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Killer robot posted:It's a pretty common progression: things meant to save the company money through automation also provide the customer convenience, so instead of being a money-saving measure management gets to viewing them as a revenue stream for a premium product. See also: digital media sales that cost more than a physical copy, banks that charge more to perform operations via ATM than by taking it to a teller. You really need to have the right sort of business management insanity for it to make sense. That and it does cost them money to charge your credit/debit card. For a small business that can add up. Checks are one of those things that will never 100% go away until currency goes 100% digital.
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Sep 30, 2012 21:12
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:37 |
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gently caress CHECKS, EAT ENIAC
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Sep 30, 2012 21:13
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Avenging_Mikon posted:Old people? Try lazy-rear end landlords. Previous landlord was a nice guy, but took ages to deposit the cheques, to the point of sometimes a couple weeks before it came out of my account. But it would take him time and effort to set up electronic payment methods like Internet bill payers or direct debit for every new tenant. So, cheques. What effort? It's the payer who has to make the effort to set up a standing order. All a landlord would have to do is look at his bank statement once a month to make sure it went through, and if he's not doing that anyway then he's a goddamn imbecile.
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Sep 30, 2012 21:25
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Jedit posted:What effort? It's the payer who has to make the effort to set up a standing order. All a landlord would have to do is look at his bank statement once a month to make sure it went through, and if he's not doing that anyway then he's a goddamn imbecile.  Desert Bus posted:Is this a device for tobacco smoke enemas? Yes, and it can also be used to blow the smoke from voided checks up your rear end (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 30, 2012 21:32
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That's the coolest weed grinder and bong set I've ever seen.
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Sep 30, 2012 21:36
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Is this a device for tobacco smoke enemas?
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Sep 30, 2012 22:13
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E:nm
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Sep 30, 2012 22:26
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Desert Bus posted:Is this a device for tobacco smoke enemas? Tobacco Smoke Enemas: Victorian Butt Chuggin'
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Oct 1, 2012 00:24
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Just sign up for an ING account and they'll print and mail your checks for you. Problem solved.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:03
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Back in the 1970s before calendars were common on watches (and before there were LCD watches) you could buy a pack of small metal calendars that had bendable tabs that would wrap onto your watchband. I can remember seeing them around 1972 and thinking that they were pretty cool, but in retrospect they're silly. EDIT: Looks like they still make them. Crazy.  
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Oct 1, 2012 01:15
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Dick Trauma posted:Back in the 1970s before calendars were common on watches (and before there were LCD watches) you could buy a pack of small metal calendars that had bendable tabs that would wrap onto your watchband. I can remember seeing them around 1972 and thinking that they were pretty cool, but in retrospect they're silly. Bizarre that they still make them, considering a lot of people don't even wear watches anymore for anything but style, what with atomic-reference-updated clocks on every cell phone and computer screen these days.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:27
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Bizarre that they still make them, considering a lot of people don't even wear watches anymore for anything but style, what with atomic-reference-updated clocks on every cell phone and computer screen these days. I have a cheap watch so I don't have to get my phone out of my pocket to check the time.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:30
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Bizarre that they still make them, considering a lot of people don't even wear watches anymore for anything but style, what with atomic-reference-updated clocks on every cell phone and computer screen these days. These would actually be handy since at work I can't whip out my phone all the time but I still need to coordinate dates with people/services. It would be great if I could just look at my wrist instead of hope I happen to be near a calendar. e: also so I don't have to spend more than $10 on my watch.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:33
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Sorry, I didn't mean to start a "usefulness of watches" derail right after the "usefulness of checks" derail  . I actually like watches and wear one myself, it's just that sales are definitely down what with everyone having a device that "does everything" now.Has anyone posted VHS tape rewinders? They're basically the go-to example of recently-obsoleted technology that seems silly looking back from today. I searched the thread and couldn't find it but I still might have missed them.  I had one that would rewind so fast it would tear the tape apart on weaker (usually rental) tapes. Of course if that happened you could open up the VHS cartridge and splice the ends back together and it would work great, minus a half-second you had to cut out where the tape was damaged. Good enough for Blockbuster to take it back.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:41
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Look at what I found last time I was in a Factory Direct Did anyone every actually use these?
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Oct 1, 2012 01:46
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Here's a two-fer: A Kodak Instamatic camera with... A FLASH CUBE! When I was a little kid I would travel everywhere with one of these in a bag, along with plenty of flash cubes. The 126 film cartridge was easy to load, similar to the tiny 110 ones. Take a picture, and when you wind the lever the film would advance and the cube would rotate to the next, hopefully unused face. Here's a shot I took with one of my brother. You can see he has a camera bag of his own on his shoulder since we both had Instamatics. We switched to color film not long after but at the time black and white was still cheaper.  EDIT: He's pointing at dog poop because it was everywhere in Brussels and we were both amused and disgusted.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:56
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Improbable Lobster posted:Look at what I found last time I was in a Factory Direct What is the point of a DVD that offers no advantages and won't play in some players? Is it just the novelty of it being small or was their some kind of tiny player designed for these?
