Slashdot Mirror
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
runyonave writes "There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week's 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore's Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias."
87 Swimming pools with diving boards.
Swimming pools don't have diving boards anymore? When the hell did that happen?
this article contains lots of bullshit. im not saying all he lists is not true but...
# Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
# Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
# Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
# Having to manually unlock a car door.
man, I guess being a wired editor brings lots of cash, but it also apparently detaches you from the rest of us...
# Recording a song in a studio.
What the fuck man? So according to you, music is generated by computers nowdays?
# Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
# Privacy
I propose you get your own life, right now. Also, if you think privacy is gone, perhaps its time to stop letting internet headlines to think for you.
Most of it though is valid as simply outdated technology, replaced by better ones (with small exceptions of things that sure died in western europe and US, but not in majority of the world)
15.3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
1) 3-D movies used red and blue, not red and gree, glasses. 2) Free 3-D glasses were passed out for this year's superbowl ads. 3) 3-D movies are still being released on DVD. With the obligitory red and blue glasses. Theaters, on the other hand, are now using digital projectors and glasses with horizontally and vertically polarized lenses. (It is not clear to me how the digital projector polarizes the frames in the first place. I suspect it is actually 2 projectors with polarized lenses alternating frames. But that could also be done with film and a rotating mirror.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
18. Wires. OK, so theyâ(TM)re not gone yet, but it wonâ(TM)t be long Weren't they saying that about 10 years ago?
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades. There are several skating rinks in Portland (e.g. Roller World and Oaks Park) that still rent traditional skates. Of course these places do have a real retro feel (they even play disco!) But my 8-year old is quite familiar with both inline and old-style skates. Inlines are faster, but most stunts are easier with a wheel in each corner. Inlines work a lot more like ice skates, except that they are more prone to lateral slipping.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I don't know about anyone else, but what started out as a joyous exploration of memory lane ended as a true to form forehead resting on palm depression inducing episode. I'm talking 88, 89, and 91-97...just turned me a little misty eyed.
So long, thanks for all the fish.
Isn't this slashdot? What's this talk about kids?
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
It's back, and it's called the World Wide Web.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
Sure, the dial-up days are over, but to a web developer trying to make the most of satellite and mobile broadband, every kilobyte still counts.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that itâ(TM)ll load this time.
Nintendo never recommended that. The official technique in the cleaning kit manual was more like the one described in this guide.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
Xbox 360.
32. Joysticks.
Every game console since the Nintendo 64. Street Fighter 4. Tetris the Grand Master.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
SSD notebooks.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
Alexa confirms it: an encyclopedia is ranked #7 among web sites.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
Some fast food chains are still closed at night and on Sundays, as are the shipping companies.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
At the moment, I'm a proud non-user of Twitter. Am I behind the times?
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
Is this referring to the fact that more Usenet clients have migrated from uuencode to yEnc?
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
Wired broadband is not available in the country, and satellite broadband and mobile broadband still lag in speed for the price. Besides, even on cable and DSL, people are trying to download multi-gigabyte operating systems and movies nowadays, and those can still take hours.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
If you think disc is obsolete, try telling that to the owner of a DVD-R camcorder.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
Tell that to the users of the one-hour SD-card-to-prints stations in every Walmart and Walgreens store.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
Until "more and more phones" include those sold by bargain-basement pay-as-you-go carriers like Virgin and TracFone, it's not a thing of the past just yet.
66. Pay phones.
Pay phones are still around; they're just portable and sold by Virgin and TracFone. They're useful for people like me who make most calls from land lines and use a cell phone mostly to arrange rides.
68. Fax machines.
That's an artifact of the law more than anything. Legal professionals depend on the fact that courts recognize signing a form and faxing it as a valid acceptance of a contract under the statute of frauds as amended. Internet mail is newer, and there isn't as much precedent in all the federal circuits about it. Besides, not everybody has a flatbed scanner to scan in a document's signature panel, and if you're thinking about replacing physical signatures with digital, few people know about key signing parties.
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
It's still illegal for the driver to use headphones with an MP3 player.
71. Remembering someoneâ(TM)s phone number.
Until more cities adopt 10-digit dialing and more voice recognition processes come off patent, it'll usually be faster for me to key in the number than to scroll through the contact list.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
Since 1986, when Edward M. Swartz wrote Toys That Kill, makers of infant and toddler toys adhered to stricter toy safety standards. Ever noticed how Fisher-Price's nostalgic Little People are significantly bigger than the original toys?
78. Neat handwriting.
This is only obsolete in states that have moved to fully electronic prescriptions. Otherwise, you have to rely on the doctor's handwriting to save you from the wrong drug or the wrong dose.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
Handheld video gaming devices and other embedded systems often don't have a floating-point unit that can compute sine, cosine, and especially arctangent faster than a lookup table + linear interpolation.
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
Snickers has reintroduced the Marathon brand name for a high-protein "energy bar" variety.
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
This might become obsolete faster in countries with cash-for-clunkers programs designed to get low-MPG cars off the streets.
92. Writing a check.
I write fewer than five checks a year. But there are still places that charge a convenience fee for use of a debit card, such as my dentist's office.
93. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
The DDR machine at the arcade has more responsive controllers than what one can buy in Best Buy. Not everyone knows about mail-order metal pads such as Afterburner and Cobalt Flux.
A dumbass, Shawn Meneely, jumps on his head, paralyzes himself, and sues everyone, and WINS 6million USD, against a trade group. Now average pool salesmen/builders can't get insurance, because boards are small part of the business.
how can you manage to get paralized when jumping into water? did he aim for another person or jump in the wrong direction?
the one who sued didn't jump out far enough and ended up hitting the board on the way down
I navigate the old fashioned way - by going to mapquest and printing out my directions manually - and wasting a page to banner ads!
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
For an article that was about things your kids may never know about
If I were to "summon the stork" tonight, my kids would end up "knowing about" anything that's still around six years later once they started to attend daily indoctrination^W^W school. Granted, some of the things I mentioned (DVD camcorders, phone plans without data, lack of jurisprudence around e-mail, phones without voice dialing, cars without remote entry) are likely to disappear, but I don't see a lot of the others (SD to print kiosks, pay-as-you-go phones, laws against driving with headphones on, toy safety regulations, arcade games with specialized controllers) disappearing within the next six years.
They died when the wide carriage inkjet arrived (which meant you could also do A0 posters), but the standard XY pen plotter is no more. I preserved one 4 years ago (Roland A3 flatbed) but I'm going to have to work out where to get the pens now..
Insert
WTF? I just read about half of the article you posted, and I gotta say - WHY for the love of God would you put a diving board on the edge of a pool that's so shallow that you could actually hit the bottom (provided there's water in the pool, of course) when jumping in?
Sure, I've jumped off of balconies a story above a pool and hit the bottom, but never off a diving board...