Ten technology FAILS
Nokia's N-Gage, Palm's Foleo, Motorola's Atrix, Apple's Newton MessagePad, HD DVD, Sony's Rolly, Sony's Mylo, Philips' CD-i, Commodore's CD-TV, IBM's PCJr, the Camputer's Lynx, Gizmondo, the Phantom, Atari's Jaguar, MySpace, Beenz - behind every iPad there are dozens and dozens of technology products that aspired to greatness …
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Thanks to operators, pointcast is back on mobile
Did you see google currents on Android? If you got an Android device, make sure to check it out.
Stupid operator limits made a lot of people use it, the pointcast from google. Using something like that while you have 14.4 mbit+ connected device is absurd but needed.
Its cache dir on sdcard is horrifying 400M btw. So, this is how these things work.
If pointcast guys gave simple instructions or just compiled& shipped a custom "squid" cache server, companies wouldn't hate them.
Gizmondo
I was hired as a contractor to work with Gizmondo, and it really was a pile of shite. But then again, since the whole thing was allegedly just a front for syphoning off large sums of Venture Capital (allegedly) which included crashing a Ferrari Enzo (remember that?) then I don't think it really mattered.
Waves of nostalgia
What's with all these articles of nostalgia, does El Reg have a hunch that the Mayan prophecy will come to pass?
Re: Waves of nostalgia
Maybe they've just received the demographic reports that say most of the readers are old farts like me...
BOB...
I remember when Packard Bell's... eeeuurgh, used to use one of those shiddy BOB like interfaces. It were right crap, and so was the hardware. and to think, PC World used to charge upwards of £1200 for a shiddy desktop with a patronising GUI.
Re: BOB...
Remember? One of them was my first PC!
Still got it in the shed, complete with its DVD decoder card installed (remember them?)!
Re: BOB...
Yep, the "Navigator". I (my dad) bought one. 4MB "beast" with CD drive... for £1500! What mugs we were!
I remember the horror i felt when Bill G started explaining how the desktop was gonna become a "Webtop"
Fortunately...
Bill G has a nearly perfect track record at having his predictions for the future of tech fail to materialise.
Re: Fortunately...
Bill Gates predicted in 2001, that fondleslabs would caputure a huge amount of the PC market. Of course, Microsoft (in an alternative Ballmer-less universe) managed to capitalise on that prediction and become market leaders, leaving Apple and Android far behind.
Re: Fortunately...
So that's why OS/2 flopped: Bill wrote that it would become the next desktop OS. IBM's marketing ineptitude couldn't match that, even though they apparently tried quite hard.
(It's in the foreword to an OS/2 book*) I have somewhere)
*) those quaint piles of sheets of macerated tree pulp, adorned with black (usually) pigments
Alternative Ballmer-less universe?
Nope, not even in an alternate universe. I think the stuff Bill G is doing now is great. But he never had the sort of vision that (like him or hate him) Steve Jobs had at Apple.
Who to blame?
PC tablets failed mainly because of battery life, heat. "Intel" as in Wintel deserves a lot of beating because of their fixation to CISC.
Now they are paying the price and still insist on it, pathological obsession.
CDI != VCD
The Compact Disc Interactive things were not a "VideoCD rebrand", but one of the rubbish early-nineties attempts at doing a console based around a high-capacity (for the time) optical disk. I remember seeing reviews of games for CDI.
I think most of the CDI units could play VCD but needed an additional hardware video decoder costing in the region of £200 - a lot of money in those days.
Re: CDI != VCD
CDI was sort of like playing crap FMV games on a Sky box.
Re: CDI != VCD
Wasn't there an MPEG-2 board available for the Commodore CDTV, to enable VCD playback?
Re: CDI != VCD
I think (and have just wiki'd to verify) it was the later AGA-based Amiga CD32 that could take a decoder to play Video CDs.
I remember viewing a Video-CD demo in the big Virgin store in Birmingham. It was playing on a fifteen inch telly and the compression artefacts were appalling.
Re: CDI != VCD
Ah - but did you know at the time that the artefacts were awful or was seeing video of a shiny disk impressive in itself?
