Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

Only to be received by another fax modem and saved digitally in a fax management system.

Like some kind of glorified node-to-node eMail with no physical paper.
Exactly. Then you can print it out and it's still legally a fax I suppose.

I understand that the transaction goes through a separate number to record it being sent and on the other side it being received and no sketchy lawyers can ask me if I can change some things in the Exchange database regarding times and dates, but it's still silly.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Aunt Carol
Exactly. Then you can print it out and it's still legally a fax I suppose.

I understand that the transaction goes through a separate number to record it being sent and on the other side it being received and no sketchy lawyers can ask me if I can change some things in the Exchange database regarding times and dates, but it's still silly.
Yeah, if tampering is the concern, digitally signed PDFs are the way to go.

Nothing stops me from scanning a document, modifying it, printing it out again, then faxing it to you.

But the average person is too tech-illiterate to comprehend that.

Fax will stay around until digitally signed documents and encrypted email are dumbed down and forced upon the consumer, just like SSL.
 
Last edited:
Coming soon to a YouTube on your desktop...
Instead of hovering over thumbnails of videos (seems like it is just the homescreen so far), and getting a short preview, videos will start to play from the beginning with captions on in a small blow-up window. I hate it.
sigh.jpg


sigh2.jpg
 
Last edited:
I'm not a big fan of modern streaming supremacy. I don't mind streaming content, but I just miss having more options and the prominence of downloading content, because sometimes you revisit something and it's either annoyingly hard to find or just isn't really available anymore. A part of me thinks this contributes to centralization of the internet as well, because people are no longer their own archives in a sense and content is being stored more and more on central services.

This is what caused me to rethink getting out of physical media. I finally concluded there was no way to do all streaming without some drawbacks, and the way every studio/channel wants you to subscribe to some new service, it was better to just buy discs of the movies/shows I like. I went out and bought a 4k bluray player, my first dedicated player in 15 years.
 
there's been some gov shits where THE RULES said you needed to get the wheels in motion by fax so goddammit get a fax machine
fortunately the apartment complex I rent from has similar "due to law we need fax" and they're generous
also in other dead tech that I don't have strong feelings about but at least touched a few times
a Japanese tv commercial for ISDN
 
  • Like
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole
This is what caused me to rethink getting out of physical media. I finally concluded there was no way to do all streaming without some drawbacks, and the way every studio/channel wants you to subscribe to some new service, it was better to just buy discs of the movies/shows I like. I went out and bought a 4k bluray player, my first dedicated player in 15 years.
I still buy books, mostly because I like the feeling of them in my hands when I read and the visual of filling up bookshelves with the ones I enjoy. I'm hoping that one day my kids read those books to some value as when I started reading I never really knew what to read and ended up going through a lot of garbage old literature.

I do agree with you as well, I remember a big thing about World of Warcraft was that there was a claim that Blizzard just didn't have the original game files one their servers anymore so they couldn't release vanilla WoW, but at the same time private servers could simply because of the physical media and archived information that existed. I'm guessing in large part this was just an excuse by Blizzard, and many people ate it up, but the idea that a company who made the game not having the original files is a really unsettling idea.

Another interesting thing was a talk by the guy who did the BBS documentary and was sued for millions, if not billions, back in the day. I think he was part of the Defcon scene and what stood out to me was that at one point he said something along the lines of it's weird that broke college kids could afford a hard drive with X gigabytes but not the content to fill it up, therefor piracy would exist. Today storage capacity has vastly increased and we simply don't care about it anymore which is odd, like what happened to that? It's also weird that there was this whole internet known as the BBS that just no one knows about it so people think something like Serial Experiment Lain predicted a bunch of stuff when all of it existed back then, just not how we know it today. Some guy has a good chunk of it preserved, but we're not really doing that.

Pardon the meandering rant, I'm a bit drunk.
 
Scroll wheels are great, adding smooth scrolling was a nice addition. But replacing the middle mouse button with a clickable rotating wheel placed on a slope is the ingenious work of the devil. 95% of the time there's no problem, it works well enough to not get hurled out the window. Then it slips a little bit and now you've clicked something else.
 
This is what caused me to rethink getting out of physical media. I finally concluded there was no way to do all streaming without some drawbacks, and the way every studio/channel wants you to subscribe to some new service, it was better to just buy discs of the movies/shows I like. I went out and bought a 4k bluray player, my first dedicated player in 15 years.
You should invest in a media storage rig and pirate all the media you want. It'll take up less space than all those blu-rays and with a proper RAID setup you don't have to worry about drives dying and losing all your media. You'll also never have to worry about disc rot or ruined discs. Fuck, I have video files I downloaded almost 20 years ago that are still playable.
 
