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I figured that'd be a thing in a professional simulator, but I almost would have assumed such things would have been too much or too unpopular for a consumer or hobbyist sim.
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Feb 8, 2014 13:43
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I've been thinking of color e-ink for a while and I'm not sure if it's been posted or not or if it qualifies. It's really interesting, but I also I guess it's sort of a niche product that is sort of becoming irrelevant with the price of tablets dropping and the battery life and screen clarity becoming better and better. You could spend the same amount of money on one of the color e-ink devices as you could on a full-fledged premium tablet with greater features and function.
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Mar 11, 2014 04:27
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There's one I think called the Jetbook that sells for about $400-500 dollars. A quick glance at the website and it seems like they're aiming it at an academic setting. I'm sure in some ways it's maybe an easier sell to some school districts as compared to a tablet. edit: Where I can sort of see where it might be a bit viable. Lighter, less power requirements, probably a dedicated interface streamlined for kids of various ages and academic settings and restricted a bit more from distracting apps in a school setting. I guess very large color e-ink panels could be even viable in an advertising way if the prices dropped enough for static print promotions in place of the flat panel monitors I see popping up everywhere. It seems that one company is making something like it already. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 07:25 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 07:07
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I think a lot of schools are starting to move towards iPads/Android tablets, though. Then you get articles like this where the tablets are sort of launched badly with too many expectations: http://news.yahoo.com/school-declares-switching-books-hp-tablets-unmitigated-disaster-203813551.html edit: It seems that a simple color eReader is a good baby step for the technology, though, in schools. Don't try to push it as an end-all, be-all device. Just an eReader to hold all the relevant textbooks and needed materials. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 19:07 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 19:04
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I'm trying to find evidence of this, and I can't, but I'm sure I tried it at least once. I could have sworn in the late 90s Yahoo had some short-lived automated telephone e-mail checking thing that you were assigned a numeric ID code and a pass code and you could dial an 800 number and I think it would 'read' new e-mails to you over the phone or tell you if you had new emails waiting.
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Apr 2, 2014 06:47
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Along the lines of a specific item: Universal remotes. I go out, I find one I REALLY like at a nice price, get it configured with all my stuff. Then, a few years later I update something and lo and behold: It's not compatible. Even learning remotes I've bought in the last 5 or 6 years won't learn a lot of buttons from new devices like BD players.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:01
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Dogan posted:Is this it? No, the thing I was thinking of was pure phone only. I tried going back to my old emails I still have on my Yahoo account from the late 90s to see if I had anything like a message about it, but I don't see one. However, that looks like how 90s futurists predicted things like in that ATT commercial. I almost can see Tom Selleck in my head going, "Imagine a world where you don't even have to turn on your computer... To see you've got email" Cut to a woman coming home to a future version of that thing flashing.
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Apr 3, 2014 04:21
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Have built-in USB ports become a standard in new cars, yet? It seems like it'd be a thing they could put a couple in a few spots so everyone could keep their stuff charged up no matter where they were in the car.
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Apr 5, 2014 03:04
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I'm reminded now of a Japanese car that was designed with a spot in it for a compact folding 49cc scooter called the Motocompo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57lDauqtpzc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X3vPNZZrCo JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 05:12 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 05:09
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In the spirit of Tax Season, several years ago the IRS had a tax filing system that worked entirely over the phone. You'd dial an 800 number, sit there and spend 10-20 or so minutes just using your touchtone to enter in your Tax ID#, SSN, your income info, etc. and you were done. I actually sort of liked it because for how little I had to file it was pretty quick and easy. I think they cancelled the service about 10 years ago, though.
