Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
You have to admit, no matter what side you're on...it's amazing the Mac has lasted this long after being pronounced dead several times.
Best Buy can have you arrested
*BSD
sulli
RTFJ.
They still serve a very important purpose for many businesses: Multipart form printing.
One company I work with prints 4 part invoices for in-home services. We've tested alternatives, but have yet to find a non-impact printer capable of getting the job done.
I think its unfair to call the technology outdated when it still performs some tasks better than its modern counterparts.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Guess what? I just want a watch that tells time. I don't want that's tacky, but most digital watches come with this ungainly feature.
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
No need to throw the Fortran libraries away, though, just wrap them in a higher level language. Chances are it'll be fast enough, and it'll almost certainly be a lot easier to use.
The Army reading list
Cars with wheels.
Buildings that need ground to support them.
So, where are the flying cars and cities on clouds damnit?!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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?
Yes, there are some people who use them, but there are fewer and fewer forms to fill out these days that aren't automated.
John
Watches are jewelry, you techno-elitist snob. That's why people don't "upgrade".
What next. I should get my wife cubic zirconium because it looks the same as a diamond but is much cheaper because it was made with "technology". I'm just soooo old fashioned.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
the company i work for uses foxpro. might as well be writing code in sanskrit
Clippy
Hacker Media
As the owner of a Bulova timepiece, I am insulted that the other values of older technology like a watch are not considered. For example, the artistic merit and fine craftsmanship of my watch are enjoyable to me every time I use the watch. On a shallower note, it's dead sexy. The same conundrum was brought up about photos vs. oil paintings at the beginning of the 20th century -- sure, photos represent a "clear" picture of something, but they in no way diminish the quality and value of an original Rembrandt painting.
stuff |
"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
Some of us forget that "new" is not necessarily "better".
It is just like over complicated phones. All I need it to do is keep time. Why does every device have to do 11,274 different things?
I've had countless digital watches, most are in the garbage. I also have one or two 'analog' watches that I simply wind up and they work. No batteries, no looking for the manual to figure out how to set the time in Tokyo, no calibrating altitude and temp.
My mother's a nurse, and she told me once that she MUST have an analog watch with a second hand when counting somebody's pulse. I tried it once, and she's right - you just can't count both pulses and seconds if you're looking at a digital display.
I think what's happening here is that with the analog watch, you use the "number" part of your brain to count the pulses, while you use the visual part of your brain to see when your 60 seconds is up (by looking for the position of the second hand).
With a digital seconds readout, you end up using the "number" part of your brain for both tasks, and you get screwed up.
And an important aspect of moving hands is that they convey information in their movement: in a cockpit the altimeter can be "read" very quickly to show whether the aircraft is ascending or descending. On a watch I can get an approximate time (it's almost 4:30pm) in a glance. Yet another example is a digital vs. analog scuba diving pressure gauge: the position of the mechanical arm can be understood very fast without worrying about the exact number of PSI left.
John.
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
Two things I like about analog timepieces:
The first is that you can usually make out the time further away, and in poorer lighting conditions, from an analog clock versus a digital.
The second is that you can use your analog watch as an impromptu compass. In the northern hemisphere, hold the watch flat and point the hour hand towards the sun. Now bisect the angle between the hour hand and the figure 12 (ie. noon) on your watch to give you a North-South line. In the southern hemisphere, hold the watch dial and point the figure 12 (ie. noon) towards the sun. The line that bisects the angle between the hour hand and the figure 12 is the North-South line.
Point the hour hand in the direction of the sun (Keeping it horizontal of course), and the point between the hour hand and 12 will be South. For you "Below the belt" /.rs (South of the equator ;-) it'll be pointing North.
Cheers!
--RjS
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
A lot of public schools are still using 95.
Badass Resumes
I'm actually somewhat surprised to see VHS not being listed. Despite large chains like Circuit City and Best Buy having gotten out of VHS sales, people still refuse to upgrade even to a $40 WalMart DVD player. These same people will complain to any employee at a store that sells or rents DVDs about how they don't have enough VHS tapes, but won't even consider the idea that times have moved on from the format.
