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You used to be able to get free phone calls from payphones in NZ by emulating pulse-dialling. Rotary phones worked by sending 10-n pulses, where n was the digit you were dialling. The phone system was still set up to accept that kind of dial, so you could just rapidly tap the phone-cradle that many times for each digit of the number and it would dial + connect without needing a phonecard.
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Dec 26, 2021 19:38
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:You used to be able to get free phone calls from payphones in NZ by emulating pulse-dialling. Rotary phones worked by sending 10-n pulses, where n was the digit you were dialling. The phone system was still set up to accept that kind of dial, so you could just rapidly tap the phone-cradle that many times for each digit of the number and it would dial + connect without needing a phonecard. Perhaps it’s different on the other side of the equator, but here in Europe rotary phones sent N pulses for N=1..9, and 10 for 0. Except apparently in Sweden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQUY2PxAI3w (Whole channel is chock full of obsolete stuff, highly recommended.)
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Dec 26, 2021 19:45
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Mantle posted:I have a desktop with similar specs I want to teach my 5yo nephew to use. Is there a supported Linux that will run as well as XP did on that era of machine? I've tried xubuntu and lubuntu and both are a bit slow. And also losing 32bit support. As far as I know, lubuntu and xubuntu are basically just Ubuntu with different default sets of applications installed. The thing about Linux is that the "desktop" is just a loose collection of applications being run under a window manager, and it's trivial to switch window managers. If you run e.g. KDE with a bunch of KDE applications, they'll all use the same shared libraries and should therefore save some memory (plus everything will have the same look and feel). Drove me up the loving wall when the Ubuntu variants made people think they had to reinstall their operating system to try out a different desktop environment. Anyway, if you're already familiar with Debian-based systems (the *buntus), just grab Debian, it's got 32-bit support and probably will for longer than anyone else. Install a minimal window manager like FVWM or maybe something more full-featured like LXDE, but be aware that the desktop environment is only a small part of the performance equation compared to the applications you run. FVWM needs like 30MB of RAM to run. Chrome needs as much as you have, plus a gig. Your machine will surely do a fine job of running emulators or playing video files (set up a cron job to youtube-dl stuff and save your nephew from The Algorithm), or learning Python, or playing with Scratch, but it's not gonna do great with fat-assed web browsers or libreoffice. Some display managers (the graphical login things) will let you select from the installed window managers, which is a great way to test out different WMs or desktop environments. I'm an old grognard so I do it via my .xsession file instead, but I know for sure that the "wdm" window manager should let you pick your WM at login time.
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Dec 26, 2021 20:02
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mostlygray posted:Fax is legally the same as signed in person. Not all occupations require faxing. I still do send and receive faxes. Not as often as I used to, but it's still necessary for some things. Sure, your daughter can send a file with your signature on it but I can do exactly the same with any document I care to fax. I'll just copy and paste your signature onto any document I want and print and fax it off. Faxes are not in any way more secure, and are worse considering businesses can send out cryptographically signed documents that can be proven to be unaltered at any stage of its life.
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Dec 26, 2021 23:17
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Laws change more slowly than technology, news at 7
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Dec 26, 2021 23:27
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Pham Nuwen posted:Anyway, if you're already familiar with Debian-based systems (the *buntus), just grab Debian, it's got 32-bit support and probably will for longer than anyone else. Install a minimal window manager like FVWM or maybe something more full-featured like LXDE, but be aware that the desktop environment is only a small part of the performance equation compared to the applications you run. FVWM needs like 30MB of RAM to run. Chrome needs as much as you have, plus a gig. Your machine will surely do a fine job of running emulators or playing video files (set up a cron job to youtube-dl stuff and save your nephew from The Algorithm), or learning Python, or playing with Scratch, but it's not gonna do great with fat-assed web browsers or libreoffice. Seconding original Debian, so long as you can install it from a USB stick and have Ethernet or WiFi support without adding non-free firmware. Debian has stricter rules for what they consider "sufficiently free and open" so other things like binary firmware aren't included in the default installer image. What was meant by "not really 64-bit"? It's listed as a 64-bit capable CPU on Intel Ark here : https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/42503/intel-atom-processor-n450-512k-cache-1-66-ghz.html The N270 I had in a netbook was only 32-bit, but better/newer Atoms are 64-bit capable. I'm guessing that it's that performance is a bit borderline when comparing 32-bit with smaller binary sizes and 64-bit with having a competent number of registers etc available on something with poor memory bandwidth? (Haven't actually benchmakrked this to compare) Would also recommend investigating non-GNOME and non-KDE desktops - anything which is "just a window manager" will be an awful lot lighter! I've used plain window managers for years (initially fvwm95, ctwm and now stumpwm) and they make old machines much more acceptable. My current desktop probably counts as retro now being >10 years old, but with an SSD and wedged full of RAM it's fine 
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Dec 27, 2021 00:06
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Zopotantor posted:Perhaps it’s different on the other side of the equator, but here in Europe rotary phones sent N pulses for N=1..9, and 10 for 0. I think you're right, but I know from personal experience the 10-n technique got free phone calls so who knows what was going on at the exchange
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Dec 27, 2021 00:59
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I work at a manufacturing company and we still get orders in via fax. US here. Plus health care demands faxes for some stuff. But it's dumb as poo poo. We can fax out of our email. Send an email to 1111111111@fax.fax and it sends it out as a fax to that number. The end users also get faxes in to their Outlook. We got rid of all physical fax machines years ago.
