is accurate but incomplete.
Note that the iron oxide is merely a catalyst and controls the rate of the burn. A catalyst is a substance which is unchanged at the end of a chemical reaction.
You leave off the amounts involved, a most important factor. Note that the iron oxide is present in a relatively tiny amount.
Now there is one that isn't dead, but certainly coughing up blood. These are still in use in MA with the MBTA for the 71 line and a few others to Watertown, MA.
It's too bad these are dying out, because for the most part they aren't that bad. They're quiet, don't stink, and for the most part seemed to be every bit as reliable as regular busses. The only downside I saw was that oddly enough they seemed to get hotter than normal busses in the summer. But IMHO that's not too bad if you can at least hear yourself think if you're riding one.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I took one of Vancouver's Electric Grid Busses to work this morning. I'm a fan of public transit, but I consider myself lucky when I ride one of these for a half an hour without the bus driver having to walk around behind the bus and reconnect the bus to the overhead wires. These busses particularly like to disconnect at busy intersections, where there are lots of intersecting wire tracks.
I like them in a way; they are quaint and quiet. But when I want to get somewhere reasonably quickly, I'm always glad to see a recently built internal combustion bus come along.
- Bruce
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Fortunately larger cities are starting to realize that there is a penalty of greater noise and pollution. The city of Montréal recently decided to reintroduce streetcars up and down some of its commercial avenues that have become overcrowded due to excessive automobile and bus traffic.
Hopefuly other cities will start to do the same real soon.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Seriously though, it is the aggregation of consumer activity such as yours, and not that of "industry", which will make the greatest difference in reducing greenhouse emissions and global climate change. So, take pride in your little yard, your non-SUV transportation, and the killer triceps you'll develop pushing your little reel mower around.
--
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
i think it has to do with the fact that people dont like paying by use. they like to pay for unlimited use and be done with it (look at how aol's popularity soared after they started charging a flat rate)
-
actually hydrogen really isn't that flammable either.
contrary to popular belief, it wasn't hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg disaster. Rather it was the paint used on the shell of the airship, made from components very similar to what is used in today's rocket fuel. A static charge caused this paint to ignite, thus sending the airship to its end.
The impressive photos of the Hindenburg burning show massive amounts of flames. Hydrogen burns clear so what was burning (visibly) wasn't the gas.
As a result of that accident hydrogen has gotten a really bad rap when it's not all that dangerous and has a lot of benefits. Clean cars being one example.
So add the "commonplace, everyday use of hydrogen" to technologies that have been given up on.
...at least as far as WordStar is concerned: Some authors still prefer using WordStar for "serious" work. This essay, written by SF writer Robert J. Sawyer, gives a comprehensive history of WordStar.
Slide Rule "No engineering student would dare venture out in public...without his (or her) slide rule in its 'holster' and hanging from the belt,"
Didn't they replace that with the calulator and more recently the laptop? Sometimes change is for the better.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
There used to be trains on the SF Bay Bridge, moving more people than cars and buses do now! Ooops, got rid of those...
sulli
RTFJ.
Hydrogen filled Penguins tend to explode violently. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
The theory is terrible.
"I'm to lazy to get out from in front of my tv to return this movie, so I'll just pitch it."
The last thing we need as a society is for more and more things to be disposable.
I can't believe it. Sure, Wordstar was a popular program, but historically, it's no more important for word processing than dBase II was for databases or Visicalc for spreadsheets. So why not dBase II or Visicalc?
Sashank
Citrix is pretty slick, but still more clunky than X, and quite expensive, but it's more of a GUI terminal than X because ALL the processing is on the server. IMO, the ONLY cool windows thingey... (don't get me wrong, i still hate windows more than the next guy...) PS... i just like the idea of full desktops on your Palm w/ Citrix ICA!
"Ummmm..."
Agreed 100% on the AM radio and CB comments. These frequencies should be taken away from their current "owners" and rededicated to wireless devices. Imagine if they were made digital and the entire band dedicated to inexpensive, beyond line of sight networking. That would be far more useful than the current trucker chatter and conservative talk shows currently wasting these frequencies.
Yep, and the article even says "ribbon microphones remain popular today ... still manufactured by Royer Labs"
And as for saying that the automatic watch is a "passed technology"; well, I guess it shows the writer hasn't been successful enough to own a decent watch.
I guess that according to the logic of this article, supercomputers are a "passed technology" because everyone uses client/server.
nal 11
Toronto's TTC still runs a large number of electric "streetcars" throughout Toronto. Their signature red and white styling is one of the city's undying symbols. Of course, someone I used to know also called them "The Red Menace" because some inept drivers just can't handle sharing the road with them.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Okay, looking at the list...
-Electrical trolleys -- where it says they're still in use, are they referring to the trolleys themselves or the buses that replaced them? Both are still in wide use in Boston -- the electric buses are everywhere (there's an intersection on Commonwealth Avenue that is covered with a spiderweb of catenary lines to prove it) and a large part of the T (the Green Line) runs above ground, even on streets. It's not a dead technology at all.
-Pneumatic tubes: I can't see why a citywide system of these things would be practical when you could hire a bike courier to do the same thing, but I can see especially why hospitals would still use them.
-The Amiga: All I'm saying is that I wish I could slap Agnes, Denise, and Paula (the three chips that constituted the Amiga's multimedia subsystems) onto a PCI card in my Mac. Not having ever had any real Amiga experience, I can't say much either way about the OS. I will, however, agree wholeheartedly that the Amiga was the first (and probably best in terms of bang for the buck at the time) multimedia computer.
-Ribbon mike: Not an audio guy, can't comment.
-WordStar: Two words: Open Source. But someone already mentioned joe.
-Wax Cylinder recording: Again, not an audio guy, but I don't see the sense in having them around today unless you're looking for a specific effect. These babies are obsolete for very good reasons.
-Slide Rules: It still amazes me that these things are no longer manufactured. They don't run out of batteries, right? They're good for teaching math concepts, right? You would think there'd at least be a couple of educational manufacturers cranking out a couple of thousands of these things a year if only for things like science museum souvenirs. I'd buy one...
-Reel mowers. Good idea.
-Automatic Watch: Hmmm... nice toy, I suppose, but you'd think they'd be a bit reliability-challenged compared to a modern watch.
-Zeppelins (be specific, dammit!) -- The case was made rather easily -- big balloon, big schlep. Go for it...
/Brian
The change you suggest would save us all quite a bit of money, allowing us to buy the latest in designer ducts! :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Turbine-powered Indycars died for a reason.
Sure they generate tons of power & are less prone to malfunction, but the problem is that a race car has to be able to handle extremes in decelleration as well as accelleration. So while the turbine car was fast -- but it had to maintain a steady speed because the turbine couldn't speed up, slow down, & speed up again through the turns the way "standard" cars could.
A turbine-powered Indycar would be toast on a road course, let alone an oval.
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Zennie
There are hundreds to choose from... or if you want vintage, try an ebay for older Hamilton's or Omega's.
Bell & Ross
Oris
Breitling
There are even automatic watches with slide rules on them. Check out the slide rule watches HERE. Not sure if there are any autos on this page, but the shop near my house has a new one. Something about a watch with PI on it.
pronoblem
These are hardly dead - stop by a home depot or lowes. They are much better than they were 20 years ago...you can actually push them along.
:) Hook it up to some sort of bicycle and there ya go!
- they are quiet, so I don't go deaf from the mower or turning up the walkman to hear over the mower
- they are clean
- they actually cut the grass (with a well maintained blade) as opposed to ripping and tearing the grass like spinning blade mowers.
- they take up less space
Now...if they could just make a riding reel mower
Benifits:
Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure the Indianapolis Star still uses the tubes, and I know the Indianapolis Police Dept. still does, at least at their public desk.
The reel mowers are great! I have one that was left by the previous owner of my house. Yes, it's an effort, but it cuts beautifully when I'm not too lazy to use it.
My brother still has his Amiga 500. Was a wonderful machine, the graphics, when done right, were truly breathtaking. He used it for graphic design, and pottering with CAD. I mooched time on it to play games. Compared to the PCs at the time, it was incredible!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I seem to remember an article about this...
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
even though i know you are trolling ill bite because right now the cold medacine im on is telling me too. colds suck.
unix should have died.
i mean come on its a brutal system. often times there is no semblance of order to the way things are layed out. common utilities dont follow a common arg system. there are pieces from every other god forsaken os on the planet thrown in. it doesnt have a constistant look or feel. different unix branches can often be so different its almost impossible for one person who is good with one to even use the other. its tried to destroy itself many times with stupid brain dead pushes and standards.
hmph. yeah unix should be dead... and so should the one animal that it resembles, Humans. oh well, maybe next year.
ps i use unix everyday, irix even, so its ok for me to call for the death of the beast.
--- I do not moderate.
what was wrong with minidisc
:) players, recorders, and player/recorders are still being made and sold. In fact, MD popularity in the U.S. seems to be going up. In Europe and Asia MDs have been, and are still extremely popular. Some of the most modern players can now get 320mins of music on a single 2.25" disc. (sounds like a 64kbps MP3 in terms of quality), or 160mins at a slightly higher quality. The cost of discs is coming down as well, now as low as ~$1.50 per-disc. Moreover, the QUALITY of ATRAC compression is continuously increasing. Standard ATRAC is up to Version 7.5 or so, and the newest Type R ATRAC is up to V3.5
Absolutely NOTHING!
IIRC they also mulch, so you don't have to rake..
Your Working Boy,
There's some really fascinating stuff, like delivering carrier pigeons by parachute and, and more absurdly, Vinyl Video.
A great way to spend a couple of hours in nostalgia-land.
dinosaur comics
What about OS-9 on a Tandy co-co? Genuine multi-tasking/multi-user, albeit a bit slow with a 1.8MHz 8-bit CPU
It was available around the same time, though I will concede that the Amiga probably was the better machine, but I still have fond memories of my co-co III with 512k of memory running OS-9. In fact that experience got me my current job :-)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Ooops. You are correct of course. Either way, both systems are by now considered obsolete, even though they are still perfectly functional, and in the case of the Amiga, actually better (architecturally speaking) than the PC, especially the graphics subsystems.
Its easier to program them "to the metal" as well.
Ribbon mics are very delicate, and the ribbon is succeptable to damage. One idiot blowing into the mic ("Hey! Is this on??") can tear the ribbon.
Sure, they sound warm, and sound much better "than carbon and early condenser microphones." But we don't use carbon microphones (professionally) either. Condenser mics have come a long long way since then also.
The biggest benefit in the ribbon mics was the internal tube pre-amp. There are better mics today using tube pre-amps that aren't nearly as fragile.
"They have this figure-eight pattern--they accept sound from the front and back, while rejecting sound from the sides." This is silly. Most modern-day large element recording mics have this capability. It was one of the first to have the capability, but certainly not the last.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
As the article admits, the infrastructure expense here is prohibitive, and why do this when self-contained electric vehicles are becoming more and more feasible?
Pneumatic Post:
Amiga:
Personally, I think Amiga failed for one basic reason: speed. The early Amigas had some amazing potential, but for day-to-day office use, for example, they could be very cumbersome. Unfortunately, by the time the hardware speed caught up with what they were trying to do, other manufacturers had competitive formats for graphics, sound, etc.
Ribbon Microphone:
I just don't get this one. I work in acoustics, and while I will grant that the ribbon microphone was impressive in its day, there are other many other alternatives that work just as well. This is probably a case of audiophiles glamorizing a certain sound timbre rather than a quantifiable advantage in performance. For example, it is possible to make a microphone with a flat response to the edge of human hearing on a silicon chip these days.
Wax Cylinder:
As with my comments for the ribbon mike, maybe there were some performance advantages to the Cylinder over vinyl, but in this day, there is no reason to prefer it over a digital system. Again, we may have a case of audiophiles prefering the qualitative aspects of a certain sound, even if a strict performance criteria would show it to be inferior.
Slide Rule:
I think I can agree with this one, if for no other reason than the article's point on its education value is true.
Reel Mowers:
Amen to this. I hate being woken up on a Saturday morning by area lawn mowers.
Automatic Watch:
A modern, electronic version of a self-charging watch does exist. Still, those things are amazing. Airship: This technology absolutely needs to be reinvestigated. It may, unfortunately, be caught in a Catch22: it needs more money to research new designs, but it needs better proven designs to get more money. Sort of like the problem the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle people seem to be stuck in right now.
If you could show that GM managed to strangle a competitors trams, OK, you might have something... but you might not: you might just have normal competition in that case too.
Think of how much better off we'd all be if warfare had stopped short of projectiles that left the immediate vicinity of the user. No stones, arrows, guns, missiles, or bombs. Not only would there be less time rebuilding after wars, which stalls innovations; the entire middle ages may have been avoided. We could be commuting to mars by now.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Never fails to shock people when I tell them I use a reel mower. "Ohmigod! But those are so hard to push around!" is pretty much the universal response.
I think most folks have some memory of a rusty contraption in their parents' garage, and assume this is just the way these things work. Far from it in reality...a properly-maintained reel mower can be pushed along with finger pressure, and in general is easier to maneuver than most gas monstrosities (and easier to feed, and not as scary, etc.). But this is starting to sound like a religious rant. I just wish more people would realize that not every problem needs to be solved by throwing some big gas engine at it.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Somebody did. I guess you missed it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You think nobody rides the bus outside the U.S., but you mention leaving behind the US-centric bullshit?
I doubt you've been to Europe if you think no one rides the bus there...
Pneumatic Post - Well, as even the article mentions, they are still in use a number of places. And quite practical too.
Amiga - well, just don't tell any Amiga owners, or they'll kill you.
Ribbon microphone - well, what do I know, I guess some people are using them. If they have that "warm" sound, I would be very surprised if there weren't audio people insisting on them all over the world.
