…that should be obsolete, but aren’t.
I’ve previously discussed the landline fallacy. If you don’t understand why people like landlines, you probably haven’t used them much, and are clueless as to what good phone service is like.
With regard to the turntables, the digital-converting ones I’ve seen a) have a vinyl lathe for a cartridge and b) overcompress the music when they convert. Fortunately, there are still a few surviving manufacturers of quality cartridges, and my audio equipment still has audio inputs. And they’ll take away my Conrad Johnson tube preamp when they pry it from my cold dead stereo cabinet.
Not a very good list, but then, it is put out by MSNBC, a media company that should be extinct but isn’t.
Although, I’m sure NYPD purchased electric typewriters, regular typewriters have the benefit of not needing power to function, while creating readable documents quickly.
Disc’s used for data storage have far greater shelf life than flash drives. Vinyl records are even better than CD’s. But as bad as modern music is, I guess it doesn’t need to last more than 5 years.
CB radios are much better when driving than twitter. Only a twit would think otherwise. Cellphones may allow for clearer communication, but when you are looking for information from anyone within an area, your cellphone contacts might not be as useful as a channel 19.
Author appears to be one of those stereotypical leftie elites who thinks that America = Manhattan. ‘sure it’s not an Onion parody?
There is one other style of turntable for audiophiles that doesn’t turn or touch the record. It uses a laser nearly perpendicular to the record aimed at a groove to read the disk.
The price was in the “new car” range though, and I don’t know that it qualifies as obsolete.
The problem with music on vinyl (for me, anyway) is that there is a tremendous amount of music released in the 1960s and 1970s that never made it to digital. So the only way to get it is to digitize it. And yeah, that means old and cranky.
Basically playing a 30 year old Dual turntable. Updated cartridges a time or two. You can get a superb cart for around $100. A good cartridge is the first key thing to get right. Run your output into the line in plug in the back of the computer and record it as a file. Processing software is the next key part. I run something from an outfit called DART Technologies. It is pretty good, but every time you run it thru the various filters, you lose something. The other hard part is that there was no standard for recording signal to vinyl, so once you figure out settings for one record, you have to do it all over again for the next one, starting from ground zero. Doing all this on a Wintel system.
Mark Levinson fan myself.
My argument for landlines is still that, if I want to get a hold of any member of a particular household, but don’t care whom, I would rather call a number that is attached to that structure, not one that might be driving around in a car or sitting in a bag at a gym. More often than not, if I want to drop off or pick something up from a friend’s house, I don’t care WHO is home, as long as SOMEONE is home, and I’d rather not have to call 3 or 4 different phone numbers to find out.
I also have a number of friends who have multi-story homes and leave their cell phones (only phone lines the couple have) in the kitchen while they’re in the basement or vice/versa.
The flip-side, of course, is that some of my friends insist on calling me on my cell phone to find out if I’m home, when calling my landline would be a much better indicator. Or those friends who seem to not keep track in their contacts about which number is which, and call me on my landline and ask “hey, are you home?” when I answer…
How about a list of technologies that have been predicted and promised some times for decades and never developed. The stereotype is flying cars, which will probably only develop when the computing infrastructure is available to make them safe, but there are so many things, especially in the computing realm that we thought would be here by now. HAL-class AI computers, for example. Truly artificial humans (It turned out that it was a lot harder to teach computers to walk than we thought.)
One I thought would be here before now is a reliable and inexpensive means of landmine (or any bomb) detection and clearing.
Why isn’t the piston engine in that list?
I gave up the land line about four years ago when I realized that I hadn’t received or made a single call on it in almost a year, other than junk calls. I live in a big city with good cell phone coverage, and I can’t remember the last time the power went out.
The quality on cell phones definitely is not comparable to a landline, but I used Skype for business conference calls for a year with nobody the wiser. There comes a time when convenience and ‘good enough’ quality outweigh the ongoing cost of a home land line.
Why landlines? Redundancy. Five nines. 911. Disasters. Period.
+1 to silvermine.
Back in my pizza delivery days, I was delivering during a snowstorm that knocked out power to half the city. All cell lines were interminably busy, either because the towers had gone down, or because the lines were all jam-packed.