Dot matrix printers can print half a page, stop and print the second half the next day. And you can read the result between the 2 jobs.
You can use it as an ouput terminal.
Try to do that with a laser printer. Won't die anytime soon.
Iraq: war to save the U
NO KIDDING!!!
This is a general trend of adding garbage to an otherwise simple device. Digitals watches, cell phones, etc.
If you're going to have a multipurpose machine, like a computer, then call it that. Otherwise you end up with a watch that takes the temperature, tells time, takes pictures, has an address book, and makes calls.
Then your cell phone makes calls, tells time, takes the temperature, takes pictures and has an address book.
Your handheld address book tells time, takes the temperature, takes pictures, makes phone calls.
Your digital camera takes pictures, tells time...
I had to laugh when I read the story on slashdot. How can OLD watches still hang around that just tell time?
BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT A WATCH IS FOR.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
He most certainly should have included old floppy drives. I no longer order a floppy drive when buying new PCs or Laptops for my company, but you can still get them if you want. USB keys are just too dang handy and hold alot more data. I'm amazed that the ole 3.5 disk is still around. At least that is better than the super old 8 inch disks I used so long ago.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Intuitive, eh? I guess nobody remembers that segment in second grade where you had to learn to read an analog display. The mental map between "Big hand on 2 and little hand on 6" to 2:30 is non-trivial... I mean, did you catch that that time is actually ten minutes after six? It's the reason why kids start out with digital watches.
What analog watches do display intuitively is the amount of time between two events, at least for differences less than an hour (or half hour). It would be interesting to make a linear clock, where you could see tiny slivers of five minutes versus chunks of half hours, and ask kids how easy it is to use versus standard round analog or digital displays.
from the eyes of a non-techie:
Could you please explain counter-clockwise to me again?
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Annoying, wasn't it? Here is the link to the full article that I saw in that Google search though.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
Well, on the multi-part forms I've used, there's usually spaces for a customer to sign (think - car repair forms at most major dealerships.) Using the same impact during signing (pressure), you get multiple copies, one for the dealership, one for records, and one for the customer, all with the same signature.
I'd hate to have to sign for work multiple times...
Karnal
Here's a real link to the article instead of having to look through Google:
Ten technologies that deserve to die
Gone are the times when the floppy is the only rescue tool for a b0rked computer. Bootable CDs and USB drives have fixed that. So why are they still around? For all intents and purposes, USB drives beat floppies in every respect: physical size, storage size, access time, mtbf.... the list goes on.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
This list is of devices that work perfectly. They do what they need to without any obnoxious interference. My analog watch tells me the time when I look at it. I never see the latest sports scores or the temperature. I get what I want. The author seems to have left off the broom. Why didn't the broom die when the vacuum was invented? Because the broom served its purpose quickly and efficiently. The broom has been used for at least 5,000 years and will probably continue to be used until humanity is destroyed. Thank goodness for places like OldVersion.com . Newer isn't always better.
For many processes, the multipart form is preferred because at certain steps along the way, one sheet is ripped off while the rest proceed along. If you printed multiple copies on a laserjet instead, you'd have to collate and staple (or do something else) to keep the appropriate copies together - hardly an efficient alternative...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
If you have numbered multipart forms then this ensures that the sheets of paper you sign/ship/mail are part of the original multipart form and not a reprint.
Many places want original paperwork, you can't guarantee it with a laser. Dot matrix is still a darn useful technology.
Trolling is a art,
ok, i thought analog watches was a bad inclusion, but vacuum tubes?! Why not throw this round thing called "The Wheel" in there, too? It's old and freaking won't die!
I love my Crate tube amp. It's so nice sounding.
This article... it's credibility is wavering at the moment. The author must have spent a whole 5 minutes looking for inspiration before giving up and writting this lousy article.
Good lord, fax needs to go away. I've bitched and moaned about this at my office for FIVE YEARS.
