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Pilsner posted:It's such a weird thing about modern phones (smartphones): Terrible battery life, extremely fragile For a second I thought you were kidding when I read your post, specifically the "fragile" bit. Do people really think this, or is it just you? I'm flabbergasted. I thought the general consensus about modern phones was that they are far more durable than they have ever been before? I mean,there was a time when I would have never even wanted to touch a new phone without putting some sort of protective cover on it first, but now the idea of a protective cover just seems silly. I've had my current phone for nearly two years now (a Galaxy Nexus) and I throw it daily into pockets full of keys and change, I've sent it flying onto asphalt, concrete, and tile, spilled drinks on it, I don't even know what else. By now an old fashioned plastic Nokia would have looked like it had been through two wars, but this drat thing still looks like brand new. This Gorilla Glass (or whatever variant on it this phone uses) is a wonderful thing. Just for fun, here's a video of a guy driving a nail into a board with the screen of his smartphone. And it's a Nokia! A modern one, though.
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May 14, 2013 21:53
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Yeah, I beat the living gently caress out of my Galaxy S [first gen] and it kept working until the day I got a Galaxy S3, except the touch screen sometimes registered phantom touches. Skidded that thing across a parking lot and all that happened was the back popped off, and the plastic got a little scuffed on the back, but the screen is still pristine. I use it for an alarm clock still. My GS3 is shaping up to be pretty good too, not counting Samsung's god-awful built in software [but who doesn't flash something better over the top of carrier provided Android?]
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May 14, 2013 22:00
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MagnumLode posted:I used to work in construction and I found a few of those razor blade caches. I always wondered why there was a ton of blades piled up inside the wall. Somehow dumping razorblades inside walls seems like a really strange idea, but I guess the houses weren't expected to last for centuries so they figured they couldn't fill up. It just seems to me that you could achieve the same convenience with a tin bank. You'd have to empty it every once in a while though. Speaking of garbage, fortunately high-rise incinerators got banned the 60s in favour of garbage collection. Incinerators used to make the air in many cities legitimately dangerous to breathe. They were probably a great way to dispose of dead bodies too.
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May 14, 2013 22:55
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Mr. Beefhead posted:For a second I thought you were kidding when I read your post, specifically the "fragile" bit. Do people really think this, or is it just you? I'm flabbergasted. I thought the general consensus about modern phones was that they are far more durable than they have ever been before? I mean,there was a time when I would have never even wanted to touch a new phone without putting some sort of protective cover on it first, but now the idea of a protective cover just seems silly. I've had my current phone for nearly two years now (a Galaxy Nexus) and I throw it daily into pockets full of keys and change, I've sent it flying onto asphalt, concrete, and tile, spilled drinks on it, I don't even know what else. By now an old fashioned plastic Nokia would have looked like it had been through two wars, but this drat thing still looks like brand new. This Gorilla Glass (or whatever variant on it this phone uses) is a wonderful thing.
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May 14, 2013 23:03
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Pilsner posted:Maybe I'm wrong, I just see cracked smartphones way more often than I remember seeing cracked regular old phones. I'd be terrified if I dropped my iPhone on asphalt - has anyone tried? I'm pretty sure my GS3 uses the same glass the iPhone does [Gorilla Glass 2] and I have dropped mine on tile, asphalt, metal from 4-5 feet and it's turned out a-okay. I can't advocate going out and throwing your phone everywhere, but mine seems pretty tough. e. I destroyed my wife's Vibrant by crushing it between the trunk lid and edge of her trunk though, so high pressure does tend to do them in. 
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May 14, 2013 23:11
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Pilsner posted:Maybe I'm wrong, I just see cracked smartphones way more often than I remember seeing cracked regular old phones. I'd be terrified if I dropped my iPhone on asphalt - has anyone tried? Go to YouTube and search for "drop test" with the phone name of your choice.
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May 14, 2013 23:20
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Pilsner posted:Maybe I'm wrong, I just see cracked smartphones way more often than I remember seeing cracked regular old phones. I'd be terrified if I dropped my iPhone on asphalt - has anyone tried? Might be that you don't bother maintaining a mental catalogue for the condition phone screens you saw 10 years ago? I drop my hand me down, years old iPhone onto concrete at least once a month, and onto carpet/tiles/wood/etc. at least once a week (I'm clumsy, so what) and it's still going strong.
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May 15, 2013 01:50
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Pilsner posted:It works, but everything related to phoning was just easier, faster and more comfortable on my old regular Sony Ericsson phone, so to speak. Maybe it's just the iPhone that's poo poo. What the hell are you talking about? If you want to make a call an an iPhone you click the phone button and type the number or click the contact and that's it. Sound quality is better than any dumbphone I've used.
