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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.'"
Just goes to show that cheap & mass produced do not mean quality.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
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.
That is awesome. I have been wanting a no-frills no-media keys NORMAL keyboard.
:)
Those MS keyboards are sooo stupid. They decided to group the F-keys in groups of 3 rather than 4, the delete key is twice as big as it should be and i HATE it when I go to press insert and I click Print Screen instead...GRRR
Ahh, that's my rant for today
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
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
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.
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.
Personally I don't think there's a choice. We must expand into space. 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. Thing is, we can afford to do this, but chances are that the next generation won't.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
I'm typing this on a "Happy Hacker II" It is small, jet black, with 'proper' key placement of my control key.
I get so many compliments and questions. I really never quite understood why the masses didn't follow. A very nice piece of 'windows key'-less technology!
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.
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.
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.
If the population of the earth keeps growing we won't have enough resources to maintain our current level of living conditions.
While the Earth still has a positive growth rate, that rate has been in decline ever since a certain piece of trash called "The Population Bomb" hit the shelves. If the decline continues we'll hit an equilibrium population of around eight billion when all is said and done. Note that according to the doomsayers who first started whining about population we were supposed to have in excess of eight billion people by the year 2000; it never happened because they didn't bothered to check their facts, which even then indicated that the rate was in decline.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate, nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level and never, ever progresses again. Quite clearly that isn't going to happen.
So if you consider the earth as a closed system you have to either raise the standard of living around the world to a level where population growth ceases "naturally" or you have to commit the resources of the rich into forcing the poor not to breed.
The first may eventually happen through technological advancement; the second never will unless you manage to enslave the Earth to a dictatorial one-world government. And so long as folks like me are around, anyone who tries to enforce breeding limits on their fellow citizens will find themselves the subject of a post-natal abortion right quick.
Right, so if we're willing to agree that considering the earth as a closed system leads to the logical conclusion that the world population growth must be controlled by force
We aren't willing to agree. You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
We must expand into space.
Settling space is a non-viable population control method. It may be useful for increasing the resource wealth of the Earth itself (your first option - make everyone rich) but no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world. In fact, it'd be a complete waste of resources to even try.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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.
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).
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...
Spoken like someone who hasn't the faintest idea about economics. Notice how the average standard of living for humans is higher than 100 years ago? And 500 years ago? And 1000 years ago? It's nothing like a zero-sum game.
In addition, your alternative to expansion is incomplete as well. It assumes only tyranny or anarchy can control populations. But there's an alternative even you touch upon: if rich people breed less than poor people, let's get rid of poverty.
There is a choice all the way up until we hit a certain equilibrium point, the choices made then will determine if we go into one of those two directions, and the grandparent is right, eventually it has to be growth into space or tight tight population controls. There is a third option, over populate and when the resources can't support the population, a rapid depopulation followed by a long resource poor dark age. I think we're nto smart enough for tight controls, thats leaves with exither expanding or crashing.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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...
I have a Sun Type 6 USB Unix keyboard, which gives me proper key placement of my control key, as well as giving me every key I could possibly want (also in their proper positions). It's multicolored (grey on the function/modifier/doing keys, white on the typing keys) which I love because all monochrome keyboards I've ever had the displeasure of using have felt horrible. (Admittedly this isn't clicky, but it still looks special, so it's nicer :)
Of the various other keys it has in a different place is the backspace key, which is right above the Enter key, next to the close square bracket ] key. When I first got this keyboard, this became an instant hit with me, because I keep changing my mind halfway through a word, or mispell something (I tried typing 'keep' as 'ckeep' before). Having the backspace key in that more accessible position is just so useful. IIRC, the Happy Hacker keyboard puts it in the usual spot?
I've never got why people find Windows keys to be incredibly annoying. Map them to meta/super/hyper and you get a key that does something useful, which you wouldn't've had otherwise. The menu key is also usefully mapped as a compose key so that you can type special characters (which English uses in spades if you want to type proper punctuation) easily. I suppose the glyphs are a bit annoying, but my Windows keys are marked with diamonds, so that bothers me not, neither!
I was contemplating buying a Happy Hacker keyboard, but could never justify the cost for a keyboard without a dedicated number pad (having used a laptop as my main box for a while, I got quite used to the deficiency—but I always knew it was a deficiency, and nothing but!).
Pardon me; I only recently got this keyboard, and needed to brag about it.
Look out!
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
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.
I obviously wasn't clear enough in this post as at least 4 people have read it and think I am suggesting that we launch poor people into space to get rid of them. 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. As such, I believe we must bring the resources of space down to earth so that it can support an increasing population. And no, this isn't fantasia bullshit. For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources. 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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Try Microsoft Bob. Or did you mean your Battery Operated Boyfriend?
I have yet to figure out why the technical field overuses 's for pluralization, 's for pronoun possession, and the mystery acronyms (see: scud - not SCUD - missles during the Gulf War) - just because a word is unfamiliar to you doesn't mean it's an acronym.
As more and more people are learning this tidbit of information, making it less & less arcane Microsoft trivia, the product manager for Microsoft Bob was Melinda French. You know her now as... Mrs. William Henry Gates III.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Looking at the layouts, it seems the Enter key is in the normal PC keyboard place. The backslash, backspace and backquote keys, however, are not. At least it doesn't have a giant L-shaped Enter key, and a tiny backspace.
I like the regular PC keyboard layout, with one exception: the Caps Lock key. I ALWAYS turn it into a third Ctrl, and don't bother switching my left Ctrl to Caps Lock. I never use Caps Lock anyway, and this way, if someone else uses my computer, they won't be confused.
/usr/games/fortune
"What the alarmists fail to acknowledge is that they don't get to decide at what point the Earth is "overpopulated". I don't think the Earth is overpopulated at the moment, nor will it be if we reach eight billion. My opinion is just as valid (or invalid) as any alarmist figure."
If by "valid" you mean "I can make whatever mouth noises I want", then you're right. However, if by "valid" you mean "accurately reflects reality", then no, your opinion isn't necessarily as valid... its validity will depend on its accuracy, not on the identity of the speaker.
The "future technology will arise to fix future problems" may end up being true, but it sounds an awful lot like "I don't need to worry about the rent, because there's a big lottery jackpot, and I'm sure to win between now and the end of the month!"
It isn't alarmist to say that we're consuming non-renewable resources, and damaging ecosystems...
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
> Kozmo could only work in an arcology setting, and only then if the service charge were added in some fashion, e.g., as part of the rent.
Dude, they're called concierges.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot