“Rear wheel steering can tend to be unstable because in turns the steering geometry tends to decrease the turn radius (oversteer), rather than increase it (understeer). A rear wheel steered automobile exhibits non-minimum phase behavior.[7] It turns in the direction opposite of how it is initially steered. A rapid steering input will cause two accelerations, first in the direction that the wheel is steered, and then in the opposite direction: a “reverse response.” This makes it harder to steer a rear wheel steered vehicle at high speed than a front wheel steered vehicle.”
From wikipedia. Was going to paraphrase but I’m too lazy.
Personally, I’d prefer rear wheel steering for town driving, but having driven forklifts on the road, I think I’ll stick to front wheel steer for anything over about 20mph!
I’m sure it’s perfectly feasible to make a car with switchable steering modes, several types of forklift and tractor have up to 5 selectable steering modes. The main thing stopping it being made is that not many people would pay as much as it would cost just for the extra manouverability that they have done without so far.
About that Giraffe’s nerve: This turned up on wimp.com today:
Clip of dissection of a Giraffe’s laryngeal nerve and (very short) explanation.
back then it probably would have been more trouble-prone, but it’s interesting that single-chip DLP and LCoS TVs use color wheels quite similar to the CBS system.
Well, there is one theory that telephone keypads are the opposite (vertically) of calculator keypads in order to slow down dialing;
"The first theory deals with the telephone’s circuitry and tone-recognition hardware. When the touch-tone telephone was being designed in the late 1950s, the calculator and adding-machine designers had already established a layout that had 7, 8 and 9 across the top row. Data-entry professionals, and others who used calculators fairly regularly, were quite adept at navigating these keypads. They could hit the numbers extremely quickly, which was great for data entry, but not so great for dialing a touch-tone phone. The tone-recognition technology could not operate effectively at the speeds at which these specialists could dial the numbers. The telephone designers figured that if they reversed the layout, the dialing speeds would decrease and the tone-recognition would be able to do its job more reliably. This theory has little proof to substantiate it, but it does make sense. "
See Why are telephone and calculator keypads arranged differently? | HowStuffWorks
What’s preferable to Word?
Depends on what you’re using it for. It’s quite good if you want to type a couple dozen pages of text with large amount of freedom of layout, but not nearly as good as LaTeX if you’re writing a couple of hundred pages of cross-referenced math-heavy text with a consistent layout. In the same way, MS Excel is optimized for people making a bunch of fancy looking tables and graphs, but sucks if you actually want more than 256 pages of data.
The main problem with true rotary (pulse) phones vs true push (tone) phones, is that 1 … 9 (and 0 = 10) in dial/rotary phones numbers are implemented as that number of pulses of a specified length followed by a pause. On a rotary phone, entering a 1 is much quicker than entering a 7 for that reason.
But in effect, on all push phones that I’ve seen that implement the earlier dial/pulse “protocol” you’re entering numbers faster than they can be transmitted and the electronics just delay the transmission for you, and the reason is obvious to anyone who’s ever used a rotary phone: a single “9” digit takes something like 2 whole seconds to transmit.
Touch-tone phones were designed that way because of the already existing association between letters and numbers in phone “numbers”. That was the least confusing way for phone users. The equipment could already deal with numbers entered faster than “touch calculating” accountants could punch the numbers. I’ve been dealing with phone equipment (phreaking) since the 70s (much of it still in service from pre-touch-tone days), and as my mother was a phone operator from those ptt days, she was the source of much of my knowledge on the earlier equipment.
Amen. Offhand I can’t think of a word processor I’d dub worse. Ahead of it I would put Nisus Writer, WordPerfect, iWork Writer, Lotus WordPro, AppleWorks WP module, MacWrite Pro, MarinerWrite, ABiWord, Ashton-Tate FullWrite, MacWrite II, StarOffice WP Module, OpenOffice WP Module, NeoOffice/J WP Module, WordPad, TextEdit, BBEdit, BBEdit Lite, NotePad, NEdit, pico, vi, the command prompt itself…
there aren’t words for how vehemently I hate MS Word and iti’s been a long term hatred. If there’s one place I do NOT want a piece of software to get intrusive and act like it knows better than I do what I’m trying to do, it’s word processing.
I do not use Word, I do not own Word and Word will never under any circumstances be installed on my main OS environment. I occasionally will install it in emulation environment. (Most recently I think as part of Office 97 in emulated Windows95?)
Would the 3 minute pop song count? It was originally that length because of the devices it was recorded on and now most pop songs are still that length due to sheer inertia.
My favorite example is the incandescent light bulb. It might be the least efficient method of electrical lighting ever devised. Many incandescents use more energy producing heat than light. And the life of the device is very short, increasing the cost of its use. But Edison was the first to market a practical device, and it’s been maintained for over a century. To this day, the incandescent bulb is used to symbolize a great idea.
Heretic! 5.1a is the way and the light!
There may be more to it than just inertia; you’ve also got the factor of how many can be played per hour on the radio, leaving time for other material like ads, weather, general jabber, etc…in short what I believe is called “programming”.
There may also be a factor of “attention span” on the part of the listener.
Further back, 3 minutes or so resulted in a “nice” dozen-or-so per 33-1/3 album. (Yes there were many variants)
To be fair, they can make longer lasting incandescent bulbs. The market simply decided that they weren’t wanted. Kind of like the market is deciding that we all want Walmart-quality clothes and shoes, etc.
But were there superior technologies that were abandoned because nobody wanted to go to the hassle of switching? (Which is the point of the OP)
There are better technologies now-- compact flourescents with decent color – but incadescents are in fact being replaced. Not instantly, but pretty steadily, I believe.
A better example might be light bulb sockets. Current sockets are way to easy to short out by sticking your finger or something in them. It would be trivial to invent a socket that’s safer, but good luck getting manufacturers to switch their bulbs.