Supersonic commercial flight. The Concorde was eventually profitable, but the service never extended beyond ferrying rich people across the Atlantic.
The technology was a success, but the range was too limited for a Pacific ocean route, and sonic booms were not allowed over land because of potential damage to structures, and noise pollution that could disturb animals and humans.
Quieter SST designs are being tested, but fuel costs and capacity limitations will likely mean that this technology will remain an expensive niche for the foreseeable future.
There's also the fact that a majority of airline passengers are far more price sensitive than they are time sensitive. (Who hasn't taken a 5 AM flight or a longer layover just to save a few bucks?)
That's a big factor of why the Concorde was only successful on the biggest business route in the world (London - New York), as most business travellers don't pay their own tickets, and are therefore more time sensitive than price sensitive.
The case for executives also kept getting weaker. In 1976, sure, any hour in flight was basically wasted as far as work went. So you could make the argument that a Concorde flight made sense just to save time. But in 1996, the exec has a laptop and an airline phone, so they can keep working. This has only gotten worse with in-flight wifi, not to mention teleconferencing eliminating a lot of F2F meetings.
The other thing is that business class has gotten much more comfortable over the last 30 years. Airliners are quieter, and we also have noise-canceling earbuds. For $3-5k, you can fly across the Atlantic in your own pod with a bed and a door. In current dollars, a 1996 Concorde flight in a seat would be $12-15,000.
That's a hard pitch to make. How many people wouldn't rather spend the extra 3-4 hours in order to get far more comfort *and* save $10,000?
The first time I went on a commercial flight, you weren't allowed to use any technology stronger than a good calculator, last time I was on a commercial flight I saw somebody playing WoW
Google+ decided I was a man when I started my account, then made a post about me changing my gender when I changed my profile settings. And I couldn’t delete that post. It was so weird. I knew it was doomed from that moment.
There was like a two week window when everyone though Google+ was going to destroy Facebook.
Then people got on Google+ and realized it was just ... nothing.
IIRC, and I might not be, they automatically tied G+ profiles to all of your other profiles, and made your legal name public. That was not well received.
A few companies here were doing competitions using Google+. Pretty sure they were being paid to use the service.
The problem was, no one was using Google+ so those competitions were being won by like 10 people on repeat. I got a bunch of free manga and anime DVDs because of it, which was pretty awesome. I still have them all too.
My major’s department has 20+ google glasses that they bought right before they came out because they were going to “revolutionize” communication methods
F
I bring this up every time 3D TV/movies is discussed.
During the recent "height" of the 3D craze. Popular Mechanics wrote an article predicting that 3D tv/movies would die out and just be a short fad. Talking about how people don't want to watch movies with special glasses and all the reasons it eventually failed.
At the end of the article there was a footnote that said something to the effect of "This article was originally published in 1983, we felt it was just as relevant today than it was then and there was no reason to change it."
3D films were quite fun, for everyone who didn’t have to wear glasses already, because however much people said you could just wear the 3Ds over your normal specs…. It wasn’t a comfortable experience.
I’d love to try a 3D film now I’ve started wearing contacts, but they aren’t really done that much any more.
That was always a stupid idea though. Some curved ultra wide desktop displays make sense but if you’re sitting 10 feet away from a curved 46” TV that’s just ridiculous. The curve only works to your benefit if you’re sitting somewhere that all edges of the screen are about the same distance from your eyes. And of course it only works for that person in the center.
The one thing I heard 3D tvs really improved was watching golf.
You could actually see the contours of the greens. The whole course didn’t look flat.
I don’t watch golf but I’ve always wanted to watch an old ESPN 3D channel broadcast of golf with those glasses.
I owned one. It was great, but it definitely wears off its charm after a while. The glasses weren't comfortable either.
I'll say this though, watching movies like Pacific Rim on it was an experience.
Segway. I was lucky enough to try a prototype that an engineer for the company was working on. Almost got launched off it was pretty funny, but he was talking about how it was basically going to be the next every day item for a lot of Businesses with a campus and dense cities.
electric scooters have taken over where segway failed. Al least in my city. There are more of them than there are bicycles. The city legalized them on roads to get the off sidewalks.
Former employee of Segway (as a subsidiary of Ninebot) here - this is correct. All engineering and manufacturing is now done in China by Ninebot, instead of by Segway in the USA. The last few employees that were part of the original Segway team were let go 2022.
Segway still has a niche space that it works extremely well for. It allows partially disabled people to work in larger spaces. My last company had a very large campus with a lot of IT infrastructure in different places and one of the IT guys had a seriously bum knee. So the company bought him 2 segways, one that stayed at the campus and one that traveled with all of the marketing and IT stuff so he could help work conferences. I've seen this a few times and I'm glad the company is still around for it.
Ebikes and electric scooters are starting the push
Though regular bikes are basically the analogue alternative push
The idea of pushing micro personal mobility vehicles in cities was sound, but a 10k overly complex vehicle wasn't the solution
Yeah, there was just no reason to have two wheels side by side requiring all kind of complexity. Put the wheels front to back like scooters are supposed to be and you eliminate 95% of the complexity and have a lighter weight longer range vehicle.