WordStar - Well, until now, I thought it was dead, but the user group looks quite real. Not like your average PDP-11 user group.
Edison Vax Cylinder - Long dead.
Slide rule - Dead.
Reel Mower - It never occured to me that it was dead. We have a reel mower at my parents house and it works beautyfully. Never needed anything else.
Automatic watch - Perhaps not as common as digital watches, but certainly not dead.
Airship - Still used for fun by some people, and for adverticing purposes by others (and for both by some lucky few I guess).
Not even that --- most of the technologies he describes haven't died at all and have never even looked like dying. There's a tram system in Croydon, lots of people wear automatic watches, etc etc. And, yes, the full orchestra in my pants is rather pleasant.
nal 11
Did the floating continent actually fall ON the airship? I thought it just cracked up as the world was blowing up. Also, didn't it have some problems earlier in the game, when the espers first came out of the gate?
I'll have to play FFVII for a while now, 'cause I forget how the airship crashes. I thought it had something to do with the crater up north, and they escaped in some sort of jet that was part of the gondola.
And yes, the original airship was not a real LTA aircraft. Man, I hated getting that damn stone. I think that it was the hardest part of the game. Stupid ice cave. I hated the floor with battles where nine undead of some sort would attack, stun everyone in your party, and then slowly kill you, while all you could do was watch and hope someone woke up. Did that ever piss me off. The airship was worth it though. I can still hear the music: Da-da-da-da-dadada-da-dada-da-daaaa...
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
My minidisc player is still useful for recording mp3's to it. Although as soon as I get a cdburner, it won't be quite useful anymore.... :/
My dad bought an Amiga 500 to replace our Timex Sinclair 1000. As you can imaging, we were pretty impressed...
1. No arbitrary key combinations
2. AmigaBasic
3. Color
4. A floppy disk
5. A second floppy disk
6. Fred Fish Shareware!!! (I hope I'm remembering the name correctly)
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
They've been banned from Indy/Cart and F1, but they are several classes of Jet powered Dragsters. Interestingly, they are still slower than top-fuelers and funny cars. Not sure, but I think they use the jet as a plane would, with no mechanical connection to the wheels. A shaft driven one might actually be faster. Fun to watch because they actually seem accelerate faster at higher speed, after moving from the line at a relative crawl. Real reason turbine cars haven't hit the mainstream is that turbine engines remain ungodly expensive and are very demanding of proper maintainence. Banned from Indycar when people realized that whereas you can cut the ignition on a Combustion Engine, the only thing you can do to a turbine is shut off the fuel and wait for the damn thing to stop spinning.
/* This post not warrantied for mission critical applications. */
Our high school rock band used ribbon mics because the bass player's dad still had a couple he never bothered to sell when he was a young musician. We tried, with unabated failure, to use them to amplify the vocals at shows; the signal was way too quiet compared to the rest of the mics. In a studio, though, where you can balance channels more easily, they really do give a nice warm sound to the voice or instruments. Thank god we had a condenser mic for the drums, though.
If you follow the third link I provided, you will see that the one and only turbine car every to race at Indy was KILLING the competition.
After that one year with a single turbine car, they were banned from the race.
Turbines would easily win Indy because they are much smaller than a reciprocating engine and they deliver a LOT more power.
And, FYI, Indy cars are raced on an Oval. Perhaps you are thinking of Formula One?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Actually we used to have electric buses in Toronto, but they turned out to be too much of a hassle & too expensive.. they broke down *a lot*.
:)
OTOH, we do have extensive streetcar and subway lines that aren't going away anytime soon. Streetcars do slow down the traffic in the core.. but that's a good thing. Keeps things more pedestrian friendly.
Most days however your best bet is a bike. Gimme a bike and I'll beat you anywhere, anyhow, anytime downtown.
I thought of that idea, too, when I was working at a daycare. It would be cool to have a bank-like drive-thru where you could stick your kid in one of the suction tubes and she would just whirl right into the classroom. The only problem with this approach was that kids ended up arriving head-down, but that shouldn't have been too much of a problem.
I could've had _the_ ultimate daycare from the kids' point of view. Sigh... Then I learned UNIX and don't work for the daycare no mo'.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I don't think so.
They use no gas or oil and so don't require me to buy any expensive Petroleum Products.
They are clean, there are no fumes to pollute the air...unless I've had Mexican for lunch.
They are very quiet. This means I can mow my grass as soon as it's light without wooring about annoying my neighbors.
The use of new materials makes it no more tough to use than any other mower...in some cases easier to manuver
Safty - No worries about launching a rock at your neighbor's cat/child/BMW. If I hit aomething that it can't handle, It just stops.
They are damn easy to start. I've usually had to pull at least twice on the cord of any (new or old) mower to get it to start. My reel mower? Starts up first time, every time.
I could go on, but the only mower I like better than the reel mower is my DR Electric mower. Battery operated and will mow a couple acres on a single charge. I use it when I've been too lazy to mow and the grass grows too long for the reel
Just my 2 centi-cred
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
"...more or less died off and perhaps shouldn't have."
:).
:P
I disagree. In every case what replaced the original is something that has made life easier or helped us out in some way or another above how the previous invention did:
1. Electric trolley: Sure we're facing pollution, but face it, cars are the way to commute if you aren't rich enough for your private helicopter (how many corp's have helipads for those of us who commute in the air
2. Pneumatic Post: Great idea at the time...but now we have radio/telephone/email/whatnot...who needs this now.
3. Amiga: A real frontier for computers, but could you play Quake on this dinosaur?
4. Ribbon Microphone: What a hassle...can you picture any rock musician wanting to lug one of these 8lb babies around? Thank goodness for the wireless mic!
5. WordStar: We now have WordPerfect, Office, emacs, vi, that are infinitely better and more feature full.
6. Edison's Wax Cylinder: I can understand how this one is unique, but lets think. People like something small. Companies like something compact that stacks/ships well. Something round and flat just seems to work better. Can you picture a pile of Mt. dew cans sitting around with all your mp3's encoded on em?
7. Slide Rule: Calculators are infinitely superior. Nuff said.
8. Reel Mower: People are lazy. Who wants to push something around when they can listen to their Rio and pretend they're on a 4-wheeler in some urban forest.
9. Automatic Watch: A nice breakthrough back then, but I'd go for a cheaper and more efficient quartz battery-powered watch any day.
10. Airship: As the article states, these are still in use in limited areas. For most of us, Delta is safer, cheaper, and just easier.
These are just my opinions from the article. Sorry to waste your reading time
Nice recasting of history, but most streetcar systems didn't shut down, with some friendly investment from GM and various other parts suppliers, until the 1950s. So, sure it's doubtful that a 1943 investigation would have turned anything up.
San Francisco, CA still runs streetcars, including some nicely restored 1940s models, and some brand new Italian ones. Beats taking the bus.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I saw a very interesting Nova documentary about the Hindenburg which claimed that the hydrogen was not the cause of the explosion. Basically, the outer skin was painted with powdered aluminium (I think), which is what we use for rocket fuel today. Hydrogen burns blue, not orange like all the eyewitnesses say the zeplin did. Also, it remained aloft quite long into the fire, which wouldn't make sense if the hydrogen was burning.
Maybe someone has some more details, but the gist of the show was that hydrogen can be made safe for airships.
As others have said, you just repeated the conspiracy theory, while getting all your facts wrong. A few seconds with Google turned up this article from Transportation Quarterly, an article with a lot more references and facts than the conspiracy sites.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
What about a list of f*ucked up things which are still around?
For example: Differently rendering webbrowsers (Netscape should go to hell), obsolete operating systems which are annoying network administrators (Mac OS should be buried once and for all), etc.
BTW: Street cars are still very present in some European cities. Especially in Vienna, Austria.
-- bmp System Support - Vienna, Austria
Leave this US-centric bullshit aside. Zillions of cities all around the world use streetcars and have for a long, long time. Ever been to Europe? Streetcars also face the same problem as all other non-dedicated right-of-way mass transit--traffic! Why do you think nobody rides the bus? Because the average speed of a bus is 12 mph.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
I assume the article was whistfully thinking of the PUSH mowers. I grew up with one of those, but we also had an industrial mower made by Locke Steel Chain company. These mowers make those delightful striped lawns after they have done their clipping. These mowers had either a single reel or three, the outer two lifted to reduce the parked footprint. They ruled the lawns of many an estate in the 50s and 60s and perhaps still do. Of course no decent baseball field, or putting green, would be without a reel mower for crafting those artful alternating bands.
I could announce that I have developed a time machine that bakes pizza, makes pancakes, all while allowing you to travel 2 million years back in time and that wouldn't really make a difference unless I really had one and people would actually use it.
What about hovercraft?
A hospital I worked at in the early 90s put in a brand new computer-controlled pneumatic tube system at the cost of nearly a million dollars. So, yes, they are still in use.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
We don't want airships dead.
/. banner ad)
(Link taken from today's
Nonsense.
Scott Bottles wrote a book called Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City which offers a good debunking of this sadly perpetuated urban legend. Coincidentally, it was published by the same university system to which you belong, judging from your email address.
This link also has a good article about this topic.
The upshot: we could genuinely discuss a conspiracy only if GM pursued its course of action and dismantled the nation's systems in spite of the fact that streetcars offered more benefits than buses. Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered. Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles. Streetcars do have the ability to move more people in the same amount of time with a high enough level of service, but the plain fact is that they were in decline.
The hearings to which you refer were about GM's monopolistic practices in creating the replacement bus systems. Who could blame them? They were taking advantage of the streetcars' demise--brought about by the economics of the time, I must stress--and getting in on the ground floor by supplying buses. And if I had time, I'd dig up those hearings and provide testimony from people who, DURING those hearings, debunked this conspiracy from the get-go, but were drowned out by the media's coverage of it all.
I'm not terribly surprised that your post got modded up to (Score: 4), but it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth.
I'm not talking about mod as in modern... I'm talking about mod as in the file format, originally started on the trusty Amiga. Think MIDI, but with the instruments stored as digital samples within the file. And think (relatively) small file sizes. Back before we had MP3s, we had MODs (or S3M, XM, etc). Every day, new mods would be released onto Usenet. Some pop, some oldies, some just plain odd, and lots of techno. People would rip samples from popular songs and remake them. Others would get similar sounding instruments and try to recreate the original song. And everyone would eventually start making their own music for the world to hear. And you always tried to keep the files as small as you could. I remember spending a weekend modding Mortal Kombat during college, not to mention the many late nights writing my own tunes. The best part was that when you downloaded a mod to listen to, you had all the instruments and the notes to play around with, yourself.
Realistically, the MOD scene is still around, though it has been eclipsed by the plethora of MP3s, etc and the advent of more bandwidth. Now, it is mainly hobbyists and the like, whereas before, you'd get people who wanted to download their favorite song to listen to it, or check out some random DJ's remix.
In case you're curious, check out: Arts: Music: Sound Files: MOD for mod files and Computers: Multimedia: Music and Audio: Software: MOD for players and trackers on Open Directory. Oh, and if you have Winamp, you already have the ability to play MODs.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
In the 1930's air force actually created two airships, one for Alantic on for Pacific ocean. They were basically flying aircraft carriers and could carry about 6 planes. Both were be destroyed in storms in the late 1930's.
I wonder how they would have done in the war. They were filled with helium so one bullet would not make them blow up.
If technology developed differently we might have had a time where hundreds of airship carried passengers all over the globe. Of course the development of the jet engine put a end to this possiblity.
You're confusing Betamax and BETACAM, the former being a dead consumer standard and the latter being a high-end pro standard. The only hting they share is the tape size (the small ones only, Betacam VCRs take 2 sizes).
Betacam also exists in digital and is the most used standard in all TVs around the world. Forget about having one at home, it's hugely expensive.
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
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My main editor is "joe" which has WordStar bindings (^K-B, ^K-E, etc). They suck, but they're not any less hated than Emacs bindings saving throw against Emacs Magic Missile).
Also I live near the reel mower activist capital of the world (maybe?) -- Takoma Park DC (where old hippies go to die).
As for the rest of the technologies, let 'em collect dust in museums.
Ridership peaked in the late 1920s
Well, no shit. Cars became available to the middle class. Has nothing to do with Streetcars versus GM manufactured buses.
Ridership peaked in the late 1920s,
True, but most major cities' bus routes run exactly on the old streetcar lines. So consider this advantage theoretical.
Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way.
False. They are called *Street*cars, you know.
First of all, after the depression and the rise of autos, most of the nations private streetcar systems were in serious decline when GM moved in, with cars and tracks dating back to the 1890s. However, that forstalled the inevitable, since even after the bus conversion, almost every US mass transit system was in public recievership by the early 1970s anyway.
Second, buses were only more economical in the era of cheap 50s gas and friendly loans from General Motors. If anyone had the choice in keeping an electric system or switch to gas today, they'd stick with electric. Also, unlike those 50-year old streetcars, none of those GM busses lasted longer than 20 years before having to be replaced, by the taxpayers.
Third, GM's tactics in this business were horrible. In Minneapolis, for example, they conspired with mobsters to essentially loot the system, and left the company as a bankrupted shell after they had to rip up the lines and sell the fleet for scrap. Where once the only sigificant operational cost was labor (the system was powered by a hydroplant), they then had big loans from GM and ongoing gasoline and tire costs. These sorts of tactics from a company that a 70% marketshare at the time were disgusting. This is hardly a secret conspriciy theory either -- GM ran newspaper ads bragging about what they were doing, and knew that in an environment where 'Whats good for GM is good for America', and the faux moderinity of gasoline busses, they were politically safe.
Well, anyway, stand out on Market Street in San Francisco some time with your dollar. See if you get on the 40s streetcar or the 80s bus, and see which provides better service.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Whether or not GM killed of trolleys, they frankly don't make a lot of sense in low-density suburban area, where most Americans seem to live.
