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Traden4Alpha
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 7th, 2012, 6:30 pm

 
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Traden4Alpha
Posts: 3300
Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

What Watch do You Wear?

February 7th, 2012, 6:49 pm

P.S. That's a very hip avatar (with a very hip watch, no doubt)
 
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Traden4Alpha
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 7th, 2012, 7:18 pm

 
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Cuchulainn
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 7th, 2012, 8:54 pm

 
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CrashedMint
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 23rd, 2013, 9:45 am

That's all gimmicky crap. It is pure novelty and zero substance.Displaying time has been solved. The culturally ingrained, universally accepted method is the clock face with two or three hands, and to a lesser degree a digital representation. It's a random choice but the choice was made and until somebody comes up with something actually better, why change? Watches are useless anyways and purely exist as jewelry today. A Patek is *worse* at keeping time than a $20 Casio, yet costs a thousand times more. It's not even a technical marvel really: Yes, you have 200 tiny cogs and wheels on a thing around your wrist, great. *I* have a machine the size of a pack of cigarettes that does voice and data transmission over a radio link through a satellite in the sky!It's pretty though.
Last edited by CrashedMint on February 22nd, 2013, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 23rd, 2013, 1:08 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: outrunHow does this work? How would it display 3:34?I would bet that the watch uses a simple RNG to layout the pattern of the 3 or 4 bubbles (starting with the first digit in a bubble on the top row) and then fills in the remaining unbubbled slots with random digits.Personally, I think the old-style analog face -- which is derived from the angular sweeping shadow of sundial -- is inefficient and cognitively confusing. I always disliked the analog motion of the hour hand which meant that 10:55 has the minute hand on the "55" and the hour hand on the "11". The analog face design is a clear example of lazy UI design by accretion. The first watches had only the hour hand (like a sundial) which was not a bad UI. But then someone added the minute hand. And instead of redesigning the UI to show the digits of time in the order that one reads them and speaks them, they just plonked another hand on the face. That is, rather than design a better device once so that all future watch and clock owners could more easily read the time in all future times, the designer was lazy and created a higher cognitive load on all future watch owners.It would be interesting to measure the amount of time it takes randomly picked people to read digital vs. analog clockfaces. I'd bet that the literal digital presentation is easier to read (and requires less time learning as a child). If the added delay is only 0.5 seconds to decode an analog clockface and a person looks at their watch/clock 12 times per day, they lose about 1.5 days of life to this inefficiency. Multiply that times the billion or so people that have ever used analog clocks and watches, and we have a loss of life equivalent to 60 thousand dead.
 
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Cuchulainn
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 23rd, 2013, 2:29 pm

Why do you need a watch? Just ask one of your students.
Last edited by Cuchulainn on February 22nd, 2013, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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CrashedMint
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What Watch do You Wear?

February 23rd, 2013, 3:50 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnWhy do you need a watch? Just ask one of your students. actually you never need them not even in exams, because at my school they announced the time during exams. ("30 minutes have passed!" "Now, 15 minutes remain!"etc.)