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10 Technologies MIA
Fantasy Football writes "CNet lists ten technologies they miss, which includes Napster, the originial Palm Pilot, good keyboards, and more. From the article: 'Technology evolves. Good technologies and products usually survive; poor ones usually go extinct. But not all of the technologies and tech products that have swirled down the drain of the tech gene pool deserved their fate. Here are some big, and some small, ideas that we thought we'd have with us forever, but that unfortunately have gone the way of the dodo.'"
Nothing to see here move along
there buisness model was fatally flawed, they didnt make any proffit because they basically sold everything at what it cost them, and didnt charge shipping.
You can still buy a real keyboard. Those guys bought the design from IBM and still produce it in the USA.
I like the feel of an old Antec clicky keyboard better, but the layout on the Unicomp is better.
Get a PS2USB adaptor and it even works great on a Mac.
Microsoft BOB
*Sniff*
What? No Betamax?
Wow, it sounds like CNet must have pretty poor editorial standards to post another article with an identical subject so soon after their last one.
Alphanos
i like my dell quietkey the best. it's got it "clickety" feel (even though it's called a quiet key) and it just feels good. what's your favorite keyboard?
Just goes to show that cheap & mass produced do not mean quality.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
Seriously, if you never used BeOS, you don't know what you're missing.
I love Mac OS X, but a sluggish GUI is a sacrifice I've learned to live with.
Model M > All Thank you. I can't type worth a damn on any other keyboard.
Oh wait, that hasn't been invented yet. Never mind.
OTOH, modern keyboards sure beat the feel of a model 33 (used a few of those in school many moons ago).
Space is essentially the only frontier we have left, and I think humanity needs a frontier. The Earth is fully populated now, in the sense that only the very remotest regions remain unexplored and all regions are claimed.
:-(.
Practical is good and all, but if we wait until we solve all our problems here on Earth first we'll be stuck on this dirtball until the sun hits Red Giant phase. Human nature being what it is.
I say Let's Get Out There! Now! It pushes limits, it's positive, and it pushes technology. Sounds good to me! May China can provoke another space race - I sure hope so. One-upmanship seems to be the only real way to get any serious funding
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
How sad... wasn't Kozmo.com in the Top 10 Dot Com Flops article, too? Yes. What's sad is that you see all of these bike messengers in NYC still touting their Kozmo.com messenger bags. And wasn't this in like 30 previous posts, too?
EV1 was never workable - the battery weight and expense, combined with limited range, made it Not Practical as a mass market car from day one.
Gotta love the bit about recalling and destroying the cars due to liability concerns. Thank you US legal system. We really ought to outlaw innovation, exploration, and all that stuff - it's too dangerous. Can let people run risks - heaven forbid.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Manned space exploration
I am of the opinion that sending humans into space is the most effective use of our "space dollars". It is fine to send up robots to collect data samples, but we also need to know the safest and cheapest way to package up live astronauts, drive them around the solar system, and bring them home safely. With the current shuttle tech, we are looking at neither the safest, nor the cheapest way of sending up live astronauts and bringing them home extra crispy. There are a lot of barriers to getting rid of the shuttle program, but discarding it for a more future-looking program (even the Apollo and Mercury missions were more forward-looking than the shuttles) would rejuvenate interest in science and physics in particular.
Kozmo.com
Never heard of it.
Napster
I don't see the attraction. A centralized database where your connections can be tracked and you are at the bandwidth mercy of a single uploading server. No thanks. I'll stick with BitTorrent.
The Concorde
I am going to agree. Actually, any type of supersonic aircraft would be great for longhaul flights.
GM's EV1
That is possibly the ugliest car I've seen since the Pontiac Aztec. It is only out-uglied by the Honda hybrid.
The original Palm Pilot
They like the stability, but I like the stability of my TV remote control. It just doesn't do very much except what was originally programmed in.
Good keyboards
There are plenty of good keyboards, Microsoft even makes some good ones. What they are asking for are those loud IBM keyboards that feel like the clumsy typewriters they were adapted from.
Wires
No. Make wireless faster.
LPs
This will continue to be a niche format. CDs provide the same quality sound playback for the human-audible range of sound. I imagine that it might be useful if you were a dog and had to listen to ultrasonic music, otherwise... not useful.
The Newton
They praise it because it failed? I don't understand what they want to say.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I miss a good gaming keyboard that will actually let me push more than two keys at once. And don't get me started on that windows key. Many a game of 3v3 war2 was clobbered due to it...
Best keyboard I've run across lately is the Matias Tactile Pro. Designed for a Mac, but works great on a PC/Linux machine as well (I'm on one right now, hooked to a KVM that has both a Windows system and a Mac mini on it).
There are a bunch of guys that are currently using lasers to decode the LP then digitize it. They then take it through some audio cleaning, to get the hiss out. Then they can set it to cd or wahtever. I saw this on telvision, they are currently doing this for the Library of Congress (I believe). They are able to get the sound off the old wax cylanders. I Wish I had a link for this.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
It's getting more difficult to find keyboards without "extra features" (also called programmable buttons). And I've yet to find a quality wireless keyboard (radio) that is slim and lacking these "extra features".
Does anyone know of any slim, wireless keyboards?
Damn straight. I still hate the sound quality of cordless phones and insist on corded phones in my house. And just forget cell phones--they're the worst. The sound quality of recently-produced corded phones isn't noticeably worse than the old Ma Bell varieties IMO though. Maybe I'm not that picky.
And I'll jump on the wireless networking bandwagon once someone explains to me why, after spending most of the nineties upgrading AWAY from half-duplex shared media networks, I should now go back.
Could have saved us from losing most of the good technologies, and is the prime technological loss to trump them all.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I recently read M o o n r u s h. The renouned commercial spaceflight author Dennis Wingo makes the argument that for a $20 billion investment humans could return to the Moon perminately, mine precious metals needed to kickstart the hydrogen economy and eventually turn a profit. That much investment includes all the launches and all the equipment needed. Of course, it won't happen with some angel investor handing over that much capital at once with some vague hope of a return on investment. No, the way it will happen is with small incremental missions with each returning an investment. Dennis Wingo's current project is Orbital Recovery. They're developing a space tug to station keep satellites when their fuel runs out to keep them operational beyond their designated decommission dates. The space tug that is developed as a result is an integral part of the return to the moon system. How long? Give it 20 years.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I want my PC version of the space cadet keyboard, ding nabbit! Complete with absurdly overbuild mechanical durability and enough shift keys to fly an airplane with! It's not quite a mind meld with your computer but it's more or less the next best thing ;-).
I lucked into an old IBM keyboard, and it will undoubtedly outlive the rest of my computer. Why the heck is there no market for durable goods any more? Or rather, why won't anyone MAKE durable goods? Has pride in workmanship given over entirely to next quarter profits? Gah.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Not to be a curmudgeon, but there is a Space Shuttle in orbit as I type this text. I'm pretty sure its occupants know "what it's like to be in space".
OTOH, I think manned space travel is going to remain an expensive novelty until we can massively improve our dollars-per-kilogram-to-orbit. And that will require either some revolutionary breakthrough in rocket science (doubtful), or a space elevator or some other alternative means of getting mass to orbit. Until one of those things happens, unmanned probes and more basic research on the "get mass out of Earth's gravity well" problem are the smart way to go.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Erm. I used to have one of the original. It was okay, but I don't miss it. I liked its simplicity and its battery life. Heck, I even liked all the 3rd party apps out there. But my big beef with it was in giving it something uesful to do. Eventually I settled on AvantGo and Dope Wars. That was kinda neat... but .. meh.
Okay, this is just me, but I really didn't find a use for PDAs until they started coming with wifi built in and support for ginormous memory cards. Heck, I played with a Palm the other day that had a camera built in. How handy is that?
I don't miss the old Palm Pilots, but I do like modern PDAs. They don't feel like a solution in search of a problem.
"Derp de derp."
http://www.oldos.org/oshistory/msbob.php
Jay | http://oldos.org
On the first computer I used, a TRS-80 Model 100, the Control key is next to the A button, and the caps lock is a tiny button to the bottom right of the keyboard.
h tml
How often does Caps Lock get used relative to Ctrl? Why was it moved? Even in Windows, copy, cut and paste use Ctrl.
http://store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/haphackeylit1.
These keyboard look ok, but they don't sell a split egronomic version.
I can map my keyboard, with xmodmap on linux, but it is hard to do that on a per user basis on a windows box, and I definitly can't do that on the windows boxes at school.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The Apple Extended Keyboard.