Re: CDI != VCD
Consumer digital video was a huge novelty at the time. In the twenty years since then we've become accustomed to horrible blockiness and strange motion smearing - only a few years ago I was astonished that people seemed happy with the terrible image quality on Sky - but back then it was strange and terrible. The big selling point for Video CDs according to the magazines pimping this technology was - wait for it - rock steady freeze-frames.
Re: CDI != VCD
"The big selling point for Video CDs according to the magazines pimping this technology was - wait for it - rock steady freeze-frames."
And we all know that every consumer video technological revolution is driven by the porn industry :-)
Re: CDI != VCD
And freezing the relevant bits in 'Return of the Jedi'.
Phil.
Re: CDI != VCD
CDI - I remembered a demo unit in Makro, playing Dragon's Lair. This was around the time that 'FMV' and 'Pre Rendered Sequences' were buzzwords, and Boots could make you Kodak PhotoCDs.
---
Re: Rock-solid freeze frames... I remember renting 'Desperado' on VHS, and finding one sequence was very worn and 'snowy' with noise. It was the bit where the leading actress was displaying her nekkid Blugarian Airbags.
Second Life
I had the "joys" of working in a call centre, where they also did Second Life support, one of the guys going through training to support fruit flavoured phones had worked on that part of the business and said that the amount of calls they would get from kids who hadn't been fed, washed or taken care of by they're parents because they were sucked into this "reality" was shocking.
Hey whevever happened to VRML?
When I joined the 'information superhighway' in the mid 90s I was looking forward to websites with a bit more depth to them.
I'm still waiting ;)
Re: Hey whevever happened to VRML?
When I joined the 'information superhighway' in the mid 90s I was looking forward to websites with a bit more depth to them...
Hey, yeah, right on, pal. Why isn't the 3-D Web on the list of technology FAILs?
Come to think of it... I'm generalizing here, admittedly, but there seems to be a sort of a pattern to a lot of the Internet/Web-based tech FAILs, in that the ones that blasted the most hype failed the most massively.
Video CD.
The other Elephant firmly placed in that room and standing on VCDs toes was the established Laserdisk.
VCD offered smaller disks, but in every other regard it was nowhere near as good as Laserdisk so was doomed to die. Unfortunately for VCD, the number of people who cared so deeply about the size of their optical disks that the loss of single-disk convenience and quality was overridden was too small a market.
DVD offered as good, or even better, quality than LD on the smaller disk size and succeeded.
The only place VCD seemed to establish a niche was as a convenient format for moody download content, as it worked with relatively cheap recordable disks and the image files were small enough to handle. I believe it's still quite popular in places where piracy is rife and bandwidth is limited for that reason.
Re: Video CD.
Laserdisks are lovely :-)
Picked up loads (i,e, my collection went from about 15 to 100+) when DVD started to pick up in the late '90s.
Picture quality of the best LDs is close to DVD, sound quality is the same (or perhaps better, as I believe it's less compressed) and some of the LD box sets (espeically the Disney ones) are really nice with books, artwork etc - like comparing album art for a double LP vs a CD. I'm sure LDs will be more collectible than DVD for this reason.
LD may also be the only place where you can see Han shoot first (Star Wars) in digital 5.1 surround sound - I'm not sure if the first realese of SW on DVD had Han or Greedo shooting first.
Re: Video CD.
Also, for over a decade, until DVD came along, Laserdisk was the premium home video format. What else would you run through your projector & 100"-screen home cinema - VHS?
Re: Video CD.
Do you actually see Han shoot first, or do you see a bit of it and then need to turn the disc over?
I thought laserdisc discs degraded, melted or otherwise were largely unplayable unless you treated them perfectly. Any problems with LaserRot?
Re: Video CD.
Indeed. Actually, most of the breaks for disk side-swaps are in sensible places, although I'm glad I picked a player that did the flip automatically (5 or 6 seconds of black screen) and CLV(?) disks got about 1hr per side, so one disk for a typical film.
Not sure about rot though - I will have to check some older disks thoughly now that I don't have too mess around with video cables to play a disk, as it's all routed through the new amp (although the 4K upscaling is probably of little benefit...)
Re: Video CD.
