Streaming IS second rate. Nobody is streaming at anything close to the bit rates that Blu-Ray uses, so you get a lot more video compression artifacts even if you get the maximum bit rate that your streaming site offers. Often, largely because of bottlenecks caused by ISPs, you don't. You also get lower quality compressed Dolby Digital audio rather than Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, both of which are lossless formats.
I'm eagerly awaiting Blu-Ray 4K, assuming it ever sees the light of day. They probably won't call it that despite the way it rolls off the tongue; they'll use something with UHD instead, reflecting the consumer branding of next generation video displays and content. I expected it to be already announced; I'm guessing that the electronics people are running into resistance from the studios, which don't want to release 4K content in a format that could be ripped. And it will be, no matter how much effort they put into DRM. Expect to see SlySoft AnyUHD and UHDFab within a year of the format's availability.
CDs stopped listing the SPARS codes many years ago, so you can't tell with a current release. But most are DDD because that's the way the recording industry has moved. A few recording engineers still prefer to record to analog tape, so their discs are ADD. Pretty much nobody is doing analog mixes any more. Reissues of old music are ADD if they have been remixed, AAD if not.
Dirty secret of the vinyl revival: most of those records that people are buying have been digitally processed somewhere along the way, so whatever supposed benefits the vinyl playback has are probably in the imagination of the listener. Any advantage of vinyl over high resolution digital certainly would be; a 24 bit digital download (or a DSD download for some recordings) effectively IS the master. (Sample rate depends on the recording; the mastering sample rate can be 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, or 192KHz.) New releases are almost certainly DDA. Reissues that have been remixed are ADA, and even ones that have not been remixed have probably received some digital processing unless they were released by audiophile enthusiast labels. (Some of those labels make a point of using completely digital-free signal paths, and might even insist on using nothing but tube amplifiers.)
Indeed. And there are also now M-DISC BD-ROM discs and drives that store 25GB. You need special M-DISC-ready burners to write them but they are readable by standard drives.
There are no M-DISC CDs so you won't be able to directly replace CDs with them. Nor do they make dual-layer DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.
I think there is room for both kinds of cars in the future. Pure electric cars make sense for urban areas where the typical trip length is short, but make poor replacements for gasoline vehicles in sparsely populated rural areas or for long road trips. Hydrogen cars work for those use cases, but are poor choices for dense urban areas because of the explosive potential of the fuel. Hydrogen tanks in cars will need to be REALLY well sealed, and those seals will need to maintain integrity for the life of the car.
Perhaps the solution is a dual system; allowing the phone to store both a no-validation card for low-value transactions and a phone-plus-PIN card for higher value transactions. That way the phone could replace both a transit card and a chip-plus-PIN credit card. As with all systems where you put all your eggs in one basket, you will need to guard the basket well.
One advantage of bundling Kinect: it made the development of new kinds of game interaction more appealing. Kinect isn't all that useful for most existing games; dance and fitness games are the exceptions and we had dance games with pads long before Kinect. And perhaps too many gamers are slugs who don't want to move. One problem with the business model for fitness games is that the people who like them seem to be content with continuing to play the same one, so there isn't a lot of repeat business.
I don't know if we ever would have seen Fantasia: Music Evolved if there had not been a large number of potential customers who already own the hardware. Though Harmonix was able to sell Guitar Hero and Rock Band even though people had to buy instruments to play them, so perhaps they would have risked it anyway.
Disclosure: I got to play test Fantasia last year. Harmonix has now announced it so I can say that it exists without violating the NDA I had to sign. I think a lot of people are going to enjoy it.
Clipper cards and other similar cards (like the Charlie Cards we have here in Boston) are also RFID based, though not all work on the same frequencies as NFC. (Clipper cards do; Charlie Cards don't. There is an app that lets you use your NFC-capable phone as a Clipper card.) The card itself has no anti-theft protection at all. Unless you register your card online you're simply out of luck if your card is lost or stolen; you lose whatever value is stored on it. Some systems let you register your card online; if you do that you can report your card missing and get any remaining balance transferred to a new card. But you're still out anything that got spent before you report the loss, and if you lose a monthly pass you may lose some days of use until they deliver the replacement card. It's a risk that most people can live with because the amount of value stored in the card account is usually small. (On the Charlie Card system, for example, the worst case loss is about $100; that would be a monthly subway/bus pass plus $30 of stored value for trips not covered by that pass. Commuter rail passes would be worth more but those are not available on Charlie Cards.)
