10 technologies that deserve to die

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isy...d=msn&LID=3800

Watch the word wrap.

Check out number 6.

Jim Davis

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:00:26 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Jim
Davis" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isy...d=msn&LID=3800

It's kind of dumb, because it's not really a technology in any useful
sense of the word. If he means "Shuttle" then I wouldn't necessarily
disagree, but I doubt if he knows what he means.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers:

I thought it was a good topic, but Sterling's treatment read to me as
though he wrote it in a rush, late at night, without preparation,
after he found it at the bottom of a pile of papers and it had a
deadline on it just past.

It's also a pretty good topic resource for discussion. I like DVDs
better than Sterling does, I think; the problem with the Shuttle is
it's the end of the line. In much the same way as Apollo was stopped
just when it was beginning to work well and an industrial base had
grown up for it, space-access technology was pared back to a barely
adequate level of support (*Barely adequate*? Well, maybe that much.)
and any evolution pretty much stopped.

I was at a panel at MIT last night, attended by Andrew Chaiken, among
others. I heard a comment really interesting to a sociologically
inclined ear (mine, if you are not reading between the lines). It was
about people who try the same thing over and over again always getting
the same result. They somehow hope if they do it again, it will
somehow turn out different, but of course it doesn't. So what's that?
It's *insanity.* The context was, how much have we reduced launch to
LEO costs since the last Saturn 5 flew? Of course, costs are not
reduced at all. (And the Saturn 5 technology is discarded now; I've
read somewhere the blueprints and records were sold as waste paper.)

But all that is drifting off topic, for all its tremendous relevance
in years to come. Which topic was, Bruce Sterling on technologies to
discard. It does trouble me a little, that he has the Shuttle and
DVDs, which have potential for the future, in there with land mines,
which to put it mildly, don't.

Cheers -- Martha Adams

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:42:15 +0000 (UTC), (Martha H
Adams) wrote:

I was at a panel at MIT last night, attended by Andrew Chaiken, among
others. I heard a comment really interesting to a sociologically
inclined ear (mine, if you are not reading between the lines). It was
about people who try the same thing over and over again always getting
the same result. They somehow hope if they do it again, it will
somehow turn out different, but of course it doesn't. So what's that?
It's *insanity.*

This is an oft-repeated generalization, and like most such things it
is only partially true.

Picture a young me, only a handful of years old, trying to sink a
basket on a regulation height basketball. I try, and try, and try,
and I fail, and fail, and fail - until 50 or 100 tries later I finally
succeed! Was it insanity to keep trying? I think not. Almost any
skill falls into this same progression - riding a bicycle, playing a
guitar, learning to whistle, learning to swim, etc. etc. etc. You
generally don't succeed the first time, or the second, or the third...
but if you keep trying often you DO succeed. It's *Not Insane*.

Jim Davis wrote:

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isy...d=msn&LID=3800

Seems to bepretty clearly pure sarcasm. The technologies he says deserve
to die are soem fo the most important technologies we've got.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

"John Savard" wrote in message
...
As the DVD does provide clearer pictures than VHS tape or laser discs,
as well as greater convenience, and it _is_ possible to handle them
with care,


Heck, even my 3-year old son knows how to handle them with care and not get
fingerprints on them. :-)

I'll tell you though a technology that needs to die:

Electronic clocks w/o a radio receiver. In this day and age, I want all my
electronic clocks to update automatically when the time changes or after a
power outage.

The mechanical ones I can live with.


I found his comments on that simply bizarre - but the DVD
will die, to be replaced by a disk that supports HDTV-level
resolution. Not some insanely expensive downloading method that limits
you to the capacity of a hard drive that can break down. Any
technology that distributes content in a way dependent on a central
server is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

"Harold Groot" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:42:15 +0000 (UTC), (Martha H
Adams) wrote:

I was at a panel at MIT last night, attended by Andrew Chaiken, among
others. I heard a comment really interesting to a sociologically
inclined ear (mine, if you are not reading between the lines). It was
about people who try the same thing over and over again always getting
the same result. They somehow hope if they do it again, it will
somehow turn out different, but of course it doesn't. So what's that?
It's *insanity.*

This is an oft-repeated generalization, and like most such things it
is only partially true.

I think you're generalizing it. Since it's not the goal you don't want to
keep trying over and over again to achieve, it's the method.

If you're always throwing the ball the same exact way and missing, your a
fool. If you try different things every time, a little more loft, a tad to
the right, etc, you're not doing the exact same thing over and over again.



Picture a young me, only a handful of years old, trying to sink a
basket on a regulation height basketball. I try, and try, and try,
and I fail, and fail, and fail - until 50 or 100 tries later I finally
succeed! Was it insanity to keep trying? I think not. Almost any
skill falls into this same progression - riding a bicycle, playing a
guitar, learning to whistle, learning to swim, etc. etc. etc. You
generally don't succeed the first time, or the second, or the third...
but if you keep trying often you DO succeed. It's *Not Insane*.

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003 13:43:30 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:


"Harold Groot" wrote in message
. ..
On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:42:15 +0000 (UTC), (Martha H
Adams) wrote:

I was at a panel at MIT last night, attended by Andrew Chaiken, among
others. I heard a comment really interesting to a sociologically
inclined ear (mine, if you are not reading between the lines). It was
about people who try the same thing over and over again always getting
the same result. They somehow hope if they do it again, it will
somehow turn out different, but of course it doesn't. So what's that?
It's *insanity.*

This is an oft-repeated generalization, and like most such things it
is only partially true.

I think you're generalizing it. Since it's not the goal you don't want to
keep trying over and over again to achieve, it's the method.

If you're always throwing the ball the same exact way and missing, your a
fool. If you try different things every time, a little more loft, a tad to
the right, etc, you're not doing the exact same thing over and over again.

Well, if you're going to go in that direction then it would be easy to
argue that no person has ever been able to try the EXACT same thing a
second time, let alone over and over, for ANY situation. The question
would become how large or how small a change would be permitted to
qualify as "the same thing for purposes of this platitude".

But let's set up a situation where the attempts are "the same thing
for purposes of this platitude." Some game where you press a button
and a truly random number comes up. The odds of getting the winning
number are very small - but the payoff on average is greater than the
sum needed to play the game. Thus if it costs $1 to play, there are
1000 numbers and the payoff is $10,000, it is certainly NOT INSANITY
to keep playing the game even if you have tried and failed 500 times.







Picture a young me, only a handful of years old, trying to sink a
basket on a regulation height basketball. I try, and try, and try,
and I fail, and fail, and fail - until 50 or 100 tries later I finally
succeed! Was it insanity to keep trying? I think not. Almost any
skill falls into this same progression - riding a bicycle, playing a
guitar, learning to whistle, learning to swim, etc. etc. etc. You
generally don't succeed the first time, or the second, or the third...
but if you keep trying often you DO succeed. It's *Not Insane*.

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:00:26 -0500, "Jim Davis"
wrote:

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isy...d=msn&LID=3800

Watch the word wrap.

Check out number 6.

Yeah, whats a Winnebago?


Christopher
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Kites rise highest against
the wind - not with it."
Winston Churchill

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:00:26 -0500, "Jim Davis"
wrote:

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isy...d=msn&LID=3800


Is that guy a cranky old fart, or what?

Coal? DVDs? Prisons? Sheesh.

Brian