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IBM promo film from 1970. Tons of obsolete stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIjgZhAjQS4
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Jul 31, 2016 21:53
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Computer viking posted:It's also contextual. Fax is obsolete in Norway. Vinyl is obsolete as a mass market medium for distributing music. Radio tubes are obsolete in radios. When no context is given, only the spergiest of goons would insist on the 100% literal "for everything ever"-reading. Considering the ubiquity of emails and pdfs fax are objectively obsolete everywhere in the world. Unless they're somehow more secure in a way I haven't thought of.
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Jul 31, 2016 22:58
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Boiled Water posted:Considering the ubiquity of emails and pdfs fax are objectively obsolete everywhere in the world. Unless they're somehow more secure in a way I haven't thought of. They're more secure in that they are legally recognized as more secure. whether or not it is in practice is another thing.
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Jul 31, 2016 23:03
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The best way to handle pdf/email security would be for each state/country to handle the storage of an entity's public key(s) through the same mechanisms that they use to handle notaries. Verisign and other for profit key companies have proven their incompetence and greed time and time again; I'd rather whatever fees go into the local treasury than someone private company's pockets
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Jul 31, 2016 23:08
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Sentient Data posted:The best way to handle pdf/email security would be for each state/country to handle the storage of an entity's public key(s) through the same mechanisms that they use to handle notaries. Verisign and other for profit key companies have proven their incompetence and greed time and time again; I'd rather whatever fees go into the local treasury than someone private company's pockets Funny you should mention it, Denmark has an electronic postage system somewhat like this, where you log-in using two-factor identification. All mail sent by the state comes through here. It's very useful compared to paper letters.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:44
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Captain Novolin posted:They're more secure in that they are legally recognized as more secure. This is pretty much nonsense. UTEA is an actual thing, and it is entirely fine with electronic signatures. quote:(a) A record or signature may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:53
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Jerry Cotton posted:PCs are obsolete as a gaming platform. "Instead of agreeing that I was indeed overly pedantic, here's a poor attempt at deflecting the argument using a flawed, and for some emotionally charged analogy. Sincerely, Jerry Cotton" Xythe has a new favorite as of 03:40 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 03:36
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Collateral Damage posted:In practice though, obsolete means something to which there is an established, widely used and objectively superior alternative. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108
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Aug 1, 2016 04:11
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Sentient Data posted:The best way to handle pdf/email security would be for each state/country to handle the storage of an entity's public key(s) through the same mechanisms that they use to handle notaries. Verisign and other for profit key companies have proven their incompetence and greed time and time again; I'd rather whatever fees go into the local treasury than someone private company's pockets The US military actually does exactly this, with your PGP also being encoded into your physical ID.
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Aug 1, 2016 05:19
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Re: faxes count as legal signature: I heard/read somewhere long ago (back when faxes were still A Thing) that non-photo blue was at one time used for signing things specifically to prevent fraud via photographic reproduction methods. Probably just a legend, but otoh, it's pretty easy to cut a signature out of another document and glue it to the fake page and it'll pass for fax purposes. Anybody else worked in a newspaper shop with physical pasteup? That's obsolete. My college paper circa 2003 did all the work in InDesign or whatever, then printed the copy and arranged it with scissors and Scotch tape on on a lightbox running the width of one wall of the "newsroom", then sent it off to the local small-town weekly newspaper that was still running '50s equipment for photographing and printing the pages. The annual special edition with color photos was done all-digital and printed by the big-city daily newspaper up the road. Also obsolete but won't admit it, just like the whole fax-machine industry: dead-tree newspapers, and print media in general. Old people keep them going, but once they die off, it's over. Edit: one time about ten years ago, I went to the local mall (malls, also obsolete even then), and wandered into, IIRC, JC Penney. They had a table piled high with catalogs at the door, and so I picked one up on the way out, because why not? I may have wanted to buy something from them in the future. Cue a clerk yelling "Hey! Put that back, it's only free if you buy something!" Turns out the store's print catalog, a 600-page advertisement for the store, was being sold for $5 in the store with no signage to warn me of the fact that they expected me to pay for it. I can understand charging $5 to get a catalog mailed to you, that poo poo's heavy, but you'd think the ones in the entryway of the physical store would be free in order to encourage people to come back. Nope! Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 06:58 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 06:41
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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KakerMix posted:Wasn't there a thing about a signature through a fax was valid? Something about an emailed signature not counting but a fax one does thus some sort of legal reason for faxes. Am I making this up? This is in Belgium, but it's possible. But honestly, I'm pretty sure they're just old and set in their ways. I imagine in the 1980's you had people refusing to use that newfangled 'fax' gizmo. Even today we have a handful of people habitually sending (non-official) documents by physical mail.
