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This long and no one has posted Laserdiscs? Let's see where it went wrong...
It did have a few advantages going for it, but they were far outweighed by the negatives. I only ever knew one person who had one, a cousin of my mother's who had a "sweet entertainment set up" in his basement. The only movie I watched on Laserdisc there was Twister, and having to get up to flip the disc made me realize Laserdisc was dumb. I do remember a few people saying they thought DVDs were going to fail when they first came out, because after-all, they're just like a small Laserdisc, and that failed.
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Jul 13, 2012 15:58
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decrypt key posted:
I think the problem is that CD-Rs and CD burners coming down in price and up in reliability made THIS obsolete overnight. Who cares about 120 MB when a CD gives you 640? Still a cool product, though.
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Jul 13, 2012 23:14
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mystes posted:I had a Palm Z22 for a little while. It had no wireless anything and came out when PDAs were already thoroughly obsolete, but for all its faults I think modern smartphones still haven't caught up to it in terms of convenience for actual PDA functionality. The iPhone is the worst at this; you actually have to run the Calendar app to see events you have coming up. I think on the Z22 you could just push one (physical) button and it was completely instant. Android phones can put a "calendar widget" right on your homescreen to show upcoming events/appointments/tasks. If you have the right lockscreen app, then all you would need to do is push one button (power button) to see them. I guess what I'm saying is yes, the iPhone is the worst, but Android and maybe? Windows Phone can be as good or better than old Palm or WM PDAs were.
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Jul 15, 2012 04:32
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mrkillboy posted:I can't help but be reminded of the current movement to popularise wireless payments via your smartphone. Exactly what I was going to say...but Google Wallet does have advantages over other RFID payment systems, in that the decryption chip or whatever is move locked-down. I don't think it's possible for someone to just go buy an $8 RFID reader thingy and drain your bank account from passing you on the street. Of course, the extra security has now brought out some problems of it's own. If someone wants to load a custom ROM on their Android phone, but forgets to wipe their info from Google Wallet first, then Google Wallet locks itself out and can no longer be used on that phone...at all. Even if the original ROM is loaded back, even after an entire factory reset, Google Wallet is borked on that phone forever, at least right now. Google might release an update to fix it, but they might not.
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Jul 16, 2012 18:10
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Teah, D batteries still get some use. C batteries, on the other hand, have always sucked a sack of poo poo and I'll be glad to see them go. I mean...you're so close to being as big as a D, what's the point?
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Aug 5, 2012 21:06
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SimplyCosmic posted:Fax machines are the top of my list. And will likely be on that list for at least another 5 to 10 years. I don't know...people keep saying they should be obsolete, but if you have something that is already a physical copy, and doesn't have a digital copy (because someone had to sign it, or it's a bunch of receipts for an expense report,)and/or you need to send it to someone else who also needs it as a physical copy, faxing is easier than the sender scanning it, attaching it to an email, sending it, and then the receiver printing it. However, if the sender already has it as a digital copy, or the receiver only needs it as digital, then emailing the attachment is easier.
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Aug 6, 2012 07:04
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WebDog posted:I recall around 1999 there were miniature mobiles that had to be controlled with a dailing wand. They were utterly impractical as they could barely hold any numbers - something like 12. Wait...an ad for the product basically said, "Yeah, it's way too small an impracticable to use."?
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Sep 17, 2012 16:02
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They might have been mentioned, but there were a few of those "ultra-capacity" drives from the mid to late 90's. Iomega "upgraded" the Zip drive with the Jazz drive!  Super Disk:   And related to that, the Sony HiFD:  The SparQ Drive:  All got crushed by CD-R's/RW's...and of course, those got crushed (for file transfer purposes) by flash drives. And now flash drives are slowly getting less popular because of cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc...