The systems deployed in the US don't store any value on the card. It's all stored in the central online system; the card is just an account identifier. That is also true of current ATM cards, though some early systems (the original Docutel ATMs) actually did store some info about account status on the card so the cards could be used while the central computer was offline. (The Boston bank I'm familiar with that used Docutel ATMs disabled the offline capability because there was a possible distributed attack on the system. Make many copies of a card, distribute people with the copies to multiple ATMs, and wait for the central computer to crash as it often did in those days. Then have everybody withdraw money at the same time. There were no cell phones back then so it would have been harder to coordinate the attack, but I suspect they were confident that the MIT hackers would find a way.)
With the upcoming switch to chip+PIN credit cards we're finally going to have widespread deployment of NFC readers. That may give us the necessary critical mass for mobile wallets to take off.in the US - phone+PIN should be an appealing alternative to card+PIN since the phone is usually closer at hand.
"Too poor to own a computer" really doesn't exist any more, at least not for anybody with a fixed address. (The homeless are another matter; even if they were to be given a free computer they would have no place to keep it.) Usable computers are GIVEN AWAY nowadays; a 10 year old desktop PC is adequate for basic internet access and it has zero market value. The catch; they mostly have unsupported OS versions on them, so they have to be wiped and the software replaced with Linux. Or they can be used with these thumb drives, eliminating the need to install any software.
Too poor to afford internet access, sadly, does exist. There are programs like Comcast's Internet Essentials ($10 internet service for low income families) that are available to some, but others live in areas where no such services are offered, in some cases where no broadband service other than satellite is available at all.
Four way stops usually aren't about making the road safer for cars. They are about slowing down the traffic to make the road safer for pedestrians. There is little need to use traffic calming measures on cyclists; their typically low speeds, small size, and high level of awareness about things around them (in part because they aren't sealed in a box) mean that bicycle-pedestrian collisions are rare on streets.
Bicycle-pedestrian collisions on sidewalks and shared bike-walking paths are another matter. The prevalence of those collisions means that mandatory bike path laws often make travel more dangerous for cyclists, as those shared paths are far more dangerous than streets are.
These modified traffic rules respect a couple of realities for cyclists.
One, a full stop is a relatively dangerous thing to do, not because the stop is dangerous but because the slow start from a full stop is. A cyclist who rolls slowly through a stop sign can proceed more safely than one who stops completely.
Second, the time just after a light turns green is a very dangerous time in many intersections for cyclists; a cyclist going straight has the right of way over a car turning right but the cars often fail to respect that right of way and turn into the path of the cyclists. Aside from the fact that the cyclist shouldn't have to hang back for the turning cars, it's not any safer; the turning cars often cut through the intersection too sharply and collide with the waiting cyclist. The red light as stop sign rule means that most of the time, the cyclist will be able to leave the intersection before the danger time of the newly turned light.
There are possible confounds to the data. Idaho drivers may be more polite than California drivers. The fact that few Idaho cyclists ride in the winter likely means that fewer cyclists are on the road at twilight or at night. It would be better to compare the Boise data to another location with a similar climate.
The one remaining advantage of non-smartphones is battery life. Smartphones are fine for people who have regular access to electric power and can plug them in every night, but are unsuitable for locations where access to power is unreliable. A small niche should remain for a bit longer, though whether it will be enough to keep those phones in production remains to be seen.
Vista itself was fine, at least by the time service pack 1 came out. There were four problems that put people off it:
1. The new Aero UI needed a lot of GPU power. At the time, most computers didn't have it so the UI ran poorly. You could revert to the old look without window transparency, which solved the performance problem, but it wasn't obvious how to do that and the OS didn't do it automatically if you had unsuitable hardware.