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Aug 1, 2016 07:15
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Xythe posted:"Instead of agreeing that I was indeed overly pedantic, here's a poor attempt at deflecting the argument using a flawed, and for some emotionally charged analogy. What? All my posts are sincere.
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Aug 1, 2016 10:07
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flesh
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Aug 1, 2016 13:03
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Delivery McGee posted:Anybody else worked in a newspaper shop with physical pasteup? That's obsolete. My college paper circa 2003 did all the work in InDesign or whatever, then printed the copy and arranged it with scissors and Scotch tape on on a lightbox running the width of one wall of the "newsroom", then sent it off to the local small-town weekly newspaper that was still running '50s equipment for photographing and printing the pages. The annual special edition with color photos was done all-digital and printed by the big-city daily newspaper up the road. Yup, did paste-up in college and at the Houston Chronicle in the late 1990's. I used to get extra shifts burning printing plates on machines older than I am.
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Aug 1, 2016 13:14
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Why do people hate fax machines so much? A ten digit number is faster/easier to type in than most e-mail addresses and once I press "Send" I don't care that the machine now has to spend the next few minutes sending my stack of grayscale documents to the other end because I'm already doing something else. I didn't even have to attach the document to an email and type "here's that thing I sent you" into the subject line first or dick around with encryption.
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Aug 1, 2016 16:45
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Cat Hatter posted:Why do people hate fax machines so much? A ten digit number is faster/easier to type in than most e-mail addresses and once I press "Send" I don't care that the machine now has to spend the next few minutes sending my stack of grayscale documents to the other end because I'm already doing something else. I didn't even have to attach the document to an email and type "here's that thing I sent you" into the subject line first or dick around with encryption. Faxes have poor image quality compared to other communication methods, provide no reliable troubleshooting or diagnostic method when you have an issue, have no proper mechanism to verify good receipt of fax transmission or that the correct person was the recipient, can be unreliable on phone lines with less than perfect clarity, can be even more unreliable when sent long distance between different carriers, and are the largest pain in the dick when being used over VoIP connections. Anyone who has to support faxes on an enterprise level will ask you to please just use email whenever possible.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:11
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Lowen SoDium posted:Faxes have poor image quality compared to other communication methods, provide no reliable troubleshooting or diagnostic method when you have an issue, have no proper mechanism to verify good receipt of fax transmission or that the correct person was the recipient, can be unreliable on phone lines with less than perfect clarity, can be even more unreliable when sent long distance between different carriers, and are the largest pain in the dick when being used over VoIP connections. It's also much easier to filter spam emails than spam faxes. When a significant portion of a given communication medium you deal with is actively annoying it's very easy to start hating faxes in general.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:18
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Print book sales rose last year. Newspapers are clearly in trouble- they were designed to be quick disposable media and nothing does quick and disposable better than the Internet- but forecasting the death of print overall has always seemed hasty to me.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:25
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Lowen SoDium posted:Faxes have poor image quality compared to other communication methods, provide no reliable troubleshooting or diagnostic method when you have an issue, have no proper mechanism to verify good receipt of fax transmission or that the correct person was the recipient, can be unreliable on phone lines with less than perfect clarity, can be even more unreliable when sent long distance between different carriers, and are the largest pain in the dick when being used over VoIP connections. I'll concede that VoIP support is spotty (although I used to send faxes over my Google Voice line that specifically states that faxes won't work on it) but I don't really give a poo poo about image quality of something that would be sent over a fax machine (black and white text). As to assuring transmission, if a fax machine answers at the other end, I probably typed the number correctly and if something gets garbled during transmission the intended recipient will tell me to resend it, the same way they would if my email went into their spam filter or I forgot to attach the document or something. I apologize that fax machines are a bitch to make work with modern infrastructure, but its easier for the end user so I'm not going to stop using them yet.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:26
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"Memorizing and typing in 10 digit numbers is easier than just picking someone from my contacts list" - a real person, apparently
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Aug 1, 2016 17:28
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Jabor posted:"Memorizing and typing in 10 digit numbers is easier than just picking someone from my contacts list" - a real person, apparently Fax machines have had contacts lists since there were fax machines. If you aren't sending to someone you frequently contact they probably won't be in you email contacts either.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:30
