Where Have All the Gadgets Gone?

waderoush writes "How many electronic gadgets did you own in 2005? How many do you own today? The answer is almost certainly a lot fewer. Counter to the dominant trend in consumer technology since the 1920s — and despite predictions of a coming 'Internet of things' — there may actually be *less* electronic stuff in our homes and offices today than ever before. That's thanks largely to the rise of multipurpose wireless devices like smartphones and tablets, which are now powerful enough to replace many older, dedicated devices like point-and-shoot cameras, music players, digital voice recorders — even whole home entertainment systems. To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today."

Comments

All ur stuff soon belong 2me

[CuteSteveJobs]

> To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today.

Awesome. Once burglary was a real hit and miss. Now your victims case their places for you. Even lists his dog. Google tells me his dog it is an Australian Sheppard. Sound docile enough. I can always get it drunk lol.
http://www.wikifido.com/page/Rhody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Shepherd#Temperament

Now when will Wade be out of town?
Xconomy robotics event 4/11 https://twitter.com/wroush
"Far too many people have too much information online as to their schedules and what they will be attending and where." http://protectitnow.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/your-home-security-never-before.html

I'll just have to arrive early to beat the crowd. I have dibs on the Canon Powershot S5 IS and the iPhone5.

Re:Good Enough

[Sique]

The equalizer is a prime example of what I am talking about. You know, why it is called equalizer? Because with analog equipment, each frequency is slightly differently handled, some frequencies are higher amplified than others, and some are more muffled than others. With the equalizer, one can make it equal, amplifiy or muffle the different parts of the audio band to have the differences ironed out. For some general degradation of the overall signal quality, you bought a quite uniform handling of the frequencies.

All the different audio types had different head curves. A turntable was different than an ultra-short wave radio, different than a ferro-magnetic tape or a chrome based magnetic tape. To connect them together, you needed an equalizer to adapt the different head curves to better fit together.

With digital equipment, the need is gone. The signal gets digitalized once at the source, and then it is handled digitally until the final amplifier, where a DSP creates a new analog signal from the digital version. Each bit is threated the same, so no need to equalize it somewhere in the signal path. Differently than in analog times, where we had a signal-noise-ratio of about 60 dB (or less, depending on the equipment), now the signal has 96 dB. There is only one part we have to slightly equalize, that are the actual loudspeakers. For that, a 5-way-equalizer looks quite approbriate. Everything else is overkill.