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<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142656/Mike_Elgan_10_obsolete_technologies_to_kill_in_201 0>

Cigarette-lighter receptacles in cars—true, we only use them as a source of
power these days. But what can we replace them with? I gather there’s a move
to 48V electrics in newer cars (mainly at the upper end of the market for
now), but it seems a bit roundabout to me to step up the car battery power
to 100-240V to feed it to an AC outlet where you plug in the AC adaptor for
your gadget, only to step it down to 12V or 5V DC or whatever else it needs.
Couldn’t we provide, say, a standard 12V DC outlet that gadgets can plug
straight into?

WWW—agreed, if only because it takes too long to say.

Home entertainment remotes—I’m not so sure about the idea of using mobile
phones. Some people are actually resorting to things like wireless keyboards
to control their home entertainment systems, which is about as far from
mobile phones as you can get.

Music CDs—they’re still the only thing my car stereo can play.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
> Music CDs—they’re still the only thing my car stereo can play.
>
I'd be surprised if that is all it does. What millennium did you buy it
in? My not-so-new car stereo can play music CDs, MP3, and a number of
other formats.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

The Internet is interesting in that although the nicknames may change,
the same old personalities show through.

Business cards obsolete?

I use these all the time.

I have my work business card and I have a personal business card (its
much easier than trying to tell someone my home phone, address,
movbile, and email address in one go)

I also don't want all my business contacts (hundreds of them that
change on a regular basis) sitting in my phone nor do I want my
plumbers details in there either.

Enkidu wrote:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>> Music CDs—they’re still the only thing my car stereo can play.
> >
> I'd be surprised if that is all it does. What millennium did you buy it
> in? My not-so-new car stereo can play music CDs, MP3, and a number of
> other formats.

Still uses an obsolete fragile low capacity storage medium.

I am suprised they still charge the premium they do for car headdecks
with a dvd transport in them. Even then its a stupid idea IMO when a USB
drive or SD card is so much more robust and able to be rewritten easily etc.

Thats why I got the $80 headdeck from the warehouse for the crap car.
Takes SD, and USB, and plays them.

Crap user interface but the $800 ones are not ten times better so not
worth it.

geoff wrote:
> "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <_zealand> wrote in message
> news:hh15pp$etp$...
>> <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142656/Mike_Elgan_10_obsolete_technologies_to_kill_in_201 0>
>>
>> Cigarette-lighter receptacles in cars-true, we only use them as a source
>> of
>> power these days. But what can we replace them with? I gather there's a
>> move
>> to 48V electrics in newer cars (mainly at the upper end of the market for
>> now), but it seems a bit roundabout to me to step up the car battery power
>> to 100-240V to feed it to an AC outlet where you plug in the AC adaptor
>> for
>> your gadget, only to step it down to 12V or 5V DC or whatever else it
>> needs.
>> Couldn't we provide, say, a standard 12V DC outlet that gadgets can plug
>> straight into?
>>
>> WWW-agreed, if only because it takes too long to say.
>>
>> Home entertainment remotes-I'm not so sure about the idea of using mobile
>> phones. Some people are actually resorting to things like wireless
>> keyboards
>> to control their home entertainment systems, which is about as far from
>> mobile phones as you can get.
>>
>> Music CDs-they're still the only thing my car stereo can play.
>
> If that dork thinks that "no significant advantages over downloadable media,
> such as MP3 files" then good luck to him. Sounds like the sort of tit who
> has his widescreen TV set to always stretch out 4:3 to 16:9 and doesn't even
> notice (or care about) the short fat people and cars with oval wheels.

The only benifit they offer over MP3 is allegedly better sound quality.
And it has been proven by the crap that comes out that no one gives an
ass about sound quality.

It also mentioned "such as MP3 files" - there are other formats as well,
many of which surpass the specs of a redbook audio cd, just none that
are blessed by the copyright holders with their restrictive DRM etc. I
have many 192k flac files sourced from dvd-a or something. Cant hear a
difference between them and the 44.1kHz downconversion I made to encode
for the mp3 player.

Optical discs are annoying, inconvenant, require stupudly large devices
to play them on, take massive amounts of space up, are slow, suffer from
moving when being used, cant have 2 tracks off them being played at the
same time in different locations, and really really deserve to die.

The only feature of them that makes them worthwhile is you can wrap them
up in some shiney paper and give them to people at xmas if you belive in
that sort of thing.

Mutley wrote:
> Enkidu <> wrote:
>
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> Music CDs—they’re still the only thing my car stereo can play.
>>>
>> I'd be surprised if that is all it does. What millennium did you buy it
>> in? My not-so-new car stereo can play music CDs, MP3, and a number of
>> other formats.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Cliff
>
> My wife's 3 year old Mazda 2 will only play audio CDs no MP3 or the
> like.. So these cars are hardly last century..