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Sep 20, 2012 14:47
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Mr_Person posted:I still don't understand those desks. You get to choose between a keyboard that's too low to type on comfortably or a monitor that's jacked clear up in the air. I've never had a problem with using a desk that's just a single, flat surface. Isn't the rule A million times this. I hate keyboard trays, and I don't get why people use them. Not only are they too low, but they are never sturdy enough and wobble every time you type. I bought a new desk a few months ago, and it was so loving hard finding one that both: 1) Had no keyboard tray. 2) Had drawers (and not a "pc compartment.") So many desks that met condition 1 were essentially just tables. What good is a desk if it doesn't have drawers to put all my crap in!? 
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Sep 24, 2012 16:59
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You Are A Elf posted:Should have gotten yourself a 1950s-ish office desk. These things can support the weight of six elephants, are fully functional with plentiful drawer space, can be found at most thrift stores and on Craigslist for incredibly cheap, and will be the only remnants of humans ever existing long after we're gone. I looked. No dice. I swear, anytime someone on SA says "you can find item X for cheap at any thrift store/Salvation Army/Goodwill/Craigslist" it's a guarantee I will never find it at any of these places. Though I realized when I was considering making an offer to my boss for an old desk like that from work that it would be too big for my bedroom.
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Sep 28, 2012 03:14
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Flipperwaldt posted:Indeed. I was just writing up a whole post about how it blows my mind. It's ridiculously convenient. If I owe my sister 10€, I'll pay her back through bank transfer, and she lives like three miles away from me. Bank transfers are horrible in the US. Last March I needed to get $800 to a friend several states away very fast. I thought I could just march on down to my bank and say, "Hey, here's a routing and account number...please transfer $800 to that account, thanks." Nope. Huge fee, probably take several days, horrible, horrible mess. Thought about Western Union, but they also had fees (though much less than the bank's, so I can see why they're still around.) She didn't have a "verified" Paypal account, so she could only send money, not accept it. She didn't have Serve, or anything else like that either. It sucked. Eventually had to bite the bullet and use Western Union. Getting money from one person to another in this day and age should not be that hard. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to just type in routing and account numbers from my online banking page and have it be in their account the next business day.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:35
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AntiPseudonym posted:Sorry to go back to bankchat, but I'm astonished about how far behind the times the US when it comes to doing transfers or paying bills. Other than paying another person with a transfer, we can do that in the US. Any decently large company will allow online payments from banks. My bank charges no fee to do online payments, and none of the companies I pay (Comcast, and two local utility companies) charge a fee, either. But yeah, we are still a bit behind the times...I'm sure the reason has something to do with weird interstate commerce laws put in place by bank lobbyists that force us to pay large fees so banks can continue to make us their bitches.
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Oct 1, 2012 13:36
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A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:Many local roads in Europe, especially Southern Europe, are actual roman roads that have been simply paved over with asphalt. Yeah, well...what have they done for use lately?
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Oct 8, 2012 16:50
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larrystorch posted:You can find CF card readers in fairly new CNC machines, though most of the newer machines have a USB port or even a RJ-45 port. Despite having those, almost all still have an RS-232 port for transfering programs into the machine controllers. Same way with medical equipment. Even new equipment, designed less than ten years ago, usually requires an RS-232 port for updating software, downloading error logs, etc... The funny thing is, plenty of them have RJ-45 ports, but they're generally only used for electronic health records purposes. Some even have USB ports (technically not actual USB ports, since they aren't universal...just SB ports,) but these are typically set up to only work with mice and/or keyboards, not a flash drive. You know how annoying it is to connect to and update a piece of medical equipment with a laptop that doesn't have a serial port? Because laptops haven't had serial ports in a long time. You have to get a USB to RS-232 adapter, set up your ports correctly, change the settings in the medical company's proprietary software thoat costs an arm and a leg (gently caress you, Drager, $1000 a year for that?!) and then cross your fingers and pray, because even though it worked perfectly fine on the last machine, it might not work on the next one even though it's the same drat model! The company I work for has a couple older Windows XP laptops with serial ports, and a couple pieces of equipment can only be connected to with them, because no one, not our IS guys, not the hospitals IS guys, not the medical company's tech support, could get any new laptop with Vista or 7 to connect to it with the adapter. But that trend is finally starting to break. I just got done a training session for a anesthesia machine that uses RJ-45 ports to update software, and has USB ports on the back that you can connect a flash drive to to download error and alarm logs. It still has the RS-232 ports for backwards compatibility and such, but I'll never have to use them, thank God.
