Living Fossils: Old Tech That Just Won't Die

jfruh writes "You might think that flat files, VAXen, and punch card readers are things of the past — and you're right, for the most part. But here and there, these fossilized technologies have found places where they can survive in production use."

Comments

One more thing that won't die

[Anonymous Coward]

First Post! ;)

Technology

[girlintraining]

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better. We may mostly be on high speed internet connections running through cable, or xDSL, wireless, or other technologies, but that doesn't mean the forerunner to those technologies are without purpose anymore. Modems are still used in ATMs because landlines are incredibly cheap to install and not a lot of data needs to be exchanged. Same thing with fax machines; Despite scanners and e-mail, many courthouses won't accept scanned documents -- but they will accept faxed documents. Amusingly, most of those fax machines are paired to document management systems that convert them back into digital files (ie, PDFs) for processing. The reason for this is not immediately obvious: Many jurisdictions have laws stating a faxed copy of a document is legally the same as the original, but lack similar laws saying a digitally signed or submitted document is valid.

The list goes on. So don't just assume a technology should be sunset because of technical reasons -- there are often human factors to consider as well.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've found that people are more likely to be the opposite. They see something new, and they say...well, the old way was better. Old cars, because they hate all these fancy engines that they can't just fix, old televisions because they can't stand those black bars, old light bulbs because those curly ones are too hard to understand.

Too many people assume everything should be frozen at a point in time, because of well, some human factor that results in a resistance to any change or improvement.

Because it might not be perfect, but the old ways, they WERE better.

Don't get me started on the people who think that they're hearing about more murders and killings today, so it must be more than it was back when they were young! Even if you produce statistics showing the opposite, or if you point out the numerous children who survive because of modern medicine, or anything else that shows it's not all bad.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I used to work on an Alphanumeric paging system. We used 2400 baud because the time necessary to negotiate a higher-speed connection was far longer than the time to negotiate and then transmit ~240 characters at 2400 baud.

Fast forward to 2001 or so, and the general decline of paging. We were attempting to migrate from physical serial port expanders connected to physical modems, connected to a breakout cable from a T1 CSU/DSU, and we tried Equinox digital modem emulators- that integrated a single connection to a T1 CSU/DSU without all of the physical. The problem was the the Equinox gear wouldn't reliably negotiate that slow, and often would lock up the virtual serial port, rendering it useless until the card was reinitialized through a cold reboot. Equinox was more interested in giving us our money back than they were in fixing their hardware, but we did finally manage to convince them, after much effort, to put work into fixing it.

Re:Technology

[qu33ksilver]

Absolutely, never forget your roots. We would be fools to discard our past because that's what led us to where we are now.

Re:Technology

[ThePeices]

"I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better"

Thats because 9 times out of ten, newer DOES equal better.

Re:Technology

[tlhIngan]

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better. We may mostly be on high speed internet connections running through cable, or xDSL, wireless, or other technologies, but that doesn't mean the forerunner to those technologies are without purpose anymore. Modems are still used in ATMs because landlines are incredibly cheap to install and not a lot of data needs to be exchanged.

SOmetimes you have to. I mean, I have a bunch of stuff I love to use, like my Palm T|X. Problem is, accessories are REALLY hard to find. I had to replace the LCD, and it cost a few bucks. I'm thinking of picking up a few spares to keep it alive, but then you have to wonder if just switching completely is better.

It's just like PATA hard drives. I have lots of stuff that use it, but just try finding PATA hard drives. They're *expensive* - like $100/500GB expensive. ($100 can buy 2TB on sale, if SATA).

The old gear may work, but keeping it working can cost a lot more than migrating to newer technology.Even just to keep functionality the same.

Re:Technology

[houstonbofh]

KDE4, Gnome3, Windows8, Vista... Sometimes change is just change, not improvement.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a SATA to PATA Adapter Card for $10 including shipping.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I think that people may say that they miss the old days, but based on people's fickleness when it comes to how they communicate (letter, phone, e-mail, myspace, facebook, etc), how they want new TVs even though tubes are arguably superior in both contrast and refresh rate (not to mention multiresolution capable), and that they sell millions upon millions of cars annually, they don't actually believe that the old days were better.

The old days were simpler, not better. When one has less choices it's often easier to choose. When old technologies are cobbled on to, like all of the additions to the otherwise-ancient Otto-cycle internal combustion engine, those additions are what make some old things more complicated and arguably worse in at least the maintenance aspect. If we see actual technological revolution though, not only is the base technology replaced, but all of the other cobbled-on parts are too.

Re:Technology

[Sussurros]

LOL! - while I understand and agree with you entirely, I rather like KDE4. The thing is that I came to it after the worst excesses had been ironed out so it was just a learning curve (as opposed to a cursing lurve). When I've since tried KDE3 I haven't liked it all. I'm not sure if it's because for me KDE3 is "newer" than KDE4 or if perhaps I just don't like it.

I really liked Gnome 2 with Compiz, but it seems to me that Unity has been a good thing because it has opened up so many closed people (such as myself) to so many new paradigms as they flee from Unity to find something else. I even know someone who likes Unity - but not enough to use it.

For me, well I find KDE4 really is an improvement over KDE3.

Re:Technology

[Stormwatch]

old televisions because they can't stand those black bars

I'd have to agree with the old timers, we are being scammed with those new sets. They sell by the hypotenuse, but the honest measurement would be the area (width x height). Wide? More like short. It's a way to sell smaller screens with more "inches". If I found a new 4:3 plasma screen, you bet I'd get it!

Re:Technology

[TWX]

To take it away from computers, in 1998 a very strong Chrysler Corporation with a popular line of products merged with a German company to form DaimlerChrysler, and over the next decade the German side of the company almost completely ruined the American side's products. The Caliber replaced the Neon and was less successful. The Avenger replaced the Stratus and was less successful, as was the revised Sebring. The new Dakota replaced the old Dakota and was less successful. The Durango's redesign was an outright flop until it was quickly revised, and still wasn't as successful. The Sprinter replaced the B-series van and was less successful. Even the minivan replacement was less successful than its predecessor. Really the only truly successful successor was the LX chassis, replacing the LH chassis.

Daimler wanted to own the designs and didn't value what was there previously, and it almost destroyed Chrysler. It killed off one brand (Plymouth) and reduced the number of models dramatically, and they're only now starting to sunset the Daimler-designed cars, as it's extremely expensive to develop a new car. Had they evolved the design for the Neon, the Clouds, the vans, and the like, they probably would have done better in both the short term and the long term.

Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.

Re:Technology

[NotBorg]

I'll take stainless steel and cast iron over teflon any day for my cooking needs. I mow my lawn without gas or electricity. I think that puppets in '80s movies feel more real than the most advanced computer animated crap of today. I'll be damned if I purchase music that isn't on a CD. DVDs are just fine for movies (I migrated from tape for good reason but blue ray simply isn't worth the hoopla). I still don't give a flying fuck about 3D... in fact I prefer movies that are not be in 3D. I look for yard sales in senior communities because I know that that those 50-year-old cooking utensils are still going to out last that stuff at Walmart.

Yada yada get off my lawn, but I'll be damned if I'll run anything less than the most recent kernel and gcc.

Re:Technology

[smithcu]

I have been looking for an affordable way to keep my SGl Fuel SCSI drives running. Now, SCSI drives are expensive! And converter cards rare and expensive, too!

Re:Technology

[Nefarious Wheel]

There's also the concern of the post-ROHS lead-free solder in newer gear -- the old stuff doesn't grow tin whiskers, and can be expected to last much longer than the stuff that does, given equal treatment. That old Vax might still be pumping transactions out for a very long time; replace it with something new, and the same might not be said.

Re:Technology

[BenJCarter]

The flatfile, like the flatworm, will likely survive eons of evolution...

XML FTW!

Re:Technology

[AK Marc]

I live in a place where 95% of the broadcast TV is wide. So the short TV is the only way to see all the signal. Cable, which has a lower percentage of wide, often pads the sides so that they broadcast the 4:3 content in wide screen.

But yes, I agree that pixel count would be a better measurement. I have a 21" 4:3 LCD screen with higher resolution than anything I can find new under 30". Pixels have gone backwards. But that's not related to the phenomenon in question.

Re:Technology

[hairyfeet]

Exactly, I put a couple of old ISA slotted PCs that once upon a time were my gaming PCs back into service out of my shed for a customer by slapping DOS 3 on them, why? Because he had an $85,000 CNC lathe by this company that had been out of business for ages and the only controller for it was this old ISA board that ran on DOS 3. And I have to say the software was actually pretty good, it was easy to use either prebuilt designs or mix and match to come up with new columns, and of course since this machine was already paid for and still ran great it was certainly a hell of a lot cheaper to buy my old gaming PCs (Sniff, my little Compaq DOOM player, they don't build 'em like that any more!) and last I heard they were still cranking out custom columns 5 days a week at his lumber business.

So I'd have to say I'm a big believer in "If it ain't broke" myself, heck my "nettop" at the shop is a 2004 1.8GHz Sempron that a customer traded in. Its VERY quiet, puts out almost no heat, and for what it needs to do, which is download drivers and look up parts? There really isn't any point in anything faster or fancier, hell with VLC it even makes a good DVD player so why replace it?

Re:Technology

[AK Marc]

I've owned a Le Baron convertible, there wasn't much worse than that (I didn't buy it, it was inherited, after I sold it for $500, I got a bill in the mail for its impound, it was traded and abandoned a few times before it was abandoned somewhere it was finally in someone's way. A fax of a bill of sale later, and the bill was dropped. Nobody who ended up with the car ever even bothered to register it, classic Chrysler.

Re:Technology

[mirix]

Chrysler was shit long, long before they hooked up with Daimler.

What is wrong with the sprinter? That's one of the few good designs - Cause it's just a merc with dodge badging on it, in the US.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

4:3 will not do you any good with the current programming being 16:9. But even the last 50 years worth of movies have been recorded in >= 16:9. I personally found broadcast/VHS movies unwatchable due to the "FS" cropping in the 4:3 era. Now it is just broadcast I find unwatchable with the >= 2.1 ratios being cropped to 1.78.

Re:Technology

[the_humeister]

I only buy my music on wax cylinders. I hand-crank the engine in my car to get it started. And these new-fangled "computers"? Give me an abacus and a logarithm table, and I'm all set.

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

KDE4, Gnome3, Windows8, Vista... Sometimes change is just change, not improvement.

So... pick the good ones and ignore the bad. eg. Windows 7 is a massive improvement over XP.

Re:Technology

[Darinbob]

Some of this may be everyone trained since birth to be a consumer. Constant advertisements of "new and improved". Encouragement to throw away old things.

Another reason possibly is that kids are a huge market now. Kids like toys, and they like new toys, things they haven't played with before. A 5 year old toy is useless as it has lost its novelty. It takes a long time for kids to outgrow this attitude, and sometimes they don't.

Although in some of the cases listed it would be cheaper and more efficient and use less energy to get a replacement. Ie, a machine to emulate PDP seems a waste when you can emulate a PDP in software for free on commodity equipment so that it's not much software at all to adapt it to control GPIO pins. But then you're into the realm of having to pay someone to write a little bit of code and you end up with something you don't understand any better than the old program.

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

That old Vax might still be pumping transactions out for a very long time; replace it with something new, and the same might not be said.

By the time the new thing breaks you'll be able to run a VAX emulator on something that costs $100 (and it will run faster on a tiny fraction of the power and fit on a shelf...)

Re:Technology

[toygeek]

Indeed, my best pan is a 9" cast iron skillet that is about 150 years old, and that's no exaggeration. Its not as non stick as teflon is, but its pretty damned good. Came over on a wagon train.

I have a client who runs a sign making business. Their CNC machine is run off an old PC or XT with a few hundred 5.25" floppies for fonts etc. Works fine, they still use it every day.

Newer != better.

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

XML in SQL - 100% more win!

Re:Technology

[Darinbob]

I would put it more at around 5 times out of 10. Sometimes the new thing has some portion that is clearly better but which is balanced out by another portion that is worse. Ie, most movie sequels which may have good production values and better effects but which have worse plots and lack of originality. Or new laptop that smaller and lighter but which has fewer ports and the user can not replace any broken components without shipping back to manufacturer.

Re:Technology

[Stormwatch]

Yeah, pixels have gone backwards because, whereas computer monitors were once far better than TVs, now they're the same components. Imagine if they built computers using only Xbox360 parts!

Re:Technology

[bickerdyke]

Over here they drew some flak for getting already pulled down along with the aquired Chrysler...

Re:Technology

[theshowmecanuck]

You may be right. Look in the Java world. When XML came out it introduced a new super hell of convoluted configuration over coding which eventually forced the creation of annotation based Java. This totally reinvigorated enterprise Java. XML did make things better by convincing the sane among us who wished to remain sane us to not use it for EVERY DAMNED THING. It also showed people how smart it is not to over engineer stuff when you don't need to... as well as how to spot dipshits who like stuff because it is new and cool. You see it isn't the new stuff that's usually bad, it's the fucktards who want to use it in every problem domain simply because its new, not because its good. But then again, that tends to force the really useful stuff yo be created.

Re:Technology

[Hognoxious]

A conversation I had some time ago:

Zealot: XML is brilliant! With XML your system can automatically send orders to suppliers and invoices to customers. No printing, no envelopes, no stamps!

Me: You mean like EDI?

Zealot: ED what?

Seems it's not just sex & rock'n'roll that each generation reinvents.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

why replace it?

Well, you certainly don't want to run a business on top of a mission-critical system that can't be replaced if it breaks.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that puppets in '80s movies feel more real than the most advanced computer animated crap of today.

I think it really depends. Puppets are incredible for some scenes, but they don't give as much freedom to the director as a cg model. But cg is far less acceptable with things we're familiar with due to the uncanny valley.

And in this same vein...

I'll take stainless steel and cast iron over teflon any day for my cooking needs.

Depends on what your cooking needs are. I'm glad stainless steel works for you, but omelettes or other delicate foods would probably be a pain to do in stainless steel. Steaks and such are more than suitable for stainless steel.

I mow my lawn without gas or electricity.

Well. I'd say that's fine. Only people that really need gas or electricity have either big lawns and can probably afford to have someone mow their lawns, are constrained on time, or are just lazy. Or people obsessed with making their lawns look amazing.

I'll be damned if I purchase music that isn't on a CD.

Do you also only buy them in music stores? Because by sticking purely to CD, you're also limiting the music you can buy quite a bit.

DVDs are just fine for movies (I migrated from tape for good reason but blue ray simply isn't worth the hoopla).

Do you have an HDTV? Because...wait.

I still don't give a flying fuck about 3D... in fact I prefer movies that are not be in 3D.

I guess you probably don't have an HDTV since HD is just as much a shtick as 3D.

I look for yard sales in senior communities because I know that that those 50-year-old cooking utensils are still going to out last that stuff at Walmart.

Can't argue with you there. The sample size of items which have lasted 50 years of use is pretty limited to only the quality stuff that could last 50 years of use. The shoddy stuff has been weeded out by now.

Then again, some of this crap I get from Wal-Mart is pretty useful for me.

Re:Technology

[mwvdlee]

When I bought my most recent monitor, the 1600x1200 24" was cheaper than a similarly specced 1600x900 22".
When doing productivity work I get more information on screen at once, when watching movies I get black bars but still the same physical size.

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

EDI can be embedded in XML before storing it in your SQL database. I'm sure there's a Java library for doing this.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

> States newer isn't necessarily better
> Uses FAX as an example
> Admits FAX only hangs around for archaic legal requirements
> Realizes he's contradicting himself and sings himself off stage with "human factors"

PS: FAX sucks!

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear that you guys are still using all that old crap now that the industry has standardized on JSON.

Re:Technology

[mwvdlee]

You don't have to rely on old computers for ISA support. There are plenty of well-known designing and producing new motherboards with ISA slots for pretty much the same price as an average motherboard, with the benefit of also supporting modern hardware.

In a way it's sad the ISA standard is gone; it was very easy for an electronic geek to make ISA cards as the protocol didn't require complicated hardware.
I don't think modern computers have any interface left that can be used without requiring a chip to handle the protocol.

Re:Technology

[SuricouRaven]

I get annoyed when people just jump straight to making a database for everything. Sometimes flat files are just a better option, so long as you don't need to run any searches.

Re:Technology

[Green Salad]

I loved driving the original Neon. Efficient, sporty, clean design with straight-forward controls. That little car just felt right. The Caliber may have more room, but it looks more like a blocky truck than a small car. I assume the Caliber paid a huge wind-resistance penalty at highway speeds. I'm hoping the Italians will bring the brand back to basic simple cars. I hope the new Dart achieves that. If not, I'm looking at the Fiesta or small offerings from Japanese/Korean brands.

Re:Technology

[Hognoxious]

Yeah, goddam Krauts, what do they know about making cars? Half of them have the engine at the wrong end.

Re:Technology

[serviscope_minor]

Yada yada get off my lawn, but I'll be damned if I'll run anything less than the most recent kernel and gcc.

I was going to say something similar, but you already did, so I'll reply instead.

Even though I'm a technophile, I've often been accused of being a bit luddite, because I sometimes use old tech. Instead, I use old tech when it is better, and I love new tech when it is better.

I always use a recent kernel, and usually have the latest gcc RCs compiled and installed. (Did you know that 4.7 can now eliminate malloc()/free() pairs! Amazing!) I would never switch to a low-tech compiler. And you can pry modern kernels with modern filing systems, amazing near real-time performance and etc from my cold dead hands. And ffmpeg. And modern JITing JVMs. And flash storage.

But I'll be damned if I'm ditching xfig, or fvwm.

And I'm not going to have window moving animations, drop shadows or any of that.

I'll be damned if I purchase music that isn't on a CD

You can purchase individual DRM free tracks from Amazon from Linux. It can be quite expensive, but its pretty handy. I could go either way on this, and I'm not a golden-ears so the compression doesn't bother me.

I'll take stainless steel and cast iron over teflon any day for my cooking needs.

Hardly new tech :)

I have a mix (stainless steel, quality PTFE coated, pressure cooker), all of which I wouldn't like to do without since they're all really useful in their place. Of course what one also wants is a chefs knife with a modern steel alloy. The thermal stability really helps for fast machining. Wait, what were we talking about again?

Re:Technology

[serviscope_minor]

No mod points, but you made me snort coffee.

Re:Technology

[mindriot]

If it works, don't replace it.

My favorite example: The equipment in the Solar Telescope office at Mount Wilson observatory. You can look at it yourself during the guided tours they offer on weekends. Great fun.
Unfortunately I'm not sure about the specific models used, maybe someone else can enlighten us here?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what? Daimler's build quality went down after the merger and they have been struggling to bring it back up since.

Re:Technology

[TapeCutter]

I've been watching TV on and off for 5 decades, there was a sweet spot in the late 70's - early 80's where TV's came on instantly.

Re:Technology

[YttriumOxide]

I get annoyed when people just jump straight to making a database for everything. Sometimes flat files are just a better option, so long as you don't need to run any searches.

Absolutely agreed. My day job is writing software and if I'm storing data that I know will never exceed a few MB at absolute most, has no requirements for search, and is a fairly simple structure; I FAR prefer to use CSV to any kind of database.