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May 15, 2013 02:22
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Mr. Mallory posted:What the hell are you talking about? If you want to make a call an an iPhone you click the phone button and type the number or click the contact and that's it. Sound quality is better than any dumbphone I've used. Chiming in here. My Nexus 4 has hands-down the best voice phone quality of any device I've ever used. If you think that using a smartphone to make calls is difficult then I'm sorry that you have brain damage.
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May 15, 2013 04:32
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On Saturday, I was out shopping at Weird Stuff (they sell all sorts of odd, mostly old, tech) and saw a box full of laserdiscs for $1. Mostly Japanese concerts, but I spotted some good ones and grabbed them, because the covers looked good and I figured I could hang them on the walls or something. Got interested, searched for laserdiscs on SA and found this thread. My fascination with old tech kicked in and I started the search for a Laserdisc player. Found one on Sunday and picked it up for free, along with about 30 free movies. It's actually pretty cool. The picture looks good, although thanks to pan-and-scan or letterboxing, I have to fiddle to get my TV displaying things right. The original 4 I picked up at the store: A Clockwork Orange Blazing Saddles Spaceballs Street Fighter The other movies I got were primarily Disney, with some concert discs (oh boy, The Cure and A-ha), but there were a few interesting ones mixed in: The Princess Bride Monty Python and the Holy Grail Ferris Bueller's Day Off Japanese "Bambi" Japanese "Song of the South" The Wizard of Oz Buffy the Vampire Slayer So now I have more laserdisc movies than I do DVDs. Thanks, thread! Next up, my friend in New York is figuring out how to send me my old desk, which was actually a gutted HP-3000 Series 58 computer (see http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=791). Absurdly heavy but really a pretty cool desk.
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May 15, 2013 04:42
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Pham Nuwen posted:Next up, my friend in New York is figuring out how to send me my old desk, which was actually a gutted HP-3000 Series 58 computer. Where do you put your legs?
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May 15, 2013 05:03
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WebDog posted:Where do you put your legs? It's difficult to see in that picture, but the desk has a server rack-type cabinet on the right (where the red HP badge is) and a very shallow cable chase type area at the back of the rest. So the big pair of doors you can see open into an area about 2 inches deep. There's plenty of space for your legs, except over at the right side where the rack is. I used the deskspace on the far right for a lamp and some random crap.
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May 15, 2013 05:27
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Somehow dumping razorblades inside walls seems like a really strange idea, but I guess the houses weren't expected to last for centuries so they figured they couldn't fill up. 500 years worth of razor blades would probably still fit nicely into a wall section assuming there's space all the way from chest-level to floor-level.
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May 15, 2013 07:30
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Mr. Mallory posted:What the hell are you talking about? If you want to make a call an an iPhone you click the phone button and type the number or click the contact and that's it. Sound quality is better than any dumbphone I've used. IPhone: Tap Contacts. Oops, it's showing some contact I don't want to call. Click Back button. Drag until I find the contact I want to cal, tap contact. Tap the number of his I want to actually call. Old phone: Press 8 digits, press call button. IPhone: Tap Phone. Ah nuts, it's on the "Recents" screen. Tap "Keypad". Enter number, tap Call button. Touch interface has its benefits, but there's no way you can call it easier than a "dumbphone" (never heard that expression before) for straight phoning. And what can I say, I think the sound quality is poor on the iPhone 4 compared to my old one.
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May 15, 2013 07:46
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Writing that post wasted more of your time than any hassle my smartphone will ever give me.