1a. Under pressure from computer manufacturers, Microsoft dumbed down the requirements for the Windows Vista sticker. The result was that you could buy computers with a Vista sticker that didn't run Vista well with Aero enabled, and they SHIPPED with Aero enabled. You had to change settings before your shiny new computer would run acceptably.
2. Vista was more memory hungry than XP. Older computers usually needed a RAM upgrade to run it well, which meant an added expense. Systems with a 512MB RAM ceiling were not uncommon at the time (they had two sockets, each of which would accept a module with 256MB or less) and those systems could not be upgraded to run Vista well. Vista also needed more hard disk space, which might require a hard disk upgrade.
3. Vista brought in a major change in the way that device drivers are coded. (With good reason; the 2000/XP driver model had security problems you could drive a truck through. The new way isn't perfect but it was a substantial improvement.) Vista drivers for existing hardware were slow to appear if they were released at all, and some of the early drivers (especially graphics drivers) were buggy. That made it impossible to upgrade a lot of existing systems to Vista, and also meant that things like printers and sound cards became useless. There were quite a few examples of peripherals that were still on the market well after the release of Vista but had no drivers for it.
4. UAC. Vista was the first version of Windows to ask for permission to perform various administrative things like installing new programs. In the initial release of Vista, UAC was far too paranoid, the result being that you got so many permission prompts that everybody just clicked through them without paying attention. So you got all the pain of the permission system without any real gain in security. The paranoia level of UAC was dialed down in the service packs but the damage in public perception of Vista had already happened.
What this all added up to: people starting from a clean slate were usually happy with Vista, but people who wanted to upgrade or wanted to reuse components from an older computer often were very unhappy. Tech nerds and tech journalists tend to be in the latter category, so the people whose opinions mattered most did not care for Vista, even though typical customers buying new computers would have been happy.
The bonus round suggests that most of the softness in the Canon images lies in the camera's JPEG processing. There is much more visible detail in the RAW images, bringing them on a par with the Samsung images, and they retain the advantage in dynamic range. The Sigma zoom lens was probably also not the best choice to get the most out of the Canon body.
So... the phone isn't going to take the place of a good camcorder or DSLR for shooting movies. Yet. Besides the problems with shadow and highlight detail, it also falls down on creative control, low light ability, and lens flexibility. And probably audio as well. But the twilight of the dedicated camera may be closer than we think.
If you have gotten this far in the process, they probably also know that you won't be a perfect cultural fit. But if they have any brains they value the experience you have and the perspective that will bring to the team.
VHS was not a broadcast quality medium, but that didn't stop VHS content from being broadcast at times. On those occasions broadcasters wanted to get the best possible quality they could out of the imperfect medium; that is what professional VHS decks were for. News programming might show a relevant VHS tape if it captured an important event and no better video was available, and there were shows that broadcast viewer-submitted content such as America's Funniest Home Videos or the Stupid Pet Tricks on Letterman.
That's pretty much what a series hybrid does, except for using a lithium-ion battery rather than a capacitor. Current supercapacitors don't have enough energy storage density to take the place of batteries, though there are MIT researchers working on carbon nanotube supercapacitors that will if they ever prove to be practical. So far no pure series hybrid has been put into mass production, though the Chevy Volt comes close; it's not a pure series design because there is a mechanical linkage between the gasoline motor and the wheels that is used at high speeds.
Diesel locomotives are also electrical engines powered by generators, and they go up and down mountains and sometimes stop frequently though not as often as the car caught in rush hour traffic. The difference between a hybrid car and a locomotive (or a diesel-electric submarine) is that in current designs excess electricity is simply wasted in a resistor bank; there is no energy storage. Siemens is developing locomotives that incorporate batteries and regenerative braking; they have reported fuel efficiency savings of 20-25% over conventional designs.
People needed a term for hybrid cars because they actually were something new to the automobile business, even if submarines had used similar power trains many years ago. "Hybrid" captures the notion that they are something between a pure gasoline or diesel car and a pure electric car, combining elements of both, so it's not a terrible name for them.
