What's new?

Shopping on the Internet?

Online bank statements?

Cellphones?

Hoo boy, sometimes you wonder what *isn't* new in the last 15 years ..

GWE

I'm thinking more in terms of the last year! Like the new TVB-Gone thingy that you carry on your keychain and whenever in a bar, restaurant, bus, airport... anywhere the TV drives you bananas, just click and it will turn off any TV in the world!

Or the new marketing tool through eBay that lets you know how much the consumer market is willing to pay for something you might not even have invented yet through their closed auction feature.

Or why so many high-tech jobs are going offshore and what is replacing them.

Or how automation is finally getting a go in agriculture and what it will mean to the emerging Brazero program.

Dig into your memory and give me some good stuff!!!

Wayne

Using usenet to do your homework!

Cheers Trevor Jones

Forget the big airport...just fly Jet Blue into Long Beach. Love that realtime position display including altitude and speed at every seat....

Charles Morrill

For example, at airports they are setting up small parking lots within 5 minutes of the terminals for people to wait in their cars, without paying a fee, until they get a call from the passenger they will pick up on their cell phones.

I'd like to see people picking up passengers on their cell phones.

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:33:53 -0600, Phil McCracken calmly ranted:

I'm waiting for Louie Wu to give me one of Nessus' Puppeteer step plates, but that's outside of Wayne's parameters, darnit.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If God approved of nudity, we all would have been born naked. ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Your Wild & Woody Website Wonk

Pocket hard drives...

Thanking you one and all for the great ideas and suggestions... keep 'em coming!

Newsgroups, whereby I have conversed with more Americans in the last

5 years than the whole of my life prior to that!

All over the world. I helped my son get his

off the ground and via newsgroups, Google and drop ship publishers he has sold to So Africa, Israel, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the Netherlands. Something that just 20 years ago would take years via the Dept. of Commerce and their feeble services to reach foreign markets for US manufacturers.

Good point!

>

Wayne Lundberg wrote: ...

Obvious? After the fact, yeah. Here's a couple that I love:

Detergent bottles with caps that drain back into the bottle. What a great idea!

Pre-made pie dough that comes in a *roll*. It used to come folded and you had to unfold it, which always resulted in it cracking. Now you just unroll it and it never cracks. What a great (obvious) idea!

It's the simple little things that impress me. Complicated is easy, simple is hard.

Bob

and I dread to think who my children have conversed with.

The artificial sphincter they use was not entirely obvious, IMO.

Direct deposit of payroll is 20 or 30 years old, innit? At least here it was, for medium sized companies and up.

Putting colored LEDs behind an ordinary plasma TV panel to light the wall beyond the screen (in sympathy with colors on the screen) and thus expand the experience by using (blurry) peripheral vision was a cool idea (Philips).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

As sent previously:

Crate motors

In the old days, you used to spend half your time and money on the car, and half on the motor. Now, the big three auto companies will sell you a motor in a crate, with a warranty(!), built up in any number of configurations, e.g. a Hemi might come with different heads, carbs, whatever. These arrive at your garage ready to install, like plugging in a new set of batteries. Here is a link, for example, for a low cost $4000 replacement small block Magnum motor for my Jeep Grand Cherokee:

but as they say in racing, "Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?", so:

- $15,000 for over 600 hp in a Hemi.

The good news is that this has opened up the hobby to anyone with money, the bad news is that now anyone can build up a really competitive hotrod. Where are the motor heads of tomorrow going to come from? You no longer ever have to get your hands dirty, really. When kids talk about customizing their "Fast and Furious" cars, they mean what stickers and neon/LEDs and sound systems and wheels they have added. Customization today means picking things out of a catalog...

FWIW, another example is the visual arts. I graduated from art school nearly 30 years ago as a 16mm filmmaker - a dead field. I spent years learning how to print B&W photos - dead as a buggy whip. Camera stores, where I worked for years, are gone. You can't even buy paper-based photo paper, it is all 'resin-coated' (plastic) now. I am selling my last film-based camera equipment and no one wants it.

Overhead projectors used to be a big business along with other AV equipment - filmstrips? When was the last time you saw a slide show of someone's vacation to Europe?

I am old before my time, because I miss all these things. Image quality has completely gone from the visual arts - today's video and digital based art students don't even know what I am talking about when I talk about the color saturation of Kodachrome...

Who knew I would be a grumpy old man at 50?

You're not alone. I used to make very good money, before I started writing, by specializing in one thing (after a few years of freelance photography): making silver masks for Kodachromes, for unsharp masking, for contrast control, and for color correction. It was extremely fussy work that required quite a lot of knowledge and several densitometers, both visual and electronic. I had couriers beating a path to my door from New York publishers.

Buggy whips, anyone?

Wait 'till you're 56. d8-)

Ed Huntress

snip

Or 60, with 20 grandkids, you'll know grumpy trust me.

None of these ideas are new. I've been in telecom for nearly 20 years now, we've been talking about those things for that long. Someday (relatively) soon, we will have just one little box to do it all.

Heh...I used to point to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as the example of reliability - it just worked. Right now, I have no dial tone at my home. There's an intermittent problem somewhere between the CO switch and my demarc. The telco has been out to fix it 4 times in the last six weeks. Oddly enough, my DSL service has never hiccuped, and it runs on the same copper pair. Whatever the problem is, it's low resistance at DC (the switch thinks my phone is off hook), but high impedance at the frequencies used by the data channel.

-Ron

GPS for the average person. (I believe the military had it quite a while ago)

Airbags in cars

The Segway :-D

Hybrid cars

DVD movie players

eBay! :-D

AIM. (AOL Instant Messenger) We use it between computers in our home for things like "Dinner's ready!"

Computer Based Training

Computer Based Hiring, Applying for a job via computers

Laser-based eye surgery

Digital TV (I probably get over 300 stations now and there STILL isn't anything worth watching most of the time!)

The Web and Internet allow nearly anyone to build an international business for very little money.

Google.com

Amber Alerts!

Implantable defibrillators

Best Regards, Keith Marshall snipped-for-privacy@progressivelogic.com

"I'm not grown up enough to be so old!"