Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die 1381
kudyadi writes "Technology Review has an interesting article on, as the title suggests, ten technologies that we continue using despite advances made in the same. The best example is that of analog watches, "Compared to today's digital timepieces, old-fashioned, sweep-hand watches are pathetic one-trick ponies. Digital-watch wearers can check temperature, altitude, and the time in Tokyo, play tunes and games, and send messages. Can wristwatch videoconferencing, Web surfing, and tarot readings be far off? But what digital watches can't do, according to sweep-hand proponents, is display the time and context as elegantly and intuitively as an analog model."" Interesting counterpoint to this post from a few years back about technologies that didn't manage to hang on. And Bruce Sterling has a short list of ones he'd like to see go away, too ;)
#1 : Slashdot (Score:1, Funny)
Tech #11 That Refuses To Die (Score:5, Funny)
Cars... Buildings.... (Score:4, Funny)
Buildings that need ground to support them.
So, where are the flying cars and cities on clouds damnit?!
And #11 is a tie between.. (Score:5, Funny)
quote (Score:5, Funny)
"And you needn't worry about your system going obsolete if it already is."
How true...
foxpro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'll tell you why (Score:2, Funny)
One word (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Adams (Score:5, Funny)
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
Analog Watches (Score:3, Funny)
Toilet Paper (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Snob (Score:2, Funny)
Re:quote (Score:5, Funny)
I'm required to carry my pager for work. I get pages maybe between once and three times a year. I've offered to give up the pager and take calls on my personal cell phone because of this. The pager is freaking old so it eats one AA battery per month. Because I got sick of throwing batteries away (*), I just decided to change the message on my pager.
If you would like to page me, please call me on my cell phone and let me know so that I can install a new battery in my pager. Thank you.
(*) I tried to create a battery recycling deal at work but people kept taking the box, thinking that these were good batteries (apparently, people don't know what "recycling" means). I'll probably try again with a better, more idiot-proof wording.
Re:Some are, some aren't (Score:1, Funny)
So you're saying it makes you more productive as well.
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:5, Funny)
Bidets? How old school is that? A real technophile uses the three seashells! [amazon.com]
Re:Some are, some aren't (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, the computer-created labels look dreadfully sterile compared to Pam's output, and I found creating them to be a pretty joyless task - tap tap, click, print, as opposed to the handle-cranking, knob-turning, bell-ringing joy of using Pam. Good lord, that's almost obscene, isn't it? I think I might have a problem here.
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:1, Funny)
"Hey Leroy whats that you got?"
"An iPod!"
"What do ya do with it?"
"I can fuck myself in the ass with it!"
Re:I agree, mod parent up! (Score:5, Funny)
These days, I have usually two devices on my person, a cell phone and an MP3 player, which have built-on clocks. Even on the rare occasion when I'm in a place where there are no clocks (such as a casino or shopping mall), and have none with me by pure accident of fate, I'm surrounded by people not only carry clocks around on their wrists, but actually derive pleasure from the brief moment of human contact they experience when I say "excuse me, but do you have the time?"
Strapping something to my wrist which only tells time would be a waste of five seconds each morning. I'm happier without one more item to worry about breaking or losing.
I look forward to the day when my phone, MP3 player, watch, GPS, daily planner, and sunglasses are all one small, light, rugged device.
Besides, it's a myth that timekeeping is what analog watches are for. They are worn as jewelry for men. It's a vain, metrosexual affectation to wear a gold watch. There's your real reason.
Re:Analog watches are better when you're counting. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe one square for a spot check, that's about it. Decreases you chances of diverticular disease too.
A smooth poop is a good poop.
--
Re:ana-log (Score:3, Funny)
I totally agree. You can have my "old fashioned, dead technology" watch when you can pry it off my cold, dead arm.
I'm somewhat dismayed that my current watch shows me the date. Why would I need a watch to tell me that?
It's says 4 right now. But it's obvious that it's November 4th! How could someone be even one day off and think it was the 5th?
Re:Multipart Impacts (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I agree, mod parent up! (Score:5, Funny)
Sliding doors in SF movies (Score:1, Funny)
Yet ever SF movie I have ever seen has an automatic, sliding door of some kind. Something mechanical with low MTBF and always in places where you can not afford the failure. IT always breaks down due to some computer Malfunctions and the protagonists always get temporarely stuck.
