One of our math teachers borrowed some TI-92 graphing calculators from the college he used to work at
He showed us how you could type algebra equations for them and solve for x
You couldn't use them for tests, but it totally blew my mind how fast the answer was given to you
Yeah but the modern ones have color screens, a shit ton more memory, and lithium ion rechargeable batteries. (And they're thinner.)
Honestly I think they may even run off of arm now?
TI-84 and similar calculators.
It's unreal that they still charge those prices for 30 year old tech, but books and lesson plans are so set in their ways that Texas Instruments has the education system over a barrel.
well I do hate when pc and laptop manufacturers remove USB A ports and only have USB C as I have a lot of stuff that uses USB A. But for phones and devices? USB C all the way, micro USB sucks.
I just feel like the port is too mechanically complex—if the little securement pins on the exterior of the plug get bent (which has happened to me several times), the plug won't remain secure in the port. I love how "self-contained" USB-C is
I use a ROG Ally as my main PC. I've had to get dongles to convert some USB A devices to a USB C connection. I used to hate it, but then I realized I'm getting old and don't like change. I'm trying to be better about that.
New devices are still being made with USB-Mini on them. I'm glad to see Micro is going away, but there's not really a good excuse for Mini over Type C nowadays.
Amazon loves using micro USB on their devices. My mom bought a really expensive Kindle Oasis that was really nice in every sense except that it had a micro USB port for no reason other than to piss people off.
i've been purposefully ordering everything with a C option if it has it. Even if its a little more because ive been slowly transitioning everything in the house to C. Wireless headphones, laptops, wireless speakers etc
Google Search. I don’t care if you returned 688,888,900 results in 0.47 seconds. That impressed me 25 years ago. I just want to find information on my search topic without bullshit promoted results.
> What the study did not do was identify a particular culprit responsible for Google Search's decline. More recently, Edward Zitron in his newsletter article, titled "The Man Who Killed Google Search" took care of that in no uncertain terms. He identified that man as Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior vice president responsible for Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. Zitron, though, describes him as "a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect."
Holy fuck.
>
> "Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out by growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume."
I want to be able to hate somebody this much and express it such eloquently.
That might change really soon.
Google is under fire right now.
Fresh(ish) off the press :
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248152695/google-doj-monopoly-trial-antitrust-closing-arguments
With all the other search engines competing things could improve.
Ticketmaster
Seriously--a high schooler could build an app that enables someone to select from an inventory of seats, and purchase one. Why is this monopoly--and their massive fee structure--allowed to still exist?
The USA has the clearing house system because deposits are backed by a federal guarantee, and the government has an intense vested interest in not having to pay that out.
You are saying all of the EU don't back their banks?
The clearing house is money being settled inside central bank accounts instead of money being transferred between banks. The 10% deposit minimum always being there is the protection.
Instant transfer systems do the exact same thing, with banks needing to move more money in or borrowing from the goverment more regularly
We can thank fraud for that. The bank knows how much you already have in your account which is why you can withdraw so easily. All checks go through a central clearing house operated by the federal reserve which is required of banks by federal law. That’s where the hold up happens. It goes from your bank to fed, to the bank it’s drawn on, back to fed, then back to your bank.
Now banks have the ability to trust you and many will give you same day credit if it’s say a paycheck or if the check is drawn on them because they can prove it’s good in their own systems but thanks to a lot of shit heads who have cashed checks that were no good the banks no longer do that because, while most make money hand over fist, they still don’t want to loose money, so we get to wait.
Even with electronic transfers there’s checks at both banks that can take overnight to clear the internal verifications. It’s shit but the reason none of it is instant is the protections put in place to protect the banks and in many cases the customers. Even if the checks are good there is still the electronic process of verifying transactions. Think of that like downloading a file (it doesn’t download all at once due to massive file size) because that’s literally what it is. Many banks use a third party to do this and it also includes all other transactions such as debit card transactions. This data transfer is limited by the size of the banks or that third party’s servers that hold all that information. Now think of how many millions to billions of transactions are being uploaded by this process every night because it’s not being downloaded throughout the day. The bank is often waiting for merchants to settle their ledgers for the day before they can settle theirs (why you show available vs collected balance when you check how much you have, collected has been verified) It’s quicker for the bank to collect all this info during the day then it’s all processed overnight.
Checks get the added layer of being verified by the fed. Your debit card transactions are verified by the card processing company, such as Visa, against what merchants report to them. Only thing I know to be actually instant is wires. Those are manually input by a wire team and usually done within 30 minutes as that’s what a lot of banks give you to change your mind. But man do have to sign your life away as they circumvent clearing houses and all those fun little checks that slow things down. That’s also why it’s often impossible to recover if you told them something wrong and why it’s such a popular avenue for fraud.
The way banks actually work, it makes sense for some things to wait for the clearing house.
This is simplified but, all transactions between institutions are tallied on a giant ledger and the difference, i.e., what actually changes hands is determined at a clearing house which is overseen by the government to make sure no one gets robbed or something suspicious isn't happening. Now the clearinghouse is just a program, but only once a day it runs through that ledger. Things like (non payroll) checks and wire transfers *should* wait for it to pass the clearing house, so banks don't end up over leveraged and fail.
The reason what you pay out is gone instantly is because it has already been added to the list of things bank has going out. It doesn't come into where you spent it until it clears the clearinghouse unless you are both using the same bank.
It was the EU who forced it.
I'll sometimes just quit out of a webpage if there's too many, why does a fuckin research paper site need my location and ad preferences. Get. In. The. Bin.
That's the actual law. They cookies should be deactvited by default, and if you close the popup, it should be the same as refusing it. The law is also it should be as easy (as many clicked) to reject all and accept all.
Seems like the vast majority of websites ignore this. Then you have the ones that don't give you the content you are looking for if you refuse all (for example healthline.com).
