Drone_Fragger posted:

British coinage is great because if you flick pennies out of a car window while traveling at speed they tend to hit other cars fast enough to smash windscreens. Good times.

Krispy Kareem posted:

I can hardly imagine what being a cashier these days must be like. More than half the time you're not handling cash and when you do credit card transactions you never forget to give the card back to the customer. Must be dreamy...

Antifreeze Head posted:

At least that held true until the Mint here started issuing commemorative designs all the drat time. Now I only make an exception to set aside the quarters struck in 1999 because they are a loving embarrassment and I hate that they are in circulation.

drgnwr1 posted:

The same thing happened when the U.S. started minting state quarters. Companies came out with maps and books to place a quarter for each state in. Then if you really wanted to get technical, there were 2 mints running, noted on the coin by a d or s. So one could really get picky about which they were collecting if they wanted to. (I may have dabbled in doing this when they were conning out for the first couple years but lost interest in waiting for a new quarter to be released quarterly).

WebDog posted:

WebDog posted:

Old ads are kinda cheating.

Veotax posted:

Don't you guys have Chip & Pin? I almost never have to touch the customer's card.

WebDog posted:

And print screen?

tribbledirigible posted:

I'd lime to draw attention to the Telex number at the bottom of this screen. Basically a point to point text messaging system that weren't unlike the telepgraph crossed sith a fax machine. A law firm I once worked for had one sittting in a closet with some casette based computers.

quote:

There were 500 unused telex machines bought by the previous government, each was put into one factory. In the control centre in Santiago, each day data coming from each factory (several numbers, such as raw material input, production output and number of absentees) were put into a computer, which made short-term predictions and necessary adjustments. There were four levels of control (firm, branch, sector, total), with algedonic feedback. If one level of control did not remedy a problem in a certain interval, the higher level was notified. The results were discussed in the operations room and a top-level plan was made.

quote:

According to Gustavo Silva (executive secretary of energy in CORFO), using the system's telex machines, the government was able to guarantee the transport of food into the city with only about 200 trucks driven by strike-breakers, recouping the shortages caused by 40,000 striking truck drivers.

quote:

At the center of Project Cybersyn (for “cybernetics synergy”) was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made. Those seated in the op room would review critical highlights—helpfully summarized with up and down arrows—from a real-time feed of factory data from around the country. The prototype op room was built in downtown Santiago, in the interior courtyard of a building occupied by the national telecom company. It was a hexagonal space, thirty-three feet in diameter, accommodating seven white fibreglass swivel chairs with orange cushions and, on the walls, futuristic screens. Tables and paper were banned. Beer was building the future, and it had to look like the future.

That was a challenge: the Chilean government was running low on cash and supplies; the United States, dismayed by Allende’s nationalization campaign, was doing its best to cut Chile off. And so a certain amount of improvisation was necessary. Four screens could show hundreds of pictures and figures at the touch of a button, delivering historical and statistical information about production—the Datafeed—but the screen displays had to be drawn (and redrawn) by hand, a job performed by four young female graphic designers. Given Beer’s plans to build an entire “factory to turn out operations rooms”—every state-run industrial concern was to have one—Project Cybersyn could at least provide graphic designers with full employment.

Beer, who was fond of cigars and whiskey, made sure that an ashtray and a small holder for a glass were built into one of the armrests for each chair. (Sometimes, it seemed, the task of managing the economy went better with a buzz on.) The other armrest featured rows of buttons for navigating the screens. In addition to the Datafeed, there was a screen that simulated the future state of the Chilean economy under various conditions. Before you set prices, established production quotas, or shifted petroleum allocations, you could see how your decision would play out.

One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country’s citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss. The plan was to connect these devices to a network—it would ride on the existing TV networks—so that the total national happiness at any moment in time could be determined. The algedonic meter, as the device was called (from the Greek algos, “pain,” and hedone, “pleasure”), would measure only raw pleasure-or-pain reactions to show whether government policies were working.

WebDog posted:

ASCII art is older than you might think.