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Oct 9, 2012 17:20
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:So what happens when an older anesthesia machine has an error and/or alarm while someone is under, and the hospital doesn't have any laptops with serial ports? Because now I'm terrified of surgery. Well, the downloading of errors and alarms is after the fact. You don't do it then and there while it's alarming. And aside from the most SERIOUS of errors, the machine will still work. And even in the most serious of errors, where the machine completely shuts down, doesn't even have power, it will still work in manual mode. The gasses will still flow, the anesthesiologist just has to "bag" the patient, the machine (obviously) isn't capable of breathing for the patient anymore. So the gas fills a bag attached to the machine, and the doctor/CRNA squeezes the bag to send the gas to the patient, and releases it to let them exhale and let it fill back up again. The biggest problem, aside from the doctor not being able to play with his iPhone anymore*, is that there is little/no monitoring of the pressures and volumes. There is always a manual pressure gauge on the machine that will work, but if the doctor isn't looking right at it, he doesn't know the pressure at that exact moment. Modern machines have screens with waveforms so they can see pressure trends and such. Parallel Paraplegic posted:Actually an "Ask me about repairing the stuff that keeps you alive at the doctor" thread might be pretty interesting, come to think of it... I've thought about starting one before, but I'm not sure how popular it would be...especially once I start ripping into all the doctors and nurses for not fully understanding how the devices work, and breaking my machines!  *Seriously, you would be shocked at how many anesthesia providers (mostly the doctors, the CRNAs tend to be more focused) play around on their phones, iPads, read books/magazines during surgery. They do a lot of work at the start and end of the case: putting meds in the patient, putting them to sleep, intubating them, getting initial vitals, then reversing all that when it's done. But once they're under and surgery's started? They basically let the machine do the work and barely pay attention. But in their defense, 95% of surgeries have no complications, go perfectly normal, and are all well and good. So spending a couple hours just starring at a couple screens that have EKG, BP, tidal volume, etc... would get so boring you'd want to stab yourself in the eye.
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Oct 10, 2012 19:21
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Jedit posted:Obsolete? This may just be the greatest technology known to man. You could keep your mobile number out of the hands of every telemarkunt in the world. Also out of the hands of every person who might want to call you. Edit: Holy poo poo, a goon's dream come true! The glory of having your iPhone, but without those pesky people calling and texting you!
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Oct 14, 2012 16:43
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b0nes posted:The easiest way IMO is to transfer it from a bank account with a built in person to person transfer function. ING and Chase both have them. I had to pay my bill for my taxes being done in April. I sent my friend a person to person transfer and she got the money in a couple of days. I don't think you need to be a customer of the bank. Yeah, but neither of us had one of those banks (though I guess I would be the only one that needed that kind...unless they only did "internal" transfers and we did both need them.) Actually, I think she might have had Chase, because now I do recall her saying that if I had Chase, I could do that transfer, but I don't have Chase.
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Oct 19, 2012 16:30
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Dick Trauma posted:I GET IT. THEY ARE NOT OBSOLETE. I think the Shaw's in my hometown still uses the rubber mats. It was a Grand Union, when they went under, it was bought by Shaw's, and they did a little renovation on the inside, but the last time I was there it still had the pressure mats...but that was probably two years ago, at least.
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Oct 29, 2012 17:09
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b0nes posted:
Do you mean revolving doors in general, or just those slow-moving, automatic revolving doors? But yeah, the hospital here in town has one of the automatic ones.