... what are you thinking?
In addition to that, there needs to be some way of physically inflicting pain upon people who print documents and don't pick them up from the printer. It's a waste to print at all, but if you then don't even get your wasted print out
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
with the advant of cheap CD-rw burners and dirt cheap flash media its amazing the floppy disk is still around
CLI
The ______ Agenda
IMHO, there's really no good reason anyone should need a typewriter for the purpose of filling out purchase orders!
The problem is, your workplace is still using the "old tech" of carbon paper based forms.
The last company I worked for that made us fill out multipart purchase order forms finally phased them out completely. They installed new computer software that let employees complete the whole purchase order online. Sure, a few people complained and moaned about how much harder it made things - but over time, even they started getting used to it. (How often do you re-order something from the same supplier? I bet it happens fairly often. Sure is nice to have the PC fill in the whole address for you when you key in the name of the vendor, because it remembers them all in an address book.)
It's also nice when someone needs to locate an old purchase order to figure out when a warranty expires or what was paid for a product the last time it was purchased. Just do a quick search in the computer, instead of digging through thousands of papers in a filing cabinet!
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
How on earth can you describe an analog watch as more intuitive than a digital watch? More elegant, certainly. But intuitive? A digital watch shows the numbers. If you can read them, you can tell the time. An analog watch uses one set of numbers (or positions, as many don't even have actual numerals on the face) for two different things. You have to learn what each hand means, and what each position means in the context of each hand. Once you learn it, it becomes straightforward and easy, but it's definitely the opposite of intuitive.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Not really. They're two-trick ponies; they tell me the time and the date. Last time I checked, "timepiece" meant "something that tells time".
Digital-watch wearers can check temperature, altitude, and the time in Tokyo, play tunes and games, and send messages.
None of which matters. I don't give a crap about the temperature, because it's moot; if I'm too cold or too hot, my body will tell me, and I'm usually smart enough to, based on time of day, season, location etc...figure out what I'm gonna need to wear(I may even, gasp, open the door and stick my head outside to see for myself). I don't give a crap about altitude, because honestly, that doesn't really mean anything to me, unless it comes on the news that anything under 1000 ft ASL is going to flood within the hour because the whole antarctic shelf just collapsed. I certainly don't give a crap about the time in Tokyo, because if I needed to know that sort of thing on a regular basis, I'd know what the differential is, and be able to do the rather easy math(anyone that can't do addition/subtraction for number under 30 needs serious help). In the meantime, I'll guess that they're approximately 12 hours behind EST since they're on the opposite side of the world.
In fact, the only reason I need a timepiece- since I(and most other people) can tell roughly what time of day it is...is because we need to be at certainly places at certain very specific times, where guessing isn't appropriate. The date function is small because we only need to look at it once a day, maybe twice, to remind ourselves. Form, meet function. So pardon me while I buy the nice, simple analog timepiece that looks nice(and will look nice for at least another 100 years) while you buy your stupid little toy that will break in 5 years(it'll be out of style in 6 months, if you're lucky). Were electric analog timepieces an improvement? Not really. Manual wind, I can sync to my computer, or even a radio program. But my electric analog watch needs battery replacement every year or so, and since it only comes out on special occasions, it's nearly always dead.
I have the same objection to cameraphones. I want my phone to do 3 things. a)let me find a number for someone I know b)let me know when someone is calling c)let me make calls.
Notice nowhere in there was "annoy coworkers with polyphonic ringtones." Or "take pictures"(I use my camera to take pictures, and they look 1000x better than anything any cameraphone will ever produce). Or "tell me the weather". I haven't even bothered to use the AIM functions, or SMS. I use my phone for one thing- telephone calls.
I once mentored for the middle school science olympiad. Mind you, these kids are supposed to be the brightest of the bunch- the kids who enjoy science and thinking on their feet. "Okay, you guys have until 3pm to finish this practice". (loooong pause) "Um, we don't have any watches on." "There's a clock right there on the wall." (blank stares.) "Um...we don't know how to read those kinds of clocks". How pathetic is that?
