Coca-Cola have relaunched glass bottles here in Australia, aimed at the Cafe and Restaurant market- they’re only 330ml but they’re still the same price as the 600ml version from non-restaurant places. People apparently like paying more money for less drink if the place they’re doing it in is “trendy”.
The smaller Coke bottles always taste better to me. I don’t know if they use more syrup, or if it is real sugar as opposed to corn syrup. Do you notice a difference in taste?
Glass bottles have a cleaner, better taste for most dudes- around 60%, iirc. Same with sugar vs HFCS. Not all Coke in glass bottles has cane sugar, however.
Straight out of the bottle it is a cleaner, cooler, slightly sweeter taste- but if decanted into a glass, it tastes exactly the same as the regular stuff. Not worth the premium price, IMHO.
Kosher for Passover Coke has pure cane sugar, and is divine.
Oops.
How about answering machines? Are those still available/in use?
I don’t know about today, but I think DVD players for video will be obsolete very soon. Bluray is getting cheaper and cheaper.
Analog satellite dishes (those big 8-foot suckers) were still required for a bunch of different things ten years ago. They’re definitely dead now.
Analog cellphones are dead. RIP. I miss having wide coverage with moderate-quality audio, as opposed to these damnable digital phones that cut in and out, mutilate sound, and drop signals when you’re on the edge of a coverage area. I like all the extra features (texting, etc.) from the digital phones, but I sure miss the reliability of my analog phone.
CB radio was already dead (for all practical purposes) by 1999, so I guess it doesn’t count.
Swipe cards wouldn’t qualify as obsolete. I have never even seen a processor for a chipped card. I don’t know what they look like. I doubt if there’s a store in my whole town that can process one.
You can take away my incandescent bulbs when you give me an option that I can throw away when it burns out, instead of driving for a freaking hour to recycle it. Compact fluorescent will be obsolete the second white LEDs are cost-effective and easy to find.
Almost 2/3 of the money I took in at my bookstore today was checks. Granted, today was high, but it’s usually 10% or so. I like checks. They’re quick to process, and they cost me (as a merchant) a lot less than processing a credit/debit card. For that matter, if you want to buy something from a friend, how many of your friends have merchant card accounts? It’s either cash or check for personal transactions.
I don’t think there’s a single business my store deals with that doesn’t use faxes. Here’s the bottom line for me:
FAX: Place document on machine. Punch in phone number. Press “send.” Elapsed time: five or ten seconds.
ALTERNATIVE: Go to computer that scanner is connected to. If nobody is using it, fire up scanner application. Wait 45 seconds for scanner to warm up. Scan each page of document. Fire up webmail application on that computer. Enter recipient’s email address. Attach the scanned document. Send it. Elapsed time: five minutes or more.
And what about Big Ugly Dishes? Or were those on their way out by 1999? The Wiki article says they were virtually extinct by 1999.
Ten feet. 
4DTV is still muddling through, and analog receivers are still used to move the dish for DVB receivers.
Airmedia Live, if I remember correctly. I found one of them in a Goodwill a few weeks ago, sitting in a pile of Primestar receivers and WebTVs. 
Here’s another one: CompuServ.
It’s quite easy to fake a signature on a fax as well.
Just cut out a signature from another document, paste it into the correct place on the fax, then photocopy it. Use whiteout to cover the outline around the pasted signature and then when you fax it will look real.
I know this because I have made documents* by physically cutting and pasting and found the whiteout trick by accident.
- Nothing illegal…
Corn syrup isn’t used at all in Australia. I have tasted US Coke (with HFCS) and Australian Coke (with sugar) and cannot notice any difference in taste. As I type this I am drinking a can of Dr Pepper made with HFCS and it tastes fine.
It seems I’ve had a Week of Quaintly Old Fashioned…
Used a fax today because the bloke I sent an email to rang me to say his email was down and could I read the letter to him. So I faxed it instead.
Yesterday, my local barber gave me a hair cut (hair singular - there’s not much there these days) and used one of those Ka-chunk chunk machines when I paid by credit card. Apparently he is too small to justify the expense of installing the more modern machines.
Obsolete? Not quite yet. When the hi-tech fails as it often does, there is place for last-generation tech. These things aren’t yet in the category of hand-cranks for car engines or propellor powered fighter planes.
For me, the operative definition of obsolete is when a product is no longer useful or available even as a back up. Sure, there are goose quill pens around as a niche market, but no-one carries one just in case their Bic runs out of ink. You carry a second Bic. And if the starter motor in your car won’t crank, you have to sit and wait for your local version of the car club to arrive and get you on your way. That’s the Plan B, not having a crank in the car. And so on.
My nomination goes to the metal key for up market hotel accommodation. Sure you can get them at the Buzzing Sign Motel, but at anything even slightly larger, you get the plastic credit card style key that is basically disposable from the point of view of the proprietor.
I doubt the Iomega Zip Drive and disk are in wide-spread use or production now.
HFCS is in* everything*.:dubious: Maybe you mean in your Coke?
And, like I said, only 60% or so of dudes can tell the difference.
I’m pretty sure Australian Coke is made with Cane Sugar- we’re not exactly short of the stuff. It’s a major crop in North Queensland.
Australia has a huge sugar industry that is (or was) politically powerful. The tropical and subtropical east coast from Ballina north is hugely densely populated with cane farms because there has historically been lots of water and otherwise good conditions for cane. One of our historical disgraces is importing essentially slaves (“blackbirding”) from Pacific Islands to cut the cane. There is plenty of tradition and history here.
Particularly in Queensland (essentially the top right quadrant of the country) there was a strong push by the government from the 19C and through the 20C to promote sugar cane planting, and it became so well established that it is almost impossible to undo without wrecking the economies of large numbers of towns that depend on it.
The price for cane sugar seems to be fairly steadily falling for a number of reasons, and therefore the raw laws of economics are forcing out the more marginal producers, but if there was any general push to introduce HFCS as a replacement for sugar, you can bet there’d be a tax on it very quickly so that sugar would still outcompete it. Unlike America,we don’t have huge corn fields to find something to do with. Our standard grain crop is wheat (for the drier parts of the country) and corn is grown for the table as a relatively niche product.
The existence of an already existing huge sugar cane operation no doubt helped prevent the growth of a corn-for-sweetener industry.
But no, HFCS is not in everything. It depends on the politics of where you live, just like in America, where I gather Florida sugar growers short-sightedly kept the price so high that HFCS became a viable alternative.
Today’s Dilbert seems ripped from this thread.
A couple of years back our office fax bit the dust, and I ordered a new one. (We do have to have faxes, because a signed fax is a legally enforceable document.) Anyway, I ordered one for under a hundred bucks. The next day, I get a call from purchasing because I didn’t order the hospital ‘standard’ machine – which cost $1200. It has every conceivable bell and whistle, but because they aren’t put onto our network, virtually none of the super-duper functions work.
Sheesh, no wonder we need death panels!