old technology

For a five year old bike, it's as new tech as anything else from that
era. Do I need to list my past 03-GSXR1K as well, Timmy?


Bob Nixon 01 Sprint ST "RED" 53K "bought original"
Chandler,AZ with 330+ days of sunshine per year.
http://bigrex.net/pictures/TTF-11-26-05/Bob_TTF_11-26-05.jpg
http://bigrex.net/pictures

 

Five-year-old old tech shit sucks as bad as brand new old tech shit.
Christ, if you really believed the crap you spew, you WOULD get rid of
that slowass British P.O.S. and replace the GSXR. But don't buy the
crappy, shitty, outdated old tech 2003 model, buy a 2006. You'll
probably be able to put four or five thousand miles on it before you
have to replace it with a 2007 model.

 

One of the reasons Microsoft succeeded in the first place was
that the Unix community kept shooting themselves in the foot
over and over and over again, probably starting with ATT and
DEC. Microsoft is also looking a tad bit fat and middleaged
these days IMHO.

 

HA! The bike I rode today has 2 aircooled cylinders, pushrods, two
valves per cylinder, carbs, points and condenser ignition and a
driveshaft to prevent wheelies.
Don't talk to me about OLD Tech!

--
PC Paul
89 PC800
77 R100RS

Trip pics at: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/paul1cart/my_photos

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to
society" - Theodore Roosevelt

 

OOooh!
Stone-Age Tech.
I LIKE it!
All hail Joseph Lucas, Prince of Darkness.

--
PC Paul
89 PC800
77 R100RS

Trip pics at: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/paul1cart/my_photos

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to
society" - Theodore Roosevelt

 

I now would like to buy a USA made carriage for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is supporting myself via my nation in the
process (especially one of those pick up trucks that I literaly walk
in and sit down in without crouching or bumping my head), but I have
for a long time preferred Volvo for a few slight and not so slight
reasons. One of the reasons high in the list is that I genuinely
prefer the boxy look. I really hate the soft tird style of carriages
that has come out these days. I love some of the older designs even
more.

My two current cars are very young in my opinion: 1982 and 1985 (both
240 series, I think 245). They are by far the newest cars I have
owned. My previous car was a 1974 Volvo. Before that I drove a 1965
Ford Ranchero of my deceased father's for a few years until my mother
gave it to her favorite offspring.

My father came before the crappy generation and I came after it, so I
never had that crappy valueless fad attitude about newness from those
almost subhumans that boomed. I understand what quality is. I
intuitively knew in vague ways what I now know more concretely, that
mine (as in mining, under the ground) and hospital air pumps (for
breathing) are designed to last at least half a century (or is it a
century?) without failing, but other parts like car parts are designed
to last a certain pretty specific amount of time. One engineer I knew
told me he would be fired if he could not get a part to last less than
X amount of time, but also at least Y amount of time most of the time,
and X and Y were pretty close to each other, far closer to each other
than either of them were to zero, and definately lower than a healthy
person's life span by many times.

So, in the interest of quality, LED lights are wonderful to me, and
yes, they just happen to be newish, newer, sort of new in a way, but
who cares? I don't care if it was made tomorrow or has existed since
before the Alexandrian library was burned down, as long as the quality
is great, or at least good. I will always prefer the better one, not
because it is a fad or accepted by some crappy herd or that it is a
certain age, but because it is better.

But, I have to put a few corrections.

" A common thread in conversations is how this or that is 50-year-old
" technology or looks like it came off a bike 20 years old... Engine
" layouts and turn signals are the most recent incarnations.

Really? The only turn signals that visually function in my eyes and
brain combination are the high contrast bright ones. The modern ones
are diffuse, not contrasted, and look on in the sun when they're off,
and look off at night when they're on. They're horrible. I like old
fasioned turn signals in my life, but I was born in 1971, and I have
looked at some of the even older car turn signal designs, and they
were even worse. Turn signals weren't originally on mass produced
cars from what I read someplace.

" It's 2006, well into the middle of the first decade of the
" (ta-daaa!) Twenty-First Century! and still we have sidewalks made of
" concrete poured into wooden frames just as the Romans had two
" thousand years ago.

I agree if you're right, but just as a note, Portland Cement was
designed around 1824, not that has a large bearing on the process of
sidewalk building necessarily. Note that Portland is from the British
Isles.

" Towels are still fuzzy cotton like the Egyptians had 2500 years
" ago. Ductile iron pipe for sewage is probably going to look like it
" has for the past hundred and fifty years for at least the next 500
" years.

SDR18 (I think it was SDR 18, but if not, similar like SDR 19 or
something like that -- this stuff is more advanced than that green
stuff the government was used to a few decades ago) is a type I used
with a plumber who does trenchless plumbing. It is, I think, a
polyethylene product, which I found had amazing properties. He
explained to me how strong it was when I made a query about how we
were supposed to handle the material while planning to do something
with it. I took a test piece and hit it hard with a sledge hammer.
Not a dent. Harder, I swung and hit, and not a dent. Determined to
break it though, I swung with a breaking force once more, and indeed
it broke, but in a manner in which it revealed to me that it was still
steadfastly strong for most purposes. I was duly impressed. This is
NOT the brittle black crap you can get as Sears/OSH/Home Depot which
shatters if you turn your eyelash at it and say a word in English,
despite it looking similar. This stuff was used to pull through with
a hydrolic system from an opening in the dirt (access hole) through an
existing pipe breaking it apart to the other end of the span to be
replaced (another access hole). Sewer pipes have changed a lot in the
last century: clay, metal, plastic..

