[notJim]

> "One second of CPU time per day" got me thinking. Sure there are benefits to having modernly cheap computers, but how did they do it before?

By this argument, do you also pay your bills manually by check at the end of each month? And book all your air travel by calling a travel agent?

There's nothing wrong with trying these things to see what advantage they have, but advocating the old ways of doing things purely because they're old seems more like religion than science to me.

[richardjordan]

I don't think you can extend his/her argument like that in a valid sense. I don't think he was advocating for a luddite position.

The appropriate question is whether or not the move to computers has improved things. Not every step forward technology-wise is an improvement. Some things need to be walked back.

For example, as a Physicist by training, most of the math I had to do was far more easily worked out by hand than fiddling around with a computer to do it.

When you're thinking through a problem pencil and paper are often a better medium than computers. Conversely where once I would have drafted letters and articles by hand, it's way faster nowadays to type into a word processor or tool like Evernote and keep coming back to improve something.

I still pay some bills by check as it fits the specific case better. But some online bill payment, or travel booking is better done online, as you correctly suggest.

...that being said, I wish I could call a travel agent and get it all booked nowadays, but they've been put out of business by book-it-yourself websites. Before these sites you may have been calling a travel agent but they were using a computer too so it's not so much the move to computation that's changed this last 10-20 years but disintermediation of the middle man. However those middle-men actually provided value that I'm only realizing now I'm older and would rather pay a little premium for the convenience of not wading through a gazillion different sites to get the right bookings and prices for a complex itinerary.

New way is always the best way seems more like religion than science to me.

[ryanmolden]

>I'm only realizing now I'm older and would rather pay a little premium for the convenience of not wading through a gazillion different sites to get the right bookings and prices for a complex itinerary

Have you tried FlightFox? I haven't yet, and have no vested interest in / association with them (i.e the suggestion isn't me shilling :)), but it seemed an interesting possibility to me.

[richardjordan]

I haven't tried it but I'll check it out.

With an agent I could say stuff like - these are roughly the parameters I want to fly under; these are the airlines I'd rather chew razor blades than fly on; use your common sense to figure something out I'm not going to hate as an itinerary.