In a disaster, the only two reliable communication methods are land-line and text message (if the cell towers are still up). And even then, lines will be jammed for hours, if not days or weeks, depending on the level of catastrophe.
Also jammed? Directory Assistance, when people try to locate loved ones. The lack of cell phone D.A. eliminates the possibility of people tracking down their loved ones in a catastrophe, especially if the only record they have of a loved one’s number is in their own battery-dead cell phone.
Landlines make a lot of sense for families that know other families and do things as a family.
Why isn’t the piston engine in that list?
Because that would be stupid.
In a disaster, the only two reliable communication methods are land-line and text message
Umm… Citizen Band radio is even more reliable than those two methods, which is why first responders tend to rely on it.
My wife always wondered why I kept a big, clunky Bell System phone in the closet. Then came Hurricane Ike and the power all over Houston was down. Out came the old phone and, voila! She was able to call out and reassure everyone that we were safe. “We are never throwing away this phone!”
Shortwave radio too. Much better “reach” than CB and its possessors are likelier to be “the authorities” both local and distant. Plus, there are a number of disaster info-related regular broadcast channels in the shortwave band, so even a receive-only set is more continuously and reliably useful than CB. For disasters with a sizable area-affected footprint, like hurricanes or major earthquakes, shortwave is more likely to cover the whole territory of interest than is CB.
I take serious exception to several items on that list.
CRT’s… I’m writing this comment on a 27″ CRT monitor. I’ve tried flatscreen, but I don’t like the color depth and clarity issues, and I especially dislike the “native resolution” problem of flatscreens; I like to change screen res for certain applications, and doing that in a flatscreen is just not as good. I’m dreading the day my last CRT monitor does. The same goes for TV’s… I have both CRT and flatscreen (both LCD and Plasma) and I find the CRT picture superior.
Disks… when I built my most recent computer system a year ago, I put in a floppy drive. Why? Because I still find them useful. I certainly wouldn’t want to be without the ability to burn a CD, either.
Landlines… At my house, a cell phone makes a very nice paperweight; you can’t get a cell signal here.
CB… The writer seems to think that everywhere has cell coverage. He really needs to get out more. Also, a CB and a phone are very different in manner of operation; a CB is a local device. Just how would you use a cell to see if anyone is available within twenty miles? CB’s, incidentally, make idea comms nets for vehicle convoys, such as offroading rallys.
Sometimes, the old way of doing something is just as good or better. If it works, don’t try to fix it.
The gist I got from this article is “change for the sake of change”, an attitude I tend to sum up with one word: moron.
Within the last year I’ve installed Win Vista on a laptop, Debian and Win 7 on a homebrew PC with a clean 750 GB disk. Clean disks, I repeat — no helpful internet connection running at all. I’m mumbling to myself about installing OS/2 or eComstation and BeOS/Haiku as alternative boot-up systems. I’m also contemplating installing MS-DOS on an older machine for the sake of playing DOS-based games and studying some older and simpler computer languages.
And I’m supposed to have done this or be doing this JUST HOW without working disk and CDROM drives?
I can understand keeping CDROM drives, but floppy drives? Seriously? Perhaps I’ve been cursed with bad ones, but I was lucky if I could get a floppy drive to read a disk it had written to only a few months earlier. While I agree that not all old technology should be scrapped, floppy drives are one of them that should.
Chris L.
Floppy drives can go bad, particularly if they’re dusty, or poorly aligned on the mounting rails. I’ve tossed a few over the years. But I have others which have lasted 10 to 15 years and still work fine. I concede 3″ floppy drives are more reliable than 5.25″ floppy drives, but they are also much younger — although I have to suspect the actual problem with the bigger disks is with the 20 year old diskettes rather than the 20 year old drives.
People claim that music from vinyl on turntables sounds better than that from CD’s. I have never done a comparison myself. So, I have no clue if this is true or not. I think the sampling rate for CD music is high enough that it should be indistinguishable to the human ear. It would be interesting to have some audiophiles take a blind test of CD music and turn table music and see if they can tell the difference. A turn table that uses a laser as replacement for a needle makes sense. This would be essentially laser read analog disk music. It should not be that expensive to make such a laser based turn table. If digitization of music does change how it sounds to the human ear, this would be the solution that ought to work for audiophiles.