Please help metamoderate.
Yup, he's right. It's on our New York State checkout list, right next ot NYS State cert. card, penlight and trauma shears. Analog watches for EMT's and Paramedics are mandatory.
My TAG Heuer Formula 1 has taken one shit kicking after another; stills ticks away like a champ at work.
I don't think the digital plastic equivalent would hold up.
--
From the article: "Vacuum tubes Audiophiles have sustained another technology that's even older than magnetic tape. In the 1970s, compact, energy-efficient transistors boded to replace vacuum tubes entirely. But transistors couldn't satisfy some guitar players and hi-fi cognoscenti."
As a guitar player, I'm insulted that this article lumps me in with the conspicuously-consuming audiophiles that drop hundreds of dollars on cleverly marketed cables. Tubes aren't an imaginary sound modifier in guitar amps, they are universally agreed to distort (clip) in much nicer ways when sent an overpowered signal compared to transistors. Only now in the 21st century are we beginning to see digital amps that can compete with this "ancient" technology. The article is correct that the consumer-level tube market is helped along by musicians, but the reasons have nothing to do with Audiophile-type superstition that seems to be implied. The tube vs. solid state harmonic patterns are quantitively different, and empirically better. I would no go so far as to label us as the cognoscenti, but rather people who aren't obviously deaf (and anyone here who has heard a clipping solid state amp will agree).
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
If you're wearing an analog watch and someone asks you what time it is, you say: a quarter to 10.
If you're wearing a digital watch: it's 9:43 and 17 seconds!!! Urk!!!
Geez... ya sound like a total dweeb!
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I think handwriting technology (pens, inks, paper) will be another one. I admit that I have never hidden my love of fountain pens, but even the average Bic has a role. Jotting down a small bit of information while on the phone or standing somewhere is just simpler and quicker with pen and paper.
PDAs have their role, but they can be slow. Plus, I can't jot something down and tape it do a doorway or under a windshield wiper with an LCD screen.
An analogue watch shows the time graphically, a digital watch shows six digits. This is why an analogue watch is considered by many, myself included, to be more intuitive.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Friends in the nursing professions all use analog watches. It's apparently difficult to take a pulse with a digital. Counting while watching a number changing is hard on the ol' brain.
I've got a pair of Waltham pocketwatches, one with an 1898 movement, and one that is probably from the 1930s.
Both of them work, and keep good time.
I also have a pile of dead, broken down computer hardware, and can point to any number of software projects that are unmaintained, unfinished, or otherwise at the end of their lives. All of these are, at best, half the age of the younger watch.
If nothing else, carrying an old-fashioned watch is a reminder about building things to last...
Wit someone down with an analog clock who has never seen one before, and tell me how intuitive it is. How did you learn which hand was the hours? Did you know that the first time you saw one? How did you know how the hands moved? How did you know that they moved at all?
Your logic that it's graphical, therefor intuitive is flawed. I can make lots of graphic representations of time... but I doubt you'll understand them without me explaining them.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
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.
This is one I like. IMO, broadcast radio has survived because it works. You can have a cheap $2 walkman to listen to the radio, or something more fancy. With analogue radio, there are no technology licenses, no patents and no trying to find the specs to some properiety file format or codec.
Now digital radio involves a bunch of semi open technologies, patents and licensing. Sometimes it just seems like technology for technologies sake, and maybe locking people into the royalty cycle?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well, technically, a vacuum tube does the same thing as a transistor, so the smaller, lighter, cheaper, cooler, and usually more reliable transistor should have replaced the vacuum tube, right?
Do you ever ask yourself -why- vacuum tubes sound better? There's a specific reason.
See, in a guitar amp, what you really want to do is overdrive the sound, creating distortion. That's the nice fuzz sound. When the signal is overdriven, the semiconductor clips off the top of the sound wave.
