The very best in obsolete and failed technology...

Dempsey

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The Nyquist rate is fine.

The only thing that may be happening is the effects of beat frequencies, where an audible frequency may result from the interaction of supersonic ones.

He said sampling at the Nyquist Rate is 'completely accurately, with no loss' which is obviously incorrect.

Capt'n Midnight

Sofaspud wrote: »

Film sound is recorded at 24 bit which allows a 144dB dynamic range, this allows a much lower noise floor since films are played really loud in cinemas, so it allows a lot more head room.

24 bits is fine, but you can't tell the difference between +/- 1 at the upper end of the scale.

Meanwhile NICAM stereo only uses 12 bits.

That's because it uses a non linear system to save space. Each sound is n% louder than than the one below it (that's a major simplification) Your hearing is also non-linear so it works out.

nlgbbbblth

e_e wrote: »

I'd argue that vinyl hasn't really been super-ceded at all. Yes initially CD took over but if anything that's the format that is most being usurped by the MP3 because they're the more portable, accessible formats. Vinyl is clearly there for a different audience of music lovers.

CD sales have fallen whereas vinyl is continually rising. I can see a point where vinyl outsells CD imo. Hell I only bought one of my favorite albums on vinyl yesterday.

Cassettes did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards. A lot of people forget that and think "CD is the enemy". It's not - cassettes were the bad guys.

In 1988 cassettes accounted for 66% of new album sales. LPs and CDs each had 17%. CDs didn't become the dominant format until 1991/92.

Capt'n Midnight

5uspect wrote: »

It's the same technology. To claim that the TU95 is merely a prop aircraft and better than jets is incorrect since it uses a varient of the same engine technology as these other jets.

On Concorde, the reason so it hasn't been replaced is purely economic. You burn far less fuel cruising at high speed subsonic speeds than insuring the significant pressure drag of supersonic flight.

TU95 isn't merely a prop aircraft. It's another Russian example of stuff that shouldn't work but somehow does.

Turbo props are more efficient at speeds around Mach 0.5 , this is why short haul commuter aircraft use them, as do slower military transports and patrol aircraft. But get any faster and they are dreadfully inefficient.

The Tu95 has a dash speed of Mach 0.87 and from it's normal cruising speed it can out-accelerate most interceptors. Which should be impossible since that would mean the propellers are running at supersonic speed. They do, and it's VERY, VERY LOUD.


The Mig 25 is kinda obsolete in the "with enough power even a brick can fly" sense. Not very manoeuvrable but fairly solid

http://i.imgur.com/Jrt4G5y.jpg :eek:

Capt'n Midnight

nlgbbbblth wrote: »

Cassettes did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards

Because of an obsolete technology - walkmans

5uspect

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

TU95 isn't merely a prop aircraft. It's another Russian example of stuff that shouldn't work but somehow does.

Turbo props are more efficient at speeds around Mach 0.5 , this is why short haul commuter aircraft use them, as do slower military transports and patrol aircraft. But get any faster and they are dreadfully inefficient.

The Tu95 has a dash speed of Mach 0.87 and from it's normal cruising speed it can out-accelerate most interceptors. Which should be impossible since that would mean the propellers are running at supersonic speed. They do, and it's VERY, VERY LOUD.


The Mig 25 is kinda obsolete in the "with enough power even a brick can fly" sense. Not very manoeuvrable but fairly solid

http://i.imgur.com/Jrt4G5y.jpg :eek:

Oh I know, I wasn't claiming it was just a prop aircraft.
It's a completely bonkers design, the blade tip shock interactions between contra rotating props must be a major problem - probably much more complicated than that you find in turbine between rotor and NVG.

jimbob_jones

Another adopter of HD-DVD's here, I think at last count I have 140+ HD-DVD's. 3 Toshiba HD-DVD players (Cheers IBood ) and two of the Xbox HD-DVD drives just in case

Thankfully most of the HD-DVD's I picked up after the fire sales started jaysus at one point I was getting a delivery from play.com and the EzDVD every few days

Karl Stein

mickdw wrote: »

British airways made alot of money from Concorde for many years once they sorted out pricing structures.