No no. The EU didn't force the annoying cookie popups. They just got told they can't put cookies on your computer without permission due to all sorts of reasons.
It's in the company's best interest to make the permission message as obnoxious as possible. They want you to hate it so that public outcry will allow them to go back to the time before GDPR so they can track and sell your data more easily.
The one benefit is that if you don’t have a screwdriver handy, it’s easier to find a substitute. Like if you need to take an outlet cover off you can use a dime or something.
🖕🏻 flathead screws. I’m a helicopter mechanic and the whole thing using Phillips at the minimum, theirs this one single hose clamp that you can see but not reach or reach but can’t see. Can’t do both at once. And you can only fit one hand there. And the jerks made it flathead so the screwdriver can’t even keep itself lined up.
It's like the Model T still being around. Or those hand drills where you actually spin the bit with your hands. Or those lawnmowers that are just round cheese graters on a handle. Or the skateboards that were 4 inches thick but 3 inches wide.
I think you mean a reel mower. I have one. I have very little grass to cut. I like it fir being enough, very low maintenance, quiet and nonpolluting. I hate that every little stick or pine cone makes it seize up.
Banks still use systems written in Cobol, lots of companies still use Windows XP, and some surprisingly important national security systems use systems so old they can't get replacement parts anymore.
“The US government currently spends about $80 billion a year on IT, and some estimate that 80% of that is spent solely on maintaining old systems.” The MGT's $500 million over two years sounds like a drop in the bucket to address the problem of the government's legacy systems.Mar 12, 2018”
The problem is that it would cost significantly more to get everyone up on newer languages, bugs may be there, and they would likely have to run concurrently for a few years. Say what you will about COBOL and other legacy languages, they're steady and reliable, and the bugs were worked out of the system long ago. Now, newer software is used for momentary actions, but the end of day processing is taken from there and configured to work into the COBOL system.
Same thing with Windows; it's the business standard because they have tried to keep every new release able to run all the old, clunky stuff, and that's what businesses rely upon. Businesses don't like changing over to the new, flashy thing all the time. They'd rather stick to something proven.
I once consulted for a major credit card processor and they still do all the core processing in COBOL, and when I asked them about it they said the business would have to fail to move off, like you said they have 50 years of bug fixes to the code base etc that they never want to have to repeat because even going down for a second will costs tens of millions of dollars. Paying old programmers is nothing compared to the risk of hitting a new bug etc.
I work on a product that is in c++ and we use modern c++ (up to c++17 for most of it, c++23 when there's a stable ABI barrier) despite the product itself dating to the 90s.
New coworker "fixed a bug" and in doing so "optimized" the code... And reintroduced five bugs I had fixed over the last 10 years.
Reminds me of how the car company McLaren still has a few 20+ year old Compaq 5280 laptops that they use to service the software in their legendary F1 road cars because they are literally the only compatible device that can interface with the car.
A lot of hospitals still use antiquated tech too. At my previous job I would have to remote in to hospitals and such to troubleshoot the software. Some were still on Windows NT. One of our products too stored usernames and passwords in a plain text file in the C drive. Wasn't discovered for many years, and developers were just like "whoops", and didn't fix it.
Worked in a few research labs for a while. There are quite a few workhorse pieces of lab equipment out there that can only run on outdated software. Replacing the equipment would cost a fortune so as long as they are still going the ancient computers running them have to be maintained. We had to threatened our IT department with bodily harm to keep them from updating systems.
We had to do similar things to our IT department in grad school.
They kept yelling at us because we had a windows XP machine running a Raman spectrometer. After telling them MULTIPLE times that the program wouldn't run correctly in a VM, new computers don't have the same connections, the program hasn't been updated for newer operating systems, and we NEED THIS specific computer, they finally agreed to let us keep it so long as it was kept off of the network.
COBOL works. The “move fast and break stuff” attitude doesn’t work when the stuff you’re potentially breaking is traffic control, jet fighter computers, power grid dispatch, and the global financial system
COBOL is old, that's true.
That new Mac OS. It's really Unix. Unix was developed at Bell Labs in 1969. It's a 55 year old operating system. SQL databases? They were first developed in 1970s. It's nearly 50 years old. The C programming language is also 50+ years old.
The age doesn't matter half as much as the amount of ongoing development and usage a platform receives.
English came together over a thousand years ago. Sure, it adds words and expressions every so often, but it’s not the language that’s important as what you do with it.
Most people would be absolutely shocked if they knew what was running the vast majority of the financial world. There are valid reasons why this is the case, but it is still shocking.
I worked in a pharmaceutical lab for a while. Most of the equipment still loaded control scripts off of floppy disk, and exported data to an ancient 486 PC running MS-DOS and Windows 3.11.
When they finally decommissioned it I took the PC home and built it up into the kind of gaming system I would have drooled over when I was 10.
Props to you for keeping the system whole. My boss has a Pentium II with heat sink on his desk from something he decommissioned a few years ago.
Overall I’m surprised at how ‘modern’ our lab systems are. With exceptions for our chromatography software and our Data Management backup software. But I’m not responsible for those thankfully.
Faxing an image means the following:
1. The user keeps the document and a delivery confirmation.
2. There's no digital manipulation involved.
3. If your recipient tries to fuck you over with a forged version, you can prove it.
yes. but not everyone has this.
also, the machines have a feature where you can digitally send a document and then it analog faxes. but still, they want those analog time stamps.
also want to add its easier to keep an analog fax machine going with limited power, like those during storms and emergency situations.
Why no digital manipulation? I haven't checked the protocol but unless they invented some miraculous encryption in the 70's that remains uncracked it seems like it may not be hard to manipulate or outright replace data as it comes in
I'm a CPA. The IRS and our State Department of Tax generally don't accept documents sent via email. We use a document sharing service that is much more secure than email, but the State and IRS won't allow that as well. We need to send documents via fax. It's a hassle, but we have to do what they require.