Vacuum tubes and transistors clip sound waves differently. In a transistor, the clip stays high until the signal drops, causing a square-shaped clip. In a vacuum tube, the signal drops after the clip, creating a sawtooth-shaped clip.
Brass and strings have sawtooth-shaped waveforms. Computers make square-shaped waveforms. So most people "like" the sound of a sawtooth better. So people like the vacuum tube sound better.
MOSFET transistors are now being used in solid-state audio equipment because they, too, have a sawtooth clip when they distort. Now note that this only matters if you actually overdrive the sound; folks who think a tube amp that isn't distorting sounds better than a solid-state amp are probably imagining things. But your Crate sounds better than my solid-state pedal because of the way the semiconductors in 'em clip.
No need to get into this argument, just see Slashdot's tenth most active story ever (at least at the moment). It's all been said I suppose.
And I suppose you'd also claim a sundial is not intuitive? The sundial is graphical, and most homo sapiens spending their days in the presence of one would figure out the correlation. Same with an analog wristwatch. Strap one on the wrist of some lost-society tribal person, and he'll eventually figure it out.
It's intuitive because the hour hand is not far removed from the natural phenomenon of a cast shadow. The main difference is that the function extends beyond daylight hours. Minute and second hands quickly reveal their function as being subsets of the hour hand.
So yes, it is intuitive. It is an instrument whose human interface is modelled on a universally-shared human experience. How more intuitive could you possibly make it?
Exactly. I typically do not want to know the exact time time, but want to know how far away I am from some past or future time.
Grand Central Terminal used to have analog clocks, and if I was running for a train it was easy to see if I had time to make it, but when they changed to digital I had to stop and do time math to figure things out. Sounds trivial, but looking at the distance between the minute hand and some numeral was easier to parse than a string of digits.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
How many people here have ever been subjected to a digital speedometer? They've only been put on a few cars in the past, and it seems that they're always eventually replaced with an analog dial. The reason of course, is that you can tell at a glance how fast you're going. With a digital readout, you have to actually read it.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I ask because any time format is arbitrary until you learn it. The digital format in particular makes no sense without initial reference to the standard 12 hour analog clock face. The first two digits represent hours, an arbitrarily defined one-twenty-fourth of the day. The next represents minutes, an arbitrarily defined one-sixtieth of an hour. Without reference to the 12 or 24 and the 60, you have no idea what 09:30 is. It might be just under a tenth of a day, it might be that the day is nearly over. It might be that within whatever section of day the first two digits represent we're nearly one third of the way through, or it might be that we're half way through.
The analogue clock is very clear at first glance, and you only have to look at it a couple of times to know what every aspect of it represents. There's a large hand that goes around quickly, and a small hand that doesn't. At a glance you can see that the small hand is a little over three quarters of the way around, and about the only unintuitive bit is that it's not refering to three quarters of the day, but three quarters of half a day.
That's why it's more intuitive than a series of six digits. Oh sure, it could be more intuitive, but unless we move to a decimal time system, I don't think a digital format is going to be as close to "intuitive" as a clock face for a very long time.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?
Presenting different content to Google than to random visitors is deceitful. They want the Google goodness of appearing to offer publically available content, but don't actually want to offer it. They're effectively lying to Google. If you don't want to offer content to non-subscriber's, that's fine. (I pay for two subscriber only online magazines that I respect. They play fair and their content either isn't indexed, or only the table of contents and summary pages are indexed.) But don't lie about the availability of content to Google. (I'm complaining now because this article features just such an example regarding Tech Review's use of this sleazy trick. My other pet peeve is IGN.)
Anyway, if you encounter this crap, step one is to report the site to Google. This is a case of "Page does not match Google's description" and "Cloaked page" and is clearly web spam.
Step two is to read the page anyway. Set your web browser's user agent "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" and you're good to go. You may also need to disable JavaScript so you don't get redirected. Personally I just suck down the page with "wget --user-agent="Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) http://www.example.com/".
