4 ms·

In the 00’s there was a lot of hype around “smart” textiles being the next big thing. A lot of sports companies were trying to make something happen with it but

• afavour 3y ago
  Global Hypercolor!
  • helf 3y ago
    [dead]
• appplication 3y ago
  I think the reason a lot of this vanished is that textiles were quickly banned in competitive sports. Swimming is a great example - the advanced suit fabrics were really impressive engineering. As someone who had a chance to wear them (and the subsequent inferior replacements after the ban), they really did make a huge difference in performance. For a while people thought the suit records would be untouchable, and many folks even specifically requested they be specially designated with an asterisk. Since then, the new generation of swimmers have absolutely stepped up to the plate, and many of the believed-immortal records have since fallen.
  • qball 3y ago
    One would think they'd just do it by division; it's not that difficult to have a Production division for standard suits and an Open division for the highest of the high-tech fabrics. Other sports that have this kind of division still have Open competitors get beat by Production ones anyway.
    • appplication 3y ago
      I think in this case it was because people could essentially just buy speed to some degree, which was a first for swimming, and this had implications on equal access within the sport. The suit bans were both swift and restrictive, which was definitely a clear signal on how seriously this issue was taken. Ultimately, as fun as the super suits were, it was definitely the right call to put an end to the fabric arms race early.
• secretsatan 3y ago
  Mini discs lasted longer than a year! Well, in Europe anyway, and Japan
• castillar76 3y ago
  Minidiscs were a great tech—-we had a couple recorders in the early 2000s, mostly for recording my wife’s recitals. They were a huge step up from DAT in terms of easy, tiny personal digital recording and playback. Couple things killed them, though. The recording industry did their usual “ZOMGWTFBBQ this will KILL the music industry!” dance that they do every time there’s a new recording tech, so Sony responded by building in 90 layers of DRM all over the place. That meant you could record yourself playing, but trying to get that recording off the disc was anywhere from annoying to impossible depending on the player model thanks to Sony’s proprietary audio formats and connection systems. Until NetMD, the players would only use ATRAC, so you’d have to use Sony’s tools to move content in and out of the devices, with lots of DRM flags to make it harder to use them to bootleg concerts or trade music. All of that was in place right when MP3 and HDD/solid-state recorder/players exploded, at which point there was no selling point for MD anymore. No one wanted to buy a copy of an album on MD (there weren’t many anyway) when they could buy the MP3s or buy the CD and rip the MP3s instead. No one wanted to record audio in a proprietary format on expensive MDs when they could record it uncompressed to a computer or a solid-state handheld and burn it to a CD if they wanted a physical copy. Kind of sad, really—-the later NetMD models were tiny, fun to use, and by then Sony had removed most of the obstructions around recording and transferring audio. Solid-state is more reliable, but those recorders don’t have the cool looks and fun interfaces of the consumer MD models.
  • castillar76 3y ago
    I should add: while there were market issues, a significant amount of the failure of MD as a format lies with Sony, who have a long track record of laboring under the misapprehension that consumers would rather buy proprietary formats that only work on Sony gear. (See also: Betamax, DAT, Memory Stick...)