My first few VCRs were able to go into slow-motion mode. I would pause the video, and then go forward one frame at a time. I loved doing that for certain special-effects scenes. Nowadays I have to go back 10 seconds to watch it again, go back 10 seconds to watch it a second time, and so on until I give up because the action is too fast to actually see.
On a probably unrelated note: It seems to me that in the past many shows and movies were noticeably brighter than nowadays. There seem to be more nighttime scenes than in decades past, and I can’t help but suspect that it is done deliberately to hide the special effects.
Seems like 100% progress to me. No backwards about it.
Now I don’t use Apple products so maybe their special branded mouse sucks. But there are plenty of other-branded mice whose touch scroll feature works very naturally and smoothly. I’m using one right now to scroll up and down this thread.
I work in I.T. and get nothing but complaints about them. Plus I’ve used them myself and they suck. I suppose touch screens in cars are better than buttons, too.
I drive a Tesla and still appreciate the physical scrollwheels on the steering wheel .
And the wheel on my mouse has two modes; one where you can feel the indentations, and another where it spins freely but has a nice momentum to it. Neither mode is going to carry well to a touch scroll system.
The great value of a touch screen, in my opinion, is that it can be reconfigured for various purposes. One situation might require three buttons, and another might need four buttons. Or the same number of buttons, but different labels. This allows the same physical screen to be used for many different functions.
But when driving my car, I hate actually using those buttons. When there is a physical button, I can reach out and feel the buttons without actually pressing them, and then decide which one to press, all while keeping my eyes on the road. But with the touch screen, I have to look away, and aim my finger at the button that I want to press. Even worse, because the ride isn’t perfectly smooth, or if the buttons are small, my aim is sometimes inaccurate, and I find that I need to use other fingers to anchor my hand in place, so that the aim will be more accurate. NOT a very safe way to drive.
Speaking of touch screens, I want to say a few words in memory of my beloved Palm Pilot, and especially its stylus.
The pointed stylus enabled me to click (or whatever the appropriate verb was) any desired pixel of the screen that needed to be clicked. Once in a while it needed to be recalibrated, but that was a small price to pay compared to today’s inaccurate crap.
I remember going from my last Palm Pilot to my first smartphone, and I chose a smartphone that came with a stylus, specifically because I loved the level of detail and accuracy that I had with the Palm. I learned all too quickly, how the smartphones were a great example of the title of this thread, Inventions That Went Backward. Suddenly, these “smart” phones were no longer accurate to the pixel, and were designed for fingerprints.
Even the “stylus” that came with that phone had no pointed tip; it was a ball of rubber no different than the pens sold today. It took me a while to understand that the stylus was not intended for accuracy, but for people who wore gloves such that the screen didn’t realize that someone was clicking on it. I applaud the designers’ sensitivity in designing a way for a gloved hand to use a touch screen. But it comes at the cost of accuracy.
If you want an example of where this accuracy is needed, I often type things that are longer than just a few words, and if I need to edit it, it is frustratingly difficult to move the cursor to the very beginning or very end of a line. On my Palm this was simple.
And yet, you felt the need to weigh in with an opinion stated as fact.
Cassette tapes are 1/8" wide with four tracks (left and right and the ability to turn the tape over) meaning that each side of the cassette has 1/16" width for a stereo recording. It runs at a speed of 1.875 ips. A reel to reel tape player plays 1/4" wide tapes in one direction (i.e. four times the width of the cassette) and at 7.5 ips. So that’s 4 times wider and four times faster or a 16 times larger real estate to record and store information.
As noted above, playing a tape at 15 ips gives you vinyl quality, and that is doubling yet again the available storage capacity, so 32 times. There is simply no physical way a cassette tape can hold the same amount of information. The trade off for the convenience of the cassette is poorer frequency range, poorer dynamic, more noise (which Dolby tried - and failed - to correct, as well as different type of metal coating (chrome vs. Fe)).
But in no way, shape, form was the sound quality superior.