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Analog watches: I use analog watches exclusively, and it's not because they're easier to read, even though I grew up before digital watches were available. Analog watches are essentially fashion accessories, distinguished from other jewelry only in that they happen to tell time. (This is especially true if you're part of the crowd that buys expensive Rolexes and the like.) For myself, I just prefer a simple, inexpensive, and tasteful analog watch over an ugly black piece of plastic with a primitive multi-segment LCD display that looks like a refugee from the late 70's.
Dot-matrix printers: This is probably lost on folks who came of age after inkjet and laser took over, but I find it a lot easier to read code when it's not interrupted by arbitrary page breaks. I long ago got in the habit of printing out code modules on greenbar paper, marking them up with highlighters and ballpoint notations, and tacking them to the wall. The later 24-pin models are reasonably quiet, perfectly legible, fast, and cheap as hell to operate. Moreover, they last forever, too. I still have and use an Epson dot matrix from 1984, and it works as well as when it was new. And if you want to do multipart forms, you can't use anything else.
And while this wasn't on the list, I have to mention...
Analog film cameras: There are still a lot of things you can't do as well digitally, but even if that were not the case, that's missing the point. Photography is an activity, just like snowboarding or building hotrods. Even if digital was better across the board, a lot of people would still use film cameras, just as a lot of people kept painting after film arrived.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I first got hooked on analog watches when I took a vacation to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I visited the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia Pennsylvania. Looking at the detailed construction of American pocket watches from the late 1800's and early 1900's facinated me. THESE are real time pieces, with hard steel gears meshing with softer brass gears, mounted on pinions that are encased by jewels. The balance has tiny screw weights to make the balance "balanced". Most of the gold-plated cases were warrented for 20 or 25 years! These devices were designed to last your lifetime, not designed with built-in obsolescence like today's products. More importantly, they were built by real people with TALANT in engineering, metallurgy, and art. Many of the the movements had very decorative Damaskeening engraved on the plate nickel and stainless steel bridges. Waltam competed fiercely with Damaskeening.
To date, I have several American pocket watches, the oldest made in 1886 and the newest made in 1912. I even managed to find a 17 jewel Waltam Appleton Tracy Railroad pocket watch at an auction for $58 back in 1992. It needed some work, so I took it to a certified master watchmaker to replace the main spring, cleaned it using ultrasonic waves, and lubricated everything again. THIS WATCH KEEPS PERFECT TIME, and it's almost 100 years old!
Now I wear an Orient (subsidiary of Seiko) that has an automatic winding mechanism, has a second hand sweep, tells the day and the date, has a 21-jewel movement, is water resistant to 50 meters, is made of all stainless steel construction, and it only cost me $40 (you have to know where to get them at low cost). I wear THIS watch because I work around NMR instruments ALL DAY and it is unaffected by the superconducting magnets and the 10 Gauss magnetic field. The only thing "wrong" with the watch is that it gains 5 minutes every two weeks, otherwise, I'm VERY happy with THIS cheapo analog watch.
ALL YOUR TIME ARE BELONG TO THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.
With a digital clock you have to read the number do the math and then figure out what the resulting number means. That's too much work if your real attention is on something else.
With an analog clock you just note the distance. As that distance gets smaller, so does your time left.. simple as that.
If I have to wake up at a specific time without (or ahead of) an alarm clock, I'll look at the time, convert to analog if necessary (I have a digital watch) and imagine the movement that has to occur between now and when I have to wake up... then I'll go to sleep and wake up at the apointed time.
Dunno why it works. I read it in a (fiction) book once, and tried it. It worked, so I kept it in my bag of tricks.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Modern Mac has the old ROM stored on disk, Openfirmware, OS X, (S)ATA, CD/DVD-RW, USB, Firewire, PCI, AGP, RJ-45, Ethernet, DVI, PowerPC... note that the Mac has grown more in the direction of the PC than vice versa
I do not know Macs, so I may have missed something, but which of these started with the Wintel PC?
ROM/Open firmware - The news is that Wintels may do this soon, but I have yet to see motherboard without ROM BIOS.