It may actually be true that their customers have no interest in smartwatches, or at least anything that can be manufactured with current technology. But I think there is also a significant population that stopped wearing watches but would be interested in a smartwatch; a lot of the Pebble adopters are in that group. When smartwatch technology is a bit more refined it may be possible to build something that will appeal to non-geeks; at that point, the traditional watchmakers had better be in the game or else they risk losing a significant part of their customer base. (The part that actively wants non-electronic retro tech is safe.)
WTCPT! Now there's a electronics geek's piece of gear! Those things are workhorses, they just keep going. Have to replace the tips from time to time, but you're going to do that with any soldering tool.
Lots of mine have already mentioned. The Laserjet II and III were tanks and the 4 and 5 weren't far behind. The Atari 800 was a beast that goes on forever.
Another one for me is a Sony receiver that I've had since 1984. It's part of the secondary system in the electronics workshop now. It now drives a pair of Minimus 7 speakers, another durable product. The Boston Acoustics A40s that were originally connected to it later became the surround speakers in a system with a pair of A70s in the front, but all four of those had to have the foam surrounds replaced so they don't count as being uber-durable.
I also have a Teac cassette deck from the 80s and a Pioneer CLD-D701 from 1992. (I later found a CLD-D502 for $10 at a flea market so I'd have a backup but the 701 is still going strong.) And the big RCA CRT TV bought at the same time but that doesn't see any use any more except for playing old Atari games; putting those on a flat screen doesn't feel right.
In the olden daisies some of us did use them for productivity applications. There was a decent for its day word processor, Paper Clip, and a good spreadsheet, SynCalc. Both have been greatly surpassed by now and they only supported dot matrix printers, so they don't see much use any more; anybody still using an Atari is either playing games, writing retrogames, or creating chiptunes.
But the elevator already existed long before the science fiction stories were written. The first modern elevator was installed in 1857 and demonstrated a few years before that. Earlier elevators exist; the first known one was believed to have been built by Archimedes in 236 BC. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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And here I thought the donkey did the kicking.
Streaming IS second rate. Nobody is streaming at anything close to the bit rates that Blu-Ray uses, so you get a lot more video compression artifacts even if you get the maximum bit rate that your streaming site offers. Often, largely because of bottlenecks caused by ISPs, you don't. You also get lower quality compressed Dolby Digital audio rather than Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, both of which are lossless formats.
I'm eagerly awaiting Blu-Ray 4K, assuming it ever sees the light of day. They probably won't call it that despite the way it rolls off the tongue; they'll use something with UHD instead, reflecting the consumer branding of next generation video displays and content. I expected it to be already announced; I'm guessing that the electronics people are running into resistance from the studios, which don't want to release 4K content in a format that could be ripped. And it will be, no matter how much effort they put into DRM. Expect to see SlySoft AnyUHD and UHDFab within a year of the format's availability.
CDs stopped listing the SPARS codes many years ago, so you can't tell with a current release. But most are DDD because that's the way the recording industry has moved. A few recording engineers still prefer to record to analog tape, so their discs are ADD. Pretty much nobody is doing analog mixes any more. Reissues of old music are ADD if they have been remixed, AAD if not.
Dirty secret of the vinyl revival: most of those records that people are buying have been digitally processed somewhere along the way, so whatever supposed benefits the vinyl playback has are probably in the imagination of the listener. Any advantage of vinyl over high resolution digital certainly would be; a 24 bit digital download (or a DSD download for some recordings) effectively IS the master. (Sample rate depends on the recording; the mastering sample rate can be 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, or 192KHz.) New releases are almost certainly DDA. Reissues that have been remixed are ADA, and even ones that have not been remixed have probably received some digital processing unless they were released by audiophile enthusiast labels. (Some of those labels make a point of using completely digital-free signal paths, and might even insist on using nothing but tube amplifiers.)
Indeed. And there are also now M-DISC BD-ROM discs and drives that store 25GB. You need special M-DISC-ready burners to write them but they are readable by standard drives.