The best example is a single application translation table for around 25 languages. 100 strings, 25 languages - it may in theory grow up to 50 languages or so eventually and if the app gets much bigger, up to 200 strings. 200*50 = 10000 strings. At an average of around 15 bytes per string, that's ~150KB of data.

As a UTF-8 CSV text file, I can hand edit it in a run of the mill text editor; loading it in the application takes milliseconds of application startup time (at which point the whole thing sits in memory while the application runs, so it doesn't re-read it again); parsing it is trivial; and any errors introduced somehow aren't going to kill the whole file (perhaps just make one string wrong; or at worst corrupt one language (a single line of the file)). I can't count count the number of times people have told me to convert this to a SQLite database "because it's better"... very sad.

Re:Technology

[Kjella]

The old days were simpler, not better. When one has less choices it's often easier to choose.

And simpler to operate, simpler to repair, the simple life is all but gone. Just to take one example, cutting lumber. Today if you want to do it professionally you're probably operating some kind of advanced machinery, that's what they use in all but the most inaccessible places that'll chop it down and chop it up without you ever leaving the operator's chair. One step below that is what we've used, a chain saw and a gas operated cleaver, sure we're more manual but still heavily machine-assisted. But I've still seen the long saw they used before that rusting in the shed and back then they cleaved it with an axe.

I mean it's hard labor, but its not particularly complicated labor. Saw, saw, chop, chop and that was perfectly acceptable work. No education required, hell practically no training required either. Here's an axe, go chop. Same if it was making hay or collecting potatoes or vegetables or whatever else manual labor. Of course then you'd work forever to produce the same firewood we produce with a chainsaw and the pros are that much faster than us again. You can't compete the old way and we'd all be a lot poorer so obviously the current way is "better", objectively speaking.

All the same, everything that's simple has been mechanized, computerized, automated and in many cases miniaturized to the point where there's nothing a layman can do about it. Either it's only professional shops with tools or more and more frequently it's just to throw away when it breaks because there's a million of them coming off a production line rather than trying to fix one unit. Same with the home, you call in a plumber or electrician or whatever, the car needs an auto mechanic because everything is too complicated to do yourself.

I suppose it's inevitable that we'll all have to specialize to improve the productivity overall, but I feel people are increasingly narrow. This is the one complicated thing that I've learned to do, and for that I make money to hire people to do all the complicated things they do. And if you're not cut out to that, well then there's very few simple jobs left. And there's just going to be less and less places where you just need a warm body.

Re:Technology

[TapeCutter]

...and the other half run on tractor fuel.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the TV was always on, even in standby. A huge waste of power that was.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the worst offenders, software changes.

I've seen entire things ruined because of terrible updates because the developer decided to hire this "awesome UI designer" or decided to just change everything because.
See uTorrent, VLC (terrible anyway), ones you mentioned, MSN (WLM), Skype (forcing video elements on everyone, which caused crashes out the ass for me for no reason at all, never had a video crash since 1996!), Mozilla Firefox(!), countless others.

WHY?! Why ruin a good thing? Nobody wants new UIs, if we did, we would say. Stop making stupid new UIs that are nothing like the old ones.
What is the god damn point in moving every single option around all of a sudden, new options interface, "so streamlined!".
Why the hell do I need to click advanced options all the damn time? Remember it in options! Holy hell I'm not 5, stop treating me as if I will click things by accident.

And why do people suddenly thing a simple interface with things behind menus is awful? If it leaves more room for, you know, CONTENT, the better.
Chrome and the new IE interface, for example, are fantastic. Terrible due to lack of customization because of how anal both the Chrome and IE devs are, but hell, even IE is more customizable.
Then you look at Mozilla, ruining Firefox every month because they never understood Google with their frequent updating schedule, mainly because THEY BREAK ALL THE GOD DAMN EXTENSIONS. Learn how to do an API Mozilla. Your API isn't an API at all.

Some developers really need to just take a permanent holiday. I heard Head In The Ground has a really nice activity called Suffocation. Cheap too!

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really have to bring up the viewing distance vs. required DPI arguments again?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

XML in SQL - 100% more bytes!

FTFY

Re:Technology

[pla]

EDI can be embedded in XML before storing it in your SQL database. I'm sure there's a Java library for doing this.

You laugh, but I actually have to support an *cough* EDI *cough* extract from one of my company's service providers that comes as EDI-via-XML.

Typical conversation - "So how often does the schema change?" "Oh, it doesn't ever change, not since we went live with this system" "I only ask because last night's run violates its XSD" "Oh, huh... We'll look into that (and send a bill for our time)". Followed by me simply turning off schema checking and coding a whole shitload of sanity-checks that the data contains something vaguely like what it should.

For anything under a meg, just give me a goddamned flat file - Fixed width, tab-delimited, or if their "what do you mean we can't put commas inside an unquoted field?" underpaid interns/H1Bs can figure out the spooooooky double-quote character, CSV (and don't get me started on escaping literal double-quotes, even Microsoft screws that one up in Excel).


/ And get off my lawn! ;)

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

In a way it's sad the ISA standard is gone; it was very easy for an electronic geek to make ISA cards as the protocol didn't require complicated hardware.
I don't think modern computers have any interface left that can be used without requiring a chip to handle the protocol.

I would think that the USB bus is a good replacement for the old ISA stuff. Faster and with lots of prototyping boards and chips available. With the availability of USB chips, the need to include one in the design should not be a problem.

Re:Technology

[jrminter]

The purpose of these new releases is to drive sales, not really improve the customer's work flow. With decreasing margins, most corporate customers - and indeed all of the rest of us - need to ask "do I really NEED this?"

Re:Technology

[Pentium100]

Which requires a chip to handle the protocol.

Re:Technology

[zippthorne]

It bothers me that not only do most people never hand-crank the engine, but that it's *impossible* to do so even if you wanted to.

So, you have to buy an extra battery pack if you want to be self-sufficient....

Re:Technology

[Zakabog]

Works fine until something breaks. Whenever I would have a customer using a really old computer (like the one you mention) I try to get their software working on a new(er) PC ASAP. I don't remove their old system or stop using it completely I just check that it's possible to use newer hardware since one day that machine is going to break and it's much easier setting up a backup of a working system than it is to try to rebuild the entire thing with no software/disks.

Re:Technology

[Mirkman]

Some things truly were better in certain ways, but for political, monopolistic, or social reasons it was abandoned. For instance, Push Reel Mowers. They cut the crass more gently (yielding a healthier lawn), they are cheaper to operate, more simple to operate, and give you more exercise. Electric cars. Before gasoline cars became mainstay, electric cars dominated roads. They are cleaner and cheaper to operate/maintain. Natural wood and stone flooring. For a long time wood and ceramic/stone tile flooring was considered "poor mans" flooring. Carpet and Vinyl was what classy people had in their homes. Now people are rediscovering the beauty and benefit of it. Timber frame and mud brick homes. Coming back into style.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

That PC probably isnt backed up.

If their business depends on it then switching to a duplicate running under emulation and retiring those couple of megs of font floppies seems wise.

Re:Technology

[Dcnjoe60]

KDE4, Gnome3, Windows8, Vista... Sometimes change is just change, not improvement.

I don't know, KDE 4.8.3 is pretty darn good.

Re:Technology

[betterunixthanunix]

Old cars, because they hate all these fancy engines that they can't just fix

That is a legitimate complaint in an age where car manufacturers are shipping engines that are designed to thwart attempts at diagnostics or repairs unless you have authorized, proprietary tools. We have not yet passed any version of the right to repair act, which would protect us from these sorts of antics.

In my opinion, it is not new technology that is the problem, but the new attitude about technology users. Increasingly we see home appliances, personal computers (including tablets), cars, etc. that are not user-serviceable. It has gotten to the point where even replacing a phone's battery is not something that the owner can do. Routine maintenance now requires a trip to an authorized repair shop. It is not enough to make a sale to a customer; now the customer needs to be dependent on you for the entire useful lifetime of whatever you make.

Re:Technology

[Crosshair84]

You don't have to rely on old computers for ISA support. There are plenty of well-known designing and producing new motherboards with ISA slots for pretty much the same price as an average motherboard, with the benefit of also supporting modern hardware.

Where might these be found? I re-solder the bad capacitors on old motherboards at work to keep ISA hardware working because you can't get new motherboards with ISA slots. I would be happy to be shown wrong and have a source for ISA motherboards.

Re:Technology

[Igarden2]

old light bulbs because those curly ones are too hard to understand.

.

I understand how they work. I dislike them because I find them to be unreliable.

Re:Technology

[squiggleslash]

In a way it's sad the ISA standard is gone; it was very easy for an electronic geek to make ISA cards as the protocol didn't require complicated hardware. I don't think modern computers have any interface left that can be used without requiring a chip to handle the protocol.

You could probably use the sound card FWIW.

That said, if it's a choice between a machine ultimately restricted to a few MHz in performance for a significant amount of its internal communications, or one that requires a chip costing a few dollars per DIY project, is it really a step back to have the latter?...

Re:Technology

[dkleinsc]

What you're describing is economic specialization. On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home. In theory, that makes things more efficient, because rather than a do-it-yourselfer completely botching the job, the specialist does the job right much faster than the do-it-yourselfer.

This process is not really that new: there was a time when pretty much everybody was doing the same things: hunting, gathering, banging rocks together to make spearpoints, fighting for survival, raising children, etc. Then you started getting differentiation based on gender (as far as current archaeology can tell) with men more involved in hunting and banging rocks together and women more involved in gathering, processing food, and raising children. Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.

So we have specialized. And it's brought us productivity far beyond anything the world has ever known. But you're right that it means that we're more reliant than ever before on the skills of other people.

Re:Technology

[IndustrialComplex]

The Trinitron 36âoe television serving as a work bench begs to differ.

Tubes have their place, but I will gladly sacrifice all of their benefits for something that doesn't weigh more than an NFL linebacker.

It is like a cast iron bathtub. Buy a new one and it will run you at least a grand. Try to get rid of a decent used one and you will be relieved if the buyer's offer is no more than to come and pick it up from its current location.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Say what you like about VAXen, but the uptime is amazing. There something wonderful about a computer so simple that it's almost impossible to crash.

Re:Technology

[NJRoadfan]

The heater in the CRT was on all the time in "instant on" sets. If the TV had a hybrid or tube chassis, most of the heaters on the tubes would be left on too. The advent of solid state electronics killed off the whole concept. While the old tube chassis TVs took up to a minute to warm up, solid state sets only needed a few seconds for the CRT to warm up.

Re:Technology

[NJRoadfan]

Buy a car with a manual transmission. No crank, but you can push it to start it if needed.

Re:Technology

[Miamicanes]

In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.

Power motors with reel blades exist, but without major protection, they're a HUGE safety hazard. And they break a lot, because there's more blade for things like stray bark chunks from mulch to get jammed in. A rotary blade has fewer places where an object can wedge into place. A manual reel-blade mower might be perfect for cutting the grass of a British (or American) townhouse with a small yard, but commercial landscaping companies that depend upon speed to give hundreds of lawns their weekly trims could never depend upon them. They're too much labor, and require too much maintenance.

As for electric cars being cheaper to operate & maintain, that's true up to the point where you have to replace the battery. Then the economics go out the window. That's why at least one new hybrid (Leaf?) was designed so that if the battery poops out when the car is old and within months of getting junked anyway, you can just flip a switch and tell it to forget the electric subsystem even exists instead of having to cough up more money than you could actually sell the car for (WITH a new battery). The economics of electric cars also depend upon governments not finding ways to tax electricity used for vehicle power the way gasoline is taxed. And if you need more than a hundred miles of range, you have two choices: wait a long time to recharge, or run from a gas generator whose efficiency is less than half of what you'd get if the engine were driving the wheels directly instead of generating electricity.

Real stone is a terrible flooring material. It stains, it cracks, and it requires expensive skilled craftsmen to install (vs some homeless guy the contractor pulled off the street and pays $7/hour to throw down). Ditto, for genuine hardwood. You see people on HGTV who proudly show off the beautiful vintage hardwood floor they spent a month restoring. You don't see them covering it up a year later with laminate in disgust because their dogs destroyed it with their nails, and their chairs & shoes scraped it up within days. It's just too much ongoing work to keep a real hardwood floor looking good.

Carpet didn't become popular until the invention of vapor barriers and vacuum cleaners. Even in ancient times, wealthy people had rugs in places like their bedroom. The invention of vacuum cleaners and mass production is what enabled poor people to have it, too. In more recent times, the fusion of inkjet printing with porcelain tile has enabled the production of floorcovering that's ideal -- the appearance of natural stone (or wood), with the indestructible nature of porcelain. The only thing they haven't *quite* figured out yet is how to make tile whose CUT edges can maintain the chiseled look of the best porcelain tile. In a middle-class bathroom, that's what inevitably gives away the fact that it's not real travertine (unless the builder went the extra step and used crown molding and wood edging to cover and hide the cut edges of the tile).

Timber frame and mud brick homes aren't coming back in style... homes with fake timbers and veneer brick glued to the outside that LOOK like timber frame & mud brick homes are coming back in style (at least, in the UK). The same phenomenon is visible in the US, where houses have brick street-facing facades, but anything you can't see from the street is covered with cheap vinyl siding or blow-on knockdown-textured fake stucco. Nobody is going to build a genuine brick structure today, because it would be cost-prohibitive. In scenarios where masonry construction is desired or required, they'll use concrete blocks & affix veneer brick to the outside. Classic all-brick construction re

Re:Technology

[NJRoadfan]

Those ISA equipped Socket 775 boards are very expensive, like $250-300 or so. Even then, they aren't 100% compatible, as they won't do DMA. So don't bother trying out your old Soundblaster on one because it won't work. There is also a company that makes a USB to ISA bridge adapter. They even went a step further and provided a custom build of DOSBox with support for the ISA slot.

Re:Technology

[Kjella]

Well, that's half of it but you missed the other half which is that it's not just human specialization, we're replacing them with machines and computers. We still need skilled, specialized people but it's increasingly harder to find work for the rest and it's not trivial to make them into skills and specialized workers. If I was to make a software application and I got 100 people randomly picked from the street to work with, I'd probably select considerably fewer because the rest would add zero or negative value to the team. The world is starting to run into that issue which is why there's so much unemployment now.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

Daimler Benz made good cars before this, but they were all good, expensive cars. Volkswagen is the German company that makes good, inexpensive cars. VW, however, already had a market presence selling their inexpensive cars in the US, and didn't need to buy a company already with a market hold.

Re:Technology

[Miamicanes]

> There's also the concern of the post-ROHS lead-free solder in newer gear

Ah, yes... the environmental wisdom of prematurely sending 10 years' worth of electronic gear to a landfill somewhere by mandating that every solder connection be what used to be called a "cold joint". Mitigated only by the knowledge that the Chinese electrolytic capacitors with substandard electrolyte probably burst a year before that point, anyway.

Re:Technology

[T.E.D.]

Bah. Why upgrade to a clunky VAX, when you can run your code on a PDP-11 coprocessor card right on your PC?

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I just bought a lightly used Panasonic 30" widescreen HD tube TV to replace the older 4:3 tube TV that finally croaked after fifteen years. You are certainly right about the weight, that is a disadvantage, and the bulk also means that the nature of where one places one is more difficult than the newer wall-hanging devices.

On the other hand, I don't really move my TVs around, and with the built-in cabinet and desk assembly in my house, the depth is not an issue. Furthermore in my case, since the TV is visible when the window blinds are drawn, having an obviously heavy, 126lb tube TV will probably discourage theft attempts. It's not that these are advantages, but they're not disadvantages for me either, and as ubiquitous as cabinets for TVs are/were, changing one's tech to thin TVs actually has had a cost beyond just the device itself in many cases.

Re:Technology

[mwvdlee]

Google for "ISA motherboard" and you'll find more valid links than you'll ever need.
The Wikipedia page for the ISA bus also lists some useful info.

Re:Technology

[arth1]

XML did make things better by convincing the sane among us who wished to remain sane us to not use it for EVERY DAMNED THING.

Very true. And I don't know what issue the submitter has against flat files - they are often the best choice, not because they are the old way, but because of unsurpassed compatibility, maintainability and quite often speed.
I recently rewrote an app to use flat files for an order of magnitude speed boost. That humans suddenly could access the data without specialized tools was just a bonus.

Re:Technology

[lee1]

How cool is it that lumberjacks read Slashdot?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

If your productivity is high enough maybe you could keep them around as pets.

Of course the problems with being kept as a pet are:
1) Pets often get spayed/neutered
2) Pets don't get the right to vote

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I guess I don't feel threatened; I've had a career installing, maintaining, and repairing the very machines that supposedly replace people, and I've observed that while there have been some labor reductions in some segments of the workforce because of automation technology, a whole lot of those jobs lost were really unpleasant to have anyway. I would rather we push an education initiative to actually teach our kids to do more with their lives than to just grab part X from assemblyline 3B, apply a bead of adhesive to it, and place it on assemblyline 4B.

There will probably always be a need for service people, so those truly unteachable will still be able to do something for an occupation. There certainly are tasks where it will never be cost effective to replace a person with a mechanical device, where every single task is different, or where machines can't be easily introduced into an environment relative to the simplicity of the task for humans.

Re:Technology

[Waffle Iron]

OTOH, you most likely don't *need* to repair new engines very often.

With the first car I had in the 1970s, I had to do some kind of under-the-hood repair every month or two. By the time the car was 10 years old, it had a dangerously rusted frame and had to be scrapped.

I now have a car that I've owned for just over 12 years. I'm probably luckier than most, but I've never had to touch anything on the engine other than battery, fluid and filter changes, plus one timing belt replacement. I'ts also rust free.

So it really doesn't matter to me if this car is less user serviceable, since it's needed almost no service.

Re:Technology

[More Trouble]

The archeological record indicates that making stone spear points (knapping) was a specialized skill. It's even more specialized today.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

When growing up, my parents taught me how to fish, hunt, clean and cook the game, do rough carpentry, home repair, safely do electrical work, properly do ABS/PVC and copper pipe plumbing, drywalling and finishing, car repairs (not involving welding due to our urban environment's limitations), roofing (we re-roofed our own home)... on top of the more generic stuff. I'm not expert at any but reasonably competent to the point that I now only call professionals for exceptional work or when draconian local regulations (here in ill-annoy) practically force you to pay extreme prices for 'union' workers who so far have about a 50/50 chance of doing crappy work below my own average capabilities.

I'm reminded of Heinlein's quote:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Don't be an insect.

P.S. we still have VAXen running specialized machine and process control equipment. They don't go down. They almost never break and when they do its almost always a 20 year old power supply failing; replace it and the system is back up. "Modern" equipment, wintel equipment, is not designed for long lifetimes because they expect you to be forced to upgrade every few years.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

i disagree TV has overtaken monitors. Just try to find a 120hz refresh monitor, and compare the price per square inch to that of a TV set.

Re:Technology

[IANAAC]

Even though I'm a technophile, I've often been accused of being a bit luddite, because I sometimes use old tech. Instead, I use old tech when it is better, and I love new tech when it is better.

