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Jedit posted:You underestimate them. When I was working in IT procurement in 2009 I was asked to find a quicker way for swimming instructors to create class attendance logs in their Excel database. It was taking hours to enter the data by hand; the pool had several instructors each taking four or five classes a day, but they only had one PC and they were forced to hotseat. I sourced them a few old PDAs from stock that could run Excel, and suddenly the job took seconds - they could create the log file at poolside and cut and sync it all at the end of the day. The PDA is a perfect example of how all the processing power in the world doesn't matter without good design backing it up. If they got over their stupid fixation on styluses and handwriting-recognition and built-in keyboards and tried what Apple did with a user-friendly touch-screen interface and a simple operating system we would still be using them.
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Jul 15, 2012 21:36
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Leon Einstein posted:DIVX was doomed to fail. Does anybody remember those DVDs that somehow decayed or something after a few days? It was supposed to mean the end of late fees, as they were disposable. Of course, DVD encryption was cracked, and ripping DVDs became quite simple. Even a few years ago when I went on a cross-country road trip they were selling them in gas stations. They're actually pretty nice in that context, pay $2 or $3 for a movie you can watch in your hotel room that night and then toss the next day.
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Jul 18, 2012 01:36
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Away all Goats posted:I had one that for some reason doubled as a TV remote control. This type: It could put you in Guantamo Bay, does that count as a failure?
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Jul 18, 2012 03:40
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Invisble Manuel posted:I always wanted one of these: On that note:  It didn't work nearly as well as advertised but with Home Alone 2 pretty much being a feature-length commercial for the TalkBoy who didn't want one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoz0vbm3Vss H I K I D S W E R E H O M E E A R L Y
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Jul 19, 2012 00:57
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ZanderZ posted:I hope to god we can quote this in 10 years and all have a laugh about "limited data plans," but I feel like it's gonna go in the opposite direction. If Google has their way we may be laughing even sooner than that. DirtyWorker posted:What about this baby? If you haven't read Steve Jobs' biography, the sheer number of ego-driven decisions he made developing it was unbelievable. Granted, his insistence on making it into a cube does look pretty cool (it's in the Museum of Modern Art, I believe) but it was ridiculously difficult and expensive to manufacture and I think about $200 of the cost of each computer was the cost of licensing the literature that came bundled in the computer.
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Aug 3, 2012 18:15
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Croccers posted:When games start bugging you to log into Facebook/Twitter to post dumb stuff on your account. One of my inadvertent favorite examples of bullshit social marketing integration in games is in Superbrothers, a game from the last Humble Indie Bundle. Just about every time you perform an action it tries to get you to spam your social networks, and people in the thread were bending over backwards trying to justify it as being an artistic statement and not just the gamemakers being lovely and self-promoting.
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Aug 8, 2012 15:09
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Willfrey posted:I recently inherited an old-rear end pickup truck I was using to move across town with. I picked up one of these things at a Radio Shack for $15.00, poppped it in my tape deck and listened to some music for exactly one 10 mile ride. When I fired the pickup back up it promptly destroyed the tape. I've been using the same $20 Wal-Mart adapter for 6 years in my old-rear end car and it's still fantastic. I use one of the old MP3 players that required actual AAA batteries, hook it up to a USB adapter in the cigarette lighter, and I have a ghetto audiobook player that automatically starts and stops with the car 
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Sep 1, 2012 00:35
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Really, UMD video format was just as useless but it had an actual media company with a library behind it so Sony could keep flooding the market.Coffee And Pie posted:There were a lot of weird portable video systems for kids in the early 00s that ran off of weird proprietary disks and cartridges, come to think of it. "were"? There are still a ton of dumb proprietary electronics for kids, in an age where smartphones and tablets and ebook readers have an ocean of free content available spending $300 on a crippled day-glo tablet is ridonkulous. Farbtoner has a new favorite as of 04:03 on Oct 10, 2012 |
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Oct 10, 2012 04:01
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I thought that the Phantom was basically one giant scam? Like, the "corporation" behind it was just a rented room in a strip mall.RunFish posted:The keyboard was weird because it was at an angle with the mouse underneath it. The idea was that you could rest it in your lap so you could play PC games on the couch like a console, never mind what an ergonomic nightmare it must be. Now we just have the rad Xbox 360 controller supported by just about every PC title under the sun so it would be even more useless.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:50
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Magic Hate Ball posted:That's not to mention all the really goofy claims, like "it redirects the magnetic field away from your eyes". In retrospect it is pretty ridiculous that we spent decades sitting in front of what was effectively a giant ray gun at work and at home.
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Oct 27, 2012 11:53
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DNova posted:Eh. No. What he said. I know that it wasn't harmful or anything, but a cathode ray tube really is a giant gun when you think about it. A gun that shoots sweet, sweet colored light.
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Oct 27, 2012 13:00
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Killer robot posted:
 The more things change, etc.
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Nov 15, 2012 14:45
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Like the others said, in cases of natural disasters where there's a huge demand for water they have the supplies and infrastructure to make and distibute cans, so they do that. It's a quick and dirty fix that might not be as efficient as bottled water, but it fills the need and it fills it quickly. I used to live in Jacksonville FL where they have an Anheuser-Busch factory, when Hurricane Katrina hit and all the shipping channels were effectively closed off they cleared out all the backed-up inventory by sending out absurdly awesome coupons to stores. You could buy a case for a few bucks, people were filling entire shopping carts with beer 
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Nov 15, 2012 19:35
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Kind Milkman posted:Some of them still exist. For example, the Space Jam website is still online and more or less works. Also, the '96 Bob Dole and Bill Clinton campaign sites are still alive and kicking:        
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Nov 27, 2012 20:52
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I can never take Wired seriously because my first introduction to them was a bunch of decade-old copies that my library was giving away. It's really easy to see through their starry-eyed futurism when you've seen how totally off-base they were about how today would be.
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Dec 21, 2012 21:12
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I just got a TomTom GPS a few months ago for work because I don't have/can't afford a smartphone and an unlimited data plan, and it's fantastic compared to how my friend's smartphone GPS is: it takes me a few seconds tops for the satellite to sync up while he has to spend minutes, my unit lasts a lot longer on one charge than a smartphone, I'm not dependent on cell signal or anything. I just type in an address (or search for one), it pops up, and I'm on my way. If I already had a smartphone I don't think that I would buy a GPS seperate, but for someone without a smartphone it's pretty useful.
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Dec 22, 2012 02:59
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