Perhaps audiophiles would reject this on the basis that it is not the digitization of the music that changes it, but that it is some how the reading of the music via a laser even if it is still analog that changes how the music sounds. I think this is rubbish.
Shortwave + CB + 4G internet + 3G internet + cable + cell service from two providers.
I think I can dispense with the landline as a crucial element of my communications package.
I have a land line for my home office. Land lines simply offer better clarity. I hate the poor clarity of most cell phone conversations and use my cell phone only when I have to (like when I travel). I think land lines will decline for casual personal use. However, they are far superior for business use than cell phones.
Actually, quite a few of these technologies are definitely not obsolete. CB radios, for example, are useful for car use and ham radios are still useful as well. A ham radio does not need any infrastructure, other than an electrical generator or a battery. I know that the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. However, ham radios are still useful back up technology.
I don’t see much use for type writers or telegraphs. However, the rest of these technologies are by no means obsolete.
Reciprocating IC engines are indeed a type of technology that should be obsolete. The probable best option would be a Stirling engine – both practically and theoretically more efficient, and capable of burning just about anything.
There’s a reason IC engines triumphed over EC engines.
EC engines like stirling engines have the problem of having to conduct all the heat energy through solid walls. This limits the temperature, limits specific power, and may require more expensive materials. Internal combustion engines produce the heat inside the working fluid itself, and are not subject to these same limitations. Most of the waste heat is removed from the engine by the exhaust gases themselves, not through a radiator.
Arizona: On Disks, remember that that was Rob Enderle.
Rob Enderle is a trolling moron.
(I mean, I suppose he’s right about floppy disks, and can’t imagine what you use them for such that they’re a superior solution, unless you have some decrepit legacy hardware lying around that requires them.
The superior solution in that form factor was the MO disk, and even it’s dead, since a tiny USB drive is faster, more reliable, holds more, and costs less.
But optical disks and especially rotary magnetic media are staggeringly useful.
His contention that “you only need 64 gigs” is utterly vapid.
But, then, it’s Rob Enderle.)
If they can make a cell phone network that is powered 100% of the time, then I would switch to cell, but here in upstate New Hampshire, that just doesn’t happen. I even have to keep an old fuddy duddy cord phone handy to plug into the phone lines when power is out since the non-wifi-conflicting cordless phones base station so conveniently doesn’t seem to have a little battery compartment.
That said, given the utility of cellphones in non-emergency situations, I wouldn’t mind it if the phone company devolved our land lines to old timey party lines…
Just don’t get the whole “landline has better sound quality than cell” argument. They all sound equally flat to me. Then again, I’ve used Cincinnati Bell most of my life, one of the two independently-owned companies part of the old Bell network. It’s been in operation since 1873.
I wouldn’t mind keeping a landline as a backup, except the minimal fees for any landline make it more expensive than the pre-pay I use now (Cincinnati bell iWireless).
Why, yes you need to keep your cell charged. There are literally thousands of “instant chargers” out there, so what’s the problem? If you’re that concerned about preparedness, you’ll have a couple of those puppies in the closet, right next to your NiCads. Me? I have a car charger. Hurricane, earthquake, whatever; I can still charge off my car battery.
Yes, vinyl records give better sounds. Rather, new (or in excellent shape) records played on a good-quality turntable, connected to a good-quality amp, in turn connected to good-quality speakers, give better sound. Alas, every time you play a record, you have physically altered it. Every time you play an album again, you’ve degraded the signal a teeny bit more. The nice thing about CDs is that you can play them over & over & over…
Since most people don’t have sounds systems capable of telling the difference (absent a poorly-done early-generation ADD remastering), it’s no surprise most folks prefer CDs.
What I don’t understand is why an audiophile market for SACD or DVD-audio never took off. Certainly the latter, with roughly 8 times the data capacity (along with modern DSPs) should provide a sound at least reasonably equal to a well-mastered vinyl album.
