Why does the stuff I like cease being made

[UtwigMU]

The first example can be Matrox:
We all know how good Matrox was for 2D quality and with G400 they were fast in 3D. I even liked Parhelia for it's features and I liked many options Powerdesk had. End of line

Then Thinkpads. They were the most awesome computers ever. X61 tablet is the best PC I've ever had. Yes, they are still being made but they slowly got ruined, first by lack of high res IPS screens, then by round edges, messed up keyboard layout (one of the reasons I stuck to Thinkpads was the same keyboard layout), ... Most people on Thinkpad forums would say present Thinkpads (from 430/530/230 onwards) are no longer Thinkpads. And quite a few guys here like Thinkpads as well.

Today I found one of my favourite bands broke up. I can think of a few more examples.

Now I could have liked for example Apple but I didn't like them particularly in 1980s when I encountered first Mac, in the 90s and 00s when I did DTP and design. I remember countless arguments over beer with some mac guy from then. And well they're still around. Or I could have liked Bob Dylan and he's still around. And some classmate tried turning me on and I even read the BIO and while I acknowledge the quality his music doesn't make my heart tick faster particularly.


I'm wondering what is it about me that I sense the stuff that is rightly made and has some rare quality that most fail to appreciate and I'm willing to go a longer way to have/enjoy it. And then why doesn't this stuff cease being made. I'm wondering whether I'm some tragic hero and whether I should work on myself becoming more mainstream since this is a lot safer and healthier.

[Umfriend]

Oh, don't tempt nostalgia. But yeah. By the time I discovered Joy Division, Ian Curtis had long hanged himself. But on the HW stuff: I _like_ Blackberry (including their Playbook). Condolences accepted. What about 16:10 screens on laptops/desktops? Commodore Amiga anyone? Fighter Ace and the MS Sidewinder Precision Pro FFB joysticks (now WITH driver support)?

[VJ]

The Squeezebox line of internet radios... years ahead of their time, open source software, killed by Logitech...

[Umfriend]

Oh, and Windows Home Server 2011. Great product. Discontinued.

[Brian Ellis]

My biggest regret is losing Asyst programming( a Forth derivative for scientific apps.) It really was fantastic, but it never transited from DOS 5 to Windows. Along similar lines, the HP-80 series of computers were stupendous for scientific apps but came unstuck in 1985 because of competition from PCs. HP brought out the Vectra PCs (1982?), but they could never adapt them for scientific apps; just Dutch copies of IBMs in a fancier box.

Otherwise, I regretted the demise of Ulead Media Studio Pro and Matrox Marvel. On the video front, I think we are shortly in for a new big thump. I forecast the 4X will reach the prosumer market within 5 years, with cams <$1000 and TVs (45") at the same price. Unless there are some rapid advances, PC editing will be very iffy, if at all possible, even with proxy editing. DVDs and BluRays will be history in 10 years if 4X takes off. Clients won't want even HD. Watch Sony for this space!

[KRSESQ]

The first example can be Matrox:
We all know how good Matrox was for 2D quality and with G400 they were fast in 3D. I even liked Parhelia for it's features and I liked many options Powerdesk had. End of line

Then Thinkpads. They were the most awesome computers ever. X61 tablet is the best PC I've ever had. Yes, they are still being made but they slowly got ruined, first by lack of high res IPS screens, then by round edges, messed up keyboard layout (one of the reasons I stuck to Thinkpads was the same keyboard layout), ... Most people on Thinkpad forums would say present Thinkpads (from 430/530/230 onwards) are no longer Thinkpads. And quite a few guys here like Thinkpads as well.

Today I found one of my favourite bands broke up. I can think of a few more examples.

Now I could have liked for example Apple but I didn't like them particularly in 1980s when I encountered first Mac, in the 90s and 00s when I did DTP and design. I remember countless arguments over beer with some mac guy from then. And well they're still around. Or I could have liked Bob Dylan and he's still around. And some classmate tried turning me on and I even read the BIO and while I acknowledge the quality his music doesn't make my heart tick faster particularly.


I'm wondering what is it about me that I sense the stuff that is rightly made and has some rare quality that most fail to appreciate and I'm willing to go a longer way to have/enjoy it. And then why doesn't this stuff cease being made. I'm wondering whether I'm some tragic hero and whether I should work on myself becoming more mainstream since this is a lot safer and healthier.

That's called growing old, dude. Get used to it. And hang on tight because it's a rough ride.