C.M. Kruger posted:

SubG posted:

That article is from 1948, but it's even older than that. The first commercially produced and successful typewriter was introduced in the 1870s, and there are surviving examples of typewriter art from the 1890s. E.g., from Pitman's Typewriter Manual published in 1893:

Collateral Damage posted:

Don't scare the natives. They're not ready for that level of civilisation yet.

Last Chance posted:

We're skipping over it for stuff like ApplePay and whatever Google does. No point in bothering with chip and pin now.

WeX Majors posted:

I will make it my life's work to be able to sit in one of those chairs while I make some important decision. I don't care if the decision is "do you want Chinese or Pizza for dinner", it needs to happen.

1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

I lived in Korea for a while and they have a similar system, but now I live in Japan and it's like going back to the stone age. Cash is almost universal here and many places don't even accept credit cards, much less any other kind of electronic payment. It's a good thing petty theft is uncommon here considering I often have several hundred dollars of cash on me.

blugu64 posted:

So people without small bills...how do you pay for things like Parking meters, or one of those parking attendants at a sporting event?

blugu64 posted:

So people without small bills...how do you pay for things like Parking meters, or one of those parking attendants at a sporting event?

drgnwr1 posted:

Its the same going to small towns or even older/hole in the wall places in the U.S. Sometimes they have the stickers posted on the doors that they accept this list of cards, other times they don't. And since I carry plastic around with me I'm rarely carrying any cash, though I should just in case when I find myself in a place like this. Some restaurants are aware of this fact and have adapted and installed an ATM on prem.

Platystemon posted:

Your parking meters take bills?

WebDog posted:

It's measured in mega-clicks

ComputerWorld posted:

E-books

E-book readers started being sold about 10 years ago and are still being developed. The most recent entrant into the market is the Sony Reader. But they're still a flop.

ComputerWorld posted:

Speech recognition

Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet. Part of the problem is that, even with 99% accuracy, there are still a lot of errors to correct. Plus, many of us use computers in public places where speech recognition would be clumsy, embarrassing or downright rude. Still, the technology continues to improve, and it is being used in niche markets such as in medicine. Maybe someday it'll make it to the rest of us.

ComputerWorld posted:

Internet currency

Remember Flooz and Beenz? These two Internet bubble vendors arguably deserved to die simply because of their goofy names. They provided online currency, which many dot-com proponents in the late '90s considered the secret sauce that would lead to the wild success of e-commerce.

ListVerse posted:

10. “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.” -– Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

Platystemon posted:

Your parking meters take bills?

Antifreeze Head posted:

The article was published in April of 2007, the Kindle released in November of 2007. Tablet computing gained popularity a few years later and now they pretty much all come pre-shipped with a few e-books. I guess there is an argument to be made about dedicated e-book readers flopping, but you could almost use that same line of argument for any device which a smartphone includes in its repertoire.

PhotoKirk posted:

I hope those are set up as a RAID.

quote:

E-books
E-book readers started being sold about 10 years ago and are still being developed. The most recent entrant into the market is the Sony Reader. But they're still a flop.

ranbo das posted:

Doesn't that just mean that you have to memorize a new pin for each credit card you own?

1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

That both surprises me and doesn't, speaking as a non-American who has only ever visited the US once. I view the US as one of (if not the most) technologically advanced places on the planet, but I also realise it's a very big and diverse country so what I experienced in big cities isn't representative of the entire country.

ranbo das posted:

Chip and Pin is going to be the de facto swap to chip and pin for the USA, although from a consumer's point of view I never got the fuss. Doesn't that just mean that you have to memorize a new pin for each credit card you own? Seems like a hassle for pretty much no benefit to me. I get that corporations and companies benefit, so I can see why they'd like it.

Antifreeze Head posted:

Siri, how wrong was ComputerWorld about voice recognition flopping?

Phanatic posted:

Is Siri really the example you want to use there? I don't think I've ever successfully used it for anything completely non-trivial. It can't find me the nearest coffee shop along my route, it can't find me a public parking lot in Ocean City, it's not hooked in to the platform's other flagship apps (Like, "Siri, rate this song 4 stars" should actually be a thing, as should "Siri, add this song to [playlist name].")

Does anyone think Siri's anything more than a gimmick? What do you use it for?