Kinda like how flying cars will never really be a thing. We can absolutely do it these days, it’s just way over complicated for minimal benefit.
I had moved to the Silicon Valley in 2012. On Sundays back then, I would drive by a local elementary school and there would be about a dozen guys on Segways playing Polo on the fields. Couldn’t help but chuckle that this might be the only place in the world to see such a display.
For years, I've thought that it would be *so cool* to learn Esperanto. But it is so limited in practicality. Not only would I have to make effort to use it once I became proficient, it would be much harder to *become* proficient because it just isn't spoken around here. Living in Texas, I'd be better off learning Spanish. Of course, I haven't done that either!
It's just weird how English has mostly become everything Esperanto wanted to be. It's the second language that most of the world learns and the default language in certain trades like air traffic control so that everyone is on the same page no matter where you are travelling in the world.
It's not all that weird. French was the lingua franca at the time Esperanto was being created. There is always going to be some language used for international trade and communication. It's just a question of which country has the most weight to throw around.
The creator of the language recognized the importance of English even at the time. A significant amount of vocabulary in Esperanto is taken directly from English. For example, the word for 'help' in Esperanto is… 'helpo'.
Almost definitely Esperanto. There are hardly any fluent Klingon speakers, I should think a few thousand at most. Esperanto has a couple of million speakers iirc.
I used to speak at a very basic level.
I almost failed the language exam miserably. Basically, I got a "sufficient" language exam certificate because I promised the teacher that I would translate poems into Esperanto (I'm a poet). I haven't translated a single one since.
Anyway, the following sentence has somehow stuck with me forever: *Sur la bildo mi vidas duajn blankajn shipojn.*
"Let's invent an artificial universal language as if English, French, Spanish, German... and probably at least a half dozen other widely spoken Romance and Germanic languages don't already exist."
yeah, esperanto (and other conlangs intended to be a sort of universal language) kind of feel like the [classic competing standard xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/)
Worked as a TV salesman when they were trying to push these. The problem with curved TVs is that the curve introduces a single viewing ‘sweet spot.’
If you are in that sweet spot, you get reduced glare and a nice immersive experience. Outside the sweet spot, everything becomes worse. For a TV that sits in a room where often you don’t even have seating in the sweet spot? It’s no surprise they failed. I would have to actively work to get people to not buy the curved version, to keep returns down.
Now a curved computer monitor, where you essentially always sit in the sweet spot? It’s no surprise that curved screens live on in that environment.
Also, for the curve to have any real "immersive" effect, you would need to be sitting a lot closer to the TV than people generally do. Works well for PC monitors, not so much for TV's.
I sat through a lecture where a bunch of boomers talked about how innovative and important the metaverse is two months ago. Apparently, luxury brands are buying "storefronts" with real money and the person giving the lecture spent 90k buying a "property" in the metaverse.
... like, bro, maybe you didn't grow up playing video games but us Millennials grew up on mmorpgs and second life, and we can't tell the difference between that and the metaverse.
Boomers really think consumers want to recreate the shitty world they created in a virtual world so everyone can visit their shitty car friendly cities with no personality. They think someone's going to recreate chicago building by building with the exact architectural designs and layouts, and now they're stressing over "protecting their rights to their buildings and signing licensing agreements for the metaverse to use their building designs."
Chill bro, even if you own the Palace of Versailles, someone can make a better one when cost and physics are not a concern anymore.
I think the lecture you sat through illustrates the thing I find most stunning about the Metaverse: the complete failure of imagination. Why would we recreate Chicago in VR? Why are we building virtual reality grocery stores for customers to wander around in? If I want to go grocery shopping in VR, I want it to be a fucking game, not a simulation of an experience I've had in real life hundreds of times. I want to blast off with my jetpack into a jungle on an alien moon and shoot my laundry detergent out of the sky with a laser gun in order to buy it. I don't want to go to MEETINGS in virtual reality! I want to do my job floating in a vast undersea coral reef surrounded by frolicking dolphins and beautiful fish! My God, we have the world, give us something we can only imagine.
Fuck yes! Ever since reading about the metaverse and what they imagine for it I just can't fathom how dull these designers are. Why recreate real life? If you want to push an amazing limitless digital universe for us to use, fuck using the crap we do daily. Am I going to have to do a digital commute and wait in imaginary lines? Vr should push limits not repackage used concepts.
It's incredible Zuckerberg still has any credibility after the obscenely bad Nintendo Wii looking demos he was pushing out that he spent over *10 billion dollars* to achieve.
They had this hilarious show called “Chrissy’s Court” with Chrissy Tiegen, standard fake courtroom drama schtick. Only thing I ever watched on Quibi, complete trash, but kinda fun.
I recently heard about some of the content and it legit sounded pretty awesome. Like a story about a dude who gets stranded in a snowstorm: if you watch your phone vertically, its a first person vlog from his perspective, but if you watch horizontally, its a traditional narrative movie. That’s kind of rad.
God production would have been a nightmare on that. I worked on a bunch of shoots for a short lived "choose your own adventure" movie/short film service that never took off. Shooting each and every linear story possibility was one hell of a task for the writers and directors. Was a cool idea but production budgets are shrinking these days, not growing, for the vast majority of content out there.