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Apr 10, 2014 03:43
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For folks who want their kids to have cassette players, they also make an MP3 Audio Cassette so they can have the best of both worlds. I guess the notion was it worked along the same lines as the cassette adapters for your car, but it was essentially an MP3 player built in so you didn't actually hook anything into it. http://www.amazon.com/Music-Player-...cassette+player
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Apr 19, 2014 06:20
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Oh, man, I'm only into this commercial by about 90s seconds and it's painful. It's right up there with the CD-I infomercial from the 90s where a man goes to speak with a electronic God for the meaning of life and learns it's the CD-I. Edit: What kind of messed up party was this couple having? Mom wakes up the next morning, dad's nowhere to be seen, you're still there and watching the kids in the living room. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 03:37 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 03:31
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WebDog posted:I think I had the same thing (posted earlier). Curiously the Internet seems to have forgotten this, as I found it with little issue last time. I had a player that was identical looking to this one called that I think was the Samsung YEPP MCD-SM55. They look physically identical to the point that their different brand names and different logos appear to be placed in the exact same places. I think the Yepp even had an option of the extra headphone remote, too. An image search on Google brings up several decent pictures. I also had an RCA Lyra RD2312 that I bought at Big Lots about 8 years ago for $30 that I always thought was pretty cool. It was just bigger than a pack of gum, had an SD slot, ran on a single AAA battery, USB input, battery cover that could be replaced with a belt clip, a built-in mic, FM radio, ability to record FM radio (IIRC), a line-in jack. Extremely nice for the time. It still works, too.
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May 6, 2014 18:03
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There were some attempts for customized music, pre-Ipod, too. I think Sam Goody's or some other chain tried to market kiosks in stores that would let you select songs and have them burnt to a CD and either you'd pick them up there or have them mailed to you. A major record label was attempting something similar where you'd select songs online and pay for them online and they'd mail you a CD with those already burnt to them. I'm sure there were always some restrictions, though. You might not be able to have an entire catalog to choose from, you might not be allowed to put certain songs from an album on their or put more than x-songs by particular artists on a single CD. As a funny aside to this, I remember when a resale CD shop set up an elaborate plan that went on for a long time. They'd burn whatever songs you want to CD for some flat price or per song plus cost of the service. The example they gave was something like: -Buy 10 CDs from us for $100. -You 'own' those CDs since you bought them and are allowed to copy songs for personal use. -You leave the CDs with us, with a list of the songs you want recorded and give us $15 to do that. -You come back and pick up your mix CD, and sell us back your 10 CDs for $80-90
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May 6, 2014 21:02
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We've talked different film and cameras before, and I can't remember if we've mentioned the '110 spy camera'. I remember it being really pushed around the time of the film "Leonard Part 6", so I think it might have had a part or just been a promotional thing in the movie, but it was a barely more than a 110 film cartridge case with a lens on it. Extremely small, very low grade. Eventually even after their initial push with the movie they showed up everywhere and they kept selling them for probably quite a few years until more traditional 110s started to be cheaper and/or phased out. I guess it's design is more commonly known as a "Micro 110"
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May 9, 2014 19:04
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For smaller homes/apartments/rentals, I could see those being pretty valuable, though.
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May 13, 2014 06:45
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We used to have an old 70s-era stereo that I'm pretty sure included the schematics in the owners manual in case you ever had to get something repaired or replaced.
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May 25, 2014 02:41
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The worst part: I can still probably navigate through that easier than the latest version of Office I tried out.
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May 31, 2014 07:19
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A Pinball Wizard posted:I used to use PFS: Professional Write on my XT; it was the poo poo. I loved it so much I refused to stop using it until I upgraded to Win95 and gave in to the siren call of long filenames. I still tell people Microsoft Works I had on Windows 95 was one of the best writing programs I had. It wasn't all that robust compared to a Word or Wordperfect, but I used to be able to sit and type out reports and essays and stories in it better than any program before or since. I can't even tell you what the magic x-factor was. I know I was a huge fan of the unbroken pages of text that made keeping a line of thought going that much easier. When I upgraded to more modern word processors they got too WYSIWYG in their formatting so I'd be in the middle of something and get: (end of page) HUGE SPACE (start of new page) That older Works did some things I really liked: Draft mode so I could focus solely on word count and writing and not about font sizes and layout. Page breaks represented by a simple and unobtrusive small dotted line.