Not the Extended II, which is pretty good, but the original Extended, with the rainbow Apple in the lower left hand corner.
Compared to the Extended, every other keyboard feels like I'm poking at a slab of Silly Putty.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
1. Manned Space Exploration
Well, I agree that reestablishing travel to the moon and beyond is important, the International Space Station is an important stepping stone that deserves focus. The reason I think so is that I truly believe it's going to take a multinational effort to get to Mars and back.
2. Kozmo.com
Make up your mind, CNET, technology you miss, or giant flop. I suppose it could be both, but even if Kozmo had stayed in business, it could never compete with my neighborhood grocery store.
3. Napster
Any opinion I might express about this would likely start a flame war, so I'll leave this one alone.
4. Concorde
You can't really miss what even yourselves admit was out of reach to almost everyone. I don't seem to miss it at all. How do you miss something you never really had?
5. GM's EV1
Zero Emission Vehicle. ROFLMAO. Zero-emission as long as you don't count the power plant that burned (coal|oil|gas|atomic nuclei) and polluted somone else's back yard. Sure, I suppose the power could have been photoelectric or wind produced, but if you believe no harm to the earth was done in the process of manufacturing those systems, you're clueless. (Hint: Strip mining for metals, processing ore, smelting, doping chemicals for solar, etc). Not that I have a problem with any of the above, but let's be realistic here. There's no such thing as a "Zero Emission Vehicle".
6. The Original Palm Pilot
I don't know. My Zire 31 does everything the original did, plus color and MP3s. I've been eying the Tungsten E2 as an upgrade. Only third party apps have ever crashed it, and that's only twice after over a year of use. The Palm-supplied apps have been rock solid. A lot like the original Palm Pilot.
7. Good Keyboards
Agreed.
8. Wires
You miss wires? Uh, you made the choice to go wireless. If you truly miss wires, just switch back, right? It's not like your old phone company disappeared, and you can't buy ethernet cables. Oh wait... the convenience outweighs the disadvantages of wireless you point to. I guess you don't really miss wires after all.
9. LPs
My wife is an archaeologist. She's told me about digging these up.
10. The Newton
The Newton was good for a laugh, but it was also a good lesson for future manufacturers of PDAs. Without Apple's failure, would we really have seen Palm's success?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I liked punch cards... I mean, they had the added benefit that if your drive broke, you could actually SEE the data...
or else!
#1: Absolutely.
OK, so the direct science of manned spaceflight is dubious, but we need the romance of space and it can really help to push along major innovation. If we let the market do it, all we get are Microsoft products.
#5: SOOOO impractical.
Make it accelerate well, not be beholden a third of its life to a power cord and actually USEFUL and it'll take off. THat's why I love hybrid and fuel cell technology.
#7: Oh SO much. I have three old IBM keyboards, one a "UNIX" keyboard (no keypad). Built like tanks. I've pounded on them in frustration and they take it like Tina Turner. I love overengineered products.
#8: Funny,
most of my phones in the house (3 out of four) are corded. Even better, two of those are from the '20s and '30s. That ring is just so beautiful. I just love getting called.
#9: Also funny,
in the past three years I've bought far more vinyl than plastic. Used and new, to be sure, but the ratio is about 3:1, vinyl to plastic.
You can choose to be nostalgiac for the past or, like me, just live in it (so says the man whose newest means of transportation is over 25 years old and has two wheels...).
Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew and had to live on food and water for a number of weeks.
That doesn't mean that it wsan't a bitching service. I mean to-your-door delivery is awesome, but it's hard to get on almost anything but pizza. Plenty of times when I've wanted something, but not wanted to get dressed and go to the store to get it. Even more so when you are talking about things outside of normal business hours.
That is was a bas business idea doesn't make it any less cool to the consumer. I wish they had found a way to make it work because I tell ya, I could go for a new DVD right now, but I don't want to go and drive and get one, espically since I'm pretty sure the video store is closed anyhow.
That can start in under 2 seconds. I don't see why current word processors like Open Office and Word need 30 seconds to load, when all they are doing is taking input from the keyboard 90% of the time. Why can't they load a simple screen and then fill in the rest behind the scenes later so you can start typing when you open the darn program, and not a minute later? It makes no sense. People are going to start to wonder why we don't use PAPER for writing anymore.
Speaking of paper, there's another technology I'll miss, especially in the bathroom, unless they get something better.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Hoo yah! I'm still using the same phone I bought in 1985 from Western Electric. This was not long after the break-up and they were still making 'em like they were going to lease 'em out to you and didn't want to have to come out and do repairs more often then every 25 years. It's built like a tank and has survived dozens of 6 foot dives to the kitchen floor. I'll probably be leaving it in my will to the grandkids.
Got the old-fashioned actual real bell on it, too, none of these namby-pamby tweedle-eedle-eep electronic imitations...harumph...
Got to go take my medication now....
What we need today is not another version of Windows needing even more computer resources, what we need today is a safer computer environment.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
legal issues aside, how was napster any better than the current breed of p2p apps?
.mp3 files, couldn't do multi-source downloading, couldn't resume, was heavily centralized, etc...
it only let you share
all in all, I'd say that napster was pretty bad. even gnutella (acquisition/limewire) has evolved to be miles better than napster.
napster's popularity was it's only saving grace. end of story.
(oh, and about the keyboards.... fill a computer lab/library with buckling spring keyboards, and see how long you keep your sanity. clickclickclickclickclickclick)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
... as in:
* Spamless Internet
* Virusless Internet
* Popupless Internet
* Bannerless Internet
* etcless Internet
Of course that the net has evolved, and a lot, but sometimes one miss those old days when your mail were mail, when browsing pages retrieved almost only the content you wanted, and even the pages were really static, without things popping up, moving, blinking or weighting far more than the useful content of what you really want to read.
is the anti-dupe article technology.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yeah, CNET is having a top 10 celebration for its 10th aniversary... can we just point everyone to it rather than having to make each one a new article!?
a g=bottom
http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6250162-1.html?t
I have an original OmniKey Ultra, made by Northgate Computer Systems. I'll give it up when someone pries it from my cold dead hands. It weighs several pounds, but has a light touch, and the paint didn't wear off the keys after the first few days of typing. The letters and numbers are embedded into the plastic. The OmniKey Ultra is so good, there are still companies who are willing to repair it if anything goes wrong. Just try getting a "modern" keyboard repaired, or a pair of shoes, or a VCR.
Here is my list:
1. Software optimized for keyboard speed. Most software focuses on the mouse, which makes it easier to learn, but you just don't get the same productivity once the learning curve is crossed. Outside of art and diagrams, the keyboard is potentially quicker (once learned).
2. XBase (dBase dirivative) for table processing. It showed what nimble table-oriented and/or collection-orientation can do. SQL is just not factorable enough to do some things as well, taking more than 3 times the same amount of code in many cases. The language had flaws, but the table-side seemed to straddle the line between SQL and array-oriented languages that derived from APL (and still used for financial analysis).
3. Developing with real GUI's. The web puts all kinds of odd constraints and hurdles in front of creating good, controllable, and quick GUI's. Before the web I spent about 30% of my time on interface issues and 70% on the processing itself. With the web that seems reversed.
4. DEC VAX file versioning. The VAX kept a copy of 2 or so save generations in case you foobarred something. With disk being cheap (for at least text files) I would like to see something similar brought back.
Table-ized A.I.
Are we talking about a 1970 model bicycle?
The Amiga was a decade or more ahead of its time, but you won't buy one in the store today.
Betamax - we should all know the story here. At the time, everyone knew that Beta was superior to VHS in every way except in terms of movie selection at the video store. It's a crying shame.
AlphaServers with AXP CPU's... Yes I know it is still possible to purchase these, but not for long. I am still stunned by how Intel was allowed to buy the Alpha technology just to own the competition's processor technology and chipmaking plant, dodge the MMU patent lawsuit (which would have been expensive for Intel) and allow Intel to write the closing chapter on the superior Alpha processor technology.
Intel's aquisition of DEC's competing Alpha technology is a clear example of Capitalism gone very wrong.
For example, I use a mobile to call, no need for Java, camera's, compasses and christmas bells.
Also, computer quality has degraded, cars are more difficult to fix etc.
That and cherry fizzies instant drink tablets, even though it always made me barf.