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May 15, 2013 07:52
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I just tell my phone to call my mom every few weeks, and it talks to her for me. Smart phones
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May 15, 2013 07:56
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Mr. Beefhead posted:For a second I thought you were kidding when I read your post, specifically the "fragile" bit. Do people really think this, or is it just you? I had my nokia 6230 (inbuilt camera and color LCD) for over 6 years, the last 2 of which saw me reacting to its bad battery life (due to old/dieing battery) by throwing it. Many times I chucked that thing with everything I had at concrete and brick walls, and I mean hard enough to have it rebound and land over 10 meters away. A lot of this abuse came from the fact that I maintained the attitude of "why upgrade when it still works" until the point where the standby battery life was something like half a day (yes I did try replacing the battery but by then most available batteries were copies that were pretty rubbish too). By the time I replaced it 1 and a half years ago the replaceable part of the case was just fragments wrapped in sticky tape, and the phone itself was so abused that the chassis was twisted/compressed and the buttons didn't really sit or feel right anymore, but it still worked. Try that with your Galaxy Nexus. [edit] I was going to say that the battery life problem of smartphones comes down to usage, as part of my job I once did some current draw tests while trying to find wifi power usage (can't tell you the phone model but it had an LCD screen a bit smaller than original Galaxy S, also all these tests are with the sim removed): - wifi off, screen screen off: 5ma - wifi on (quiet network), screen off: 6ma - wifi on (busy network), screen off: 50ma (probably higher than it should be because phone was a prototype with unoptimised wireless drivers) - wifi off, screen on: 250ma I would imagine the screen of current flagships would draw a lot more (especially OLED with brightness up). Basically when you sit on your phone browsing or taking advantage other things that a modern phone can do, you are draining battery in a use-case that didn't exist on a dumbphone, and whilst doing so drawing more than those phones were even capable of. If you use your smartphone like a dumbphone you will see battery life that's similar to one (if not better in some cases). Fuzz1111 has a new favorite as of 10:21 on May 15, 2013 |
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May 15, 2013 09:47
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Pilsner posted:Old phone: Press down (button or joystick), press first letter of contact's name - or keep pressing down until reaching the contact. Press call button. Dumbphone: press down to go into contacts, oh great I want to call someone who's name starts with an "o", press the 6 button three times, scroll through all your contacts starting with "o", select the right contact, select the number you actually want to call, press the call button Smartphone: tap contacts, tap the letter on the right to jump to it, tap the right contact, tap the phone number This poo poo about making the thing you don't like seem overly complicated and bad works in both directions. People who feel superior because of the type of phone they are using, be it smart or dumb, are really annoying so can we please go back to talk about cartridges, laserdiscs and weird TVs?
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May 15, 2013 10:10
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I think posted about the Quantel Paintbox, but I've dug up the photos I had off an old memory card. This Quantel DPB 7001 Digital Paint Box seems to hail from around 1981. At the time of these pictures (2007) it was still working and had amazingly been discovered to communicate with After Effects by way of capture card. You were able to transfer rendered footage across both devices. But because these were video feeds and not files you suffered generation loss each trip. But it was still being used for title overlays and graphics well into the 90's as Australia was pretty slow in adopting HD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2iBdc-Btsw  It used a giant tablet and stylus as it's main form of operation. The main purpose of the program was image manipulation and it's signature airbrush / pastel look that defined most screen graphics of the 80's. That monitor was apparently notable for being "one of the first digital monitors in Australia". The whole unit was stored in a special closet in the back of the room that was air conditioned and padded to reduce noise bleed.  ]10 inch platter hard drive. I suspect they're Fujitsu M2294 that stored around 300mb. I understand this were pretty much your swap disk. The noise was like starting a small biplane.  These were your main storage and where your project files and masters ended up. 650mb CD-RW's built into caddies.  This was how you imported images into the thing. A camera setup above a lightbox that would capture a burst of something.  Print Screen. Literally. It would print off a photograph of whatever was being displayed. It was rather cool how it processed as it would do R.G.B in separate passes, sucking the image back in to do the next color over the top. Full gallery here
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May 15, 2013 10:37
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Shai-Hulud posted:Dumbphone: press down to go into contacts, oh great I want to call someone who's name starts with an "o", press the 6 button three times, scroll through all your contacts starting with "o", select the right contact, select the number you actually want to call, press the call button Hell, if the touchscreen proves too complicated then you can just use the voice controls. There's only a small chance that it'll misunderstand you. Anyway, wood powered vehicles.  They were used sometimes in the very early days of automotives, and then again in WWII because of the gas shortages. Wikipedia says that you still see them sometimes in North Korea, but that place is kinda sucky so I think they fit in this thread.
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May 15, 2013 10:42
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Wanamingo posted:Hell, if the touchscreen proves too complicated then you can just use the voice controls. There's only a small chance that it'll misunderstand you.
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May 16, 2013 05:34
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I didn't even know people used the contacts list to call people. I just hit "call" then start typing the name of who I'm calling. After like two letters it's usually who I'm looking for and I'm on my way. I've heard a lot of complaints about smartphones but this is the first time I've ever seen this argument.
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May 16, 2013 20:58
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Today I watched as a nurse saved the data from my ILR on a floppy disk. It then got stuck in the machine. I felt nostalgic.
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May 16, 2013 21:04
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Speaking of floppies. I read a news article the other day about the government here in Norway is giving mllions and millions to hospitals and doctors and people in the health section to upgrade from floppy disks. When I worked in a hospital 9 years ago, floppies were extinct, but I guess they're still used in all the other ones. :S
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May 17, 2013 00:20
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I still use floppies every day at work to transfer copies of Quattro Pro spreadsheets off a 486 running Windows 3.1. It gets annoying sometimes but I kind of like getting to use that old stuff in an otherwise very modern setting.
