Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Sunshine89 posted:

From 2003 to 2006 some areas in Toronto had access to an innovative solution in search of a problem, Dexit

Dexit was an RFID key tag that functioned like a debit card. You went online to load the card, and would tap it without having to put in a PIN or signature. In theory, it had the advantages of a debit card (you don't have to remember to pay it, no interest) and a credit card (no transaction fees), but in practice, it was one more thing to carry around, you could only put $100 on it (and had to remember to load it), very few places accepted it, and there were no perks for using it.

It was advertised heavily, but I never saw anyone use it.

Similarly, my debit card had an RFID tag for about three months. I used it all of twice, and one of those times had enough fumbling with the reader that it would have been faster to swipe. The bank didn't explain why it was sending new cards, or that the little metal doodad proudly adorning the front of the card was in fact an RFID tag.

Except earlier that month, all the stories hit the news about, oh gosh, some guy with a reader could walk down the street and skim data from passers-by, so maybe it wasn't a great idea. But no problem, the data is encrypted, right? Well, the readers containing keys for decryption are available for $8 on eBay and the read can be passed off as an rear end pat, or the device can be modded for more range.

Three months later, about long enough for a round of corporate hand-wringing, I got yet another new card in the mail.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2012 07:37

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:45

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Amaritudo posted:

Really in the end, Blu-Ray won solely because Toshiba just didn't have the Hollywood clout that Sony did. There was a glimmer of hope when Paramount defected to HD-DVD but the loss of Warner put the final nail in the coffin.

I thought it was as much that the PS3 pushed out a huge install base for Blu-Ray players that people could essentially get "for free" with the purchase of a game system. When BD and HD-DVD first came out, the players were something like $1000, so even a $600 console used only as a player was a surprisingly good deal. So, y'know, using a loss-leader to win the format war.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2012 03:23

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

You can find MS Bob if you look for it; a number of abandonware sites host it with a "take your own chances" disclaimer. It will still run in 32-bit Windows 7 or Vista, but you would need to use Windows XP Mode or another VM if you have 64-bit Windows.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 21:50

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

You're paying for the software, which only runs on that hardware.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 22:58

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

VogeGandire posted:

IBM ThinkPad. Slow, unattractive, as reliable as an AK47 and along with cockroaches, game boys and Nokia 3310s, the only thing that will remain after nuclear war.

The ThinkPad on my desk is wondering why you're calling it failed or obsolete.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2012 23:14

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

It's still holding in there on Lenovo's ThinkPads and Dell's Latitudes. A few more models here and there, but at this point it's pretty much a business-PC thing only. Shame.

Unless you like USB keyboards, that is.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2012 01:05

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Geoj posted:

You can still buy Phenom IIs that are rebadged quad-core CPUs based on six-core dies. Granted its no i5-2500 but for $100 its a decent processor.

It's not, really. You could put AMD's entire desktop lineup in this thread, Phenoms/Llano as obsolete and Bulldozer as failed.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 04:31

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Sagebrush posted:

I wonder which one is going to last longer anyway -- flash memory or the dye layer in recordable optical discs? Last I checked, CD-Rs only had a lifetime of ten to fifteen years before they start to degrade and become unreadable. Blu-rays can't be much better.

NAND flash is spec'd to retain data for a year, but most non-enterprise NAND can't manage that. With lovely SSDs, you're lucky to get a few months out of it. Flash drives usually do better, since the NAND wasn't binned for speed at the expense of other considerations, but the capacitors which make up the memory itself will leak, and bit-rot will set in within a few years even in a safety deposit box.

Flash memory is not long-term storage.

And it will soon be obsolete! Memristor-based memory (memory-resistor, if you're PBFing on the portmanteau) should be coming out next year, and it has a lot of potential. Initially, it will be a faster Flash, but Memristors could well become a super-speedy, unified RAM and storage. So standard silicon fabricated SDRAM could bite the dust, too, in a couple decades.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 18:02

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

HP/Hynix ReRAM should be in production next year, but it may not hit consumers' hands until someone finishes making cell phones around it. 2014 is probably when we'll see diversity in volume, more realistically.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 18:57

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

HonorableTB posted:

I can't fathom the idea of wrapping a bunch of lamb intestine around my dong and going to work. That's just so grody.

Goal: Have sex
Limitation: No baby

Supplies:
(1) Woman
(2) Sheep

# ¿ Oct 28, 2012 22:10

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Killer robot posted:

I also got this stuff there:

Old canned water from civil defense programs. It's really not that different from a lot of beer cans of the era, I gather, and might have come off the same bottling lines as such. Before there were even pull tabs and you needed to punch an opening with a churchkey opener.

