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Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More?
J. L. Tympanum writes: While discussing music with my 24-year old son, the Typewriter Song (Leroy Anderson) came up. Within 10 seconds he had it playing on his laptop, but he didn't really get the joke because he had never seen a typewriter, nor heard the characteristics sounds — the clack of the keys, the end-of-line bell, the zip of the carriage return — that the typewriter makes. What other sounds do we not hear any more? More points for the longer they lasted (typewriters were around for over a century).
With almost every TV station broadcasting 24x7, you don't hear these sounds much anymore.
Duration: presumably from the 1940s or 1950s throught at least the 1980s.
The Museum of Endangered Sounds has a lot of great examples of this.
Guess you don't live in a cold part of the world in the winter, or where it can hit 35C+ in the summer. Around here in Canada, we use 30-50m segments that aren't welded because the tracks shrink and expand so much. Once the temps drop to -20C here, you can lose over an 3cm, and once it gets over 35C with the train's on them they can expand over 10cm causing them to warp off the bed.
So if I walk outside, the next time a train goes by I can hear it hit every clack clearly. Since it's around -20C right now, I can hear it inside my house about 300m away if I pay attention.
Om, nomnomnom...
What the hell is this? This is not news. Just put this crap in the polls, where questions belong.
While you are technically correct, I happen to think it's one of the more enjoyable threads
on Slashdot in a long time.
There's a lot of unpleasant news which shows up here. One can only take so much
of that sort of reality in a day's time, before despair sets in. So an enjoyable lighthearted
thread is far from the worst that could be on this website, though I certainly agree that
Slashdot these days is a far cry from what it used to be.
Right now I'm enjoying near perfect color reproduction, blacks that are actually black, zero input lag, no ghosting, nothing that resembles backlight bleed and no stuck/dead pixels.
I'm experiencing the same except for the wider colour gamut, better contrast ratio, and far sharper picture that comes from spending more than $50 on a modern LCD.
CRTs haven't outperformed common LCDs for about 5-10 years, and even in the early days if you actually bought a proper LCD like an NEC Spectraview you ended up with something that no CRT could match. Go shopping somewhere other than Wallmart when your CRT finally dies and you'll hate yourself for having lived with that garbage so long. Check out some high-end offerings from all those same companies that produced high-end CRTs for colour critical applications back in the day like Eizo, or NEC, (they are still in the business and they are also the source for panels used in medical imaging etc if you like colour accuracy) and don't base your view of technology on what you somewhat throws at you during Black Friday sales.
I had a high end trinitron screen as well. It was a great screen back in the day but I don't miss it.