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Oct 1, 2012 02:47
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Dacap posted:What is the point of a DVD that offers no advantages and won't play in some players? Is it just the novelty of it being small or was their some kind of tiny player designed for these? I thought it was the sony PSP or something.
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Oct 1, 2012 02:51
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I was watching "A Time to Kill" on DVD and had to flip it over halfway through. Was there a time when DVD's couldn't hold a whole movie per side? I don't think there was, but for some reason, that DVD only has half the movie on each side.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:12
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Dacap posted:What is the point of a DVD that offers no advantages and won't play in some players? Is it just the novelty of it being small or was their some kind of tiny player designed for these? It's cheaper to make, I guess? Can't be that much cheaper. Anyway, Factory Direct must have had a giant shipment of those, since they were advertising these things for $2 in their newsletter for ages.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:15
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BoutrosBoutros posted:I was watching "A Time to Kill" on DVD and had to flip it over halfway through. Was there a time when DVD's couldn't hold a whole movie per side? I don't think there was, but for some reason, that DVD only has half the movie on each side. I think it depended on the length of the movie and the encoding quality. I vaguely remember that in the early days you could get better quality with a two sided disc for some reason.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:19
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BoutrosBoutros posted:I was watching "A Time to Kill" on DVD and had to flip it over halfway through. Was there a time when DVD's couldn't hold a whole movie per side? I don't think there was, but for some reason, that DVD only has half the movie on each side. Encoding issues and fact that some early DVDs did not use multiple layers.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:30
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MRC48B posted:I thought it was the sony PSP or something. No, those were UMDs. Here are some proprietary Sony formats that you've never used, and maybe never even heard of, because they did nothing but duplicate the functionality of an existing format but with Sony owning the ecosystem: UMD MicroMV ATRAC3 HiFD MMCD SACD Memory Stick (available in plain, PRO, Duo, PRO Duo, PRO-HG Duo, Micro M2 and XC versions) DAT and arguably Minidisc and Betamax, which both found niches where they were relatively popular, but never became the standards the way Sony wanted them to. I was betting on Blu-Ray becoming yet another one, but looks like Sony finally broke their streak there.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:33
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Do some car players or something only have miniDVD slots? I can't see that format as being terribly useful, especially with how brutal the compression must be to fit a 2.5-hour movie into a 1.5 gig disc. A full-size dual-layered DVD at that quality would hold about 15 hours of video, for reference. They're not for PSP, since UMDs require a cartridge and aren't a standard DVD format. And they wouldn't be cheaper to make, either, since they're non-standard.BoutrosBoutros posted:I was watching "A Time to Kill" on DVD and had to flip it over halfway through. Was there a time when DVD's couldn't hold a whole movie per side? I don't think there was, but for some reason, that DVD only has half the movie on each side. The first year or two of DVD's availability, they couldn't really do dual-layered DVDs, and it took a while for production costs to go down reasonably. A single-layered DVD gives you 4.7 gigs, which for MPEG-2 can be limiting for longer movies, especially back then when the encoding technology was still in its infancy. Since its LaserDisc predecessor would require at least two disc flip/changes (and likely move for CAV editions) this was still seen as an improvement. I think pretty much every movie that used to be like this on DVD has been reissued in some capacity to no longer require a disc change or disc flip, especially with Blu-ray now; the only Blu-ray movies that still require it are the Extended Lord of the Rings movies.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:35
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Sagebrush posted:I was betting on Blu-Ray becoming yet another one, but looks like Sony finally broke their streak there. Only reason blu-ray even did was becuase sony spent literally billions of dollars essentially bribing companies to use blu-ray, and then selling the PS3 at like a 500 dollar loss so that they could ensure everyone who had a PS3 would be buying blu-rays.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:37
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Kwyndig posted:Encoding issues and fact that some early DVDs did not use multiple layers.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:42
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I remember watching dual-layer DVDs in class in high school and when it would pause between layers everyone would panic like it was the end of the world.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:55
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That's still better than having to flip over the drat Laserdisk. Also, those business card DVD/CDs existed, right? Those were the cutting edge of awful. Completely useless if you didn't have a tray drive. That said, I still kinda miss CD cartridges. In elementary school they had those huge towers full of them, so you could play Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego. They were fantastic in an awful way.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:01
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I remember watching dual-layer DVDs in class in high school and when it would pause between layers everyone would panic like it was the end of the world. At the time it was indistinguishable from the scratches that the players were super sensitive to.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:03
