Slashdot Mirror
Do Tools Ever 'Die?'
An anonymous reader writes "NPR recently ran a debate between two commenters regarding the perpetual lifespan of tools... in other words, that no tool ever goes completely out of use. This debate wasn't focused just on mechanical tools based on simple machines, but included electronics as well (vinyl record players, for example). Did you know you can still buy 8-inch floppy drives online? NPR is looking for examples of tools that have gone entirely out of use... any ideas, Slashdot?"
How many times have we read about NASA tapes and such from early missions where the hardware to read them has long since disappeared, and no one is even sure what format the tapes are in?
Infuriate left and right
I'm pretty sure he's still sucking in oxygen
Hitler Died, He was a tool.
Who run Barter Town?
Aside from learning venues (which you could argue every tool has to offer), there's a whole range of tools of encryption that no longer function as they were intended when they were created. From Rome's Scytale to Germany's Enigma Machine, none of those tools are useful today on account of how easily they are cracked.
My work here is dung.
Some time ago radiation wasn't well understood, and a number of tools were built to take advantage of it for personal use. The radioactive shoe sizer came to mind right off the bat, but a searching for it I found a number of tools that were certainly ill advised. http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2006/05/fun_with_radiat.html http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/10-radioactive-products-that-people-actually-used/1388
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I heard someplace that the quickest ever total replacement of a technology was cotton fishing lines. Cotton lines must be replaced every season. When nylon came out, it was cheaper than cotton, and lasted forever. Is there any use for cotton fishing lines anymore?
Still being made and used by historical buffs (I've talked with a guy who was actively making stone tools to show how it was done), and a pair of anthropologists go around demonstrating how stone knives could be very good at taking apart animals that hunters had brought down. All that stuff is still being made and used, if only to show how it was made and used.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
The shoe-fitting fluoroscope.
Basically a box that you put your feet into where x-rays are fired upon your feet and you can look into the viewing ports on the top and see the bones in your feet for the purpose of getting correctly sized shoes.
It was used during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and was subsequently discontinued after employees experienced radiation burns from the constant exposure.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm
Too easy - I just took a bunch of pictures of obsolete technology to include in my response (and to make it authentic I shot it on film). Now, if you can please hold on a bit I just need to send the roll off to get processed into Kodachrome slides. Shouldn't take more than a few days, so please check back.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
The Antikythera mechanism is a 'tool; that is no longer in use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
How about Henges ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henge
Very probably being used in Egypt as I type - when ADSL is taken down you need an old school modem, and I bet at least one person has had to dig out the old rubber cup version.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Are you commenting on how this place is where good tools go to die...
Or how they sell such crappy tools, that they will inevitably die.
I've bought a good many tools from harbor freight, and yes, I know what you're talking about. Everything is crap, so only buy things you'll rarely use or they can't hardly screw up.
Bad tools to get at Harbor Freight:
cordless drill
sawsall
anything electrical
anything precision
Good tools to get at harbor freight
hex wrenches
rubber hammer
traffic cones
C clamp
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Libraries have this problem building faster and faster. Instead of just books, they have rapidly growing archives of media in oddball, forgotten formats and rooms full of old equipment to read it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Perhaps you're just not reading the right personal ads.
People also buy vinyl because it is easier to mix with. You have direct physical control over the movement of the disc and therefore the speed of the music which gives you more control for beat-matching and makes scratching possible/easier. Obviously, it has it's disadvantages. Your bags are heavier, vinyl can get damaged, it takes longer to find a piece of vinyl than search a digital disk etc. but as a tool for this specific job, many still (rightly, in my opinion) consider it superior.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Someone already mentioned the pyramids. The key thing about tools we no longer make is that we lose the NAMES for around the time we lose the tool. Because once we stop making them, we stop talking about them. Here is another example, from less than 200 years The original 'phonograph' used a wax cylinder instead of a vinyl LP disk. They had a 'mechanism' that would shave the cylinders, erasing the current recording and allowing you craft a new one. We don't make this tool anymore and no longer even have a name for it, siumply because we would NEVER under any circumstances, shave an existing 200 year old musical cylinder.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Linotype machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
Paige Compositor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor
My tool hasn't been in use since I got married.
Just look at the textile industry. There are lot of odd tools they used from the early 1900s that today, we honestly have no idea what they are even used for. That doesn't even include the mountains of wood bobbins, loom repair devices, etc.
Censorship is a very usefull tool, one of the most ancient too. It can make other tools useless! And this is how you make a offtopic message "ontopic".
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
I saw a documentary about stone-age families. Apparently they used baby wooly mammoths to wash their dishes, and adult wooly mammoths to shower themselves. The woolly mammoth is quite extinct, so it is unlikely that it is still in use.
The point of the NPR article (which I listened to this morning) was hese tools were still being produced and used, even if only by hobbyists etc.
Papyrus qualifies. Still being made and used.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Philosopher's Egg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aludel
Philosophical furnace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanor
Cupellation
You may scoff, but while it was highly debatable in the 80s and mid-90s, these days it's likely to be on the truer side than it was ever before. It's not that CDs are "clinical" or "sterile", but that CDs enable a whole range of audio abuse, the most common one being, well, LOUDER IS BETTER!!!! In no medium until the CD has it been possible to store a dynamic range compressed audio without giving up something. On vinyl, a loud mix means less audio can be stored, while it doesn't matter on a CD.
The other effect is what makes tube amps "better" as well - what happens when you overdrive them. A vinyl record when clipped doesn't hit a hard stop - it hits a soft stop and ends up distorted. Ditto a tube amp - overdrive them and the waveform distorts. However, do that to a CD or transistor amp, and you get clipping. The harmonics induced by clipping the audio are far more harsh to most people's ears than the soft-clip distortion you get with vinyl/tube.