You left out one vital requirement for your imaginary engineer - you can leave the device in your pocket while you approach, enter, start, & drive the car. A key can’t do that. I find the convenience of leaving the key in my pocket all the time far outweighs any of the potential problems with leaving the car on. After all, if you park in a garage at home you’re just as likely to leave the keys in the ignition as to neglect to hit the off button. I certainly won’t ever buy a car again that uses a key instead of push-button start.
Well… landline phones weren’t even “phones” in the classic analog sense after a certain point in the 1980s or 1990s, when the telecom companies basically ran analog to your home, but digitized your phone calls and sent them over the same old digital backbone with everything else.
Voice has pretty low bandwidth requirements- I would bet a big part of why cell phones sound cruddy much of the time is cheap/bad speakers and microphones, not some sort of network-related issue.
I just learned this one in the last couple of months - if you have an Apple product, long-press the space bar, then hold your finger on the cursor. With some luck (97.3% success rate for me), it will magnify the text around the cursor a bit and you can move the cursor to where you need it.
No, mine is Android. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, Lo and behold, a long-press on the space bar gave me a message about “Cursor Control”, and a quick Google search led me to this article which explained how to use it. THANK YOU!!!
No, it’s the transmission. Some people I call on my cell phone exhibit the usual telephonic level of crap quality. But my wife and I are both on AT&T, and if we connect, our voices have the same sort of good audio fidelity you get on Skype/Zoom.
IMHO, the humble pickup truck has gone backwards as market forces brought about many transformations over the decades.
It used to be, you would buy a pickup truck for less than a nice car, and it was a perfectly functional vehicle, meant primarily for hauling stuff. People who drove them did hard work and may have looked down upon air-conditioned leather-upholstered luxury cars.
Nowadays, most trucks are manufactured as gigantic $70k “cars” with four doors and a stubby five-foot bed in the back to retain the truck appearance. Inside, they are packed with all kinds of features that might be nice to have but add greatly to the cost. They have become the luxury car.
The old-school pickup typically had a bench seat in the front and no back seat. It had no air conditioning and no power anything. There was probably a “three on the tree” shifter.
That type of vehicle was very practical for hauling stuff and no tears were shed if it got some dents.
I believe these still exist in the world of fleet trucks, but you won’t find many of them available at car dealers.
Ha! Same here! My kindergartner was playing with the iPad and I noticed her moving around the cursor that way. I was like, what devilry is this? So she showed me. How I had not learned about this method of moving the cursor, I don’t know. How long has it been standard on the iPhone/iPad?
What’s interesting to me is how big the the new Ford Rangers are compared to the original ones in the 80s. I miss the actual compact pickups they had back then
I remember reading somewhere that small pickups were no longer on the market because it cost just about the same to build, in North America, a small pickup or a basic F-150, and so they wouldn’t have been able to charge less for the smaller models. And the chicken tax increases the price of imported small pickups.
I’m all in favor of conserving water and helping the environment, but modern toilets simply don’t have the oomph of the toilets of yesteryear. Today you’re lucky to even clear away a rabbit dropping in a couple of flushes. But boy howdy, back in the day you could clear a pile of T-rex poop with a single flush. It was like breaching the Hoover Dam with each depression of the handle.
Regarding recorded music: I think what has gone backward more so than the media and compressed file format the music is recorded on are the components younger generations choose to play music back on. In my experience (with my late teen/early 20s kids and their friends), they have no desire to listen to their music on high-end (but large and cumbersome) components, choosing instead the convenience and portability of small devices.
To be sure, the sound quality of many contemporary portable devices is quite good…for their size. But, it doesn’t compare to the sound of Hi-Fi systems previous generations built and enjoyed. The young people I know have no desire for a high-end sound system even when listening at home, where portability isn’t required. And, I guess they don’t want to look dorky even wearing a good set of headphones, opting instead for average-sounding earbuds. They seem to want good quality, but don’t care about great quality.
When I fire up my big speakers and huge sub-woofer my kids yell, “turn that music down, it’s shaking the house!” When I was young, my parents scolded, “turn your damned music down!” Now, my kids tell me the same thing. I can’t win. Maybe my grandkids will be cool.
Smartboards have a lot of advantages over whiteboards, but it took a long time before they came up with one of them that two people could write on at once, and they’re still almost all of them smaller than most whiteboards.
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