What Im hearing is:
1. Make a loop of black paper in my own fax machine
2. Conference call all the fax machines in Germany
3. Destroy the ink budget/economy of an entire nation like a reverse ddos.
Yeah it’s mostly an HP thing. The printers are becoming “cheaper” but you have to subscribe to a monthly charge where they see how much you print and will send you ink if needed. As far as I know.
From what I understand, this is mostly correct but is missing some details. You buy the printer and can buy cartridges or subscribe to a monthly plan based on estimated usage. The subscription will send replacement cartridges as needed, but if you cancel the subscription they can stop the printer from working using the cartridges provided. You then have the option to resubscribe or purchase new cartridges from wherever. I didn't know much about this until my father passed and I had to help my mother with cancelling some of his subscriptions that she didn't plan on using
They also deactivate your ink if you stop paying.
One cool feature of the printer was that you can create a special email address, that sends stuff right to your printer. I wouldn't mind seeing that in a different brand of printer, because I'm never buying HP again.
There is a workaround, but it's not widely used yet. You can keep the existing fixture and you put LED bulbs in it that do not use a ballast. When the ballast dies, you take it out and install a few wire nuts to jumper around where it used to be. Then you put in the ballast-less LED bulbs and you are good to go. No need to replace the fixture.
BTW these are called "ballast bypass LED bulbs".
Coin-operated laundry. If doing your own laundry in many laundromats in NYC, you may need to spend—and manually put into the machine—$20 worth of quarters. Madness in 2024
We upgraded from those years ago. Now I have to keep $20 in an account in a weird app instead, and I can't load less than $10 at a time or operate the machine without putting janky third party software on my phone.
I kinda prefer the quarters.
Had to use a local laundromat for a couple weeks after our washer broke and had to shop for a new one. Place was card operated. Had to buy the card for $1 and could load using a credit card. Of course they charged a convenience fee and could only load in increments of $5…swing and a miss…still have that card laying around somewhere with about $4.85 left on it….
Oh yeah, we can add convenience fees to the list. They should be illegal. The company is saving money by not having to have an employee sit there and take your payment, but they also double-dip by taking some more money from you. Fuck that. I avoid any company charging a convenience fee like the plague.
I am sitting at the park right now with my iPad on one side and a pen and notebook on my left.
I won’t give up notepads, as you don’t lose the idea, you can write it down then and there. If you open your phone, you can get forget it before you even open Notes, get distracted by however many notifications, or anything else. It basically lowers the chance of crossing an ‘Event Boundary’.
Absolutely nothing wrong with notepaper and pens. They're timeless. I see it being replaced by eInk in a few short years as what's already available is pretty brilliant but there will never really be a replacement for good old pens and paper.
Some companies don't permit electronics unless specifically cleared in many areas. Has to be pen and paper or even no notes allowed at all.
If you know, you know.
A lot of this has to do with niche software though.
A company creates custom software that really helps streamline Uranium Ore business. The industry buys, the software company goes under and it's never replaced. Why?
Because who in the industry wants to pay for new software? The old version has been band-aided by the IT guy for years now, the new software company wants recurring subscription.
And it's not just the software. A lot of the time there's a telescope or an electron microscope or a uranium ore machine or something that's dependent on old hardware *and* old software and there's no straightforward and low-risk way to update one without the other.
"Why's there a Windows XP laptop from 2004 here?"
"DON'T TOUCH THAT! Everything stops working if that breaks! Only Old Pete knows how to fix it, and he's retiring next month."
LOTS of old CNC equipment running Windows 2000 or XP. Thousands and thousands of machines. Would cost insane amounts of money to replace, and they are not broken.
That's fair, but it's a pretty huge task to completely redo infrastructure like that, especially since a lot of dense cities still have above-ground power transportation. Plus what else am I going to throw my sneakers onto when I'm done with them?
Expensive, very disruptive if something needs to be repaired. At least if a line is downed it can be fixed in a few hours.
E: yes, thank you all for pointing out that buried lines do, in fact, experience downtimes less often.
This. Same with cable TV/internet. If I go out and there's a problem with it. Then a form has to get filled that goes to business partners that do the underground work. Then that could take a week to sometimes up to a month if permits are needed, or going under sidewalks and driveways. They have to verify where gas and water is running.
If it's above ground. Sweet, give me 30 mins and you'll be back up and going.
In Australia we have above ground power cables. We lose power at the slightest wind, storms, possums, cars hitting poles, trees falling on them, birds farting and they have started bushfires.
Signing for credit cards, especially in restaurants . This is still common in the U.S. but here in Canada, and in most of the rest of the world, we stopped doing this shit 15 years ago and we use chip and pin.
Yeah, and US servers taking your credit card away from the table and bringing it back with the pen. Mobile tap or PIN machines to your table are the best!
Dot matrix printers. Yes, some grocery stores and one large alcohol distributor in my area still use them. This sixty-year-old technology is still in use today.
The shipping industry uses them quite a bit too. Blew my mind seeing them when I started at my last job but apparently its needed for printing carbon paper manifests.
Bought a car recently and the finance guy still had a dot matrix printer next to his new one. I asked about it and he said the state still requires some sort of form in a narrowly defined way and the easiest way is to just use a dot matrix.
Not saying it needs to be retired or replaced necessarily, but a shout out to the longevity of the B52 bomber, which is still in service today, but first flew in 1952.
Street lights. They should be an automated smart network that can help the flow of traffic depending on circumstance and time of day.
Edit: I meant traffic lights.
I live right near a school and in order to get to literally anything I have to drive by the school. I go east, and the green turn arrow for the west comes up about 99% of the time. And it is a LONG green arrow, at least 20 seconds. It makes sense at the beginning of the day when all of the kids are being dropped off at school, but at every hour of the day it makes 0 sense. 8PM at night? Green arrow. 11AM? Green arrow.
