Redundant technology

[Sebastian Cobb]

Just listened to an interview with someone from the BFI and he said they employ retired BBC and ITV engineers to keep their 2 inch tape machines running. He didn't explicitly say this but he implied it is a bit of a race against time to digitise their tapes before they all die.

A couple of my former colleagues ended up moving to work on a BBC Archive project, it was surrounding using facial recognition and voice analysis to find stuff in the archives quickly. One of the reasons for this, beyond just making things more efficient was the purging of people who had been yewtreed.

I heard the BBC did some conservative estimates on some of their more obsolete formats and concluded they've got more tape than the tape heads can read before wearing out sadly.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I work in retail and tbh the phone pay thingies are pretty annoying because they take more steps to use than simply getting your card out your wallet. Was particularly tiresome during lockdown because it necessitated people apologetically taking their masks down to unlock their phones. Like... your card is right there pal. Just use it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I work in retail and tbh the phone pay thingies are pretty annoying because they take more steps to use than simply getting your card out your wallet. Was particularly tiresome during lockdown because it necessitated people apologetically taking their masks down to unlock their phones. Like... your card is right there pal. Just use it.

Yeah this is the thing for me, more faff to unlock the phone (8 digit pin, face is less secure and both face and fingerprints could be unlocked by force) and then just an extra payment processor before it hits up visa/mastercard anyway.

They've just added tapin-tapoff to the busses here where it will cap at daily and weekly tickets but the basic price is slightly more than the phone app, and while they can accept nfc because they do accept apple/google pay they haven't added the nfc stuff to their own phone app so with that you need to know what you want up-front. Really they should be offering a discount for the tap-in/out stuff because it gives them much better insight data on where people get on and off the buses to find hot-spots in the routes and allow for better planning and demand management in the future.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I work in retail and tbh the phone pay thingies are pretty annoying because they take more steps to use than simply getting your card out your wallet. Was particularly tiresome during lockdown because it necessitated people apologetically taking their masks down to unlock their phones. Like... your card is right there pal. Just use it.

That's what I figured. I'm presuming you can't just tap your phone when it's in sleep mode with the screen off, so you must have to unlock it to turn it on, open the app, press a few buttons and THEN tap it. It's a solution in search of a problem.

[shiftwork2]

I just about caught the fag end of Telex.  It persisted into the 1990s in certain industries such as shipping.  "The speed of the telephone with the accuracy of the printed word".  I don't know how it worked or the story behind it COME ON BUZZERS

[Mr_Simnock]

why not just read the wiki page as a starter?

[purlieu]

I think CD also still does well but Japan always did get special releases for to stop cheaper grey imports or something.

Still accounts for 70% of music consumption in Japan, and that includes streaming.

Mind you, they're not that obsolete here either. They still sell about as much as downloads, vinyl and tapes combined.

[tag]purlieu defends CDs again[/tag]

My girlfriend updated her Tidal account to family, so I use that on my phone sometimes, and the amount of times the stream has cut out because of bad signal - either on the train in the middle of nowhere, or in a city centre because the 4G is always overstretched - so I have to stop the album and switch to something I actually have on my phone is ludicrous. I still have pretty sizeable CD, DVD, vinyl, tape, BluRay and book collections because they work absolutely fine without having to jump through any hoops.

[willbo]

Do you mean iPods/mp3s are dead as stand-alone machines because everyone has an app on their phone that does the same job? Or that people have generally migrated to streaming services? I still listen to the vast majority of my music on mp3, and update it regularly with new music. I think there's some part of me deep down that doesn't trust that the internet is always going to be there, so I want an offline copy of everything I love across all media.

yeah, apparently no kids use MP3 players now cause of phones. I never knew.

[JaDanketies]

I've used that phone payment thing a few times recently. Monzo suggested that I use some credit service called 'Flex', and when I tried to sign up for it, it only exists as an add-on to my Google Pay account, so I did that and now I can pay with my phone!