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Macintosh (refuses to die) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The REAL reason I wear an analog watch (Score:3, Funny)
>
> If you're wearing a digital watch: it's 9:43 and 17 seconds!!! Urk!!!
Funny, that's why I wear a digital watch.
Sometimes I want to know how much time has elapsed between two events to within 500ms. And I don't want to do base-60 arithmetic in my head, because unlike the ancient Babylonians, I was raised in a base-10 world.
Re:#1 : Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Macintosh (refuses to die) (Score:3, Funny)
it's amazing the Mac has lasted this long after being pronounced dead several times.
Damn, it's like it's a religion or something!
Typewriter technology (Score:3, Funny)
Woohoo!!! (Score:2, Funny)
C It's so nice
implicit none
integer nodes
parameter(nodes=1440)
C
C Talk about the language that won't die!
C
nodes = 0
do while(nodes
write(*,*) 'Hi! I'm FORTRAN, the undead of programming languages!'
C
write(*,*) 'I have no idea what a pointer is!'
C
write(*,*) 'Or a class, for that matter!'
C
nodes = nodes + 1
C
end do
C
write(*,*) 'And it's impossible to tell when one line ends and the next begins!'
C
write(*,*) 'And I put a LF at the end of every write statement. How convenient!'
C
write(*,*) 'Well that's all for now. I guess I'll return to the operating system without a return code!'
C
end
Re:ana-log (Score:3, Funny)
B-Ark (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:5, Funny)
I always wondered why the fuck there are pictures of babies on toilet paper. Or names likeAngel Soft [nobodys-perfect.com].
"Hi! Our toilet paper is soft! In fact, it's so soft that we've named it Angel Soft! Because every time you take a dump, we want you feel like you've just ripped a wing off the back of one of God's celestial servants, so that you could smear your shit all over it!"
If we ever need more evidence that marketing executives deserve to go to Hell, that seals it.
Re:Old-fashioned watches (Score:1, Funny)
Then clean them with your obsolete analog watch (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Snob (Score:1, Funny)
I'm not wearing any clothes. I always slashdot in the nude.
Sheesh. The assumptions some people make.
Re:I agree, mod parent up! (Score:2, Funny)
No it isn't, we wear them because our wives have bought them as presents for us, and its cold sleeping on the couch.
Re:The REAL reason I wear an analog watch (Score:5, Funny)
Joe Average (Score:2, Funny)
Because I'm choosing her on the basis the size of her tits.
Re:ana-log (Score:2, Funny)
I went in to work today without my cell phone. Nobody seemed to notice. I'm encouraged. Tomorrow I'll leave my clothes at home.
Re:Macintosh (refuses to die) (Score:1, Funny)
Re:The REAL reason I wear an analog watch (Score:1, Funny)
Re:My fortran program... (Score:3, Funny)
This does remind me of a study some people did quite a few years ago when I was a grad student at a big university (whose identity isn't important here). They instrumented the Fortran compiler on the big central mainframe in the CS dept so that it silently checked for a number of common problems such as integer overflows, and recorded the results. They then used this for all submitted Fortran jobs (which was more than half the machine's load), and studied the results.
The main result was summarized as: More than half of the Fortran runs had at least one output value that was incorrect because of integer overflow. This actually resulted in several retractions of published papers.
One of the problems in the number crunching biz is that on most hardware, detecting integer overflow takes an extra instruction. Part of this study was a survey of users. One of the questions asked whether they would use overflow checking if it slowed the program down. Around 90% of the Fortran users answered "No." So they didn't care about correct results; they only wanted fast code.
One wag summarized this with a pair of definitions: A "good" compiler generates the fastest code that correctly implements the meaning of the source code. An "optimizing" compiler produces even faster code than that.
Anyway, it's a good idea to be very wary of anyone who puts "optimized" before "bug free". This implies that they consider speed more important than correct results. This attitude is rampant in the Fortran user community.
Not that they're the only ones.
early 80's 14Kbps modems? (Score:3, Funny)
I've been robbed.. Why is it I stumbled through the 80's with 300bps, 1200bps, and 2400bps(end of the decade) modems when they had 14Kbps modems available in the early 80's.. My 1200 baud modem was a $700 modem in 1988!!
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)