Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Toys

Binary Watch 217

sovereignclass writes: "IDG in Sweden ran a little story about a firm in Norway that has built a binary wrist watch. It look way cool and I am definitely in line for getting one myself. With a price-tag of 250 norwegian kronor it's not a tough buy either. Yes, it shows time in decimal too... In Sweden we often poke fun at the Norwegians (like the Germans do to the Ostfriesen) and this almost sounds too good to be true."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Binary Watch

Comments Filter:
  • by seldolivaw ( 179178 ) <me&seldo,com> on Friday December 07, 2001 @08:45AM (#2670149) Homepage
    The product shots [online.no] are CG renders! I doubt this product really exists...
  • Hang on... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by cthugha ( 185672 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:05AM (#2670220)
    Is that display little-endian or big-endian? Or will you be able to change endian mode? Or buy a separate model for each, maybe?
  • by HuskyDog ( 143220 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:09AM (#2670230) Homepage
    On KDE there is a thing called "fuzzy clock" which tells you the time in words to an accuracy of 5 minutes (mine currently says "Ten past one").

    Does anyone know of a watch that does this?

  • What We REALLY Need (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Scottaroo ( 461317 ) <scottNO@SPAMstatzs.com> on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:12AM (#2670243) Homepage
    Binary is OK, but what we really need is a watch that count telling UNIX time - seconds since the epoch.

    "Do you have the time?"

    "Yeah, it's 2,000,230,293"

    "Go away."
  • Glem aldri (Score:2, Interesting)

    by imrdkl ( 302224 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:30AM (#2670288) Homepage Journal
    In Sweden we often poke fun at the Norwegians

    As a guest of the norwegians, I find it amusing that they were given the hardest, rockiest land in all of Sweden as their own, only to become the some of the most valuable land on earth, because of the oil, gas, fish, and other wealth just off the shoreline.

    It's lots of fun tho, the tit-for-tat between them and you. I saw a widely circulated map the other day which shows scandanavia without sweden. Very popular here.

    Closest thing to it in the States that I can think of is the ongoing rivalry between Oklahoma and Texas. (although there is probably more physical violence in that one, heh.)

    Stillig klokke, dudes.

  • Great Virus Game!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by squaretorus ( 459130 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:41AM (#2670322) Homepage Journal
    This is cool. Sending virii to each others watches! It'd work like this:

    I set up my virus to give the message 'all your squares are belong to torus' and walk about with my watch blasting that out in IR. Any other watch I pass gets infected with the virus!

    Then everytime a watch links to a base unit it puts all its messages (along with where they are geographically) into a website.

    I can call up 'all your squares are belong to torus' and see how far its spread.

    I walk past someone on a street in London who flies off to Tokyo and goes dancing allnight - soon most of Japan is infected with 'all your squares are belong to torus'. How cool a game is that! I'd play!

    The best locations to get your virus to would be Antrctica and the ISS I'd have thought. Oh, and Manchester.
  • Re:Nitpick Redux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @11:24AM (#2670716) Homepage Journal

    HH:MM:SS time is actually called "sexagesimal."

    Yes, it is called sexagesimal, but that's a misnomer. It's three decimal components with distinct modulo periods.

    For mathematicians, sexagesimal numbering would use sixty different digit symbols, for every component. The Babylonians used sexagesimal numbering for a range of things, not just counting minutes, but that's where we got the hour/minute/second convention.

    Someone below also mentioned that the watch is "binary coded sexagesimal". That's closer to the mark, as the minutes and seconds digits are shown in distinct groupings of six binary digits (wasting four permutations for 60, 61, 62, 63). It does not count for the hours position, though, as that is shown with only five binary digits.

    A twelve-hour system would be "binary coded duodecimal," but the watch appears to use a twenty-four hour system which would be called "binary coded tetravigesimal."

  • Watch The Video!! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dwdyer ( 5238 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @12:01PM (#2670945) Journal
    From the looks of their video [online.no], they definitely need to hang out with some marketing folks, if only for a couple hours over a few beers. Still, the video has an enduring, ineffable charm. All the qualities of amateur pr0n. Without the pr0n. (Be sure to turn up the volume in order to hear the dialogue in the live-action scene -- unlike pr0n, the dialogue makes the magic.)
  • by leighklotz ( 192300 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @01:16PM (#2671357) Homepage
    When I was growing up my parents had a Spartacus Backwards Clock, a popular item from the 1950's, I guess. Unfortunately for me, though, I am now completely broken about clockwise and counter-clockwise. I have gotten to where I can now figure it out, but it is definitely a cognitive task, not an immediate perception as it is with normal people.

    A friend reports a similar confusion with orange and purple, but it was purposefully engendered by her many cooperating (all older) siblings...

Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?

Working...