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axolotl farmer posted:You can still see this kind of hallway pager in older office buildings and public institutions like universities and government agencies. An obvious flaw is that if a bulb burns out it will show the wrong pattern. It's definitely obsolete technology. They were getting phased out or falling into disuse already in the 90s.
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May 18, 2016 14:23
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Lowen SoDium posted:My company used pagers for IT oncall up until about 8 years ago, and phazed the out for cell phones, then iPhones. The biggest reason we switched was the pagers we going from $12 a month to $20, and cell phones costed us a few bucks more per month. Someone told me that the real reason they try to get people to turn off their devices during takeoff and landing is to get people to maybe possibly pay attention to the safety stuff during takeoff and landing, when they're giving the safety briefing and when problems are most likely to happen.
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May 18, 2016 14:25
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axolotl farmer posted:You can still see this kind of hallway pager in older office buildings and public institutions like universities and government agencies. My parents’ church had these lights to discreetly alert doctors who were on‐call. There was a row of I think five bulbs, each a different colour. With no blinking allowed, thirty‐one codes are possible.
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May 18, 2016 14:30
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Lowen SoDium posted:The cell phones can disrupt medical equipment, airplane equipment, etc thing has always struck me as pretty stupid. If there was any truth to it in even a slightly dangerous way, do you think that they would even let you take a phone in to a hospital or airplane? They used to say the samething about laptops on airplanes in the 90's. I'm pretty sure I read some posts in the Aeronautical Insanity thread indicating that the interference is real. Maybe it was only in particular circumstances that nobody really cares about though, I forget.
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May 18, 2016 14:36
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TotalLossBrain posted:A rifle prominently featured in neocon masturbatory fantasy novel "Unintended Consequences". Holy poo poo I looked it up, and the cover is a soldier raping lady justice in front of the burning US constitution  e: OMG "In one part of the novel, he races his hot-rodded GMC truck against a rival Porsche, with Bowman winning, driving in excess of 140 mph to win" this book must be so bad. I'm tempted to read it e: HAHAHAHAHA of course the only female character is "a victim of childhood abuse and organized crime", "abducted by mafia thugs during a trip to Chicago, Illinois, who force her to become a sex slave for mafia bosses and leaders" even hackbunny has a new favorite as of 15:45 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 15:41
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There's a bad book thread if you want to share more. 
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May 18, 2016 15:48
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Humphreys posted:I can't believe that sort of talk for some reason. Isn't part of the FCC testing meant to determine if a radio source can interfere with other equipment? Sure, but plenty of radio sources can and do interfere with other equipment. It depends on the license what's allowed or not. *Unlicensed* devices aren't allowed to interfere with other equipment, and if other equipment interferes with them the users of those unlicensed devices are SOL. A licensed device is allowed to radiate per its license, and if it causes interference with an unlicensed device (like most of the stuff in a hospital, all its computers and diagnostic machines etc), that interference is allowed, so the hospital's going to want to tell people "Don't bring things in here that cause interference." Given the ubiquity of cellphones, people who are designing mission-critical stuff like flight control systems or hospital EKGs, now try to design them so cell phone interference won't be a problem, because you can't rely on peoples' willful compliance with such requests to prevent crashing the plane/killing the patient. So it's not an issue. Hospitals' concerns about cellphones are currently more related to HIPAA fears, or the plain old fear that someone will capture malfeasance/mispractice with their camera. I got bitched out by a nurse for snapping a picture of my mother's vital signs on the monitor by her bed. Which I can sort of understand, given the stupidity of HIPAA. Lowen SoDium posted:The cell phones can disrupt medical equipment, airplane equipment, etc thing has always struck me as pretty stupid. If there was any truth to it in even a slightly dangerous way, do you think that they would even let you take a phone in to a hospital or airplane? They used to say the samething about laptops on airplanes in the 90's. Cell phones and other carryon electronics can absolutely cause interference with airplane equipment and medical equipment. Here's the dirty secret: Know what else causes interference with airplane equipment? The other airplane equipment. You've got a dozen different boxes from multiple manufacturers all flying through the sky inside a good approximation of a Faraday cage, they're going to crosstalk. So you design your box to work properly in that environment. You do sanity checks on your inputs, you write software that discriminates properly. It's not too hard to distinguish between "noise" and "valid input" unless the noise is coming from a jamming pod on an EF-111 or something (Obsolete tech callout. Still can't believe the USAF doesn't operate its own dedicated EW aircraft, but anyway). Imagined posted:Someone told me