|
It's easier in the civilized world because they can mandate laws at the federal level that are immediately implemented. In the US, most things federally mandated have to be implemented by state law, giving the lobbyists another chance to gently caress it up - and if you think the government is corrupt on a federal level, just wait until you get a taste of what goes on at the state level. e. According to a former boss who once worked with the Texas legislature, their sessions are nothing but a giant party full of booze, drugs, and hookers, with the state legislators basically doing nothing but sitting around with their pockets open, waiting for a lobbyist to insert a wad of money along with a pre-canned opinion to be regurgitated. The only legislators who are in any way proactive are the religious fundamental nutjobs praying for a speedy apocalypse (and if you think they aren't partying along with the rest, then buddy, you've never seen a Baptist cut loose on the weekends.) rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 23:55 on Jul 12, 2016 |
#
?
Jul 12, 2016 23:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 18, 2024 07:44 |
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:My workplace still hands out physical checks to be cashed and only just began a mass switch to electronic timesheets and direct deposit this month. Part of the reason is that many of the employees and contractors are old farts who get confused by anything harder than writing their hours out in pencil and cashing a check, and another part is that the company won't pay the big bucks to have an excellent and efficient payment system created for them and we've suffered numerous glitches and bugs. My employer just moved to electronic pay stubs which I'm all for because it's a pain in the rear end to file away all of them when I would rather just go online to check them and only print them out on the very, very rare occasion that I need them. The blue-collar workers in our production department, on the other hand, all freaked out about this because most of them are scared of computers and don't have internet access outside of work.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 04:24
|
|
|
So the USA is basically the very worst of obsolete and failed technology?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 07:45
|
|
|
Nutsngum posted:So the USA is basically the very worst of obsolete and failed technology? In South Korea Internet Explorer used to be mandatory for Internet banking, whilst the fax machine is still a business necessity in Japan so it's not all obsolete.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 09:05
|
|
|
The fax is still one of our most critical systems here. We get fund purchase orders via fax, and the only validation of authenticity made is that the sender's fax number is correct. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 09:24
|
|
|
Nutsngum posted:So the USA is basically the very worst of obsolete and failed technology? It's only marginally less of a failed state than Venezuela.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 09:54
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:The fax is still one of our most critical systems here. A fax machine is good. I own one because I ran a business 10 years ago (it's a brother laser MFC) and some places wanted contracts or purchase orders faxed rather than emailed 10 years ago due to a fax being a business standard communication unlike email back then. I get happy every time I have an excuse to use it these day, like letters to banks or forms to insurers etc, since some only accept only fax or mail but postage for a letter has gone up to $1 and takes 3-5 days for even local mail (and they promise to delay your mail here in Australia now just to gently caress with us...). gently caress Auspost, they're obsolete for most communications due to email and other things. With a fax machine they are even more obsolete  Last time a hospital sent me a letter for an appointment 6 days from mailing and they paid the extra 50c or whatever for express. Still took 7 days for me to get it - I received the letter after the appointment time had passed. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 11:07 on Jul 13, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 10:53
|
|
|
Trying the Win10 upgrade to Pro over 7 Ultimate. Wish me luck! grumble grumble new GPU, DirectX12 blah blah
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 10:58
|
|
|
Work for the gov't so: Fax machine used half a dozen times a day? Check. Printers that use ink ribbons and continuous feed paper with the little holes on the sides? Check.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 11:23
|
|
|
Powerlurker posted:My employer just moved to electronic pay stubs which I'm all for because it's a pain in the rear end to file away all of them when I would rather just go online to check them and only print them out on the very, very rare occasion that I need them. The blue-collar workers in our production department, on the other hand, all freaked out about this because most of them are scared of computers and don't have internet access outside of work. At least one of our instructors doesn't even have a computer with an Internet connection at home. He does all his online work on a phone or tablet and is incredibly obstinate, so he insists on getting a check to cash. In fact, all but one of our instructors are incredible prima donnas like that! We also have one old guy in the shipping room who outright lives in a church and only works one or two days a week at our office because he spends the rest of his time cooking and cleaning for the church to pay for room and board, so he's definitely not filling out an online timesheet because he basically lives the life of an urban peasant in the 18th century.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 13:42
