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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 ;)
*BSD
sulli
RTFJ.
SMTP and identd
My favorite quote from the article:
"And you needn't worry about your system going obsolete if it already is."
How true...
Sig? What sig?
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Bidets are a 19th century innovation, and here we are (in America at least) cleaning our nether regions with paper. How barbaric!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ha, yeah. I work in a library, and I used to add and replace the spine labels on books. This was done on a large, heavy Olympia typewriter that I came to name 'Oily Pam' (through anagramese). Time came when we invested in a computerised labeller, though we kept Oily Pam on hand for clothbound books, which the computer-created labels weren't great for. Every time a labeller tape ran out, the last few inches of the reel had a striped silver warning design that was still adhesive, and I gradually covered Pam in this half-mirror pattern. But eventually she fell by the wayside entirely, and one day I had to intervene to stop her being thrown in the garbage; now she lives under my desk and my God, I've just noticed this whole story is sounding pretty perverse.
Anyway, the computer-created labels look dreadfully sterile compared to Pam's output, and I found creating them to be a pretty joyless task - tap tap, click, print, as opposed to the handle-cranking, knob-turning, bell-ringing joy of using Pam. Good lord, that's almost obscene, isn't it? I think I might have a problem here.
These days, I have usually two devices on my person, a cell phone and an MP3 player, which have built-on clocks. Even on the rare occasion when I'm in a place where there are no clocks (such as a casino or shopping mall), and have none with me by pure accident of fate, I'm surrounded by people not only carry clocks around on their wrists, but actually derive pleasure from the brief moment of human contact they experience when I say "excuse me, but do you have the time?"
Strapping something to my wrist which only tells time would be a waste of five seconds each morning. I'm happier without one more item to worry about breaking or losing.
I look forward to the day when my phone, MP3 player, watch, GPS, daily planner, and sunglasses are all one small, light, rugged device.
Besides, it's a myth that timekeeping is what analog watches are for. They are worn as jewelry for men. It's a vain, metrosexual affectation to wear a gold watch. There's your real reason.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Quiet you! You'll run it for all of us! Getting around without a watch only works when the rest of the timepiece slaves willingly chain themselves and give us the time when asked to do so!
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Oh yeah, it's based on UNIX! Unix just came out A FEW YEARS AGO!
I find that LED clocks are more intuitive. People who say they can't read them must just be stupid and unable to read the most intuitive clock in existence.
I thought mankind was descended from the B-Ark colonists -- you know, the hair dressers and telephone sanitizer salesmen. Where do apes come in to the picture?
It's not polite to ask the details of somebody's sex life in public.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.