Also players of electric guitars who eschew digital ‘modeling’ in favour of old fashioned stomp boxes to get ‘that sound’ (and count me among them - the Pod XT that I use is great for being able to carry one bulky thing to a gig, but I can find the sound I’m after way quicker by using the old tech.)
Anything that uses faxes.
Yeah, this is true, but is it because they embrace some technology that is obsolete - or is it because the tech hasn’t actually improved?
How much better is an assault rifle designed today compared with one designed 50 years ago? I suspect that it is a bit better, but not really by much.
I think an example of the OP is an eccentric engineering professor who still liked using his slide rule rather than a pocket calculator.
Offices that keep files upon files upon files of blank forms. Get a copy machine that stores documents.
I still use a blackboard and chalk to teach. That’s pretty old.
How do chefs fit in to this discussion?
Nurses still chart on patients using (black) pen and paper. Some hospitals are moving to electronic charting, but it is a slow process (and the software sucks–bad interfaces. If anyone here wants to make millions, go into nursing informatics or health care software design. Please!)
People do still use plastic curlers in their hair and wooden clothespins to hang their wash out. (if it works, why not still use it?)
I done heard tell that there be some folk who still git their information outta them there books. Crazy!
Isn’t Air Traffic Control one of the biggest professions where they’re using technology that really needs to be updated?
For real? I would assume fuel injection would be allowed and a lot more efficient.
For some reason I know plenty of lawyers (strangely due largely to the social circle I developed while building film sets). Two work for for Canada’s largest law firms and they definitely don’t use WordPerfect. Their firms have mandatory style sheets for MS Word that are firm-specific (which occasionally clash with client stylesheets causing the document to become corrupt) so working on WordPerfect at home would even be problematic.
Depends on what you want to consider as “the gun” I guess. The basic M-4 carbine isn’t radically different from the Armalite AR-15, its parent, from the late 50’s. You’re basically looking at a shorter barrel and collapsing stock, neither of which is a new or innovative feature either.
Where the militaries are really clinging to outdated technology is that most soldiers who are issued a firearm get one with old-fashioned iron sights. Iron sights are as old as guns themselves. Modern optical or electro-optical sights dramatically increase hit probability with both long guns and handguns. Militaries know the value of such sights; think of the number of photos you’ve seen of soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq sporting a dot sight on an M-4.
Those militaries who don’t issue them in numbers will typically cite cost or need (which means cost) as an excuse. It still comes down to the hard fact that soldiers with optical sights will be more effective at shooting the enemy than those without.
Yep, they still use carburetors, and push-rods engines with the camshaft down in the block
Retail inventory management systems - at least at Wal-Mart, everything done on a computer is still a black and green mess of F3 and F12.
WP isn’t archaic – it’s just not as popular as it once was. For many years WP was far superior to Word, and there are things that it simply does better than Word, still. WP “thinks” differently from Word, and for those who learned it early and well, transitioning to Word is painful and, to them, a step down. WP perfected tools that are useful to preparation of law documents and Word played lagging catch up for a long time. I still prefer the way that WP does labels to the way that Word does them.
[WordPerfect as example of obsolete technology, as opposed to Microsoft Word]
I agree. Unless you also argue that using MS Word is also obsolete, since OpenOffice is available.
And, for the record, I have seen many recent documents produced by government lawyers using WordPerfect.
Them, and Costco and Bed Bath and Beyond, and… There must be a billion IBM AS/400s out there still chugging away.
Banks surprise a lot of people. There’s a sparkly new shell of Web 2.0 applications, and mobile banking on your cell phone, and slick little personal check scanners that let small businesses deposit checks without visiting the bank or even using an ATM, but it’s all driven by hulking old mainframes and grotty old Tandem systems.
The whole banking system is riddled with antiquities such as paper checks and the Fedwire system.
I’ve never worked in banking, but this agrees with what I have heard. I well remember the late 1990s, when kids graduating with computer science degrees were reportedly getting hired by the banks at $80k and up, if they knew how to fix Y2K bugs in existing COBOL code.
Carbureted racing engines aren’t archaic, exactly; carburetored engines are much easier to tune.
Now, the pushrod engine certainly is archaic. The small-block LS V8 engines still in use by GM weren’t special in 1955 and certainly aren’t now.
Why arey still made? Quartz movements are cheap and accurate. Plus you don’t repair them-you toss them.
I’d rather have a watch I can keep for 60 years than needlessly throw out 15 of them in that time. In fact, I actually can not stand the whole disposable world we’re creating for ourselves.
My sister wears the watch my grandfather got as a high school graduation gift.