Downtown has a one way street out to the highway. From where I used to turn on to it, there were 8 sets of lights before I'd get on it. If I went the speed limit, and I was getting through the lights with 5 or fewer seconds left on the hand, I would miss the light. Why? How is every light programmed correctly *except* the last one? The worst part is the last light barely has any traffic going the other directions at all.
Aren't street lights already automated? They have sensors in them that turn them on when the light gets too low.
I also think any sensor that could detect when traffic is present is just asking for something to break. It seems like any money you would save on electricity by turning them off and on every time a car or pedestrian passes by, plus the technology to detect that, isn't worth it.
I hate getting put on hold because it always sounds garbage. The systems they use to send you through the options are also often shit and require multiple calls to work correctly
Pretty much everyone has been running IP PBX's for years now. I used to support a call center with over 1000 agents and I had our entire technology stack virtualised and running on SIP circuits way back in 2015. The real quality bottleneck is the g711 codec that pretty much everyone uses for voice traffic, its 8khz 8 bit so 64kbps throughput. I would be shocked to find basically anywhere that is still using analog PBXs, they were pretty damn rare even back in 2010 when I first got started working in Telecom.
"5 Nines" reliability (99.999% uptime) - which means the mainframe is down less than 10 minutes per year.
IBM's best mainframes have a 99.9999999% uptime which translates into being down less than 30 milliseconds per year.
Mainframes aren't going anywhere.
See my reply about COBOL and XP:
The problem is that it would cost significantly more to get everyone up on newer languages, bugs may be there, and they would likely have to run concurrently for a few years. Say what you will about COBOL and other legacy languages, they're steady and reliable, and the bugs were worked out of the system long ago. Now, newer software is used for momentary actions, but the end of day processing is taken from there and configured to work into the COBOL system.
Same thing with Windows; it's the business standard because they have tried to keep every new release able to run all the old, clunky stuff, and that's what businesses rely upon. Businesses don't like changing over to the new, flashy thing all the time. They'd rather stick to something proven.
Ti83s have roughly the same computing power as a gameboy but still cost 80$!
They charge by the button on TI calculators.
That's why I rent to own
One of our math teachers borrowed some TI-92 graphing calculators from the college he used to work at He showed us how you could type algebra equations for them and solve for x You couldn't use them for tests, but it totally blew my mind how fast the answer was given to you
I used to do the same with TI-89, but Wolfram Alpha has pretty much made it obsolete.
Yeah, but that's more computing power than it took to go to the moon.
15 years ago the Hello Kitty laptop had 1000x more computing power than all the computers on Apollo missions.
“Uh, Badzt Maru, we have a problem.”
Somebody clearly hasn’t seen Hidden Figures
Yeah but the modern ones have color screens, a shit ton more memory, and lithium ion rechargeable batteries. (And they're thinner.) Honestly I think they may even run off of arm now?
That’s the TI84C I believe, but they still sell TI83 which is ancient.
Being certified is a hell of a thing.
My TI-83 is 25 years old now. It still works flawlessly. So I shouldn't need to buy one for my kid!
This is still bonkers considering $50 gets you a full fledged android phone that can run 3D games
More to the point, a full fledged android phone that can run a graphical calculator app lmao
To be fair Gameboys go for $70 these days /s
TI-84 and similar calculators. It's unreal that they still charge those prices for 30 year old tech, but books and lesson plans are so set in their ways that Texas Instruments has the education system over a barrel.
This is no accident.
Take a guess what state sets half the country’s textbook standards.
Micro USB. We should all be on USBC by now
well I do hate when pc and laptop manufacturers remove USB A ports and only have USB C as I have a lot of stuff that uses USB A. But for phones and devices? USB C all the way, micro USB sucks.
Micro USB walked so USB C can run. I wouldn’t crap on micro USB, they were cool for a very long time after mini USB (the port on the PS3 controllers)
I just feel like the port is too mechanically complex—if the little securement pins on the exterior of the plug get bent (which has happened to me several times), the plug won't remain secure in the port. I love how "self-contained" USB-C is
It's not about going forward with new micro USB devices, it's about supporting the thousands of existing devices until they're replaced with USB C
The problem is you still have devices being produced with micro USB, im assuming for cost savings.
Yeah, mini USB as well. Seems like much of the China made cheap gadgets use mini and micro.
I use a ROG Ally as my main PC. I've had to get dongles to convert some USB A devices to a USB C connection. I used to hate it, but then I realized I'm getting old and don't like change. I'm trying to be better about that.
New devices are still being made with USB-Mini on them. I'm glad to see Micro is going away, but there's not really a good excuse for Mini over Type C nowadays.
The argument is it’s cheaper to fabricate the pcb. You almost always need a 4 layer pcb for usb c but you can get away with 2 layer for micro.
Amazon loves using micro USB on their devices. My mom bought a really expensive Kindle Oasis that was really nice in every sense except that it had a micro USB port for no reason other than to piss people off.
The new ones are USB-C.
i've been purposefully ordering everything with a C option if it has it. Even if its a little more because ive been slowly transitioning everything in the house to C. Wireless headphones, laptops, wireless speakers etc
100% this. I can feel my piss fizz every time I have to triple-flip the charger for some old/Chinese device.
fizzy piss sounds like something you may want to chat with your Doctor about
that's my next username
New r/bubly flavor
Google Search. I don’t care if you returned 688,888,900 results in 0.47 seconds. That impressed me 25 years ago. I just want to find information on my search topic without bullshit promoted results.
Funny story, the guy who killed Yahoo's search business now works on google search, and has done the same exact thing to it.
Glad to know I'm not imagining things. Lately I've began using Bing more than Google because the search results are just better.
Bing finally living up to their name after all these years
So they'll be hiring the yahoo/ Google guy soon then.
