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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.'"
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.
This was an article related to the "Top 10 Dot-Com Busts" that was linked here yesterday. It was linked from that article. This isn't a dupe on anyone's part, just a companion article.
It did basically the same thing for windows 3.1(1). That was the main I hated to do a factory restore on that computer. You had to manually remove the damned program after you were done.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
It was perfectly practable for a commuter car.
battery expense ammortized over 5 years (expected lifespan) yeilded a cost only slightly higher than gas prices of the time (by a few hundred dollars). With fuel costs expected to rise (which they have) the crossover point for the battery pack is 2.5-3 years.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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!?
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http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6250162-1.html?t
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.
Microsoft makes some good ones? I've oned one MS natural and one MS natural elite, but both died due to the contacts wearing out.
While the IBM clicky keyboard (can't remember the model number off hand) might not be your bag IIRC they used metal on metal contacts basicly looking like tweesers inside the key hole.. where the pressing down action caused the contacts to meet and behold a key press is registered. Dec keyboards I believe are made in much the same way though i'd have to check mine... but you phone up support if you dumped coffee in your keyboard and they tell you to put it in a bucket full of soap and water and let dry, and most of the time the problem was resolved.
The current keyboard trend is circuit traces on one membrain, a seperator, and a membrain with a solid contact spot. They are cheap, easy to mass produce, and rub away after a couple of years. I mean it "nice" not having to spend $50 to $100 on a keyboard, but those who spent $50 to $100 on a keyboard likely have something that can still be used today.
There was a time when the keyboards were made by using a large PC board with basic contacts, with a flexable bubble material on top with a little metal contact. While these will eventually wear away, they don't do so nearly as quickly as plastic membrains.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
From what I've read the zero emissions policy was at first a reaction to unbelievable amounts of pollution from automobiles in L.A. - any other slant that was put on it after that was people playing politics and the nuclear lobby trying to get green credibility (and possibly succeeding).
"Try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched LP.
Then try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched CD."
That's funny, because a mildly scratched CD plays fine. CDs have error correction that is quite strong, so minor scratches aren't an issue.
Now, you can't take a knife to a CD and expect it to play properly. But you can't do that to an LP either.
You can drill holes in CDs, though, and they still play. Mostly.
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
We must reduce population growth, and the best way to do that is to grant more political power to women, especially in developing countries (where in many cases, they are considered chattel). There's a good article on Wikipedia discussing the theory of demographic transition and how it affects population, and how giving women more economic and political control naturally reduces the birth rate. Of course access to contraception and (gasp!) abortion is important as well.
I agree that the "what, me worry?" approach will not help, and unfortunately that is the one adopted by most of our political leaders. No one wants to tell people to stop having kids. In a few countries with declining populations citizens are actually encouraged to accelerate the birth rate!
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
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).
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!)
http://www.eff.org/endangered/
What the heck is an RPL calculator? Do you mean RPN?
No, he means RPL; RPN is something else and doesn't by itself make a calculator great.