The technological shift had rendered at least $6 million in photo equipment obsolete.

The shift of seasons can render people "attentive to things that are unexpected or beyond our control," he said, with Ms. Felch adding, "Things we'd rather not have in our lives."

As near as we can tell from the probe, the shift rendered the planet inhospitable to life.

While he expects these changes to exert "a dramatic positive impact" in the decade ahead, he also warns that the shifts have already rendered many popular technical indicators obsolete.

For the first time in three generations a shift in public opinion has rendered ordinary the discussion of a more assertive Japan and left defenders of the "peace Constitution" on the defensive.

Some students of South African politics suggested that this shift to the left by the governing National Party, which introduced apartheid after taking power in 1948, might render the Democratic Party irrelevant.

But then again the vast shift of creative effort from paper to the Web may render the fact that some good novels were written during our time irrelevant.

And the shift will render traditional systems uncompetitive at traditional price levels.

Large demographic shifts have further rendered the city's firehouses less active than when many of them were built 75 to 130 years ago.

Although it is not altogether impossible to find actuality films made after 1910, the shift towards documentaries and newsreels rendered the genre irrelevant both commercially and artistically.