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Dec 27, 2021 01:26
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mostlygray posted:Fax is legally the same as signed in person. Eh, this isn't true and depends on the place and the thing in question . There are lots of things where fax was never acceptable. Wet signatures or professional seals are needed in a lot of areas for things. In that space, email is now becoming an option because the use of cryptographically signed documents is becoming recognized. So yeah, there are things that skipped fax as an option but can now be emailed.
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Dec 27, 2021 01:41
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T.C. posted:Eh, this isn't true and depends on the place and the thing in question . There are lots of things where fax was never acceptable. Wet signatures or professional seals are needed in a lot of areas for things. In that space, email is now becoming an option because the use of cryptographically signed documents is becoming recognized. So yeah, there are things that skipped fax as an option but can now be emailed. The docusign things via email are absolute arse - they provide a "unique" link via unencrypted email and anyone with that website link can sign with nothing else being required to prove identity. I have no idea how these appear to have been made acceptable for signing legal documents. Edit: typo fixes
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Dec 27, 2021 02:16
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The US Patent & Trademark Office, whose entire purpose is advancement of technology, still requires fax for certain types of filings for the filing date to be legally recognized. It's mostly a backup for when their electronic filing systems go down, with the only other option filing via USPS first-class tracked mail, but there are still a couple of types of petitions that can only be filed via fax or snail mail. They have a lot of other antique methods, too. For example, all ownership and licensing agreement documents are recorded for posterity to microfiche, because it's still one of the most stable long-term recording mediums for legal documents. Thankfully these documents can be filed electronically, but the USPTO's system doesn't accept secured PDFs. So whenever a $$hundreds-of-millions++ ownership or licensing agreement needs to be recorded, and the agreement paperwork was signed with DocuSign, I have to print that fucker to paper and scan it back in as a plain-Jane unsecured PDF or TIFF to upload it to the system that then prints everything to microfiche for the purpose of storage. And color drawings... enjoy filing those via CD-ROM. The USPTO's ancient web system doesn't accept PDFs with color images because their entire system converts everything to and operates on monochrome TIFFs. So if your patent application relies on graphs or heat maps or what-have-you that can only be shown with color images, make sure you have some first-class envelopes/labels and blank CD-Rs on hand. And be ready to pay the USPTO's additional $140 fee to petition to have them accepted.
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Dec 27, 2021 03:24
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Dicty Bojangles posted:The USPTO's ancient web system doesn't accept PDFs with color images because their entire system converts everything to and operates on monochrome TIFFs. I have the perfect solution for dealing with those TIFFs. 
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Dec 27, 2021 04:18
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:You used to be able to get free phone calls from payphones in NZ by emulating pulse-dialling. Rotary phones worked by sending 10-n pulses, where n was the digit you were dialling. The phone system was still set up to accept that kind of dial, so you could just rapidly tap the phone-cradle that many times for each digit of the number and it would dial + connect without needing a phonecard. I really would like to go down memory lane and see what most of the 'big names' from back in the 80-90s H/P scene are doing now. I say most because I have stumbled into a few IRL through various work things over the years and they were quite toxic.
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Dec 27, 2021 04:21
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USCIS (US Immigration) is worse. They still require snail mail for the vast majority of forms, and only moved away from wet signatures after COVID. Keep in mind that immigration petitions can easily be well over a thousand pages. The worst was the PERM certification, where three different people needed to physically sign a specific original form printed on special blue paper. One of those people was the intending immigrant, who was often in another country, so you had to mail the original internationally and have the person sign it and mail it back, hoping that whatever courier you use didn't lose it. At least now photocopies are acceptable.