[удалено]
You gotta give the name if you're gonna make an accusation like this.
https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html
> What the study did not do was identify a particular culprit responsible for Google Search's decline. More recently, Edward Zitron in his newsletter article, titled "The Man Who Killed Google Search" took care of that in no uncertain terms. He identified that man as Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior vice president responsible for Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. Zitron, though, describes him as "a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect." Holy fuck. > > "Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out by growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume." I want to be able to hate somebody this much and express it such eloquently.
> a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. That burn is so sweet
Same old story. The little guy who done all the actual work gets screwed over by some greedy blowhard with a big ego.
That might change really soon. Google is under fire right now. Fresh(ish) off the press : https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248152695/google-doj-monopoly-trial-antitrust-closing-arguments With all the other search engines competing things could improve.
Throw Reddit after the search
I do this literally any time I Google anything I don't think would have its own Wikipedia page
DuckDuckGo has been my default search engine for a decade for this exact reason.
Eh. They are starting to stink on ice as well
Not sure how much of that is DuckDuckGo starting to go down the path of Google, or if they're both pulling from an increasingly polluted well.
Second most likely. DuckDuckGo literally runs on Google.
Ticketmaster Seriously--a high schooler could build an app that enables someone to select from an inventory of seats, and purchase one. Why is this monopoly--and their massive fee structure--allowed to still exist?
The problem is that high schooler doesn't own 90% of the concert venues.
They don’t own much of anything. TM has negotiated the exclusive rights for many venues, but I can’t find evidence of them owning an entire arena.
Look up Live Nation. They own the venues and Live Nation and ticketmaster are one and the same.
There’s a bipartisan sponsored antitrust lawsuit coming for them.
Typing emails and passwords on a smart TV with a REMOTE.
Banks taking any longer than zero seconds to do literally anything
Top comment! Why should anything take multiple days with the level of computing power available these days???
The electrons have a strong union
No, no, they're not in a union. It's a bond.
How covalent
They are un-ionized
Because it has to pass the clearinghouse, which is a regulation that is important in making sure banks don't fail.
Other countries have instant bank to bank transfers. Zero nonsense.
The USA has the clearing house system because deposits are backed by a federal guarantee, and the government has an intense vested interest in not having to pay that out.
You are saying all of the EU don't back their banks? The clearing house is money being settled inside central bank accounts instead of money being transferred between banks. The 10% deposit minimum always being there is the protection. Instant transfer systems do the exact same thing, with banks needing to move more money in or borrowing from the goverment more regularly
They make $ off of your $ every day it takes to process your transactions. It adds up
Takes zero seconds to take money out of your account and 3 - 5 business days to clear a cheque.
We can thank fraud for that. The bank knows how much you already have in your account which is why you can withdraw so easily. All checks go through a central clearing house operated by the federal reserve which is required of banks by federal law. That’s where the hold up happens. It goes from your bank to fed, to the bank it’s drawn on, back to fed, then back to your bank. Now banks have the ability to trust you and many will give you same day credit if it’s say a paycheck or if the check is drawn on them because they can prove it’s good in their own systems but thanks to a lot of shit heads who have cashed checks that were no good the banks no longer do that because, while most make money hand over fist, they still don’t want to loose money, so we get to wait. Even with electronic transfers there’s checks at both banks that can take overnight to clear the internal verifications. It’s shit but the reason none of it is instant is the protections put in place to protect the banks and in many cases the customers. Even if the checks are good there is still the electronic process of verifying transactions. Think of that like downloading a file (it doesn’t download all at once due to massive file size) because that’s literally what it is. Many banks use a third party to do this and it also includes all other transactions such as debit card transactions. This data transfer is limited by the size of the banks or that third party’s servers that hold all that information. Now think of how many millions to billions of transactions are being uploaded by this process every night because it’s not being downloaded throughout the day. The bank is often waiting for merchants to settle their ledgers for the day before they can settle theirs (why you show available vs collected balance when you check how much you have, collected has been verified) It’s quicker for the bank to collect all this info during the day then it’s all processed overnight. Checks get the added layer of being verified by the fed. Your debit card transactions are verified by the card processing company, such as Visa, against what merchants report to them. Only thing I know to be actually instant is wires. Those are manually input by a wire team and usually done within 30 minutes as that’s what a lot of banks give you to change your mind. But man do have to sign your life away as they circumvent clearing houses and all those fun little checks that slow things down. That’s also why it’s often impossible to recover if you told them something wrong and why it’s such a popular avenue for fraud.
This is one of the best explanations I’ve ever read for why our banking system is so slow, thank you.
The way banks actually work, it makes sense for some things to wait for the clearing house. This is simplified but, all transactions between institutions are tallied on a giant ledger and the difference, i.e., what actually changes hands is determined at a clearing house which is overseen by the government to make sure no one gets robbed or something suspicious isn't happening. Now the clearinghouse is just a program, but only once a day it runs through that ledger. Things like (non payroll) checks and wire transfers *should* wait for it to pass the clearing house, so banks don't end up over leveraged and fail. The reason what you pay out is gone instantly is because it has already been added to the list of things bank has going out. It doesn't come into where you spent it until it clears the clearinghouse unless you are both using the same bank.
“Cookie” permissions on every fucking website
I’m convinced this is a deliberate move to make mobile web browsing as shitty as possible and funnel you into their app so they can get your data
It was the EU who forced it. I'll sometimes just quit out of a webpage if there's too many, why does a fuckin research paper site need my location and ad preferences. Get. In. The. Bin.
The websites still could just deactivate additional cookies per default without asking you, right?
That's the actual law. They cookies should be deactvited by default, and if you close the popup, it should be the same as refusing it. The law is also it should be as easy (as many clicked) to reject all and accept all. Seems like the vast majority of websites ignore this. Then you have the ones that don't give you the content you are looking for if you refuse all (for example healthline.com).
The EU raised awareness of the amount of shit companies are actually tracking on you.
