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 ;)
Small benefits (Score:3, Informative)
The first is that you can usually make out the time further away, and in poorer lighting conditions, from an analog clock versus a digital.
The second is that you can use your analog watch as an impromptu compass. In the northern hemisphere, hold the watch flat and point the hour hand towards the sun. Now bisect the angle between the hour hand and the figure 12 (ie. noon) on your watch to give you a North-South line. In the southern hemisphere, hold the watch dial and point the figure 12 (ie. noon) towards the sun. The line that bisects the angle between the hour hand and the figure 12 is the North-South line.
For Those Who Won't Read The Article... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old-fashioned watches (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers!
--RjS
Re:Windows NT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Snob (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Some are, some aren't (Score:3, Informative)
And I find that feeding an envelope or a label into the typewriter is much easier than setting up the printer to print one address. It may not be elegant, but it's simple
Of course, I can't surf slashdot from a typewriter.
there is a another good reason for Fortran though (Score:3, Informative)
So as strange as this may sound fortran can be much faster!
Re:Toilet Paper (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bruce Sterling link (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce Sterling's article (Score:4, Informative)
Ten technologies that deserve to die [msn.com]
Impact printers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Analog display on a digital watch (Score:2, Informative)
Same reasons you cite. With a quick glance you can tell that you're pushing your engine into the red, or that your temperature getting too high, or you're going wayy fast.. You just see speed, rpm, temperature without having to read it.. Reading engages wholly different parts of your brain and complicates the activity.
Re:"Sweep Hand" Watches Rule (Score:4, Informative)
Re:vacuum tubes?! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:there is a another good reason for Fortran thou (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, its available only in recent compilers (gcc 3 for example) that may or may not be as good at this type of optimizing as Fortran compilers, but hopefully this argument for starting new development in Fortran can finally be put to rest.
Re:About watches (Score:2, Informative)
So why do people still buy watches?
Alarms. I need at least three for my usual days, more occasionally. The one on my cheap digital has been set to 2:17pm for five years now (to get the kids from school)
Re:"Sweep Hand" Watches Rule (Score:2, Informative)
I couln't imagine flying with digital gauges. Most of the stuff I look at while flying doesn't need to be quantified in hard numbers, but more or less whether or not something is changing: if i'm climbing or descending, if i'm deviating from my course, the direction to the next ADF beacon, things like that.
Re:What about the other values of a tech? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Macintosh (refuses to die) (Score:2, Informative)
I don't understand you people.
Re:Macintosh (refuses to die) (Score:2, Informative)
Todays PC is still a heavly modified IBM PC AT the full 16 bit upgrade from the classic PC.
Mac classic was made a few years after the classic PC.
The first Mac didn't even have it's own explantion buss making the whole Mac IO based around the Mac II.. A plug and play system. where as the PC buss has to play to the legacy IO of the ISA buss (and PCI dose ditch that to some extent to move forward).
And.. The power Mac is a totally new Machine. Apple ditched the 68K processor and the legacy Mac design just as the Mac was having it's first few legacy design problems.
The PC however is still using a processor that plays to the 8086 and that chip is based on the 8080 who is from the 4004.
Then as MacOs itself gets dusty MacOs X.
Not an os built on top of MacOs (Like Windows).
Some people complain that OsX dosn't even keep up the Unix side (Thow this kinda shows that Unix isn't that dusty eather).
Re:KISS - keep it simple stupid (Score:3, Informative)
I think he meant that the 1-12 numbering was quite useful and intuitive in a lot of senses. For example, when I worked at McDonald's, we had a system for making sure that burgers weren't left in the bin for too long. There were the numbers one through 12. Shelf time was like no greater than 10 minutes. So if you put the number 7 down, then you knew that if the clock was at 35 after or later, then you knew it was time to throw that stuff away and make new stuff.
Ehh I think I'm missing a step here but hopefully you get the gist of it. Using a clockface to measure relative bearing is also useful. "You gotta bogey on your six!"
Re:Pen/Ink/Paper (Score:3, Informative)
Class notes for almost any class with serious math content. Subscripts, superscripts, integrals, odd character sets, sketches of curves and graphs. Large expressions that barely fit across the page of paper, let alone on a PDA screen. Flipping back two pages to see whether an expression there matches what you've just written. All typically done at insane speed -- somewhere in the Ph.D. programs there must be a seminar where they teach the secret of how to write that fast on a blackboard. To a lesser degree, the same argument applies to almost any situation where you're trying to work out a bit of math by hand.