that the real reason they try to get people to turn off their devices during takeoff and landing is to get people to maybe possibly pay attention to the safety stuff during takeoff and landing, when they're giving the safety briefing and when problems are most likely to happen. Except that they don't care if you're heads-down in a book, or listening to a portable CD player, etc. They only told you to turn off cellphones and the like, or put them in airplane mode. If "they want you to pay attention" was the reason, the restriction would be far broader. Flight attendants don't care if you pay attention to the briefings anyway. The real reason for turning off cellphones, back in the day, was the nature of the cellular network. When you're on the ground and moving at 60mph, you have line of sight to only a couple towers at the same time and handoff isn't an issue. If you're a few thousand feet up at 500 knots you have LOS to a lot of towers, you're reserving a lot more channels and the handoff is much more of a problem. Again, back the in day: I expect current cell towers have discrimination built in to reject connections like that. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 17:05 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 16:47
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axolotl farmer posted:You can still see this kind of hallway pager in older office buildings and public institutions like universities and government agencies. Seems similar to the thing they had at some restaurants to tell the waitresses they had an order up. It would ding, and then their number would light up.
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May 18, 2016 16:50
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I know that my dentist has a no cell phones rule that isn't because of anything related to equipment but rather from people acting like tremendous idiots and trying to answer their phones in the middle of their dental cleanings 
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May 18, 2016 17:49
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Humphreys posted:This is one band I would love to see live. Looks like a lot of fun. Best concert I've been to, no question about it.
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May 18, 2016 18:06
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Lowen SoDium posted:My company used pagers for IT oncall up until about 8 years ago, and phazed the out for cell phones, then iPhones. The biggest reason we switched was the pagers we going from $12 a month to $20, and cell phones costed us a few bucks more per month. My apartment complex used to equip one of the maintenance guys with a pager for emergency calls on the weekend. They eventually converted him to a cell phone because I don't think anyone knew how to deal with calling a pager. I certainly didn't as I've never called a pager in my entire life.
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May 19, 2016 04:52
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This reminds me of the setup my middle/high school had, where they used colored signal lights to time the classes rather than bells, or clocks in the classrooms. The white light was lit for something like the first two-thirds of the period, then green for the last third, then amber for one minute as a signal to wrap things up, then red while people went to their next class, then blinking red for the last minute before the next class started. The idea was to cut down on getting distracted by the clock, which it did pretty well, though in boring classes people tended to start chanting "aaam-berrr" under their breath towards the end. They gave up on it a few years after I graduated—it dated back to at least the mid-'60s so god knows how much of a pain it was to keep running, particularly if it was a custom build.
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May 19, 2016 06:16
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Lazlo Nibble posted:This reminds me of the setup my middle/high school had, where they used colored signal lights to time the classes rather than bells, or clocks in the classrooms. The white light was lit for something like the first two-thirds of the period, then green for the last third, then amber for one minute as a signal to wrap things up, then red while people went to their next class, then blinking red for the last minute before the next class started. The idea was to cut down on getting distracted by the clock, which it did pretty well, though in boring classes people tended to start chanting "aaam-berrr" under their breath towards the end. They gave up on it a few years after I graduated—it dated back to at least the mid-'60s so god knows how much of a pain it was to keep running, particularly if it was a custom build. Sounds terrible. Did they ban watches as well?
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May 19, 2016 06:49
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I actually had a regional flight in Norway in 2000-2001 where when they started up the plane the pilot got on the intercom and told us that someone had forgotten to turn off their mobile phone and asked us to check them again. That was with a twin prop 30ish seater plane, probably a Dash-8 or similar.
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May 19, 2016 09:11
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Supradog posted:I actually had a regional flight in Norway in 2000-2001 where when they started up the plane the pilot got on the intercom and told us that someone had forgotten to turn off their mobile phone and asked us to check them again. That was with a twin prop 30ish seater plane, probably a Dash-8 or similar. I doubt the pilot noticed any interference at that particular time. More often than not, such announcements are a ploy to get those last few passengers to turn off their phones. There’s always some who think the rules are beneath them. It’s a shrewd move as a precautionary measure.