This is what caused me to rethink getting out of physical media. I finally concluded there was no way to do all streaming without some drawbacks, and the way every studio/channel wants you to subscribe to some new service, it was better to just buy discs of the movies/shows I like. I went out and bought a 4k bluray player, my first dedicated player in 15 years.
They've started to alter digital content to remove offensive words and scenes. There was an article on the BBC last year showing how advertisement companies were going to go back to classic films like cassablanca, and digitally update the billboards to have modern day companies advertised. That's a short skip away from digital censorship of old titles.

That's if they even decide to keep the episodes up and don't pull them like they did with episodes of Southpark, Family guy, Brooklyn 99, Community and Always sunny (to name but a few).

Storing files digitally and/or buying old shows in their unedited physical format, is the only way to avoid post-release censorship.
 
I'm guessing in large part this was just an excuse by Blizzard, and many people ate it up, but the idea that a company who made the game not having the original files is a really unsettling idea.
I can't remember the names/titles, but one big company straight up threw away the source code for one of their games
They've started to alter digital content to remove offensive words and scenes. There was an article on the BBC last year showing how advertisement companies were going to go back to classic films like cassablanca, and digitally update the billboards to have modern day companies advertised. That's a short skip away from digital censorship of old titles.

That's if they even decide to keep the episodes up and don't pull them like they did with episodes of Southpark, Family guy, Brooklyn 99, Community and Always sunny (to name but a few).

Storing files digitally and/or buying old shows in their unedited physical format, is the only way to avoid post-release censorship.
I've downloaded banned Spongebob episodes just because they're banned
6_the_dollar.png
 
I don't know why, but earbuds are cheaply made. I've went through several which broke though a couple months of use. Not to mention they slip out my ear during regular use.
 
  • Dumb
Reactions: Madre Muerte
My phone battery is deteriorating and I cannot replace the battery itself. Why did they remove that ability?
If you're really determined, you can order a replacement battery from China and pay a repair shop to take the phone apart and install it for you. Research is required first, obviously, and some phone models are too much of a hassle.
 
the slow migration from wired to wireless accessories, with wired equivalents of modern tech being phased out.
i understand that they're more convenient for most people, i'm not against the technology entirely and have used some wireless tech before.
but when i'm trying to get something for my desktop, there is literally no reason for me to use a wireless alternative and have to deal with all of the drawbacks that technology comes with (e.g. battery management and automatic power timeouts).

for example, my friend had recently obtained a set of wireless speakers and they have the incredible feature of turning off after ten seconds of no sound to save power, which is fine, but the problem comes in with the speakers taking at least two seconds to respond to sound output and turn themselves back on.
this results in the first two seconds of anything he listens to being completely dropped and there's no way to disable this without playing a constant, low humming sound.
apparently he does not see a problem with this and the way he resolves the problem is to simply restart playback of the video/song to compensate.
 
People putting their drama on blast on social media. It's disrespectful and tacky. Not to mention depressing.
I'd like to expand on this a bit. Social media has normalized itself into modern culture. It's quite scary. I see friends post drama about their day-to-day for all to see. Complaining about their job, their families, their relationships on their pages. And people encouraging or enabling it.

There's a lot of trends about social media that tick me off. But drama has to be the worst of it all.
 
I still buy books, mostly because I like the feeling of them in my hands when I read and the visual of filling up bookshelves with the ones I enjoy. I'm hoping that one day my kids read those books to some value as when I started reading I never really knew what to read and ended up going through a lot of garbage old literature.

I do agree with you as well, I remember a big thing about World of Warcraft was that there was a claim that Blizzard just didn't have the original game files one their servers anymore so they couldn't release vanilla WoW, but at the same time private servers could simply because of the physical media and archived information that existed. I'm guessing in large part this was just an excuse by Blizzard, and many people ate it up, but the idea that a company who made the game not having the original files is a really unsettling idea.

Another interesting thing was a talk by the guy who did the BBS documentary and was sued for millions, if not billions, back in the day. I think he was part of the Defcon scene and what stood out to me was that at one point he said something along the lines of it's weird that broke college kids could afford a hard drive with X gigabytes but not the content to fill it up, therefor piracy would exist. Today storage capacity has vastly increased and we simply don't care about it anymore which is odd, like what happened to that? It's also weird that there was this whole internet known as the BBS that just no one knows about it so people think something like Serial Experiment Lain predicted a bunch of stuff when all of it existed back then, just not how we know it today. Some guy has a good chunk of it preserved, but we're not really doing that.

Pardon the meandering rant, I'm a bit drunk.
Square lost the source code for Kingdom Hearts. The developers of the remasters had to dig through the retail game. Konami lost the source code for Silent Hill 2, 3, and I assume 4. Whatever the developers did to make HD versions of 2 and 3, I wish they hadn't. Think Bethesda lost the source code for Daggerfall. Video games have been going through a similar lack of care towards preservation that film had in its early years.
 
Back