So I have a little story of my own about using old technology (returning to old technology, actually).

I have a cheap knock-off android tablet from China that I managed to bork trying to install a newer ROM on it. So it's been out of commission while I figurre out how to get it back to working condition. Enter and old Zaurus sl-5600 that I've had lying around for the better part of a decade. Because I like to do light surfing/check email/read from bed first thing in the morning, I charged it up and started to use it again.

First off, it still holds a decent charge with the original battery, and that's after sitting in a drawer for most of these years and going through extreme temperature changes in an unheated cabin. Any newer battery would have exploded after having gone through those temperature changes.

This thing has an ancient version of QTopia on it (1.5.4), an old Linux 2.4.18 kernel, and an ancient Opera browser (7) on it. While the software is no great shakes, it still does a respectable job at what it was meant to do. Actually, come to think of it, the PDF reader is better than any PDF reader I've found for android, so that's one piece of software that still outperforms newer tech.

But what really impresses me about it is the hardware. I can't help but ask why a nearly decade-old piece of hardware can run circles around a year old piece of junk out of China. This thing can actually be used outside in sunlight. The screen is actually more responsive to touch that any modern resistive screen I've touched, stylus or not.

It's made me really appreciate how much better made older hardware was/is. Granted, it was expensive when it came out, but that price shines through in the hardware build quality. When I originallly purchased it, I would have never thought I'd be using it nearly a decade later.

Re:Technology

[Maximum Prophet]

Indeed, my best pan is a 9" cast iron skillet that is about 150 years old, and that's no exaggeration. Its not as non stick as teflon is, but its pretty damned good. Came over on a wagon train....

Not only that, but it's hard to find a good new cast iron pan that's as good as an antique Wagner or Griswold. I've considered buying a new pan, then machining it smooth.

The thing is, teflon pans are only very non-stick when they are new, after they begin to peel, you have to throw them away. If my cast iron pans are misused, I just scrub them with a little vinegar, then re-season them in the outdoor grill.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so true anymore. There's this thing called fuel injection that runs off of electric fuel pumps that may or may not get enough juice from your push. It depends on your alternator, pump, and how fast you can push it. Some are very hard to start this way.

Re:Technology

[Maximum Prophet]

A file system *is* a database. If your flatfile is just a little too big, you can very efficiently break your data up by putting the 'A' records in fileA, the 'B' records into fileB, and so on. If you need a one-off query, grep and sed are your friends.

If you have a Terabyte of data that needs to be indexed six ways to Sunday, then a database is the way to go. But for small quantities of data, flat files can't be beat. (An "small" is getting bigger every day)

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you have to buy your own music? Can't you just record it yourself straight to wax cylinder?

Re:Technology

[Norwell Bob]

Ask and ye shall receive.

http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html [Adek Motherboards]

Not curious enough to send a RFQ, but maybe I'll be able to replace my old 486 that I've been using with my EPROM burner all these years. And, no, don't tell me about Willem burners... they suck.

Re:Technology

[marcello_dl]

I'd like to point out that it's not the result of inevitable progress, but a choice.
You can work to increase yield, or to make easier to use, easier to maintain, stuff.
One direction ends up in efficiency gobbled up by the oligarchy who manages it. The other ends up in a ecosystem which often manages to surpass the former in many aspects.

You see it in the software world. One is the new Apple model, the other is the FOSS movement.
Or in the electronic world. One is the stuff that comes shipped with schematics, the other is the stuff you can't open with a normal screwdriver.

In the long run the first is the narrow path that leads to salvation, the second is the large path that leads to perdition.

The choice is as usual made by the most powerful people, possibly they are aware of it, possibly it's just he composition of their interest that ends up in the creation of a system.

Re:Technology

[jahudabudy]

You know, I've often wondered why comma delimited became the standard, rather than pipe delimited. You run into a pipe in text data far less often than you run into a comma. No need for text qualifiers with a pipe delimiter. Is MS Excel the culprit?

Re:Technology

[marcello_dl]

Managed to mess up the paths.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad stainless steel works for you, but omelettes or other delicate foods would probably be a pain to do in stainless steel.

You talentless git. It's not that hard. L2Omelette nubie!

Re:Technology

[ColdWetDog]

I've been watching TV on and off for 5 decades, there was a sweet spot in the late 70's - early 80's where TV's came on instantly.

And nothing of value was gained.....

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG do not get me started on this. I work in Healthcare Integration (all things HL7 and X.12 EDI). I had a conversation recently with a C-level person who oversees a cluster of hospitals. This person was telling me how sick and tired they were of the vendors trying to shove HL7 in his face when there was so much more to be gained from SOAP and "Web Services". No matter how the conversation turned, it wound up being "SOAP is the cat's ass" and that EDI standards were for pussies.

I've coded and supported both - and each have its own place in the milieu of a hospital. Just because it's newer doesn't always make it a best fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

Proof positive to me that this person bought in to one too many PowerPoint presentations of how much "Enterprise Service Bus" and "Web Services" is the end-all, be-all of integration and how me must all move to it IMMEDIATELY for ALL THINGS or be ridiculed by everyone - including the homeless on the street.

I'm willing to bet this was a chip off the same ass-clown that years ago in the early nineties witnessed Visual Basic 1.0 for the first time and went "Holy SHIT!!! EVERYTHING MUST BE A GUI!!", including roll and scroll applications that are to this day proven to be more efficient at Laboratory data-entry. Your app should support the workflow, not the other way around. Sometimes I think C-level shitheads get that way because their neckties choke off the blood supply to their brains.

Re:Technology

[ColdWetDog]

Yeah, pagers are one tech who's demise causes me sadness and headaches. When our 1970 era paging system died and supposedly couldn't be fixed, we searched for replacements. It's pretty bleak. Everybody thinks SMS / Cell phones are the modern schnizzles. That's fine except they need a complicated infrastructure to just work and 800 MHz doesn't penetrate buildings well and it's hard getting work done if everybody is standing outside in the rain.

OTOH, I finally got rid of the rest of my pile of SCSI I cables a couple of months ago. Time marches on.

Re:Technology

[HeckRuler]

Well, he's a lumberjack. And he's ok.

Re:Technology

[compro01]

by mandating that every solder connection be what used to be called a "cold joint".

Lead-free solder doesn't create a cold joint any more than leaded solder does when used properly. It's just that it's difficult to tell the difference between a good joint and a cold joint visually with some of the alloys, like SN97C, as the joint will always appear dull, unlike the clear shiny-good-dull-bad you get with leaded solder.

Re:Technology

[Nimey]

SIMH. I'm reasonably sure it will run on a $100 used computer right now, or on a new piece of equipment that's not much more and power-efficient.

Re:Technology

[leftover]

And adds latency.

Re:Technology

[compro01]

A place I used to work at had a couple machines built on Adek boards for running a few bits of equipment.

Re:Technology

[compro01]

If it works, don't replace it.

But DO have a plan for replacing it, preferably in a very quick manner. Even good old stuff doesn't last forever and Murphy will ensure it's gonna retire when you really really need it.

Re:Technology

[Nethead]

I still have an old Leading Edge 286 for programming old Motorola radios. Almost brings a tear to my eye when I boot up and see Norton Commander again.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better.

I wrote a humorous article about that very thing seven years ago -- Useful Dead Technologies. It's a bit out of date; they went back to knobs on radios, and shoelaces are now the best of both nylon and cotton.

Whenever we trade an old technology for a newer one, there are almost always tradeoffs. For example, a guy at Felber's had an old fashioned part for a furnace that cost $25 he was replacing a faulty $250 digital board with. I like my electronic thermostat on my hvac, but the old ones were nice in that they didn't need batteries.

Analog TV suffered ghosting, interference, static, and digital has a much sharper picture, but the interference, rather than making the picture snowy or ghosty or the sound staticy makes the digital picture freeze and the sound echo and stop.

I think way too many folks throw out perfectly good equipment when they could be repurposing it. Throw a couple of NICs and Linux in an old Celeron and you have a router.

Re:Technology

[Just Some Guy]

Me: You mean like EDI?

In fairness, it's possible to hate EDI on its own demerits. There are two kinds of programmers: ones who've never dealt with EDI, and ones who drink.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a legitimate complaint in an age where car manufacturers are shipping engines that are designed to thwart attempts at diagnostics or repairs unless you have authorized, proprietary tools. We have not yet passed any version of the right to repair act, which would protect us from these sorts of antics.

We won't get one either. Too many bureaucracies, EPA probably foremost among them, do NOT WANT individuals to be able to work on their cars. If I'm surprised about anything its that the EPA hasn't fiat regulated away the "right" under whatever emission control dogma of the day they could choose (or even the overarching 'regulate carbon emissions so you can regulate EVERYTHING').

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Top gear talked about that; management decision "Why are we building cars that will last for hundreds of thousands of miles when the original owners mostly only keep them a few years... we can reduce quality, still be better than most (Fiat, et al) and save money/make money. That had nothing to do with the Chrysler acquisition. Chrysler was _raped_ by Daimler. They went in with large resources, cash reserves, decent designs and fairly good sales, and came out a stripped shell.

Re:Technology

[hillbluffer]

LOVE my Palm TX, and still read books on it every day. The screen's larger than every smartphone I've compared it to, which still makes me smile. Accessories actually aren't too hard to find on either Amazon or Ebay. Had to replace the screen when I stepped on it a year after I got it, DirectFix supplied that, and the instructions :) Better believe I bought a metal clamshell case for it after that! Why not upgrade to a smartphone? I don't want to be THAT connected; I want some time to myself. Besides that, the replacements cost MORE than the full price I paid for the TX originally! Funny thing is, my TX has worked reliably for three years, and my mother-in-law's e-ink Kindle died from "screen freeze" only one week over it's warranty. Amazon WONT just swap it out, only offering a refurb if we sent the old unit and $65 in (yeah right, when a brand new unit costs $75). Mother-in-law said heck with that, and bought a sony reader. Anyone want a broken Kindle keyboard?

Re:Technology

[dkleinsc]

Sure, there were some people who were better at knapping than others. But there's also evidence that the basics fairly widespread knowledge, the sort of skill that your average Og could pull off in a pinch. Generally, Oog might make the spearpoints because he does a really good job, but if Oog can't do it, Og can.

Same sort of story as some people being better able to spear an animal so the tribe could eat. Yes, there were specialists, but the basics were general knowledge.

Re:Technology

[shiftless]

the car needs an auto mechanic because everything is too complicated to do yourself.

No it's not.

Re:Technology

[Blaskowicz]

if you choose a motherboard so that it's got a floppy connector, you can plug the 5"1/2 drive right in. have a stack of old floppy drives as backup. BIOS is still there, or BIOS emulation in UEFI. no emulation needed, you can run 80's software right on your 2012 hardware, unless if there are timing bugs. a lowest end sandy bridge or Athlon will boot MS-DOS or FreeDOS just fine.

Re:Technology

[hillbluffer]

Sometimes change is WORSE. Original Windows Vista, Windows ME.... *chuckle*

Re:Technology

[andyteleco]

I recently had to get rid of a really old iron bathtub in an appartment I bought and had redone. The flat is on a third floor without an elevator so it was a real problem to get it out to the street as I couldn't carry it alone.

Finally, one day while I was trashing some other junk a gypsy came to me and asked me if I had anything metallic to throw away. I told him that if he was able to get the bathtub out of the building I would give him some other old stuff too as a bonus. Needless to say, 5 minutes later he showed up with a buddy and together they carried the thing out.

I'm sure they must have made a few bucks selling it as scrap by the weight

Re:Technology

[hillbluffer]

teflon pans DO wear out; cast iron works darn near forever, if you don't let it rust. If I had a smaller yard, I'd look at a reel mower, but for now, I just dump gas in the briggs and stratton. 3D is mostly a scam, especially when an older movie is "converted" to 3D. CD's and DVDs are beginning to go the way of the DODO, now that media's beginning to be released on thumb drives, and via DL.

Re:Technology

[JDG1980]

In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.

Maybe that's a hint from Nature that you shouldn't be growing grass down there in the first place. What does grass do, anyway? What purpose does it serve?

Re:Technology

[hillbluffer]

I can't help but ask why a nearly decade-old piece of hardware can run circles around a year old piece of junk out of China.

Better written software written in a lower level language. Just that simple.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably come here for the Monty Python references. (See first reply to your post)

Re:Technology

[shiftless]

I use a safety razor to shave. It was more hassle to learn, but I get a much better shave.

You know, I'd like to have one of those old push reel mowers. I bet cutting the lawn in silence is much more peaceful.

Re:Technology

[shiftless]

Actually, there is one thing I do like about Win8, and it's the improved Windows Explorer. There was lots of basic functionality lost from the File Manager days when Windows 95 came out, which has taken this long to finally be put back in.

I agree with someone else's observation about change. It would be much better if those doing the changing would actually bring along the great things from the previous iteration, instead of always taking two steps forward and one back.

Re:Technology

[dkleinsc]

Your argument about oligarchy is a question of distribution, not production.

Specialization is about increasing and improving production. Within a group of people making an operating system, for example, you could have 1 person (say, Andrew Tanenbaum) writing the whole thing, or you could have somebody who specializes in memory management who can do a better job of handling memory management than the generalist who also has to think about disk IO. End result: better code.

That's true whether you distribute the code under GPL2 or whether you carefully bottle it up behind copyrights and patents and trade secrets. Where distribution makes a difference is whether the economic benefits of that expertise go to everybody (because it's GPL2 or BSD code) or get concentrated towards a particular set of people (e.g. Microsoft shareholders). But that's a different question from whether specialization improves productivity.

Re:Technology

[harperska]

I've always wondered why 0x1F delimited files aren't the standard. Why use textual characters as control characters in the first place when we have perfectly good control characters made for exactly that purpose just waiting to be used?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it web scale?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf dose that mean ? and why is this Insightful ?_?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

"I mow my lawn without gas or electricity"

sooooooooooooooooooooo

cows ?_?

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

The old days were simpler, not better.

Some things were simpler, but some weren't, because we have technology that simplifies things. Take your car, for example. No cruise control, driving a long trip is lots simpler, you don't even have to touch the gas pedal. Farther back, say when my dad was a kid, just getting the damned thing started was a chore. Set the choke by hand, get out, crank start it manually, jump back in before it died because the choke made it run rich and readjust the choke... and that was even simpler than preparing the wagon and horses like they had to do previously. Take cooking; I asked my mom how to make gravy and she said she stopped making gravy years ago, now there's instant gravy that you mix with water and heat, and it tastes every bit as good as what she made by hand. Microwave ovens make cooking simpler. Computers make doing your taxes and balancing your checkbook simpler. Photos -- you used to have to open the camera, put film in, take a roll of pictures and change the film, take it and get the film developed, go back the next day for your pictures, then off to a post office to mail them to grandma. Now you just whip out your phone, shoot, and email it. Simple.

As to better? Only in a few ways were the old days better. Before 1970 the air and rivers and lakes were filthy and unhealthy, few had air conditioning, there were no microwaves, VCRs, personal computers, cell phones, robots, velcro, flat screen TVs, ABS, air bags, GPS, ziplock bags... not better by any means. And God help you if you were black or gay back then.

As to "cobbled on," tech has always been like that. Pottery making was an offshoot of weaving; the first pots were straw baskets that were covered in clay and burned in a kiln. The first cars were merely wagons with a gasoline engine bolted on. The first telephones had no dials, they were added later and later replaced with buttons, which made the phone more complex internally but much easier to use. The same with four stroke engines, far more complicated than a two stroke but far less fussy to maintain.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

Actually, I've found that people are more likely to be the opposite. They see something new, and they say...well, the old way was better

In many cases the old ways are better, but in my experience most new things are better. For instance, phones. Damn but my phone is a lot more useful than the one I had in 1970. Microwave ovens, the only things I use the stove for is deep frying, eggs, hamburgers, and pizza. Almost everything else I just use the microwave; I've even figured out how to make good chicken breasts in the nuker.

Usually when someone complains about a new thing it's because of tradeoffs. You mentiones cars -- yes, it was better that you could actually work on one yourself if you wanted to, but the gas mileage was far lower, the cars were far more dangerous, and they last a hell of a lot longer today.

As to TVs, you're still going to have black bars with an old one, or worse, the aspect ratio stretched making the picture look odd. They did last a lot longer though. One TV I bought in 1969 still worked when I left it behind in a house I moved out of in 1995.

I can't for the life of me figure out why people are still using incandescants. The drawbacks twirleybulbs had when they were new have been overcome; nobody visiting me says "hey, the light looks funny" and they're instanly on (and even when they were new they only took a second or two).

I doubt you'll find a single person who thinks that ether was a better anasthetic than the drugs they use now. It was a true nightmare for the patient (and everyone who went under with it had the same nightmare) and ether is very flammable -- it's used as automotive starting fluid.

But then there are guys like my dad who says "I went without a cell phone and computer for eighty years, and I don't need one now." Then wonders why I snail mail send photos to him.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home.

Plumbing and house wiring haven't changed much in a century, and house wiring is actually simpler than in 1912 when they had knob and post wiring. And I don't know about plumbers, but as long as I've been alive you have to be a certified electrician to do electrical contracting (my late friend Ralph, a WWII vet, was an indoor wireman since the war ended, you had to be certified even back then according to him).

Cars, otoh, hell it took a trained mechanic 45 minutes to change my car's battery, I could change the battery of an old car myself in less than five.

Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.

None of that (except perhaps religion) came about until the invention of agriculture. The guy that planted the first seed changed the world.

Re:Technology

[marcosdumay]

Is MS Excel the culprit?

Hardly so. Excell doesn't even like to use commas for separating values in its CSV files. MS wouldn't destroy a stantard they brought to market, they reserve that for 3rd party stuff.

Re:Technology

[Pentium100]

they last a hell of a lot longer today.

Really? My car is 30 years old, how many cars made in 2012 will still be operational in 2042? Because it looks like the new cars are much more flimsier (after all, you have to save every gram of weight, so the car can't have thick body etc).

I can't for the life of me figure out why people are still using incandescants.

I like the yellow light of an incandescent bulb. Incandescent bulbs are also dimmable down to zero.

Re:Technology

[jcoleman]

You were probably a hipster before it was a thing, too.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

Tubes have their place, but I will gladly sacrifice all of their benefits for something that doesn't weigh more than an NFL linebacker.

That's a feature, not a bug. My house was burglarized last year, and if I'd had a lightweight flat screen instead of a 42 inch Trinitron they would have taken it, too. The weight is an anti-theft device.

Re:Technology

[afidel]

Just google industrial motherboard ISA and you'll find plenty of options.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Riddle us this first, what percent of 30 year old cars are still operational today? What's the average maintenance schedule? Then we'll see what we can speculate about today's cars.

As for the flimsiness, new cars are designed to be flimsier for an entirely different reason...safety. Better for the car to get damaged than the people inside.

And me, I just had somebody complain that the CFL they got was YELLOW, so...whatever. I suppose you could order any phosphor you wanted in CFLs and somebody would still be grumpy.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

In the timeframe TapeCutter was talking about, the only tube in a TV was the CRT. Before TVs became all solid-state (except the CRT) they took longer to warm up than a computer takes to boot. The "instant on" actually saved power, because people would actually shut them off once in a while. I leave my main computer on all the time, because I use it as a radio and I want sound when I'm making my coffee or eating my lunch.