If you’re looking for a reasonably-priced turntable, check out the music-instrument stores. Yep. Got a Gemini “professional” turntable which gives excellent sound. Only problem is that it’s manual return. 🙁
I just can’t believe that John B posted a nearly exact copy of the comment he left to Rand’s earlier article about landlines. What, you didn’t think anyone would follow the link? As for the challenge of finding out if someone’s at home? It’s called “making an appointment.”
CRTs do generally provide better blackness than most LCDs. On the other hand, LCDs provide lower cost (per square inch of screen) better resolution, tremendously lower power consumption, and produce far less heat.
Come to think of it, for all of the “disaster” fans out there, why not just backgrade to vacuum tubes!? They laugh, disdainfully, at EMP. 🙂
Mike Shupp highlights the difference between normal human beings, and hobbyists. I can’t crack on him too much, as I have over a dozen antique computers myself. Which reminds me; those old full-height 5-1/4″ floppy drives still work today. Heck, my PC/XT has a working full-height 10Mb Xebec drive onboard. Now, if I could only find a useful utility to convert QX-10 apps downloaded off the web to a 5-1/4, which can then be read by my Epson…
As for the linked article’s position on drives: it’s absurd. I don’t trust “cloud computing,” so I don’t rely on Gmail or other web-based apps. I want my data saved locally. Ironic, really, considering that I don’t have much use for landline phones. 🙂
Not only do I want local storage, I want local backup of critical data. From what I’ve heard
ARRRGH Flipping TAB key!!
From what I’ve heard, MOD was an excellent backup solution, but is now obsolete.
Local storage + local backup = much higher redundancy & more immediate access than “cloud” storage.
Now, if the author had said rotating-platter drives were obsolete, he might be on firmer ground. Solid state storage (thumb drives, memory sticks, flash drives) capacity is increasing every month. I still have a 128Mb thumb drive I was happy to get when it was on sale for only $30.
So I will go out on a limb and predict that rotating platter drives will soon (next 5 years) become obsolete in the face of solid-state drive improvement.
As a coda, I’d like to cite what many consider to be an unacceptable compromise, the hybrid car. Considering the frequent citation of disaster concerns here, the following story might prove instructive.
A few years ago Massachusetts suffered from a nasty ice storm, leaving some areas without power for nearly two weeks. One local Prius owner owned an inverter, so until power was restored he used his car as a generator for the house. I can’t tell you exactly what was powered up, and what wasn’t, but it was reported that said Prius owner expended only c. 4 gallons of gas during that time. The nice thing about the Prius is that normally the gas engine only comes on when the battery runs low, so our Massachusetts neighbor had -in effect- an on-demand generator in his garage. AFAIK a standard IC car isn’t designed for something like that, and a purely electric vehicle would have crapped out in a couple of days.
That, my friends, is redundancy with a vengeance. 🙂
I’ve owned the same Slimline phone for 20 years. No complaints. I’m single and childless, so I have no need for a cell phone.
Let’s crank that list up to eleven: the manual transmission. I hate those things with a passion. You have to deal with three “buttons” – accelerator, clutch, shift – just to freakin’ change speed. And the sequence has to be timed just right, or you stall out. The automatic transmission made it possible for average-dexterity folks to learn to drive.
I can’t crack on him too much, as I have over a dozen antique computers myself. Which reminds me; those old full-height 5-1/4″ floppy drives still work today. Heck, my PC/XT has a working full-height 10Mb Xebec drive onboard. Now, if I could only find a useful utility to convert QX-10 apps downloaded off the web to a 5-1/4, which can then be read by my Epson…
Reminds me of a friend, who upgraded his wife’s laptop from a 6GB to 20GB 2.5″ IDE drive. As he didn’t have a form factor to put the notebook drive into another computer, he decided to just mess around with it. He took a couple of breadboards and cannibalized some old motherboards for chips. He then built an interface card to work with his old Apple IIe. After writing the driver software, all was working like a charm.
Sure, who needs 6GB on an Apple IIe, but the fact he could do it probably explains why he earns the money he does.
Alan, I’m surprised — being a single, childless man puts you in the prime demo for a sportscar where manual transmission is mission-critical. My SWAG: you don’t have one of those, either.