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Oct 30, 2012 18:07
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Smoke posted:A common method was to use leaf switches inside which basically close a circuit when the stick is pushed in a certain direction, resulting in that familiar clicking sound. In some cases, the leaf switches were fragile enough to actually break off due to repeated stress, especially with notorious games like Decathlon which used stick waggling as control method. That game could tear through a Quickshot in minutes if you wanted to get a decent result. I like how joystick went away and were replaced by d-pads, because the joysticks weren't analog anyway. But then when the actual analog joystick came with the N64, they went right back to making joystick mangling games like Mario Party. I had two controllers that I brought to friends' houses when we had gaming nights. One was for 99% of games...and the other was my poo poo one for Mario Party. Nothing worse than trying to play Goldeneye or Perfect Dark with those lovely N64 controllers with about half an inch of travel in every direction while at the "zero" point.
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Nov 16, 2012 17:56
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Fozaldo posted:Take your pick. Not enough random gears glued on.
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Nov 27, 2012 23:57
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movax posted:Retinal scans are cool though. Those can be thwarted, too. Ever see Demolition Man?
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Nov 29, 2012 00:36
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Natural Joe posted:When I was 8 my family briefly had a computer, already outdated, that had a turbo function. It was the best turbo function I have ever seen solely because to activate it you had to insert a key and turn it like it was on a nuclear submarine or something. Was it a Gateway 2000? our first PC was one of those, and yeah, it required one of those keys. 386, 4 MB or RAM, no CD-ROM or sound card...yet somehow still managed to get X-Wing and TIE Fighter to run...at pretty appalling frame rates, but beggars can't be choosers.
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Dec 15, 2012 04:44
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Astroman posted:
Welp, off to eBay I go. I was trying to save money, too, you jerk.  Fake edit: Hey, only $106 for your precious scorpion watch! 
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Jan 3, 2013 15:39
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That looks really uncomfortable to hold. Why does it curve up on the left? Just so Nintendo didn't sue them?
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Jan 10, 2013 18:15
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Datasmurf posted:Ah, yes. Kazaa. Or Kazaa Lite, Bearshare, Limewire, Frostwire, iMesh, EDonkey2k, Gnutella and my old favourite after Napster, WinMX. Interestingly enough, I've got the setup exes for all these (except LimeWire, because gently caress that crap). I should really clean up my old misc download folders. No one ever remembers Scour. 
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Jun 27, 2013 02:14
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Oh yeah, we had a DC service at my school...at least, I think that's what it was. Some guy coded a indexing/search engine accessed from a website, and it would give you results for all the computers on the network that had the files you were looking for. Of course, since, like, 90% of the computers were laptops, there was a decent chance whoever was sharing the file you wanted might either not be online since the last time indexing occurred, or could go offline at any moment (it was early 2000's, and only 1 dorm and a few other buildings on campus had wireless, and most laptops didn't actually have built-in wireless cards.) DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 17:59 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 17:57
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Monkey Fracas posted:Man, this is way cooler than USB drives. Not as practical, certainly, but much cooler. It looks like something out of a 80s/90s scifi movie/TV show That's why I always liked SmartMedia cards:  I remember my dad's first digital camera used SmartMedia, and to get the pictures on the computer, he had to put the SmartMedia card into a floppy-disk adapter: 
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Jun 28, 2013 19:56
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Inspector_71 posted:I saw a link (probably from this thread) to a project a guy was doing that involved a split-flap alarm clock, where the flaps would stop advancing during the night until the alarm time came around, when it would go through the entire set of flaps and then display the correct time, which would act as the alarm. That's cool until that one time you wake up in the middle of the night, see the time hasn't changed, and freak out because you're still half-asleep and think time has stopped.
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Jun 28, 2013 23:39
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion Car" wasn't so pretty to look at either. Holy poo poo, talk about coincidence. I read this post, and then watched a short "sneak peak" at this weeks' new episode of Venture Brothers: http://video.adultswim.com/the-venture-bros/sneak-peek-mommas-boys.html
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Jul 4, 2013 16:15
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bunnielab posted:I think having total faith that "this time we 100% have it right" is pretty stupid. Tell me about your alternative medicine clinic.  Edit: To add some meaningful dialog, I'm not saying that I blindly follow everything I hear, but that goes in all directions. If I see a news article about XYZ is causing caner, or ZYX is no longer causing cancer, I always take it with a grain of salt, but the beauty of knowing the scientific process is that I can look these things up for myself and determine if I should believe it. Did this study follow proper protocol? Are the journalists conflating facts/assuming causation instead of just correlation? (spoiler alert: yes, they always are.) Being a cynical bastard and saying this like "well, scientists were wrong about x-rays, and thalidomide*, and smoking, so therefore they must be wrong about everything, all the time" is pretty stupid. DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 21:12 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 21:06
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KozmoNaut posted:E2: Oh god, an "inches deep lake" on the roof to cool your house. Imagine the mosquito problem! Solved by applying liberal amounts of DDT. 