Re:Technology

[Pentium100]

Riddle us this first, what percent of 30 year old cars are still operational today?

Probably not a lot, however, unlike other devices (that are used at home) cars also get destroyed in crashes, though the older cars can more easily be straightened out after a minor crash.

What's the average maintenance schedule?

A couple times a year - replace the coolant, check the brakes, get winter/summer tires. Also, once every two years or so adjust the valves and tune the carburetor and LPG vaporizer. Any mechanic can do it and it does not cost a lot. Even I could tune the carburetor if I had the exhaust gas analyzer.

Then we'll see what we can speculate about today's cars.

It still may not be comparable. It seems like modern cars are designed to they run relatively without problems for some time then quickly break.
Kinda similar to other equipment. For example, an old tape deck may need some repairs once in a while but it can be kept operational for decades, while a bluray player will work without problems for some time and then break with no way to repair it (or the repair being pretty much the replacement of all internal parts leaving only case of the old device).

I suppose you could order any phosphor you wanted in CFLs and somebody would still be grumpy.

Different people, different tastes. I like the light level to be low (a single 40W lightbulb for the room) and the light to be yellow instead of white.

Re:Technology

[Miamicanes]

> Lead-free solder doesn't create a cold joint any more than leaded solder does when used properly.

"When used properly" is a key point. Quite a few things are built in ways that DON'T use it properly.

Re:Technology

[dwye]

You know, I've often wondered why comma delimited became the standard, rather than pipe delimited. You run into a pipe in text data far less often than you run into a comma. No need for text qualifiers with a pipe delimiter. Is MS Excel the culprit?

Comma delimited looks better to humans, but unused char delimited works better with parsers. At AT&T Research, the fraud databases (all on Unix) used pipe delimited as the default separator, the last time that I was there, even when the data was not printable text.

Re:Technology

[Crosshair84]

Thanks everyone for reenforcing my point.

None of the options given in any of the posts are "new" motherboards. All they are is old NIB mobos being sold off, most are horrifically obsolete as far as processors and ram go. Hardly any have SATA ports and the PATA ones can only take 120gb hard drives. Many of the "newer" ones only have two ISA slots, useless for the T1 switches we have deployed, we need at least 3 slots, 4 preferably.

Show me something with 3-4 ISA slots that can at least run DDR2, SATA drives, and a Core2 Duo and I'll be impressed. I'm already aware of the other stuff out there.

Re:Technology

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Tubes have their place, but I will gladly sacrifice all of their benefits for something that doesn't weigh more than an NFL linebacker.

That's a feature, not a bug. My house was burglarized last year, and if I'd had a lightweight flat screen instead of a 42 inch Trinitron they would have taken it, too. The weight is an anti-theft device.

If you had it in the driveway on wheels they probably wouldn't have taken it.

Re:Technology

[ChrisMaple]

Unemployment is caused by government interference with the market. If you're willing to work for 5 cents an hour, finding a job is easy, but the government has made it illegal.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had a problem with them myself, had them for years, only one has ever burned out.

Re:Technology

[LinuxIsGarbage]

What I find amazing is in a very short period of time Fiat gave a mid-cycle refresh to a lot of models to hold them over to the new models and it's been very well received by customers. Sales are up a ridiculous percentage. For essentially the same cars.

I don't know what in particular I find amazing. Whether it's just marketing from Fiat managed to move these units, or whether it's the relatively low investment required to make saleable models which Daimler didn't see fit to do while they were driving Chrysler into the ground.

Take the poor Sebring/Avenger. A favorite target of automotive journalists it was always ranked at the bottom of the midsize market. I think it was worse than the Sebring/Stratus it replaced, which itself was "more refined" but not as reliable as the basic but durable Acclaim.

Anyways the Sebring/Avenger was a competent car. Good safety ratings/safety features, reasonable fuel economy, reasonably powerful powertrains, reasonable prices (particularly used *). The driving dynamics, though not sporty, or close to class leading, were competent. It is just a bread and butter family sedan. By far the worst thing about the car is the absolutely crappy interior materials. What did Chrysler do about it? Absolutely nothing! So year after year they were lambasted about the crappy interiors. So they put the same shitty plastic in all their cars.

Fiat comes along, takes the existing car, puts normal plastics in them, tweaks the styling, changes the name(200), offers a Pentastar V-6 and voila it's well rated and sells like hotcakes *. Even all reliability / durability ratings have shot up on it (Though I didn't know of the Sebring/Avenger having any particularly problematic parts).

* The Sebring and even the newer 200 have abysmal resale value, in part because Rental companies are their biggest buyers, but this makes it (particularly the 200) a good buy on the used market. I recently test drove a used 200. The price was ridiculously low and it came with the Pentastar (which is ridiculously powerful, and surprisingly fuel efficient), sun roof, spoiler, etc.

As far as the Sprinter, my understanding was the Ram van it replaced was a POS compared to Econoline and whatever the fuck GM calls their shaggin' wagon. It's not that the Ram was always bad, just that they stopped doing anything to the platform a while ago.

Re:Technology

[ChrisMaple]

Software cannot be successfully analogized to hardware. FOSS can benefit from each person's contribution, its price is not affected by improved features or bug removal or robustness, the ability of each person to improve it does not make it more expensive. Hardware, particularly in high volume applications, is very much cost driven; changes that allow an assembly to be snapped together (preventing disassembly for all time) instead of screwed together reduce purchase price or increase profit margins.

There's just no sense in making a watch that can be repaired with a $4 part and 2 hours of labor, when a new watch costs $5.

Re:Technology

[LinuxIsGarbage]

That old Vax might still be pumping transactions out for a very long time; replace it with something new, and the same might not be said.

By the time the new thing breaks you'll be able to run a VAX emulator on something that costs $100 (and it will run faster on a tiny fraction of the power and fit on a shelf...)

In high sulfur environments, ROHS stuff can wisker itself to death within 3 months, while the VAX will continue to plug away.

Re:Technology

[ChrisMaple]

Gee, that means the hardwood flooring in my 184 year old house must be a fantasy.

Stain as desired, coat with the best polyurethane available. When the poly wears through, recoat before the wood is damaged. In high traffic areas, use runners.

Re:Technology

[LinuxIsGarbage]

SIMH. I'm reasonably sure it will run on a $100 used computer right now, or on a new piece of equipment that's not much more and power-efficient.

$200 netbook will probably do. Plus it has a built in UPS, good for 6 hours!

Re:Technology

[LinuxIsGarbage]

You can buy brand new 486 motherboards, and processors, with ISA and PCI slots
http://www.esapcsolutions.com/industrial-motherboards-motherboards-c-45_109.html

Re:Technology

[ChrisMaple]

A well-built, maintained push reel mower is OK under ideal conditions: short grass, no twigs or other stuff to jam the blades, no hills, no obstructions. If intermediate noise levels are OK and your lawn isn't too big, use a plug-in electric rotary mower.

Re:Technology

[lewiscr]

Kids these days don't have to memorize their ASCII tables.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I've driven B-series Ram Vans for a decade at work, along with various GM and Ford designs. The Ford Econoline is not as good and still has the twin-I-beam front end- the GM is a little better.

From a commercial standpoint, the sameness in the body is actually a good thing, as there are basically 30 years of vans that can all be upfitted the same. They may not be as desirable from a home buyer perspective, but if one's old van is finally worn out, all of the shelving and other upgrades can simply be moved into the new van.

I won't deny that the B-series needed an overhaul or a new model, for things like wider-opening back doors, lower load height, etc, but the Sprinter was much taller than the B-series, and far less suited to urban environments. They've attempted to take the Minivan into that realm, but it's not really rated to tow what a work van could be expected to tow, and they haven't made a real, solid-side cargo version since the very first generation of the minivan.

Re:Technology

[rrohbeck]

We store CSV in XML fields in some cases. And we also store XML in MySQL. We're now porting SQL from an older DB to MySQL. Porting the stored procedures is a pain of course. And some of them output XML and some CSV.
Every now and then the application breaks because somebody forgot to run xmllint after a change.
It's called job security. Except for the people who designed that crap, most of them are long gone.

Re:Technology

[tyrus568]

You mentioned cooking. I would say that the art of cooking is one of the trades that has not been duly changed by technology, bar one invention. That was the electric mixer/food processor.

Sure, you can go buy a Sara Lee cheesecake from the freezer section. You can go buy a boxed/frozen apple pie. But I guarantee that if you had my apple pie first, you would find the frozen one rather unappealing.

While frozen phyllo dough and cookie/biscuit dough like Pillsbury has helped bring at least some semblance of proper food to the masses (I'm probably excommunicated for saying that), the modern household really lost something when the people (usually Mom or Grandma) who spent a huge part of their lives in the kitchen now go out and find careers. The art of cooking, as handed down through families through the generations, has dwindled to only a facet of what it once was.

Usually, the family doesn't know how, what or why dinner is being made and served. They just want it to taste oh so good... and they know Grandma has been in the kitchen since seven that morning... but they have no idea the amount of work that was involved when making an apple pie, or the labor of love that is scratch buttermilk biscuits slathered with butter and dipped in white gravy (they don't realize that the almost hidden bite of the biscuit is the pinch of cayenne pepper, and that the palate-filling wholeness is sharp cheddar secretly dropped into the batter). They totally take for granted how the crust of the pie is flaky beyond belief and melts in the mouth, and the apples have just the right amount of butter and cinnamon and chopped to just the right size.

They love it, but they only know that Grandma is a kitchen witch. Cooking in the kitchen is like casting spells: poof, banana bread appears because you feel like having banana bread... and it's the good kind where the bananas were almost black before you use them, to spread that lovely pungent flavor through the bread and form that amazingly delicate texture. No one else knows what's involved except another kitchen witch.. er, cook.

Many cooks disdain anything but a paring knife, a butcher/chef knife, a wooden spoon, proper measuring spoons and cups, and a mixer. Who wants me to make cheesecake?

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Why get an old one, they're still make new. Fiskar makes a good one.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

A file system *is* a database.

Yeah, but you try to tell that to kids these days, and they'll laugh at you!

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

There are off the shelf *cheap* bi/di Sata IDE adaptors available for 20-30rmb in China ... and lots of DOM style IDE flash SSD's out there.

Prices are reasonable too. I've replaced a lot of older PATA stuff with smaller sized IDE FLASH without issue.

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

You know, I've often wondered why comma delimited became the standard, rather than pipe delimited. You run into a pipe in text data far less often than you run into a comma. No need for text qualifiers with a pipe delimiter. Is MS Excel the culprit?

I'm guessing it's because some PHB though commas looked nicer.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

> There's just no sense in making a watch that can be repaired with a $4 part and 2 hours of labor, when a new watch costs $5.

It doesn't cost $5, its price is $5.
The real cost includes disposing of it safely or the damage that happens when it's not disposed of safely, and the increase in raw material prices due to unnecessary consumption.
If it's still competitive or not, it's another matter.

I agree on software not translating to hardware, but open hardware is possible too. Let's see how hard it will be fought.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

> Your argument about oligarchy is a question of distribution, not production.

> Specialization is about increasing and improving production.

That's the main objective, I agree. But it is not always the case. In fact I witnessed reorganizations whose end result was to increase control by having more interdependencies. It's like writing spaghetti code to keep oneself employed.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

Don't be too sure, I've had people want to buy it from me.

Re:Technology

[Miamicanes]

The point is, people don't want to spend their year doing perpetual floor maintenance -- especially not maintenance that leaves them unable to walk on the floor for days at a time. Laminate & engineered hardwood can be replaced in an afternoon, then ignored by everything besides your Roomba for the next 5-10 years. If you buy premium commercial-grade laminate or engineered hardwood, you won't have to BOTHER with a runner to protect high-traffic areas, because the transparent aluminum coating is extra-thick.

Properly-maintained hardwood looks beautiful. The problem is, keeping it that way is too much work and inconvenience. I have three friends with classic art deco condos in South Beach who did the whole, "omigod, how could they cover up this beautiful hardwood" thing, spent weeks restoring it, enjoyed it for about a month, then went through weeks of despair after their dogs/cats/kids/visitors/they_themselves progressively destroyed all their hard work and scratched/scuffed it up from daily life. They all eventually ended up covering it with laminate or engineered hardwood, and rationalized it as "protecting the original floor for future generations, when better coatings that dry faster" exist. And keep in mind... the coatings we have today dry in a FRACTION of the time the varnishes they had a hundred years ago did. Imagine a floor that literally couldn't be walked on for weeks, in a house with kids, circa 1920, and it's no wonder that people covered them up with linoleum, sheet vinyl, and carpet at the first opportunity.

Re:Technology

[mcgrew]

I would say that the art of cooking is one of the trades that has not been duly changed by technology, bar one invention. That was the electric mixer/food processor.

Well yes, if you're only talking about commercial cooks and chefs. I was talking about everyday life; everybody cooks whether professionally or not. Your average joe in his home has a far simpler time cooking than his grandma did, even though the chef at Ghallager's doesn't.

I guarantee that if you had my apple pie first, you would find the frozen one rather unappealing.

True, I personally don't care for the prepackaged pies, but even then, my mom still makes pies but buys frozen crusts. The gravy, however, I can't tell the difference.

Home made bread is another thing that's far better than store-bought. When I began gardening (I don't any more) I was amazed at how much better the home-grown veggies tasted. I suspect they had more vitamins and other nutrients than canned or frozen vegetables.

Re:Technology

[cthulhu11]

This is very true in the server arena. When Oracle made buying Sun hardware nearly impossible we started looking around for alternatives. I've been dismayed at the giant steps backward in manageability the competition offers. Sun hardware (not that I didn't say SPARC) can be set up from bare metal without more than a serial console and a host ethernet link. The service processor can be logged into without trying to have a non-English-speaker on the other side of the planet successfully find and transcribe a hidden physical tag. No legacy keyboard/monitor need be plugged in, and when using Solaris one can install the OS over the serial console - RHEL I haven't gotten to completely work without a video console. The competitors are pitiful. Most have no serial console functionality out of the box at all. IBM systems require convoluted procedures involving local media. Cisco UCS -- the Cisco people we talked to didn't even understand the issue. HP (at least as of G7, hoping that G8 doesn't do anything unfortunate) has some serial functionality, but it's badly broken. Factory password is printed on a hidden physical tag. In some places one can't cut/paste because characters get dropped. On G7 systems, PXE booting forces the console to 115200 bps for no good reason. One G7 system I have lets one log into the service processor when at 9600 bps, but commands are randomly rejected. At 115200 bps, it curiously won't let me log in on the serial console, but authenticates the HTTP interface just fine. On none of the HP hardware have I been able to connect to the host/OS console when SSH'd in. Oh and I love how the ILO option-rom utility won't let one save changes via a serial console. Before you tell me to just use the network interface for management, consider that 1) The network interface needs to have IP configured. Counting on remote hands being available and competent to do that, and for legacy compatible keyboard and monitor to be on-site is not an option. DHCP requires knowing the MAC -- printed only on that hidden tag 5000 miles away -- and requires either a local DHCP server (infeasible) or tricky relaying of broadcasts across the WAN. 2) Encoding video and sending it across the world for simple textual operations is stupid and suffers greatly from latency, as in not being able to time keypresses to get into legacy BIOS utilities. Full video console redirection functionality requiring MS-OS on the client end is just the icing on the cake. 3) Network interfaces rely on successful speed/duplex negotiation to work. In 2012 multiple vendors still ship $20,000 servers with a @#$@# 100mbit NIC that can't autonegotiate. So, yeah, network management of servers is all the rage now, and it sucks. It sucks hard.

Re:Technology

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention everyone seems to forget that in our race to the bottom frankly the new stuff sucks for longevity compared to the old stuff. those Pentium I boards I sold that lumber mill had been stored in my shed for a couple of years and fired right up and are now ass deep in all that flying woodchips and mess and just keep on taking abuse. the traces were thick, the caps were well made and easy to replace, they built those old boards like tanks.

The new stuff has teeny tiny traces, good luck changing caps on a lot of those designs because you have NO room to work, you look at it and the words "designed for the dump" might as well be stamped on it because the whole board was designed to be tossed instead of fixed at the slightest problem. That's fine if its just some office box but NOT something you are depending on for mission critical work. With those two machines I wouldn't be surprised if they last as long as that lathe does, another 10 to 20 years frankly wouldn't surprise me as they have no fans to get gummed up, the chips don't get hot, its just a damned solid design.

Re:Technology

[graphius]

So do you want to work for 5 cents an hour? didn't think so. Not the government's fault*

Our economy says it would be more worth your while to beg on a street corner than to work for 5 cents per hour.
Yes I understand you are exaggerating to make a point, but even if you use the current minimum wage (whatever it is in your jurisdiction) That is still below the poverty level, and you create a downward pressure on all wages until you have a virtual slave class of working poor....
That is what is illegal (and should be)

*There are MANY other economic factors you can blame on them, but minimum wage, not so much...

Re:Technology

[K10W]

sometimes old stuff is better, I understand new tech all too well and sometimes it's better sometimes worse but in the latter it is marketed as better still. The "less is more" marketing or selling something by spinning it's weakness as a desirable quality. The cost cutting, outsourcing labour overseas with poor QC and fall in production standards even in industrialised countries like EU, US, JPN etc. can sometimes mean newer stuff is poor quality compared to old stuff. Often these days it is made to be limited life, considered disposable compared to previous tech which was made to last longer and be repaired rather than replaced. Tried and tested design at often lower price is something you can bet your business on without a gamble. Newer only has the edge if it supports features the old stuff doesn't. If it ain't broke why fix it.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

So does my tractor. But it's been running almost every day since 1961 and hasn't changed. Can't say the same for myself, though. Considering the abuse that both of us have taken, the tractor has come out much better than any computer will, I expect.
On that note, I am disappointed that nobody uses pen plotters anymore. They were so fun to watch. Much like our presidents.
Oh yeah...I DO have one of those German cars, too. The tractor runs better on the fuel.

Re:Technology

[Crosshair84]

It's not a matter of "Race to the bottom". The companies are building for the target market. If they know that their computers are going to be, on average, replaced every 3 years then they are going to build them to last 3 years plus a little bit more. They would be stupid to build them to last 20 years.

Let me use a car analogy. The fastest speed limits in the US today is 80 mph. Why don't car makers build cars whose top speed is only 80 mph? Because the acceleration and performance when you get close to 80 mph would be crap. They also know that most people will try to do 5 over. So, in order to satisfy their target market, they have to build cars that have good performance and acceleration to 85 mph no matter what, including headwinds, are of vehicle, etc. So the effect is that the cars they build just so happen to be able to do 110-120, poorly, so they can do 85mph well.

On the flip side, car makers don't build every car so it can do 230 mph. The people who want or need a 230 mph car are corner cases. Building a car that can do 230mph is expensive and most people only want a car that can do 85. Building 85 mph cars is much cheaper and people care more about the lower price than having the capability to do 230 mph.