Concorde never really paid for itself if you include development costs. What it did do was advance aeronautical engineering expertise and showed that transnational European cooperation could challenge the US. Airbus might not be nearly as successful had Concorde not paved the runway

Dempsey wrote: »

Jet engines exhaust provides enough thrust for propulsion.

That's incorrect. The big fan on the front produces the majority of the thrust (80%) by pushing air around the engine rather than through it.

Dempsey

Charles Rocher wrote: »

That's incorrect. The big fan on the front produces the majority of the thrust by pushing air around the engine (85%) rather than through it (15%).

What type of engine are you referring to? Exhaust can count for anything between 30-70% of thrust depending on specific design. Anyways my point there was that exhaust as a percentage of thrust is much less in turboprop designs which is correct.

cml387

Dempsey wrote: »

What type of engine are you referring to?

That would be a turbofan.
High bypass turbofan engines generate most of their thrust by the big fan at the front of the engine.

In the late 1960's, Rolls Royce though they had a game changer engine with the RB211.

Not only did they have a three spool engine over the American's two spool, they had a fan that was made of very light carbon fibre.

It might have worked, but when frozen chickens were fired at the engine blades in test,they failed, and in the end Rolls Royce went bankrupt.

Karl Stein

Dempsey wrote: »

What type of engine are you referring to?

The turbofan jet engines we see every day at airports.

Your assumption that:

Jet engines exhaust provides enough thrust for propulsion.

is incorrect.

The big fan on the front provides the vast majority of the thrust.

5uspect

Jet engine is an umbrella term for a wide range of gas turbine engine used to power aircraft. The original design was a turbojet; compressor, combustion chamber, turbine, nozzle. Here the nozzle downstream of the turbine provides all the thrust. This type of engine is obsolete and you'll struggle to see any in service today.

Nearly all large jets and military jets run on turbofan engines. Regional jets and transports tend to use turboprops for the above stated reasons.

All of these engines essentially have a turbojet at their core. How work is extracted from the turbine and converted to thrust is different. This is why I pointed out that the Tupolev is actually a jet, just like the AerCorps PC9s are also jets.

Tokyo

Anybody that studied engineering in NUIG back in the 90's will remember these - the VT220...



Back when the rest of the world had moved on to pentium processors, and Windows 3.1 was being overtaken by Windows 95, engineers in UCG were still learning to program on these. They were churned out by Digital (before they closed down), came with a choice of green or amber phosphors screens. They ran on the VAX architecture, and you could program on them in FORTRAN 77, and surf the internet using LYNX. Long obsolete, they still bring back memories of waiting, gritting teeth, for code to compile, and I wish I could get my hands on one again for old times sake...

...__...

Ah memories,
The day we got the phillips CDi playing casino games for days there going for decent money on ebay we still have it in the attic or somewhere.

Minidiscs and recordable dvd players still use this nostalgia always wins.
going to the game rental shop in palmerstown renting a load of games for the commodore 64 and copying them on a casette tape. spending a fortune on a nokia 9200 just to break the screen a few weeks later. God that really was rubbish.
The countless pocket organisers, translators and rubbish like the foot spa that just got water everywhere.
Then there was the 4 in one hi fi units there best feature you could change the display colour. Checking my email on the sky box everyday until the phone bill came in. calling a number to get a ringtone sent to the phone hours going through the selections not realising it was a pound a minute I got murdered for that.

Great fond memories

syklops

mike_ie wrote: »

Anybody that studied engineering in NUIG back in the 90's will remember these - the VT220...



Back when the rest of the world had moved on to pentium processors, and Windows 3.1 was being overtaken by Windows 95, engineers in UCG were still learning to program on these. They were churned out by Digital (before they closed down), came with a choice of green or amber phosphors screens. They ran on the VAX architecture, and you could program on them in FORTRAN 77, and surf the internet using LYNX. Long obsolete, they still bring back memories of waiting, gritting teeth, for code to compile, and I wish I could get my hands on one again for old times sake...

Nothing obsolete about lynx.

Tokyo

syklops wrote: »

Nothing obsolete about lynx.

True - we used to use it for web browsing at work without drawing attention from anyone nosey glancing towards your screen...