Well, that's a different conspiricy! Suffice it to say that GM was a big real estate developer and also so home appliances in those days...
(Although the federal loan subsidy policies of the day were the real motivating factor behind the suburbs. Not that I can blame people. After being cooped up in an apartment through the depression and the war, with no money and rationing, and nothing getting maintained and nothing new getting built for 30 years, a nice shiny Chevrolet and your own federally subsidized 1/2 acre probably sounded pretty good!)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Reel mower only refers to the cutting system, not the power system. A former neighbor actually had a power open reel mower (scary and dangerous looking), and most large groundskeeping services that care about the appearance of their grounds use large, powered, self-propelled reel mowers which Toro still sells. They're probably too big and expensive to justify for most of the dinky home yards, but they are made.
Betamax is obsolete, but Betacam is still around.
Check back issues of Mix or EQ from back around 91-92 for discussions on why MD sucks.
Care to cite a more RECENT reference? MD has come a long way in the NINE YEARS between those "discussions" and now.
Oh, and just to bother the troll I'm replying to...seems EQ thinks it is now a useful medium.
Toronto has a great public transport system! I wish other cities (ie. Vancouver) were modeled as well.
Absolutely agree with you on the bike point. Way back when, I was a bike courier in Vancouver, so I had a lot of experience in that realm. Even during college I even used to ride from d/t out to Burnaby in faster than any other mode of transport during rush-hour.
I hate it whenever people talk about why Betamax should have won. Having owned an Amiga, I believe in good technology as much as anyone else, but most people forget two VERY important features Betamax did not have over VHS: a) VHS was an open standard. Multiple vendors built VHS decks because JVC licensed their format. Sony was stupid enough not to let other vendors in on their game. b) JVC engineers and marketers recognized that people would want to tape movies and sports events that were 2 hours long. Not everyone cares about how many MHz of luma bandwidth etc that Beta has over JVC and that's a lesson all designers, engineers and developers should learn: The users needs are paramount! And before anyone suggests it, while the Betamax format shares SOME commality with BetaCam, the latter is VERY different from the consumer format. It's popularity has little to do with it's technical merits-it was largely because Sony turned around and realized how important it was to support their broadcast customers well (a lesson Panasonic did not learn with their technically better M and MII formats) Calum
Wow.. 35 full shares. Pocketmoney trader, eh ? :)
sometimes they aren't even used for the aural properties... seems like artists like the retro look of ribbon mic's in their videos...
*Shrug*
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
San Francisco is a little strange. We have a combination of gas-powered buses, electric buses, restored electric street cars from other cities (you know, the ones that look like bomb shells), and cable car trollies (sp?). The cable cars are of course one of the neatest forms of transport due to the fact that they are 100% manually controlled. My understanding is that the operator pushes a lever that connects to a cable underneath the street. (This lever, BTW is easily 4 ft. long) When they want to stop, they disconnect the lever and apply the brakes. The trolly itself has no locamotion of its own and is really very much like a boxcar being tugged along on a rope. Pretty cool tho.
Oh, and the obligatory link.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I grew up with a push mower and bought one when I bought my first house. They kick ass, especially if you're into midnight mowing because they're so quiet. They can be found in any decent hardware store -- hardly a dead technology.
In contrast, the days of the gas mower are numbered - to be replaced by cleaner, quieter electric mowers. Me, I'll take free, healthy human-power over expensive, polluting gasoline any day.
Huh? If automatic watches are "dead" I better hide my wrist. ;) I have one on right now that works just fine. Seiko branded. Now if I could just find a better watchband for it..
You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots
Actually, not true. At least, for 98; I have it installed as a service on my box at home, which I log into periodically throughout the day. I also run linux on the box; sometimes I forget to leave it in 98 mode for my girlfriend to use. so, ssh into the box, reboot, and voila.... comes back in 98. The point being, i can still VNC in after the reboot.
And before anybody starts into me, yes I know that Wine, et al exist to avoid reboots, but AFAIK, none of those solutions allow me to play everquest. please enlighten me if you know a way to play EQ and MechWarrior from linux.
A small excerpt:
You shithead post shit like this on every Slashdot article that mentions Beta.
BetaMax -- Consumer format, dead
BetaCam -- Professional format, still very alive.
The tapes look about the same, but the formats were never compatible (except for some pro cross-over models), period.
Actually there was an article in the January 2001 issue of popular science that airships are making a comeback because the materials and fuel needed to run one are really cheap. Not to mention they can carry more weight, and if an engine dies, you don't go hurtling towards the ground to be killed in a giant explosion. :)
This article seems to have a rather modern bias. What about something older, such as the technologies employed by the Romans that have left things standing 2,000 years later?
While I agree with some of these, some extra development was needed on them or they were ahead of the time. Size and speed are the "drivers" of the society and they forget about quality sometimes. I agree with the ribbon mic and the colt revolvers as quality over quantity. The Amiga as a great thing and the electric cars/buses as a future thing..... Why don't we make a poll of the technology that shouldn't be abandoned?
Ecuador always on my heart....
I doubt if any of you ever used a General Magic operating system. I believe their OS was called Magic Cap. It was the OS of early, pre-Pilot PDAs such as the Sony MagicLink and I believe the Motorola Envoy. Very similar to Bob, you would have a picture of a desk with various common desktop items on it like a memo pad, clock, diary, and even a Magic 8-ball. If you wanted you could go out of the "office" and into the "hall" where there were different doors leading to rooms like the "Utility Closet" where you could set up the unit, or the "Game Room". There were even pictures and plants in the "hall". From the hall you could go "outside" to "Downtown" where you would see little buildings, each representing a different piece of software. The whole thing was very graphical and actually fun to use. The social UI deal worked better on a PDA than it did on a desktop. Still, I prefer the simplicity of the PalmOS. Does anyone else remember Magic Cap?
See what I mean? If IBM had worked that thing out, this AC would be writhing on the floor in utter agony right now. Sheesh.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Beta did take off. every television station in the nation (if not the world) uses beta for everything. It made sony an enormous hunk of cash, even if the consumer market dwindled. Beta has been used for going on 20+ years now (granted, most inventions in the article were older...)
-
Yeah WTS ... despite the fact that our host box goes down every other day (known issue, apparently...) the seat licences cost almost as much as a W2K Professional licence, which we've also bought. (Admin connections are thankfully free.)
Since you have to justify this thing on admin costs alone, it will probably never really catch on in a wide scale way in the Windows world. I'd be all for VNC, but I've heard that it doesn't handle multi-user correctly on Windows, and it's really just an admin solution.
Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.
:)
The point of the article is sometimes that good technologies disappear and are replaced with new ones of questionable value. Reel mowers are a good example. For a small lawn, reel mowers:
1. are quieter
2. are less expensive
3. require less maintenance
4. provide less opportunity for serious injury
5. don't need gasoline, oil or electricity
6. don't emit fumes
When I see a guy mowing his 1/8 acre with a riding mower, I can't help but laugh. Sure, he has the "technologically superior" solution, but he's also ridiculous
I think those brands are able to produce MiniDisc players because they have licensed the technology from Sony. As you know the slashdot crowd, it not completely a fan of licenses (there goes my Karma!) if it isn't the GPL license. :-)
But you are right, the technology is wildely spread and I think Sony knows very well that it should keep it's licensing regulations reasonable because some other company might just try to kick them from their throne with better or other technology (remember the Philips DCC).
I actually use exclusively TDK MiniDiscs (because they are produced in my country, and my have help my economy a bit) and have a Portable Sharp MiniDisc player and a Sony Hifi with MiniDisc. The Sharp was very affordable, by the way
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I walked onto a plane a few years ago and noticed that the in-flight movie equipment was Betamax.
The article never said they're dead, just niche.
Also this Seiko watch is a bit different in that it's battery powered, but movement charges the battery, as opposed to being purely mechanical.
It does look very, very cool though, I'm looking at the PDF file now. I want one too!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
About Reel mowers: Properly maintained the are vastly superior to power mowers for the following reasons:
Eviromentally friendly.
No need for oil,
No Exhaust
Less pieces to manufacture
Low maintainnence.
No gas purchases,
No oil purchases,
No spark plug purchases
Healthier.
Slightly more effort. Thus you can get a moderate increase in your heart rate.
Don't under estimate Reel mowers. I suggest you try one before you jump to any conclusions. And be sure it is properly maintain to avoid rust in the bearings.
I had a friend who got me to try his, and it cut grass very nicely, and was quite. Would I want to mow the back 40 with one? No. But for an average lawn they work very well. Most people when the think "push mower" they recall some experience using one that had bearing problems, and was impossible to push.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sucks. Come on, did you ever try to use it? It made a text editor and latex seem easy...
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
My vote goes for the microswitch keyboard. Sure, it's noisy and a little more expensive, but it provides satisfying tactile feedback and a good level of resistance.
disclaimer: the above is not a troll
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
FFVII's airship survives until the end when basically debris from a comet destroys the thing, but even then, it has some emergency over-ride like thing that allows it to keep functioning.
FFVIII's airship was a spaceship, but FFVIII sucked anyway :)
Actually, FFI's airship wasn't really an Airship-Airship, it used helicopter blades and a magical floater stone which caused it to float - but damn, was it fast! Fastest FF airship to date, I think...
And all of FFVI's airship's survive to the end too... hey, one of them could even make it to the moon! Although that was really a spaceship, the Giant Whale, I guess.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
>What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and
>Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't
>count). People still don't know that they should
>be able to log into their home computers
>wherever they are.
Can you say Terminal Services? Thats exactly what you are looking for, and it's in Windows 2000 S/AS/DC.
-H
Those things were great...
Faster than any of those Ti calculators (mainly because my classmates couldn't use them very well).
Then along came RPN, and I just had to have that HP29C.
Those were the days...
http://www.tri-met.org/max.htm
Ribbon Microphones are still used by several bands... because of their "warm sound."
I'm sure that some of the others on this list are still in wide use today. I've seen Pneumatic Posts in all sorts of banks, and some large stores. (Nike Town in Downtown portland uses them to move around shoes...)
The Amiga is not quite dead too. I'm not sure about WordStar, but I know people who still swear by WordPerfect 6.0 (the blue an white version in DOS).
My grandpa still uses a slide rule to figure out all sorts of math. I think he's just showing off, but when he's faster at it then I am with a TI-89, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Reel mowers are still in use. Not just by old farts who refuse to change either. They're waaaay cheaper, and for small lawns not all that inconvenient.
Automatic Watches... uhhh Seiko Kinetic? Anyone?
Everytime I see football I see airships. Granted they're not used for transportation, except for the crew, but they're still there, and useful.
It's interesting to see a list of things that are refered to as passed technologies, all of which are still in use somewhere today. Perhaps people need to open their eyes and see that these things are out there with their loser elegance beating out the "winners" that lack simplicity.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
But a number of the inventions (just about all, in fact) mentioned in the article were not completely eliminated, just largely displaced by alternatives. I think that's the general way of things, in fact. Old technology is rarely eliminated at a stroke. Instead, it's bumped into a niche market where it's particular advantages are significat enough to keep it alive. Over the very long haul that niche may dry up completely, but it rarely happens overnight.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'll vouch for electric. My parents have had a rechargable one for 10 years without a single repair. The thing recharges silently in the garage when not in use.
Now if only they could make cars do that..
The RCA 77DX ribbon mic is a little more common than the old 44's. Even though the ones on the desks of Larry King and David Letterman are replicas, you can still find them used by recording engineers to pull off the mid-side recording technique.
Professional equipment, not consumer.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
It's called an E6-B. It's a circular slide rule used to solve navigation problems and wind triangles for aviation use. It's actually faster to use than the electronic versions (that's why I've stuck with a mechanical E6-B rather than buying an electronic one). The other good thing about it as there are no batteries to fail, and you can still read it wearing polarized sunglasses.
As far as the Hindenburg, even if it were helium-filled it could have caught fire, but not quite as spectacularly. The doped fabric covering of the airship was itself highly flammable.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Actually, only the Indy Racing League runs exclusively on oval courses. The CART series races on many road courses (Detroit, Elkhart Lake, Portland, Vancouver, etc...). Both series race Indy cars, though.
you when A prize!
Half the time people don't believe me when I tell them Betamax is still in use. It's nice to see not everybody is without a clue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Philadelphia, PA has a working trolley system in addition to the subways and regional rails.
I take the trolley to work each day.
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
We (meaning my wife occasionally and me frequently) use the reel mower we bought last spring for our dinky lawn and you're right about the bennies. But you forgot that the neighbors will almost never borrow it, and nobody will want to borrow it twice. They'll either hate it or get their own. Besides, you don't have to start the the thing - I've done my whole front lawn in the time it's taken my neighbors to get their gas mowers running for more than a minute. Plus the looks you get from people driving by are interesting.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Actually, there were two turbine powered Indy cars in different races in the seventies. One (or maybe both) is in the raceway museum in the middle of the track. Both cars went out late in the race with a huge lead to simple mechanical failures (one time it was a $2 bearing). They are banned in Indy competition.
The coolest tech that isn't allowed to be used was the giant fan on the bottom of the car that sucked the car to the track. This created a lot of down force and allowed the car to go through the corners almost as fast as it went down the straightaways. It was banned because it spit road debris at the drivers behind it.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
I suspect that there were always two streems of things called beta, the consumer version (now dead) and the pro version (still in wide use).
I'd like a model similar to the way my phone company (US^H^HQwest) does last call return -- 75 cents per call isn't BAD when you really need it, but after a specified number of uses per month, they stop charging for it.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
I grew up as electronic calculators became standard. I learned the slide rule for the heck of it. There are a couple of good reasons for using a slide rule. There is one reason, however, that would justify crushing every electronic number cruncher out there:
order of magnitude
The modern generation of calculator kiddies make this mistake a lot. Cute in the schools, potentially fatal in the real world (engineering, architecture, and chemistry, to name three areas where shifting decimals have caused fatal accidents).