I don't remember those days, but I do remember this era:

Pull tabs that ended up tossed on the ground where you could cut bare feet, flat-sided steel or bimetal cans. And brown 7-Up labels, I don't even remember that. It looks so foreign now that I'm used to sculpted aluminum with stay-tabs. By the way, I heard stay-tabs took literal years of design and experimentation before commercial adoption. Not that they're that complicated in principle, but they needed to make them with a minimum of materials and with a basically zero failure rate to not upset customers. The cans have also gotten thinner and lighter over the years, for related cost-savings reasons. When you make millions of something, every gram shaved off by better designs and manufacturing processes saves money. Remember these 2-liter bottles?

Specifically the separate opaque plastic bottom. 1970s-80s manufacturing processes weren't up to making a single piece bottom that both would stand up stably and not crack or break under pressure when treated as roughly as people treat plastic bottles. Once they got that working right, they ditched the base and 25% of the plastic needed. Plastic caps came along later, and still more recently they moved toward shorter caps that use even less materials. Modern bottles have a lot of performance margin too. They're tested to take 100psi, and they're durable enough to take dozens of reuses and repressurizations if you do homemade soda or something.

Also, remember 10 and 16 ounce glass bottles with styrofoam labels, before they got around to making single-serving plastic bottles?

Yes, I love the march of packaging technology. Well, other than the ones that increase shelf life at the expense of making things drat hard to open. And I mourn the obsolete technology of instant-win contests that don't require you to go to the company website and register to enter the number on the cap.

My grandfather actually was one of the R&D scientists at Continental Can Company, and he worked directly on both of those projects. The current five-prong shape of soda bottle bottoms came from his group - he hired a sculptor to make the shape attractive once they figured out how to manufacture a solid-enough bottom.

It really was the work of years, too. When my mother was in college and law school, now and then she'd mention on the phone that some new soda bottle designs had hit the shelves, and my grandfather always had her send them some for competition research. Then the bottles would arrive all exploded, and his team would basically say "Well, that's clearly not it," and get back to work.

Earlier in his career, at Monsanto, he was on one of the R&D guys focusing on the original productization of plastics, including coating the inside of cans to prevent rust. Until my idiot uncle threw them out after my grandparents died, we had some memento pop-beads, which were the original shipping and storage unit for plastic before it was melted and molded for use.

My grandfather was a real nerd-type inventor; he often got frustrated when corporate would react to an invention with a "We can't sell that." For example: a one-at-a-time cracker dispenser. Most crackers would crumble to pieces being run through those screw threads, but who cares? It's a simple and elegant way to accomplish something almost nobody wants: getting only one cracker at a time straight out of the package. :science:

He still worked in retirement, and one of the neater jobs was consulting on making a zero-G fire extinguisher for high-altitude planes and spacecraft. The big problem was that water-sprayers would aerosolize in freefall and fail to smother the fire.

The solution came to him when he shaved one morning and really paid attention to his shaving cream. Oh, pressurized foam! :downs:

He died of end-stage emphasyma. Don't smoke, kids.

Factory Factory has a new favorite as of 15:14 on Nov 15, 2012

# ¿ Nov 15, 2012 15:08

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:45

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Pastey posted:

It's kind of funny to think that even with all the methods of data storage invented in the last 40 years or so, paper is still the only thing that we know for sure will still be here hundreds of years from now and retain it's data. Assuming it's stored correctly of course.

As far as I remember, the figures (on average) are something like this:

Magnetic media - 10 to 20 years
Factory pressed CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray - 30 to 50 years
Archival quality CDRs/DVD-Rs/Recordable Blu-Ray - 100 years
SSDs and other flash based media - 3 to 6 months unpowered, longer based on write cycle, max probably 10 years

Paper - stored in a constant temperature/humidity environment - indefinite

I keep reading stories from time to time about newly researched mediums that could last millennia, but as far as I know nothing has made it to market yet even in the high end. There may be some really esoteric stuff in use by the NSA or some such, but I haven't read baout it yet.

If anyone has any inside knowledge of this I'd love to hear about it.

I don't know if this is a brilliant idea, a dumb idea, or something that is both simultaneously, but: M-Disc. What tells us about e.g. Egypt? poo poo carved into stone. So use your DVD/BD burner laser to engrave a stone disc.

Lifetime estimates for other writable optical media estimate that this thing will last about 1000 years. Compatible BR drives start at like $50, and if you built recently, there's a moderate chance your DVD drive you chose at random is compatible.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2014 00:19

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