Shane-KornSpace

Invested in a discman shortly before Zen players and iPods took off.
Had this one here!
Discman
And this one after my first one broke, here

Capt'n Midnight

Voice/data/fax modems

Fax machines

Huge batteries for your home phone

telephone operators

Eircom "High Speed" ISDN

Electric Milk Floats and bread vans

The Swastika laundry

Czarcasm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Voice/data/fax modems

Fax machines

Huge batteries for your home phone

telephone operators

Eircom "High Speed" ISDN

Electric Milk Floats and bread vans

The Swastika laundry

Ahh here Capt'n, I'd hardly call fax machines obsolete, in fact I make regular weekly use of my Brother MFC-680CN for sending faxes, standalone fax machines maybe, but plenty of offices I've been in still use them (actually now I think of it my father in law has a GSM fax machine in his lorry for receiving shipping documents that he has to have signed at the docks when picking up containers), so not quite obsolete yet.

ISDN 64K lines though, in pairs to provide 128K or single to give two separate office lines, they were some rip alright, because Eircom had you pay line rental for TWO separate lines!

It was fairly bittersweet getting in 512K broadband as it cost about the same as ISDN but the blistering speed for the time, was incredible!

grenache

rob316 wrote: »

I spent €300 on a minidisk player/recorder, think it was about 12/18 months later ipod came out :rolleyes:

Invested in hd-dvd also only for Blu-Ray to kill it dead.
edit: it was this one
http://www.av-land.co.uk/sony/mzn707/mzn707bluelrg.jpg

DVD is still more popular than Blu Ray to this day

SpaceTime

Fax is often built into email systems in offices and hosted VoIP providers these days. Incoming faxes just arrive as a PDF and outgoing is sent to a server as an email.

ISDN is still widely used to connect office phone systems. Although VoIP trunks are beginning replacing it over the last few years.

It also continues to have a purpose in broadcasting. Radio stations use it to carry outside broadcasts and links to remote studios.

ISDN links have very low latency and fixed bandwidth as they're a digital circuit switched service rather that IP based.

Much faster IP services like widespread availability of VDSL2 (e fibre) are making ISDN obsolete though even for some of those obscure applications.

ISDN is just a purely digital method of accessing the traditional landline telephone network. It uses the same switches (exchanges) and infrastructure as a traditional landline.

For internet access, ISDN is really very obsolete though. Its 1980s - 1990s technology.

jmayo

Stavros Murphy wrote: »

It's still in his shed, in mint condition, with the original wrapping...how the feck would I know?? That's 25 years ago ffs!

Well go find out young man.
It might be worth a few quid

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm amazed that the humble audio cassette tape hasn't been mentioned, it revolutionised our lives in the 70s. We could just tape the songs rather than have to buy the records (another obsolete) media.

They might be obsolete but how was it a failed technology.
It sold millions upon millions and made the likes of BASF, Maxell, Agfa, Sony etc millions.

A lot of the things mentioned here may be obsolete, but they are hardly failed technologies.
Some of the things mentioned here would be akin to listing the beetle or the Model T in this debate.

mike_ie wrote: »

Anybody that studied engineering in NUIG back in the 90's will remember these - the VT220...



Back when the rest of the world had moved on to pentium processors, and Windows 3.1 was being overtaken by Windows 95, engineers in UCG were still learning to program on these. They were churned out by Digital (before they closed down), came with a choice of green or amber phosphors screens. They ran on the VAX architecture, and you could program on them in FORTRAN 77, and surf the internet using LYNX. Long obsolete, they still bring back memories of waiting, gritting teeth, for code to compile, and I wish I could get my hands on one again for old times sake...

Again VAX might be obsolete, but was it a failed technology ?
Digital sold loads of them and they were around for a good few years.

And here is the kicker Microsoft NT owes some of its heritage to VAX/VMS.
And NT led onto to such things as Win 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012, 8, XP etc.

One of the chief designers of NT was David Cutler ex of Digital.
The guy has worked on windows version upto at least 2003 and now appears to be involved in Xbox.

So maybe one could even say Xbox has some links back to VAX/VMS.

BTW I found a neet trick you could do to crash a terminal so you could pi** off for lunch/lecture and come back to it.