Almost every technology has a downside - in this case, a loss of understanding of where the answer should be.
On a marginally related tangent, how many people out there can take the Nth root of a number? Mandatory in my father's day, my class only learned square roots, and they don't teach it at all now (speaking of US/Canadian schools). There have been a couple of times when knowing how has been very useful ... and people raised on electronic calculators would never have even dreamt of applying it, because they simply were never taught.
Ten Passed Technologies
Not every disappearing technology deserves that fate. Sometimes the "losers" have an elegance and simplicity the "winners" lack. Here are ten examples.
MS Word
The sparse and tightfisted Word processor from the extinguished Microsoft company shaped the future of modern Speech Processors (SP) and user hyperinterface: thousand of icons and buttons in the screen, random behaviour, ill-behaviour with large document, the talking clipper. It lacks of features is considered, nowdays, more a virtue rather than a defect.
ISDN and ADSL
Copperlines, the 20th-century analog of today's quantic-optic fibers, had their own "last mile" problem. One 20th-century solution: small electron quantums pushed along expensive copper cables via porting in unhealthy high-frequencies that acted as carriers.
CDs and DVDs
Audiophiles lament the passing of digital sounds and MPEG audio, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the holographic pild. But the recorded disc was in its own day an upstart technology, elbowing out a superior medium for recording sound: the dic-shaped vinyl first manufactured by RCA in the middle of last century.
Personal Computers
In 1979, Commodore brought the Personal Computers to consumers. Two years later, the final shaped of old and bloated hardware born with the name of IBM Personal Computers, which lasted for 30 years until the quantic processor won its own position in the market.
Internet
The appeareance of this technology in the general-public market, 25 years later from its invention, was believed as the greater revolution since the Gutember invention. Nowadays, it is hard to believe that such a unreliable networks technology, still based in moving electrons along copper cables and optic fiber, and therefore anti-ecologic until its own bones, could last for 30 years with no opposition from the mithyc Greenpeace. Additionally, the primitive protocol used for reliable transmission, because networks weren't reliable at all, didn't allow for bandwidth aggregation and reservation, according to the amount of "electron packets" needed for the, already dissapeared, 2D plus sound streamed movies.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I have a solar powered watch made by Citizen. They call it the "Eco-Drive". The watch is stylish enough that the solar cell lies beneath the face of the watch. I had an automatic watch too.
Here is one URL on the solar watch: http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/ecodrive-review.html
On the scale from 1 to badass they are playa's. If I ever become a billionaire or even a 10millionaire I'm going to have one. They are kind of slow an steady, fairly quite, smooth, and really big and cool looking.
When you ride in to town in your blimp, people take notice. Plus, I think non-German blimps just give off a really friendly and happy energy. It's not some aggressive looking lear jet.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I have one for years also, never had an electrical one, or with an engine. The engine is my arms
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Oh, please! If it weren't for the proprietary hardware there wouldn't be any Amiga at all. While the software was pretty innovative too, it was the hardware that made it a real killer.
tubes are great... at a local establishment in Milwaukee, WI, they're used to make martinis "shaken not stirred", by running the shaker bottle through a modified bank tube that runs through the bar.
International Exports Ltd.
And no, I'm not gonna tell you the password.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
i've got a tuba in my pants. wanna blow it?
Nothing wrong with MD at all! I have a portable player/recorder, and it rocks. Media's cheaper than the memory in my buddies' mp3 players, and it's more durable than the CDR. (That, and everyone thinks no one uses it, so while mp3 will be first up on the wall when the RIAA comes, the MD will still be useful.)
Newer versions of the ATRAC spec give great sound, too.
--Ben
--Ben
Fast-forward a few years and imagine Vancouver becoming like London and try driving behind one of their diesel buses w/o an oxygen mask. Of course, by then you'd probably ditch your vehicle for the ever-so-reliable Underground ;-)
Besides, what kind of traffic jam can be caused by the minute or two it takes to reset the contacts?
Yes, SF has some of these older cars running along Market Street and the Embarcadero. I see them every few minutes from my window here. But that's not quite the same as going all over the city.
And the poster who pointed out that all this is US-centric...well of course it is. To most Americans, the idea that there's a world outside of our own country is one that is easily forgotten, if ever learned.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
sounds like a job for ....
MARKETING!
guess you geeks still need us Marketroids after all :)
- j
If someone can't read the decimal point correctly on a calculator, I really don't think they will be able to get it right on a slide rule.
Hey, Mr 510 - besides the historic F line that you see from your window, San Francisco has 5 other Streetcar lines with a mix of 70s cars and brand new ones.
Most of them run out to the Sunset via a tunnel under Market Street and Twin Peaks, but maybe some of your Noe Valley pals get the J-Church.
Try this link. It pretty debunks the idea. Also this. GM was convicted of conspiring to monopolize "supplies"--that is, to force the companies it owned to buy all their busses from GM. Not of driving streetcars out. Streetcars had already peaked in 1920 and were in decline for a long time. And streetcars were replaced by busses all over the world, including in locations which had no connection to GM and where the busses did not come from GM, and even by companies in Los Angeles which were not owned by GM.
It's about as closely related to the classic Amiga OS (or hardware) as a PC with Linux and UAE.
Now that was a great OS, artificially killed for commercial reasons. (but there's always gnuton).
-- Slef
I still wear (every day) the Seiko Automatic that my parents gave me 13 years ago: works beautifully, though I dropped it a month ago, and put a small crack in the glass. Doh!
Drop me a line if you don't want your Kinetic...
Ok, styrafoam is bad, but McD has not yet found a suitable replacement that keeps the hot side hot and the cool side cool. Man that was a great sandwitch (compared to the regular stomach grenades).
jetpacks give new meaning to "First Person Shooter"...
What about Betamax? I heard (never saw it, too young at the time) it was better than VHS and had smaller tapes as well.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
(1) R-12 refrigerant [don't kill it until you have a drop-in replacement].
(2) Muscle cars. [Damned tree hugger bullshit rules.]
(3) Car engines designed to run cool [running cooler runs longer. 195F? 210F? 160F is better.]
(4) Leaded gas [LESS dangerous than today's MTBE, and improves MPG]
(5) Analogue cellular. [You know, the reliable one digital 'falls back' to.]
(6) Carburreted, non computer controlled car engines. [fscking modules or sensors die faster than engine components.]
(7) Tube based audio and RF amplifiers. Remember when a short at the output was NOT destructively harmful?
(8) NTSC television. (Planned if not in progress) [Digital is not about benefiting consumer. It's about control, PPV, banning recording, blocking commercial skipping, etc.]
(9) Serial mice. [Whaddya mean it'll cause damage if I unplug at "wrong time"? Big step backwards here.]
(10) Bumpers on cars. [Why should cars crumple in 10MPH collisions? My truck (2x300lb chromed steel bumbers) reflects energy in a collision. And since most other cars crumple, I'm even safer today.]
It wasn't the hydrogen. As reported in a Channel 4 (UK) documentary, Secrets of the Dead, (and discussed on /.), the Hindenburg had been completely painted with a compound made of iron oxide and powdered aluminum, ie. rocket fuel.
It seems the Nazis were more comfortable saying that an 'act of god' had caused the freak ignition of the hydrogen in the tanks, than admit that the german engineers had deliberately painted the skin with such a substance.
As I use a reel mower to mow my teeny tiny lawn.
I also don't carry a watch, either quartz or self-winding, as my Palm gives me time, too.
I'm sorry, but this article isn't quite clear on its own concept. Many of these technologies deserved their fate, often for fatal flaws pointed out in the article. It's more of a wishlist of technologies which proved infeasible. Sure, the wax cylinder was a better recording medium, but a full orchestra in your pants would be better still. It's like the author is complaining to god that the laws of physics should have been altered to make these ideas practical.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
I always thought Nintendo's Gameboy was amazing considering it's ten years old and all Nintendo has done to it is add color.(yes GBA is coming)
But not too many ten year old console game systems can still make dump truck loads of money!!!
Is it proof that game play is more important than graphics?
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
A very nice historical piece, but hardly very controversial. All the items mentioned were good or exceptional in their day, but for one reason or other were superceded.
One excellent attribute does NOT make a successful product. It takes a combination, and technical excellence is only one of them. Cost matters a great deal, too!
My Atari 800 displayed 128 colors. Also, I would imagine that a wax cylinder would degrade quite rapidally in comparison to the vinyl records, so superior seems quite questionable. And when did Wordstar lay the ground work for WYSIWYG? Was that in 1985, after the Mac was released? It certainly wasn't in the earlier versions.
This article is a prime example of the need for web anotation.
I agree with you, but a proper airship would have to be run like a cruise liner, as sitting in those cramped little seats for hours, while the air ship moved at 50mph, basically u would have lethal a blood clot about 1/3 the way into your trip.
I believe though there could be a market in airship cruise liners, for the same reason people take cruises on the water. The food, the sex and the view. And maybe the mariachi band.
And as to the hindenburg exploding(in the article), I saw a documentary a few months back explaining that the skin of the hindenburg was made up of various chemical components that approximate the substance hydrazine. Often used in solid rocket boosters. This was unknown at the time of course. The theory is though, that a static shock caused the hydrazine to start to burn, which in turn ignited the hydrogen seconds later. Kablooey.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
As a result of that accident hydrogen has gotten a really bad rap when it's not all that dangerous and has a lot of benefits. Clean cars being one example.
Hydrogen isn't a viable replacement for gasoline in cars. It can only be stored as a compressed gas, which has a far lower energy density than liquid gasoline. Further, because hydrogen molecules are so small, they have a tendency to diffuse through many metals and other materials, so containers/hoses/seals/etc. are annoying to build.
You'd also have to overhaul all gas stations to handle a gas instead of a liquid as their main product. Yes, they handle propane already, but you'd have to tear up and replace the gas pumps and main storage tank.
IMO, something like methanol is a better solution. You can burn it cleanly in conventional engines, or you can burn it in specially built fuel cells. It can be stored as a liquid with a not-too-bad energy density, and it can be produced easily.
I don't know why the author chose to include "automatic watch" on the list. As far as I know, such devices are in wide spread use. In fact, there are even a couple of variations. For instance, Seiko's kinetic watches, which, if I am not mistaken, recharge their battery through arm movement. I've owned a Tag Hauer watch with a counterweight that wound the watchspring every time it moved around. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. In fact, many companies use the "automaticness" of their watch as a marketing gimmick...Look, here's a fancy watch with all the guts you've come to expect it to have, but guess what, you never have to wind it!
The reason that LA's Red Line was shut down was not because it was bought by GM, but because it failed to make a profit. Check out some facts here
Also, Philly still has streetcars, so I'd say your information is pretty suspect. Berkeley, eh?
Just junk food for thought...
And yes, BETA should have definitely been on the list.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
Please tell me that I am not the only person here under the age of 40 who owns and knows how to use a slide rule. Just don't ask me which box in the basement it is still packed in.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Quite the opposite, I would say. The Beta never really took off. Therefore it has never died. However all those inventions mentioned in the article has completely dominated the world for some period of time.
Dammit, I'm dyslexic - stupid Roman Numerals. And all of FFVI's airship's survive to the end too - No they don't - only one does. All of FF I V's survive to the end.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
"WordStar2000, released in 1985, fared poorly against rival WordPerfect, and the company fell from its lead position. "
They released WordStar2000 in 1985?
I guess it was just ahead of its time.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Unfortunately, the older electric buses are being (slowly) replaced with conventional buses. As someone who lives on Main St. and rides the infamous No.3 daily, I hate to see the decline of this system.
It irritates me for at least two reasons: first, the old system works fine, even counting the number of times the driver has to hop out and reconnect his bus to the overhead lines.
The second is that we are developing fuel cell technology (Ballard Power) for mass transit, but the fskers in Translink would rather waste money on the damn SkyTrain monorail. Why not place orders for a bunch of fuel cell buses, and hence stimulate both the fuel cell and fuel cell FUEL industries locally?
The electric trams were the FIRST form of mass transit in Vancouver, and still provide clean public transportation a hundred years later.
They are making a well-deserved comeback, with high appeal for environment and neighbor conscious people with yards smaller than a polo field.
If I may politely point out...
There are some posts earlier that tend to contradict those statements regarding "betamax"'s use today... something about differences between betacam used in pro. video applications and the old (long dead) consumer format of betamax...
Just as an FYI... *shrug*
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
As long as I have a straw, some paper, and spit, pneumatic technology will never die.
NO CARRIER
When you watch CBS news tonight.. see the credits..it should mention something about how its archived in betamax..
Now, I might be going a bit off track here, but if my memory serves me right, magnetic bubble memories are still used in hostile environments (satellites, for example) where a 'conventional' RAM wouldn't last very long.
Actually a quick search on google shows that at least in Japan there is still some development going on in this field
http://www.sta.go.jp/sonota/sonota/e9908_10.html
-- the cake is a lie
For a better version of the Divx-type standard, see Netflix. They send you a DVD (a real DVD, compatible with any player or computer) and a pre-paid mailer to return it. You watch it for as long as you like, and return it when you're done. You get charged for the time you've borrowed it, which works out to roughly $20/month.
Of course, if you're going to rent a movie enough times, you might as well buy it anyway.
For more information, click here.
The Breitling NaviTimer has 2 of these technologies together - it's an automatic watch with a built in slide rule, cost is about $3000 tho'.
--It's better to ride the rainbow than find the pot of gold.
Reading this article reminds me of the Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen. One of the theses of the book is that new technologies may often be worse than the current ones, but the new technologies are improving more rapidly. To take an example from the article, the early versions of the carbon mike were worse than the current ribbon mikes. Unfortunately, the author forgot to mention that the later versions of the carbon mikes were better than the ribbon mikes.