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Dec 27, 2021 05:09
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That's definitely intentionally bad. People love making immigration be as hard as possible for no reason.
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Dec 27, 2021 05:27
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There are a number of monochrome-only compression modes in TIFF. I was working in a company that used group 4 compressed images for their parts list drawings. This is a fax compression algorithm, which makes some sense for these drawings, they are monochrome line art. They deployed an ActiveX plugin to display them as the decoder wasn't common at the time. Wikipedia says support is now widespread, but that probably means widespread within things that support TIFF at all. I also had to remove protection from a PDF before, I suggest doing a "print to PDF" directly.
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Dec 27, 2021 08:10
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Sort of iffy since this is still a current product, but I finally got my hands on one of these babies: This is an Askania mzm1, an industrial inspection microscope made in Germany. What makes it thread relevant is that it was built using Zeiss plans and probably equipment which are essentially unchanged from the 70s/80s. Back as wwii was ending it had been decided that the Soviets would get control of the town of Jena in eastern Germany where Zeiss was based. However the US soldiers got there first and nabbed the Zeiss engineers and managers but had to leave the equipment and most of the workers. As such past that point there were two independent Zeiss companies rebuilt from those two bases, one in west and one in the east, with a lot of clashing over the trademark. When the wall fell Zeiss reunited along with the rest of the country, with the western zeiss basically taking over on the microscope front, but it turns out some of the eastern zeiss contractors just sort of never stopped. Most of this microscope is completely unchanged from one you could order from the soviet bloc 40-50 years ago. Honestly, Zeiss Jena didn't make amazing microscopes and this one isn't amazing either, but I still like it.
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Dec 27, 2021 10:34
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That's neat. What sort of magnification does it give? Is that a TV camera on top?
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Dec 27, 2021 17:07
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This one is a low magnification setup, zooming from 0.8-4x. It's actually the only 'new' design they make as far as I can tell, but it's just one half of a stereo microscope with a compound microscope head so not really new in a meaningful way. It does have a video camera, though it's mostly acting as a dust cap since it looks to be the more boring, recent kind of obsolete.
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Dec 27, 2021 17:25
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evobatman posted:Where do you work, so I can short their stock? When I send a document through conventional means. It goes through. I swear every "E" thing I do ends up breaking. Be it a job with Amazon, or a small company. There's so much fussing and overhead for "E" crap. Letters always work. Faxes always work. I like things that work. I just picked up a couple of shifts at Amazon for some cash flow. The W4 part of the sign up was broken. Maybe it works now, I don't know. I had to call them to get confirmation about my start date because their email system didn't send me that. Don't worry though. They sent me a bunch of emails that they're hiring for the position that I'm already hired for. Give me a letter and a fax any day of the week. Emails are cool and all. They don't always work. Some servers are set to try once then silently discard. Some are set to try 4 times, wait 24 hours, then try again. Some are set to try once every 24 hours for 4 days. A fax goes through or it doesn't. You get instantaneous confirmation. US Mail is reliable. Unless your carrier is drunk and steals mail, you will always get your mail. Cue up the "Drunk Uncle" bit from SNL. People always Twitterin' Snapchats to each other to buy THC gummy bears because #feelings #woketiktok.
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Dec 28, 2021 06:46
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This fascinating piece of obsolete and failed technology from the Soviet Union recently came across you Youtube subscription inbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPT6nIRFI_I Also, this other piece of technology is not quite obsolete or failed but it's certainly weird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUqBB4FiOQ
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Dec 28, 2021 22:29
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My dad got one of those at a pawn shop to add to his ryobi army. He likes it.
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Dec 29, 2021 07:24
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"Why is this case built so sturdy?" asks the man who bought a portable soldering iron.