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Zenostein posted:Also, those business card DVD/CDs existed, right? Those were the cutting edge of awful.  While I'm sure they were fine back when 2x or 4x speeds were the norm but spinning at 48x would cause anything that wasn't evenly shaped to spin off into the drive and shatter.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:09
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Wouldn't the smaller disks fall into the smaller tray in most CD drives? Like there was a recessed layer that was maybe 2/3 the size of a normal CD. Surely that'd stop it from flying off. On the other hand, god help you if you put one of those monsters into a slot-loader.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:18
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I'm pretty sure the business-card CD fad came much later than the era of 2x and 4x drives anyway.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:25
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Flipperwaldt posted:Indeed. I was just writing up a whole post about how it blows my mind. It's ridiculously convenient. If I owe my sister 10€, I'll pay her back through bank transfer, and she lives like three miles away from me. Bank transfers are horrible in the US. Last March I needed to get $800 to a friend several states away very fast. I thought I could just march on down to my bank and say, "Hey, here's a routing and account number...please transfer $800 to that account, thanks." Nope. Huge fee, probably take several days, horrible, horrible mess. Thought about Western Union, but they also had fees (though much less than the bank's, so I can see why they're still around.) She didn't have a "verified" Paypal account, so she could only send money, not accept it. She didn't have Serve, or anything else like that either. It sucked. Eventually had to bite the bullet and use Western Union. Getting money from one person to another in this day and age should not be that hard. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to just type in routing and account numbers from my online banking page and have it be in their account the next business day.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:35
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I'm shocked to see people would make a CD in the shape of a house. Was there such a demand in the world for house shaped CDs?
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Oct 1, 2012 04:43
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DrBouvenstein posted:Bank transfers are horrible in the US. Last March I needed to get $800 to a friend several states away very fast. I thought I could just march on down to my bank and say, I bet if you'd wanted to transfer $800,000 though, instead of just $800, they'd have been able to do it instantly and with no fuss.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:47
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DrBouvenstein posted:
Walmart offers a cheap money transfer service. You go in to their money department, pay them the money , give them the name and location of the person and you get a code to give to the receiver and they can pick it up at any walmart location.
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Oct 1, 2012 04:57
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Depending on your bank, you can also do INTERAC email transfers. I think the charge for Scotiabank is something like $1.50
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Oct 1, 2012 05:01
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Pretty sure the interac transfers are just for Canadian banks only.
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Oct 1, 2012 05:05
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Bizarre that they still make them, considering a lot of people don't even wear watches anymore for anything but style, what with atomic-reference-updated clocks on every cell phone and computer screen these days. The atomic reference clock existed even when I was a child, but there was no good way to set your watch to it. People tended to synchronize their clocks to whatever clock determined "late" for the majority of their appointments. This generally meant setting your clock to "work time" or "school time". Of course, that was set by someone with their own arbitrary measurement of time. As a result, anyone's given watch or clock could easily be off by 5 minutes either way and it wasn't uncommon to see clocks off by 10. It was an entirely plausible excuse to say, "it's 9:30 by my watch" and I can remember sometimes moving my watch back a few minutes so that I would be "on time". No one complained much, because that was just how things were. The only thing was that if school (work) started at 7:45am, you'd better be there at 7:45am by their clock, not by yours. Now everyone sets their clocks off their cell phones, which are synced to the atomic clock, and it's really rare to find someone whose watch is off by even a minute. I don't think about it much, but a whole line of excuses for being late disappeared almost overnight.
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Oct 1, 2012 06:33
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:37 |
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Yeah, my sister (in Canada) does email transfers quite regularly for rent and stuff, but I personally have never used it and I don't think an equivalent exists in the States.einTier posted:I've also noticed that time has gotten a lot more accurate and synchronized as well. Huh? There's been a perfectly functional way of setting your watch to a national time signal since about 1925: most every publicly-funded radio station (and some commercial ones too) broadcasts a standard time signal at least once a day. You'd tune in just before 1pm and listen to the chime. If you had/have a shortwave radio, you can also listen to WWV on 15.000MHz and get a time signal every minute, 24 hours a day. Have to adjust for the speed-of-light delay between your location and Ft. Collins, CO if you want really bang-on accuracy, but hey, if you have a shortwave radio that's the kind of dorky poo poo you're happy to calculate  Also, if you didn't have a radio nearby but could get to a payphone, you could call the phone operator or an automated national hotline, and it would also provide you with the exact time. e: and before that, what do you think huge clock towers like Big Ben were built for? Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 06:48 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 06:34
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