Also forgotten in the article is the fact that technologies compete on many fronts. This has been mentioned before, but phonographs are more durable and easier to make than wax cylinders. These aren't trivial benefits that should take a back seat to quality. The fact is that higher fidelity is something often perceived only by audiophiles, while everyone benefits by the fact that they can play their record more than a few times before it begins to fade (as a wax cylinder does).
Brant
Funny that amiga is atop the list when a new OS was just announced!
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Typically, these are sold as "tiff" mowers - tiff grass is a lightweight, oh-so-soft grass (the best damn grass to lie down on, if you ask me), that simply can't be cut by a rotary mower (rotary mowers tear and break the grass, and are thus used for hardier grasses like bermuda - tiff is soft, and a rotary mower will literally "blendo" the grass, and produce a sludge - providing you can find tiff grass that long, of course).
They are essentially a reel mower with an engine, and a wheel at the back, connected by a drop chain/lever combo. You have to push the mower, then drop the wheel to prevent a "scuff" mark on the grass (boy, was I bawled out by my boss on my first job in high-school about that!), but man - you could litterally guide them easily once going.
Now, these suckers were anything _but_ safe - the reel keeps spinning as the engine runs (of course, the model I used was old, they may be safer today, with a clutch or something) - I am sure some fingers could be chopped off by that thing (and I know more than one snail in the yard lost its life due to the mower I was using!)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I just bought an automatic watch last January, and no, it wasn't a Rolex (an Omega), but I saw plenty of manufacturers (Rolex, Breitling, Heuer, Omega, Patek-Philippe) that made automatic watches. They're way sweet, I love having a kinetically-wound watch...- -----------------
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I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
SF streetcars have dedicated right of way. And i love the vintage cars from other cities. esp. the "green hornet" from chicago.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
I was taught how to use one just last year. (I already knew, but hey...)
Get your pilot's license. You'll have to buy a device called an E6-B computer to figure time/speed/distance/fuel burn, wind correction angles and ground speed, etc. You guessed it: it's a circular slide rule. Fast, cheap, durable, effective and never runs out of batteries.
Side note: I ban calculators in my Physical Chemistry tests. I'm thinking about giving extra credit to anyone who can do the problems with a slide rule.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Rochester NY was an early adopter of VCR technology, I still think you can buy blank beta tapes in ROchester.
Automatic watches are far from dead. Can I have one for Christmas?
Another draw-back to hydrogen powered cars is, in fact, water. Consider this: If you've got 100,000 cars burning hydrogen in your local city, you're putting an awful lot of water vapor into the air, enough that you could affect the climate... You could produce some really nasty thunderstorms if you pass a cold front through some nice humid air (just like what happens in the spring and fall in central Texas).
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
I wonder how many of the posters on this group concluding that these solutions all "deserved their fate" hold the same opinion when it comes to OSes.Are all alternative OSes to M$ Windows 'inferior' by the same reasoning?
Usually the very same person claiming the technology is obsolete just happens to have some cool hot new replacement.
Its like MP3, what was wrong with minidisc ? The capitalist system may be good at producing lots of choice, but from an environmental perspective, thats a hell of a lot of obsolete technology to dispose of.
Food for thought the next time you recycle that old 486 by putting Linux onto it, not only do you get one up on Gates, and stick it to "the man", you are also being environmentally friendly !!!
Linux is too Cool!!!
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Watches that "wind" themselves are quite common?
I'm currently wearing a Tag Huer Kinetic Chronometer.
Yeah, I was just thinking about this very thing, while writing some email in WordStar on my Amiga, and listening to MP3s on my portable wax cylindar player, on my morning zeppelin commute to work.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Airships?! Bah! I saw an airship only a few days ago, whilst playing Final Fantasy VII!
*grin*
--The Kid
So it goes.
Yes, Win2000 has it, and it may even return to the mainstream, some 10 odd years later.
My point was that Citrix, PCAnywhere, and all that stuff aside, there's no free, standardized, widespread remote login for windows. It's an invisible capability to 90+% of the windows userbase. Which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the fact that aging computers from 10 years ago (unix) have this capability built in.
How many Win2000 users are using their home desktop from work?
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What happens when you outlaw guns
Office 95. The most stable office app ever produced by Microsoft with the least security/nag issues (e.g. the paper clip).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Why does everyone keep insisting that BetaMax was such a great technology? Just because it delivers better quality pictures doesn't mean it was better suited for the home user. One of the reasons that VHS succeeded over BetaMax was that you could be sure of recording a whole football game on a VHS tape, but you couldn't fit the whole thing on a BetaMax (depending on game length, of course).
Say you had to commute 40 km to work every day, so you go shopping for a car. There's an electric one with lots of cool gadgets, it's better for the environment, and you're even sure that you could tap into your neighbour's electric panel to fuel up on his electricity! Wow! Except that its average range is, perhaps 75 km, so you would consistently have to walk the last 5km home, start unreeling your 5 km long extension cord, go back to the car, plug it in... or move your house 5 km closer to your work.
Sometimes certain features outweigh all the others, and that was probably partly the case in BetaMax.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
By law in Japan, a liceanced swordsmith is only allowed to make 2 swords per month, and they must be made from crude Tomahage that is made the same way it has been made for almost a thousand years.
By law all machine made world war II swords are supposed to be destroyed, as they are considered to be an embarrassment to the Japanese art.
You know nothing about Japanese swordmaking.
love is just extroverted narcissism
It would seem to me that airships would be an incredible way to travel short - to - medium length distances.
You could travel as the crow flies, at a low enough altitude to not affect air traffic but at a high enough altitude to get a cool view, and I don't know about the energy costs of pushing it around but it would seem to me to be less than that of running jets to keep a plane aloft...
It would appear to be a more leisurely, train-like way of travel without the awkwardness of having to run across train lines (going around mountains, there's a piece of metal on the track, sorry for the seven hour delay, etc)
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Oh, and those reel mowers? Houses here are packed so closely that most lawns are smaller than most rooms. The local Sears stocks at least two or three different models, plus a couple of the powered ones - commonly used for golf courses, since reel mowers actually cut the grass better than rotary ones.
--
Hey, thought about a constructive first post while reading the article and: :-)
:-)
allready 8 posts when I'm back and also two allredy moderated down
Well, I learned to use Slide Rules in school, 20 years ago when I was 12 to 14 or so, I think. I think they are still manufactured, at least in most german high schooles (Gymnasium, is that a high school?) they are mandatory thought in the 6th year.
Strange, all my friends had Amigas but I took a Mac, black and white of course.
Just today I bought 35 shares from CargoLifter, the Air Ships company
Strange incidents!
I agree with all points of the author! Well collected sampless of vanished technologie!
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't count). People still don't know that they should be able to log into their home computers wherever they are.
Windows 2000 Server now comes with Terminal Server which allows multiple users to log in remotely (with GUI) to that server. It's been around for about 3 years now as Winframe and just recently was included in NT directly.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
I am now moving back to my original idea of a canvas-winged plane controlled by punch cards
When you build it, make sure it turns without having to telegraph the supreme court first.
Whew. For a second there, I thought this article would be a list of projects and technologies abandoned by Apple after Steve Jobs took over.
:)
That said, the e-mate's handwriting recognition interface should be on the list.
Whatever happened to TELEX? It used to be used alot, but I haven't heard about it in years. Then again, I barely know what it is, so could somebody enlighten me as to its purpose?
I might be missing some thing but I think most of those are best left forgottenand Two I don't think are forgotten at all. First the Automatic Watch I 've see watched that wind by your wrist moving. second slide rules are convient some times and that is why you can still get those easly. so doesn't that mean they haven't died?
.. . . . . . . . .
They're just not mainsteam. :)
;)
;) Good technology never dies; it seems more like the really good ideas get delegated to "fans" or people who don't fall prety to marketing and/or the feeling they need the latest and greatest.
You know all those subways in New York? They're powered by electricity. Sure, the metaphor is a little different, but the idea is still there: Electric powered mass transit.
Pneumatic tubes? Bah, Home Depot and Costco use these systems to this day. I worked for a company a couple years ago that maintained these systems; cashiers use them to deliver money to the vault in the back.
Amiga? HAH. I still have a functioning Amiga 2000.
Don't many studios still use some varient of the 'ribbon microphone'? Admittedly my expertise is starting to peter out, but I do know it's common for either recording artists or movie people to use older technologies because they sound (or look) a certain way.
Reel mowers, bah. I had a friend during childhood who's parents still used one.. they made him mow the lawn with it as punishment.
Only commenting on the stuff I know.
Just because you don't see a representation of it on every street corner doesn't mean something has dissappeared.
That's a great idea, but it should be more like the 100 best. There are just too many great techs out there that should be on a list like that.
Airships would actually be cool to have today. They could fit in roughly the same market as luxury cruise ships. Can you imagine having a giant steel-framed helium airship with a gondola contianing state rooms, fine dining, and so on? There could even be an observation deck on the lowest floor with a glass bottom! Who wouldn't pay for a trip like that?
Free Hans!
By 1984, WordStar International was the country's largest software company, but WordStar2000, released in 1985, fared poorly against rival WordPerfect, and the company fell from its lead position. (emphasis mine)
Well, maybe the world wasn't ready for WordStar2000 back then. They should try re-releasing it now but they better hurry - only 13 days left!
Mmmm.. Donuts
I can remember using Wordstar when I was in high school. It was lame......
And I KNOW someone who has one of those Edison wax things. Not the recorder kind, but the playback. It's on some sorta metal. Sounds real nice........
--
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
These days, everyone's deploying "FlashMemory;" I would think it a very nice thing if there were something in the way of a solid state technology that would provide something much cheaper than RAM, and less sensitive to vibration than disk.
What would be real nice would be to have something that would provide the 512MB of storage you want for a portable computer, cheaper than flash, and without the mechanical requirements of hard drives...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Good point - I guess I heard too much of the DiVX marketing crap about disposable rentals.
Actually, since the tubes would be more suited to cylinders than disks, perhaps wax cylinders are the medium of choice over ZIP disks and floppies. And think, we could store analog data on them instead of this new-fangled digital format.
new guns are too well made.
Battlefield tolerences were there for a reason
and is why the ak47 is so reliable. Due to its "loose" tolerences it isnt known for its accuracy but under any conditions it is one of the most reliable weapons made. Same for the old goverment
model 1911s m1s and m14s. Military weapons need to be reliable and tough first before accuracy can be considered. But the perfect scores on the 600 meter range look good on the books to the brass.
It doesnt matter that such accuracy plays heck with reliability as long as it makes the brass look goodnew guns are too well made.
Battlefield tolerences were there for a reason
and is why the ak47 is so reliable. Due to its "loose" tolerences it isnt known for its accuracy but under any conditions it is one of the most reliable weapons made. Same for the old goverment
model 1911s m1s and m14s. Military weapons need to be reliable and tough first before accuracy can be considered. But the perfect scores on the 600 meter range look good on the books to the brass.
It doesnt matter that such accuracy plays heck with reliability as long as it makes the brass look good.
If you want to live in a high-density environment and rely on public transportation, more power to you. But your preferences are not necessarily right for everyone, and I oppose attempts to impose such decisions by force.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
> In other words, the automobile increased people's freedom, you don't like the choices they
> made with that newfound freedom, so you wish to "force" them (your word) to live the way you want.
well in all honesty, the availability of automobile transportation only became possible due to massive amounts of your tax dollars used to build roads. Chances are you were never given a choice as to whether that was what you wanted.
Cars are great, no doubt about it... but for commuting, they suck.
> But your preferences are not necessarily right for everyone, and I oppose attempts to impose such
> decisions by force.
Taxation and government policy are another matter of force. If it's all right to build and maintain roads with my taxes, then surely the same is true of other means of transportation.
Hey, whatever works for you, but I don't want to have to wait an hour for a CD to be made, especially if I want to make multiple CDs. In addition, although CDs scratch easily, they are cheap. And if I have to make a new one, well, it's fast.
However, what we need these days are some old fashioned caddy CD players. Just keep all your CDs in caddies and you've got all the protection you need.
But they are awkward. A CDR can be had for twenty cents or less and burned at 8X or better. The first thing I do with new CDs is to immediately rip and mp3 them. It is a one time automated process. MP3 mix cds can be made from my mp3 server very quickly.
That means I have my mix cd in about 10 minutes or so rather than waiting for the Minidisc to fill up in real time. If Minidiscs were a data format (commonly availiable as such!!) rather than a media/audio format then I would like them a lot more. Ditto for "mp to minidisc" conversion software. The mp3 has to be converted to atrac and written at 1x to the disc. Make it no conversion and usable as a fast superfloppy in a player than can be firmware adapted to play ANY digital audio format and I'll be the first to buy it.
The airship shouldn't have died? The slide rule? Slide rules are great, but they don't run Pac-Man anywhere near as well as my HP48sx.
Seriously, what about some of the great ones? Betamax, or Sony's 8mm wallet-sized videotapes?
What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't count). People still don't know that they should be able to log into their home computers wherever they are.
What about guns? Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made. Today's guns suck by comparison - the tolerances are way down, machined rather than hand matched.
IBM's butterfly notebook?
actually playing music on MTV?
we should do a slashdot article and pick the 10 best abandoned technologies. these don't even come close.
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What happens when you outlaw guns
I liked Wordstar, and I liked Turbo Pascal version 3, which had a "Wordstart-like" editor (plus a compiler and linker, all in 39 kbytes). In that list, I would put magnetic bubble memory in the airships' place as a technology that deserved to survive. If magnetic bubbles had evolved at the same pace as magnetic disks did in the last 20 years, we would have far more interesting storage devices today.