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Jun 20, 2014 07:31
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WebDog posted:The Government wasn't too pleased to hear this and Texas and New York soon sued Sony BMG to start replacing consumer's CDs with ones that didn't have the software. I still can't find a definitive list of those. I think I mentioned this in another thread or this one a while back, I found three different 'official' lists of Sony CDs with those issues and no list was identical, numbers quoted at X-number of affected titles but none of the lists added up to that many, different titles on different lists, and I even think one of the archived lists even vanished. Another thing about shutting off autorun was that I didn't think that was really an option until post-XP Windows, was it? I guess you could hold down a key on the keyboard and force it bypass autorun that way, but I could never get it to not-Autorun in XP on its own. I seem to recall there was a UITweak tool you'd have to download to shut off autorun, but I might be misremembering.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:15
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Computer viking posted:Reminds me of their PlaysForSure music DRM, which, well, doesn't. It was an xp-era program for both hardware and music stores, and also Windows media player, with reasonably wide compatibility. So obviously, the Zune and its music store didn't support it at all. Wasn't there something to do with MS creating a separate format for the Zune in order to appease companies that had bought into the PlaysForSure technology and not pull away people who bought their devices to the MS Zune store?
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Jul 3, 2014 05:28
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mrkillboy posted:Back in the early-1990s I used to read a lot of imported British console magazines like Super Play and CVG (I live in Australia) and one thing that really really stuck out for me in the letters sections was that they'd always harp about how you couldn't rent out games in the UK and that it was illegal or forbidden or something. Also Nintendo apparently had something to do with it as well? Not quite a UK thing, but from my recollections this was also a sort of big deal in the US but nothing ever came of it. Nintendo fought pretty hard to get rid of video store game rentals in the early 90s, took the case to court, etc. They thankfully lost that war in the US but they did win a war on instruction manuals being photocopied by stores, which lead to a small industry of third-party instruction sheets for games explaining how to play them being pasted onto rental cases.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:50
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What about things like concept albums and rock operas that get a chance to use the format as a means of telling a story through the collective songs. Take something like ELO's Time or The Who's Tommy. Not that I want or expect or need every album to be such a thing, but when it works, I think it works very well. I know I've listened to a few such things that even things I think of as 'lesser' or even stand-alone bad songs end up having some value as an overall part of the whole.
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Jul 15, 2014 07:29
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Jerry Cotton posted:Well obviously I'm glad Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds exists but about 100% of all albums contain filler. I'm not really disagreeing either. I'm probably just admittedly being a bit contradictory on it. Even I have a few CDs that I found myself saying, "This could have just been a 5-song EP and I would have loved it" instead of it being a 10 song LP that I was sort of disappointed by. The ability for artists to be mostly singles-driven likely an overall good thing in the long run for consumers and performers, especially the relatively low-cost of buying desired singles digitally. At the very least, it could possibly result in artists being able to keep the hype and popularity maintained over a longer period of time, spacing out the releases of completely new singles to the marketplace to keep them fresh and in the limelight.
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Jul 15, 2014 08:04
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I'm sure on their pocketbooks, too. I could have sworn I read something where some bands were complaining about the labels would withhold royalties or demand payments from bands to cover things like recording costs and studio expenses incurred to produce their contractually obligated albums. Sure, that would still be things with singles, but if you're doing fewer songs with less in-studio time, that might put a band on the hook for a lot less.
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Jul 15, 2014 08:24
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On the subject of music, I could have sworn in the 90s Todd Rundgren was tried to push a multimedia music experience that would let users listen to customized versions of tracks by essentially giving them some very low-degree of simulated mixing power at home: You could listen to a song as it was or adjust playback parameters of it to your liking. It was for the CD-i, nothing more ever seemed to develop of this user-controlled music that I can figure out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_World_Order According to a Q&A, it sounds like Rundgren was stating that the mixes were sort of pregenerated in a way and you didn't have access to individual components to alter on the fly.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:12
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I thought Al commented on his record contract about 10 years ago, right around the time the digital singles downloads were becoming popular, where he said it ended up sort of not being the best for him because the way it dictated how the label would pay royalties to him on singles from downloads vs. physical album sales.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:18
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This almost feel like a sort of technology that never was and I might be misremembering it: Tom Laughlin, I think, tried to promote a home video distribution plan that pretty much was paperboys delivering VHS tapes. I guess the notion was a proto-Netflix, in a way. You'd subscribe to a service and a neighborhood kid would come around on a schedule and drop off and pick up movies from your home. They imagined it would have picked up really quickly since I think the time they were pitching it that newspapers were still very popular for home delivery. I can't find anything on it, now. I used to think I might have seen it referenced on the Billy Jack website, but there's almost literally nothing there now but a photo and a link to an estate sale.