My old Dodge Intrepid would do 85mph easy peasy, but once you took it past 95 it started to drag ass in terms of acceleration. I eventually got it up to 115, but it took a lot of road to do so.

In the past, computers were very expensive and people held onto them for a long time so computer makers build computers that lasted a long time. As the cost to build them went down, people replaced them more frequently, especially given the speed increases. Makers adjusted to this reality by building their computers to a lower expected lifetimes to reduce costs and sell more computers. If a 286 computer in 1983 cost the equivalent of $500 today to build, you would have seen them built like computers today.

Compare this to early mass-produced cars like the Model T. EVERYONE back then bought new cars. At some of the courthouses I do work at you will see their old photo collections on the wall, courthouse in Two Harbors MN as one example, people on homesteads on the North Shore of Lake Superior living in log cabins had shiny new Model T Fords. The used car market did not exist until the mid 1930's. Why did everyone buy new cars? Because cars then were cheap to buy and cheap to maintain, cheaper than horses in fact. (A Model T Ford would weather a harsh MN Winter under a tarp just fine, horses........not so much.) If you were even considering selling your car and buying a new one it was because your current one was little more than scrap metal at that point. Even when the used market pooped up, only the poorest families bought used cars because new cars were still very cheap to buy.

That changed significantly when the government started seriously regulating the car industry, lets leave aside the merits of some of those regulations for this discussion, those regulations seriously increased the price of new cars. The government mandates cost the same regardless of if the car was designed to last 5 years or 10 so car makers started building cars to last longer. Thus because of these regulations you say the average age of cars on the road increase drastically from the 60's to today and the used car industry become the big player it is today. In fact, some older cars are very desirable now because the government has made it illegal, via regulations, to build new ones and they have design attributes that people want. late 80's early 90's Ford Ranger pickups are one example. I recently bought a 1990 Ford Ranger with 241,000 miles on it. I started searching the car forums, looking to fix it up a bit as an around town pickup and I made the mistake of posting photos showing its condition and what I paid for it. I have people literally throwing money at me wanting to buy it instead of telling me how to fix the stupid gas gauge.

Anyway, back on topic. Users like me

Re:Technology

[toddestan]

The thing with modern cars is that they are entirely dependent on complicated electronic systems to even run. At some point new parts will stop being made for them, and over time obtaining functioning spare parts will get harder and harder for them. It's going to be a bit like in TFA, where you're going to be fighting with a finicky 30-year old propriety electronic computer system that is completely unsupported by the manufacturer and nearly impossible to get parts for, and whatever parts you do find are salvaged from other cars and are just as old.

On the other hand, a competent machinist with some mechanical aptitude and a basic understanding of electronics can keep an old car going pretty much forever. It wouldn't surprise me at all that in 30 years they'll be more cars from the 1940's and 1950's driving around than cars driving around from today.

Re:Technology

[hairyfeet]

Hey a fellow Ranger man! I got a 99 XT Ranger, great truck. lousy on gas but they ride smooth and can haul a hell of a load and those with the Vulcan V6 like mine? Can't hardly kill the thing.

And while I agree about the whole price and replacement issue i do think there is one side effect you are missing and that is this: It was simply easier back then to design a thicker board with thicker traces than it is now. With today's tech it will cost more to make the thicker board because of the materials where back then it wasn't the material cost that was the issue, it was making boards in quantity that wouldn't have high failure rates. It was MUCH harder then to make a thin crappy board simply because if you would have tried it so many of them would have come off the line duds that you'd end up binning more than you sold. if the rumors are true that is why its easier to find a Phenom I triple or dual than a quad, because their quads often had a failed core so very few passed muster, and according to the sites i hang out at its nearly impossible to OC a Phenom I without disabling Core 2 for that same reason, even if it worked Core 2 would be fragile and more prone to failure than the other 3, again because of manufacturing woes.

Now as for today? Frankly i'm seeing a LOT of older duals and better that are still going strong 6 or 7 years after being built and with software simply not keeping up with hardware for most jobs that half a decade old machine still does the job. i personally switched all my builds to using solid caps for just that reason because my customers are more likely to keep that triple or quad for a decade and with solid caps the boards will last that long easily. I have no doubt this hexacore i built for myself as well as the hexa and quad i built for the kids will be running when Win 7 goes EOL in 2020 simply because one can simply swap out the GPU and even the games are barely stressing duals, much less quads and hexas.

Anyway enjoy your Ranger, now that Ford has quit making them you're gonna find more and more guys hanging onto them as they really are great small trucks. My oldest has experienced the same as you online when he posted pics of his Midnight Blue 98 S10 extended cab, guys left and right were trying to get him to sell. I know that despite the lousy gas mileage i won't be getting rid of mine, those rangers are just too comfortable and fun to drive.

Re:Technology

[toddestan]

I'm kind of wondering if that is coming to an end here soon. I haven't seen anything newer than LGA775 with ISA slots, maybe that will change once the pipelines for new LGA775-compatible hardware starts to dry up.

Re:Technology

[DrVxD]

So... pick the good ones and ignore the bad. eg. Windows 7 is a massive improvement over XP.

"better than XP" != "good"

Re:Technology

[nobodie]

the fax thing just pisses me off. Instead of being able to open and esign, do a simple scan and save to file, email. I have to print out, sign, find a stupid fax machine, and then pay to send it off. Or else buy a fax machine to use once a year or three times in one month and then not again for two years.

Re:Technology

[theshowmecanuck]

And now Volkswagon (Hitler's revenge) aren't so cheap anymore either.

Re:Technology

[currently_awake]

Chipfabs lower cost by increasing density, meaning more delicate chips. Older computers (properly maintained) last much longer than new ones.

Re:Technology

[K. S. Kyosuke]

He's cool because he has an Ethernet plug in his lavatory.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

This follows the general principle of market regulation that if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and if you tax something, you get less of it.

People whine and bitch about unemployment being high; I wonder how many of them realize how silly it is to complain when we subsidize unemployment through unemployment insurance and minimum wage. It's very schizophrenic.

Re:Technology

[pruss]

I still regularly read books on my Palm TX--Plucker is a better ebook reader for my purposes than anything available for Android and PalmBible+ is better for my purposes than any Bible reader for Android (unsurprisingly, since I am a co-author of both apps)--but I now find the screen a bit small compared to my Epic 4G Touch.

I am having occasional freezes that require a momentary shorting of the battery to fix, so I expect it won't be that long before it dies completely.

Re:Technology

[EXrider]

Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.

My grandparents had a Dodge Aspen, what a POS. It seemed like the thing never ran right unless the freakin stars were aligned properly with it being sunny, 75 and 0% humidity. Towards the end of it's short life, it overheated constantly until the crack in the head was so huge that it couldn't hold coolant anymore. One time when we were stranded in a parking lot, I actually said to my Grandpa: "Grandpa, I can't even imagine this stupid car being new and exciting when it came off of the assembly line." I'm pretty objective about vehicles, but Chrysler made a lot of junk back in those days. Chrysler "Ultradrive" transmissions were also notoriously junk.

Re:Technology

[anerki]

Nobody is going to build a genuine brick structure today, because it would be cost-prohibitive.

Careful with the generalizations. In Belgium and likely many other countries around Europe we build a lot with bricks and stone. Like the saying goes, a Belgian is born with a brick in his stomache.

Not all countries ruthlessly save costs when it comes to building. I bought my first house two years ago, since then I've laminated one floor (because it was a horrible salmon covered tile) and remove all the laminate on another level because there's a beautiful hardwood floor under it in dark brown. Just treat it with a good oil and then ship's varnish over it twice and you're good for 10 years ... Hardly like my dog is going to 'ruin' my floor.

I've had hardwood at my parents too, lived there 20 years, they for 30, all the time with at least 2 dogs, sometimes a cat. Just treat your damn floor, it doesn't take a lot of work (at all) and it pays off.

Personally I'd rather spent twice the amount for a house that will last until 2100, with a proper foundation, solid walls and proper floors. If I wanted to live in a glorified cartboard box with plastic coverings, I'd go camping.

Re:Technology

[anerki]

Like Calvins (and Hobbes') dad, you'll go into the future kicking and screaming :)

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

funny that...on the other side of the Pond people say exactly the same thing happened.....could it be that the US just couldn't bring itself to embrace ....gasp....the Germans?

As much as tech costs...

[TWX]

...I don't want it replaced before it's no longer doing its job effectively. The Navy system, for example, was finally replaced when the actual PDP11 hardware was no longer viable, and given the expense of the control software to develop, it probably was more cost effective to simply emulate a PDP11 to keep the existing code viable.

Reinventing the wheel only because a technology has been around for a long time is not cost effective, and replacing technology because viable machines are simply old is also not cost effective. This same logic makes me dislike programs like Cash for Clunkers, as the cost to develop and build a car, plus deliver, is high enough that taking cars off the road that are still viable, almost without regard to fuel economy, is not cost effective. Use it until repairing it is financially impractical, especially considering the expense of buying another new one.

Re:As much as tech costs...

[labnet]

...I don't want it replaced before it's no longer doing its job effectively

Except you PDP11 system might burn through $10k of electricity per annum when an modern PC might use $200/annum
Similarly, a euro diesel uses half the fuel of a typical amercan clunker for the same power and torque....

Re:As much as tech costs...

[Billly Gates]

Replace PDP with IE 6 and your opinion changes drastically if you design sites where the client feels its easy to view the same site on his IPAd as his w2k workstation. Why fix it?

I am beginning to hate XP too and feel it is downright dangerous to use it on the web. Especially if you use Java and flash 9 with 40+ exploits. No firefox wont save you on such a circumstance. Different scenario than your PDPs but clueless users dont see it that way. All they know is that state of the art website looks like crap without rounded corners and they keep getting infected. Therefore YOU suck

Re:As much as tech costs...

[scharkalvin]

For many years as IBM introduced newer and faster computers the instruction sets of the older machines were emulated by the newer ones so that customers code would not be obsoleted. Eventually you might have had several layers of emulation going on.

DEC's vax emulated the PDP-11 instruction set and would run RSX-11 (their most poplular PDP-11 OS) under the VAX OS as a sub task so that customers could migrate from the PDP-11 to the VAX. And DEC's Alpha machines would emulate VAX, PDP-11, and 386 instruction sets (in software). Nothing new here.

Re:As much as tech costs...

[TWX]

But IE6 was broken from the day it shipped...

Re:As much as tech costs...

[JDG1980]

There's a difference between using outdated systems for a specific, limited purpose and using outdated systems as a general computing/application development platform.

The former is OK. The latter is... well, IE6.

Re:As much as tech costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

American clunker? When Europe produces such wonders as the diesel Panda? Sheesh.

FWIW we probably WOULD have high efficiency small diesels here if it weren't for the EPA. The mandates for particulate filters and urea injection have produced engines that HAVE to run for extended periods frequently enough to keep things clean. IN a short spurt commuter car things would clog up and require expensive maintenance in pretty short order. All for a very small reduction in emissions (but they're activist bureaucrats and ANY cost should be borne by us plebes in furtherance of their heavenly goals).

IFO would love and could really use a midsize or large enough compact pickup with a diesel. Can't get them here. Stupid government.

B-52s

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. We're still flying B-52's with wire-wrapped computers. None of this modern solder.

Re:B-52s

[TWX]

I I'm sure there's solder in the computer of the B-52. There might be no integrated-circuit memory, but components still need to be connected somehow.

My guess as to why the AP-101 is still in use is that with it being expensive to certify new equipment in flight, when the device performs as needed, replacing it is not practical or strictly necessary. On the other hand, if the Air Force determined that it really, really did need a new computer in the B-52, it would happen, despite obstacles to the process.

Re:B-52s

[slimjim8094]

There might be no integrated-circuit memory, but components still need to be connected somehow.

Yeah, the GP mentioned it - wire wrapping. It's pretty cool stuff - done properly, it actually creates an even better connection than solder.

Re:B-52s

[mirix]

I was under the impression that the only thing left original on the B-52s is the sheetmetal.

I imagine they've probably upgraded the avionics a few times by now.

Re:B-52s

[ThreeKelvin]

And, wire wrapping was at that time better at handling vibrations and bumps than solder. Perfect for avionics!

Oh, I miss wire wrapping.

Re:B-52s

[DerekLyons]

That's nothing. We're still flying B-52's with wire-wrapped computers. None of this modern solder.

Actually, wire-wrap is the "new fangled" technology of the pair... soldering goes back to the earliest days of electricity and electronics, while wire-wrap dates to the 1950's.
 
That being said, the [US] Navy was still buying wire-wrapped backplanes as late as the late 1980's. Wire-wrap has a lot of advantages if you're buying equipment meant to be in service for decades, rather than mass produced equipment intended to last only a handful of years at best. Also, with automated wire wrap, you can use one basic backplane frame for essentially an infinite number of components. The system I worked on for the Navy had over 150 different logical units using only three standard backplanes and a small handful of custom backplanes. This meant the spares pool could be pretty shallow because replacement backplanes could essentially be produced on-demand. Automated testing was also much easier because all of the component locations (for plug in modules) were located on a standard X-Y grid.

Re:B-52s

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it causes heart attacks.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/PDP-8I-backplane.jpg

Stuff skipped...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the author(s) of this piece don't knit much. And most likely wouldn't know a programmable knitting machine if it bit them in the collective whatever! That said, they use punch cards to create the designed begin knitted. Again in the world of fabrics, Jacquard looms have not vanished and they still use punch cards; as do certain kinds of Chinese drawlooms. Just saying...

Re:Stuff skipped...

[Anonymous Coward]

The best lace in England is still made on punchcard looms.

Re:Stuff skipped...

[catmistake]

Jacquard looms have not vanished and they still use punch cards

Nice. Since you brought it up, I'm sure you're aware just how damn important those things are (skip to 6min in), not only to James Burke, but modern computing. And I bet we could just barely squeeze into the Grand Canyon all the tiered support guys, techies, MSCE's, sysadmins, DBA's, CTO's, CIO's, grey breards, webdevs, coders, CE's and honest to God computer scientists that have never heard of it. I kind of like old hw. I'm posting this from one right now!

Re:Stuff skipped...

[catmistake]

might help with the rest of episode 4 (sorry about that, folks!)

Re:Stuff skipped...

[Hognoxious]

Protip: you can skip straight to the point X minutes and YY seconds within a youtube video by appending "&t=XmYYs" to the url thusly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sunv0Q38wS8&t=6m00s

Re:Stuff skipped...

[Anonymous Coward]

(thumbsup) Thank you kind Sir*, I did not know about that one.

* I went with the statistically likely option; please swap out for something more gender appropriate if required.

Re:Stuff skipped...

[catmistake]

too cool, thx

Vaxes

[BasilBrush]

VAXes, not VAXen.

Re:Vaxes

[fahrbot-bot]

VAXes, not VAXen.

Actually, "Vaxen" is acceptable and I have actually heard it used - yes, I'm that old. Furthermore, from (1) Vaxen and mentioned on (2) VAX:

(1) The plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers. "Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen."
(2) ... systems include the "BVAX", a high-end ECL-based VAX, and two other ECL-based VAXen: "Argonaut" and "Raven".

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

VAXen would be female.

Have you ever used a VAX?

They were so sexy back in their day that they just *HAD* to be female.

Re:Vaxes

[BasilBrush]

I also go back that far, and I believe it's an anachronism. We called them VAXes back then, not VANen. They *xen meme smells more 1990s than 1970s. But even if there were some were calling them VAXen back then it's still wrong. It's just bad English.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the PDP-9 I learned C on.

Re:Vaxes

[fahrbot-bot]

They *xen meme smells more 1990s than 1970s. But even if there were some were calling them VAXen back then it's still wrong. It's just bad English.

It's called a colloquialism - get over it - and we used it at my university in the early to mid 1980s and I also heard it when I worked at NASA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.. As the reference.com site mentioned, it was used among hackers. Perhaps you're just not hacker enough :-)

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and nothing sucks like a VAX.

(sorry, someone had to say it)

Re:Vaxes

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

It's just bad English.

No, it's an Old English plural noun ending for the weak form (e.g. ox oxen.)

Re:Vaxes

[overbaud]

Some would argue that American english is bad english.

Re:Vaxes

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I also go back that far, and I believe it's an anachronism. We called them VAXes back then, not VANen. They *xen meme smells more 1990s than 1970s

Here are about 25 usenet posts from 1981 that use the term VAXen.

But even if there were some were calling them VAXen back then it's still wrong. It's just bad English.

My high-school english teacher, who was awarded state english teacher of the year on more than one occasion, taught his classes that "Language creates environment and environment creates language" - in other words, correct usage is defined by nothing more than whatever enough people say is the correct usage. And we had a cluster of microvaxen at my high-school too.

Re:Vaxes

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Err... but only if there's more than one...?

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I cannot find the old emails anymore, but the Morris worm from 1988 generated a lot of email chatter. Amongst the first, if not the first, emails sent discussing the downing of several high priority machines was a mention that the affected machines appeared to be VAXen and possibly other systems. I was not in academia nor industry at the time so I don't know if this term was common parlance, but there is evidence that it was used at least by 1988 if not earlier.

Re:Vaxes

[Darinbob]

VAXen was used in the 80's for sure. It always was a sort of joke though. So the more uptight people with white shirts and ties and Fortran probably said VAXes whereas hippies with beards and C compilers probably said VAXen.

Re:Vaxes

[serviscope_minor]

in other words, correct usage is defined by nothing more than whatever enough people say is the correct usage.

Except French (the nation, not the language) where there are whole institutions dedicated to tilting at that particular windmill.

Re:Vaxes

[spitzig]

There is disagreement among language theorists about this. Some consider language to be prescriptive, some descriptive. I think it's both. There IS clearly a concept of "bad English", which is not the same as incomprehensible, though.

I teach English to non-native English speakers, and I'm not going to teach my students to say "Where he at?".

However, some of the mishmash of rules in English come from attempts to insert the rules of Latin into English.

Re:Vaxes

[BasilBrush]

Perhaps you're just not hacker enough :-)

Well, I don't have a neckbeard, thankfully.

Re:Vaxes

[BasilBrush]

I know where it's from. Yet, as VAX isn't a word from Old English, it shouldn't have an Old English plural. It should have a Modern English plural.

Re:Vaxes

[BasilBrush]

Some would argue that English is poorly pronounced French.

Re:Vaxes

[Sarten-X]

Some would argue that French is a simplified form of Zarcbuklioidian, but they'd probably be ignored.

Re:Vaxes

[scharkalvin]

The name VAX is actually an acroname. It stands for Virtual Address eXtendion. The VAX is an extention of the PDP-11 instruction set, and extends the word and address size from 16 to 32 bits. Same thing Intel later did to the 80286 microprocessor with the 80386. The VAX was one of the few mini computers with THREE address instructions. (IE: ADD A,B,C) or "add a with b and store the result in c." Most computers have only one or two address instructions (few have even TWO address instructions), the destination and usually one of the operands is a register (usually the SAME register).

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

correct usage is defined by nothing more than whatever enough people say is the correct usage

Your right!. Dont listen to those grammar nazi's.. there just a bunch of looser's!

Re:Vaxes

[pz]

Perhaps you're just not hacker enough :-)

Well, I don't have a neckbeard, thankfully.