Neither do you, if you think that modern technology isn't used at any point in the process. Yes, the swords are made the same way, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal. Yes, there's still a lot of ritual that goes along with the creation of a sword.
And yes, modern metallurgical techniques are used.
Who do you think reads all those graduate theses which have been written on Japanese swords? Swordmakers, for the most part. Because once you take a good, hard look at what makes a Masamune so perfect, that gives you a big hint as to how to make your own swords better.
Your comment is about as informed as someone saying "violinmakers haven't changed their techniques in hundreds of years". Considering that some scientists come tantalizingly close to producing Stradivarius-quality instruments by careful study and analysis, violinmaking is undergoing rapid change due to modern technology.
This is the way the world works. The world wants it fast, cheap and good. The merchant says "fine, pick two", but the prosperous merchant says "fine, I'll give you all three". The second kind of merchant puts the first kind out of business.
Science is a wonderful tool with which to drive down costs of quality goods. It doesn't replace the human touch, nor can it ever replace human expertise; but people who say that science has no adjunct role to play are smoking crack.
Even when it comes to swordmaking.
Unless you're in Seattle instead of Vancouver and the disconnect happens on one of our many steep hills--driver stands on brakes and waits for supervisor to show up = "massive traffic jams." The turn the 12 makes from 1st Avenue up onto Marion is particularly bad.
No relation to Happy Monkey
I'm not a gun person at all, but I do love Tales of the Gun on The History Channel. They did a great show on the AK-47 with a bunch of commentary from the guy who designed it (who was damn young in 47). They said that both the manufacturing tolerances and the operational tolerances of that gun are just ridiculous.
-B
Dictionaries and that telepathic thing IBM was working on, the one that would send a painful electrical pulse into the brainstem of anybody being stupid online.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
We have street cars in NY. We put them underground and call them subways.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
MiniDisc may be proprietary, but I actually like the concept. I mean, a nice protected disc (plastic around it, no scratsches!) that is re-recordable. I wished some of my CD's had such a protection.
It is excellent to make mixes from your CD collection (that's legal, isn't it?) without having to go over the process of ripping each single track (I hate mixes with 2 songs coming form the same source CD) to your harddisk and then write it to a CD.
Once you get sick of your mix, you have to throw away your CD, but the MiniDisc is just erase, and re-record. As for final, the players are very small and not as combersome as portable CD players....they *do* drain a bit more power. Very shake-steady by the way.
From my point of view, the MiniDisc is a very viable *digital* replacement for the audio-cassette.
Please don't bash a product because it is proprietary, but judge it on it's merits.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This article saved my life! I am now moving back to my original idea of a canvas-winged plane controlled by punch cards, and the power is generated by hamsters running in little wheels.
I'd hate to accidentally use outdated technology for such an endeavor.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
These probably died (though I have no direct proof of this) because you couldn't put long performances on them.
I had the chance to hear a wax cylinder, on a genuine Edison machine (it was after finals in history class of my senior year in high school - my history teacher was an antique appraisor on the side). I don't remember what song it was, but it was definitely nice - though kind of crackly and scratchy (what do you expect after 80 years?). However, the thing I remember distinctly is that the music only lasted a few minutes - for a single cylinder.
I don't know what the "RPM" was (I don't think there was standard rpm settings on cylinder records - just a preset speed, or spin it up until it sounds right) - but was there ever "long-play" cylinder records made, or was there multi-speed players made?
Would be curious to know if this was the case...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This applies to just about everything mechanical, not just firearms, BTW.
... machined rather than hand matched.
.18 or so), operational tolerances up.
Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.
Which Colt revolver would this be? The Single Action Army? The Patterson? The Python? The King Cobra? All of them are remarkable weapons (I've used all of them save the Patterson). All of them were machined.
Samuel Colt didn't "hand match" his weapons. He was smarter than that. The virtue of Sam Colt's weaponry was that the parts were all interchangeable, and that's only possible with machining and mass production, not handcrafted individual objects d'art.
Today's guns suck by comparison--the tolerances are way down
My SIG-Sauer is manufactured to tolerances which are usually reserved for jet aircraft. My Kimber M1911A1, likewise.
You also seem confused about tolerances in general. Saying that "tolerances are way down" is a good thing. That's like saying "tolerances fifty years ago were 0.1mm, tolerances this year are 0.01mm." If tolerances are down, that means manufacturing techniques have improved.
Now, manufacturing tolerance isn't the same as operational tolerance. Operational tolerance ought to be very high--weapons are expected to tolerate many different kinds of ammunition without a hiccup, in the most awful conditions. A modern 9mm Glock will chamber any 9mm ammunition you want to throw at it--AET, JHP, LRN, hardball, Glaser, whatever. A 9mm Browning, built in 1935, suffers feed failures on anything other than hardball unless you've had a gunsmith do a throat and ramp-polish on it.
Modern firearms: manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
This, by the by, is reflected in every other manufacturing field. You remember the early '80s, when people had massive air conditioners running in their computer rooms? Now, in 2000, it can be 90 degrees in the house and I don't have any qualms about firing up my dual Pentium IIIs. Manufacturing tolerances down (from point-whatever micron down to
Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14 spends more than half of its operational lifetime on the ground being serviced. The average F-22 doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
A $10 toaster from 50 years ago is big, clunky, heavy and totally reliable. A $10 toaster today is lightweight and totally reliable (at least, mine has never failed me). Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
Good grief. Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques. Even Japanese swordsmithing has gone modern. Four hundred years ago, smiths had to resort to crude and inexact methods to measure certain vital characteristics of metal. Today, smiths use modern metallurgical know-how and thermocouple thermometers to determine exactly what the optimal temperature for forging and tempering is.
Good grief.
Chicago used to have a thriving street car network. It died about the same time all of the other street car systems in other big cities died.
Recently there was an attempt to revive the system, at least in the more touristy downtown areas. The system was deemed impractical, as it would have been ruinously expensive to implement, would have accentuated an already bad traffic situation, would have generated minimal revenue compared to the already existing bus system, and was not projected to draw all that many more tourists to the area ("Gee maw, let's us drive to Chicago and see them thar new fangled street cars" - not gunna happen)
-josh
The article is a tad misleading about reel mowers, it mentions they are hard to push when in fact, a properly maintained reel mower with sharp blades is not significantly more difficult to mow with as long as the grass isn't absurdly long. The problem is that a lot of the old reel mowers are dull and rusty, a proper reel mower should still spin for several revolutions after you stop pushing. If I recall correctly, its not the weird shaped metal bands that are sharp, its the blade on the bottom towards the rear of the mower that is sharp, however, it will cost you more to professionally sharpen a reel mower, since few places are used to doing it, and the blade is longer (only the last 2" of a gas-powered mower's blade is sharpened).
:)
They don't take abuse as well, since you'll have to work harder to push the mower instead of the motor, and they won't cut long grass at all, but in the latter case, a power motor will also quickly wear out if used for the same job, and can be dangerous if you hit something in the grass (I once threw the blade of a power mower 50' after hitting a small tree stump that nobody told me about, it totally destroyed the lawn mower, and the total absence of anyone in the flight path was the only factor in preventing a fatal accident). Anyways, for long grass, there is another old fashioned tool that works without gasoline, it totally quiet, and gives you a nice workout - a scythe.
Although they definitely aren't mainstream, like a lot of the other technologies on this list, they definitely still have a place. Circular-slide-rules are still taught to and used by pilots all around the world ... they are very useful for quick inflight calculations, and your average small airplane pilot uses them routinely (especially during training).
Found this link to the Transit Museum Society of BC which has lots of history and pics of the trolleys.
You may also be interested in a few products that make use of the MD for storing data, such as camcorders or cameras. Here's a nice page to look at (with pictures ;) and also here.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
I use the editor "joe" to this day - Borland IDE and Wordstar keystroke compatible. Best thing since sliced bread? Naw - old habits die hard. I think WordPerfect deserves more praise than Wordstar, but you know, whatever.
Now, the technical reason. You can't fit as much information in at lower frequencies. Ham radio operators are restricted to, if I'm not mistaken, 1200 bps on these bands. I would *hate* to use a new digital device at 1.2Kb...
If you have noticed, digital devices have been moving steadily upwards in frequency.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
- http://www.cedmagic.com/
- Justin Halls page on the CED
What can I say? You Americans are crazy!(I realise most geeks go digital)
So i don't think that one has died quite yet
And i'm working in New Parliament House in Canberra (Capital of Australia for the Geographically impaired) which was built in 1988 and has an operational Pneumatic Tube to transfer legislation between the Government Printers and the Parliament.
To be honest, if they were to build the building today they'd be using PDF to zap the legislation around on the internet, because, as the article said, pneumatic tubes are expensive to build.
Whats more i used to work in a cinema in London that used to use a Pneumatic tube to move money from the box office to the tab room.
The problem was that the tube ran over the ladies toilets.
Cunning theives with inside knowledge lifted the ceiling panels, cut the tube and put in a "catcher" came back 8 hours later and took away 30,000 quid.
The fallback technology was walking across the foyer with locked cashboxes and an escort, which turned out to be cheaper and never lost a penny.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
what about jet packs?
even first-person shooter games still use them, though they were only popularized by cheezy government videos and never in REAL consumer production. i would love to be able to commute through the air instead of sitting in traffic. i liked the grappling hook better though.
something else that should have made the list is AM radio, and maybe CB radio.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
- The demise of streetcars was instigated (in part) by the automobile vendors (GM in particular).
Some major cities (i.e. NYC, Philadelphia, and San Francisco) never did remove their trains (only Phillie and San Francisco had trollies though).
The technical reasons why we probably don't have an extensive train system in the U.S.A. is that the population is widely spread out than say in Europe, so having individual based transit is more efficient than mass transit.
- The death of beta was due to Closed Standards instigated by Sony. Sony did not
want to license beta, so their competition (led by Phillips and JVC) revolted and rushed the (inferior) VHS standard to market. The market place crushed beta for popular use. Sony was
very careful not to repeat that mistake with compact disks, and was much more open in the licensing process.
- The similar death happened to IBM's microchannel bus, which blew the doors off ISA which was the competing technology in the mid 1980's.
- I think wordstar failed due to distribution channel and management problems (much like Visicalc). Although I lived through this time,
I was already a professional developer and not
a word processor user (except for troff at
that time).In W. E. Peterson's Almost Perfect , he cites a decision to address user interface problems at the expense of performance as a cause of alienation of die hard wordperfect users as the turning point.
Others seem non-political:I would absolutely love to be able to take a cross country trip gliding above the ground at a relatively leisurely pace while being able to actually enjoy the traveling aspect of the trip. Something very difficult to do given the state of the highways and commercial aviation.
Of course they would probably try to cram in a hundred rows of 10 inch seats with 4 inches of leg room too...
MiniDisc is a no-hassle system. You still have to rip and convert to burn on CD-R and whatever.... I do have to record real-time to a MiniDisc, that is true...but whatever! I'm making a mix of songs I like, don't you think the hassle of listening one to them is a big time? No not at all :-)
MiniDisc is not like your CD-R(W), it is like a casette, I tought I made my point in the previous post about that. If Sony would see a commercial use to faster dubbing (digital-in to MD) they would do it....remember Casette Desks had that function years ago!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The costs of maintenance and inconvenience must be factored in when considering this mode of transportation.
Steve Albini uses ribbon mics religiously on his productions for these bands and more. And for small unsigned bands I think his rates are still well under $150/hr. It costs about $100 to $150 to re-ribbon a mic. If you're spending any money at all on a recording the cost of fixing a mic or two is trivial.
With the demise of the electric trolley came the use of the automobile and migration to the suburbs. When an individual is able to drive through a neighborhood without thought of the outside environment, he or she becomes removed from the situation.
It is this apathy that caused our cities to decline. If one was forced to walk or ride at a slow rate through what is your neighborhood, you take more care to notice your surroundings. People would still be involved in their neighbor's lives, thus building communities.
What we have today, however, is people living in isolated pods in suburbia, with no regard for each other. When homes are spaced 100 feet apart, and the only way to the local store is by driving, when would you ever have time to interact with your fellow man?
Although this really is spilt milk, so to speak, many of these problems came from the rapid conversion from electric trolleys to individual automobiles.
I agree with the other post
that AmigaBasic was (relatively)
crap... especially the upper
limit on program size,
which was hard coded.
However... to offer a replacement
for your list:
ARexx was the "replacement"
for AmigaBasic,
put in (I think) in Amiga 2.1.
Personally,
I would have put in up there in
a list of any of the architectural
of software offerings
that the Amiga had...
not that one could write huge programs
with it (although I did write some arcade
games in it and nothing else),
but it went hand in hand with the
integration of the Amiga...
back in the day,
almost _every_ program came
complete with an ARexx 'port,'
and you could automate the program
via the use of scripts.
Furthermore, you could automate
multiple programs to work together
in a script.
It allowed some of the most amazing
things to be done with some simple
programming...
I would kill for a similar (perl?)
interface scheme for controlling
the gimp, gnome, etc...
(I know, gimp's already got scripting,
but ARexx scripts could operate as daemons,
which could communicate with programs
in the system, not just scripts run
_by_ the program).
Every computer shy of Amiga in 1984/85 had a maximum of 4/8 bit color at best, the Amiga started with a minimum of 16 bit color... The drawback though, was that Commodore (Emphasis on the Commode) was expecting their market to be much akin to their experiences with the Vic-20/C64, ie: available in Toys'R'Us and Sears...
The main drawback was, their systems were cheap enough to not sell (as most geeks then and now consider a sub $1000 machine as worthy of apprehension), but just pricey enough that nobody would consider (based on early 80's economy) buying one... In those days, $1000 was almost two months' wages for most...