|
|
|
Nutsngum posted:So the USA is basically the very worst of obsolete and failed technology? State-level elected government sure is. Truth be told, though, the government of the United States and all states and territories thereof is not and has never been designed to function in a superb manner. It's explicitly designed so that, no matter what retarded fuckmonkey gets elected to whatever position and how much damage they try to do while in office, the system continues to function. No one person alone can cripple the basic function of the government, and coalitions of various actively malicious jackholes would take a tremendous amount of time, money, and effort to do so. You might look at recent events and declare it a failed state, and while there are certainly some huge problems and a growing disconnect between citizens and the government, it hasn't failed yet. The basic mandates of the Constitution are still covered: establish justice (ie. law continued to be enforced, if sometimes poorly), insure domestic tranquility (we haven't broken out into Mad Max style anarchy yet), provide for the common defense (the military might be a bloated, bureaucratic hellhole, but we can still stomp a hole in anyone who challenges us on our own turf) promote the general welfare (people generally have jobs and can contribute to the economy, retirees still get their social security checks, medical care is available to anyone who needs it even if it will bankrupt you, etc.) and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity (we're still free to consume the media we want, generate and freely express opinions of our own, buy what we can afford, go where we want to go, and do as we please, so long as we're not breaking the law or hurting someone else). The government needs to be fixed, not thrown away and replaced with something entirely different. rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 23:48 on Jul 13, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 23:45
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:Trying the Win10 upgrade to Pro over 7 Ultimate. Wish me luck! It went really well for me aside from needing to hunt down the no p2p-type updates because the internet out here in the sticks gets clogged up trying to upload forever So an obsolete technology screws up a newer one who knew
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 03:07
|
|
|
Yeah I finally took the plunge and upgraded the laptop to Win10, it's fine, start menu I don't really like [even after unpinning the stupid metro boxes] but I used Classic Shell for that, and the new settings window thing is dumb but old control panel still exists so I'm good
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 03:13
|
|
|
Blackchamber posted:Printers that use ink ribbons and continuous feed paper with the little holes on the sides? Check.  tractor feed. I once did some consulting work at a mom & pop business where the owner preferred to continue to pay for his 9 pin Okidata printer heads to be replaced rather than switch to a pair of laser printers (laser printers would have paid for themselves in consumables alone over a period of a year or two) because he still had some ungodly amount of triplicate carbon invoice papers with the company logo stashed away in the back of their warehouse.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 06:29
|
|
|
Geoj posted:
Sounds like my loving parents, who are still using a 30" tube TV manufactured in 1989 because it was $250 when they bought it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 07:05
|
|
|
I haven't used one in 20 years, but in my mind I can still hear my old dot matrix tractor feed printer I used to use with my C64.  I unironically loved how that sounded. BZZZZRRRRRT BZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRT JUST SIX MORE HOURS UNTIL THIS BANNER'S DONE PRINTING
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 08:24
|
|
|
Once we get to a point where everything is easy, those kind of printers will come back simply for their novelty. I am looking forward to it. Think how we had a race towards better and better game graphics and now pixel art and Minecraft are a thing. Give it time, ridiculous dot-matrix printers will be back. They add gravity to a situation.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 08:29
|
|
|
Shugojin posted:It went really well for me aside from needing to hunt down the no p2p-type updates because the internet out here in the sticks gets clogged up trying to upload forever My update won't go past the 'Check for updates' phase which has been stuck for 8-9 hours at 0%. This is the second run through with same effect.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 08:33
|
|
|
cheerfullydrab posted:Once we get to a point where everything is easy, those kind of printers will come back simply for their novelty. I am looking forward to it. I like how a dot matrix will outlast an inkjet by a whole order of magnitude. Still on the original ribbon.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 09:23
|
|
|
Came across a bunch of tapes at work in a format I knew very little about : Philips VCR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TElmbdDWtI Nice, writeup here (but with weird site navigation): http://www.totalrewind.org/philips.htm Now I just need to track down functional playback equipment, to see if we can salvage any of the stuff on these 40 year old tapes...