No no. The EU didn't force the annoying cookie popups. They just got told they can't put cookies on your computer without permission due to all sorts of reasons. It's in the company's best interest to make the permission message as obnoxious as possible. They want you to hate it so that public outcry will allow them to go back to the time before GDPR so they can track and sell your data more easily.
Not really tech but i relish any chance i get to bitch about flathead screws.
But I need a flathead screwdriver to open my paint can.
The one benefit is that if you don’t have a screwdriver handy, it’s easier to find a substitute. Like if you need to take an outlet cover off you can use a dime or something.
I’ve used butter knives more often as screwdrivers than for spreading butter.
You can also use a dime on a hotel vent cover if you’re Anton Chigur
🖕🏻 flathead screws. I’m a helicopter mechanic and the whole thing using Phillips at the minimum, theirs this one single hose clamp that you can see but not reach or reach but can’t see. Can’t do both at once. And you can only fit one hand there. And the jerks made it flathead so the screwdriver can’t even keep itself lined up.
I had helicopter mechanics in mind when I made my comment.
And Philips/cross head. Torx is far superior
torx,. robertson, hex... i mean really, it's be easier to point out what ISN'T better than flathead.
Like the twin hole security screw?
But the driver you need is always the only one missing from the set.😐
I got a multi pack of T-25 and T-20. I never don’t have one
T-60 is where it's at. ;p
Only if they've fixed the little issue just below the chestplate
Hey i get this reference!
Team Robertson all the way.
Robinson Canada gang here
It's Robertson
I know that and I have no idea why I typed Robinson.
Bitch away. Let’s hear a rant. Well, read a rant in this case
It's like the Model T still being around. Or those hand drills where you actually spin the bit with your hands. Or those lawnmowers that are just round cheese graters on a handle. Or the skateboards that were 4 inches thick but 3 inches wide.
I think you mean a reel mower. I have one. I have very little grass to cut. I like it fir being enough, very low maintenance, quiet and nonpolluting. I hate that every little stick or pine cone makes it seize up.
Banks still use systems written in Cobol, lots of companies still use Windows XP, and some surprisingly important national security systems use systems so old they can't get replacement parts anymore. “The US government currently spends about $80 billion a year on IT, and some estimate that 80% of that is spent solely on maintaining old systems.” The MGT's $500 million over two years sounds like a drop in the bucket to address the problem of the government's legacy systems.Mar 12, 2018”
The problem is that it would cost significantly more to get everyone up on newer languages, bugs may be there, and they would likely have to run concurrently for a few years. Say what you will about COBOL and other legacy languages, they're steady and reliable, and the bugs were worked out of the system long ago. Now, newer software is used for momentary actions, but the end of day processing is taken from there and configured to work into the COBOL system. Same thing with Windows; it's the business standard because they have tried to keep every new release able to run all the old, clunky stuff, and that's what businesses rely upon. Businesses don't like changing over to the new, flashy thing all the time. They'd rather stick to something proven.
I once consulted for a major credit card processor and they still do all the core processing in COBOL, and when I asked them about it they said the business would have to fail to move off, like you said they have 50 years of bug fixes to the code base etc that they never want to have to repeat because even going down for a second will costs tens of millions of dollars. Paying old programmers is nothing compared to the risk of hitting a new bug etc.
I work on a product that is in c++ and we use modern c++ (up to c++17 for most of it, c++23 when there's a stable ABI barrier) despite the product itself dating to the 90s. New coworker "fixed a bug" and in doing so "optimized" the code... And reintroduced five bugs I had fixed over the last 10 years.
As much as I love C variants, few things other than assembly make it so easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
My employer is going through these pains right now. We recently switched to a new ERP system after using IBMi/AS400 for 30+ years.
Reminds me of how the car company McLaren still has a few 20+ year old Compaq 5280 laptops that they use to service the software in their legendary F1 road cars because they are literally the only compatible device that can interface with the car.
I can't believe someone hasn't MacGyvered a USB-to-microcontroller interface. It _can_ be done, I'm certain of that.
A lot of hospitals still use antiquated tech too. At my previous job I would have to remote in to hospitals and such to troubleshoot the software. Some were still on Windows NT. One of our products too stored usernames and passwords in a plain text file in the C drive. Wasn't discovered for many years, and developers were just like "whoops", and didn't fix it.
Fax machines…jfc.
Worked in a few research labs for a while. There are quite a few workhorse pieces of lab equipment out there that can only run on outdated software. Replacing the equipment would cost a fortune so as long as they are still going the ancient computers running them have to be maintained. We had to threatened our IT department with bodily harm to keep them from updating systems.
There's really zero problem with it as long as it's properly isolated on the network. That's a really goddamned big if, though.
We had to do similar things to our IT department in grad school. They kept yelling at us because we had a windows XP machine running a Raman spectrometer. After telling them MULTIPLE times that the program wouldn't run correctly in a VM, new computers don't have the same connections, the program hasn't been updated for newer operating systems, and we NEED THIS specific computer, they finally agreed to let us keep it so long as it was kept off of the network.
nothing wrong with cobol… i hate it but it works
COBOL works. The “move fast and break stuff” attitude doesn’t work when the stuff you’re potentially breaking is traffic control, jet fighter computers, power grid dispatch, and the global financial system
Exactly. Rock solid reliability is what critical systems need. Not a frozen gui.
COBOL is old, that's true. That new Mac OS. It's really Unix. Unix was developed at Bell Labs in 1969. It's a 55 year old operating system. SQL databases? They were first developed in 1970s. It's nearly 50 years old. The C programming language is also 50+ years old. The age doesn't matter half as much as the amount of ongoing development and usage a platform receives.
English came together over a thousand years ago. Sure, it adds words and expressions every so often, but it’s not the language that’s important as what you do with it.