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May 19, 2016 09:28
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I have heard that the main reason why they ask you to turn your phone off is because the pilots can sometimes hear signals through the radios on their headsets and it's very annoying and distracting. If you've ever put a phone by a speaker and had a message come through you know what I'm talking about. That seems pretty reasonable (if it's true, of course).
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May 19, 2016 12:19
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I have heard that the main reason why they ask you to turn your phone off is because the pilots can sometimes hear signals through the radios on their headsets and it's very annoying and distracting. If you've ever put a phone by a speaker and had a message come through you know what I'm talking about. That seems pretty reasonable (if it's true, of course). Duttdurrduttduttbweeeeee.... Yeah, I can easily imagine a Widerøe flight in 2001 having equipment that picked up audible cellphone interference.
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May 19, 2016 13:22
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The same goes for being on set and you're hooked into a radio headset. Even if someone's phone is on silent you'll hear the interference over the radio. Also a similar thing for radio mics having to be at a legal frequency as they got sick of people picking into police channels.
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May 19, 2016 13:26
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Lazlo Nibble posted:This reminds me of the setup my middle/high school had, where they used colored signal lights to time the classes rather than bells, or clocks in the classrooms. The white light was lit for something like the first two-thirds of the period, then green for the last third, then amber for one minute as a signal to wrap things up, then red while people went to their next class, then blinking red for the last minute before the next class started. The idea was to cut down on getting distracted by the clock, which it did pretty well, though in boring classes people tended to start chanting "aaam-berrr" under their breath towards the end. They gave up on it a few years after I graduated—it dated back to at least the mid-'60s so god knows how much of a pain it was to keep running, particularly if it was a custom build. When I was a student in college and also when I was a TA at same, I hated the clock watchers. At 5 minutes to the hour, the clock-watchers would start putting their stuff away and zipping up their bags. I've got 5 loving minutes assholes! Let me finish my lecture! You paid for this education, use the time wisely. It's not high school.
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May 19, 2016 14:31
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Related to paging in hospitals, I walk past the access panels for the pneumatic message tubes at my job every day. There's probably miles of them running through the walls and floors that'll never be used again but aren't worth removing unless there is a major renovation.
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May 19, 2016 20:47
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mostlygray posted:When I was a student in college and also when I was a TA at same, I hated the clock watchers. At 5 minutes to the hour, the clock-watchers would start putting their stuff away and zipping up their bags. I've got 5 loving minutes assholes! Let me finish my lecture! You paid for this education, use the time wisely. It's not high school. I was on a campus that spread more than 6 miles with many programs having to spread the breadth of it in a 15 minute interval. Nevermind that the first and last 5 minutes of a 50+ minute lecture should be summarizing the main points anyway, not introducing new information. Not understanding that schedules exist and presentation skills should be kept up does sound like all the best of academia though.
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May 19, 2016 20:58
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deoju posted:Related to paging in hospitals, I walk past the access panels for the pneumatic message tubes at my job every day. There's probably miles of them running through the walls and floors that'll never be used again but aren't worth removing unless there is a major renovation. I've read about a hospital who have begun using their pneumatic system again for physical test samples since it was much quicker than running between buildings.
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May 19, 2016 21:05
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Guy Axlerod posted:Seems similar to the thing they had at some restaurants to tell the waitresses they had an order up. It would ding, and then their number would light up. Yep - I remember going to Pizza Hut in the late 70s-early 80s and they had a similar system. The best was our local Showbiz during that same time period - you'd place your order at the counter, then watch for your number on a TV screen. Except the TV screen animated your numbers along with Pac Man, Pong, and the like. When your number was up, you'd go pick it up at another counter. Good times, I tell you.
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May 19, 2016 21:26
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Boiled Water posted:I've read about a hospital who have begun using their pneumatic system again for physical test samples since it was much quicker than running between buildings. Huh. I'm not an bio med engineer but I figured firing potential pathogens through a hospital-wide network of imperfectly sealed tubes would be A Bad Idea. Somebody must have done the math on it and figured it was OK. 
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May 19, 2016 21:44
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deoju posted:Huh. I'm not an bio med engineer but I figured firing potential pathogens through a hospital-wide network of imperfectly sealed tubes would be A Bad Idea. Somebody must have done the math on it and figured it was OK. I was in an emergency room in February that was doing just that. Seemed pretty okay to me.