I agree with a lot of your comments and would add:
3. Napster. Was great for a while and I bought quite a few CDs after getting to know a lot of new bands. Near the end though there was so much crap -- poorly encoded songs, songs that cut off before the end, etc. Even BitTorrent suffers from some of the same issues and I don't want to spend hours looking for a good rip of a song I want. Itunes is just so much more evolved and hassle free for me.
4. Concord. Loud, expensive and the sonic boom forced them to run transoceanic routes only. Admittedly cool though. There was work on a replacement that sought to significantly reduce or eliminate the sonic boom, but it fell off the rails.
5. GM's EV1. I saw one at a mall display and while the technology was interesting the styling did leave a lot to be desired. Hybrids appear to be a bridge between gas and electric for now.
6. Palm Pilot. I still use my Palm, a second generation color model. Pocket PCs look great and can do so much, but the cost just doesn't seem worth it when my cell phone (and old Palm) accomplishes the same tasks.
7. Keyboards. My mom still has her first office PC, an IBM XT. The keyboard weighs a ton and feels very solid, but I remember that the clicking drove sound me crazy. Modern keyboards also seem to take a lot less effort to push the keys than the old IBM keyboard.
9. LPs. Convert LPs to digital? Isn't that what a CD does (an admittedly simplistic interpretation)? I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of CD vs recorded to digital from LP? I know that all my Elvis CDs were remasted and cleaned up digitally from the original masters. I would think this would be an improvement.
On the whole, you would expect that technology continues to improve. I think the gist of the article is while technology might change, it doesn't necessarily improve over previous generations as styles and tastes change.
Just my take.
Regarding the following from the article:
I don't think they were more "authentic", it is just that analog tends to add "extra" noise and distortion that may provide some variety to the ears. The best guitar music is not clean and pure, but "damaged" with purposeful distortion and noise. Digitially-reproduced music is sometimes too clean, like spending every day at Disney Land. After a year of that you would crave a biker convention instead.
Table-ized A.I.
"The Newton
When Apple gets things right, it's spectacular (think iPod), but when the company messes up, it's a hoot. The first popular pen-based PDA, the Apple Newton, was big, expensive, and too smart for its britches. Early models tried to interpret handwriting with often amusing results, making words out of users' scrawls that often combined into surreal "Newton Poetry." We miss the Newton because what it thought we meant was often far more interesting than what we were really trying to say."
Having just experienced OS X last week (dedicated Linux user, sometime Windows user who had to recommend a Mac to his parent for the lack of viruses/spyware while still letting them run Quickbooks and I have 1 thing to say to KDE&Gnome - MY GOD, WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO COPY WINDOWS FOR WHEN WE CAN COPY APPLE!!!!!!!)I too would love it if apple redid a handheld that could sync in with their computer. They wouldn't have to redo a new line because they already have a handheld. They could simply dip their toes in the water and introduce the iPod with some more feature than simply playing music...... and showing pictures:) If nothing else, at least you'll have a legitimate excuse now to write an iPod off as a business expense!
The handshake noise of dial-up modems.
Napster was only cool as long as there were no real alternatives. Audiogalaxy was much better, both in handling and the way it worked. Heard a song on the radio while being at work? Entered the website and when you got home, the song was on your harddrive. And you could find a lot of things that you would have never found on napster.
Everything after Audiogalaxy was quite crappy, especially Kazaa / Morpheus etc. Only Top 100 music and lots of dialers, worms and fakes.
Yeah, those were the days.
Plug them in and they work *instantally*. No fussin' with tiny USP doors or a dismount step[1], just yank-and-crank.
[1] As long as you change the drive letter/reference before yanking, otherwise you get that annoying "drive not ready" error, but that can happen with pen-drives also.
Table-ized A.I.
Damn do I miss a good simple keyboard. I like to touch a keyboard before bying one, so I don't like to buy online. None of the stores have a simple 104 key USB keyboard that feels right (bonus if it has a mini usb hub for mouse). They have weird layouts, 1000 extra buttons, small buttons, bad feedback, etc.
I guess we should assume everyone missed it the first time.
"originial". Good God.
Thanks, India
(flamebait -1, unemployed -2)
...they did.
They didn't mention the Generra Hypercolor 'collection'!
Oh c'mon, don't look at your monitor like that... you wore 'em too.
Trivial Omnipotence
It seems to me that fewer manned space trips is actually a boon for us technologists.
:-)
Sending humans that weren't designed for, or evolved to, going into outer space is inefficient and costly when compared to specific tools that humans have created and are continuing to improve upon.
Let's compare what we could lose against what we could gain. Gone will be photo opportunities, of one man in a space suit, planting a flag on another planet, as seen in the article. Gained will be 'spin-offs', from research and developement efforts, that will come from advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence systems, because remote control over such great (time) distances is simply not feasable.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather be a unsung computer science nerd, than a glorified trained monkey in space.
Do not think that I'm belittling the efforts of those that made significant contributions to our space programs in the past. But, as we gain the capability to explore safer, better, and cheaper, then we also have the responsibility to set aside our old pride (photo of man next to flag) for new pride (photo of man next to robot).
what ? the at&t phone wasn't cheap and mass produced ?
but true - things have used cheaper materials and techniques and *are* crap as a result.
I have an original IBM PS2 keyboard (on which i am typing this) and its just not equalled by anything else i've ever used. Sad really - its dated 1984, weighs more than the Shuttle its plugged into, and you could beat your boss to death with it, wipe off the blood and it'll still work perfectly.
Hmm, i now start to see why they changed them...
Having grown up in the LP era and spent large amounts of hard-earned lawn mowing and snow-shovelling money on them, I can honestly say about them "Good Riddance!".
They are primitive sound technology. They are expensive, fragile, and don't sound good. You can always tell an MP3 file of an old 60's pop song made from an LP as opposed to one ripped from a CD. The fidelity is just not there.
An LP held 45 minutes of music for most of its life and about 60 minutes at its most advanced. It cost about $20 (in today's US dollars). Now a blank DVD ROM holds about 4000 minutes in high-quality MP3 or OGG files and sells for $0.39 (in today's US dollars). An exact copy of this set of 4500 minutes can be made on another 39 cent blank disk in about 15 minutes. And you can control which selections will be copied and the order.
To get ultra high fidelity audio from LPs requires thousands of dollars of precision equipment, very fragile and sensitive to the local room conditions. To get the same fidelity from high quality 320kbps MP3 and OGG files takes a $59 player. And it even puts out this high fidelity sound when you are running with it.
And some silly people want to go back to LP?
"cheap" & "mass produced" are relative terms. What may have been cheap and mass produced 25 years ago is more likely to be of quality than items that are mass produced in our current disposable FRU (field replaceable unit) society.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
I really miss the days when a new computer release was really that. In the good old days before PC homogenization we used to get new and interesting computers released every month it seemed. I know, I know the PC industry had to mature and standards were required blah blah.
It was fun though...
Nice firm keys and a great clickety-click sound. ..and there is always the Northgate Omnikey 102.
Blogging because I can...
i had an old ibm scroll point rolling ball mouse (think little purple button for the mouse on older laptops instead of little wheel on the top) that i swore i would never give up to the "rolling scroll" mouse that is so common today. sadly, i am not aware of an optical scroll point mouse, and thus had to switch because gaming and a rolling ball mouse do not sit well together. i think i would pay $100 for a scroll point optical mouse on par with the mx 500 series.
Have you been asleep for the last couple of decades? We are doing great things with space exploration: probes going to the outer reaches of the solar system, solar sails, new propulsion methods, hibernation, you name it, it's being worked on.
However, sending human astronauts to Mars or even the moon at this point will just take funding away from important space related programs and delay meaningful manned space travel by decades.
Whose batteries were recharged by a really, really big coal engine.
KFG
Yellowtab is making an OS called Zeta based on the Beos source and from the looks of it, Zeta is an updated version of Beos. Here's a slashdot post about it.
I guess I noticed that when palms were younger every manager seemed to have a dead one sitting in a pile of cables in the corner of the room. Once they got rechargable lithium batteries, though, that stopped. Personally I still use my Palm Vx... I would say that's the classic model if it's useful to you. It does enough for me. I agree about ginormous storage being very useful, too, but don't think a good enough model has come out yet (i.e. they crash too much or don't have batteries lasting long enough or don't have enough space!)
Back in the 70's GM made several hundred cars with a turbine engine. they were quiet, powerful and worked like a dream
Although I'm sure they were recalled for bullshit reasons, turbine engines were not suitible for cars because of their slow acceleration.
