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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.'"
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*
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
Just goes to show that cheap & mass produced do not mean quality.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
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
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.
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.
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.
I liked punch cards... I mean, they had the added benefit that if your drive broke, you could actually SEE the data...
or else!
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....
... 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.
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
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.
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.
Take a 300k Autocad drawing of a house with detail plans and open it on a 386 and take the same drawing and open it on a 3.2 GHz P4.
Tell me the redraw times are the same.
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...
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?
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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!
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).
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.
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".
Why not "VAGINAED" space exploration? Why do you have to be so phallocentric? It's 2005, for crying out loud.