Posted on 04/15/2009 9:51:45 AM PDT by EveningStar
Looking back at the 20th century, it's clear that even the biggest and baddest gadget sensations will one day fall victim to technological evolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Last year our neighbor was sh*tting biscuits, because his computer took a dump and he couldn't pay his bills or access his bank.
He was over here using our clunker quite a bit for the two weeks it took Best Buy to get him running again.
True, but the difference is becoming vanishingly small. Some cameras (see RED cinema cameras) exceed film outright.
In America's fourth largest city, we were without power for 1-3 weeks around town.
And yet we are supposed to all get electric cars that we charge up off power from our house...
And the people without power? They got gas burning generators.
We got our first word-processing computers around 1980 and used the 8-inch floppies. Wow.
Pfft, I remember when 8” floppies were the coolest new thing.
Real programmers were strong from lugging around key punch cards.
You can buy a $6,000 digital back for a ‘medium format’ camera, too (to replace the use of polaroid plates).
What price points are we talking about for equivalence?
Contracting, specifically bidding, too.
No cell phone coverage in Yrrisari.
I read stuff like this and then realize my house looks like the Smithsonian museum.
My thoughts exactly. Only thing I ever really needed a wristwatch for was taking pulse when i worked as an EMT for a very short while.
And he's wrong about #6, film cameras. Analog film still has a quality for capturing an analog world that digital can't match; unless you go for the ultra megapixel $5000 camera.
They can have my wristwatch when they take it off my cold, dead wrist.
OK, maybe that’s going a bit far.
I’m finding, as I get older, that the novelty of the cell phone has worn off. Really, I only use it for emergencies and/or work. We’ve considered replacing the landline with cell, but our DSL runs through those landline wires, so I’m not sure if that’s a great idea in the long run.
Reason I mention the cell is that it’s the only clock I can trust besides my wrist watch and the one on my PC (we sync our network to the fed time servers, and since I manage that, I know it’s correct).
I have found that most “public” clocks, if they are working at all, are off by about 15 minutes in either direction, on average.
In the small company I work for, we have a bunch of cheap battery-powered wall clocks. They are constantly drifting. The phone system has a clock, but it doesn’t have the capacity to sync to a time server, so it drifts too. Every other device with a clock has the same problem and keeping them all in sync isn’t a priority.
My wristwatch is always there, and I keep it set to the correct time. I think of it as time self reliance.
Ditto-copiers! I love the smell of ditto fluid in the morning.
Four digits, and falling. My Nikon DX40 cost about $1400 and is practically indistinguishable from film.
I worked at Kodak around digital movie film scanners/printers. Quality work required a $0.5M machine to digitize the film, and another $0.5M machine to write the edited image back to film. Now you can just buy a RED cinema camera for around $0.01M (aka $10K) to shoot the “footage” directly, and screen it with the theater’s $50K digital projector; the camera is flatly better than film, and the projector (while still inferior to the trained eye) is considered superior in the general public’s perception.
Upshot: you have to be doing very high quality, large-format photography for a wealthy & keen-eyed audience to find any discernable difference between film & digital ... and at those prices involved, the digital option may very well be superior.
Bonus: “film” is practically free for digital; I can dump hundreds of 3Kx2K images on a single cheap SD card, then move ‘em to a notebook in seconds for near-endless storage. Even if I could discern the difference between film & a good digital camera (and do have the eye to), I’d sacrifice a bit of quality to up the odds of getting a really good picture content-wise. Some of the best photos I’ve seen were from a grainy 1-megapixel camera.
Why would anyone want a CRT in this day and age?
Does this mean my long playing records played at 33 1/3 are over the hill? ... Guess I’m gonna have to get my Dr. Who tapes onto some other venue soon ‘cause my VCR players will not be repairable.
Republicans (not conservatives) about to go extinct.
Buy your movies off the internet. Download them to your PC, DVR or a thumb drive and play on your plasma TV. DVD players are going away too.
I just transferred six CD-ROMs of computer business records to one 8GB thumb drive and it's only 2/3 full.
I haven't bought a music CD in several years. Why pay $14 when you can download the 3 songs on the album you like from Rhapsody? You pay $0.99 each or $14 per month for unlimited. Two days ago I downloaded a couple of playlists from Rhapsody that amounted to almost 10 hours of music and not a bad song in the bunch.
I still wear a watch, though, but I only have 4 now - 2 Tag Heuers, a Cartier, and a Seiko.
imsari to hear that.
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