This is where the electrical system in a Toyota Prius picks up: a small (cylinder) engine is economic but lacks horse power. A battery backed electrical motor adds these. Replacing the engine in a Prius by a turbine might be a nice experiment, but remember that efficiency of standard combustion engines has improved drastically in the last decades.
Then again, maybe it's best to just wait for fuel cells to deliver enough power.
The article made boring by Wikipedia!
1. Manned space exploration
see List of human spaceflights by program
2. Kozmo.com
Kozmo.com was a venture-capital driven online company that promised free one-hour delivery of anything from DVDs to Starbucks coffee. It was founded by young investment bankers, Joseph Park and Yong Kang in March 1998 in New York City. The company is often referred to as an example of the dot-com excess.
Kozmo promoted an incredible business model; it promised to deliver small goods free of charge. The company raised about $280 million including $60 million from Amazon.com. The business model was heavily criticized by business analysts, who pointed out that one-hour point-to-point delivery of small objects is extremely expensive and there was no way Kozmo could make a profit as long as it refused to charge delivery fees. Not surprisingly, the company failed soon after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, laying off its staff of 1,100 employees and shutting down in April 2001.
3. Napster
Napster is an online music service which was originally a file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning. Napster was the first widely-used peer-to-peer music sharing service, and it made a major impact on how people, especially university students, used the Internet. Its technology allowed music fans to easily share MP3 format song files with each other, thus leading to the music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs, which have been much harder to control. The service was named Napster after Fanning's nickname.
4. The Concorde
The Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde supersonic transport (SST) was one of only two models of supersonic passenger airliners to have seen commercial service. Concorde had a cruise speed of Mach 2.04 and a cruise altitude of 60,000 feet (17,700 metres) with a delta wing configuration and an evolution of the afterburner-equipped engines originally developed for the Avro Vulcan strategic bomber. It is the first civil airliner to be equipped with an analogue fly-by-wire flight control system. Commercial flights, operated by British Airways and Air France, began on 21 January 1976 and ended on 24 October 2003, with the last "retirement" flight on 26 November that year.
5. GM's EV1
The EV1 was the first electric car produced by General Motors in the United States. The experimental cars were the only vehicles in the history of the company to bear the "General Motors" badge. GM leased about 800 EV1 cars with the proviso that after the three-year leases were up, the cars reverted to the company. They were only available in California and Arizona and could only be serviced at designated Saturn dealers. The first generation EV1s used lead-acid battery batteries in 1996 (as model year 1997) and a second generation batch with nickel metal hydride batteries in 1999. As cars came off lease, they were refurbished and upgraded to second generation. GM spent more than $1 billion developing and marketing the EV1, but the company decided that it could not sell the car in enough quantities to make the EV1 profitable. The program was stopped in 2003.
6. The original Palm Pilot
Pilot was the name given to the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (then a division of U.S. Robotics and later 3Com).
7. Good keyboards
The IBM Model M keyboard was manufactured by IBM, Lexmark and finally Unicomp, starting in the 1980s. Built solidly, with a heavy steel backplate and fully swappable keycaps, its sturdiness and versatility allows it to outlive virtually any other computer component, and its buckling spring key
There are other alternatives. You can also be:
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
1) Audiogalaxy. Wonderful as BitTorrent is, it's simply not as good for finding incredibly obscure music that only 3 people in the world are interested in.
2) Games written in Basic. Oh for the glory days when any schoolkid could write from scratch something that his mates would be interested in playing.
3) The 12" single. For the sleeves - CD singles are great, but I really miss getting a square foot of artwork thrown in for free.
4) Booting from ROM. The Amiga started the rot, back in the old days you could turn a PC on and start to use it in seconds. Hard OSes were practically immune to piracy, and the 'it has to be right, we can't patch it' OS coding ethos has a lot going for it too!
5) Trackballs. The mouse you don't need a pad for, perfect for laptops too, but we ended up smearing our fingers over horrible 'trackpads' instead - how did that happen?
6) Analogue TV. Still hobbling on but it's days are numbered. My 30 years of compression-artefact-free viewing are already over.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
5. GM's EV1
Zero Emission Vehicle. ROFLMAO. Zero-emission as long as you don't count the power plant that burned (coal|oil|gas|atomic nuclei) and polluted somone else's back yard. Sure, I suppose the power could have been photoelectric or wind produced, but if you believe no harm to the earth was done in the process of manufacturing those systems, you're clueless. (Hint: Strip mining for metals, processing ore, smelting, doping chemicals for solar, etc). Not that I have a problem with any of the above, but let's be realistic here. There's no such thing as a "Zero Emission Vehicle".
Moving emission from the vehicle to a power plant has a huge bonus: point sources of pollution are much easier to address (filter, upgrade to cleaner to technology, whatever) than diffuse sources.
To put it bluntly: Even if you believe nuclear power is The Way(TM), you probably shouldn't put it in cars. Not yet.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate,
Our current population size is already not sustainable; any non-negative population growth rate is therefore too high.
nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
The predictions were generally of the form "if growth continues unchecked, then...". Fortunately, limiting growth and family planning have put a damper on that. Unfortunately, some populations are increasingly being limited through natural consequences of overpopulation (famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict), which was bound to happen sooner or later.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level
Over the last century, technology has primarily allowed us to increase population size by increasing the rate at which we extract non-renewable resources; it has not appreciably increased the sustainable population size.
You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
It's either family planning or environmental disaster or war or disease; take your pick.
You see when you're listening to a digital CD the sound comes out all like _|-|_|-|_|-|_ and it sounds terrible, but if you're listening to an analogue LP the sound is all like v^v^v^u^v^U^wooooOOOooo000ooo. So basically the sound quality is smoother and easier from an LP, and it's got all those extra harmonics and sounds, which come free! I mean, you don't get any pops and crackles on CD, and those give the music all their character. The beatles sound sterile and dead without the pops and crackles. I think we need to invest some serious research $$$ in a portable LP player, that you can use like an iPod, I mean, an iPod has what, 40Gb of storage, that's about 4000 minutes... So if you had some kind of barrel, with 40 LPs in it, and a player, and some gyroscopes, you could have that great L:P quality wherever you run. And you'll get fitter faster.
But, anyway, back to my point. For things to sound good, you need an LP, some really thick cables, a gold plated power supply, some of those special bricks which go on top of cables, and a whole bunch of tetrodes & pentodes. Also, once, I saw the beatles in concert, they sucked - they were nothing like they are on an LP - I mean, between the lot of them they couldn't make a single crackle or pop, and they didn't skip once!!!! Where's the warmth?!?!?! Remember, it's w000oo000OOO000oooo))oo which is great not 101010101010101010111 all those ones sound terrible.
You know, the ones that actually have three buttons that are operated by three different fingers. A hell of a lot more ergonomic than the ones today where the wheel doubles as the third button that needs the strength of an index finger to press, thus requiring the middle finger to rest over the right-hand button not the middle button where it should be.
Oh how I miss my dual-wheel three-button A4Tech mouse - zero lateral finger movement. If only it was optical.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Convert LPs to digital? Isn't that what a CD does
But then you have to repurchase your entire collection, and store two redundant sets of discs.
Also I imagine there's probably stuff out there that was never rereleased on CD.
I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of CD vs recorded to digital from LP?
Taking a different angle, assuming CDs are comparable, how about cost comparisons? Time spent recording, splitting, cleaning up LP transfers versus just going down the store and buying the CDs.
I bought a Macally IceKey because I read about how great it was... It is basically a high quality laptop keyboard with fullsize buttons and full layout. The buttons are very easy to press and your hands can basically rest flat on the table and keyboard because of its minimal height. I sometimes hear that ergonomically it is better when buttons click and the keyboard is "angled" (don't know how to call that... when you use those legs on the back of the keyboard) but I highly doubt that. As I see it, the best thing for your hands would be a startrek like table where you don't have to hold up your hands at all, but of course then you have no feel for the buttons. The IceKey actually has a very good feel and it is very flat - perfect or me.
e y.html
:)
http://www.macally.com/spec/usb/input_device/icek
Disclaimer: Yes, it also looks good with my iBook
Have we already forgotten the tag?
... (shudders at the memory of scarlet text marquees scrolling on lime green backgrounds)
C',mon, it wasn't all daffodils and kittens back then
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Why not "STAFFED" space exploration? Why do you have to be so male-centric? It's 2005, for crying out loud.
We surely have to. See the previous post about killer algea, so to survive we have to diversify and spread out.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
"Or to put it less tactfully: poor people breed faster than rich people."