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 10:02
|
|
|
Blackchamber posted:Printers that use ink ribbons and continuous feed paper with the little holes on the sides? Check. People still use dot matrix printers because they can print directly onto duplicate/triplicate forms.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 12:01
|
|
|
We have a tractor feed printer here for our AS400. It's 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide. Makes a hell of a racket when printing. Basically only used now to print code, everything else gets sent electronically.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 14:38
|
|
|
GreenNight posted:We have a tractor feed printer here for our AS400. It's 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide. Makes a hell of a racket when printing. Basically only used now to print code, everything else gets sent electronically. Sounds like it might be a line printer. Does is have a shroud and make a *CHUNKCHUNKCHUNK* sound when it prints? Gotta watch that paper dust that gets generated. I believe the old IBM line printers are the reason for the "lp0 on fire" error code in the kernel.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 15:26
|
|
|
flosofl posted:Sounds like it might be a line printer. Does is have a shroud and make a *CHUNKCHUNKCHUNK* sound when it prints? Yes, it's a line printer. The inside gets vacuumed out a few times a year.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 15:29
|
|
|
flosofl posted:Sounds like it might be a line printer. Does is have a shroud and make a *CHUNKCHUNKCHUNK* sound when it prints? In the late 90s I worked IT for a local newspaper, and we used those line printers for bundle wraps and other things. They were incredibly big, incredibly loud, incredibly fast and made so much dust. One of my jobs was to vacuum them out weekly with our special non sparking toner/dust vacuums. Obsolete things: Our inserter (that would puff the paper open and insert the ads) ran off a no-poo poo, original PDP11.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 15:47
|
|
|
Our old laserjet broke at work, so we put in a huge Konica multifunction machine. To fit it in, I threw out the fax; the only thing we'd used it for the last years was receiving about one spam fax per year. I think the new one has a fax modem, but eh - not worth the bother. Apparently 2016 is the year of the fax-less hospital research department. In unsurprising news, we only kept it around in the first place because we sporadically had to fax things to Americans. I vaguely remember arranging an international fax call on our internal phone system was annoying and complicated.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 22:44
|
|
|
Sweevo posted:People still use dot matrix printers because they can print directly onto duplicate/triplicate forms. That and they're incredibly robust in filthy shop environments. When I left the car dealership I was fixing a paper jam in the Oki and noticed the plastic paper guide ridges had been totally worn away from decades of use. It was occasionally blown out with compressed air when it got too cruddy. The ribbon cartridges only last about two weeks but when you buy them in bulk they're ridiculously cheap. Also it's a nice little cartridge that just drops in, unlike the huge ancient Texas Instruments printer the front office used where I got ribbon on two spools and had to feed it all around just so. They also had a few typewriters for filling out triplicate carbon forms.
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2016 16:47
|
|
|
Well some apparently obsolete tech has at least let my PC hobble along. My attempts to get Windows 10 installed ended with an install that doesn't support ANY form of USB. No keyboard, no mouse and no USB devices (yet still will charge devices connected to it). So here I was with a fresh upgrade at the login screen and no loving way to type my password. Luckily I still had a PS/2 keyboard lying around and a motherboard with support for it. It worked! However on of the keys on the board is dead and it happened to be part of my password. A quick and dirty PS/2 emulation circuit with an arduino and I can at least login and change password to not use that key. Now I have networking up too and even with official drivers and trying windows update to solve the problem - my computer is still crippled 
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 01:56
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:Well some apparently obsolete tech has at least let my PC hobble along. Who's responsible for manufacturing your laptop or motherboard?