The Tesco Clubcard app is also on my phone so I'm fucking about with it at the till anyway. Although most of the time I still use my regular Monzo account. Paying with credit is a pain because I've then got to pay off the credit before I start getting charged interest.

Typing this on my laptop, it reminded me of the horrors I faced in my youth, when the only PC we had at my mums was her work laptop, and the mouse was one of these things.


I also remember discovering that the laptop screen a former employer had provided me with was a touchscreen, about one year into working on it.  Remember that Windows OS about 8 years ago that assumed everyone was going to be using touchscreens, and they had to quickly update it because it was fucking shit

[Huxleys Babkins]

Typing this on my laptop, it reminded me of the horrors I faced in my youth, when the only PC we had at my mums was her work laptop, and the mouse was one of these things.

I'd take the Thinkpad nipple over the vast majority of trackpads any day of the week.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My thinkpad still has one of those nipple things but I never use it.

[Zetetic]

On trackballs - I loved the one on my (mother's) PowerBook Duo 230. Particularly for playing Oxyd.

Wish trackballs had lived on a bit longer in laptops, given how easy it was and remains to make a rubbish but technically functional trackpad.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Does "picture in picture" exist in any modern tv's?  I'm talking about the thing that some VCR's were advertised as having in the late 80's early 90's.  You could watch one tv channel while seeing what was happening on another channel in a little window in the corner of the screen.  Of course when you only had 4 channels it was just a gimmick, but now there's more channels it'd be a bit more useful, but apart from that short period during the late 80's/early 90's I've never heard of it since.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Does "picture in picture" exist in any modern tv's?  I'm talking about the thing that some VCR's were advertised as having in the late 80's early 90's.  You could watch one tv channel while seeing what was happening on another channel in a little window in the corner of the screen.  Of course when you only had 4 channels it was just a gimmick, but now there's more channels it'd be a bit more useful, but apart from that short period during the late 80's/early 90's I've never heard of it since.

Yeah, my Samsung has that, it's probably about 10 years old but I think since it only has one tuner you can only pip to an AV source, I can't really remember because I don't use it. I had a DVR with multiple tuners that could also do it provided both were free.

I remember back in the analogue cable days some family friends had a subscription and one of the channels was an index/preview channel that had a load of channels tiled on the screen and it'd cycle through each one showing a few seconds of each while the rest were frozen screenshots. I thought it was amazing at the time, although it was probably not a feature of the cable box and just something that had been generated at the headend and shoved down as a video channel.

[jamiefairlie]

My dad's company head office in the 70s had mimeograph duplicators, a hand cranked photocopier that emitted the strongest smell of sweet, oiliness I've ever encountered, utterly unique.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Still very happily using mp3s here too. Sacked off Spotify and Apple Music and haven't really missed them either. Got bandcamp on my phone but that's it as far as streaming goes. I have my music library looking all nice and good on my computer by using musicbee, which is sort of like 2008-ish iTunes, but actually usable. Still collecting CDs too.

[jamiefairlie]

Tv shows broadcast in Dolby Stereo "where available".

[dontpaintyourteeth]

5.1 speakers don't seem to be a thing anymore. It's all soundbars these days innit

[Sebastian Cobb]

5.1 speakers don't seem to be a thing anymore. It's all soundbars these days innit

Some of the posher ones can support atmos and have secondary wireless rear speakers I think, they can also do 'front top' by having drivers that fire upwards. Although I think if I wanted surround I'd get a proper surround system rather than buying an expensive soundbar that tries to hack it.

[jamiefairlie]

5.1 speakers don't seem to be a thing anymore. It's all soundbars these days innit

The whole home theatre concept got swallowed up by inferior but more handy mobile tech. A bit like how elaborate home hifi lost out to mp3 and iPods.