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May 19, 2016 21:59
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Quite a few hospitals still use tube systems for delivering samples and drugs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube Some are even building new ones. http://www.post-gazette.com/news/he...es/201210280156 XYZ has a new favorite as of 22:32 on May 19, 2016 |
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May 19, 2016 22:29
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deoju posted:Huh. I'm not an bio med engineer but I figured firing potential pathogens through a hospital-wide network of imperfectly sealed tubes would be A Bad Idea. Somebody must have done the math on it and figured it was OK. You put it in a sealed container good enough to walk around with it. Then you put that in another sealed capsule shaped for the pneumatic system. Then you put that in the tube. It should be fine.
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May 19, 2016 22:42
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I got a whippin' earlier in the thread over posting pneumatic tubes as being obsolete.  EDIT: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495621&userid=128422#post408730499
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May 19, 2016 23:27
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Goober Peas posted:Yep - I remember going to Pizza Hut in the late 70s-early 80s and they had a similar system. Chuck E Cheese did that, but not as fancy. All the active numbers would be up, and when a new number came up it took up the whole screen and flashed.
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May 19, 2016 23:27
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XYZ posted:Quite a few hospitals still use tube systems for delivering samples and drugs. The last time I was at the Doctor-Plex, I got my prescription from a "vending machine" in the waiting room. I asked how it worked. They take the doctor's scrip (that he creates on a tablet) and fire it to their on-site pharmacist. They approve it (checking against interactions/dosage/allergies) and prints a barcode. You take the barcode to the machine and it scans it. Then a big honking robot fills a bottle (liquid/tablets/capsules), labels it, caps and fires it across the campus in a pneumatic tube. You pay for your co-pay with cash or debit/credit card. It then spits out the bottle and prints a receipt and drug fact-sheets. All said and done, from the time you scan the barcode to getting your meds is about 30 to 45 seconds. The longest part of the process is getting the pharmacist approval (that took about 5 minutes).
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May 19, 2016 23:49
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I'm sure this counts under "failed technology," pneumatic tube discussion reminded me of these videos. What if someone built a restaurant around a complicated system of automatic food delivery? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4qKt6Wr5w Or to take that concept to another scale, how about building an entire city around the idea of replacing mail service with an enormous system of conveyor belt and elevators? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSgzH66oH28
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May 20, 2016 17:30
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All of Dahir Insaat's 'inventions' are that overly complex and insane.
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May 20, 2016 19:45
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If that restaurant existed, I would go to it once for the novelty, and possibly see it fail hilariously.
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May 20, 2016 19:49
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:All of Dahir Insaat's 'inventions' are that overly complex and insane. Do they actually make anything besides YouTube videos? Their site is, uh, light on information.
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May 20, 2016 19:53
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Toast Museum posted:Do they actually make anything besides YouTube videos? Their site is, uh, light on information. The current best guess I've heard is that it's a design/animation/whatever student's portfolio work.
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May 21, 2016 02:29
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Rebel Blob posted:I'm sure this counts under "failed technology," pneumatic tube discussion reminded me of these videos. What if someone built a restaurant around a complicated system of automatic food delivery? Looks like they took the old 'Automat' idea and ran with it. Bonus old-timey video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrbyqUOObdU
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May 21, 2016 03:31
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hackbunny posted:Holy poo poo I looked it up, and the cover is a soldier raping lady justice in front of the burning US constitution
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May 21, 2016 04:33
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Rebel Blob posted:I'm sure this counts under "failed technology," pneumatic tube discussion reminded me of these videos. What if someone built a restaurant around a complicated system of automatic food delivery? This looks like poo poo a kid would come up with based on watching lots and lots of old cartoons where automatic services go wrong. I cannot imagine anything like this being practical, reliable or even affordable. Like all you'd need is one thing to go wrong inside and everything just stops working. -
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May 21, 2016 05:32
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twistedmentat posted:This looks like poo poo a kid would come up with based on watching lots and lots of old cartoons where automatic services go wrong. I cannot imagine anything like this being practical, reliable or even affordable. Like all you'd need is one thing to go wrong inside and everything just stops working. http://vmashup.com/fYpnHjTq
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May 21, 2016 05:47
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Exactly. I'm glad that Powerhouse automatically comes to mind when people see complex machines doing tasks.
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May 21, 2016 05:50
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