There is a transition point in any country, and yes even America and Western Europe had it, from (A) high mortality including infant mortality, must make 10 kids so maybe 2-3 survive, to (B) chances are good they'll all survive, so no point in breeding like rabbits anyway. That point is mainly a question of not even being "rich", but simply of access to sanitation and basic medical care.
And it takes a while for the "no point in breeding like rabbits" notion to sink in. At that transition point there's a generation or two which basically still doesn't know or get it. They still try to make as many kids as they can, so some will survive, but, surprise, this time most or all survive. So there's a temporary population boom. Then the idea sinks in and it's ok from there.
Most of the western world is already past that point. Other countries started much later, so they're still in the trailing edge of that population boom. That's all.
But even there the keywords are: trailing edge. As was mentioned, the global growth is already decreasing pretty quickly.
"Personally I don't think there's a choice. We must expand into space."
You want to do... what? Send all the poor into space colonies? Have you actually calculated how many millions it takes to put even 1 man on the moon? Now add the cost of building self-sustaining habitable space, shipping suplies and resources back and forth, etc.
Now multiply that by, say, 1 billion people, if the goal is to reduce population on earth by any signifficant amount.
Right. For a _tiny_ fraction of that cost you could just provide the most basic sanitation and medical care them, and not worry about overpopulation any more. Again, you don't need to make everyone rich.
And even if you wanted to make everyone "rich", there are better ways than blowing several million dollars _per_ _person_ to put them on Mars. And it's happening without government intervention anyway. That's what globalization does: all those jobs and factories in poor countries, a lot of which end up producing for local consumption anyway, _are_ raising their standard of living.
"You are either for the expansion of growth of the human population off the earth and into space or you are for mass murder and restricted personal liberty to control population growth here on earth."
Ah, right, was wondering where we'd get the mandatory appeal to humanity or some other tried-and tested fallacy. Would have been too good to actually have a coherent logical argument, instead of reaching for the fallacies, but I guess that was an unrealistic expectation.
No, I'm for using the money in a way that actually benefits us all, rather than on unrealistic SF stuff. Space colonization may give trekies and SW fans a hard-on, but right now it's simply not a realistic option.
"Of course, there's also the third option. The so called what, me worry? approach. Which is to just pop your hands over your ears and sing "lalalalalala" and hope the whole issue will go away."
Or here's a fourth: actually get a clue, use logic and facts, instead of going on a SF bullshit spree and emotional appeals to humanity.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ami Pro: Bad business kills great product. Intuitive, easy-to-use word processor. Nothing today holds a candle to it. I probably miss it the most of any old technology. Too bad IBM can't open-source it.
LP?: What's so great about LPs? I've always wondered what audiophiles can hear that normal people can't. What is the world like to someone with that kind of hearing? To me, LPs are music set in a background roar. It was nice when I was in college and couldn't afford CDs to get an LP for $1, but the sound wasn't that good. Besides, to balance this out, since the LP era, digital remasters have made many recordings sound better than the best LP ever sounded. (Who wants the un-re-remastered version of Yes' Relayer? It didn't sound decent until the second remastering!) Plus CDs are so convenient: I can put my entire music library into a little zipper case. And I can edit out the filler ("Mother" on Synchronicity is the canonical example), and put 2 LPs on 1 CD, etc. I'll take CDs any day.
Napster: I like being able to call up out-of-print music on demand which no one will sell me for any price.
Riddle me this: In any other market, companies take unwanted inventory and sell it for scrap value just to get it off the books and salvage some value out of it. So why don't record companies take all their out-of-print music and sell it to some service that will let people download songs for a $1 membership fee or something? What do the record companies get for hoarding music? Isn't there some value in it they could squeeze out?
I miss the automatic dupe detector.
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HP RPL calculators. Yes, they still make them, but it not exactly as if they evolved with time. Well, perhaps I don't miss them, since I haven't had much use for them since I left university, but still.
HP calculators are (used to be) fine pieces of engineering. A few months ago I needed to calculate something and since there really isn't anything that compares to the HP RPL calculator interface I digged out my HP48 from a deskdrawer. I turned it on. The batteries had not drained! It must have been roughly ten years since I used it last. There was stuff lying around on the stack since I last used it.
not a shareholder then I take it.
In Japan, the male population declined slightly last year, and the overall population is predicted to peak in 2006. The birth rate of 1.29 kids per couple is a pretty major factor. (And I sure wouldn't want to be that .29 of a kid...)
I think I've got it worked out.
:-).
:-)
There was a sort of unwritten agreement at one time between some games developers to see how much bullshit they could get 'Edge' magazine to print (I think there's a sister mag called 'Next Generation' in the US - they shared a lot of content). The journos are arrogant and pretentious, and like to think they are technically knowledgeable, but of course they aren't.
So in features/interviews with some of the cheekier games dev houses, you would find some rare old nonsense passed off as 'technology' by the developer
I think the same thing is happening here - there's a group of slashdot readers who have a competition to see how many dupe stories they can get accepted onto the front page.
It's the only thing that makes sense
I think the detail is that he smoked, smoked, smoked those cigarettes (and worked in NYC, which someone wrote is equal to another several packs/day). Despite his upbeat sign-off, it's a small percentage of people who survive lung cancer.
It's okay, it plays Zork.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We miss the Newton because what it thought we meant was often far more interesting than what we were really trying to say.
:-P
Thanks for trying to do the journalist thing, guys.
Quake 2 -_-
it could never be the same again.
I Predict A Riot
http://www.keytronic.com/home/keyboards/keyboards/ keyboards.html
I miss the original palm too... I had a Palm Pilot Professional which hit the sweet spot. It did all the PIM stuff and did it well.
Of course, my Blackberry 7280 now does it all with the addition of email and a cellphone, so I guess there's really not much to miss after all.
Oh yeah, I *never* wanted to balance my checkbook, do work processing, or watch movies on my PDA, so my Blackberry just about gets it right in the way that the original Palms did.
It takes a while to figure out that progress isn't linear. As an older person, my favorite is the motor-driven analog clock radio.
* It doesn't need a backup battery.
* Unlike cheap clock radios without backup if the power goes out for a minute, it takes about 5 seconds to adjust the minute hand.
* Ditto, if the power goes out. you aren't going to wake up for work two hours late unless the power is off for two hours.
* If you want to get up later one day, you don't have to cycle 23 hours that evening to get the alarm back to the earlier time.
* I just think analog is cool. It's a one-glance pictoral instead of digital information.
* And the clock motors were 60-cycle syncro and perfectly accurate for all practical purposes.
But, aside from the expense of being made of metal (back then), I imagine assembling a clock motor was labor intensive, right?
I'm currently using a circa '68 Zenith that somebody gave me around '98 because the AF power transistor had thermal runaway. An easy diagnosis and an equally easy fix with a circuit board of discrete components. A little light grease on the clock gears every few years and it's good to go.
And there's an even smaller pecentage of people who survive life.
On the other hand, if you mainly listen to techno/industrial music and not "soft and warm" music, the LP really comes off at a disadvantage.
*Imagines Skinny Puppy with LP distorsion*
*Shudders*
Top tech I miss, is people putting top ten lists all on one page, rather than having to click "continue" ten times. Congrats to cNet for being concise on this one... Reminds me of the old days...
Good keyboards? I find bang for the buck for key boards has come a *long* way. I buy $7.95 Cicero keyboards at Future Shop (argh), which have an incredibly good feel to them. They way my kids (okay, okay, and I), go through keyboards, I'm glad I have have "disposable" keyboards with a great feel. Other than that, thought it was a cool article.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"The point of my post was that the earth has limited resources and therefore cannot support the current or future world population at a standard of living that is acceptable."
Ok, I'll bite. _Which_ resources doesn't it have enough to sustain an 8 billion population? Because it produces currently a surplus of food, has enough uranium for centuries, has iron under almost literally every hill or mountain, and it can synthetize fuel and plastics from any other source of energy (e.g., nuclear.) So _what_ materials do you absolutely need to bring from the moon?
"For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources."
"Unthinkably large" sounds cool, but:
A) Exactly how much _is_ "unthinkably large"? More than the exact same money (including, salaries, supplies, shipping, etc) would get you from a mine on Earth? Enough to not be lost in the decimals, compared to what millions of people already extract on Earth?
B) What's the price per ton to transport it, and to transport supplies back? There's a good reason why you get raw materials or oil imported by train or ship, not by airplane: cost per ton transported.
"Of course, next you're gunna claim there are no resources on the moon and that the only way forward is to huddle in the dark as we use up all the resources on earth."