[Replies From View]

Items that haven't been superseded by the smart phone:

nail clippers

rotisserie chicken

bookends (both ends)

reflective clothing for cyclists

video cassettes

[pigamus]

My dad's company head office in the 70s had mimeograph duplicators, a hand cranked photocopier that emitted the strongest smell of sweet, oiliness I've ever encountered, utterly unique.

I remember the smell from junior school - everything in purple ink for some reason 

[MojoJojo]

Some of the posher ones can support atmos and have secondary wireless rear speakers I think, they can also do 'front top' by having drivers that fire upwards. Although I think if I wanted surround I'd get a proper surround system rather than buying an expensive soundbar that tries to hack it.

The big problem with a proper 5.1 system is you have to layout the whole room around it. The rear speakers ae supposed to be behind the viewer, which is hard to do in most UK houses. The atmos stuff is a bit of a step up over stereo (for films) but much easier.

[MojoJojo]

Office one: conference room speaker phones. Everyone's just on MS Teams now.

(That might just be the company I work for, although I assume it's going that way everywhere).

[jamiefairlie]

Office one: conference room speaker phones. Everyone's just on MS Teams now.

(That might just be the company I work for, although I assume it's going that way everywhere).

Hugely expensive dedicated video conferencing setups, now redundant.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Office one: conference room speaker phones. Everyone's just on MS Teams now.

(That might just be the company I work for, although I assume it's going that way everywhere).

Which can be worse if multiple people huddle round a laptop in a meeting room (as they should, so as not to annoy the rest of the office who aren't on the call) and there's no speakers as the laptop can be too tinny to hear well.

[jamiefairlie]

We have an ancient printer at work which does one important task - printing cheques that are incorporated into a letter. It's incredibly temperamental and has a dedicated 3 person team whose sole job is minding it.

Several large clients rely on this one antiquated device to ensure they are within compliance because, much as they would like to be rid of it, if someone doesn't want to sign up for EMTS, then cheque is the only other option.

I don't know if it still around but we used to have an ancient document scanner as well. We couldn't replace it with a newer one as there was a bespoke software programme which added a digital signature to the scans so that they had a locatable reference point on our database and the software would only work with this scanner and no other. The computer it was tethered to was pretty ancient as well. It was running Windows 7 but only just as the PC originally had XP on it.

Yeah there was a whole industry based on document scanning storage and searching wasn't there. Massive proprietary tech and database systems all obsolete now.

[Consignia]

Office one: conference room speaker phones. Everyone's just on MS Teams now.

(That might just be the company I work for, although I assume it's going that way everywhere).

They are still used, you just have buy ones that can link up to Teams now. Microsoft can supply you with some very expensive suites.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Although certain aspects of modern Linux distros are much improved from just a decade ago because they eventually copied bits and pieces from Solaris (and other Unixes).

Using OpenSolaris in 2007-09, disk management and service management was so much more pleasant than anything I'd encountered messing about with Debian, Fedora, or Gentoo.

Yeah I think Solaris bought in some pretty revolutionary, but now quite common containerisation concepts. For instance Solaris/Oracle zones are notionally very similar to lxc. Although I think FreeBSD had jails or something that was even similar.

The Solaris machines at university seemed pretty good, but the work ones I used had been thrown up and the bare minimum installed on them, the version of find on them didn't even have a case-insensitive switch.

Although I'll forgive clunkiness if there's a decent support network and I think Oracle tried to scrub a lot of this so they could hide it behind a licensing wall. I seem to remember their sites being pretty bad for having circular references and dead links as well.

[jamiefairlie]

Re: ceiling speakers, I used to work nights in a hotel with them in the function rooms. Huge console behind the main reception desk area with a big old digital sound system. It was great tbh, used to take in my drum n bass mix CDs in and pump out DJ Hype whilst setting up wedding receptions and conferences.

Also, the place had an OHP stashed away which still occasionally got wheeled out for presentations. This was only about 15 years ago.



Not very environmentally friendly.

PowerPoint used to have an option to print to overhead slides. I think overhead projectors were still the main tech into the late 90s for most people.