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Cat Hatter posted:Fax machines have had contacts lists since there were fax machines. If you aren't sending to someone you frequently contact they probably won't be in you email contacts either. Literally everyone I have ever exchanged an email with is in my work account's contact list. Welcome to the future.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:38
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Last time I sent a fax I used Adobe Reader's built in tools to add my "signature" and then "printed" it to the office MFP in fax mode, using copy and paste to enter the phone number they included in the email with the PDF form. The fax appeared immediately in my online account on their end, meaning their incoming fax didn't involve putting marks on paper pulp either. On both ends we have optimized the use of Fax, instead of optimizing the process so that it doesn't need the fax.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:39
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Jabor posted:Literally everyone I have ever exchanged an email with is in my work account's contact list. Welcome to the future. Cool, someone automated part of your workflow to make emailing a document almost as quick as using a machine developed in the 60's. What a time to be alive.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:08
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Cross-posted from the Bulk Storage thread, I give you the Recordgraph, used from some time in the 1930s until at least post-WWII.quote:It uses uncoated 35mm Cellulose Acetate film, into which a laterally-modulated groove is embossed. The 'endless' film loops usually comprise 50 ft [15.24 m] of film, wound as a hank of 30 turns. This is loaded onto a magazine from which it is drawn from the centre, through the mechanism of the machine, by a sprocket wheel. During recording, the film is embossed with a sound-track in the form of a groove and then returned to the outside of the magazine. The standard recording speeds are 20, 40 and 60 feet per minute (4, 8 & 12 ips) [ 10.2, 20.4 & 30.6 cms/sec].  Note the complicated tape path. According to Poppy Records, the site I'm getting all my information from, these film loops have become brittle with time, and if you attempt to play them back on a surviving machine, they will probably be irretrievably damaged. If you want to transcribe one of these loops, you'll have to hand-build a machine. This matters in particular because, according to an LA Times article archived at lathetrolls.com, a big chunk of the post-WWII war crimes trials was recorded on Recordgraph. lathetrolls.com posted:What can be done when old devices and software are eclipsed? Electrical engineer Charles Mayn, 63, has spent his career answering that question.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:24
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Obsolete and decaying storage formats are the crisis issue for contemporary archivists, combined with the ease of deleting information. It takes hard work to search several filing cabinets' worth of paper to find all trace of the documents you want to destroy. It's trivial to throw away a PowerPoint after its use is over. Someone obviously never has had to use an external terabyte harddisk with a Matrioshka file system that contains progressively older backups, a fuckton of Thumbs.db files and duplicate JPGs that differ in date of creation by an hour because DST somehow got skipped  Seriously, I would love a print of a photo where on the back you'd have some kind of QR code you could scan to recreate the binary BMP from scratch or something.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:16
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Laserjet 4P posted:Seriously, I would love a print of a photo where on the back you'd have some kind of QR code you could scan to recreate the binary BMP from scratch or something.  Considering that QR code would only use black and white and include error correction you would need a printer that prints at around 30x the resolution of the front image and a scanner that could scan it back in.Upload the encrypted image to the blockchain, print the decryption key on the back of the photo 
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Aug 1, 2016 20:31
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Yeah going digital with the recordings is pretty much just the next step in the sequence that so far includes recordgraphs and tapes.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:39
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Grim Up North posted:
Well I mean logically if you want a BMP of the image you're not going to be able to cram it into anything smaller than the image itself.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:05
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People don't like faxes because of all the loving spam.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:51
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Jerry Cotton posted:People don't like faxes because of all the loving spam. People don't like faxes because it's still physical media, when there's this perfectly fine technology that does the same damned thing from the comfort of your desk, without having to spend money on paper and ink. And if you are digitally faxing and digitally receiving on both ends of the fax line, you're basically just emailing the document so why not drop the POTS line middleman? People, businesses, and government institutions that require hard copy are obsolete and failed technology.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:53
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rndmnmbr posted:People don't like faxes because it's still physical media, when there's this perfectly fine technology that does the same damned thing from the comfort of your desk, without having to spend money on paper and ink. And if you are digitally faxing and digitally receiving on both ends of the fax line, you're basically just emailing the document so why not drop the POTS line middleman? And again the thread ventures into declaring something obsolete because a goon doesn't have a use for it. Walking has been obsolete since the invention of the wheeled office chair.
