Who is Bob if not Cortana’s grandfather.
I wish I knew who the grandmother was so we could figure out how Clippy came to be…
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Clippy is like one of those weird mutts at the pound. Pretty sure there is some Bob in there but …??? what’s that other thing??? that makes him so flexible and annoying?
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I have just bought a cassette tape recorder. Cassette tapes are much better for language practice than MP3s, and you can record streaming audio from a computer without any problems. I remember back in the day the media companies did not like cassette tapes because you could record off the radio.
Having physical buttons still seems to me the ideal technology for a record/playback device.
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I don’t understand why physical buttons are so rare. Yes, touch devices mean programmers can use different arrangements for different things, but touch devices don’t work for me, they don’t work for blind people, they don’t work for a lot of people.
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Manufacturing cost, I would guess. That trumps (ecch another perfectly good word down the tubes) everything.
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Also: moving parts wear out.
Also also: a physical button is forever a button (and not a knob or slider or whatever)
Also also also: physical buttons require clearances and that allows ingress of dust and water, both of which eventually kill devices.
As far as blind people not being able to use touch screens, here’s Stevie Wonder using his iPhone (which, apparently, he’s a big fan of):
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Given that the current working life of a mobile phone is a few years (before the sealed in battery loses capacity, the OLED display burns in or there is no update to close a major security breach) moving part wearout is not necessarily an issue. It’s not unknown for buttons and dials to be rated for tens of millions of operations.
Also, from the point of view of a record/playback device, changing the functions of buttons is not needed and is not desirable for quick action. Record, play, rewind, fast forward, eject, pause, record level, playback level, tone controls. That’s it. You don’t want one changing into another.
It’s only recently that phones - mainly phones - have met IP67 and above. I have a 7 year old laptop with physical keys. They still work even though a number of them have had the legends worn off and a dent in the middle.
And did I mention the tape recorder I bought is thirty years old and works perfectly?
Touchscreens have their place in our wonderful general purpose pocket computers with a variety of I/O built in that would have shocked a 1990s mainframe designer. But they are not, in my view, ideal for special purpose equipment.
(See also Tesla cars, where I do think that the UI is flawed by the desire to make the interior look “modern” with a big screen.)
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My dad bought one of these when we were in Germany back in cold war days. He recorded a lot of German music from the radio, using his stereo hi fi equipment (all tubular).
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so they skipped?
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I miss knobs. Volume knobs, channel knobs. You could just spin it instantly to the channel or setting you wanted, and if you wanted more control, you could carefully fine-tune it. Now you have to click “Next” or “Up” 300 times, and it’s all-or-nothing, there’s no way to adjust/fine-tune.
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Not like records, but like CDs. And because tape wears out, the result was a horrible digitized squeaky hissing noise.
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As do I.
I purchased a Surface Knob for mostly a volume control.
Overpriced for just that, but it does have other uses.
If my CNC behaves and my “elite Aurduino skills” prove up to the task I’ll have have knobs and switches for days.
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a completely new way to interact with technology. […] Adjust the volume on your favorite Spotify track
A $100 bluetooth knob! A ‘completely new way to interact with technology!’ 
(Well, maybe new to post-millenials.) What other goldmines of ‘completely new’ technology are us old people not thinking of?
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If you pair it with the Surface Studio (Or Surface Book 2) and the software you are using supports it, it really is useful.
But, yeah, for a $100, you’d better have more uses than a volume control (or a business account to charge it to in the first place)
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I don’t have a surface studio, but I gather it was a mechanism for interacting with pie menus.
If you want to get physical, though, MIDI mixers may be somewhat more promising…
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Haven’t watched the video, but that is surprising. I also know there are grid devices, to help people avoid tapping the wrong places. But some of us would still need to avoid tapping when not tapping-- maybe I’m not feeling contact, or maybe the screen’s getting interference at a distance. I had an always-going-haywire touchpad when I still used Ubuntu; a patch eventually came out.
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Old joke about how Eve was the first computer user because she had an Apple in one hand, [Coleco] Adam in the other, and a Wang whenever she wanted it.
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I lived in a small town once where only four digit dialing was required to reach a telephone with the same prefix-- basically everyone in the city limits. The service was from a small, non-ATT company.
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I received one of these every xmas:
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