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Jul 25, 2014 08:23
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WebDog posted:Oh yeah, don't miss the days of trying to host games via modems - effectively blind firing on the hopes we'd connect. As a bit of a funny story along those lines, I bought a video capture card for my computer and the software that only worked with that card (to my understanding) required a serial number to be entered in order to install everything from the drivers to the applications. Then I lost the book with the serial number on it. I was so frustrated that I ended up typing in gibberish, too, and just lucked into a working install code after a few tries.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:50
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Elliotw2 posted:I have heard that Hauppauge is worse than that still, actually physically requiring the CD to install the base drivers, and all the updaters check to see if the disk is in the drive before they will run. About the only thing I can maybe half come up with is that it's maybe tied into licensing rights for various codecs or something and they maybe had to assure the owners it'd have some sort of install restrictions. I seem to think several years ago when I went to reinstall a video editing program of mine the MPEG codecs built into it no longer worked right off the bat as before. I think it was because in the years between installs they were no longer affiliated with the company that provided the codecs so that part of the activation/install procedure required taking some extra steps.
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Jul 27, 2014 06:25
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You know, for some reason, I just imagine using a gussied-up Dialoc being really cool lock for a camouflaged door to to a hidden room in your house. It just looks like a useless, broken rotary phone to anyone who sees it. Of course, now that I type that out it sounds more like something a serial killer would have more than a manchild who wants to have a pretend retro batcave in a spare room.
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Sep 13, 2014 07:55
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On the subject of cars and electronics: When I saw a commercial for Navdy recently, I'm not sure how popular it will be in the long run. It's a sort of bluetooth display that reflects a projection against your car windshield to give you a transparent HUD as you drive, letting you make calls, see your GPS directions, etc. It reminded me of how I had my GPS sitting in my window one night and wondering why the GPS/phones didn't have a 'mirror' mode so that everything looked right side up in the reflection of the screen on the windshield. (Or do any?) Seems like it could do a similar trick without needing a whole new device to do it.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:42
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I know I've probably mentioned it before but I'll mention it, again, in case I haven't. Probably more of a rant than anything else... Google TV. A pretty good idea, I sort of 'like' the concept, it could have really been something great once the prices dropped to a sub-$100 level... On the other other hand, I don't think I've seen a tech device like this end with somehow consistently LESS features and support during its lifecycle than it launched with. Seems sort of strange because it just feels like between Google's success with tablets, Chromecast, Chromebooks, and a reimagined/rebranded "Android TV" on the horizon to replace it, GTV has just felt like it has never been handled well from any angle.
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Nov 13, 2014 11:22
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driguy posted:It's a macrovision remover. There's a signal present in the overscan area of commercial VHS tapes that tells the recording VCR that the incoming signal is copy protected. I had a VHS Player (not recorder) that I bought in the 90s that would almost always have problems on modern rental VHS tapes with Macrovision. About the only things that would play properly on it were old and non-major releases. So, most movies released in the 80s or, essentially, anime. It did it even if it wasn't hooked up to another VCR, it could be hooked up directly to any TV through either coaxial or RCA and still did it. Ultimate Mango posted:The best thing about fancy VHS tapes: the 'counter' that let you watch movies that you weren't supposed to while nobody else was home and rewind to the exact spot where it was when you picked up the tape. I really liked it when HH:MM-styled counters got added in place of that. I used to make AMVs in the 90s as a hobby and I was SOOOO lucky that my recording VCR was exceptionally good with being relatively on-mark with how much it was recording between pauses. Then it eventually died and I fell immediately out of the hobby once I discovered my new VCR wasn't near as accurate to the point that it became almost impossibly difficult to time up clips. Lowen SoDium posted:VHS-C was the bane of anyone who worked at retail in the late 90's and early 00's. This reminded me of a guy who went into a store about 8-10 years ago having a breakdown at the staff. Long story short, he says he's looking for something that will let him play computer games on his TV. They figure he's wanting a VGA-to-TV adapter and take him to one. He keeps asking if this will let him play any computer game on his TV, and they tell him if it plays on his computer then it should. Eventually he then tells them he doesn't have a computer... It degrades pretty quickly after that. There's a lot of cussing, threats, etc.