Neither do I, but I'm old enough to remember everyone calling them VAXen. It was such a widespread colloquialism that it approached standard usage.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Admit it, you've got beard envy. Come out of the closet already.

Re:Vaxes

[ColdWetDog]

You spelled Zarcbuklioidien wrong.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just bad English.

No, it's just bad German.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you all correct and wrong at the same time. VAXes refers to machines running VMS. VAXen refers to machines running both VMS and some flavor of Unix.

Re:Vaxes

[SoupGuru]

Ax yourself if there's a difference between correct language and popular language. My heart sank when I picked up Webster's and one of the "accepted" pronunciations of "ask" was "aks".

So I would wager there is language - words we all agree upon that can be used to communicate - and then there are proper ways to use those words. "Me want cookie" are words we all know and communicate pretty effectively. However, it is not "proper".

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you can have the world famous VAXCluster, with capabilities never equaled (except by newer VMSClusters).

Re:Vaxes

[sjames]

Your so-called 'English' is nothing but bad Anglo-Saxon. You've piled on so many layers of fail that it's barely recognizable!

Re:Vaxes

[dwye]

And Icelandic, where they carefully maintain Old Norse, just in case any einjerer or valkyries turn up and want to gab.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

My high-school english teacher,

Well, if some high-school english teacher said so, then the question is settled forever and there can be no argument.

We must never attempt to prescribe clarity or consistency in language, but must accept whatever runny shit dribbles from the mouths of morons as meaning exactly what they want it to mean and nothing else.

Re:Vaxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if some high-school english teacher said so, then the question is settled forever and there can be no argument.

Certainly more authoritative than some snippy AC, don't you think?

Re:Vaxes

[DrVxD]

Some would argue that American english is bad english.

There are others would argue that American "English" isn't English.

Hardly obsolete.

[Lord Kano]

I can speak from first hand knowledge that many Fortune 500 companies are using technology that most people think of as obsolete. If you paid $50k for a software package that was written for VAX OpenVMS and the publisher went out of business 15 years ago, what would you do? You'd do the same thing these guys do. Work on getting a replacement, and keep that replacement in the wings until you can no longer run the existing (perfectly working) package.

In 2009, I worked on porting a fairly lengthy program from VAX to Alpha in OpenVMS Fortran. Why? Because it took 20 years to get the program just right and it works perfectly for the suited task. Why throw away a perfectly functional program just because the VAX is dying?

Today, companies are producing good and providing services that touch all of our lives using 30+ year old technology.

LK

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[nospam007]

"In 2009, I worked on porting a fairly lengthy program from VAX to Alpha in OpenVMS Fortran. Why? Because it took 20 years to get the program just right and it works perfectly for the suited task. Why throw away a perfectly functional program just because the VAX is dying?"

I'm a railway dispatcher in my daytime job and all the new installations in Europe (ESTW) from Siemens, Alcatel etc still use OpenVMS to run the systems. It uses tons of modems talking to the equipment in the field, another item that's hard to come by nowadays.
It was developed in the 70ies and runs now on Intel machines only because they can't get any more MicroVAXes or Alphas
But lots of installations still have those and they run flawlessly.

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[Anonymous Coward]

> In 2009, I worked on porting a fairly lengthy program from VAX to Alpha in OpenVMS Fortran.

Wasn't Alpha already replaced by Itanium at this point?

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[Billly Gates]

If your labor is greater than the 50k cost I would say it was a rip off and a bad investment. Alpha is dead and Itanium is dying with HP being fickle with intel and Oracle killing it the risk is huge!

A wiser investment would be to write it for Linux or Windows new if your plucking down cash. They wont be going anywhere for a long time. Who the knows whays gping to happen to vms.

CEOs have stated CIOs do not understand business and see shit only as costs with no value. Like cars and equipment its a better ROI to EOL.

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[tom112358]

If your labor is greater than the 50k cost I would say it was a rip off and a bad investment

Probably not. The accumalated bug fixes over the course of 30 years have probably cost them much more than the purchase price. If the system were to be redone from scratch, it would bring with it a whole other set of bugs, which would have to be fixed.

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[Kadagan AU]

I work for a competitor of Alcatel and Siemens in the rail industry, and we are migrating some of our bigger customers off of VAXes.. We have been for 10+ years now, and the migration is nearing completion I believe. I don't specifically work with those projects, but for a time I was in charge of administrating a number of linux systems running VAX emulation software.. We used it primarily because we ran out of physical VAXes to use, and decided to stop buying them off of ebay (it's the only place you can get VAX parts now). I still have a drawer full of OpenVMS and Multinet licenses.

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[Lord Kano]

> In 2009, I worked on porting a fairly lengthy program from VAX to Alpha in OpenVMS Fortran.

Wasn't Alpha already replaced by Itanium at this point?

Yes, but the company in question still had active maintenance contract for the Alphas and the Itaniums were not ready for production use yet.

LK

Re:Hardly obsolete.

[Lord Kano]

In this situation, it was the right decision. This was a big and I do mean BIG system that was responsible for a lot of things. The kinks had been worked out from a functionality standpoint and the best thing to do was keep it moving. The company chose to stick with a known code base that many of the in-house resources were familiar with and could continue to support with minimal changes to the way things operated.

LK

Old Tech Never Dies...

[Mashhaster]

It just fades away into obscure applications that most people never know anything about. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say tape is dead, or the desktop is dead, and yet people still use NDMP to back up data from company desktops over fibre channel to LTO tape drives as recently as right now, and still will tomorrow and the day after that.

IBM 402 now in museum.

[Animats]

Actually, the IBM 402 mentioned was acquired by the Computer Museum, and is on exhibit there.

Internet Exploriasaurus 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Every once and a while someone shows up in our shop with a 'puter still running it on XP with ancient virus and malware troubles, talk about scary fossils!

Re:Internet Exploriasaurus 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Every once and a while someone shows up in our shop with a 'puter still running it on XP with ancient virus and malware troubles, talk about scary fossils!

Funny, I've got 3 boxes running XP and I don't have any trouble finding up-to-date virus and anti-malware software. And I visit some pretty disreputable sites, too. No, get your mind out of the gutter, not those, but warez/crack sites. Besides some study just showed that religious sites have more malware than porn sites (which figures, I always thought that if I was running a porn site, I wouldn't want to piss customers off, at least not with malware).

Re:Internet Exploriasaurus 6

[Anonymous Coward]

And I visit some pretty disreputable sites, too. No, get your mind out of the gutter, not those,

Bleh! *cringes for a moment* Ok, not those sites. Whew. Go on.

but warez/crack sites.

AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa I was right! *breaks out in hives*

Flat Files FTW!

[wrook]

Developers who think that *everything* needs to be in a database scare the crap out of me. Sometimes flat files are a really good idea. Sometimes putting something in a human readable form that can be viewed and edited with a normal text editor is a really good idea. There are many, many things where I don't need to search vast amounts of data, where I don't need atomic commits, where I don't need rollback, etc, etc. For those things I use a flat file.

Admitedly, I know the difference between regular, context free and context sensitive grammars and I know how to write a parser. Unfortunately, this isn't always common knowledge in a software team :-P

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Tablizer]

It's true that flat files may be "good enough" for a particular use, but it's not very flexible for unanticipated future uses.

Basically if you base your app on a flat file, you are gambling that you won't need many of the features databases provide out of the box. Knowing how requirements changes, it's often the wrong bet.

Software design is a lot like picking investments: you have to estimate future changes and the magnitude of their impact. Experience in both software design and the domain (industry) help in this regard.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

A database as a replacement for flat files I can live with, but replacing them with xml-files is what's getting me spitting mad. Pure lunacy.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Lehk228]

your application shoudln't be too dependant on what format it's data is stored in anyways, unless it's only function is toprocess data in format X,Y,and Z

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

If XML isn't fixing your problems, you must not be using enough of it...

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[dbIII]

Developers who think that *everything* needs to be in a database scare the crap out of me.

That's actually why there was some old plotting software from 1995 on a SparcStation20 with SunOS 5 in my office. The newer software had a full rewrite to integrate a database into a very simple plotting and queueing system and the rewrite never finished implementing all of the features of the old system (thus text output on diagrams looked like crap). The old software is still running unchanged on a newer and vastly faster Solaris10 host, but of course the evil piece of crap licencing software that decided if the useful software could run or not needed a pile of hacks before it would function. The dishonest would have only needed one very easy hack instead of the pile of stuffing around required to run it under the terms of the licence.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[wvmarle]

Well when it comes to US taxes I'd wager it falls in the "vast amounts of data". However I can imagine it takes really long to change the storage methods, if only because you have to be really sure it Just Works and the old system does just that.

That said a lot of my small business info I store in spreadsheets. A perfect in-between: human readable, and with the AutoFilter function easily searchable by column. And with a couple hundred records a year no need for anything more fancy.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

One big factor is that API support for databases is way nicer than flatfile support in most environments.

And, so many people run MySQL in "non-ACID" mode, its not like they really care about transaction rollbacks or whatever. It's just an easy place to save stuff.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[wvmarle]

I would write a data reader/writer module for the program.

This would handle the data storage, and if later requirements change it's a relatively small part of the program that changes. The rest of the program doesn't have to care how it's stored externally: it just cares about having function calls available to do a read, write, maybe search. This makes it also relatively easy to expand.

And when in future there is a need for say more sophisticated search options, you can rewrite that one module so it starts to interact with a MySQL or Postgres database or so. Even the data format conversion becomes a breeze that way as all you do is read from the old system and write to the new system.

Further in the future maybe your external db goes out of business, and again it's a relatively easy change to a new db.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[JimboFBX]

If the data you are cramming into a file doesn't naturally fit into a tabular format that you would want to selectively recall at random times, then I would question why you would ever "realize" you need a database.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[KlaymenDK]

I would write a data reader/writer module for the program.

Quoted in lieu of an upvote. This is the #1 step in optimising file system access -- store it in a flat file first, with a proper wrapper, and then you MAY update to a higher-end system later on IF it's needed. Don't underestimate the bandwidth and accessibility (as in: hacking data for testing, etc.) of the flat file! :-)

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[gl4ss]

moving from a flat file approach(depending on the flatfile) to a db isn't usually that big of a chore.
however that code being tied to a db, or even worse a specific db, can be much worse. an advanced "flat file" approach is a custom db however in the end and if using a premade db sw if the features aren't there you're kind of fucked and dumping the data into your own process anyways for doing anything.

If I'm creating a log file on android for example, should I be appending to a flat file OR creating a sqlite db for the purpose? the sqlite approach would make it necessary to use a sqlite reader to view the data, dropping old entries would be slightly easier though. the sqlite approach would take slightly more code too, in terms of lines.

fwiw, most guys who put everything in a db do it because it's less "work" for them, usually that just throws away portability _and_ flexibility for the given data(and because they took a course in databases but not in database creation..).

sometimes the database approach is self documenting though which is a plus.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Darinbob]

Flat files are great when your application involves scanning through them serially. A more modern database is used when you need random keyed access.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Darinbob]

Me: Doctor, it hurts when I do this!
Doctor: Try doing that some more and see if it goes away.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather the opposite. A flat ASCII file is the most flexible data container you can possible have. It's completely free-form. If you pair it with simple LZW compression (a ZIP file) it's close to the most compact, also. And it's even the most scalable for many uses, I know because I just converted a big relational database (hundreds of millions of records) to flat files, and in the process we now use a tenth of the disk space and the system runs ten times faster. Users are delighted.
And for data analysis (where relational databases really shine) you can always create a ad-hoc datawarehouse and feed it with the data from the flat files.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[SuricouRaven]

"the sqlite approach would make it necessary to use a sqlite reader to view the data, dropping old entries would be slightly easier though."

Circular file. Make it a fixed size. When you run out of file, start overwriting it from the beginning. Maybe ten lines in C, and a four-byte overhead at the start to indicate where to start putting new records. A little more complexity to read because you'll have to skip the half-overwritten record, but not difficult.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[dwpro]

Flat files are almost always the wrong solution. Here is why:

1. It means someone needs write access to a file system to change a configuration to an application
2. complications arising from scaling to multiple machines requiring either duplicate identical configs, shared network paths, and the associated complexities
3. keys, constraints, defined types, all of the benefits of a database should not be ignored out of hand by saying, oh, I don't need them. Really? You don't need data validation/integrity? How about your backup?

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[gman003]

Agreed.

I'm working, in my "free time", on a video game. I put the game data in CSV files, because hey, that means I can edit item values and such in Excel.

I'm seriously considering moving them to a SQLite "database" for performance reasons - my hand-crafter CSV parser is extremely slow, and it would be far less effort to switch to a simple database than to try to optimize it. The main reason I haven't yet? Ease of access to the data. I'll probably do it once I write a full "editor" for the game (I'll need one anyways, because "level design in Excel" is a phrase only uttered on the fifth and lower levels of Hell), but not before.

Oh, and there's the whole "three or four text fields as composite primary key" thing. That doesn't really work well in databases. And mapping those to numeric IDs is going to be tedious.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Tablizer]

Just about any systematic data structure can "fit" in tables (assuming some skill and practice). One can even represent C program source in tables. Now whether such is the most convenient format depends on the details.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[sjames]

It's easier to add a database when you discover you need one later than it is to rip one out when you wish the system wasn't so over-complex for it's simple requirements.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are zillions of free CSV libraries out there, many of which are also pretty fast.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Tablizer]

Any rule that says "always start with X first" is suspect. Again, experience about the domain and diff app approaches may suggest what base assumptions to start with based on probable future directions of change and needs.

Often the relationship between domain nouns is not one-to-one such that some kind of look-up or Join is warranted to avoid duplication of information. Medium to large flat files are not so grand at joins, especially in a multi-user or concurrent environment. You'll get stuck with locked or corrupted data/files that bring you out Sunday morning to clean up.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Tablizer]

I'm skeptical of that.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[wrook]

I get the feeling that you are thinking about a specific type of software that you work with frequently. There is nothing wrong with what you are saying in specific circumstances, but most software really doesn't need what you are talking about. I'll reply inline to your comments.

It means someone needs write access to a file system to change a configuration to an application

Somebody *always* needs access to the file system if you're going to write. If you use a database, you are either running under the group of the database, or you are trading one authentication system for another. The applications I write (hint: not web apps) are run using the permissions of the user running it. No additional security is necessary (the user *should* be able to write his own configuration). If I am writing some multi-user application where I need to write data for users that don't have a shell account on the machine, the authentication mechanisms in a database *may* make it more attractive, but it really depends on the situation.

complications arising from scaling to multiple machines requiring either duplicate identical configs, shared network paths, and the associated complexities

That is a rather specific set of requirements. The vast majority of software written today never needs to be scaled across multiple machines. But if I wrote software that needed to be scaled this way, it is definitely a consideration. Unless scaling was a requirement right out of the gate, I wouldn't design this in. It is not exactly rocket science to refactor the code to make use of a database later.

keys, constraints, defined types, all of the benefits of a database should not be ignored out of hand by saying, oh, I don't need them. Really? You don't need data validation/integrity?

Did I mention that I know how to write a parser? Validating input is not exactly difficult. I'm not saying that I don't need this. I'm saying that it is not difficult to provide it in most cases.

There is one good point you make here, though. If you think it is at all possible that you might want to move the data into a database at some point, it is worth normalizing the data up front. It's not so much that you care about the data format on disk, because once it goes in a database you lose the ability to play with it directly anyway. But if it moves into a database you may be in for some nasty refactoring of your model objects if you don't plan ahead. Object relational mapping is always a PITA.

How about your backup?

How is a database easier to back up than a flat file???? Especially if it's a text file.

Like I said, you are probably thinking specifically about multi-user applications, available on a network to people who don't have shell accounts on the machines that the application is running one. You are probably thinking either of large data sets, or at least large numbers of small datasets that need to be tracked and maintained. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who litterally think that *everything* needs to be in a database. I've got a gui app with 5 things that can be configured. Let's start up MySQL and store those 5 things in there! There was even a Linux distribution (I forget the name) where they stuck every single configuration file on the system into a database.

I'm not against databses where the use is legitimate. I'm complaining that some people are database crazy.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[KlaymenDK]

Any rule that says "always start with X first" is suspect.

True enough. :-) I might have been a bit simplistic, rather than accurate and lengthy.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[sjames]

Ever tried to do either?

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Data Reader/writer module...Also called a Data Access Layer... wow. What a freaking concept!

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[dwpro]

There are most assuredly cases where a database isn't a requirement, that point is well taken. Just a couple clarifications:

With regard to the validation, I meant data entry. if a person modifies a flat file in a text editor they can enter whatever they want. At least in a database they are constrained by types.

When I said backup, I meant that guy who's supposed to be able to do your job when you're gone, I should have clarified. :) Also, I modify data directly in databases all the time. Most DB clients make it quite easy, and at the very worst a SQL query.

I think some of your trepidation may come from the developer overhead involved traditionally in interfacing with databases. Modern tools make it nigh on effortless to create a database table and access it as an object in code, far less trouble than writing parsers or dealing with files.

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[DrVxD]

If XML isn't fixing your problems, you must be using it...

FTFY...

We stand on the shoulders of giants

[fragMasterFlash]

The real trick is trying to distinguish yourself as enough of a "giant" so that future generations may acknowledge the footing with which you provide them.

MicroVAXen

[n6kuy]

Heh. Yeah, we still use several of those here in Los Alamos as part of the control system for our linear proton accelerator. They work and are pretty reliable, though I suspect we'll be up the creek if one of 'em goes bad.

Re:MicroVAXen

[serviscope_minor]

Never mind the VAxen, it sounds like Los Alamos is already heading up that creek as fast as possible courtesy of LANS.

IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was going to be about IE6

Re:IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was going to be about IE6

No silly, the article is about technology.

If Its Not Broke..

[SuperCharlie]

I had a client who was (still is) an auctioneer. Not a real techy type, didnt need to be. They had a DOS based software that served them well. For over 7000 regular customers and years of auctions. No, not online, just something to keep track of items, bids, and clients. Its all they needed. It fit perfectly into their business, all the not techy people used it..past win 3.1, past win95, 98, even up to XP when their hardware started to fail and then they couldnt find the hardware to support the software any more. They ended up paying for new PC's, new software and new networking not because it didnt do what they needed..or even wanted, but because they simply couldnt run it any more. They were sad to see it go. Newer is not always better. Often (like MS Office) its just about making sure you keep paying.

Re:If Its Not Broke..

[Anonymous Coward]

Could that be the one I wrote? 1984-ish, Compiled dBase - Clipper, I think. Parramatta Road, Sydney, Australia? I know it was running until last year, when he retired and the auction house building turned into a groovy, if overpriced historical motorcycle place.
Maybe not - it was never replaced at all, unlike the one you speak of.
He had trouble getting gear to run it on, but hey, a virtual DOS machine is straightforward, surely?