There are no M-DISC CDs so you won't be able to directly replace CDs with them. Nor do they make dual-layer DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.
not unless it's the Toyota Highlander :)
I think there is room for both kinds of cars in the future. Pure electric cars make sense for urban areas where the typical trip length is short, but make poor replacements for gasoline vehicles in sparsely populated rural areas or for long road trips. Hydrogen cars work for those use cases, but are poor choices for dense urban areas because of the explosive potential of the fuel. Hydrogen tanks in cars will need to be REALLY well sealed, and those seals will need to maintain integrity for the life of the car.
Perhaps the solution is a dual system; allowing the phone to store both a no-validation card for low-value transactions and a phone-plus-PIN card for higher value transactions. That way the phone could replace both a transit card and a chip-plus-PIN credit card. As with all systems where you put all your eggs in one basket, you will need to guard the basket well.
One advantage of bundling Kinect: it made the development of new kinds of game interaction more appealing. Kinect isn't all that useful for most existing games; dance and fitness games are the exceptions and we had dance games with pads long before Kinect. And perhaps too many gamers are slugs who don't want to move. One problem with the business model for fitness games is that the people who like them seem to be content with continuing to play the same one, so there isn't a lot of repeat business.
I don't know if we ever would have seen Fantasia: Music Evolved if there had not been a large number of potential customers who already own the hardware. Though Harmonix was able to sell Guitar Hero and Rock Band even though people had to buy instruments to play them, so perhaps they would have risked it anyway.
Disclosure: I got to play test Fantasia last year. Harmonix has now announced it so I can say that it exists without violating the NDA I had to sign. I think a lot of people are going to enjoy it.
Clipper cards and other similar cards (like the Charlie Cards we have here in Boston) are also RFID based, though not all work on the same frequencies as NFC. (Clipper cards do; Charlie Cards don't. There is an app that lets you use your NFC-capable phone as a Clipper card.) The card itself has no anti-theft protection at all. Unless you register your card online you're simply out of luck if your card is lost or stolen; you lose whatever value is stored on it. Some systems let you register your card online; if you do that you can report your card missing and get any remaining balance transferred to a new card. But you're still out anything that got spent before you report the loss, and if you lose a monthly pass you may lose some days of use until they deliver the replacement card. It's a risk that most people can live with because the amount of value stored in the card account is usually small. (On the Charlie Card system, for example, the worst case loss is about $100; that would be a monthly subway/bus pass plus $30 of stored value for trips not covered by that pass. Commuter rail passes would be worth more but those are not available on Charlie Cards.)
The systems deployed in the US don't store any value on the card. It's all stored in the central online system; the card is just an account identifier. That is also true of current ATM cards, though some early systems (the original Docutel ATMs) actually did store some info about account status on the card so the cards could be used while the central computer was offline. (The Boston bank I'm familiar with that used Docutel ATMs disabled the offline capability because there was a possible distributed attack on the system. Make many copies of a card, distribute people with the copies to multiple ATMs, and wait for the central computer to crash as it often did in those days. Then have everybody withdraw money at the same time. There were no cell phones back then so it would have been harder to coordinate the attack, but I suspect they were confident that the MIT hackers would find a way.)
With the upcoming switch to chip+PIN credit cards we're finally going to have widespread deployment of NFC readers. That may give us the necessary critical mass for mobile wallets to take off.in the US - phone+PIN should be an appealing alternative to card+PIN since the phone is usually closer at hand.
"Too poor to own a computer" really doesn't exist any more, at least not for anybody with a fixed address. (The homeless are another matter; even if they were to be given a free computer they would have no place to keep it.) Usable computers are GIVEN AWAY nowadays; a 10 year old desktop PC is adequate for basic internet access and it has zero market value. The catch; they mostly have unsupported OS versions on them, so they have to be wiped and the software replaced with Linux. Or they can be used with these thumb drives, eliminating the need to install any software.
Too poor to afford internet access, sadly, does exist. There are programs like Comcast's Internet Essentials ($10 internet service for low income families) that are available to some, but others live in areas where no such services are offered, in some cases where no broadband service other than satellite is available at all.