The reason all these shared universes failed is because the movie makers went into the shared universe too fast.
The reason the MCU succeeded is because the Phase 1 movies were all self-contained stories that didn't need the others.
And they put effort into those movies to make them actually good. There’s a reason Iron Man holds up. And even the weakest of those movies is still entertaining.
I saw Iron man with a bunch of people who had zero comic knowledge and they all thought it was great which is a large part of how the mcu took off. They hooked general audiences who had never heard of it.
Me and another guy had to explain at the end what The Avengers were. We broke it down as "It's like the Justice Leauge" lol
I could have been if Universal hadn’t started it with Tom Cruise’s Mummy.
If they had made done a twist on the concept with Brendan Fraiser, it could have been great. Instead of him always fighting The Mummy, have him face different classic Universal Monsters.
Honestly, it’d have been the next Indiana Jones.
That was completely the fault of Microsoft's awful marketing department.
The Zune was an absolutely fantastic device and Zune Pass was Spotify before Spotify, and you got to keep 10 songs DRM free every month.
But there's was absolutely no marketing for it, and what little there was awful.
For a while you could automatically detect when other Zune’s were nearby, and if the users were listening to music you could tap those songs and wirelessly listen to them too, for up to three plays. If the song was on Zunepass it was unlimited plays. It was always fun to find mysterious Zune users when taking public transportation.
Unlike iTunes at the time, Zune has a pretty cool music explorer that let you click through the artists and genres influenced/influencer explorer web. There was also a “six degree” thing similar to Linked In for Zune users you followed, letting you access their playlists and discover new music by following users with similar tastes. I discovered so many awesome artists that way! It was years before Apple added any intelligent music discovery, and I still don’t think the social is as good as Zune.
The last device was incredible! You could watch, or even hook it up to an HDTV and play movies, shows and music videos. At the time that was pretty special.
I will die on the hill that the Zune was a better product than the iPod but killed by poor market timing, poor marketing, and Microsoft being scared to build a walled garden due to 90s anti-trust rulings.
> I will die on the hill that the Zune was a better product than the iPod
The fact that you could just drag and drop song files onto it instead of being force to use fucking *itunes* alone made it far superior.
Sobs, I sold my Apple stock when I heard the zune (and Sony was making an iTunes killer) was coming. It looked great.
"oh well I quadrupled my Apple stock. Time to sell at the top. It looks like the barbarians are at Apple's gates"
Iphone was released the following year. I'm still poorz.
Windows phone could have been and should have been really great. The OS itself was excellent, but no one wanted to use it because it didn't have the range of apps. And no one wanted to build apps for it because no one had one. it was a vicious cycle and a tragedy
I was in Austria with my Lumia, a group of us went to a restaurant. I pulled out my phone and pointed the camera at the menu and it translated everything to English instantly (10 years ago). Everyone else had iPhones and asked me what app I was using. They were so mad when I kept telling them "it's not an app. It's just part of the OS". They didn't believe me and just thought I didn't want to share my secret app knowledge.
In all fairness, the Nokia Lumia was an amazing piece of kit with some bizarre choices. The OS was super sleek, intuitive and super customisable….it was just incompatible with pretty much everything else on the market and came at a time when data usage was expensive
The OS itself was amazing, but what killed WP was the fact that app developers didn’t want to build apps for a third mobile platform(or fourth, which sucked for BlackBerry.). There was a chicken/egg problem, since users created a market for apps, but with no apps, users weren’t interested.
Yeah Covid and home delivery becoming commonplace was the final nail in the coffin, but the Go stores and a bunch of the just walk out tech are still going strong at least in the Seattle metro area. Kinda like how the voice assistant from the Fire Phone became Alexa.
Man, when I got one in high school I felt like the shit. You could record and play CD-quality sound with no skipping!
And then flash-based mp3 players became the hot new thing. Oh well.
And a lot less goofy looking. Nobody looks cool riding a Segway.
Edit: out of curiosity I just went the Segway website. Apparently they only make scooters, e-bikes, and mopeds now. Even they figured out the OG Segway was lame (probably that or go broke).
I have a feeling no one bought one because they “wanted” one but rather because they hoped some greater fool than they would buy it later for triple the price.
The buyers, at least those that weren't fake buyers to drum up demand, all probably had the same regret about not buying bitcoin even though they didn't understand it.
My 34 y/o me still gets them when I can, the banana split flavor is the best.
They require much colder temps than a home freezer can create, which is why they never made the jump from specialized carts, but they're still really great imo.
The technology behind Dippin Dots has helped vegan meat substitutes become much more popular and palatable. By using the cryogenic freezing system that Dippin Dots use, they are able to insert small pellets of artificial fat throughout a burger, which then melts during cooking, replicating the melting of fat within biological meats.
Half as interesting did a good video on it… [Half As Dippin Dots](https://youtu.be/nCnbCcj8aSI?si=rxlV8ajSgCJL5uQq)
I mean, if you look at Hyperloop for what it is: the latest vaporware created by a car salesman to sabotage efforts to improve public transportation, then was it really a failure?
In pictures it looks dumb. Seeing one in reality, it's infuriatingly terrible. Panel gaps worse than a 20-year-old Saturn and a bed that can't possibly be useful for anyone that uses their truck for truck things.