I do not know about its natural environmental ecosystem effects, but
the experience of working with it was fabulous. It is also more
expensive per inner volume capacity per length than some other stuff
currently sold, although I doubt it is that expensive for total cost
(longevity, maintenance, etc.).

" There's no particularly good reason to do it any differently.

I think a more precise statement is that there is usually not a good
reason to do something different for no reason other than it being new
and/or different.

" Certain technologies are going to be with us in pretty much the same
" for for a long, long time.

Perhaps, and I agree this is a strong possibility, and as it should
be.

" Which brings me back to motorcycles with internal combustion
" engines.

Ahh, here is my main gripe. Bangers are bangers. Perhaps with bikes
it is different, but with larger carriages like typical automobiles
today and whatever vehicles we'll use tomorrow, I would like to see
more turbine based things like gas turbines, jets and stuff, just to
have more exposure to them. Anything with fewer or no moving parts
would be preferred. I like the new "foil" bearing systems for high
speed shafts (that can withstand about 100,000 start cycles). I am so
tired of bangers.

" We could burn hydrogen, methane, propane, butane, ethane, octane or
" whatever and still we'd have to have some kind of tank to hold it in

yeah or delivery mechanism, but yes almost always a buffer is most
necessary

" and some way to make it quiet as it leaves the engine.

Aha.

" brakes of everything from leather to unobtanium.

yeah regenerative breaking is one of my pet peeves if the magnets are
light enough.

" Turn signal: ... a light on the end of a stick. Gosh, how stylish
" does that have to be?

The less the better.

" Okay, put it in the front of the rear-view mirror; that's
" cool. Integrate it with the tailllight, that's cool. But there's
" only so much innovation to be had with turn signals. Yet some of us
" can tell immediately that some turn signal design is ... twenty
" years old!

Why, because you can actually *see* it blink?

" You know, when you're stuck in some alien junkyard and all you can
" find is hulks of spacecraft from hundreds of years ago, which were
" already hundreds of years old then, you pick one, integrate your
" ship's systems into it as well as you can, and then get the hell out
" of there. If you survive, nobody's going to care that you did it
" with outdated technology. (I wonder if anyone else reads David
" Brin.)
"
" So my bike may be based on a design with roots in the 1930s. It
" works ... and it works well. And the turn signals have LEDs in them,
" so there.

Many old industrial and other machines last so long that many entities
are loathe to change them, because they know the new ones won't work
as well. Most of these such machines were installed when our Country
was still Great, far before my birth. An engineer can correct what I
say here: There were some parts PG&E had installed when the people who
invented the current use of Alternating Current might have still been
alive, possibly designed by some of those very people, that were still
in use and considered essential to the entire greater greater San
Francisco Bay Area electrical grid, in use continuously for I think 75
years by around 2000 or 2003 or something when they were carefully
replaced. One of the reasons they were so slow to replace them
despite their high maintenance costs and besides just the difficulty
of removing essential parts to permanently constantly functioning
systems was that the costs of replacing them with something better
didn't offset the costs of keeping them for about that long, because
it took about that long for anybody to bother to develop something
better enough to make it worth replacing them. They were getting very
expensive to maintain because of various factors, and still it took
decades for them to design something worthwhile to replace them with.
Consider that they were practically installed in the Beginning of Time
for the age of electricity and we were still using them only a few
short years ago, and you'll realize right away that old things,
sometimes very old things, are far better than just seeing what
happens if you squat on something long enough and flail your arms
about saying "I'm new! I'm new! Therefore I'm better! See what I
can lay here??! I can OUTPUT, therefore I AM!", like so many pro-new
of that generation near or at baby boomers have been (or is that more
akin to some other groups?)

Alas, many machines have been replaced recently because it became
better in some way to do so, but still, it shows that machines can
often be better old than new. I know that well.

My 1998 Dell is still running. My 2003 Asus had its capacitors blown,
most likely because of some Asian crapiness. Both were plugged into
the same things when the rain "storm" came by, doing power twitches,
and it is unknown if that was related or when it happened.

Some 2003 Toyota ran into the side of my very new (to me) 1982 Volvo
at about 40MPH in 2004. Hers burst into flames and was unrecognizable
even before the fire changed it. Mine is still my main vehicle and
has gone tens of thousands of miles since with only a few hundred
dollars of relicensing work required; I've spent far more in gas than
I have in repair and paperwork for that accident. (The accident was
caused by the racket of the high cost of insurance causing extreme
driver fatigue (sleepless nights working to pay for it); the obvious
antidote to that problem (not participating in the racket) was very
effective at eliminating crashes (and generally improving health) for
a long period, but alas, the trap has been befallen again; time will
tell if the minimalist approach this time will be sufficient.)

SFPD, known for both good and bad decisions, made a good decision
*after* the 1906 Earthquake to have above ground networks of temporary
pipes (otherwise known as an interconnecting network of hoses)
installed during underground pipe breaks. This was excersized from
then on, and worked well in the 1989 earthquake, a scant 83 years
later.

C Crain Company sells a new expensive light bulb based on LEDs that
saves money (which has a high probability of outlasting our nation,
and hence probabilities of ghettoization of overpriced housing,
thieves, riots, and wars have to be built into its total value of
ownership and maintenance).

Quality is quality, and does not (solely) determine age, nor age
quality.

 

Mine, too. Fer Chrissakes, I wish stuff that breaks would just stay
effin' broken, instead of fixin' iself and breaking over and over again!

 

Yeah. On the bright side, now I have a new phrase for intermittent faults.

 

There are a few places in my life where this seems to be showing up now.
Thanks for the well-turned phrase.

Rich, Urban Biker