Four way stops usually aren't about making the road safer for cars. They are about slowing down the traffic to make the road safer for pedestrians. There is little need to use traffic calming measures on cyclists; their typically low speeds, small size, and high level of awareness about things around them (in part because they aren't sealed in a box) mean that bicycle-pedestrian collisions are rare on streets.
Bicycle-pedestrian collisions on sidewalks and shared bike-walking paths are another matter. The prevalence of those collisions means that mandatory bike path laws often make travel more dangerous for cyclists, as those shared paths are far more dangerous than streets are.
These modified traffic rules respect a couple of realities for cyclists.
One, a full stop is a relatively dangerous thing to do, not because the stop is dangerous but because the slow start from a full stop is. A cyclist who rolls slowly through a stop sign can proceed more safely than one who stops completely.
Second, the time just after a light turns green is a very dangerous time in many intersections for cyclists; a cyclist going straight has the right of way over a car turning right but the cars often fail to respect that right of way and turn into the path of the cyclists. Aside from the fact that the cyclist shouldn't have to hang back for the turning cars, it's not any safer; the turning cars often cut through the intersection too sharply and collide with the waiting cyclist. The red light as stop sign rule means that most of the time, the cyclist will be able to leave the intersection before the danger time of the newly turned light.
There are possible confounds to the data. Idaho drivers may be more polite than California drivers. The fact that few Idaho cyclists ride in the winter likely means that fewer cyclists are on the road at twilight or at night. It would be better to compare the Boise data to another location with a similar climate.
The one remaining advantage of non-smartphones is battery life. Smartphones are fine for people who have regular access to electric power and can plug them in every night, but are unsuitable for locations where access to power is unreliable. A small niche should remain for a bit longer, though whether it will be enough to keep those phones in production remains to be seen.
Vista itself was fine, at least by the time service pack 1 came out. There were four problems that put people off it:
1. The new Aero UI needed a lot of GPU power. At the time, most computers didn't have it so the UI ran poorly. You could revert to the old look without window transparency, which solved the performance problem, but it wasn't obvious how to do that and the OS didn't do it automatically if you had unsuitable hardware.
1a. Under pressure from computer manufacturers, Microsoft dumbed down the requirements for the Windows Vista sticker. The result was that you could buy computers with a Vista sticker that didn't run Vista well with Aero enabled, and they SHIPPED with Aero enabled. You had to change settings before your shiny new computer would run acceptably.
2. Vista was more memory hungry than XP. Older computers usually needed a RAM upgrade to run it well, which meant an added expense. Systems with a 512MB RAM ceiling were not uncommon at the time (they had two sockets, each of which would accept a module with 256MB or less) and those systems could not be upgraded to run Vista well. Vista also needed more hard disk space, which might require a hard disk upgrade.
3. Vista brought in a major change in the way that device drivers are coded. (With good reason; the 2000/XP driver model had security problems you could drive a truck through. The new way isn't perfect but it was a substantial improvement.) Vista drivers for existing hardware were slow to appear if they were released at all, and some of the early drivers (especially graphics drivers) were buggy. That made it impossible to upgrade a lot of existing systems to Vista, and also meant that things like printers and sound cards became useless. There were quite a few examples of peripherals that were still on the market well after the release of Vista but had no drivers for it.
4. UAC. Vista was the first version of Windows to ask for permission to perform various administrative things like installing new programs. In the initial release of Vista, UAC was far too paranoid, the result being that you got so many permission prompts that everybody just clicked through them without paying attention. So you got all the pain of the permission system without any real gain in security. The paranoia level of UAC was dialed down in the service packs but the damage in public perception of Vista had already happened.
What this all added up to: people starting from a clean slate were usually happy with Vista, but people who wanted to upgrade or wanted to reuse components from an older computer often were very unhappy. Tech nerds and tech journalists tend to be in the latter category, so the people whose opinions mattered most did not care for Vista, even though typical customers buying new computers would have been happy.
The bonus round suggests that most of the softness in the Canon images lies in the camera's JPEG processing. There is much more visible detail in the RAW images, bringing them on a par with the Samsung images, and they retain the advantage in dynamic range. The Sigma zoom lens was probably also not the best choice to get the most out of the Canon body.