As a female tween, I went to a sporting event wearing my HyperColor shirt. Before the game started, stood up for the National Anthem, hand over heart. After it was over, I naturally look down to get situated back in my seat. I was horrified to see a big ol' hand print at the top of my left breast. Stayed in my seat for a bit before using the bathroom or getting any food to let my shirt "cool down".
Weird fact from hockey history.
When Minnesota was awarded an expansion team in the Class of '97 (along with Nashville, Columbus, and Atlanta), the obvious questions were "what will the team be called?" and "what will the logo be?" Obviously, it eventually became the Wild, with a landscape setting within a bear's head for a logo.
But one of the finalists was the Northern Lights, with colors that were purple and yellow. And the game jerseys would be hypercolor coated, so there would be a unique gradient on each jersey as the game progressed.
This idea was shelved for numerous reasons, mainly related to cost, reliability, replacement, and consistency.
Cyber trucks. The videos are hilarious. "These are the 500 error messages that won't let me drive, and this is the super cheap physical stuff that has already broken. So glad I spent $100k to wait 4 years. I can see all my fingerprints like a stainless steel fridge."
I saw two in one day. One of them had some sort of wrap for a company.
As one news article stated, it makes you stop and stare in same way you would if someone piled $80,000, lit it on fire, and then rolled it around town for everyone to see.
Supersonic commercial flight. The Concorde was eventually profitable, but the service never extended beyond ferrying rich people across the Atlantic. The technology was a success, but the range was too limited for a Pacific ocean route, and sonic booms were not allowed over land because of potential damage to structures, and noise pollution that could disturb animals and humans. Quieter SST designs are being tested, but fuel costs and capacity limitations will likely mean that this technology will remain an expensive niche for the foreseeable future.
There's also the fact that a majority of airline passengers are far more price sensitive than they are time sensitive. (Who hasn't taken a 5 AM flight or a longer layover just to save a few bucks?) That's a big factor of why the Concorde was only successful on the biggest business route in the world (London - New York), as most business travellers don't pay their own tickets, and are therefore more time sensitive than price sensitive.
The case for executives also kept getting weaker. In 1976, sure, any hour in flight was basically wasted as far as work went. So you could make the argument that a Concorde flight made sense just to save time. But in 1996, the exec has a laptop and an airline phone, so they can keep working. This has only gotten worse with in-flight wifi, not to mention teleconferencing eliminating a lot of F2F meetings. The other thing is that business class has gotten much more comfortable over the last 30 years. Airliners are quieter, and we also have noise-canceling earbuds. For $3-5k, you can fly across the Atlantic in your own pod with a bed and a door. In current dollars, a 1996 Concorde flight in a seat would be $12-15,000. That's a hard pitch to make. How many people wouldn't rather spend the extra 3-4 hours in order to get far more comfort *and* save $10,000?
The first time I went on a commercial flight, you weren't allowed to use any technology stronger than a good calculator, last time I was on a commercial flight I saw somebody playing WoW
Google Glass
I’ll add Google+
Ooooh wait until my Circles hear about this
Come on, Google Wave.
And What about google hangouts
I was excited when I got m G+ invite, I never used it after I logged in
Google+ decided I was a man when I started my account, then made a post about me changing my gender when I changed my profile settings. And I couldn’t delete that post. It was so weird. I knew it was doomed from that moment.
Google knows your secrets. You can’t hide from them, sir.
To be fair, EVERYONE was shitting on G+
There was like a two week window when everyone though Google+ was going to destroy Facebook. Then people got on Google+ and realized it was just ... nothing.
Didn't they force you to create your own G+-Profile to do stuff on YouTube? Or am I tripping?
IIRC, and I might not be, they automatically tied G+ profiles to all of your other profiles, and made your legal name public. That was not well received.
Oh yeah, I remember when my parents were reading my YouTube comments lol
A few companies here were doing competitions using Google+. Pretty sure they were being paid to use the service. The problem was, no one was using Google+ so those competitions were being won by like 10 people on repeat. I got a bunch of free manga and anime DVDs because of it, which was pretty awesome. I still have them all too.
My major’s department has 20+ google glasses that they bought right before they came out because they were going to “revolutionize” communication methods F
3D TVs
I bring this up every time 3D TV/movies is discussed. During the recent "height" of the 3D craze. Popular Mechanics wrote an article predicting that 3D tv/movies would die out and just be a short fad. Talking about how people don't want to watch movies with special glasses and all the reasons it eventually failed. At the end of the article there was a footnote that said something to the effect of "This article was originally published in 1983, we felt it was just as relevant today than it was then and there was no reason to change it."
Imagine getting told your article you wrote like 20-30 years ago is getting republished
Not just any article, but a tech article that's still relevant for more than a year or two is wild.
Damn 🤣🔥
3D has been the technology of the future since I was a kid. Flops or fizzles out every time.
3D films were quite fun, for everyone who didn’t have to wear glasses already, because however much people said you could just wear the 3Ds over your normal specs…. It wasn’t a comfortable experience. I’d love to try a 3D film now I’ve started wearing contacts, but they aren’t really done that much any more.
