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Shitty Technology That's Still Around
Posts
Hold your horses there. O/S 2 is not a shitty technology. It's just old. So it's a classic.
My god
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
PNG has been around since 1996 and is superior to GIF in every conceivable way. Yet IE continues to fuck it up.. basically guaranteeing it will never replace GIF.
Animated image formats in general seem like an out of date idea, with as much computing horsepower as we have these days, we should be able to seamlessly drop in an avi or something without having to use a flash player. HTML5's <video> tag aims to fix this.. but it seems like it'll be years and years before it's reliably functional.
Also, GIF is synonymous with moving image, while very few people even know PNG can do that. And mass video integration is NSF56k, which does affect things. But yeah, it's a good idea to start rethinking this.
Hell, the whole computer is a modified 1970's PC on steroids, using overly massive 1980s programming. We honestly just need to redesign the computer from scratch, rewrite the operating system as we know it, and go from there.
So outdated that the most advanced browsers all recently adopted animated PNGs! Where recently is defined as within the last 6 months.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I can't imagine too huge.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Fax machines.
Floppy drives and motherboards that expect one to do a BIOS update.
Incredibly inefficient AC/DC adapters.
Internal Combustion engine in consumer vehicles
It depends a bunch of factors but generally it's about 10% smaller then the same size MPEG-4 depending on the codec. But it's much harder on the computer on the client end. So a page full of them might be a big problem on a slower machine.
Can we please kill the transformer already? There is absolutely no reason anyone's laptop needs a power brick that weighs more than it.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
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But the concept itself was to allow for animations in an era when computers couldn't even render SD quality video. Now that we all have quad core 2 duo dual core quad duo processors, animated image formats seem like a pretty stale idea.
Just because browsers are only now implementing mpng doesn't make the idea any better.
And I say it's time to bury all the 56k modem bullcrap. If some poor bastard is still out there on dialup, he can simply elect to not download huge files.
This means the problem is not the power brick.. it's that we're powering our homes with standards developed when modern devices weren't even conceived as possible.
So wrong here.
Batteries still suck.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
And engines sound awesome.
Land lines - I just got a landline back about 9 months ago. After having IP based service through the cable company, and seeing it go down whenever the service was out in my area, we figured it's time to go back to old reliable.
56K modems - when the cable goes out, guess what still works for internet access? We keep an account with a local dial-up ISP for this very reason.
Floppies - do you realize that you can probably grab a floppy you created back in the 80's and have it still work now? Magnetic media will always outlive optical. It's slow, but it has it's purpose. Granted, I have one, but I use Zip disks in parallel for archiving larger crucial stuff.
Batteries still suck because of politics and greed, not because the technology is inferior. Had we instituted a 1% tax on oil 50 years ago to fund battery research we'd all be driving electric cars. The ICE is grossly inefficient. Compare it to any other device you own and you'll be appalled.
So then the technology is in fact currently inferior. Its inferior because of politics and greed, but still inferior.
I'm aware internal combustion is not super efficient, a lot of the energy produced by combustion gets lost as heat, but the energy we do get out of it is still pretty amazing. It allows a single truck to tow several tons of goods to any point you can locate on a map.
Only thing that will topple it is the planet running out of oil. A number of new technologies are poised to replace it, but as we stand right now, if oil were to disappear overnight, there is absolutely nothing available that could fill the void. Society would quite literally collapse.
Even with billions of dollars dumped into research, I don't think batteries would be able to compete with internal combustion. A battery is still reliant on a power plant somewhere to provide a charge, and the chemicals used to make them function incur an environmental hazard that's at least as significant as what a oil burning car creates.
Back to the topic at hand, a shitty technology that I'd love to never see again is bluetooth. It'll never happen, at least, not any time soon, but my god I hate bluetooth, and i use it almost every day. I have a bluetooth headset that I use all the time, and while I love the fuck out of the thing the bluetooth connection it relies on makes me want to kick a puppy. My keyboard and mouse at work are bluetooth, and 3-4x a day it just stops working for about 30 seconds.