I just can’t believe that John B posted a nearly exact copy of the comment he left to Rand’s earlier article about landlines. What, you didn’t think anyone would follow the link? As for the challenge of finding out if someone’s at home? It’s called “making an appointment.”
Well, then apparently my position on the subject hasn’t changed since the last time Rand wrote about it, because I, personally, didn’t follow the link at all. I suppose there’s something to be said for consistency in one’s own arguments, and for sticking with a position over time.
As far as “making an appointment,” most people I know don’t make appointments to drop by and say hello to friends when they unexpectedly find themselves in town on a business trip. Unless, of course, you have the kind of friends who don’t mind getting a 4 A.M. phone call from an airport just to find out if they’ll be home after they get off of work 14 hours later, because you might have time after your meeting as you drive back to the rental car place to stop in and say “hi there!” In which case, your friends are a lot more understanding than mine.
Either that, or I suppose I could schedule my entire life. I much prefer to live in the moment, and if the mood strikes me as I’m passing through a town, it’s nice to make a single phone call to find out if an old friend is around for a chat.
I’m waiting to read one of you shouting, “get off my lawn!”
The automatic transmission made it possible for average-dexterity folks to learn to drive.
Coming from a country/continent where manual transmission is very much the norm this comment makes my mind boggle. The issue is you LEARN to drive, that involves a degree of co-ordination in the first place. If changing gear is a problem then… well, it would explain the driving I see on the 5 around here.
Don’t get me wrong. I drive an automatic now, but there are plenty of times when I miss manual. A “sports” setting doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to performance driving and I have been caught with a flat battery where I’d have been easily able to jump a manual car rolling downhill.
I also second the landline “quality” comments. Don’t really notice myself 99% of the time. I have a landline because it’s basically a feature of the DSL and while Comcast are the only internet alternative, I’m sticking with DSL.
I also find the concept of a phone being important as attached to a structure to be a little weird. I now think of phones and people, not phones and places.
I have no interest in sportscars. The 40K or thereabouts is way too much for a lower middle class guy to spend on something that’s nothing but flash. Okay, it’s flash plus speed, but here in Texas they have speed limits.
Alan, a manual (AKA standard) transmission offers several benefits. Far greater control during bad weather, more efficient shifting gates, better mileage, lower cost, and less complexity.
I work at a restaurant (hence with many Mexicans) and when I see some of them walking to work I’ll pick them up. Very nearly every one of them remarks on the fact that I drive a stick; I guess this is less common in the US than I had thought. Thing is (from my friends tell me), very nearly every car made in Mexico uses a standard transmission, instead of an automatic. They seem to find it odd that an American would prefer a standard transmission… 🙂
I suppose that I would have to say: if you like driving, get a standard. If you just want to travel from point A to point B with the least fuss, get an automatic. Just don’t look at me funny when I blow by you during a snow storm. 🙂 Oh, that’s right, Alan lives in Texas; the land of no snow, and very little bad weather which affects driving. How very fortunate for him. 🙂
I’ll give Alan this much: in inner-city driving, with a lot of stop & go traffic, standard transmissions suck!
I also find the concept of a phone being important as attached to a structure to be a little weird. I now think of phones and people, not phones and places.
While I obviously think of phone numbers attached to buildings, and also people, this comment in particular made me think of a pretty large user of landline phones: businesses and small businesses.
Granted, real estate agents for the most part only communicate with cell phones any more, and I’ve seen cell phone exchanges on more and more local contractor trucks lately, but retail and other brick-and-mortar-based businesses have pretty significant landline usage.
So do security systems, even the ones that use a cellular signal for communication. In most cases, the cellular is a backup, but even when it’s the primary, there’s almost always a landline as a backup.
If there was a more robust and flexible method of hooking a cell phone into a home’s internal phone lines (with a cell antenna on the house somewhere, power for the cell phone, etc), it would be a pretty good way to get around a lot of the concerns that come with cell reception and accessibility in the home, but I’ve yet to see that market really take off (or maybe it has and I haven’t been paying attention).