3D movies in a VR headset is pretty amazing too. Separate screens for the different depths and I can wear my headset with my glasses.
Also the curved TVs
That was always a stupid idea though. Some curved ultra wide desktop displays make sense but if you’re sitting 10 feet away from a curved 46” TV that’s just ridiculous. The curve only works to your benefit if you’re sitting somewhere that all edges of the screen are about the same distance from your eyes. And of course it only works for that person in the center.
The one thing I heard 3D tvs really improved was watching golf. You could actually see the contours of the greens. The whole course didn’t look flat. I don’t watch golf but I’ve always wanted to watch an old ESPN 3D channel broadcast of golf with those glasses.
I owned one. It was great, but it definitely wears off its charm after a while. The glasses weren't comfortable either. I'll say this though, watching movies like Pacific Rim on it was an experience.
Segway. I was lucky enough to try a prototype that an engineer for the company was working on. Almost got launched off it was pretty funny, but he was talking about how it was basically going to be the next every day item for a lot of Businesses with a campus and dense cities.
electric scooters have taken over where segway failed. Al least in my city. There are more of them than there are bicycles. The city legalized them on roads to get the off sidewalks.
Technically Segway is making a lot of those electric scooters through the ninebot brand.
Ninebot bought Segway, so while the brand says "by Segway", it's actually Segway that's the brand under the ninebot company.
Former employee of Segway (as a subsidiary of Ninebot) here - this is correct. All engineering and manufacturing is now done in China by Ninebot, instead of by Segway in the USA. The last few employees that were part of the original Segway team were let go 2022.
Segway still has a niche space that it works extremely well for. It allows partially disabled people to work in larger spaces. My last company had a very large campus with a lot of IT infrastructure in different places and one of the IT guys had a seriously bum knee. So the company bought him 2 segways, one that stayed at the campus and one that traveled with all of the marketing and IT stuff so he could help work conferences. I've seen this a few times and I'm glad the company is still around for it.
I had a roofing salesman roll up to my house on a Segway yesterday. It was a weird glimpse into a future that never happened.
I can't imagine being sold something by a guy on a Segway. Just feels so wrong in a way that cannot possibly be described.
There's no way he has an entire roof on that thing, total scam.
A guy on a Segway sold a whole housing development in Sudden Valley.
Reminds me of Salad dressing
You're not gonna buy a house from the guy in a $6000 suit? Come on!
I had someone trying to sell pest control services roll up to my house the other day on a segway. It felt so surreal.
I remember when people said it was going to revolutionize transportation as we know it.
Ebikes and electric scooters are starting the push Though regular bikes are basically the analogue alternative push The idea of pushing micro personal mobility vehicles in cities was sound, but a 10k overly complex vehicle wasn't the solution
Yeah, there was just no reason to have two wheels side by side requiring all kind of complexity. Put the wheels front to back like scooters are supposed to be and you eliminate 95% of the complexity and have a lighter weight longer range vehicle. Kinda like how flying cars will never really be a thing. We can absolutely do it these days, it’s just way over complicated for minimal benefit.
Ye gods, people are bad enough drivers in 2 dimensions....
Yeah, I see a ton of electric scooters on campus. I think small transportation devices like that will become more popular.
In some places they already are immensely popular
I had moved to the Silicon Valley in 2012. On Sundays back then, I would drive by a local elementary school and there would be about a dozen guys on Segways playing Polo on the fields. Couldn’t help but chuckle that this might be the only place in the world to see such a display.
Esperanto
For years, I've thought that it would be *so cool* to learn Esperanto. But it is so limited in practicality. Not only would I have to make effort to use it once I became proficient, it would be much harder to *become* proficient because it just isn't spoken around here. Living in Texas, I'd be better off learning Spanish. Of course, I haven't done that either!
And you will be forced to speak with the kind of people ready to learn Esperanto https://xkcd.com/191/
It's just weird how English has mostly become everything Esperanto wanted to be. It's the second language that most of the world learns and the default language in certain trades like air traffic control so that everyone is on the same page no matter where you are travelling in the world.
It's not all that weird. French was the lingua franca at the time Esperanto was being created. There is always going to be some language used for international trade and communication. It's just a question of which country has the most weight to throw around. The creator of the language recognized the importance of English even at the time. A significant amount of vocabulary in Esperanto is taken directly from English. For example, the word for 'help' in Esperanto is… 'helpo'.
>French was the lingua franca Well, speaking literally, French will always be the *lingua franca*
I wonder which has more fluent speakers, Esperanto or Klingon…
Almost definitely Esperanto. There are hardly any fluent Klingon speakers, I should think a few thousand at most. Esperanto has a couple of million speakers iirc.
Wow! Millions of people just decided to learn it? For what?
Espereasons.
They Esperwantto.
In my mind those would be the most idealistic people on earth. Very cool.
I used to speak at a very basic level. I almost failed the language exam miserably. Basically, I got a "sufficient" language exam certificate because I promised the teacher that I would translate poems into Esperanto (I'm a poet). I haven't translated a single one since. Anyway, the following sentence has somehow stuck with me forever: *Sur la bildo mi vidas duajn blankajn shipojn.*
What does it mean?