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 02:07
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:My attempts to get Windows 10 installed ended with an install that doesn't support ANY form of USB. No keyboard, no mouse and no USB devices (yet still will charge devices connected to it). That sucks pretty bad! Clean install or upgrade? quote:Luckily I still had a PS/2 keyboard lying around and a motherboard with support for it. It worked! I was going to say "I hope you didn't hot plug it" but Wikipedia says it doesn't tend to be an issue on modern systems. I've been turning my SCSI scanner on and off when my PC is turned on too and it hasn't blown anything up yet, I guess I too am living on the edge 
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 02:10
|
|
|
Sir Unimaginative posted:Who's responsible for manufacturing your laptop or motherboard? It's an MSI 970 Gaming edition (AMD). Windows update is slowly working and haha device manager just decided that it doesn't know what my new RX 480 is (it did minutes ago) and now recognises my R9 270. Updates finished - time for a reboot! (and holy poo poo it took a lot of tabbing to get to the quote button - CTRL+F to find quote didn't do poo poo haha) EDIT: After all windows updates. Still no USB. At least all 5 screens and 2 GPUs are recognised now...and wee system reserved partition wasn't upgraded from what it was for win7 to whats needed for win10! Now i have a notification every minute or so bitching I am running out of space. EDIT 2: SUCCESS!!!!! Turns out it was not completely Windows 10's fault. 2 motherboards ago I had an ASUS and it installed a thingy called 'AI manager' or something that controlled USB for sleep state USB charging etc. There, hiding in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{36fc9e60-c465-11cf-8056-444553540000} was an upper and lower filter calling on that process. Deleted those registry entries and a quick reboot later I am back and running! Humphreys has a new favorite as of 04:41 on Jul 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 02:54
|
|
|
And here I thought registry editing was obsolete and failed technology.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 05:41
|
|
|
TotalLossBrain posted:And here I thought registry editing was obsolete and failed technology. My memory is obsolete, I think I tried typing 'Registy' 5 times swearing at microsofts lovely local search intelligence before I remembered that it's 'Regedit' EDIT: To stop this detail... Ever wondered why the CD Audio spec was for 74 minutes? Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I hesitate to post a gizmodo link as a source but here you go: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/08/the-history-of-the-compact-disc/ Humphreys has a new favorite as of 14:31 on Jul 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 08:13
|
|
|
Lincoln posted:I used live in Germany, so I've seen the best-possible rail system for people. The German rail system has totally gone to poo poo since it was privatized.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 18:41
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:The German rail system has totally gone to poo poo since it was privatized. Has it? I've been an expat for over 20 years now, but I did visit last year and took a small regional from Wittenberge to Berlin. It was very convenient and cheap, but I have no frame of reference living in the Western US.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 18:46
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:Well some apparently obsolete tech has at least let my PC hobble along. I had that happen on a first gen Microsoft Surface. After upgrading to Windows 10 it lost all knowledge of networking since Clinton's second term. I had ISDN and cable modem options. No wifi, which is awesome on a device without an ethernet port. I think I ended up having to disable virus protection or something equally stupid and reinstall. So it might have been your motherboard's fault, but Microsoft has issues upgrading it's own hardware as well.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:So here I was with a fresh upgrade at the login screen and no loving way to type my password. Luckily I still had a PS/2 keyboard lying around and a motherboard with support for it. It worked! However on of the keys on the board is dead and it happened to be part of my password. A quick and dirty PS/2 emulation circuit with an arduino and I can at least login and change password to not use that key. Could you have used ascii code (Alt+###) to sidestep a broken key?
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:The German rail system has totally gone to poo poo since it was privatized. I lived there in the mid-80s. Ran flawlessly.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 23:24
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:Could you have used ascii code (Alt+###) to sidestep a broken key? I thought of that when writing the code on the arduino...by then I was in deep enough that I just wanted to get it done.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 08:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 18, 2024 07:44 |
|
|
Zopotantor posted:The German rail system has totally gone to poo poo since it was privatized. I mean the obvious conclusion is that the "best-possible rail system for people" is a state-run one. (Which is true just as with all other public services. You can have an absolutely abysmal state-run public service but you can't have a good private public service oh gently caress see it's already an oxymoron!)
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 08:38
|
|