Sparkler Filters web site

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1998 I would have barfed at the flash and the poorly implemented navigation buttons on the left. I still do. The sad thing is that 1998s over-designed web site is still a thing of beauty compared to 2012s attempts to be simple. In the 21st century, even the simplest image or hyperlink has to be hacked up by a few hundred lines of JavaScript doing who knows what. The worst example is the FaceBook like button on 3rd party sites. I had to block access to a FaceBook server because a script associated with the button has an infinite loop problem on IE8. Yeah, IE8 is sucky outdated tech too; but let that sink in. A button is causing an infinite loop. I still have a hard time believing it. It pegged the CPU too, which is XPs fault. No Javascript on a stinking web page should be allowed to result in 100% CPU usage. Plainly MS and FB share some blame there but... a... button... looping... I still can't get over that.

Re:Sparkler Filters web site

[mikael_j]

Thing is, those horrible websites from 1998 are still horrible. They didn't even try to follow anything resembling a standard, design for websites was often handled by developers or businesspeople with no design abilities. Content management systems for the web were practically non-existent. Overall I'd take a new web 2.0 website over one of those abortions any day.

Or have you forgotten the broken Java applets and JavaScript that would make any browser freeze for 30+ seconds before letting you load the page (and still do on modern hardware)? When compared to that a modern website that loads 500+ kB of jquery, jquery-UI and other 3rd party crap from some CDN is wonderful (still horrible compared to a well-designed site but at least it doesn't carry with it a mandatory 30 second browser freeze and a one in five chance of nuking your browser session).

Re:Sparkler Filters web site

[Cornwallis]

Or have you forgotten the broken Java applets and JavaScript that would make any browser freeze for 30+ seconds before letting you load the page (and still do on modern hardware)? When compared to that a modern website that loads 500+ kB of jquery, jquery-UI and other 3rd party crap from some CDN is wonderful (still horrible compared to a well-designed site but at least it doesn't carry with it a mandatory 30 second browser freeze and a one in five chance of nuking your browser session).

Glad you brought up /.!

Re:Sparkler Filters web site

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, Sparkler Filter's web site works easily in my browser a decade later, while Yahoo pegged my CPU due to an errant script. Users don't care if you have a CMS. They care what happens when you hit their site. If it's a site for a company that makes industrial components, they don't care about design sense. They just want information on the components. You can give them that with a handful of HTML tags and NO Javascript. Generating the information dynamicly via server-side scpripting is acceptable since you probably need to query the DB to keep the information up to date; but there is NO excuse for the client to be doing any scripting AT ALL. NONE. Get it through your iDevice addled hipster brains...

Some office equipment and software never die

[Grayhand]

I still see offices especially things like vets and some stores even that are using old DOS based record keeping systems. They weren't sure how to transfer all the information so they keep using systems that are several decades old. I haven't worked around it in years but up into the late 90s motion picture effects companies still used old DOS based machines to run motion control systems. The hardware and software they used at the time couldn't be adapted to Windows.

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[billcopc]

The fundamental problem is that, for a lot of these systems, newer does not mean better.

That DOS record keeping system, is it good enough ? Would a costly rewrite and/or data migration result in useful improvements to justify the expense ?

For many businesses, it only becomes a problem when the old hardware breaks down, and the new hardware can't run the obsolete software. In practice, people would sooner run their archaic system via DosBox than have it redeveloped.

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[gl4ss]

if you're using a pc as an industrial control machine then the realtime nature of dos is really a plus..

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[Half-pint HAL]

More to the point, DMA and hardware memory addressing made interfacing a breeze. Modern abstraction layers are certainly justifiable in terms of security, but they're a real inconvenience if you need actual control of your computer.

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[tomhath]

Have you ever watched one of them being used? Most DOS programs are astonishingly fast; press the Enter key and it's ready for the next command. We're so used to spinning busy cursors we've lost the memory of instant responses. Why give that up for slow eye candy?

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[clodney]

A product I have worked on for years goes back to the mid-80s. Originally DOS, then Win 3.1, now Win32. With some very minor exceptions, files created by the DOS version are still automatically recognized and upgraded to the current format at load time.

Every time we think we can drop the Version 1 file format reader, we hear about some customer (almost always outside the US) that just upgraded their old DOS system to the current system. And usually that happened because the PC or attached hardware had failed and the new replacement required newer software.

OTOH, I was lobbying to drop support for an ancient file format converter, and googled on the device whose format we were matching - the first page that popped up was how someone had just donated their device to a museum. So far no customers have complained that we dropped that support.

Re:Some office equipment and software never die

[Anonymous Coward]

At the company I used to work at, we were still using DOS-based register tills networking with LAN Manager as late as 2011. Of course, the company I worked at was Borders, but hey, avoiding unnecessarily costly upgrades bought us maybe a month or two...

Living Fossil?

[Guppy]

Living Fossils: Old Tech That Just Won't Die

Is there anyone else who read this headline and thought it that it referred to some old dude?

Re:Living Fossil?

[Nimey]

People still read User Friendly?

Ya... The thing is...

[Sycraft-fu]

It often turns out it is NOT doing the job as effectively as you might think. I've seen people jump though some amazing hoops dealing with old technology because "It gets the job done." Ok maybe so but that isn't the question you should ask. The question is if new technology would get the job done better to the extent it is worth the price.

A simple example is with desktop PCs. Various things can take a really long time on old PCs, like formatting a document for print, or even booting or opening a program. Time is wasted waiting for that. At some point it becomes worth it to get something newer and faster. The time spent transitioning to the new system and the money spent on it are worth it in the time savings during use.

I've really seen this in the world of audio creation/editing. On 1996, when I started playing with it, it was all offline, you'd choose something and it would render laboriously out to disk, then you'd listen to the result (there were pro systems that could do it realtime, not desktops though). I could spend 10 minutes waiting to hear the result of an EQ, and then have to undo it and try again. Now it is all realtime, non-destructive. I make changes and they happen as I make them.

Also there's the simple maintenance factor of old systems. It can end up costing a ton to try to keep them running, or you have a ticking time bomb situation where you are relying on something that really can't be fixed if it breaks (or even both). An enormous amount of resources both monetary and time can be poured in keeping old systems running on the grounds of "it just works".

Now I'm not saying toss everything old all the time, but some real cost/value analysis needs to be done, not this inertia of "What we have works and it'd be expensive to replace it." I really came to appreciate that with the Y2K stuff. Place I was working at had an ancient billing system, no way to upgrade it. So they had a new one written. Talk about an amazing difference. It now run as a Java app on any computer, rather than needing to use these old dedicated terminals, it was fast, it could do all kinds of things they'd wanted, it eliminated things that had to be done by hand before and so on. So worth it, even without the Y2K thing. However the old system had survived "Because it works, and replacing it would be expensive."

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Bert64]

Generic uses like simple document creation aren't actually any quicker than they were years ago... Sure the hardware is quicker, but the software is considerably heavier resulting in a user experience that while prettier, is around the same speed as it always has been.

For most uses, the old software was actually perfectly adequate, and old lightweight software running on modern hardware would be the ideal scenario.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[hairyfeet]

Another thing people forget to look at with older systems is heat and the increased costs in AC for running an old power hog. I had a company that was "getting by" on those piggy Prescott P4 and big old CRTs so I told the boss "Just buy two machines and see if you see a difference and then we can see about changing out the office" and I swapped out those two piggies for a couple of 19 inch LCDs with an E350 mini unit mounted behind it.

Well it wasn't two weeks later he was coming in to work out a plan to replace every unit just because he saw how much cooler it was in those two rooms than in the other offices and how much quieter it was. Even after bumping up those that said they needed more power to quads he told me a few months later he saw both his need for cooling and his electric bill both go down just by getting rid of the piggies.

So sometimes it can really help to get rid of older tech if that older tech is power sucking, I know that getting rid of those Pentium Ds and CRT hand me downs the boys were playing on for more modern multicores with flat panels certainly dropped our cooling bills. You just don't realize how power hogging that gear is until you replace it.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Billly Gates]

Which is the problem of having IT as a cost center and viewed as no business value and an uneccesary expense by the CPAs who moved into managment.

Its an investment that can save money.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[KiloByte]

The old saying is: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

As long as all the functionality you want is there, replacing the thing is a pure waste of money: there's a cost but no gain.
Of course, there's stuff like trying to run a new browser on a phone just two years old, but new software on old metal is the worst you can get.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[MiG82au]

Bzzt, wrong, our 500 page reports full of cross references, macros and pictures, needed to be edited as sub-documents when we had Pentium 4 machines. Now I can manipulate a few complete ones at once.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't heard that in 20 years, but it's still true.

If I wanted bells and whistles, I'd hire a clown.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[ceoyoyo]

Maybe if you're writing a letter. Try writing something even twenty or thirty pages long with a couple of figures. It's nowhere near as fast as it SHOULD be, but it's a LOT faster than it used to be.

Yeah, my iPad handles figures in text better than Word on an i7, but both do a MUCH better job than the 386 DX40 we bought because you needed a fast computer to do "desktop publishing."

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt, wrong, 500 page reports full of cross references, macros and pictures are NOT the same as "simple document creation".

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good points. I think it backfires a little, though. We are at the point with i7 processors, etc., where there isn't so much waiting for the computer anymore, so speed increases won't make as much difference in productivity. That means that the newer machines should be built accordingly to last longer and be repairable. In other words, maybe we should take the next step forward by going backward a little so that our next steps aren't just throwing stuff away (especially cases and power supplies, etc.).
Batteries: Here's an idea (I'm probably not the first to think of it) and you can shoot it down: Lets start putting the chargers into the batteries and making the batteries standard shapes and sizes for all rechargeable systems. In other words, make all the cells with a charger chip so that any rechargeable battery can be used anywhere (Lego batteries that you can stack...). Maybe a third contact on the battery for the charging power to be applied.

Make it so.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Bert64]

You're doing it wrong...
We generate reports some of which are 5000+ pages long... When this was done in word ~6 years ago we had to split them up and often got buggy behaviour with such large documents...
Now we use a web based system to enter data into a backend database, and then a latex based output which generates a nice looking pdf report which is cross referenced all over the place and usually has a large number of pictures and tables.
Up until the last year, we were running this system on a 500mhz server, until the company finally realised just how much time we save with this system and were willing to invest in some newer hardware for it.
Entering data was fine on the 500mhz box, but generating reports used to take a few minutes. Now we run exactly the same software, but a much faster system and the difference is huge.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[MiG82au]

That's interesting (really, I had no idea you could do such things) but Airbus has no interest in paying us for pdf reports, and they're the customer. It sounds like there's little possibility for reuse with your method, and often an older report will be updated to a new build standard by another company.

We might be doing it a bit wrong, but the use of a template and macros for the initial generation of report is far ahead of what most engineers are doing.

Also many reports end up having quite a bit of bespoke work done on them, and it sounds like that could be difficult to do on your system.

Re:Ya... The thing is...

[Bert64]

Depends what the report is for, we have a lot of flexibility within the template (and multiple templates etc)... There is also the ability to modify the generated latex by hand before compiling it into a pdf.

FYI, not sure what content your reports have but we are writing pentest reports, which are a mix of common vulnerabilities found with scanning tools, and more specific stuff found by manual testing as well as a summary and cross referenced tables showing host information (ip addresses, os, open ports, associated vulnerabilities, any comments etc).

Also once the information is in the database, we have the ability to generate reports according to several templates (and other outputs such as a csv list etc), so we can generate a summary, a table of systems, a report indexed by (vulnerability|hostname|ip|time) etc without having to do anything more than choose an output template from a drop down list.

Our system is obviously set up for this kind of report, although the basic idea could be easily adaptable to many other scenarios.

And word is probably the worst tool for the job, libreoffice is quite a bit better (doesnt choke on large documents so readily, and can use macros in multiple languages some of which are actual useful reusable languages which aren't about to be deprecated), not that we'd want to use either.

Punch cards still in daily use

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

The Gardena T 1030 automated watering system uses a modern form of a punch card to program its schedule. It is rather clever in that the hard plastic "card" has small plastic sliders which cover the appropriate holes for the desired settings (e.g. watering at 6am, every second day, for 5 minutes). When put into the small machine, it's read optically (AFAIK).

http://www.gardena.com/int/water-management/water-controls/water-timer-t-1030-card/

BACKDOORS for SPOOKS!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised how much hardware and software have back doors built into them, much of it legally.

GOOGLE: Cisco routers back doors

and you'll find hours of reading material alone just for one company.

WIKILEAKS: published information on dozens of companies making spyware for hardware and software and selling it to governments.

When is the last time you checked the firmware on your PCI devices and network card?

Your router?

Dumped and checksummed/debugged your BIOS lately?

Why aren't the anti-malware companies like Symantec and others climbing over each other in an effort to invent the technology and utilize it via the cloud to create GIANT databases of legit firmware for hardware in the fight against the most serious of root kits? Are they in bed with big bro?

How many so called remote exploits were patched this week in Windows? This month? This year? Since its release? Start from the beginning of the Windows version release and count all of the remote exploits up to present day and compare that to OpenBSD for example.

##

U.S. govâ(TM)t wiretapping laws and your network
â" https://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-us-govt-wiretapping-laws-and.html

âoeActivists have long grumbled about the privacy implications of the legal âoebackdoorsâ that networking companies like Cisco build into their equipmentâ"functions that let law enforcement quietly track the Internet activities of criminal suspects. Now an IBM researcher has revealed a more serious problem with those backdoors: They donâ(TM)t have particularly strong locks, and consumers are at risk.â
â" http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/03/hackers-networking-equipment-technology-security-cisco.html

About the IRS

[BenEnglishAtHome]

The section in the article about the Individual Master File was close to correct. It's not that it couldn't be accessed but once a week, though. There was the Integrated Data Retrieval System that could access it any time. Unfortunately, it was only updated once a week. The updates to the IMF were input via IDRS, so that sometimes led to some weirdness with the two being out of sync. There was an entire list of "cycles" that you needed to memorize as you processed work so that you'd know "If I do this, now, how long will it be before it actually shows up on the system I need it to be on?"

Then there was the BMF (Business Master File) for businesses.

Then things get weird. There's a Master File called the Non-Master File (NMF) for return information sufficiently rare that it's just not linked to everything else. Congress can come up with new statutes that require new forms far faster than they can be programmed into databases that properly link every relationship between every line. The really small-volume, low-priority stuff goes in the NMF. A bit over a decade ago it wasn't accessible except by sending off a paper request for a printed transcript. Now snapshots are viewable via IDRS but those pesky cycles are a far more complex problem.

OK, now, shall we get into the EPMF (Employee Plans Master File) or any of the other "master" files? (I once asked why any file deserved to be called "master" if there were other "masters". The programmers in attendance at the meeting were not amused.)

Enough. IT at the IRS was fun and crazy-making, challenging and boring, something I loved that ultimately was decimated by politics and broke my heart. I'm glad I saw it back in the best of days but I'm awfully glad I'm retired from that place now.

Re:About the IRS

[Darinbob]

Here's the thing. If the IRS always upgraded to the latest technology every 5 years they'd be accused of wasting tax payer money.

This doesn't apply to just government but actual businesses care about the bottom line too. I've had a friend burst out laughing because I mentioned some slightly old technology being used (ie, oscilloscope that used a floppy disk). He would ask "why are you using old stuff?" and I'd say "because we don't have a budget to replace everything just because we want to". Then on a different day he'd wonder why his employer kept struggling to make a profit.

Re:About the IRS

[mwvdlee]

It's not just the purchase price of the new tech either; you'll need time and money to learn and support the new tech.
And if it connects to anything, you may have to upgrade other parts as well.

My PDP-11/23 based controller

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs my garden railway. 'O' Gauge (7mm/ft) and has 420m of track. Yeah I have a big garden but the mainline is double tracked.
I retrieved the 11/23 from a skip in the early 1990's. I have three more complete systems I got off eBay. The weakest parts are the PSU's. I've got quite good at fixing them over the years.
Some people ask why I don't move to a PC Based system. Well, the Q-Bus was easy to interface to and all I/O is done via four 48bit Digital Input/output cards. Want to change a value then just poke the memory address. But the O/S Is RSX-11/M-Plus so I wrote a device driver.
There again, I used to work for DEC so I had the skills to do it.

Magazine about technology survivors

[fotoguzzi]

Years ago there was a quarterly magazine called Inventions and Technology that one received when they purchased a General Motors auto. Each issue devoted a page to some ancient piece of machinery/equipment that was still in use decades after it should have been thrown away.

The gist of the article was always the same: it still works just fine and we would never make something as nice today. I wish I could find that magazine somewhere.

The sad thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many CRTs are still in use? In cold climates they are not so bad ( despite using more electricity ). In a hot climate though, not only do you pay extra for the electricity to heat the place you pay for extra electricity to air condition the place.

Use a ten year old computer as a wireless router for your home. You can't stick it in the corner of a closet. Those things need ventilation. Very likely where ever you keep it, you will hear it.

There is a reason old tech is old tech.

Tech never becomes useless

[geogob]

This is the key point... Technology hardly ever becomes useless. It will always do what it was designed to do (taking it still works as intended).

It will eventually become outdated, replaced with more effective technologies (cost or function wise) or fail to fulfill newer need.

But this, we should never forget. Technology will always do what it was designed do to.

I've got some...

[Gordonjcp]

At work, we use an old Toshiba T1100 laptop to program 20-odd-year-old radio equipment. Nothing newer will run the DOS-based software, and the programming cable requires a proper +12/-12V swing from the RS232 port. I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.

On the MicroVAX, there is one large petrochem site I visit quite often that has several MicroVAX 3100s tucked away in a rack controlling various processes. They are *pristine*, looks like they've been racked up, the cabinet door closed, and left for what, 20 years? Closer to 30? They still have the little plastic protective film on the badge on the front...

Re:I've got some...

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be if I was allowed in there. I always rip them off if I see them. It's an obsession of mine.

Re:I've got some...

[Darinbob]

Occasionally IT guys will threaten to upgrade all machines with Windows 7 and send out emails to users telling them which day they'll be upgraded. Then the guy managing a highly critical process will have to walk over and explain to them that they had better not dream of upgrading the Windows NT box, or replacing the DOS box with newer hardware. And the IT guys would sputter and talk about policies and antivirus. But they'd leave his machines alone. Then they'd go off and send emails telling other people that their Macs were scheduled to be upgraded to Windows 7...

Re:I've got some...

[Nethead]

I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.

http://www.onfreq.com/syntorx/

I'm guessing that you're working with RSS. I have an old 286 for dealing with that. At one time I did have a unix program that would code the EPROM for a Syntor, still had to sneaker net a floppy over to a DOS box with the burner.

Anyway, narrow-banding should soon rid you of all that old cruft, just make sure a ham gets it and not the dumpster.

Re:I've got some...

[Gordonjcp]

It's pre-RSS, but what it's actually called has gone out of my head. The repeaters MC-Compacts, and I have a couple of MC-Micros and M110s for my own nefarious purposes. Even a 286 is a bit too quick for the software.

I don't care about narrowbanding, because I spend all day every day contravening FCC rules.

73s de MM0YEQ

Re:I've got some...

[hillbluffer]

If it's not broken, don't "fix" it. Hope that petrochem site has lots of spares available, tho.

Re:I've got some...

[Nethead]

FB OM, thx fer the DX de w7com.

Re:I've got some...