Also why some of the best guitar FX pedals use tubes in their final stages - you want that nice distortion, tubes are really the only way. The alternative is to waste a lot of ADC/DAC and DSP processing power by not using the full dynamic range so there's no possible way to clip, and then process the signal to add soft-clip effects.
Anyhow, there may be some truth to it - because vinyl is still around, yet it's been replaced twice, and still sticks around. The first time was the compact cassette where a full record could be contained in a pocket-sized album. The second time is the CD, which killed tapes, but never really killed vinyl. There's probably a reason for that.
I'd stay away from the hex wrenches. Most likely they are made out of that cheap stuff that strips easily under moderate usage. Same with socket sets.
Unless one is using them for hobby/very light home use, one is better off with Sears Craftsman tools - at least in the US.
Huh?
I heard the story on NPR this morning and I think it's overrated. In my opinion, by including in the report tools and inventions that are custom made for leisure or passion and not necessity or practical use, the scope of invention "death" is reduced artificially.
The report included some examples of old farming implements that are still in use in some developing countries, ostensibly because they cannot afford the newer technology and the old tools are certainly effective. These surely are examples of old technology that is still "alive."
However, the problem is that, while the authors concentrated on the advertisements shown on a late-19th Century Farmer's Almanac, and offer these as proof; they extrapolated their observations to apply to the entire breadth of all human civilizations.
I disagree with this. Obviously some inventions have become obsolete when newer and better technology superseded it. The fact that some fringe group or individual continues to manufacture ancient items for study or pleasure (with no intention to apply or use it in practice), does not mean that the technology is still "alive". Such technology is obsolete and out of circulation for practical use. Understanding or knowledge of it may still remain, but it is effectively dead.
Their thesis then can be rephrased as such: Knowledge acquired by humanity throughout the course of history is accumulated and seldom lost. This is a much more intuitive and obvious assertion than the original one, but also a much less interesting one.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Due to changes in medical knowledge, plenty of 'tools' used in medical practices have fallen into disuse because the underlying medical theory has been dis-proven.
As an example, I present to you the Tobacco smoke enema device. How many of these do you think are still in use today? Do you really want tobacco smoke blown up your backside when you just have been pulled out of the water with a set of bellows and a pipe? Yet in the 17th and 18th centuries they hung these things all along the river Thames to help 'warm' people just pulled out of the water.
"The truth shall make ye fret" -- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
Nope. LG washing machines use this to report problems to the service counter. You dial a number, hold the phone to the washing machine, and it hisses to the other end...
It's been a few years, but the last time I used dialup, v.32 9600bps still worked.
What really amazed me was a friend who still had a US Robotics HST modem from the very early 90's (9600 bps) that would connect at 56K (X2?) after just a firmware upgrade. Talk about a tool that never dies! Of course, those things were almost $1000 when they came out.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
I understand the technologies for both of those things have been lost. (Apparently, the Romans had some trick they did with oxhairs or sinews or something that gave their ballistas a lot more power than the competition.)
When I was back in high school (early 90's) my friend owned a 1978 Oldmobile Cutless with an 8 track. Since we only had CD's we used a CD to cassette adapter in the cassette to 8 track adapter to listen to music while we drove around. not exactly the coolest setup ever, but it worked!
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Don't count on microwave ovens for too much longer. I've just been doing as a hobby project a simple design of semiconductor only microwave. It has major advantages - it can have a _much_ larger fraction of the cabinet as cooking volume - especially in small units. It can be smoothly varied easily in power.
Of course, it has the disadvantage that instead of $20 for a 900W magnetron, the semiconductors to power it would at the moment cost around $1500 for the dozen or so devices needed. (in quantity)
I would expect to see the first solid state microwaves on the market perhaps in 2020 or so. At which time, the days of the vacuum tube will be numbered. Already in a moderate fraction of homes, the second to last valve has gone away. (the cathode ray tube)
Sounds interesting, but wouldn't it be less efficient than a magnetron?
The cavity magnetron doesn't suffer from the main disadvantages of vacuum tubes - there's no heater filament that can fail, and there's no fragile envelope like the glass envelope found on most familiar vacuum tubes. The magnetron self-oscillates, so the circuitry to drive it can be remarkably simple - in many cases just a transformer, a diode and a relay. Presumably a simple PWM controller can be used to modulate the cooking intensity. The magnetron is also very low cost to produce.
A solid state microwave oven will still have to have a motor to drive the turntable or other food-moving mechanism, and room for an interior light and possibly a cooling fan, and similar control electronics.
Given the very low cost of producing magnetrons, and the fact that a semiconductor alternative which would presumably need to have some kind of antenna or emitter which would consume space along with the semiconductors themselves, will there really be a business case for it? How small do you expect the microwave-emitting package to become given the power level required?
Putting moderation advice in your
I don't use my tool as often as I did when I was younger. There may come a day in a few years when I won't use it at all, except for draining the bladder.
Even Craftsman is slipping in quality. Their stuff still has a lifetime warranty, but compare a socket wrench made now to one made 10-20 years ago, and you find that they definitely are not as well built.
I'd highly recommend Snap-on or Mac Tools. Both of those still are high quality. They are expensive, but if someone uses a tool often, having the assurance that a tool isn't going to break and possibly injure is a good thing. However, for people who occasionally reach for the toolchest, the Sears offering is for the most part good enough. This also applies to the other store lines with lifetime warranties -- it is good quality, but not as good as Mac or Snap-on
For bicycles, I'd recommend Park Tools.