Since high end graphics, sound and video processing was still something only a limited few were actually interested in at the time, their market was limited even more... If you put the three, PC's, Macs, and Amigas, side by side with current tech, the Amiga would win hand over fist... Only problem is, their manufacturer's are dead and buried, and the current Amiga is still vaporware... AmigaDE is one example of their possibly moving to x86 and 68x platforms in the future...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Man, it wasn't ME you saw kissing your wife, no sir! A LOT of people look just like me, people keep telling me that!
You'd also have to overhaul all gas stations to handle a gas instead of a liquid as their main product. Yes, they handle propane already, but you'd have to tear up and replace the gas pumps and main storage tank.
Isn't that a little tautological? We can't do X because X contradicts what we do?
It is a bit tautological, but it would still be a major investment to overhaul all gas stations, on top of the other costs for switching fuel types. This makes liquid fuels more financially attractive, and thus more likely to be implemented when fossil fuels finally become expensive enough to warrant it.
I'm sorry, but most of us have seen in Chem I or II where the teacher takes a balloon filled with helium and pops it, causing a fireball. Yes, it does take an ignition (via spark or open flame), but it *is* highly flammable in oxygen rich environments as 2 H2 molecules and 1 02 molecule combine to make the rare di-hydro-oxide (sic - water) or H20, as well as others such as H202. I agree that the hydrogen probably didn't start the fire, but it definately was the main component in the explosion that we've all seen on public television and the History Channel.
Just my buck-o-nine
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I would have to add MODs (XM, S3M, IT, you get the idea) to the list. Most of the mods in my collection are orders of magnitude smaller than MP3s of the same duration, and orders of magnitude more creative. I still haven't found anything that sounds better than masqrade.mod or icefront.s3m... But people stopped making them, I guess, because MP3s don't require as much creativity or know-how.
>|<*:=
Actually, slide rules AREN'T dead. I'm an airplane pilot and have to be able to make various calculations in-flight. For instance, "you're flying a heading of 010 at 100 knots, the wind is from 090 at 10 knots, what angle of wind correction do you need, and what will your ground speed be?"
e rs .html
I have a fancy electronic calculator that I normally use, but when I took my practical test, the FAA examiner took the batteries out (he was allowed to simulate a failure of any instrument on the aircraft). Guess what I had to use?
http://www.jetstreamcat.com/avshop/flightcomput
(I passed, but just barely.)
"left, right or down in a document, by pressing control-E, S, D or X. Variants of this "WordStar diamond"
Hmm, I wonder if this inspired the same arrow-key layout on the TI-994/A
In the interest of efficiency, I suggest the immediate implementation of pneumatic tubes to transport floppy & ZIP disks containing data from computer to computer. Use of proven pneumatic technology is superior to untested 'copper wire' and 'fiber optic' technology for the transfer of data.
Additionally, money being spent on creating larger monitors should be redirected to productive tasks such as maintaining the nationwide Pneumatic Tube Network. Those seeking larger screens for their comp-uters should simply use Fresnel lenses.
- Central Services
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.
Swatch is making a line called autoquartz that recharges its own batteries. Geeks will love them - you can see the insides inclusing the charging mechanism from the back. And it makes a quiet whirring noize when you move your wrist. I love mine! And they're pretty cheap. No winding, no batteries, and cool design!
Id say the top absolute number 1 technology that shouldnt have died is Microsoft windows. I mean, they spent how long developing it, and I cant count the number of times its died.
--
Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net
... Playstation ...
Not dead yet! Historic streetcars are running in San Francisco, and of course lots of cities including SF run light rail, essentially updated streetcars.
sulli
RTFJ.
I took my bike to Vancouver when I rode down the coast to S.F. Nice city for biking. It took a lot less time to escape the suburban sprawl than it would here. Damn, it probably takes 2-3 hours nowadays if you start downtown. Assuming you survive the suburban road-rage that is. And with Harris/Mel in charge, things are only bound to get worse :(
The Amiga had the first personal computer operating system to offer pre-emptive multitasking, allowing running programs to utilize the processor as efficiently as possible. I would think that cooperative multitasking would utilize the processor more efficiently, while pre-emptive multitasking gives you robust-ness. -Magnus
"Yet ribbon microphones remain popular today "because their unique transparent sound quality was better than carbon and early condenser microphones," says audio engineer Bob Speiden, whose own ribbon microphones, developed in the 1980s, are still manufactured by Royer Labs. "
I dunno...doesn't seem dead to me. What qualifies as a dead technology to these folks? This is still being used and produced today.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
"Electric Trolleys" exist in several cities. Vancouver, BC has an efficient system of buses which run on overhead electric lines, and stretches throughout the most heavily populated metro areas. I believe San Francisco also has electric streetcars, but they could be gas-powered... And slide rules? Back in 1988, before you were *allowed* calculators in high school exams, a slide rule was da bomb =).
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The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
A lot of these ideas didn't seem to have really died, so much as to have never taken off. Many remain stuck in the same niche market of their inception. One that is a strong counterexample to to this is the slide rule. It certainly achieved great popularity in its time, but is now almost unrecognizable to most people nowadays. However, in introductory physics lab, at Brandeis, constructing one and performing calculations with it was part of our final exam. It was a very valuable experience. I don't think students in school ever really learn about logarithms like they did back before HP started popping out calculators.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
I always liked stret cars, but there are a lot of people who don't. Here's an anti light rail page that I found amusing:
http://www.railroadingamerica.com/
Good, Cheap, Fast... Choose any two, you can't have all three. It's the same way with anything. In all the years I've been involved with computers, the expensive stuff has always run better and lasted longer. Even in the line of products the company I work for sells, I can fairly accurately tell which will be more likely to have problems and which ones won't nine times out of ten. And as for musical instruments, musical tones have never been something that mass manufacturing has manged to reproduce well, especially since music depends a great deal on both the musicians skill, and the familiarity with the instrument he or she is playing. On the other side of the spectrum you have mass producers who are trying to keep costs down to maximize their profits, and as such intentionally damage the ability of the instrument to make the best sound possible. Indeed if all instruments were manufactured with the same materials, and specifications that you'd find in a high-end hand-made instrument, you might find it much more difficult to distinguish between them, but as long as manufacturers are driven by profits with customers willing to make sacrifices, we're left with loads of poorly made, cheap devices that operate enough to satisfy consumers. McDonalds isn't popular because the food is good -- it's cheap, fast, and largly edible and for many people, that's evidently good enough.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Every been to a golf course?
Reel mowers are most certainly not dead. Nearly every golf course in existance uses them exclusively for cutting fairways and rough (they pull them behind tractors). Most good golf courses use a species of grass called bent grass for the closer-cut fairways. It is almost impossible for rotary blade mowers to get as close and consistent as a reel mower.
Here in the Netherlands a new firm has plans to build an airships like those in the days of Graf Zeppelin. Although it won't be filled with hydrogen, the principle is exactly the same with Helium.
These guys are targeting market like survailance and communications as the ships can stay at one place a lot longer than a helicopter(about two weeks vs. a few hours) and transportation to place here no plane con land and a helcopter can't reach, like very remote oilplatfroms.
I really hope to see one flying... hopefully in 2003
The rise and fall of technology depend mostly on the popularity of the technology and not on the pick (speed, throughput, reliability, power usage, opensourceness, physical size, code size and elegance). This is due mainly to marketing The reason that we have such penetration of wintel boxen was the IBM brand name. Perfectly useful (often superior) technology are suppressed b/c of their respective acceptance among the public (e.g.) Betamax, Amiga, OS/2, 2.88M floppies, Virtual Boy, etc.
And I'm not talking about guitars. Violins, Violas, Violoncelli, and Basses. It doesn't matter how well the wood is shaped or machined -- the hand-carved ones, when well-made, beat the living snot out of the machined ones.
GTIA equipped Ataris (basically made after 1982 or so...400/800s could be upgraded with it) could display 256 colors. To do it, one put the machine in Graphics mode 9 which allowed one 16 different luminances for one hue and painted 16 vertical stripes on the screen. An assembly language routine was then used to interrupt the graphics processor(ANTIC) and insert a different hue for that scanline. Sixteen hues were available for that scanline value and the screen is already painted with 16 vertical luminance bands thus 256 hue/brightness combinations on the screen at once. And no, you couldn't paint all over the screen with any arbitrary color you wanted. These high color displays had to be carefully planned.
Most of the people behind the 8-bit Atari's chipset went on to develop the Amiga's chipset. Jay Miner was the most notable of these. It is ironic that many Commodore 64 design alumni wound up on the team that developed the Atari ST.
Gee, and no one has made any reference to Brazil???
Personally, I think it would be cool to have pneumatic delivery tubes everywhere.
Its a great thing that GM did. As a member of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, I can tell you that it was a great relief to see that Baltimore and other large cities are going back to utilizing the "Light rail" which is nothing more than an updated version of the 1930's Peter Witts that were in use throughout the United States and possibly abroad (you'll have to excuse my lack of international Cable car history). They're a joy to ride in as unlike the popular Subway system in Baltimore, you can actually *see* the surroundings instead of the inside of a cement tube 30 feet below the surface of the city. I hope that Baltimore actually manages to make it more effecient (double tracking the entire line would be a nice start) and to expand the trolly service more than the extra line that goes to the local Airport (Baltimore-Washington International).
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
They deserve their fate.
Modern != better. Modern usually means better, but it's not an absolute.
One of the errors which people (particularly engineers) make when designing modern hardware is they think that the rest of the world is as controlled and as precise as the product itself is. If you can specify that "the turbofan in this jet engine is made of a single crystal of pure nickel and built to 0.001mm of accuracy", it's easy to think that it's only going to be used in situations that are equally controlled and controllable.
So the net effect is the engine works great, but the first time a goose gets sucked up the intake, the entire engine is going to shred. (Don't laugh; this happens with surprising frequency nowadays.)
The problem is that operational tolerance comes at a cost in performance. A Soviet-era tank is reliable as the day is long, but it's got crappy performance. When people discover "Wow! With these new manufacturing tolerances, we can make things even better than before," they rarely consider that pushing things to the limits of performance has repercussions on operational tolerances.
Look at UNIX as an example. Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98. The reason is that, while Linux is a technically superior platform, Linux has large operational tolerances. It's very resistant to crashes because of the way it's designed. However, this fault-tolerant design comes at a price: by separating the 3D libraries from X, by separating X from the kernel, etc., you introduce lots of hidden latencies.
Win98, in the interest of pure gaming performance, lets the machine get down close to the bare metal. But we all know what kind of operational tolerances Win98 has--the first time you get any kind of weirdness, the entire system crashes.
Does all this make sense?
Electric Trolley
Melbourne, australia has a massive (and imho very good) network of electric trolleys, or what we call trams.
Pneumatic Post
One of these was used in the place I used to work to move medical specimens around the hospital.
Reel Movers
I actually have one of these, and I used it recently. These died for a very good reason, they're very difficult to cut grass with.
Automatic Watch
My seiko kinetic uses a fairly simmilar principle, except (afaik) it stores the enregey as electrical energy, not mechanical energy, so you have the accuracy of crystal quartz timing without needing to change batteries.
I just finished reading the article about technologies that became obsolete, and I was surprised. I have heard of most of these devices, but never knew that they held their own against newer technologies. Huh. It makes you feel sorry for the inventors of this technology, who were blasted by the crummier competition.
No, not the codec with that annoying winky thing in the name...
Divx, the subsription-based DVD format. In theory, at least, the thought of never having to return movies was nice. Maybe if they had changed it so that you owned it outright after X number of rentals or could buy full rights to it at a reasonable price. Maybe if they hadn't added so much cost to a relatively new product that naturally cost quite a bit. Maybe if you could get them at the neighborhood video store, and not just Circuit Shitty...
Then again, I could be wrong. People have a tendency to resist using certain things when the meter is running (see: taxis, long distance).
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Its like MP3, what was wrong with minidisc ?
:-)
As long as portable MP3 players are based on the crappy flash RAM concept, Minidisc players will continue to be the better device, and MD certainly has a greater (and well deserved) market share over here.
But once those miniature HDD-based devices evolve to the point that they have 6+ Gb storage, are as small as the tiny MD players, and the batteries actually last a decent length of time, then the days of MD will be numbered.
Currently, I carry about 4 Gb of all-time favourite music via minidiscs in a small plastic bag nestled in my bag. As you can imagine, you'd be insane to try that for a flash RAM device. MD is almost as good as what HDD will eventually become, but HDD promises some pretty cool advantages. I'm looking forward to the future
My family had a Craftsman reel mower until 1995. It was much more reliable than the gas mover, much easier to start, quieter, and easier to maneuver on hills. Yes, it constantly jammed (lots of trees = lots of sticks to run over), but it didn't pollute. And it didn't scare the cats.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
Automatic Watches: Rolex, Bell & Ross. Those are still automatic. I'm sure there are others.
Slide rules: Airline pilots use a circular slide rule still. And as of 1994, USMC loadmasters used a version to determine aircraft center of balance.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I'm in fact working on a little project which compares the science fiction from about the 1920's on up to the 1990's, showing
- a) how the SF of each generation showcased both its optimism and its dark desires, and
- b) how much SF sucks nowdays compared to Flash Gordon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, et alia.
Admit it, a lot of those VOY eps with Tom and Harry playing Captain Proton are some of the better ones.io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
I think we should stick with horses: they are pretty harmless and they eat grass that's available everywhere.
Seriously, logistically, oil-based fuels are just about the worst you can imagine. Yes, it costs money to retool, but probably less than the medical costs related to burning gasoline alone. And the retooling creates job and economic opportunities anyway.
I'm currently wearing a Mambo Automatic watch , that I bought this time last year new..
It is a 'self winding' watch and I never have problems with it.
Ever notice how they were never called 'analogue' watches until 'digital' watches became the norm for sheeples?