Actually, next I'm gonna claim you need to read a book on economics. Might be a fascinating read.
The question isn't just whether there are resources on the Moon worth getting, but whether it's cheaper to get them from there. That's how the economy still works here on Earth, I'm affraid.
There's a lot of "plan B"s out there, that are perfectly feasible, but aren't done because "plan A" is still cheaper. E.g., why the USA prefers to import oil than to extract its own. Or for that matter than to synthesize it from coal, or to switch to hydrogen cars and nuclear power to produce the hydrogen, or whatever.
If 20 billion USD was all it takes to bring a lot of cheap resources from the moon, that is, cheaper than you can get them on Earth, some corporation would already do that.
But maybe we'll do something else first. Yours is not the only solution, but just one possible "plan B" in a list of _thousands_. Humanity has a _lot_ of already existing options before huddling in the dark or mass-murder, and more are already being researched. (Of course, it makes a better doomsday whine if you ignore them.)
Which of them will be used next and when, will have to do with economics, not with what looks way cool to SF fanboys. _Maybe_ some day bringing iron ore from the moon will be cheaper than digging it from under a mountain on Earth. But maybe we'll just use plastics and composite materials produced with fusion power instead. Or maybe something else.
When one such "plan B" becomes cheaper, or the current "plan A" becomes too expensive, we will know it, and do it then. That's how the economy works.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
href="http://www.a4audio.com/cd-detail.asp?Catalo
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"You don't get what's to like about a company that sold everything at cost and didn't charge for shipping?"
How did this get mod'ed Insightful? (Yah, yah, pretend I'm new here.)
I suppose it's much like Santa Claus. People like the concept, but nobody with a brain thinks they really exist.
Negative cash flow is bad, m'kay?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If this gets pushed too far we will be trying to find objects with no effect whatsoever on the world around them.
Simple and to the point.
Once they switched processors and added colors and tried to have mass market appeal, I think they killed their core culture, which is a shame. Now every PDA looks more or less the same, and we all kind of remember the Palm for what it was, not what it is.
Not that I could ever stand to use the things on a day-to-day basis, no matter how hard I tried. (Fantasy of an original Palm being released in a world with pervasive net access)
Keyboards have been my biggest complaint for many years. My home keyboard is one I got used off of and old Pentium 60 Zeos corp computer. Its AT, it has a full click in the keys (not quite as full as the classic IBM keyboards of old) and the larger enter key. For my needs this is the best keyboard out there. I type faster and with less mistakes.
At work I have another AT style keyboard gotten from a garage sale for 2 bucks. It has 12 extra programable function keys, a build in calculator and of course the full click and larger enter key.
A trip to my local Compusa shows me about 12 different keyboards and all of them suck with one exception. The exception is a keyboard with removed sidebar number pad in a metalic base (heavy, nice) and it is basically a notebook keyboard. Flat keys with a short throw click..it sells for $250 !!! One day it will be mine.
Apple free since 1990!
It's 2005, for crying out loud.
And there you are, crying out loud. STFU!
never existed. There was a plane called Concorde once.
And James Cameron if you're watching, "Titanic" was not a ship, it was The Titanic.
How about the Northgate Omnikey. 116 Keys, Dual function key rows, all good. http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/stellar.h tm
Kozmo started charging for delivery on orders under $30 at least a year or so before they went under.
Further, they were turning a profit in both Boston and New York -- both very dense cities where deliveries were easily made via bicycle. Not so in some of their later expansions (Dallas comes to mind).
KeyTronic quit the EU market from the beginning of August 2005. They probably don't even make the various European layouts any more. Unicomp says that most layouts are available on order, but you'll have to order from the USA, ($79 + overseas shipping)*1,22 and the price including VAT isn't all that realistic.
Bottom line -- in the EU we're just supposed to scour through junk heaps to find some working IBM clickers...
I've experienced numbers 7 and 8 directly within the last couple of months. After switching jobs, my new cube was outfitted with a truly horrible Belkin 104 key model. The keys felt like someone had spilled orange juice all over it, sticking in position up or down. What I really wanted was an ergonomic wired keyboard. Good luck finding one. I tried Best Buy, Target, Fry's, and Wal-Mart without success. All had wireless ergonomic models, but nothing wired. So I caved and got the Microsoft Wireless Desktop Comfort Edition. It was a wireless mouse / keyboard combo, and the keyboard had a nice ergonomic curve to it. Big mistake. Nearly everyone in the office has a wireless device, so there is a ton of interference. Add to that the fact that the keyboard consistently misses keystrokes, or sticks the control or shift key down. This is murder when using Vi for editing.
Where can I find a good, wired, ergonomically shaped keyboard?
Those 2 AA batteries lasted an entire month. Let's see any of today's new devices do that.
The list of "features" in a new palm seem pretty pathetic...
Built-in 1.2 megapixel camera
(no thanks, I'll wait for the cheap 8 megapixel cameras that you can change lenses on. golly gee, I miss those old cameras you can change the lenses on.)
Instantly capture photos and video clips
(Expansion card required, sold separately. and I'll wait for the cheap 8 megapixel panaramic video recorder, too.)
Listen to MP3s
(Expansion card required, sold separately.)
High-resolution, 320 x 320 color screen
(what a battery eater, the old lo-res black and white is good enough.)
Create and edit Word and Excel compatible files
Synchronize with Outlook
(Windows only. Why would I ever want to do something like that. The old and simple email and note writing apps are good enough for me.)
Built-in Bluetooth(TM)
(yeah, right. I admit I would prefer WiFi rather than the serial cable and/or infra red on the original Palms. Does anyone actually use Bluetooth? Does anyone care?)
32MB of memory
(24.7MB actual storage capacity. Bloat. I got by with 1MB of memory, no problem. Simple lightweight apps.
Expansion slot
(for all those expensive power consuming hardware bits that will quickly become obsolete and broken.)
High-performance ARM processor
(again, who cares? the processor in the Palm Pilot was good enough and again, it didn't suck power!)
For a pre-exisiting diesel vehicle, you can argue that using biodiesel is zero-emissions, from a carbon standpoint. Since the carbon released had been converted from atmospheric carbon, the release is zero-sum.
Of course, there are other emissions, such as NOx, that would have come from the soil, or even petroleum fertilizers.
Magnetic speakers are cheap and mass-produced as well, but they are also heavy, and can't be easily placed next to other circuitry without problems.
Don't buy the cheap plastic ones.
I had a "Disk Doctor" polisher gadget, and it was a menace. It broke the first time it was used and ruined the DVD too.
Nowadays I use a soft washcloth and polish by hand.
There are probably good polishers, but I couldn't tell you which ones are good.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Yes, back in the last century when CDs were new there were demos on TV of people "drilling a hole in a CD and it still playing".
The trouble is, they were drilling between the end of the recorded section (which, as everyone here will know but no-one then did) starts from the inside out rather than (as with an LP) from the outside in. It's about as relevant as drilling a hole in between the end grooves of an LP.
Hey, my dad survived lung cancer. For about four years after they took the first lung (they took half of the second later). Of course, he was 6 feet tall and about 100 pounds when he died at age 59. Well, he wasn't really 6 feet tall any more, since the cancer was digging into his spine by then.
It's absolutely true that no one survives life, but my God there are better ways to wrap it up, trust me. If cancer doesn't worry you, Google COPD (my favorite hits are the tips on how to take a shower without feeling like you're being slowly suffocated). Today would be an excellent day to quit smoking.
When I worked at IBM, the old IBM PC Keyboards were on the employee purchase plan dirt cheap, along with IBM PCI 10/100 Ethernet adaptors with WOL (the Intel chipset). You'd bet I picked up a case of each- about 12 of either fully boxed. As I scrape the letters off each one and it starts to give me trouble, I move to the next.
Couldn't be happier. The current 'new' keyboards all suck... but you see, it's all about predicting that it's going to happen.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Nope, he still has you. The waste products are:
carbon dioxide
perspiration
urine
feces
The original USR Pilot 1000 did not arrive until 1996, NOT 1994.
Also, as the owner of one of these Pilot 1000s, I will say, it did crash periodically. Not OFTEN mind you, but then, my Palm Tungsten T5 doesn't crash any more than the old Pilot either. The only thing I dislike about the Tungsten over the original Pilot is Graffiti 2. I'm too used to the original Graffiti.
I liked the Pilot much better than the big bulky Newton 120 I had before it.