So... the phone isn't going to take the place of a good camcorder or DSLR for shooting movies. Yet. Besides the problems with shadow and highlight detail, it also falls down on creative control, low light ability, and lens flexibility. And probably audio as well. But the twilight of the dedicated camera may be closer than we think.
If you have gotten this far in the process, they probably also know that you won't be a perfect cultural fit. But if they have any brains they value the experience you have and the perspective that will bring to the team.
VHS was not a broadcast quality medium, but that didn't stop VHS content from being broadcast at times. On those occasions broadcasters wanted to get the best possible quality they could out of the imperfect medium; that is what professional VHS decks were for. News programming might show a relevant VHS tape if it captured an important event and no better video was available, and there were shows that broadcast viewer-submitted content such as America's Funniest Home Videos or the Stupid Pet Tricks on Letterman.
That's pretty much what a series hybrid does, except for using a lithium-ion battery rather than a capacitor. Current supercapacitors don't have enough energy storage density to take the place of batteries, though there are MIT researchers working on carbon nanotube supercapacitors that will if they ever prove to be practical. So far no pure series hybrid has been put into mass production, though the Chevy Volt comes close; it's not a pure series design because there is a mechanical linkage between the gasoline motor and the wheels that is used at high speeds.
Diesel locomotives are also electrical engines powered by generators, and they go up and down mountains and sometimes stop frequently though not as often as the car caught in rush hour traffic. The difference between a hybrid car and a locomotive (or a diesel-electric submarine) is that in current designs excess electricity is simply wasted in a resistor bank; there is no energy storage. Siemens is developing locomotives that incorporate batteries and regenerative braking; they have reported fuel efficiency savings of 20-25% over conventional designs.
People needed a term for hybrid cars because they actually were something new to the automobile business, even if submarines had used similar power trains many years ago. "Hybrid" captures the notion that they are something between a pure gasoline or diesel car and a pure electric car, combining elements of both, so it's not a terrible name for them.
It may actually be true that their customers have no interest in smartwatches, or at least anything that can be manufactured with current technology. But I think there is also a significant population that stopped wearing watches but would be interested in a smartwatch; a lot of the Pebble adopters are in that group. When smartwatch technology is a bit more refined it may be possible to build something that will appeal to non-geeks; at that point, the traditional watchmakers had better be in the game or else they risk losing a significant part of their customer base. (The part that actively wants non-electronic retro tech is safe.)
WTCPT! Now there's a electronics geek's piece of gear! Those things are workhorses, they just keep going. Have to replace the tips from time to time, but you're going to do that with any soldering tool.
Lots of mine have already mentioned. The Laserjet II and III were tanks and the 4 and 5 weren't far behind. The Atari 800 was a beast that goes on forever.
Another one for me is a Sony receiver that I've had since 1984. It's part of the secondary system in the electronics workshop now. It now drives a pair of Minimus 7 speakers, another durable product. The Boston Acoustics A40s that were originally connected to it later became the surround speakers in a system with a pair of A70s in the front, but all four of those had to have the foam surrounds replaced so they don't count as being uber-durable.
I also have a Teac cassette deck from the 80s and a Pioneer CLD-D701 from 1992. (I later found a CLD-D502 for $10 at a flea market so I'd have a backup but the 701 is still going strong.) And the big RCA CRT TV bought at the same time but that doesn't see any use any more except for playing old Atari games; putting those on a flat screen doesn't feel right.
In the olden daisies some of us did use them for productivity applications. There was a decent for its day word processor, Paper Clip, and a good spreadsheet, SynCalc. Both have been greatly surpassed by now and they only supported dot matrix printers, so they don't see much use any more; anybody still using an Atari is either playing games, writing retrogames, or creating chiptunes.
But the elevator already existed long before the science fiction stories were written. The first modern elevator was installed in 1857 and demonstrated a few years before that. Earlier elevators exist; the first known one was believed to have been built by Archimedes in 236 BC. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...