Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
... 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.
So you just completely ignore the cost of the energy to charge it, huh? Must be nice doing that...
--
lds
Actually, they provide better quality playback for the human-audible range, because they have much lower noise.
While it's true that CDs cut off sharply above 20 kHz and thus can't produce ultrasonics at all, it's a misconception that LPs don't also have high frequency limitations. It's tempting to believe that, because they're analog, they are producing the sound with infinite detail, but it's just not true: the higher frequency sounds require smaller features in the groove, and those small pieces are easy to wear off. After a few playings, ultrasonics, if they ever were present on the LP in the first place, are gone because the ridges that correspond to the ultrasonic frequencies are just too tiny (and therefore thin and weak) to stand up to the stress of colliding with the needle. It's much the same as the concept of keeping a really fine edge on a knife -- the finer it is, the sharper it is, but as you get finer and finer, the faster you lose the fineness of the edge you've put on there.
The bottom line is that CDs have LPs beat in the area of signal-to-noise ratio and they also have them beat in frequency response. While it is possible to hear the difference between LPs and CDs (because they each introduce their own kinds of distortions), it is tough to make an argument that LPs are superior unless it's based on a personal preferences for the distortions you can hear.
Those guys bought the design from IBM and still produce it in the USA.
Ah, the only patent a big software co. actually *deserves* a royalty for.
Table-ized A.I.
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?
Because the decade old one is as good as new and costs only 2 or 3 dollars?
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.
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.
I think you'll find that "famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict" has historically been much more widespread than it is presently, even in sub-Saharan Africa--and this despite our ever-increasing population. How, then, is this an indication that technology hasn't boosted the sustainable population size?
"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.
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!
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?
I agree with their attitude in the article - this was something to aspire to. It was very expensive, but not so expensive that it was unimaginable as a once-in-a-lifetime possibility.
I miss it for exactly that reason. Plus I used to work at Heathrow and have nostalgic memories of everyone checking their watches as the 11am BA001 flight roared past the window.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
i agree with audiogalaxy. an excellent service. i miss it greatly. recently tried iTunes, and was amazed at the lack of depth. the best thing about audiogalaxy was the detailed user reviews. it made me more informed with my CD purchases. i haven't bought a CD since it went down.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
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".
With obesity problems nowadays, this might not be such a bad idea.