hmmmmm, Id rely on a gPS over a map any day of the week.

Battery life? Even our 15+ year old magellan2000 will run for 24 hours with normal 4 AA's, gets to about 3 days with recharagables, including 12 hours of backlight.

Drop the GPS and crack the screen? Id like to see a usable map after its been droped in a uddy puddle, just wipe the screen and the GPS is fine and dandy most of the time. And this is all assuming the map didnt get blown away when you droped it.

I've never know a GPS give the wrong position, even back in the day when the signal was scrambled it was good to within 20-30m usualy, and the firmware usualy had a buffer to calculate your position based on dead reconing and the gps so it avoided any erronous signals. Anyway, its much better than DECA ever was, and even dGPS wasn't as accurate as modern handhelds now that the signal is no longer scrambled. Even the best map reader will make mistakes, IME GPS never does, how the user interprets and reacts to that data may be questionable, but i'd wager knowing your exact position and making the wrong decision is safer than geting it wrong in the fog/woods/unfamiliar hills and still making the wrong decision.

Maybe.

But there are other issues:

– you miss out on office banter, coffee room chats, lunchtime gossip, overheard conversations.
– it gets quite lonely.
– it's very hard to motivate yourself.
– you end up working at odd times of day.
– it's much harder to separate work and home life.

Despite all the bashing of me about GPS no one has answered the point – how do you plot a route across a distance without a map? Say Blair Athol to Kingussie? ( that being a route I have done)

I have MM on my puter but still know its easier with a paper map where I can see the whole route at once.

The other thing you cannot do with a gps is name the various surrounding mountains. You know – the munro baggers game.

I regullary plot my rotes on the computer in fact can't remember the last time i didi it with a paper map. I use the zoom function that alows me to see it up close and then far out. It also means i can print of bits or the whole route and i can leave it up on the screen so that my wife knows excatlly where im going.

I listen to music on CD, watch a tiny little telly occasionally, read paper books, paper newspapers, collect paper maps and follow them using compasses, travel by bicycle and routinely disable applications on my mobile phone that I find confusing

Well doing those doesn't make you out of touch thought does it as they are all easily and readily available.

Looking at the list No:14 pagers. We use them a lot here in the hospital as you can get the signal where you can't for a mobile phone and you know some one wants you when you are in a noise place (i work in the maintainence departemtn) and can't see them going any time soon.

I like old technology. It's designed to last, and designed to be fixed if it goes wrong. Compare that to stuff like iPods which are designed to be thrown away after two years. Some new technology is great and enables you to do stuff you couldn't do before. Some is just landfill in waiting.

I plotted Blair Athol – Loch Morlich – Tomintoul – Inverey – Blair Athol using TrackLogs without any problem at all. We rode it by GPS, two between four of us. We were carrying maps but they never came out.

There's no way to say this without it sounding a bit arrogant (and I don't want to) but I'm a pretty good navigator using the ancient ways. But I almost exclusively plan and navigate electronically these days. In my experience GPS always beats map and compass (or chart and compass afloat).

I'm not anti-map by any means – I love them and would always have one with me in an unfamiliar area – but they're a backup these days. And to be honest I'd rather have another GPS as a backup.

Maps can also be pretty dangerous in the wrong hands. I'd rather see someone with a GPS that shows their offtrack than someone who's misinterpretted a map and goes marching off confidently in the wrong direction.

I had a flying car in 1986. It was a Vauxhall Chevette. It didn't land quite as well as it flew but was still driveable.

This thread Puts me in mind of something that'll make you all point and laugh at – whenever I see a big, old, old tree, I find myself asking what it has seen in it's life – and the stories it could tell…….

IGMC…….

Hmm, ever try and repair an old skool tape player? They are a box of a million bits all of which have to be working perfectly otherwise it chews your tapes. Which happened a lot – remember that? Ten years ago people talked about the tape players of the day as new fangled crap that was waiting to be landfil. Most of my electronics on the other hand lasts ages without any moving parts to fail. Of cousre, I might like to upgrade it within a few years, but that's another issue.

Fact is, what you buy now is far far better, more useful and better designed than it ever was. You are just letting misty eyed nostalgia get in the way of your actual memory 🙂 Imagine having to carry about a bag of tapes just to listen to a few albums on your train journey. And having to sit there for an hour or two making a mix tape with only maybe 25 songs on it if you didn't want to listen to albums.

Yeah, iPods are shite aren't they? In fact, bring back.. er.. whatever it was people did before walkmans. Whistling – yeah…

Molgrips – plenty of non qwerty keyboards out there – the trouble is we are locked into them by the fact that thats what people (in the UK) know how to use – relearning touch-typing on a non qwerty is tricky.

IIRC french keyboards are different with the vowels as the home keys for one hand and the five commonest consonants as the home keys for the other.

you can buy keyboards in a variety of patterns.

I'm a compulsive skipper. I missing listening to a whole album as I basically never do it now even though I obviously could.

Yeah I know.. Maltron springs to mind.. but no-one actually does, do they? Computers or laptops don't come with this stuff.

So? What impact does that have on the ipod debate? None, I think you'll find 🙂 Studios can do what they like.

Well the two activites are different. A whole album could be a complete work in itself, with the ebb and flow of tempos and themes constituting a journey or a story.. or it could be a few great hits padded out with junk. I've got both in my collection 🙂 I do listen to full albums sometimes but I've also found that with my entire colletion on random I hear certain songs in a totally different context which makes them sound totally different. I've often thought for the first minute of a song 'what the hell is this? I don't own this? It's great!' before eventually recognising it as somethign buried on an old old album. Relaly helps to keep your music fresh.

"Once eBooks get enough momentum going, the cost of publishing real books will go up and up and up"

On the other hand, they should substantially reduce the cost of academic texts and journals. My Mrs works in professional tuition – her firm will be using readers for her class notes from next year as it will save a fortune on photocopying.

As for GPS, I just find plotting a route on a map so much more satisfying.

It is true that the future will hold lots of things that we wouldn't think possible now.

Things like computer based implants, we are the computer and it's controlled from thought, music played directly into our ears from our built in wireless network connection, vast memory storage in our brains, no need for power as it uses our own energy source!

You wait the Matrix will be reality 😉

The GF's rabbit.

Yeah but by the same argument products these days are far cheaper than they were.

Your parent's hifi was probably handed down to them as it was an expensive item that your grandparents saved up to buy and it had been treated carefully all its life.

Fair point, but you couldn't play games, surf the web, watch TV or movies on a walkman.

So to do like for like you'd really have to compare iPod Touch to the total price in the '80s of a walkman, laptop, Astro Wars, portable TV etc.