And some of it is easier to deal with. Take a look at the much hated fax machine. They tend to be extremely easy to set up and it can be supported by non-technical people. A small retail business is unlikely to have the in house skills to set up a MFP and make it work seamlessly with Outlook.
Yeah, but you'll still have to pay to charge those batteries.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
True, but it's something like .70 cents on the dollar compared to gas. I forget how much "gas" was in this study. Still, it's cheaper than gasoline.
My main concern with batteries is range/recharging. I think currently the best batteries have a range of about 200 some miles. Which is pretty good I suppose, not as good as some normal cars though. If I am on a long road trip, how long will it take my batteries to recharge when they run low?
edit- Or was it something like .70 cents per "gallon" compared to gas?
I'll see your Police Charger and raise you a Police Lamborghini
To balance the Euro.
That's if the first drive doesn't destroy the disk upon insertion/spinup due to the layers of dust, cobwebs, and spider corpses in the drive. :P
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Old floppies are actually more reliable than newer ones. Towards the end of the floppy's production cycle, build quality got EXTREMELY poor. I was still using my old windows 3.11 install disks up until a few years ago, because all the newer disks I got my hands on had a really bad habit of getting bad sectors as soon as you tried to write to them.
I still have a pack of circa 1995 disks that seem to be holding up just fine. As a side project I was recovering a laptop drive with Win95 and those disks came in quite handy.
Uh, no. My DS only needs 5.2V and the power supply I use for it takes anything between 110 and 240 volts and down-converts it without the need for a massively overweight lump of iron. The problem is clearly the power brick.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Actually it's extremely easy to cap out a modern processor with PNG's if you do enough layering, alpha channels, and tweening. This is because, generally speaking, there are no widely pervasive radically optimized 2D rendering engines in use.
Also, video isn't quite to the point where you can just sling it around at will. It'll take another couple of years for that technology to mature.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
That would be because your DS draws ~100mA and a laptop draws ~3.5 amps.
Remember, volts = pressure, amps = flow.
Seriously, why are these still around? There isn't a gamer in the world who hasn't heard of GameFAQ, or at least Google. Hell, today's consoles let you browse the internet with them, and the day they allow you to browse the internet while playing a game, the age of strategy guides should come to an end. The trees will thank you.
Now, if the guide also functioned as an artbook, or had some other neat bonuses included, then I could see the appeal. One of my favorites was Ninja Gaiden II (the NES one, not the Tits and Gore one), which included a comic adaption of the whole story sandwiched between the pages (I think it was a Hong Kong comic, if my memory of the artstyle is accurate).
Other than that, yeah, we really don't need strategy guides anymore.
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A few things:
Effectively all consumer electronics run on direct current (DC) electricity, which requires a steady low voltage. Effectively all power distribution uses alternating current (AC) electricity, which gives you a fluctuating sinusoidal voltage. To convert from AC to DC power, there are inevitably losses.
However... AC power is much more efficient in transferring large amounts of electricity, which is why we use it. DC power distribution actually came first, but was supplanted by AC power because of those issues.
The power brick your laptop connects to is not a transformer. It is a AC to DC converter. A well-designed AC/DC converter can be fairly efficient, but the small ones with the converter built directly into the plug tend to be very inefficient.
A transformer is literally two coils of wire wound around a piece of iron, or other ferromagnetic core. They tend to be very efficient.
GT: Tanky the Tank
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Well, if we can't get rid of the things already, can we at least seperate them from the plug? I have about 20 things in this house that have giant bricks that plug right into the wall and eat a whole outlet , unless you want to plug them in upside down and possibly rip the socket out of the wall
The NDS can kiss my ass for making a mini-sub style plug that isn't actually the same size as a mini-usb plug. Seriously, fuck you right up the pooper Nintendo.
I found a usb cable with an NDS-sized plug on one end, and my laptop charges the DS with it just fine. The only reasonable conclusion to make is that Nintendo were being douches and didn't want people to use any old usb cable.