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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.
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
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
"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.
I agree. At work we use a dot matrix printer to print shipping forms that have to be signed. It just prints on one, and using carbon paper, it makes 2 other copies. The benefit of this comes when you sign the top copy and all 3 have the signature on them. With laser printer and making seperate copies, we had to sign 3 papers. So signing 100 copies would become signing 300 copies.
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
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.
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".
No, you should get your wife another kind of gem, one whose price and supply aren't controlled by the same international monopoly that has brainwashed her into desiring a diamond an order of magnitude over other stones that you can buy without being gouged as much.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
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.
I definitely agree with the main point of the parent poster. Older technology sometimes just downright works better.
Case in point: New cell phones vs Old cell phones.
New cell phones have mostly all had software problems of sorts, with laggy displays, crashing software (damnit I have to reboot my phone AGAIN), etc, etc. Older cell phones weren't so reliant on the 'cruft' that makes up new cell phone software, and generally worked a LOT smoother, and FAR less buggily.
Example: I have a Motorolla T720 color screen phone, which IMHO, really bites ass. The thing drops calls, I get a black screen of death pretty much every few days (which requires me to completely remove the battery to drain the power), the display is soooo laggy its not even funny, plus many other small software bugs I am sure I can't recall of the top of my head.
I would LOVE to get my old StarTac back...man that thing was rock solid! I even accidentally ran it through a FULL wash cycle in the washer and all I had to do was replace the battery. It also has/had none of the drawbacks I listed for the T720. Operation was as smooth as it could be IMO.
Here's a vote for old technology when it works well.
/* sig */
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.
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.
In a world where Ford has lived to be a hundred years old, I think the lesson here is that if you don't mess up your finances, make a halfway decent product, devote equal time to listening to your customers, engineers and marketeers, you can survive even if you don't rule the market.
It's companies that consider success being number one, and anything less failure, that don't survive.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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...
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