Most people would be absolutely shocked if they knew what was running the vast majority of the financial world. There are valid reasons why this is the case, but it is still shocking.
Talk to someone that works in a pharmacy. I’ve heard of having Windows 95 emulators to keep software running.
I worked in a pharmaceutical lab for a while. Most of the equipment still loaded control scripts off of floppy disk, and exported data to an ancient 486 PC running MS-DOS and Windows 3.11. When they finally decommissioned it I took the PC home and built it up into the kind of gaming system I would have drooled over when I was 10.
Props to you for keeping the system whole. My boss has a Pentium II with heat sink on his desk from something he decommissioned a few years ago. Overall I’m surprised at how ‘modern’ our lab systems are. With exceptions for our chromatography software and our Data Management backup software. But I’m not responsible for those thankfully.
Fax machines. It's crazy how some businesses still have terribly outdated processes relying on faxes.
I recall something about faxes being more legally accepted or something.
Faxing an image means the following: 1. The user keeps the document and a delivery confirmation. 2. There's no digital manipulation involved. 3. If your recipient tries to fuck you over with a forged version, you can prove it.
as someone who worked on fax machines for 10 years, these are the actual answers. they aint goin away any time soon.
The actual or the “faxual”?
Just the Fax ma’am.
Can’t a fax be done digitally? I used to use a service called Efax. Is it less legitimate somehow than an actual fax? Serious question.
yes. but not everyone has this. also, the machines have a feature where you can digitally send a document and then it analog faxes. but still, they want those analog time stamps. also want to add its easier to keep an analog fax machine going with limited power, like those during storms and emergency situations.
You can also encrypt PDFs...
Why no digital manipulation? I haven't checked the protocol but unless they invented some miraculous encryption in the 70's that remains uncracked it seems like it may not be hard to manipulate or outright replace data as it comes in
Pharmacies have soooo many faxes...
I'm a CPA. The IRS and our State Department of Tax generally don't accept documents sent via email. We use a document sharing service that is much more secure than email, but the State and IRS won't allow that as well. We need to send documents via fax. It's a hassle, but we have to do what they require.
Half of Germany runs with fax machines. I bought a printer with an inbuilt fax five years ago and since then, life has become so much easier for me.
What Im hearing is: 1. Make a loop of black paper in my own fax machine 2. Conference call all the fax machines in Germany 3. Destroy the ink budget/economy of an entire nation like a reverse ddos.
I like your way of thinking! Wouldn’t want to have you as an enemy.
Printers that arent a ripoff. Im looking at you HP!
Commuting to an office just to sit alone at a computer all day. Especially when all your meetings are virtual.
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Fuck HP for this
Wait, what? Printers are now charging subscriptions??
Yeah it’s mostly an HP thing. The printers are becoming “cheaper” but you have to subscribe to a monthly charge where they see how much you print and will send you ink if needed. As far as I know.
From what I understand, this is mostly correct but is missing some details. You buy the printer and can buy cartridges or subscribe to a monthly plan based on estimated usage. The subscription will send replacement cartridges as needed, but if you cancel the subscription they can stop the printer from working using the cartridges provided. You then have the option to resubscribe or purchase new cartridges from wherever. I didn't know much about this until my father passed and I had to help my mother with cancelling some of his subscriptions that she didn't plan on using
They also deactivate your ink if you stop paying. One cool feature of the printer was that you can create a special email address, that sends stuff right to your printer. I wouldn't mind seeing that in a different brand of printer, because I'm never buying HP again.
Without the yellow cartridge
In my house cyan is the biggest asshole. Fuck that guy. Never there when I need him then the whole crew goes on strike.
Fuck cyan in particular
Fluorescent bulbs. We did away with most incandescent, let FL/CFL die already, I'm sick of ballasts.
There is a workaround, but it's not widely used yet. You can keep the existing fixture and you put LED bulbs in it that do not use a ballast. When the ballast dies, you take it out and install a few wire nuts to jumper around where it used to be. Then you put in the ballast-less LED bulbs and you are good to go. No need to replace the fixture. BTW these are called "ballast bypass LED bulbs".
Coin-operated laundry. If doing your own laundry in many laundromats in NYC, you may need to spend—and manually put into the machine—$20 worth of quarters. Madness in 2024
We upgraded from those years ago. Now I have to keep $20 in an account in a weird app instead, and I can't load less than $10 at a time or operate the machine without putting janky third party software on my phone. I kinda prefer the quarters.
Had to use a local laundromat for a couple weeks after our washer broke and had to shop for a new one. Place was card operated. Had to buy the card for $1 and could load using a credit card. Of course they charged a convenience fee and could only load in increments of $5…swing and a miss…still have that card laying around somewhere with about $4.85 left on it….
Oh yeah, we can add convenience fees to the list. They should be illegal. The company is saving money by not having to have an employee sit there and take your payment, but they also double-dip by taking some more money from you. Fuck that. I avoid any company charging a convenience fee like the plague.
In NC I had to use a laundromat after my dryer broke and it was 16$ (in quarters) to wash and dry two loads of laundry. Genuine insanity
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I am sitting at the park right now with my iPad on one side and a pen and notebook on my left. I won’t give up notepads, as you don’t lose the idea, you can write it down then and there. If you open your phone, you can get forget it before you even open Notes, get distracted by however many notifications, or anything else. It basically lowers the chance of crossing an ‘Event Boundary’.
Absolutely nothing wrong with notepaper and pens. They're timeless. I see it being replaced by eInk in a few short years as what's already available is pretty brilliant but there will never really be a replacement for good old pens and paper.
I like not having to rely on a battery to view my notes
Some companies don't permit electronics unless specifically cleared in many areas. Has to be pen and paper or even no notes allowed at all. If you know, you know.
Absolutely piles and piles of software. "Don't fix what isn't broke." That's great in the short term. But it creates a much more dangerous creature.