[twosat]

When I went to my local computer shop to buy a replacement RS232 cable for my external modem, the shop attendant thought that I must have had a very old computer. Now, I know that the modem itself is about 10 years old, but the computer has just turned 4, and it is not possible for me to use an internal software modem when I dual-boot into my Knoppix system. What made me laugh though, was when a few months ago I went and bought a 19-inch Sharp Aquos HD TV with LED backlighting. What did it have among its plethora of ports, but an RS232 port for controlling it from a computer!

Re:I've got some...

[twosat]

When I went to my local computer shop to buy a replacement RS232 cable for my external modem, the shop attendant thought that I must have had a very old computer. Now, I know that the modem itself is about 10 years old, but the computer has just turned 4, and it is not possible for me to use an internal software modem when I dual-boot into my Knoppix system. What made me laugh though, was when a few months ago I went and bought a 19-inch Sharp Aquos HD TV with LED backlighting. What did it have among its plethora of ports, but an RS232 port for controlling it from a computer!

Old tech in the US .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI still uses CP/M machines with 8" floppies for a certain piece of custom software. Apparently, they have tried to upgrade these systems several times but in each instance ran into contract disputes or cost overruns, etc.

Hang in there

[KlaymenDK]

Hey there. I just want to say, stick to your Tungsten as long as you want. There is pain in switching (I hesitate to write "updating").
Personally, I switched (from a couple of T3's) to Android as the "best" alternative to PalmOS. It's not crap --it is the "best", after all-- but it is nevertheless not nearly as good as PalmOS. Oh handwriting, how I do miss thee! (Yes, I realise that Access put out a "Graffiti" app, but it does not compare to the full-screen support and custom strokes of TealScript.) My ailing work laptop is in dire need of a reload, but I'm loath to do it -- I can't ever reinstall Palm Desktop.
My brother used *up* a small handful of Psion Series5's with several parts replacements, but in the end went for an iPhone and is reasonably content with that.

Re:Hang in there

[NJRoadfan]

StyleTap (a PalmOS emulator) has been ported to iOS, but requires jail breaking. There are a ton of Windows Mobile 6.5 and Symbian devices out there to run StyleTap though. An android port would likely be pretty popular if they ever released one. The biggest issue with input on modern phones is the capacitive touch screen. PalmOS was designed with a stylus in mind and input precision isn't something capacitive screens do well.

Re:Hang in there

[hillbluffer]

Surprisingly, HP's still got Palm Desktop downloads up for most of their devices here. http://kb.hpwebos.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/33529_en.html KlaymenDK, If none of the DLs there meet your needs, let me know, and I'll do some more digging.

Re:Hang in there

[hillbluffer]

You CAN get styli that work with capacitive screens, but that doesn't improve the onscreen keyboard.

Re:Hang in there

[KlaymenDK]

Thanks a lot (really!), but software availability isn't the issue ... I don't have a Palm device any longer, and the installer requires it to be connected. :-/

Re:Hang in there

[hillbluffer]

Just checked eBay. There's a Palm TX there from a top-rated seller for $15. Most of the listings range from about $70 to several hundred, and I'd consider about $150 as a fair price.

...but then there's the case of

[Anonymous Coward]

...sticking with old tech long after it needs to go away. The company I work for provides us with Pentium 4's with XP and 2gb RAM. On a daily basis, I have to have Outlook, multiple instances of Word and Excel, 5-10 IE (6, of course) windows, 2-3 instances of claims processing software, along with various other incidentals, running at any one time. Needless to say, they are SLOW, and hinder us from being able to do our job properly.

Motorola Analog Radios

[Virtucon]

I recall that there are still lots of Police, Fire and other first responders still using the old analog one or two channel radios. These bricks have been around forever, require that you have an FCC license and cost a small fortune to operate. The thing that keeps them relevant is that 1) It uses licensed spectrum so there's not much chance of interference from other users 2) The radios are practically indestructible, they can be dropped from heights that would kill a smart phone. 3) the batteries can be swapped out in a couple of seconds so you can have batteries on a charging rack and when you run out of power, you just pop another battery in it from the rack. 4) You can get a "potato" microphone, one that you can clip onto your shirt for example while the radio sits in a holster on the belt, which are great in very noisy environments such as airport tarmacs.

There's quite a few businesses out there that still use them as well, especially airlines. At one airline where I worked, we tried a pilot project (no pun intended) to switch over to Push To Talk (PTT) devices. This would have saved a lot in operating costs and allowed for other functions. It also eliminated the need for example to have a relay operator (somebody who took the voice communications and relayed it to other channels or via phone). Unfortunately the marketing at the time for this particular vendor, Sprint, supplying the PTT technology had commercials running on TV that demonstrated that it could be used to track the phones. The "Where's the Dots?" commercials unnerved the union workers who were using the PTT phones. Net, Net, the project came to a screeching halt and they went back to their old analog radios.

as up to date as they are....

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost all of these so-called high-tch /cutting edge gadgets are still using old-fashioned electricity (gulp!) -which was invented in the .....um..... At least before I was born in the '70s

It's also a matter of manufacturing quality

[aglider]

As well as of software and hardware design quality.
I mean, if you have seen the pictures, you'd not say it's a 60 yo machine. I'd say it's 20 yo. An 8088 class machine, for example.
The knobs still have a well readable lettering on. There is not a lake of exhaust oil on the floor or burns on the metal shields.
Meaning that the mechanical and electrical construction has been designed to last and for ease of maintenance.
My oldest machine has been a IBM (yeah!) Tower i486 DX4-100 deployed in 1995 as a DNS server and retired in 2005 for a total MB failure.
10 years at 24/7 of operations. That's it.
Current hardware (and also software, I fear) is not done to last. Is done for lasting revenues. Which can actually be the opposite.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying how it seems to me to be.

Re:It's also a matter of manufacturing quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, reminds me of another success story, the Original Heidelberger Tiegel - a printing press. It was designed before WW I and eclipsed (with refinements) about 1960 and was taken out of production 1985. Many of the 160.000 produced machines are still in good use today, because they are incredible sturdy and good enough for the job - today they are much less used for printing books but for perforating, punching and numbering.

SuperPET

[cartman]

I had a college professor who still used an 8KB Commodore PET. He stored his typed notes on cassette. On occasion he would print out a handout using his 8-pin dot matrix printer and then mimeograph it. I have no idea how he still got printer ink for the printer.

Unfortunately the pet only had enough ram to store a few pages, so if any document was longer than that, you had to establish a new file. Many of his handouts ended abruptly after a few pages.

Someone once tried to convince him to get a new computer. He responded: "You're talking to me about a new computer as if I NEEDED it."

Re:SuperPET

[Pentium100]

I have no idea how he still got printer ink for the printer.

My dot matrix printer uses typewriter ribbons. It is quite fast in text mode (IIRC 100 characters/second), but super slow in graphical mode (something like 1 page in 5 minutes on the lowest quality).

It is still the only printer I have that can print on a cassette J-card or other small piece of paper.

All airport tickets...

[Herve5]

All airport tickets in the world, and most train ones at least in Europe, are still exactly based on the punch-card system sizes...

Re:All airport tickets...

[BluBrick]

Most, if not all x86-based computers these days, boot first into 25 rows by 80 columns text mode before switching to another display mode. Now, that number was not arbitrarily chosen - 25x80 characters has been a standard for text consoles for decades. But even that was not arbitrarily chosen - guess how many characters the punch card could represent. (Really? You need to be told it's 80?) That's right folks, even if indirectly, most of us use a hangover from punch card technology every day and often we don't even realise it. Of course, the backward compatibility links go right back through the Hollerith Census Tabulator cards to Jacquard Loom pattern cards, if I remember the story correctly, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Newer is not better

[SgtChaireBourne]

Newer is not better, different is not better. Only better is better. In these cases it is just a fact that the old tool does the job well enough not to need replacing or even does the job better than the new tools.

If it's not some combination of faster, easier, and cheaper then there should be some doubt as to whether it should replace a working tool.

old tech that just won't die.. and yet

[Anonymous Coward]

No sign of the VGA connector...

Flat files obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flat files obsolete? What do you think relationship databases store their data in?

not really

[arcite]

majority of airlines have done away with physical tickets and moved to e-tickets. A paper ticket is no longer necessary.

And one technology that died before it's time:

[dbet]

Paper ballots.

Re:And one technology that died before it's time:

[afidel]

Nope, at least not here in Ohio. We tried electronic ballot machines, ended up throwing them in a warehouse and going to scantron paper ballots.

USA and Europe Estimates Flawed

[retroworks]

The award goes to CRT (cathode ray tube) displays, which are built like battleships. They work for 20 years. There has been a hoax promoted by environmental "watchdogs" that the CRTs are being hammered apart for copper, and California went as far as to pay 48 cents per pound (taxpayer money) to make sure all the CRTs are broken when turned in for collection, based on the myth that the display devices become obsolete by Moore's law.

The EPA's methodology for calculating recycling rates is as follows: Find annual production (e.g. plastic milk bottles, newspapers), input lifespan, and calculate waste generation. But they put "Moore's Law" in for the "lifespan" of tech equipment... e.g. that CRT monitors have a 3 year lifespan. They assumed that "replacement rate" (new purchases of hardware) was an indication of lifespan, even though the growth of internet use worldwide was in double digits, and that all the old CRT monitors, millions and millions, were being dumped in primitive wasteful conditions.

Try applying the same methodology to used cars... that replacement purchase equals lifespan. OMG!!! We must have a massive death star of used cars crowding our landfills!!

The growth of the internet has been 10 times the rate, for the past decade, in nations with per capita incomes of $3-4K per year. They can't afford brand new display devices and were purchasing the CRTs for the past decade. Someone made up a completely bogus statistic that they were being burned in landfills in the developing world, something now completely disproven (the photos of TVs at the dumps in Nigeria were from NIGERIANS, who have had TV since the 1980s.. the scrap in Guiyu China comes predominantly from Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhuo). The story of the CRT is finally winding down as LCDs get cheaper and cheaper, but it has been amazing the mythology and hoaxes spread about CRT exports during the past decade. http://tinyurl.com/ghanahoax

Re:USA and Europe Estimates Flawed

[NJRoadfan]

CRTs can last much longer then 20 years. Still plenty of working 1970s TVs out there that have received ZERO service and repairs. 1960s TVs are a bit flaky, but a full recap usually does the trick with those. Mind you, those capacitors that are marginal/failed are over 50 years old, not 5 years old.

Re:USA and Europe Estimates Flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

It suits the agenda of the people running the EPA. Scare tactics, deliberate exaggerations, and they gain yet more power and control over yet more people and industries. Its the natural progression of a government bureaucracy once it gets big enough to attract the 'true believers' who think any means is justified by their sacred ends.

Re:USA and Europe Estimates Flawed

[ElusiveJoe]

Posting this using CRT. Only recently LCD started to catch up with the contrast ratio of my good old iiyama.

Brave New World

[KingAlanI]

"Ending is better than mending"

My PDP-10 laughs at your VAX

[Suzuran]

Still runs as it did the day it was shipped.

Remember children, if it's not 36 bits, you're not playing with a full DEC!

Re:My PDP-10 laughs at your VAX

[lophophore]

Jupiter was eclipsed by Neptune. Or something.

Cosmic thunder from Maynard, my eye.

inkjet

[KingAlanI]

I can see how laser printers would be unable to do this, but my inkjet can handle anything US letter or narrower.
The guide in the paper tray can even be pushed over to fit snugly against narrow paper.
Of course, the settings on the document you're printing need to match the piece of paper.
I mainly use this for printing addresses on envelopes

Re:inkjet

[Pentium100]

My main printer is quite big (it can print on A3 paper), so the small piece of paper gets lost inside it. Also, there is some problem with drivers or something that if I try to print on a small piece of paper (say, a CD jewel case cover, 12cm x 12cm) the text gets a 6cm margin (if I wanted to print in the center, I get only half of the text, the other half gets printed on the rollers).

The thing is that the cassette J card is not only narrow, but short too.

Re:inkjet

[KingAlanI]

Yeah, A3 (twice as large) would be a different issue.
I can set a document up to print outside the margins, not sure if that would work for your situation

Re:inkjet

[Pentium100]

It doesn't. I guess it works like this - the driver cuts everything out that is outside the margins and the printer, detecting a small piece of paper decides to move the head by 6cm and call that place "zero". If I send the same print job, but feed a normal A4 paper, it prints correctly (near the edge), but if I feed the small paper, it prints 6cm from the edge. It probably is some bug in the firmware. Not that big a deal, since I don't usually print on cassette j-cards (I just write on them, but I print Cyrillic letters since I can't write those).

quickest way to drive young people away

[peter303]

Start reminiscing your punch-card stories. Works everytime.

Re:quickest way to drive young people away

[redneckmother]

Yupper. If the stories don't run 'em off, I drag out a couple of my IBM JCL decks, or the object deck that (when IPL'd from the card reader) played "Jingle Bells" on an off- station AM radio positioned near a 360/40.

Really?!

[Thud457]

direct link to the single-page print version to avoid idiotic goddamned clickbait.
Because the submitter is a nimrod.

VMS was and is one of the best O/Ss

[ppentz123]

As an old DEC-hand from the beginning of the VAX era, I still consider VMS superior in many ways to modern O/Ss. Certainly better designed, and in a more coherent fashion than Linux, and Windows NT is simply a pale imitation/copy of VMS. I could say more... but what's the point.

Re:VMS was and is one of the best O/Ss

[Suzuran]

TOPS-20 > VAX/VMS

Re:VMS was and is one of the best O/Ss

[zaft]

I never used TOPS-20, just TOPS-10. I found VMS to be MUCH, MUCH more full-featured and flexible.

Re:VMS was and is one of the best O/Ss

[lophophore]

Maybe you've forgotten about this:

%DECSYSTEM-20 not running.

Re:VMS was and is one of the best O/Ss

[Suzuran]

TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 are vastly different.

it's real fun until your date barfs in your lap

[Thud457]

I did a quick g**gl*, but couldn't find any more detail on the DEVICE 9B6 - MULTISTATION DISORIENTATION DEMONSTRATOR .

Does anyone have any good sources of information on this?
Why did the Navy need to hire American Airlines to build this instead of Sellner Manufacturing?!

The abacus is still useful

[lee1]

The article begins with an example of what the author seems to think is truly outmoded technology, only useful for teaching preschoolers. But people who know how to use the abacus can multiply a couple of four-digit numbers together, arriving at the result before an experienced electronic calculator user has finished entering the first number into the machine. I've seen shopkeepers in New York's Chinatown using abacuses in place of cash registers, and I'm sure their use is still widespread in China, at least. Electronic calculators begin to have an edge when you need to extract square roots of numbers more than a few digits long. There is a pattern here: old technology often requires some training to use it effectively, but if you put in the work to develop the skill, it works better in some situations.

Re:The abacus is still useful

[mbaGeek]

agreeing with you - I was going to make the pencil and paper analogy (I'm sure somewhere out there are people out there that prefer using a bird feather dipped in ink as opposed to the newer tech ...)

"old tech" sticks around because it is doing something useful AND because upgrading a complicated system is never easy or cheap. Users who were experts at the "old way" of doing things need be trained (or replaced by "younger, less experienced, cheaper, but already trained in the new tech workers")

we could wander into the "creative destruction" economic discussion but then the Marcus Aurelius quote (paraphresed by Hannibal Lecter) "This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole..." came to mind, and something about the "nature of tech" equalling "performing useful work" made me realize that I was using way to many quotation marks and should be doing something else ...

Re:thank God no hol er ith...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, thank God hol er ith card aren't coming back. That would be a bad thing for certain races...

oh, wait, this is /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, what idiot moderated that offtopic?!
It's right there in TFA.

Antique plumbing is expensive

[Medievalist]

Cast iron bathtubs, particularly antique ones, are very desirable and command high prices if they are in good condition.

I'm refitting a bathroom in a 160+ year old house. The bathroom was originally installed in the late 1930s. The prices for original-quality parts are jaw dropping - you can easily pay $1200 for a faucet set (although I don't).

In the trades, the old stuff that has survived is incredibly high quality, for the most part. Victorian machined brass plumbing, for example, is awesome! I have replaced worn out ABS, bristol and polybutalene that was attached to 90 year old figured and threaded brass in perfect condition. PEX is nice but it will never match hand-cut victorian red brass.

Something similar is true in computing; you see old VMS and PDP systems running all over the place, because of their extreme cost effectiveness. Unix derived OSes dominate cutting edge hardware, despite Unix's age and shortcomings. It's survival of the fittest - DECnet IV was better than DECnet/OSI, so almost nobody upgraded, even though DECnet IV was not perfect.

This.

[shiftless]

+1. I use what works best, discard what doesn't. Frugality is a big part of it. Sometimes the old ways are better, sometimes they're not. I shave with a two-sided safety razor, type on an IBM Model M. I'm reading this from a 24" LCD...which are connected to my quad core Athlon w/ 16gb on Windows 7. I drive an old hot rod, running a modern fuel injection computer and tuned with a laptop. I use cast iron cookware, ordered from my smart phone from Amazon.com without even leaving the kitchen. I use silver utensils passed down from my great grandma. While polishing them may be a bitch, it's a damn sight better than the stamped out steel (or worse...plastic) garbage everything else is using.

I think we are entering a new age of human (or at least, American) history, which is replacing the age of gluttonous consumption which has been prevalent. I think people are starting to pick up on and appreciate some of the older ways of doing things, especially in the wake of all the environmental consciousness etc.

I've always hated mowing grass, but you know what, with a push reel mower I just might like it again. The exercise would be great, you just can't beat the peace and quiet, and the environmental benefits are the cherry on top.

Ya it is

[Sycraft-fu]

You should try digging an old system out of storage some time. We have old computers around here and it is amazing how slow they are. Booting a Windows 3.1 system was a 3-5 minute proposition, booting my Windows 7 system is about a 20 second proposition. Simple thing like booting and loading programs are slow, never mind processing.

Also people need to stop whining about light weight. I love my new heavyweight software because it does things the lightweight stuff can't. I want a document editor with realtime inline spell and grammar checking that is extremely accurate. I want a web browser that can display video and do interactivity. I want my computer to not grind to a halt when I have it try to do 5 things at a time, like it is presently doing.

I remember very well what the old days of computing was like, in part because I mess with it from time to time for various reasons. I do not wish to go back to that. I want my software to be enriched, to do a whole lot for me, and I want it to still be very fast and responsive. I can, and do, have that with modern hardware.

Re:Ya it is

[Bert64]

Funny you should mention it, i just dug my Amiga 3000 and 4000 systems out of the closet today...
They both still boot in under 10 seconds, loading programs is also pretty quick and the interactive response is very quick.

Nothing unusual

[Casandro]

At the place I work, we have some word processing systems named after a 1970s band. It looks fairly modern, it even has decent resolution colour screens and a semi-functional shell. It is programmed via macros in the word processing package. And unlike the Canon Cat, this one is really badly designed.

And I thought DOS was old

[Ngarrang]

And here I thought that having multi-million dollar punch presses being controlled by DB9 serial cable, attached to a PC running DOS was retro. An IBM 402, still doing accounting? Talk about doing it the hard way.