For notes I'm addicted to Parker ballpoints. For more normal writing, my personal favorite is a high-quality #0 drafting pen with India ink. Darned hard to find these days. Pain in the butt to keep clean. Tends to make a serious mess when you take it on an airplane due to the drop in air pressure (had the same thing happen when I drove over the Continental Divide with one). But a wonderfully-precise high-contrast smooth-flowing line, no bleeding through the paper, almost waterproof as soon as it dries.
And in C++ (Score:3, Informative)
Rather than add even more new keywords to the language, C++98 put the can-optimize-for-various-parallelisms numerical arrays in the library. The std::valarray template is defined to be free of aliasing, so implementations are allowed to chew hell out of the numbers. (Many don't, yet.)
FORTRAN 200[03] then went and added even more weird and wonderful features. :-)
Re:#1 : Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Well if binary is such a good concept (least number of LEDs per required time resolution etc.) then why have ThinkGeek gone for binary coded decimal? They're throwing away all the advantages, by using 6 LEDs for something which only needs to count to 12 (24?).
Could we modify it to display seconds since the epoch?
Re:reasons digital/electronic watches inferior (Score:3, Informative)
You know, it's not too hard to find watches with decent crystals. Your $30 POS probably has a plastic one, slightly more expensive & you get glass and after paying a few hundred you finally get to sapphire crystals. Sapphire is close to diamond in hardness so it's not going to scratch at all (my Dad's been an aircraft mechanic his whole life, and the sapphire-crystalled Seikos he has last -years- doing that kind of work with almost no visible damage to the face).
Re:Old-fashioned watches (Score:2, Informative)
That said there's no reason you can't figure out direction with digital watches, if you already understand how that works. (also many digital watches have compasses in them)
incandescent light bulbs (Score:3, Informative)
Apple using Wintel technology (Score:4, Informative)
I do not know Macs, so I may have missed something, but which of these started with the Wintel PC?
ROM/Open firmware - The news is that Wintels may do this soon, but I have yet to see motherboard without ROM BIOS.
OS X - Unix, not Wintel
SATA - From the harddrive manufacturers. The implementation for Wintel has the BIOS must faking one of the standard IDE positions so that MSWindows thinks it is running from "C:". This reduces the number of drives that can be used in a dual IDE/SATA PC, and encourages the consumer to find an OS that can fully use the hardware. This could not have been planned by MS.
CD/DVD-RW - Consumer technology coopted by the computer world.
USB - The Wintel answer to Firewire.
Firewire - Apple. It is so much an Apple technology that Intel refuses to incorporate it into their motherboards.
PCI, AGP - Hardware manufacturers, but they are the standards for Wintel. Be thankful that Apple has decided to follow the "standards" for commodity hardware.
RJ-45, Ethernet - Ethernet came from the mainframe/Unix world. It barely touched the Wintel world until the late 80s. The RJ45 plug was a quick prototype that accidentally made it into production. The engineers are still kicking themselves for designing a plug that is designed to catch on EVERYTHING.
DVI - I do not know who started this.
PowerPC - IBM. Was it first designed for Apple or Microsoft? Does anybody other than Apple and IBM use it?
Musical Instruments (Score:5, Informative)
And speaking of tubes - the rich nonlinear sound of a tube amplifier hasn't yet been replaced by a more modern equivalent, especially for electric guitar. I think one of the articles mentioned vacuum tubes.
Piano, horns, guitar - most all acoustic instruments have nice sounding synthesized sampled versions that can be had at a fraction of the cost. These can be played from your computer or a keyboard. Yet the physical instruments, as expensive and potentially out of tune as they are, will probably always be preferred because of their human interface. Similarly, drum machines, which do not show up late or steal your girlfriend, are not replacing human drummers playing acoustic drums, except in 80's music and certain "techo" genres.
Re:And #11 is a tie between.. (Score:2, Informative)
S
Re:Fortran is # 10 (Score:3, Informative)
The advantages you've listed just aren't that important against C++:
It's very commonly said that Fortran is faster than any other language. I don't think that's actually true. This article [iu.edu], written back in July '97, talks about a lot of other techniques possible in C++ to close the performance gap and even outperform Fortran. And in the seven years since, C++ compilers have improved greatly, and these techniques have been widely adopted. There are a lot more papers here [oonumerics.org].
PIANO (Score:1, Informative)
It is worth noting that in a concert instrument we would not amplify the sound at all with microphones and speakers. If a 7-foot-6 semi-concert grand isn't big enough (they go from large loungeroom to 500-seater theatre) then you upsize to a 14-footer.
Also note that rather than trying to find the right samples, a tuner/technician can actually change the nuances of the instrument depending on the music to be played (timbre, tone, tune, it all counts) and that with over 7000 moving parts in your average action, thinking you can copy it cheaply even with a variety of samples just isn't going to work very well.
Pianos are one instrument and keyboard synthesizers are another.