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May 17, 2013 04:12
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I switched doctors, and tried to get an appointment at the new place. They turned me down, because the floppy with the new patient list hadn't arrived yet. It comes once every month.
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May 17, 2013 12:59
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I had a scanner done recently, and it took two weeks for the hospital to mail a CD rom to my ENT. I had to reschedule the appointment because of this and lost a few weeks, something you don't want when you have a terrible sinusitis. The CD had 50MB on it, most of it being the software used to read the images... I know it's socialized medicine and the whole thing cost me less than a combo at Mc Donalds, but still, I'm sure it would be cheaper to email the files than to burn a cd and mail it. edit: the ENT's main computer, a laptop, doesn't even have a cd drive, he keeps an old desktop around with floppy drive and cdrom just for this kind of stuff.
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May 17, 2013 14:05
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I don't know about anywhere else but in the UK even though we're all now officially using the same radiology software and they should eb talking to each other they're not and due to information governance regulation setting up an online share of confidential information is a nightmare. So yeah, it often ends up with a patient carrying a CD-ROM from one hospital to another.
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May 17, 2013 16:21
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sweeperbravo posted:Here's an actual thing that bothers me about the phone- remember me talking about being able to text/type without looking?
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May 17, 2013 16:51
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GWBBQ posted:I still can http://www.8pen.com/ That looks absolutely horrible. No, I really do miss t9, my last phone had a fold out keyboard as well as t9. I could type with one hand using t9 or with both hands using the fold out. I really wish they'd start putting real keyboards on phones again. Swype is okay... but it isn't great.
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May 17, 2013 21:38
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semiavrage posted:That looks absolutely horrible. No, I really do miss t9, my last phone had a fold out keyboard as well as t9. I could type with one hand using t9 or with both hands using the fold out. I really wish they'd start putting real keyboards on phones again. Swype is okay... but it isn't great. But think about the re-tooling costs required to sell the phone in non-English-writing locations. The hardware keyboard is gone, my friend.
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May 18, 2013 03:33
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Don't care, I still want one and don't buy a phone unless it has one. Smartphone? You can pry my QWERTY (or dvorak, for real neckbeards) from my cold dead hands 
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May 18, 2013 04:59
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Memento1979 posted:But think about the re-tooling costs required to sell the phone in non-English-writing locations. The hardware keyboard is gone, my friend. Many Nokia's had removable shells and keypads that could be swapped out for different colours or languages on a whim. They still sell them in local phone shops in the UK.
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May 18, 2013 05:23
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DNova posted:I still use floppies every day at work to transfer copies of Quattro Pro spreadsheets off a 486 running Windows 3.1. All of this makes my brain hurt.
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May 18, 2013 05:51
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I managed to drop my old Siemens C65 phone off a lift 26 feet down to a concrete floor, and it only had a minor scratch on the corner it landed upon. My rear end in a top hat puckers at the thought of doing that now with my smartphone.
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May 19, 2013 06:42
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nature6pk posted:I managed to drop my old Siemens C65 phone off a lift 26 feet down to a concrete floor, and it only had a minor scratch on the corner it landed upon. My old Sony-Erricson candy bar had a busted antenna which oddly wasn't covered under its damage protection. So I threw that thing 30+ feet in the air onto concrete 4 times before the tiny 2 line LCD screen finally cracked. It still worked, but now at least I could get it replaced.
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May 19, 2013 19:07
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nature6pk posted:I managed to drop my old Siemens C65 phone off a lift 26 feet down to a concrete floor, and it only had a minor scratch on the corner it landed upon.
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May 20, 2013 15:05
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Pilsner posted:Old phone: Press down (button or joystick), press first letter of contact's name - or keep pressing down until reaching the contact. Press call button. I agree with you, I got my first smartphone this winter and while I love it I think the thing it does least well is act as a phone.
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May 20, 2013 16:20
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Bought a reel-to-reel player (Akai GX-255) at a thrift store last weekend. Yesterday, I finally got some tapes--a whole box of them! I've been going through the unlabeled ones; so far I've found Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "Tommy" by The Who, and a talk given in 1966 by someone from a college in Sacramento. Also verified that the recording function works by taping over part of a recording of a Christian radio station. Playback on pretty much every tape is just a little bit too fast, so I'm going to crack open the case and see if I can debug it. Or break it.
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May 20, 2013 18:27
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It's quite possible that your machine is fine, and the machine that recorded every one of those tapes was running slow. Have you tried a tape from another source?
Ron Burgundy has a new favorite as of 18:35 on May 20, 2013 |
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May 20, 2013 18:30
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