The ultimate in hard work was surfing newsgroups (pre internet) to download pictures using a vax terminal.

mikemac1

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Fax machines

Every bank in the country still uses fax machines. So do the big insurance companies and the businesses in the IFSC

Every year multi million pound transfer deals for football players have to be faxed in before a deadline

Fax is far from dead and will be around for a long, long time

Pinch Flat

mikemac1 wrote: »

Every bank in the country still uses fax machines. So do the big insurance companies and the businesses in the IFSC

Every year multi million pound transfer deals for football players have to be faxed in before a deadline

Fax is far from dead and will be around for a long, long time

We're doing a project for an international insurance company. It will involve taking down the entire power supply to their building over a weekend.

Things they needed operating was the PABX system for the phones (which in itself is obsolete) and a fax machine. Customers abroad still use these if their cars breakdown apparently.

keano89

jmayo wrote: »

mike_ie wrote: »

Anybody that studied engineering in NUIG back in the 90's will remember these - the VT220...



Back when the rest of the world had moved on to pentium processors, and Windows 3.1 was being overtaken by Windows 95, engineers in UCG were still learning to program on these. They were churned out by Digital (before they closed down), came with a choice of green or amber phosphors screens. They ran on the VAX architecture, and you could program on them in FORTRAN 77, and surf the internet using LYNX. Long obsolete, they still bring back memories of waiting, gritting teeth, for code to compile, and I wish I could get my hands on one again for old times sake...

Again VAX might be obsolete, but was it a failed technology ?
Digital sold loads of them and they were around for a good few years.

And here is the kicker Microsoft NT owes some of its heritage to VAX/VMS.
And NT led onto to such things as Win 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012, 8, XP etc.

One of the chief designers of NT was David Cutler ex of Digital.
The guy has worked on windows version upto at least 2003 and now appears to be involved in Xbox.

So maybe one could even say Xbox has some links back to VAX/VMS.

BTW I found a neet trick you could do to crash a terminal so you could pi** off for lunch/lecture and come back to it.

The ultimate in hard work was surfing newsgroups (pre internet) to download pictures using a vax terminal.

If you take the letter proceeding VMS you get WNT (Windows NT).

Not sure if its just pure coincidence though.

jmayo

keano89 wrote: »

If you take the letter proceeding VMS you get WNT (Windows NT).

Not sure if its just pure coincidence though.

Supposedly it was an in joke.
I remember using a kind of command line interface to NT that allowed old VMS commands to operate on it.

I think IBM OS/2 might be a better example of something that didn't really take off mass market like it's competitors (Windows) and died out.
Actually to a large degree Cutler signed the death warrant of OS/2.

SpaceTime

Pinch Flat wrote: »

We're doing a project for an international insurance company. It will involve taking down the entire power supply to their building over a weekend.

Things they needed operating was the PABX system for the phones (which in itself is obsolete) and a fax machine. Customers abroad still use these if their cars breakdown apparently.

Well, an older digital "time division multiplexing" TDM (ISDN type) PABX would be obsolete. However, most companies still have a PABX of sorts, it's just usually a soft switch that usually operates on the same infrastructure as their computer network.
Effectively, a dedicated server for the phones with everything connected up over Ethernet.

In some very large organisations, you may even find the PBX still provides analogue phones with a dial tone around the place as they won't shell out for hundreds of fancy IP phones.

Calls get handed over to the public networks either on SIP trunks (IP-based) or on ISDN lines (TDM-based).

For small companies, a hosted PABX service is becoming more popular, but some people still prefer to have that stuff in-house so they've control over it. Especially companies that are concerned about security.

My house actually uses a hosted PBX for the phones and home office..

jca

grenache wrote: »

DVD is still more popular than Blu Ray to this day

He means the format HD-DVD which lost out to Blue Ray in the end. No one is really interested as I think they're both dying on their feet with the arrival of Netflix decent quality pvr's etc .

Pique

keano89 wrote: »

If you take the letter proceeding VMS you get WNT (Windows NT).

Not sure if its just pure coincidence though.

And if you add a letter to HAL (as in the intellignet computer from 2001- A Space Odyssey), you get IBM.

Woah dude !!!

DublinWriter

jmayo wrote: »

The ultimate in hard work was surfing newsgroups (pre internet) to download pictures using a vax terminal.

Ummm...I think you'll find that Usenet existed thanks due to, and because of, the Internet.

Your statement is a bit like Homer Simpson saying "The Internet? It's available on computers now? Wow!".