Casey, I live in heavy-snow country, and people with manual transmission show no more capacity for effective snow & ice driving than the automatic people, and oftentimes are much worse. Automatics have “control” in snow, it’s called first and second gears. Much more important is a car’s weight distribution & configuration – front-wheel drive rules in the slush, and doofuses in manual-transmission rear-wheel-drive zoomers are the ones that the tow-truck operators get called to pull out of ditches.
Now, I’m not going to call manual transmission an obsolete technology, just a recreational one like vinyl records. My father, on the other hand, firmly believed that manual was the dead hand of the past, to the point where I never learned how to drive stick. I can sort of do it, but not at all well.
The article is a pile of shit. A technology is dead when it is no longer in use – the perceived merits are irrelevant to the facts. The telegraph is dead, the fax machine isn’t, for sufficient reasons in and of themselves. The writer clearly has Hayekian information-issues, insofar as he rages against the irrationality of technology consumers’ aggregate decisions, thinking he has the panoptic knowledge to determine others’ foolishness or wisdom from his lofty perch above the groundings.
I suppose I should count my blessings that the PDA isn’t on that list.
Hey, film (non-instant) cameras didn’t make the list.
I’ve driven both automatic and manual trannies, and have to say that I appreciate the freedom the manual gives to the driver in choosing their own degree of power vs efficiency vs torque whereas automatics are less than free in that regard. Particularly when one is nursing an older vehicle, I’d much rather have a manual trannie to worry about than an automatic. I can actually repair my own manual tranny, but even as a professional mechanic, I wouldn’t touch an automatic problem that required cracking it open. They have specialists for that stuff.
Mike’s got a point. Complex and difficult technologies will have shorter life-spans than simple and basic ones. Simplicity and easy repair has a timeless advantage; elaborate kludges for short-term exploitation of some transient technical edge go away as soon as a more elegant replacement is found. Look at eight-track, or even audiotape cassette. Nobody makes audiophile luddite noises about audiotape cassettes the way they do about vinyl, because they were kludges. At best, there’s some residual nostalgia about Walkmen, because of their novelty value re: portable, truly individual music.
Heh, the Walkman reminds me of an old David Letterman gag. He demonstrated the Sony Walkman TV – the prop was essentially a headphone with the earpieces rigged to cover the eyes.
Let’s hope nobody applies that concept to texting devices.
Mitch, you make some good points. I suppose I should have limited my comments to front-wheel drive standard transmissions. And while automatics do have drive 1 & drive 2, how many people are intelligent enough to use them effectively? They’ve been spoiled by the “automatic” interface to the point where they don’t how to use low gears effectively.
But then, every car I’ve driven with a standard (except for short periods with a Chevette and an old Beetle) had front-wheel drive, so I’m probably prejudiced. 🙂
Agree that the general thrust of the article was more snarky than observant.
Yes, the simplicity of the standard transmission is one of the reasons I like it.
Going back to recordings, vinyl records are superior (I repeat the caveats I posted above) if you have good (i.e. undamaged/unworn copy) vinyl album, and a good stylus/record player, and a high-quality amp, and high quality speakers…
And even then, a studio-quality vinyl recording will eventually degrade after every playing. Cassettes are even worse since they suffer from low tape speed and lousy mastering. Not to mention repeated playing degrades the original signal. It’s not that hard to make good-quality cassette recordings, but you need a high-quality turntable & cassette recorder to do so. I have an old Akai which kicks serious buttocks, and Nakamichi used to make magnificent cassette recorder/players, even at the “low end.”
On the other hand, many CD masters suffer from ineffective A-to-D conversion, and it’s difficult to capture harmonics, as opposed to pure original signals. I’ve played 12-string acoustic guitar, and the harmonics are a huge part of the sound, but might not be captured effectively even with D-to-D recording. Sampling rate is critical, as is bandwidth.
As I said previously, even a “basic” DVD format (4.77Gb) should provide tremendously better sound, considering the DAC capabilities of modern processors, sampling rates, and bandwidth.
I would expect that a properly recorded D-to-D master would sound just as good on DVD audio as a “classic” vinyl album.
Even then, a lot depends on the pre-amp, amp, and speakers used.