Mums 4 year old hyundai does mp3 and wma off round shiney trinkets that
are a pain in the ass. No aux in or USB slot so never really gets used
other than with the FM recieving the lousy signal from an ipod transmitter.

On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:05:11 +1300, Richard wrote:

> The only benifit they offer over MP3 is allegedly better sound quality.

Audio CDs as a medium hold 16bit 44.1kHz PCM audio. They are capable of better sound quality than
MP3s given that MP3s take 16bit 44.1kHz PCM audio and use various methods to throw away audio
information.

Thus, there is no "allegedly" about it - CDs are absolutely *capable* of better sound quality.

This is, of course, entirely subject to what sort of audio is being put onto the CDs - is it a poorly
mastered piece of rubbish, or is it a state-of-the-art high quality audio product.

If poorly mastered rubbish then you might as well bung it into low bitrate MP3s and distribute it over the
Internet.


--
"Filtering the Internet is like trying to boil the ocean"

Carnations wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:05:11 +1300, Richard wrote:
>
>> The only benifit they offer over MP3 is allegedly better sound quality.
>
> Audio CDs as a medium hold 16bit 44.1kHz PCM audio. They are capable of better sound quality than
> MP3s given that MP3s take 16bit 44.1kHz PCM audio and use various methods to throw away audio
> information.

mp3s and other encoded formats don't have to be derived from cds,
depending on the format selected they discard no audible information and
still achieve significant reduction in bitrate.


>
> Thus, there is no "allegedly" about it - CDs are absolutely *capable* of better sound quality.

Only if they are selected as the original source and the audio at the
destination is audibly degraded. If you can't hear a difference, then
the cd is not capable of better sound quality.
It is possible that encoding directly to a digital distribution format
from a 24/96 master will avoid signal degradation caused by going
through the 16/44.1 compromised format first.
>
> This is, of course, entirely subject to what sort of audio is being put onto the CDs - is it a poorly
> mastered piece of rubbish, or is it a state-of-the-art high quality audio product.
>
> If poorly mastered rubbish then you might as well bung it into low bitrate MP3s and distribute it over the
> Internet.
>
>
No point living in the past.
Clued up artists are releasing their material through services like
Bandcamp where uploads at 16/44.1 wav is the worst quality they will
accept. Much better to upload free and download at 24/96 FLAC for $10 an
album straight to the artist. New benchmark.

http://bandcamp.com/faq#aiffwavuploadrequirement

On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:03:42 +1300, victor wrote:

>> Audio CDs as a medium hold 16bit 44.1kHz PCM audio. They are capable of
>> better sound quality than MP3s given that MP3s take 16bit 44.1kHz PCM
>> audio and use various methods to throw away audio information.
>
> mp3s and other encoded formats don't have to be derived from cds,

Agreed - they could be derived from inferior already-encoded sources and therefore result in an even
worse audio product.


> depending on the format selected they discard no audible information and
> still achieve significant reduction in bitrate.

There is only one audio compression format that I am aware of that is loss-less, and it really only is best
when encoding from uncompressed PCM audio - the same as what is on CDs.

All other compression codecs - including MP3 and OGG - achieve their reduction in bit-rate by actively
discarding audio information; and the greater the reduction in bit-rate means the greater amount of
audio information has to be discarded, so what you're saying is incorrect.


--
"Filtering the Internet is like trying to boil the ocean"

On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:03:42 +1300, victor wrote:

>> Thus, there is no "allegedly" about it - CDs are absolutely *capable*
>> of better sound quality.
>
> Only if they are selected as the original source and the audio at the
> destination is audibly degraded. If you can't hear a difference, then
> the cd is not capable of better sound quality.

That is faulty logic. The audio format on CDs *is* the uncompressed standard for PCM audio for music.

Just because your own equipment is so poor that you cannot hear all the detail in a CD then you can't
blame the original audio source for that.


> It is possible that
> encoding directly to a digital distribution format from a 24/96 master
> will avoid signal degradation caused by going through the 16/44.1
> compromised format first.

16/44.1 *is* the audio standard. It is not in any way a "compromised" format.

24/96 is a high-definition audio standard for audio DVDs, not for CDs.

Have you ever seen an audio DVD player for sale in NZ? Come to think of it, have you *ever* seen an
audio DVD for sale in NZ?

Also, there is little point for encoding an MP3 at greater than 16/44.1 because even at 16/44.1
considerable audio information is disposed of; and even greater audio information would need to be
disposed of if you encoded the MP3 at 24/96; and the whole point of using an audio compression
codec is to achieve a reduction in file size while not reducing the quality of the resultant output too
much.


--
"Filtering the Internet is like trying to boil the ocean"