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Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die
kudyadi writes "Technology Review has an interesting article on, as the title suggests, ten technologies that we continue using despite advances made in the same. The best example is that of analog watches, "Compared to today's digital timepieces, old-fashioned, sweep-hand watches are pathetic one-trick ponies. Digital-watch wearers can check temperature, altitude, and the time in Tokyo, play tunes and games, and send messages. Can wristwatch videoconferencing, Web surfing, and tarot readings be far off? But what digital watches can't do, according to sweep-hand proponents, is display the time and context as elegantly and intuitively as an analog model."" Interesting counterpoint to this post from a few years back about technologies that didn't manage to hang on. And Bruce Sterling has a short list of ones he'd like to see go away, too ;)
Not really. Microsoft has always sucked, Macs have always been the best alternative for the desktop, so no, not really.
It being "pronounced dead" doesn't mean a whole lot, just that people are wrong, which really isn't all that suprising.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Yes. You can pay for a $1100 watch, pay for an insurance policy, pay for an appraisal, pay for it to be repaired, and end up having paid out over a thousand dollars for something thats just supposed to tell time.
Or, you can shell out $10 for a cheapo timex that will tell time just as well, but will break in 3 years. At which time you buy another. Total price over your life of maybe $150.
Seems like I got a watch that just tells time, and saved $1000. The advantage to the expecsive analogs is what exactly?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Well, virgin boy, digital watches are an instant turn-off for women. When a woman asks a man for the time, she's really testing his sense of taste and classiness. A digital watch says to a woman, "Run, run far, far away from this dweeb."
The shoes that a man wears will also dictate how a woman feels about a man. Shiny black leather shoes, not patent leather, and a nice analog watch makes it clear to a woman that you have class.
A digital watch and basketball shoes or Doc Martens makes it clear to a woman that you are not dating material, unless you are a multi-mullionaire.
"We use vacuum tubes because they sound good," says Victor Tiscareno, a trained violinist and vice president of engineering at Red Rose Music, a maker of high-end home audio systems. Low-distortion, solid-state-transistor sound "looks lovely on an oscilloscope," he explains. "But what we measure and what we hear aren't the same. Vacuum tubes just sound more human, more lifelike.
If on an oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer you can't see distortion -- and clipping would be the _very_ visble -- it's because it doesn't exist.
Basically this claim that there's something magical about tubes that you can't measure or see with any tool, is just the saddest case of "the emperor's new clothes." Claim that something can be seen or heard only by the truly gifted (in this case, audiophiles), and enough idiots will start convincing themselves that they're seeing/hearing it too. Just to seem gifted too.
If you believe in that, might as well start believing in Bigfoot too. Noone's seen them or been able to photograph them, but they're there. Just trust me that it's there. See the analogy with the whole tubes issue yet?
That said, I wish I knew which marketing guy started the whole scam, elevating an inferior technology to fashion status over night. That one was a genius. I sincerely hope he/she was handomely rewarded, seein' as decades later there's still a sucker that falls for it every minute.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.