You could add Star Trek and Star Wars to your list of things that have been spoiled by the passage of time, mainly simply because of bad stewardship.

History is littered with the carcasses of products I grew up with (both useful and frivolous) that are long gone. The most immediate example I can think of is "Space Food Sticks," a chocolate or peanut butter flavored confection marketed as astronaut food for the masses (think of an early version of Powerbars). They were great. I loved them. Discontinued even before the Moon-landing program ended (I hear they're still made Down Under, but I haven't looked into the shipping).

One of my clients (an audio engineer) steadfastly refuses to upgrade from XP because he's sick of product designers "just changing things for no other reason than to justify their jobs." He has a long list of high-end audio equipment that's no longer made that was better than anything made today (so he says).

I hear you about the Marvels. Mine is still plugged into my W98 box and still works just fine, although I needed to hook it up to a digital-analog converter box to get a picture :/ .

[cjolley]

I have a brand new G200 at work.

ScreenShot001.png

[Jammrock]

That doesn't count cjolley. That's just part of your Nuvoton dKVM.

[cjolley]

I was remoted in, it's part of my HP DL380p G8, .
And it does count, that is an authentic G200 chip on the motherboard. A brand new HP (or Intel) motherboard.
It's not in production here yet, so I can still do some playing around.
Anyone got a copy of the gl miniport lying around?


PS, It really has 2 six core processors, hyperthreading makes it look like 24.
It's for a new cashiering system we are implementing.

Here is a DL180 G6 connected to the same kvm (this one runs linux):


[root@trvmhost ~]# lspci | grep VGA
01:03.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc ES1000 (rev 02)
[root@trvmhost ~]#

[Jammrock]

It is Matrox tech so I'll let it slide this once

The G200eh is actually integrated inside the Nuvoton IPMI controller. Nuvoton likely licensed the IP from Matrox, integrated it, sold it to HP, who rebranded it as an iLo.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/ipmi.cfm

Nice server, btw. Central hub to dumb terminal cashier stations?

[cjolley]

It is Matrox tech so I'll let it slide this once

The G200eh is actually integrated inside the Nuvoton IPMI controller. Nuvoton likely licensed the IP from Matrox, integrated it, sold it to HP, who rebranded it as an iLo.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/ipmi.cfm

Nice server, btw. Central hub to dumb terminal cashier stations?

The graphics chip is on the iLO card not the motherboard? Interesting since the iLO system itself does not use video out.
(I guess it does in a way, because you can get to it from the terminal during boot up)
I may be able to find out for sure by looking at the temp sensor map.

The stations are domain PCs in their own right. Our first touch screens. We'll see. (btw touch screens are much cheaper if purchased with the PC)

The server will have several jobs.
Database for transaction and image information. (MS SqlServer ) (They didn't have an Oracle version of their software)
OCR and Handwriting recognition for check images.
Application server.
And since our file server is over 4 years old I'm going to throw our file shares on there too.

It has 32 gigs of ram and 25 x 600 gig drives (about 11 TB at raid 60 with a spare)

[Umfriend]

What's wrong with SQL Server?

[cjolley]

Oh, I'm mostly kidding now.
Back when I first started with databases it was pretty much a toy compared to Oracle.
eg autocommit on by default.

We use Oracle for our in-house stuff. I don't really know much about the current SqlServer.
Except that when I ordered our licenses it has gotten WAY more expensive

[Umfriend]

Back in the '90s, I did a lot of work in DB2 (mostly querying and just a small tiny bit of inserts/updates on single row level, no stored procedures etc). Two of the things I miss in T-SQL are:
1. A GROUP BY would automatically ORDER BY the same columns by default. Extremely annoying to have to explicitly require that; and,
2. A GROUP BY or ORDER BY could be done on column numbers!! e.g. ORDER BY 5, 1, 2 DES, 3.

[cjolley]

1. A GROUP BY would automatically ORDER BY the same columns by default. Extremely annoying to have to explicitly require that; and,
2. A GROUP BY or ORDER BY could be done on column numbers!! e.g. ORDER BY 5, 1, 2 DES, 3.

1, You aren't alone in feeling this way but guaranteed ordering without an ORDER BY defies foundational principles of database theory. Why is it annoying to add an ORDER BY? Then you are just saying what you really want.

2. It won't let you use column numbers in an ORDER BY? I thought that was in the SQL standard. It is certainly a feature of most DB engines.
I've never heard of being able to GROUP BY column numbers. That sounds like it would make reading a query that wasn't utterly simple very difficult.