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 ;)

Comments

Re:Macintosh (refuses to die)

[Keitero-sama]

I love my 9" mac, it makes a great home for my fishes.

Re:Macintosh (refuses to die)

[pla]

If we run out of non-mac mods your post will tank. I've had +5 go down to 0 after a few days with mac moderators still attacking my posts moderations.

Same here... I tend to not really care about my /. karma, since for the most part people seem to consider my posts decent, and I've kept "excellent" karma for a couple of years now.

However, I tread rather lightly when it comes to anything Apple-related... Even guarded criticism of glaringly obvious facts result in a post getting moderated into oblivion.

Sadly, I have yet to see such blatant abuse of the /. mod system when I metamod (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would consider "unfair" while metamoding... At worst, a few that I didn't really find all that funny, but not bad enough to rate as distinctly "unfunny"). Personally, I think /. needs to shift the focus of metamoderation to detect abuses of down-mods, rather than up-mods. I mean, except for glaringly obvious "I posted from my other account and modded myself up", people tend not to abuse positive moderation.

But, so it goes. Except for certain topics (such as anything Apple), the moderation system seems to work tolerably.

Re:Macintosh (refuses to die)

[jc42]

Even guarded criticism of glaringly obvious facts result in a post getting moderated into oblivion.

That's not my experience. I've posted a number of criticisms of the New Mac (OSX) recently. Most weren't modded at all, of course. Those that got moderator attention all got mostly positive points, despite the fact that my comments were mostly negative.

Well, to be more accurate, my comments were very mixed. I see a lot of good things about my Powerbook, but also a lot of things that could be improved. A lot of those improvements are already present in linux-based systems. Some aren't. In some cases, the things I can't find are supposedly there in OSX, but the documentation isn't good enough for a dummy like me to find or use them.

From a computer geek's viewpoint, I make it clear that I consider OSX mostly inferior to linux, but better in a few ways. I also make it clear that I recommend that Windows users switch to a Mac unless they enjoy using the worst-designed computer on the planet.

(Of course, I expect followup telling me of other computer systems I could buy that are even worse than Windows. ;-)

In any case, none of this seems to have produced a religious attack from the Mac crowd. Just replies that are in turn interesting reading, and sometimes even informative.