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Dec 18, 2014 04:09
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"I'm looking for an 8mm to VHS adaptor"
"I am sorry, but there is no such adaptor. You probably are thinking of a VHS-C adaptor which is for..."
"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT! I HAVE SEEN THEM BEFORE, MY COUSIN HAS ONE!!!!"
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Heck, even that angry customer anecdote I had came from a Radio Shack. But to reference that again, do people still care about the VGA-to-TV adapters? I know they used to be relatively popular but now with so many computers shipping with HDMI outputs and/or TVs having VGA inputs, it seems like they're no longer as sought-after. I have one I've never even used I was given by someone throwing it out.
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Dec 20, 2014 09:36
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dpbjinc posted:Note that Thunderbolt is far worse as far as that vulnerability is concerned. It uses PCI Express, and PCI Express is designed for high-performance internal devices like disk controllers and graphics cards. This for some reason got me to thinking of something. The malicious 'dialer' viruses, programs, etc. that went around where it would cause your PC to dial something like a per-minute or per-call number without your knowledge. With everyone making the move to much faster services like DSL, Sat. and cable, not even having a traditional modem at all in newer computers, etc., I haven't seen anyone really make a big deal about this in years. However, 10 years ago, it seemed like one of the bigger PC security concerns.
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Jan 3, 2015 19:04
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I know it was really frustrating several months ago when i was looking for something new and almost every place (even fast food, min. wage places) required online applications and didn't have or accept paper ones. I sort of felt that change in direction was sort of crappy because there are a lot of jobs that are going to attract a portion of the population that won't have the most reliable, secure or available internet access.
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Jan 12, 2015 22:04
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On the subject of film vs. video, was there an era were filming on actual film, regardless of the type 8mm, 16mm, etc. was actually sort of affordable? Granted, this covers only a small window, but it seemed even in the 90s to me as a teenager it felt like a very expensive endeavor to get even regular still photos developed.
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Jan 21, 2015 22:38
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Boiled Water posted:I don't think 1950s america put much thought into how their houses should be recycled. I don't know if it's something I saw in this thread or not, but I seem to think there was some magazine article or something from I want to say the 1950s about how we'd be expected to live around the year 2000. There was a belief that homes of the year 2000 would be more or less disposable. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/miracles-youll-see-in-the-next-fifty-years/1/#mmGal http://blog.modernmechanix.com/miracles-youll-see-in-the-next-fifty-years/3/#mmGal "It is built to last only about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will last a century." http://blog.modernmechanix.com/miracles-youll-see-in-the-next-fifty-years/4/#mmGal No more will the impending 'razor blade wall' crisis be a concern to future man. He'll just slap some Nair on his face. Vacuum and sweeping? Nope. You'll hose every room down for a cleaning... Edit, from the same site: Pigeon Spy Camera. I mean, we've got our drones and micro flying bug bots, but remember good old days when our spy equipment used to crap all over the enemy, too? http://blog.modernmechanix.com/carrier-pigeons-take-aerial-photos-with-new-camera/ It's not all been progress. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 09:29 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 09:20
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Oddly enough, in retrospect the sort of stuff people recorded off TV back in the 80s and 90s onto VHS that is probably worth keeping is the stuff that they worked hard to keep from saving in the first place: Old commercials. Most TV shows and movies have probably ended up on streaming or DVD in the years since for probably less than the cost of the blank VHS tape, but stuff like old ads (regional and national) are probably sort of lost to the ages. In hindsight, I sort of wish in the 90s I spent less time hitting pause during commecial breaks. They're a nice, strange little time capsule to the various years when you want to remember not just the entertainment that was popular, but the products and services, too. Sort of like a few years ago I was watching an old VHS tape and saw ads for things like Sam Goody and Suncoast and with a select pop titles, or old SURGE(!) commercials.
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May 10, 2015 20:46
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