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Aug 2, 2016 06:35
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Maxwell Lord posted:Print book sales rose last year. Newspapers are clearly in trouble- they were designed to be quick disposable media and nothing does quick and disposable better than the Internet- but forecasting the death of print overall has always seemed hasty to me. Yeah, TV network news in the '60s was the death knell of the newspaper, yet I somehow managed to get a degree and a job in print photojournalism in 2000-2013 (got laid off in '13 because I was the weekend and vacation photog, but the paper's still putting out a new edition every day).
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Aug 2, 2016 06:53
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Cat Hatter posted:And again the thread ventures into declaring something obsolete because a goon doesn't have a use for it. I mean, you're the one who made the hilarious "end-users find it easier" generalisation based solely on your personal stick-in-the-mud.
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Aug 2, 2016 08:13
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I sometimes really wish I had a job working for a newspaper. I remember taking a tour of the Oregonian facilities back in grade school and being totally floored by how awesome their presses were and how cool it was in the back rooms where all the action happened. Every time people talk about the death / impending death of print media, it makes me sad. I get it, but still.
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Aug 2, 2016 08:44
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Cat Hatter posted:Why do people hate fax machines so much? A ten digit number is faster/easier to type in than most e-mail addresses and once I press "Send" I don't care that the machine now has to spend the next few minutes sending my stack of grayscale documents to the other end because I'm already doing something else. I didn't even have to attach the document to an email and type "here's that thing I sent you" into the subject line first or dick around with encryption. "Hello this is your customer. Yes we need your documentation for this product which I know totals hundreds of pages easily. PD-what? No here's my fax number, don't worry it's only ten digits short."
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Aug 2, 2016 08:46
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rndmnmbr posted:People don't like faxes because it's still physical media, when there's this perfectly fine technology that does the same damned thing from the comfort of your desk, without having to spend money on paper and ink. And if you are digitally faxing and digitally receiving on both ends of the fax line, you're basically just emailing the document so why not drop the POTS line middleman? At one job I made it a month before realising we had a fax machine and one particular company had always faxed me their orders which I had obviously not seen as the fax was hidden on another part of the building and I had not been briefed on it. Luckily this client also had a habit of calling in their orders 'just in case' no none were the wiser.
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Aug 2, 2016 08:58
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At my old job we used to get fax spam from some weird office furniture company selling fake plastic trees. They always sent the same order form every tuesday. I usually filled them out and put them in a different coworkers mailbox every week but nobody ever bought me a tree
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Aug 2, 2016 09:48
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I too find it easier to print something, hope the printer had paper and ink, walk over to the printer, put it in the fax, dial the fax #, hope it goes through ok, then wait for the person on the other end to get it, scan it back into their computer (only at a shittier quality now) and then deal with it. Truly this is way easier than print to pdf > send to mail recipient. "someone automated part of your workflow" yeah Microsoft Outlook about 20 years ago.
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Aug 2, 2016 10:38
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Imagined posted:I too find it easier to print something, hope the printer had paper and ink, walk over to the printer, put it in the fax, dial the fax #, hope it goes through ok, then wait for the person on the other end to get it, scan it back into their computer (only at a shittier quality now) and then deal with it. Can we just agree that sometimes email is easier and sometimes fax is easier? We'll all be OK. I like emailing PDFs that I already have, and if the contract has to be filled out by hand, I like to fax them. I never have problems with my fax machine at home, nor at work. It's reliable technology.
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Aug 2, 2016 11:04
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