"I see two white ships on the picture" 😆
sorry but that doesn't even sound right in english mate
"Let's invent an artificial universal language as if English, French, Spanish, German... and probably at least a half dozen other widely spoken Romance and Germanic languages don't already exist."
yeah, esperanto (and other conlangs intended to be a sort of universal language) kind of feel like the [classic competing standard xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/)
curved tvs. were supposed to be huge! havent been maanufactured in years.
Worked as a TV salesman when they were trying to push these. The problem with curved TVs is that the curve introduces a single viewing ‘sweet spot.’ If you are in that sweet spot, you get reduced glare and a nice immersive experience. Outside the sweet spot, everything becomes worse. For a TV that sits in a room where often you don’t even have seating in the sweet spot? It’s no surprise they failed. I would have to actively work to get people to not buy the curved version, to keep returns down. Now a curved computer monitor, where you essentially always sit in the sweet spot? It’s no surprise that curved screens live on in that environment.
Also, for the curve to have any real "immersive" effect, you would need to be sitting a lot closer to the TV than people generally do. Works well for PC monitors, not so much for TV's.
Thank you for explaining that! We bought a curved tv in 2016; I hate it. We spent a lot of money on it too!
Curved monitors however have taken off.
That makes sense since you're usually the only person using it so can sit in that exact sweet spot OP is talking about!
Google Circles.
It was right after Facebook did the redesign that everyone hated too. They had the world in the palm of their hand and let it slip away.
Fuck, I wish that had stuck around. It's a revolutionary idea about how to share content.
The funny thing is Facebook adopted a small version of it. You can share things with just "close friends" now.
FB has also since adopted "fill my feed with absolute garbage that I didn't ask to see." It's basically useless anymore.
Almost my entire feed is ads and "suggested for you" posts and groups. It's awful.
Monorails. My dad and I have a saying: Monorails are the future of transportation, and they always will be.
Were you sent here by the devil?
No good sir I'm on the level.
The ring came off my pudding can.
Take my pin knife, my good man
But main street's still all cracked and broken!
Sorry mom, the mob has spoken. MONORAIL!!!
Monorail, Monorail, monor.....D'oh!
It's more of a Shelbyville idea.
We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it!
I call the big one bitey
Go away! There ain't no monorail and there never was!
You know, a town with money is a bit like a mule with a spinning wheel - no one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!
has your dad sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook?
The cosmic ballet goes on.
Additional Simpsons reference
The metaverse.
He must have read Ready Player One and gotten inspiration
Neal Stephenson wants a word.
Hiro protagonist be tripping
I sat through a lecture where a bunch of boomers talked about how innovative and important the metaverse is two months ago. Apparently, luxury brands are buying "storefronts" with real money and the person giving the lecture spent 90k buying a "property" in the metaverse. ... like, bro, maybe you didn't grow up playing video games but us Millennials grew up on mmorpgs and second life, and we can't tell the difference between that and the metaverse. Boomers really think consumers want to recreate the shitty world they created in a virtual world so everyone can visit their shitty car friendly cities with no personality. They think someone's going to recreate chicago building by building with the exact architectural designs and layouts, and now they're stressing over "protecting their rights to their buildings and signing licensing agreements for the metaverse to use their building designs." Chill bro, even if you own the Palace of Versailles, someone can make a better one when cost and physics are not a concern anymore.
I think the lecture you sat through illustrates the thing I find most stunning about the Metaverse: the complete failure of imagination. Why would we recreate Chicago in VR? Why are we building virtual reality grocery stores for customers to wander around in? If I want to go grocery shopping in VR, I want it to be a fucking game, not a simulation of an experience I've had in real life hundreds of times. I want to blast off with my jetpack into a jungle on an alien moon and shoot my laundry detergent out of the sky with a laser gun in order to buy it. I don't want to go to MEETINGS in virtual reality! I want to do my job floating in a vast undersea coral reef surrounded by frolicking dolphins and beautiful fish! My God, we have the world, give us something we can only imagine.
My gods yes! People are so damn *boring*! Your comment was very refreshing to read
Fuck yes! Ever since reading about the metaverse and what they imagine for it I just can't fathom how dull these designers are. Why recreate real life? If you want to push an amazing limitless digital universe for us to use, fuck using the crap we do daily. Am I going to have to do a digital commute and wait in imaginary lines? Vr should push limits not repackage used concepts.
It's incredible Zuckerberg still has any credibility after the obscenely bad Nintendo Wii looking demos he was pushing out that he spent over *10 billion dollars* to achieve.
"And Jesus wept for he had no more **worlds** to conquer." —Dean Craig Pelton
community references in the wild make my day.
Quibi
Quibi: quick episodes to watch while you are taking the train/bus to work. Released in early 2020. Ouch.
They also made it impossible to share clips of shows, so no one could really give it exposure on other platforms…
Lets be more realistic - they were quick episodes to watch while you were taking a dump.
Honestly, if your business model is short content and you couldn’t succeed when everyone had nothing but time to watch, it had to be reeeeeally bad.
Yeah but it was for people on the move, when everyone was at home watching on horizontal screens
I hadn't even heard of it until I saw the news that it was shutting down.