Nope, all of my Laserdiscs are still in good shape.
Re: Video CD.
Bah, humbug ;) You need to really make an effort to harm a Laserdisc. Like break them, throw them at the wall and crack them, burn a hole in them with a lighter. They are tough. A friend once forgot one in the car in summer and it warped to the shape of his dashboard… we just got it re-heated in the sun on a flat surface for a day and it played fine again afterwards.
Laser Rot is an issue that happens via contamination in production, eating away the disc from in between the layers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot#Laser_rot
There is nothing you can do about it except playing the disc on the ultra high-end Pioneer HLD-X9, the red laser of which can supposedly "see through" the rot in most cases. It tends to be cheaper to replace the disc, though, that player does not come cheaply.
Re: Video CD.
Laserdisk was the way to pick up somethings in good quality with subtitles as opposed to US NTSC VHS with dubbing.
Could be pricey though, Pioneer NTSC/PAL output Laserdisk players being expensive and rare secondhand.
And then DVD really took off and made everything available in a much more convenient size
Hence my defunct Anime collection on LD somewhere in the loft and a LD player in garage.
Re: Video CD.
"my defunct Anime collection on LD somewhere in the loft and a LD player in garage"
If you have the player and the media it's not defunct... :-)
You could at least copy them to DVD.
Re: Video CD.
Seconded! Getting my collection onto a harddrive is one of my projects for 2013. My player will not last forever. Speaking of it: get that player out of storage and use it every once in a while!
Just threw out
- a Palm V.
Audrey is still in a box somewhere (but I got her cheap -- $75 from Tiger Direct IIRC)
So that's two for me
//it's the one with the pockets filled with techno-trash, thanks
Re: Just threw out
Just sold my old Palm IIIx, complete with folding full-size keyboard, after 12 years faithful service - still working fine, but I no longer had any computers with an old-fashioned RS232 interface to sync with, and the desktop software would only run on my old machines. Palms were very good machines.
Replaced with an iPod Touch, which is an excellent (and under-rated) PDA.
You can tell xmas is close and enthusiasm is flagging.
This is the first of the 'Worst tech' articles you see a lot of this time of year.
Cut and paste from last year.
Where's my VR headset?
I was hoping to see VR in this list, but maybe it's so dead it didn't even make the radar...
I had massively high-hopes for VR back in the day, was so disappointed that it didn't really happen. Or did it and I never saw..?
Admittedly, if it had become a consumer-viable product, I would actually be inseparable from my goggles. Like, my skin would be growing around them and my eyes wouldn't have seen natural light in years. So, maybe they're doing us a favour...
Re: Where's my VR headset?
Don't worry, google are trying to fix that for you...
I am waiting for VR Contacts, and the resulting eye exams before the start of all tests from primary school until you leave education...
Re: Where's my VR headset?
Current cutting edge of semi-consumer VR:
http://www.oculusvr.com/
Latency still an issue.
What about that...
...Amstrad email phone nightmare thing
Re: What about that...
I will never forget the emailer. A real clash of mystery over reality, leading to fortunes won and lost. God I wish I had a crystal ball I would be a millionaire.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/694409.stm
"The mystery over what kind of internet device Amstrad would launch had strongly boosted the firm's share price by more than 600%, from 83 pence at the end of September 1999 to 607 pence at the end of trading on Tuesday." (28 March, 2000)
"However, disappointment over the fact that the e-m@iler will not allow consumers to actually surf the internet made many investors to reconsider Amstrad's stock market valuation."
"The firm's share price plunged by as much as 14% before recovering slightly." (it didn't recover for long, as it was shit!)
"Failures", surely, not "Fails"
Unless we're trying to be a load of mindless Americans (with apologies for the tautology).
Re: "Failures", surely, not "Fails"
Mark down for the racism.
Re: "Failures", surely, not "Fails"
Downvote for Minaj-level understanding of racism - Americans are not a race.
Frankly, if Americans were a race, we'd almost all be racists.
Re: "Failures", surely, not "Fails"
Xenophobia then. And Brits have some way to go before they're in a reasonable position to run around calling folk from other nations ignorant - and I speak as one, not as an American.
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