----- One piece short of Legoland
The Edison Cylinder, for example, was fragile and quickly wore out as it was made of wax. Phonograph albums were easier to store and held more program, but still had the wear problem. I can't tell you how bad a record sounds after spending most of its life getting played on a Sears Silvertone console. Ick. Compact disks sacrificed some of the program duration, and exchange we get a higher fidelity, and in my opinion more durable, recording medium. It's a natural progression in technology.
Don't get me started on the Amiga; suffice it to say I've owned four of them.
I own a reel lawnmower that I bought two years ago at Lowes (it's an American Lawnmower Company model). I don't think that these "died" off due to any flaw in their design; mine does a really good job. They're not even that hard to push. Rotary mowers, however, allow the user to go longer periods between mowings. I know that in the springtime I can't skip a week-- sometimes it needs mowing twice a week. With a gasoline powered rotary mower the engine has enough power to slog through the overgrowth. Reel mowers get bogged down for the same reason that you can't cut a phonebook with scissors: not enough power to close the blades. The ever-increasingly powerful engines allows people to avoid mowing for even longer times resulting in removing more plant than is healthy.
Also, contrary to the article, reel mowers actually cut closer than rotary mowers; mine won't go higher than 2-7/8" high. Reel mowers are also less traumatic on the grass since the mowers cleanly cut the leaves instead of tearing them as with a machete.
Finally, reel type mowers are safer since you can't cut your feet off. Stick a hand or foot under a rotary mower and it gets whacked off. Stick a finger in your reel mower and it's off for a bandage, or at most a stitch or two. Of course, that means that sticks and other yard debris are serious impediments. (Not that you should run over things with rotary mowers-- they make great catapults!)
The airship was a technology that was ahead of its time. Its downfall had a lot to do with the materials the German government had to work with: Hydrogen instead of Helium, flammable Aluminum rather than modern graphite composite materials, doped canvas instead of modern skinning materials, etc. etc. etc.
If one took advantage of modern materials, computer controls and modern engines, the airship could become a very usable means of transport. And with photovoltaics covering the ship's skin and electric/fuel hybrid engines, you would have an ecologically sound means of transport too. Sure, it's not going to break the sound barrier, but what about airships for pleasure cruising? I could see hybrid powered airships and ecotourism going hand in hand. Cruises between the Bay Area and the Baja Peninsula? Sounds good to me! Sign me up!
Admittedly, lighter-than-air craft have to be replaced a lot because empty, moored craft are less than stable in very adverse weather. I think Goodyear lost a blimp recently in a storm. But using modern composite materials you'd probably be able to salvage enough of the important stuff to rebuild, if not survive a storm, on the ground.
I hear that Zeppelin, AG is back in business, with plans very similar to what I'm talking about. Maybe not solar/hybrid-powered airships, but airships built with modern materials and efficient, computer-controlled gas engines.
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
In Melbourne, Australia we have Electric Trolleys (aka Trams) running on many tram lines around the city. I personally don't like them since they slow down traffic to a major extent. When you get stuck behind a tram you can be stuck behind it for 10 minutes doing an average of 20km/h. I bought a Reel Mower about 6 weeks ago. I have a house on a small block and therefore don't have much lawn to mow. Also, I don't like the fact that modern mowers slice'n'dice the grass a zillion time and pump "grass gas" into the atmosphere where it creates smog. The reel mower is easy to use, isn't too loud, and is better for the environment.
It also makes a neat paper shredder...
"Unlike conventional microphones, in which air pressure from sound waves moves a diaphragm to produce an electrical signal, in a ribbon microphone, a tiny piece of foil hovering between two magnets created a signal when it moved in response to air velocity."
Correct me if I'm wrong but maybe Sennhesier and Neumann have it all wrong. Because unlike conventional microphones (I'm assuming he's speaking of todays current models), evidently, as implied in his description, do not respond to air velocity.
It's like this: If we thought the steam engine were to be affordable and a viable option for mass use, then we probably would have used more widely in automobiles, etc. In the terms of Microphones, the ribbon wire was inefficient. It only captured a certain frequency bandwidth. At the time, they barely had begun to figure out that sound ran the scale from 0Hz to an infinite number. The human ear only technically hearing about 20hz to about 18kHz, Give or take, depending on your state of tonitis. So in light of better sound parameter discoveries, the need for more efficient, more accurate equipment, arose. Hence the demise of such a poor way to capture audio. Next came the Tube Microphone. Using a thin metal disk diaphragm proved to be a much more viable means of capturing a full scale of sounds. This sound, then amplified by tube, became the next generation of usable means. After the limitations were reached, they moved on to engineer the diaphragm types widely used today. The tube mic has been revisited. Mainly because of it's warmth in sound. I doubt that a ribbon mic is going to make a huge comeback, but some one might get all kinds of nostalgic over it's rebirth.
By the way, the figure eight pattern to which he refered, is called Hypercardioid. Ahhh, newbies to the audio world.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Well, he was killed by Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit before he and Cloverleaf could completely run the Red Car out of business, and pave over Toon Town, but they got a good enough start to make it snowball.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Turbines aren't ideally suited to stop and go traffic, but in an Indy car they would be excellent.
link
photo
DIY/info
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It makes perfect sense that most of these items died.
For example the "Pneumatic Post"...aka air-driven paper communications system. Well I would rather read Slashdot on my computer monitor and not get a piece of paper blown to me every could of minutes. Could you imagine a slashdot discussion using this system. There wouldn't be enough Draino in the world to unclog the pipes...
And why would I use an Amiga today. Yes it was a pretty cool piece of equipment in the 80's, but except for collectors, it doesn't make much sense to use one today...
And I don't even want to respond to why I would rather use a calculator instead of a slide rule...
FoonDog
Trollies
I more disagree than agree here... High voltage wires, even when suspended, become a hazard with falling branches etc., and have to reach far into the suburbs for most implimentations. (Nearby Dayton, Ohio still uses 'em!)
Amiga
Right On Target there... Even as a small niche, the Amiga was the prototyper's dream. A decade ahead of the competition, you could plug in a $100US-or-less add-on to digitize video, do Max Headroom-esque video effects, process live wacked out audio effects in real time...
If it weren't for the proprietary hardware, it would have Ruled The Earth. It's most saving grace was the openness of its programming.
Slide Rules? Sure, good for visualization of functional relationships. Reel Mowers? No thanks, I've use a few. AutoWatch? An engineer's moral imperative! Airships? Works for Bladerunner!
my first wordprocessor that really had oomph! I had used Paperclip on the C64, but Wordstar was great. I only stopped using Wordstar after I discovered a copy of Chi-writer on a pile of diskettes loaned to me ages ago.
Chi-writer by far was awesome - great WYSIWYG mathematics/symbols all on a diskette or two!
Sniff, sniff...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
"...just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques"
Furniture. Couches, chairs, cabinets, bookshelfs etc. etc. etc.
I'll take old hand-made furniture ANY day. MUCH better than that pre-fab shit that falls apart - You know, the stuff with the particle board backs?
(have some Amish folk make you a kitchen table, then go buy one from Leon's or Furniture Barn - you tell ME the difference).
Are slide rules really no longer being manufactuerd by anyone as the article suggests? Surely somebody somewhere is still producing these things. If anybody has any good links to a source, let me know!
I agree with the spirit of everything you write, but the contrarian in me must point out that my house, built in 1929, has nice solid soundproof plaster and lath walls that stand up nicely to high-speed collisions with my three-year-old's tricycle (now that's operational tolerance!); modern house manufacturing techniques (i.e., gypsum board) don't come close. Similarly, older houses tend to be much more resistant to vibration than newer ones---try setting up a turntable on an upper floor!
You can argue legitimately that moving to pre-fab mass-produced materials for home construction made it possible for millions of people to afford houses who otherwise could not have, but the quality of the old plaster-and-lath technology is incomparably better.
I didn't say modern science could make violins that are the equal of a Stradivari, but that approach. Check out Sci Am from a few months ago for an approachable article on the physics and biology of violinmaking--it turns out that, contrary to what violinmakers have thought for years, that the composition of the lacquer has an integral role in how rich a tune the violin presents.
We still don't know why Stradivari sound the way they do. Once we do know, then expect those same techniques to be applied to other violins.
The color of the flame is related to the amount of the fuel that is combusted. An orange-yellow flame contains much non-consumed fuel. A blue flame has a perfect oxygen/fuel ratio.
Any combustable material can be made to produce a blue flame if there is sufficient oxygen supplied fast enough.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Nidhogg writes:
The president of our company held on to his little DOS copy of Wordstar until just last year. He would actually type out his official correspondence in that and send them to a 9-pin dot matrix printer (which he also refused to give up).
The way I got him to give it up was by convincing him that it wasn't Y2K compatible and could conceivably wreck his machine.
Now unless he needed compatability with the rest of the office, all you did was convince someone to give up a working system that they had used and had no problems with, just to train on a new system that probably cost them more time (at least to learn) and money (for the new computer and software).
I would not be proud if I were you.
On topic, the self-winding watches are definitely still around, and not as rare as the author makes them out to be. My father has a Seiko Kinetic, for example.
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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
I see alot of people saying beta should be on this list.. well, beta is still in extensive use. Very much so, by the professional video recording industry (all your local tv stations use beta for recording their stuff), professional television is all recorded on beta, sony still makes high-end equipment for beta (very, very expensive stuff) and it's in wide use. Just not in *home* use.
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Electric mowers are nice, if your lawn's not too big to handle the cords. You need to learn what directions to go to not run over your power cord, and you can't use it when it's too dark, but they work pretty well and they're much quieter than gas-powered, though the quietness and ecological advantages of avoiding the internal combustion engine are balanced out by the Nuclear Power Plant on the other end of the electrical grid :-) Electric mowers are also much easier to keep working. Occasionally their motors do fry themselves and need rebuilding, but it's not like gasoline ICEs that need constant tinkering.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.
The basis for this was the use of Large Tesla coils to actually transmit electricity through the ground.
That link also has info on Tesla's "Death Ray", which is rumored to have caused the Tunguska event.
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I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
I especially agree with the slide rule. I'm currently a CS & German major, and it involves a heck of a lot of math sometimes. I've always had a hard time at math, partially because I've always been taught how to follow formulas for putting characters into my calculator, not how to do the actual math. Now, when I get up into more difficult calculus and other things at college, I find myself struggling because I've never learned how to really do the math, I've just learned how to use a calculator. I remember my physics prof brought in some old logarithim books that he had in college...and it absolutely amazed me. I almost wish I could have learned that way.
Wow. Ten ideas that made it big for a short period of time, and then got superceded by other new ideas. Big deal.
They got outcompeted; they served their time, and now they're relegated to their technological niches. The implementation is outmoded, but the idea lives on. That's how unnatural selection works; it's technological Darwinism.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ya, i know they've been making a comeback. but the pre-programmed crap that followed were, well, slightly pansy-assed.
Nothing like a fat Moog sound. Ever!!
Seriously, logistically, oil-based fuels are just about the worst you can imagine. Yes, it costs money to retool, but probably less than the medical costs related to burning gasoline alone. And the retooling creates job and economic opportunities anyway.
My objection was that hydrogen was one of the worse alternatives we could be using. Its only advantage is that the fuel cells that process it are simple and cheap compared to cells that process methane or methanol.
Heck, even methane would be better than hydrogen, because you don't have the diffusion problem.
Ethanol, the subject of a previous slashdot story, would work fine in conventional engines and can be stored as a liquid, but is hard to build a fuel cell for.
Methanol can be produced as easily as ethanol, and is simple enough to be processed electrochemically with some efficiency. Most importantly, because it can be stored as a liquid, you get most of your infrastructure for free and don't pay an energy density penalty.
Pneumatic Post - movie, "Tommy Boy"; actor, Rob Lowe; classic.
:)
... is to vinyl as BetaMax is to VHS. The former is technologically superior but the latter is mass marketed better. Tsk, tsk.
l %20mowers%20
Amiga - still... suffering... from... the.. heartbreak... I...
Ribbon Mic - I am currently searching for one.
WordStar - So that is the reason why we have bloated attachments containing Microsoft Word Documents
Edison's Wax Cylinder -
Reel Mower - When I watch "Leave It To Beaver", I always thought that with new technologies in light weight materials that Reel Mowers should be making a comeback. http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=ree
Automatic Watches - I see these watches sold all the time. They have never gone out of style. You can buy watch cases that can rotate the watch for you.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
can in some cases exceed CD quality.
I thought I'd reply to myself to provide an analogy to this, as it might be counter-intuitive enough to attract flames. An uncompressed BMP (eg like CD sound) image might take, say 100kb. A compressed JPG of the same image can, (depending on the image) be simultaniously a fifth the file size (ie like MD) and at a higher resolution, such that details not clear in the uncompressed BMP image can be made out in the JPG image. Ie, the compressed data can have a better picture despite the imperfections of lossy compression. For some images (types of music), the compression artifacts will cause more damage to the image than what is gained in resolution. For some however, the artifacts can have minimal effect and the resolution gain can have great effect, and the result is unquestionably superior.
In short, my counter example to the "MP3 is like cassette" idea wasn't intended to say "MD has better sound quality than CD" (cause in all but extreme cases this just isn't the case), but rather to blur this over-simplified view that compressed=bad and uncompressed=good in an area where filesize limits are being applied (such as music reproduction).
I just don't know who to respond to on the thread. So I'm making my own. Everyone go to Dresden, Germany. Besides being a beautiful city, they have updated all of their street car lines to the most modern, coolest sounding things out there. And they really can book sometimes! (Especally on the long ride out to Klotzsche) They're reliable, fast, and easy to use. And oh so quiet!
All Hail Newton!!!!!!
I have a three year old MP120 - most
Palms are just now getting up to
my Newton's level of usefullness.
And the PC Card slot - pure genius!
Where's the beef?
"voluminous yet light" it is
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
This is why it makes sense for the government to subsidize mass transportation.