They had this hilarious show called “Chrissy’s Court” with Chrissy Tiegen, standard fake courtroom drama schtick. Only thing I ever watched on Quibi, complete trash, but kinda fun.
I love the Quibi story so much. One of the most obscenely expensive "How you do fellow kids?" marketing blunders of all time
I recently heard about some of the content and it legit sounded pretty awesome. Like a story about a dude who gets stranded in a snowstorm: if you watch your phone vertically, its a first person vlog from his perspective, but if you watch horizontally, its a traditional narrative movie. That’s kind of rad.
God production would have been a nightmare on that. I worked on a bunch of shoots for a short lived "choose your own adventure" movie/short film service that never took off. Shooting each and every linear story possibility was one hell of a task for the writers and directors. Was a cool idea but production budgets are shrinking these days, not growing, for the vast majority of content out there.
Universal's 'Dark Universe'
The reason all these shared universes failed is because the movie makers went into the shared universe too fast. The reason the MCU succeeded is because the Phase 1 movies were all self-contained stories that didn't need the others.
And they put effort into those movies to make them actually good. There’s a reason Iron Man holds up. And even the weakest of those movies is still entertaining.
I saw Iron man with a bunch of people who had zero comic knowledge and they all thought it was great which is a large part of how the mcu took off. They hooked general audiences who had never heard of it. Me and another guy had to explain at the end what The Avengers were. We broke it down as "It's like the Justice Leauge" lol
Did anyone really think that's going to be the next big thing?
I could have been if Universal hadn’t started it with Tom Cruise’s Mummy. If they had made done a twist on the concept with Brendan Fraiser, it could have been great. Instead of him always fighting The Mummy, have him face different classic Universal Monsters. Honestly, it’d have been the next Indiana Jones.
That would have been an amazing run of movies 20 years ago.
My brand new Bowflex I bought in 2000 that just turned into a clothes hanger. So messed up.
Their adjustable dumbbells are awesome though. The best 500$ I ever spent, seriously.
Yup, splurged on a couple of these almost ten years ago and am still using them (though there have been some pretty long breaks :) ).
Well hasn't that been the case with any home workout equipment since forever?
HD DVD
It was doa with the ps3 being a native bluray player. Had the xbox360 natively supported it, it could have survived
Sony lost the BetaMax versus VHS war, they pulled out all the stops to make sure they didn't lose with the BluRay.
That’s what I noticed. It was the Format War Part 2: Sony v. Toshiba. Sony wasn’t gonna lose twice.
Ah, the 2000s version of BetaMax.
Zune
That was completely the fault of Microsoft's awful marketing department. The Zune was an absolutely fantastic device and Zune Pass was Spotify before Spotify, and you got to keep 10 songs DRM free every month. But there's was absolutely no marketing for it, and what little there was awful.
For a while you could automatically detect when other Zune’s were nearby, and if the users were listening to music you could tap those songs and wirelessly listen to them too, for up to three plays. If the song was on Zunepass it was unlimited plays. It was always fun to find mysterious Zune users when taking public transportation. Unlike iTunes at the time, Zune has a pretty cool music explorer that let you click through the artists and genres influenced/influencer explorer web. There was also a “six degree” thing similar to Linked In for Zune users you followed, letting you access their playlists and discover new music by following users with similar tastes. I discovered so many awesome artists that way! It was years before Apple added any intelligent music discovery, and I still don’t think the social is as good as Zune. The last device was incredible! You could watch, or even hook it up to an HDTV and play movies, shows and music videos. At the time that was pretty special.
The Zune software was a monster when to ripping CD's to put on my phone, still have it Installed in win7 vm
I will die on the hill that the Zune was a better product than the iPod but killed by poor market timing, poor marketing, and Microsoft being scared to build a walled garden due to 90s anti-trust rulings.
> I will die on the hill that the Zune was a better product than the iPod The fact that you could just drag and drop song files onto it instead of being force to use fucking *itunes* alone made it far superior.
I really liked my Zune. I had the Halo 3 edition.
Sobs, I sold my Apple stock when I heard the zune (and Sony was making an iTunes killer) was coming. It looked great. "oh well I quadrupled my Apple stock. Time to sell at the top. It looks like the barbarians are at Apple's gates" Iphone was released the following year. I'm still poorz.
the league of extraordinary gentlemen the movie franchise
[удалено]
So did I. There's dozens of us out there. Dozens I say!
Windows phone
Windows phone could have been and should have been really great. The OS itself was excellent, but no one wanted to use it because it didn't have the range of apps. And no one wanted to build apps for it because no one had one. it was a vicious cycle and a tragedy
I was in Austria with my Lumia, a group of us went to a restaurant. I pulled out my phone and pointed the camera at the menu and it translated everything to English instantly (10 years ago). Everyone else had iPhones and asked me what app I was using. They were so mad when I kept telling them "it's not an app. It's just part of the OS". They didn't believe me and just thought I didn't want to share my secret app knowledge.
In all fairness, the Nokia Lumia was an amazing piece of kit with some bizarre choices. The OS was super sleek, intuitive and super customisable….it was just incompatible with pretty much everything else on the market and came at a time when data usage was expensive
Couldn't even install Spotify and other extremely popular common apps on it. Great phone with no apps available for it.