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Jul 18, 2013 16:01
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Base Emitter posted:Yeah, about those Cray supercomputers: http://hackaday.com/2010/09/29/tiny-cray-1-courtesy-of-an-fpga/ drat, that poo poo is Cray-Cray. I'm so sorry.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:53
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Radio Help posted:Have I been giving myself cancer by adding my fabric softener at the beginning of the load? Did I miss something? You're not giving yourself cancer, but your washing away most of the fabric softener. The reason the ball existed was so it would automatically open after the wash cycle and on your clothes in the rinse cycle. On older machines without an automatic fabric softener dispenser, you had to remember to add it manually after the wash cycle stopped.
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Jul 22, 2013 14:54
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DicktheCat posted:Does it really do that much? I don't use liquid, only the sheets, and YES! The other goon isn't kidding when he says how badly clothes (especially things like dress pants,) cling to themselves, each other, and you when it's dry out. From what I understand, dryer sheets work by having a small amount of a wax-like substance in them, and in the warm dryer, it sort of "melts" and coats all your clothes, so they feel "softer," and the chemical keeps the actual fabric itself from rubbing against itself as much so less static charge builds up. The thing that's annoying about them, is that you should never use them on towels, because the substance coats them and makes them really bad at doing their job. The day I learned to dry my towels separately from the rest of my clothes changed my life.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:23
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I never much cared for clit mice. I blame it on my first laptop that I was forced to buy from my college. Early IBM (yes, it was still IBM back then) Thinkpad. i want to say it was a T20? Mid-2000 era. The drat things sucked. Always had weird hardware problems. Mine had to had the power adapter replaced three times (a small fall, like, desk height to the carpeted floor was enough to break them. It was a known issue, but the computer depot kept giving me replacements from the same bad batch!) The screens all had wonky pixels (I had one that was always green, one that was always white, and a "patch" that was always a bit darker...this was fresh out of the box, yet the screen was NEVER covered in the warranty) and the best was the clit mouse. They didn't have nub+touchpad, JUST the nub. I knew lots of people (myself included,) who's nubs just stopped working right. On mine, the thing kept falling off. Like...just the small pressure from me pushing it up/down/whatever caused the red tip to come off the base. And on top of that, it would keep "drifting" in that last direction I pushed it in. What I want to know is, whatever happened to laptops with tiny trackballs in them? I liked those.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:20
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Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller. You can use a Sega controller for an Atari (just have to do some testing to see what button does what,) but I don't think you can use the Atari joystick for a Genesis, since there won't be enough buttons.
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Jul 24, 2013 20:13
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The flicker reminded me that no one ever had the refresh rate of their CRTs set properly! Oh, the default 45 Hz Windows 98 sets it to? Yeah, I'm sure that's fine. Even a poo poo graphics card and monitor combo could do at least 60! The worst was when I'd point it out to someone, up it to 75 HZ or more if I could, and they 'd respond with, "I don't notice a difference." WHAT?! Are you blind!? 
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Aug 13, 2013 03:05
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A Pinball Wizard posted:Having to choose between 640x480 at 75hz or 800x600 at 60hz was Sophie's loving Choice. Yeah, I think you're right. Still, keep the refresh rate up, up, up!
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Aug 13, 2013 03:53
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Fozaldo posted:Lancia Orca  Words cannot express how much I want to drive that car. I pretty much always pretend I'm piloting a spaceship as it is, that would only complete the feel.
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Aug 13, 2013 21:28
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