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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?"
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.
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?
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...
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...
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.
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.