FTA: "Try to buy communications equipment today--it's all wireless. Wireless networks, cellular phones..."
They make wireless cell phones? Damn, and I'm still carrying around this 28 mile spool of cable for my wired cell phone. I need to look into this...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
definitely belongs on the list. That was the best PDA I ever had. A perfectly-sized chicklet keyboard, tremendous battery life, a C compiler, a sane OS. I hoped they would be around long enough for a Linux port but it wasn't to be. I know there have been follow-up HP products but they prioritized the wrong things, e.g. a color screen adds little while shortening battery life.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Usenet back before Canter/Siegel. Heck, Usenet back before AOL made it available to their users. Despite lack of civility and the occasional (OK, not so occasional) flamefest - it was entertaining, amusing (i.e. kremvax hoax), and surprisingly useful. If you wanted to get information, share information, it was the place. And no - even with a zillion Web sites and Google Groups (the remains of Usenet) there's no equivalent.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The problem with using economics as a justification is that we're not working with a completely free market, and there are many externalities that are just not figured into the system - what is the 'cost to society' of releasing ten tons of small particles into the atmosphere? It is certainly nonzero, and is not reflected in the cost of running a factory.
If you subsidize oil enough, you can make it profitable to drill in the US.. but when it takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than you get from the product, there's no real reason to drill. Until our economic policy accurately reflects thermodynamics, arguments based on 'cost' really don't hold water.
That said, it still represents a huge energy loss to mine for anything on the moon...
If you think spending 40 quid on a good soundcard and another 40 quid for some "good speakers for my PC" is what fidelity is about then you need to have your hearing checked out.
And if you think "fidelity" is what music appreciation is about then you need to have your brain checked.
Play me a good song, and I won't care whether it's a 96kbps MP3 stream or pristine vinyl on a $2000 turntable -- I'm going to enjoy it. Likewise, play me a bad song and I'm NOT going to enjoy it, irregardless of "fidelity".
1. OpenDoc - This was just kind of cool.
2. Hellcats Over the Pacific - Old fashioned dogfighting
3. Hypercard - Fun for the whole family
4. Mechwarrior 1 - The new ones may be fun too, but this falls under the same category as #2. Games tend to get more complicated over time.
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
Believe it or not, they still make these. I have one on my desk.
with no dupes and JonKatz....
I never understood why anyone would prefer the IBM keyboards with their 100dB, carpal tunnel-inducing key strokes and gigantic phone coil cord. Of course, I bet if I asked the RPG programmers here they could tell me...
1. F/OSS -- Destroyed when Mordak the Executioner bombarded the last of the OSS revolutionary comclaves from space with his "StarWave" hyperlight virtual partical reciprocator.
2. Energy Conservation -- Abandoned when M'hec'ma'har, the galactic cloud made of pure, unadulterated fossil fuel was discovered.
3. Humans -- Structurally reengineered into virtual extinction when Humans had to redesign thier internal atomic structure to be able to survive the Val disturbance, when all atomic matter in the universe went through it's temporary depolarization.
4. Microsoft -- Finally met it's end when one of the Seven All Creators (Steve, not Jabar this time) decided that they had built thier towers too high.
5. Reality TV -- Damn that took a long time.
6. The War on Drugs -- Now that the newly restructured fundamental laws of physics that the new humans were built on are no longer susceptible to drug induced states of euphoria, finally we could end this.
8. The number 7 -- Turns out we didn't really need it after all.
9. All other languages except for English -- After discovering that all sentient races in the Universe speak perfect, American English, and that only a subset of humans spoke strange, non-English dialects, those last few "Language Terrorists" were finally dealt after a bloodly battle resulting in the massacre and total gravatomic annaihilation of seven galaxies... Of course, really the only survivors that really needed to be dealth with were Juan Carlos and his mother, Maria, of Earth, but those other seven galaxies were really pissing us off.
10. Ka'THUR -- Don't tell me I'm the only one glad to see this go. I mean, seriously.
But that's better then the last time I saw the Northgate copies. They were $200+ then.
The unicomp is decent. Using one to type this.
On the Northgate a few of the keys have gone all mushey on me, no complaints though. Lasted for more then a decade of heavy use.
On second though I might have to get one. The original cost about $100 IIRC.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
He's Mr. Natural.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You can either have a ton of devices trying to limit smog-producing emissions or you can work on reducing emissions at a few large sources. I'll all for the latter. Coupled with roof-top solar cell electricity production (in areas where it makes sense) this can have a substantial increase in air quality.
There are, of course, no free lunches, and you have to work at minimizing the emissions of power plants - but it's easier to do this there, where power generation is more efficient than in internal combustion engines.
And I'm all in favor of increased efficiency.
porn n' ice cream.
oh yeah.
porn n' ice cream.
Why not "VAGINAED" space exploration? Why do you have to be so phallocentric? It's 2005, for crying out loud.
I miss a trackpoint (those red nipple things on an IBM Thinkpad) that work...
(In Xorg when using it my mouse goes all over the place uncontrollably)
I always wanted to do barcode scanning at home, but I never found time to get off my lazy ass and pick one of those up at Radio Shack while they were still available.
Magnetic core memory is nonvolatile. It has to be explicitly erased to change its value.
If 32 kb of magnetic core was good enough for the Apollo 11 lunar lander, then it's good enough for me!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
My K5 FP article "Useful dead technologies" never got slashdotted, you wankers. And it was better, actually mentioning dead tech that many younglings never heard of.
And it had nothing stupid like the following:
"Napster..." I hate to break it to C|NUT, but Napster itself is dead but its tech isn't. It has evolved through Gnutella, etc, and finally to Bittorrent, which is to teh original Napster what the Space Shuttle is to the Wright Brothers' plane.
"Concorde... victim of economic factors and the aftermath of its only fatal crash...."
The fatal crash had little if anything to do with its demise. It was just too damned expensive. And why is this fool decrying the death of a technology he never once used himself?
"The original Palm Pilot"
This is like begging for "the original IBM PC". Today's offerings are superior.
"Good keyboards Once upon a time, using a computer was a loud, tactile affair."
And now my keyboard is wireless and what's more, doesn't wake the neighbors.
"Wires" Wires? Jesus, what a luddite. Why on earth do you miss wires?
"LPs" - I covered this in two different unSlashdotted K5 FP articles, "Which is better, analog or digital" and "How to rip from vinyl or tape." Only in my articles, I actually explained what was better about analog than current offerings (and begging for higher sample rates) and what was better about digital recording.
"The Newton" and then he goes on to say he misses it because... it sucked? Huh? Did it really?
My writing no longer graces the pages of K5. Perhaps I'll return some day. At any rate, I'm flattered that Rafe Needleman ripped me off.
The bastard - my head was just starting to get back down to normal size.
-mcgrew
Love mine. It has a couple flakey keys on the numeric keypad, but nothing serious. I scoured PC surplus auctions for years before I came across mine, duct-taped to the bottom of a bundle with two other no-name keyboards. Five bucks for all 3! Score!
One other thing about the Omnikey Ultra (mine) that rarely gets mentioned is that it was dip-switch configurable, both in layout and emulation. With the right cable it could be used on an Amiga, Mac, or PC. You just changed the DIP switches to put it in the right mode. I used it on my Amiga for years before moving it to my PC. Just change a couple of switches and voila!
Control and Caps-Lock are interchangable too. Set the switches and move the keycaps.
Best keyboard ever made.
Jesus Christ I actually laughed out loud from that one. Keep it up, New Here!
Where can you buy 4000 minute "hi-fi" mp3 or ogg discs for $0.99 (other than the Chinese supermarket...)?
Most CDs you purchase retail can go from $6.99 to $21.00 (even higher if there are multiple discs) and contain under 60 minutes of music.
Making your own records was not something that most consumers would have had access too. Even in the last 40 years of consumer home audio via reel-to-reel or cassettes the investment was minimal for equipment that would record and store music, I would think that it would have been at least a comparable cost to a computer system, the appropriate software and blank discs.
crazy dynamite monkey
It's not all about energy cost, but rather which form of energy sells for the most.
If we mine oil using oil then yes, energy cost matters. But if we use solr/wind/etc.. energy to mine oil we can support a large energy loss because the energy we are getting in the form of oil comes in a nice package AND there is a supporting infrastructure ready to use it, both of which statements are false about solar and wind.
So it still comes down to how much is that guy willing to pay at the pump before changing his infrastructure.
Don't we all miss Kozmo???
And the natural selection of good apps depend more on NEED than WANT.