OS X - Unix, not Wintel
SATA - From the harddrive manufacturers. The implementation for Wintel has the BIOS must faking one of the standard IDE positions so that MSWindows thinks it is running from "C:". This reduces the number of drives that can be used in a dual IDE/SATA PC, and encourages the consumer to find an OS that can fully use the hardware. This could not have been planned by MS.
CD/DVD-RW - Consumer technology coopted by the computer world.
USB - The Wintel answer to Firewire.
Firewire - Apple. It is so much an Apple technology that Intel refuses to incorporate it into their motherboards.
PCI, AGP - Hardware manufacturers, but they are the standards for Wintel. Be thankful that Apple has decided to follow the "standards" for commodity hardware.
RJ-45, Ethernet - Ethernet came from the mainframe/Unix world. It barely touched the Wintel world until the late 80s. The RJ45 plug was a quick prototype that accidentally made it into production. The engineers are still kicking themselves for designing a plug that is designed to catch on EVERYTHING.
DVI - I do not know who started this.
PowerPC - IBM. Was it first designed for Apple or Microsoft? Does anybody other than Apple and IBM use it?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Despite all the advances in in technology and manufacturing, old musical gear still reigns supreme in many areas. A vintage Neumann U47 mic (like the Beatles used) fetches a tidy sum and sounds better than most anything made these days. They don't make the exact replacement vacuum tube for it anymore, but there are close substitutes.
And speaking of tubes - the rich nonlinear sound of a tube amplifier hasn't yet been replaced by a more modern equivalent, especially for electric guitar. I think one of the articles mentioned vacuum tubes.
Piano, horns, guitar - most all acoustic instruments have nice sounding synthesized sampled versions that can be had at a fraction of the cost. These can be played from your computer or a keyboard. Yet the physical instruments, as expensive and potentially out of tune as they are, will probably always be preferred because of their human interface. Similarly, drum machines, which do not show up late or steal your girlfriend, are not replacing human drummers playing acoustic drums, except in 80's music and certain "techo" genres.
"In the early 1980s, at the dawn of the PC age, high-volume electronic storage and transmission--360-kilobyte floppy disks! 14-kilobit-per-second modems!"
I've been robbed.. Why is it I stumbled through the 80's with 300bps, 1200bps, and 2400bps(end of the decade) modems when they had 14Kbps modems available in the early 80's.. My 1200 baud modem was a $700 modem in 1988!!
I'm a west coast guy, it's late in the day, so nobody will read this anyway, but...
I've read all of the analog vs. digital debate. It's great to see such spirited debate over these simple devices.
This is the way I see it:
So here is my takeaway:
For what it's worth...
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It really all depends on what you grew up with, and where. Analog more closely represents the "real world". The earth spins, and the shadow of your sundial spins around with it. It's cyclic as well, showing the whole period of sweep for 12 hours.
Digital watches always scream the same time: It's always NOW. NOW, NOW, NOW. There is no sense of future or past inherent in the digital watch. For people who grew up in a time when past events and future possibilities were important enough to receive attention whenever consulting the current time, the digital watch is lacking.
Finally, as an oceangoing navigator, there is something very basic about the analog chronometer that is completely lacking with those little LCD's. 12 Goes into 360 just fine, which can be handy when thinking in terms of time being relative to a circle on the globe. It just isn't as apparent on the digital watch. There are a bunch of short-cuts when figuring out position that just isn't suited for digital. Also, a wind-up chronometer is somewhat less likely to suffer EMP from close lightning.
Exactly. I race... I just cannot get into the Tack Tick. There's something about the fluid compass, the motion corresponding with the boat, and the quick and easy ability to figure out tacks and course changes.
I also race cars sometimes... there's a reason analog instruments are preferred. A *very* quick glance down instantly tells you what you need to know, almost without taking your eyes off the track. A pressure driven analog oil gauge can tell you information about the condition of your engine from the motion of the needle, something you wouldn't get from a digital instrument.
There are lots of times that analog is superior.
Larry