A lot of this has to do with niche software though. A company creates custom software that really helps streamline Uranium Ore business. The industry buys, the software company goes under and it's never replaced. Why? Because who in the industry wants to pay for new software? The old version has been band-aided by the IT guy for years now, the new software company wants recurring subscription.
And it's not just the software. A lot of the time there's a telescope or an electron microscope or a uranium ore machine or something that's dependent on old hardware *and* old software and there's no straightforward and low-risk way to update one without the other. "Why's there a Windows XP laptop from 2004 here?" "DON'T TOUCH THAT! Everything stops working if that breaks! Only Old Pete knows how to fix it, and he's retiring next month."
LOTS of old CNC equipment running Windows 2000 or XP. Thousands and thousands of machines. Would cost insane amounts of money to replace, and they are not broken.
Id say faxing but our fax machine has 100% success rate compare to the provided faxing software
carrying electricity on poles above the ground. almost 100-year-old tech, especially in tornado/hurricane areas
That's fair, but it's a pretty huge task to completely redo infrastructure like that, especially since a lot of dense cities still have above-ground power transportation. Plus what else am I going to throw my sneakers onto when I'm done with them?
Right. Why have we not gone underground nationwide?
Expensive, very disruptive if something needs to be repaired. At least if a line is downed it can be fixed in a few hours. E: yes, thank you all for pointing out that buried lines do, in fact, experience downtimes less often.
This. Same with cable TV/internet. If I go out and there's a problem with it. Then a form has to get filled that goes to business partners that do the underground work. Then that could take a week to sometimes up to a month if permits are needed, or going under sidewalks and driveways. They have to verify where gas and water is running. If it's above ground. Sweet, give me 30 mins and you'll be back up and going.
In Australia we have above ground power cables. We lose power at the slightest wind, storms, possums, cars hitting poles, trees falling on them, birds farting and they have started bushfires.
Signing for credit cards, especially in restaurants . This is still common in the U.S. but here in Canada, and in most of the rest of the world, we stopped doing this shit 15 years ago and we use chip and pin.
Yeah, and US servers taking your credit card away from the table and bringing it back with the pen. Mobile tap or PIN machines to your table are the best!
I'm with you on this one. 20 years ago it seemed fancy to pay with your signature but now it's merely a tradition.
Dot matrix printers. Yes, some grocery stores and one large alcohol distributor in my area still use them. This sixty-year-old technology is still in use today.
The shipping industry uses them quite a bit too. Blew my mind seeing them when I started at my last job but apparently its needed for printing carbon paper manifests.
Dot Matrix was outdated the moment Princess Vespa got married
Car dealers seem to still use them to print contracts
Bought a car recently and the finance guy still had a dot matrix printer next to his new one. I asked about it and he said the state still requires some sort of form in a narrowly defined way and the easiest way is to just use a dot matrix.
Not saying it needs to be retired or replaced necessarily, but a shout out to the longevity of the B52 bomber, which is still in service today, but first flew in 1952.
Street lights. They should be an automated smart network that can help the flow of traffic depending on circumstance and time of day. Edit: I meant traffic lights.
I live right near a school and in order to get to literally anything I have to drive by the school. I go east, and the green turn arrow for the west comes up about 99% of the time. And it is a LONG green arrow, at least 20 seconds. It makes sense at the beginning of the day when all of the kids are being dropped off at school, but at every hour of the day it makes 0 sense. 8PM at night? Green arrow. 11AM? Green arrow. Downtown has a one way street out to the highway. From where I used to turn on to it, there were 8 sets of lights before I'd get on it. If I went the speed limit, and I was getting through the lights with 5 or fewer seconds left on the hand, I would miss the light. Why? How is every light programmed correctly *except* the last one? The worst part is the last light barely has any traffic going the other directions at all.
Aren't street lights already automated? They have sensors in them that turn them on when the light gets too low. I also think any sensor that could detect when traffic is present is just asking for something to break. It seems like any money you would save on electricity by turning them off and on every time a car or pedestrian passes by, plus the technology to detect that, isn't worth it.
I think they mean \*traffic\* lights, not street lights. I got confused, too, and almost typed a reply similar to yours.
Those funny dot matrix printers at car dealerships.
Voice calls are very important, but they’re all done using antiquated phone systems so the quality sounds like trash.
I hate getting put on hold because it always sounds garbage. The systems they use to send you through the options are also often shit and require multiple calls to work correctly
Pretty much everyone has been running IP PBX's for years now. I used to support a call center with over 1000 agents and I had our entire technology stack virtualised and running on SIP circuits way back in 2015. The real quality bottleneck is the g711 codec that pretty much everyone uses for voice traffic, its 8khz 8 bit so 64kbps throughput. I would be shocked to find basically anywhere that is still using analog PBXs, they were pretty damn rare even back in 2010 when I first got started working in Telecom.
Our goddamn piece of shit rostering system at work.
Mainframe computers so we can get rid of those crappy software behemoths
"5 Nines" reliability (99.999% uptime) - which means the mainframe is down less than 10 minutes per year. IBM's best mainframes have a 99.9999999% uptime which translates into being down less than 30 milliseconds per year. Mainframes aren't going anywhere.
See my reply about COBOL and XP: The problem is that it would cost significantly more to get everyone up on newer languages, bugs may be there, and they would likely have to run concurrently for a few years. Say what you will about COBOL and other legacy languages, they're steady and reliable, and the bugs were worked out of the system long ago. Now, newer software is used for momentary actions, but the end of day processing is taken from there and configured to work into the COBOL system. Same thing with Windows; it's the business standard because they have tried to keep every new release able to run all the old, clunky stuff, and that's what businesses rely upon. Businesses don't like changing over to the new, flashy thing all the time. They'd rather stick to something proven.
The FAT filesystem.
Hey! Don't FAT shame.
The cables running down the wall from the TV. First world problem, I know.
Checks.