Think of the Spitfire fighters. They were cool. They no longer exist because better aircraft have appeared. Even the F-16 flew awesome, and is now replaced with more automated stealth fighters, and will soon be replaced with unmanned drones. Now I would prefer to see spitfires zip across the skies rather than drones, and dogfight videos rather than nightvision targets blowing up. But thats wanting what you dont need.
I loved the IBM model M keyboards, and their feel. But I chucked them out because they were loud and heavy, and didnt buy another because the market produces cheaper and lighter keyboards now. All the new IBM keyboards are pretty good and at a good price given their easy mass production and low quantity of plastic. So I'll use these now, and remember the gool ol days.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
ha ha!
You just got F'd in the A!
My other first post is car post.
Esp. with the loss of the EV1 car. I bet a lot of conservatives are yelling "FAG!" from their oil derriks with glee.
Go to the local public library and check out the entire rock and pop collection. Rip these CDs to your PC hard drive. Buy a DVD burner for $70. Copy the entire MP3/OGG collection to the blank DVD that came with the DVD burner. Take the DVD burner back to Fry's. You have a 4000 minute 39 cent DVD.
My Zire (21 I believe) lasts more than a couple of months easily. On the other hand it has no colour, no backlight, nothing. It is a lightweight m100, nothing else and as fast as the original Palms. On the other hand, it was dirt cheap and it does its job (taking notes down). My other PDA is an SL5500 so I usually use that one for fancier stuff.
I miss the old MacWrite word processor that came with the first macs. Even a kid could pick it up in a few minutes, and do fancy hand-outs with pretty fonts and graphics.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
What about OS-9? That was a cool operating system! So fast!
Now the Mac is the same old bloatware as anyone else. I, for one, refuse to upgrade to X! And now with the Intel segmented crap, it'll be the same as a PC.
I miss the old MP3.com. Originally, it was THE major player in LEGAL free music distribution. Now they've gone pay, and the other free distribution sites either have too, or have diversified too much, or are too small, or whatever to build up the kind of momentum that MP3.com had before it became mismanaged by fools that didn't understand the artists role in their success-- preferring to see the artist as customer rather than collaborator.. IUMA too has dried up, and while there are dozens of smaller sites now, the idea of a centralized catalogue of legal free music has pretty much gone...
Then you REALLY must be new. He has been doing that stupid joke for almost a year now.
Try soundclick.com, it's got a huge library of free music and they don't charge you anything to create an account and upload your mp3s, as long as you keep each under 10MB and no higher than 128kbps. You can upload mp3s of any size at very high bitrates if you pay like 4 bucks a month. Very cool. Only problem I have with the site is that once I accidentally visited it using Internet Explorer and saw that most of its advertising is for spyware companies.
"Supporting infrastructure ready to use wind and solar energy," i.e. the power grid. Solar and wind energy are generally collected as electricity. Oil is also burned to produce electricity. The market economy ensures that where this oil goes doesn't really make a difference; the oil is just added into the market, and the whole transaction still nets an energy loss.
Also note that the infrastructure we have for extracting oil mostly runs on energy from... oil.
Yes, I'm not saying there isn't a net loss of energy in something like shale oil or the like. I think there probably is. That is besides the point. People will still pay for a nice energy packaging even iff it contains less energy than it cost to produce. I charge my cell phone battery, even though that is a net loss of energy simply because I like to carry my cell phone with me. We don't care about net losses of energy because energy is not a scarce resource. A limitless supply of it strikes the Earth's surface each second. We only care that it comes in handy little packages.
Now no one is going to use oil to drill oil when there is a net loss... that's just silly. When we move to net loss production we will be using less handy packages of energy (like wind) to produce more handy packages (oil). That isn't a problem because currently there is NO infrastructure to produce oil from these sources... it must be built from scratch.
Even punchlines are being duped now!
DragonHawk: "Negative cash flow is bad, m'kay?"
toddestan: "Why don't you stop looking at it from the point of an investor/shareholder, and look at the company from the point of a customer? What isn't there to like about a company that has great prices, fast delivery, and free shipping?"
I am looking at it from the standpoint of a customer. Companies that consistently lose money eventually run out of money and die. A company that doesn't exist does me no good at all. At work, one of the things I always look at when selecting vendors is the corporate health of the vendor. I want the vendor to be around in the future. I want them to make money. If they don't, they die, and I (as the customer) am, at best, severely inconvenienced. If the vendor provided more then just a commodity, things might get very expensive as I look to replace "legacy" stuff.
Hence the Santa Claus analogy. What's not to like about a jolly old elf who flies around giving presents to people who do good? Well, nothing, except for the fact that it isn't realistic. I don't base my personal life or my professional work on such things.
That's reality.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
At the point where we need to drill for oil at a loss, building a new drilling infrastructure isn't significantly cheaper, even short term, than building a new energy transport infrastructure (like hydrogen, or better batteries). The problem is that the more oil we drill, the harder it is to get to the remaining oil.
The real danger is that as easily accessible oil runs out, we will not have the good sense to invest enough of that energy in sustainable infrastructure. Energy itself is not scarse, but the means to convert it from sunlight into anything useful have to be developed and manufactured. The irony is that we need oil energy to build its replacement, but as long as oil remains cheap and plentiful, there's no economic incentive to make that switch. The government keeps prices artificially low; it's great politically, but doesn't help the future outlook.
If your end goal is to colonize another celestial body, then I believe it would be more efficient to learn about it's properties, then terraform it through remote methods, and then only afterword to step human feet on it.
1)Look for a good neighborhood.
2)Terraform remotely.
3)Profit!!!
'Spin-offs' are simply multi-use technologies that will help keep the cost down, and further justifiy the spending of even more money toward your goals.
Yes, stealing is much cheaper... forget the library just go to the mall at night with a box van (if you don't have one you can steal that too) and rob the music store, brilliant, why didn't I think of that.
If you buy retail music on disc you are getting 60 minutes or less regardless of maximum capacity.
I dug up some records I have with their original retail price stickers circa the early to mid 80s or so, the prices ranged from 4.99 to 9.99, which adjusted for inflation fell between the ranges of $9.07 and $18.16 (for the year 1984). Adjusted for inflation I paid $12.07 ($6.99 in 1984) for Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", and how much is it today? $11.99, it is the same length as the LP, same tracks, wow, it's 8 cents cheaper.
Burning DVDs has nothing to do with buying retail LPs and proves in no way that LPs are more expensive or less economical. I hope you understand.
crazy dynamite monkey
I have a Tungsten E2 on my desk.
1) It had Grafitti 2 (accuracy sucks) and it's impossible to downgrade back.
2) It is very slow (it turns on in about 400-500 ms). May be it's because of the slower flash memory.
3) It crashes a lot, even though I don't have any hacks or anything installed (new OS?).
Older Palms were of better quality. New models have some cool new features, but the quality of the OS (stability, speed and input accuracy) is lower.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Easy buddy, "keep it up" was my own little joke having checked his posts page. Btw, your uid is 70000 higher than mine. I'm 0ldschool, kiddo.
Another great site that went out of business for the same reason as Kosmo as far as I can tell at least was www.mrswap.com . I traded games and movies on this site like crazy! The idea was that you could sell your game or movie or book for so many mr.swap BUX and then use those BUX to buy movies, games etc... from other users. Mr. Swap made their money from the shipping and handling. The shipping and handling fees were very cheap and when someone purchased something from you they sent you a box pre-printed with the buyers address and you simply put in the item(s) used the easy seal to close it and put it back in the mail. When you bought something they'd deduct your BUX plus whatever the S&H charge was and send the seller a box which would then come straight to you with your goods. I know that I completed at least 250-300 sales and purchases through there. I basically replaced every VHS movie I had with DVD by trading on Mr. Swap. I was truly bummed when they went out of business. Shortly before they shut their doors there was a great write-up about them on a big magazine or newspaper online (might have been NYTs, can't remember for sure). It's too bad that a replacement service that was as "easy to use" and efficient as this one never popped back up.
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
"Next week?! What aren't you telling us? "
The government likes secrets, and if they can get away with keeping it, they will. My point is, in some cases, we just aren't going to even know what hit us, so it's best to be diverse all of the time. I mean, look at 9/11? Who saw that coming? The minority did, and the rest were blown away with what was happening. Imagine those planes were large rocks from space. Wouldn't it be better to be already having a few people living on Mars and the moon with plenty of plants that we could live off of until the Earth was back to "normal"?
Why slashdot? Why not?
What can I get for $10 Anything you want.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"