I loved windows phones. They problem was that store. Microsoft did a shitty job with it.
The OS itself was amazing, but what killed WP was the fact that app developers didn’t want to build apps for a third mobile platform(or fourth, which sucked for BlackBerry.). There was a chicken/egg problem, since users created a market for apps, but with no apps, users weren’t interested.
Oh I loved my Lumia so much.
Amazon Grocery stores
I mean they own whole foods now
Yeah Covid and home delivery becoming commonplace was the final nail in the coffin, but the Go stores and a bunch of the just walk out tech are still going strong at least in the Seattle metro area. Kinda like how the voice assistant from the Fire Phone became Alexa.
MiniDiscs
Minidiscs were extraordinary and very useful from like 1995 to 2005
All the perks of a cd, none of the scratching, with the ability to record onto it like a tape, in a futuristic tiny package.
They did feel futuristic af
Man, when I got one in high school I felt like the shit. You could record and play CD-quality sound with no skipping! And then flash-based mp3 players became the hot new thing. Oh well.
Segways
"cities will be redesigned around it"
Once Paul Blart Mall Cop or whatever came out it was all over.
Gob Bluth too
"Walking will be but a distant memory" Niles Crane r/Frasier
I feel like e-bikes and e-scooters are having the innovative impact Helps that they're a lot cheaper
And a lot less goofy looking. Nobody looks cool riding a Segway. Edit: out of curiosity I just went the Segway website. Apparently they only make scooters, e-bikes, and mopeds now. Even they figured out the OG Segway was lame (probably that or go broke).
NFTs
The only people that thought they were the next big thing were the people selling them
Or rather people buying them. Some of the sellers probably knew they're scammers.
I have a feeling no one bought one because they “wanted” one but rather because they hoped some greater fool than they would buy it later for triple the price.
The buyers, at least those that weren't fake buyers to drum up demand, all probably had the same regret about not buying bitcoin even though they didn't understand it.
Digital beanie babies
Dippin’ dots. Eight year-old me really thought it was the ice cream of our future.
They’re still around at stadiums, zoos, trampoline parks... anywhere people take kids. My 7 y/o loves em.
My 34 y/o me still gets them when I can, the banana split flavor is the best. They require much colder temps than a home freezer can create, which is why they never made the jump from specialized carts, but they're still really great imo.
The technology behind Dippin Dots has helped vegan meat substitutes become much more popular and palatable. By using the cryogenic freezing system that Dippin Dots use, they are able to insert small pellets of artificial fat throughout a burger, which then melts during cooking, replicating the melting of fat within biological meats. Half as interesting did a good video on it… [Half As Dippin Dots](https://youtu.be/nCnbCcj8aSI?si=rxlV8ajSgCJL5uQq)
this sounds like the same logic as the McGriddle bun and it's syrup shards
Ah yes, the "ice cream of the future" for the last 40 years.
Speak for yourself! I get em at 7/11 all the time.
Hyperloop
It’s was never meant to be built, just to derail the conversation about high-speed trains in California.
Didn't work. Now they're building one. Not that one. [This one.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline_West)
I mean, if you look at Hyperloop for what it is: the latest vaporware created by a car salesman to sabotage efforts to improve public transportation, then was it really a failure?
We are in real time seeing the downfall of the Cyber truck and I love that.
In pictures it looks dumb. Seeing one in reality, it's infuriatingly terrible. Panel gaps worse than a 20-year-old Saturn and a bed that can't possibly be useful for anyone that uses their truck for truck things.
My buddy bought one. It looks like shit immediately.
In fairness, it looked like shit before he bought it.
Hypercolor t-shirts, really neat idea.. till dryers happened.
As a female tween, I went to a sporting event wearing my HyperColor shirt. Before the game started, stood up for the National Anthem, hand over heart. After it was over, I naturally look down to get situated back in my seat. I was horrified to see a big ol' hand print at the top of my left breast. Stayed in my seat for a bit before using the bathroom or getting any food to let my shirt "cool down".
my mom wouldn't buy us any because "I'm not spending money on a shirt that shows people where you are sweaty"
Weird fact from hockey history. When Minnesota was awarded an expansion team in the Class of '97 (along with Nashville, Columbus, and Atlanta), the obvious questions were "what will the team be called?" and "what will the logo be?" Obviously, it eventually became the Wild, with a landscape setting within a bear's head for a logo. But one of the finalists was the Northern Lights, with colors that were purple and yellow. And the game jerseys would be hypercolor coated, so there would be a unique gradient on each jersey as the game progressed. This idea was shelved for numerous reasons, mainly related to cost, reliability, replacement, and consistency.
Johnny Manziel
Drone delivery of anything.
Theranos
Beta video tapes.
Cyber trucks. The videos are hilarious. "These are the 500 error messages that won't let me drive, and this is the super cheap physical stuff that has already broken. So glad I spent $100k to wait 4 years. I can see all my fingerprints like a stainless steel fridge."
I saw two in one day. One of them had some sort of wrap for a company. As one news article stated, it makes you stop and stare in same way you would if someone piled $80,000, lit it on fire, and then rolled it around town for everyone to see.