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Dec 29, 2021 13:21
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mostlygray posted:When I send a document through conventional means. It goes through. I swear every "E" thing I do ends up breaking. Be it a job with Amazon, or a small company. There's so much fussing and overhead for "E" crap. I totally agree that email has a lot of issues that keep it from being reliable as it should be, but fax can go gently caress it self. At a previous job, I was the responsible for pretty much everything PSTN at our company at all locations worldwide, and I can tell you that faxes were responsible for the vast majority of trouble tickets I had to deal with. Cheap Office Depot fax machines would frequently have interoperability issues with other fax machines and servers. The issue was usually that they were refuse to auto negotiate to a lower speed or fax Group and you had to manually hard set them to a lower speed or disable Super G3 all together. Faxing over VoIP lines was a complete nightmare. Finding the right configuration that is supported end-to-end between your VoIP provider, Session Border Controller, and whatever device you are using to terminate VoIP to POTS for the analog fax is my own personal hell. Also, getting confirmation that a fax was received is nice, but I seen multiple times where a sender transposed or misdialed a fax number, but it still fell in our range of 4000 fax numbers that went to our RightFax server. So the fax went through and the send confirmation, but the intended recipient didn't get it.
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Dec 29, 2021 14:24
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Mr.Radar posted:
Embedding the power brick isn't that unusual. The device is already UL rated, and you can keep your safety certifications without making your design more complex with an open-frame supply internally. My B6 charger does this too.
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Dec 29, 2021 19:24
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Mr.Radar posted:Also, this other piece of technology is not quite obsolete or failed but it's certainly weird: I can think of a bunch a situations where a battery powered iron like that would’ve come in pretty handy! Also, I don’t know who this guy is, but I hate videos like this. He talks for like 5 minutes at the beginning about himself, just get to the point! Also ‘anum’ and ‘domicile’, calm down James Joyce, jesus.
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Dec 29, 2021 19:55
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That's not his usual style of video, but that is kind of how he talks. You have to accept that the nerds that make these kinds of videos will talk that way.
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Dec 29, 2021 19:57
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Cojawfee posted:That's not his usual style of video, but that is kind of how he talks. You have to accept that the nerds that make these kinds of videos will talk that way. That's true, not sure I was so salty at that video! It is interesting that that's how they chose to include the power supply.
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Dec 29, 2021 22:27
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frogbs posted:That's true, not sure I was so salty at that video! It is interesting that that's how they chose to include the power supply. eh, it is like 5 minutes of him talking about why or why not he doesn't like specific existing soldering tools before he actually gets to the ryobi itself, there's a chapter marking and overlay text specifically in case people DON'T want to sit through that in other words, it's not unthinkable to not want to engage with it, but he knew that publishing the video and did accommodate it
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Dec 29, 2021 22:38
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He voted for Hillary.
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Dec 30, 2021 00:45
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3D Megadoodoo posted:He voted for Hillary. They already said he was annoying and knows it.
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Dec 30, 2021 03:53
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I don't mind his presentation style, then again I do like Doug Demuro's videos as well, so take it as you will
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Dec 30, 2021 11:14
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Lowen SoDium posted:I totally agree that email has a lot of issues that keep it from being reliable as it should be, but fax can go gently caress it self. I mostly hate doing the scan and fax thing because I don't have a good document management system. I suppose I wouldn't mind it so much if I did. I do a lot of work with event companies and a lot of them still use printed forms that they mail to you and you fax back. I even work with one that still uses carbon paper. Several others use carbonless. Those suck because they won't fit through the document feeder so you have to use the flat bed. Some do use the Internet for sign-up so that's nice. The only problem is that their websites are broken half the time because somebody's cousin set up the website and they've mixed their furniture business with their event business and you can't find anything on their site.
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Dec 30, 2021 19:29
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Due to the fact that printers and scanners are poo poo, telefax is still the best and most importantly fastest way to send a copy of a written document to anyone. Well, would be if anyone could receive one.
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Dec 30, 2021 20:09
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https://twitter.com/80snewsscreens/status/1476960642691174403?s=20
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Jan 1, 2022 08:18
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3D Megadoodoo posted:He voted for Hillary. I don't think that's true? Every tweet I've seen from CRD on twitter indicates that he thinks Clinton sucks.
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Jan 2, 2022 01:38
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DoctorWhat posted:I don't think that's true? Every tweet I've seen from CRD on twitter indicates that he thinks Clinton sucks. those two things aren't mutually exclusive
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Jan 2, 2022 01:41
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DoctorWhat posted:I don't think that's true? Every tweet I've seen from CRD on twitter indicates that he thinks Clinton sucks. Just probe me for drunkposting that. Make it a 30 TIA.
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Jan 2, 2022 01:42
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DoctorWhat posted:I don't think that's true? Every tweet I've seen from CRD on twitter indicates that he thinks Clinton sucks. And your point?
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Jan 2, 2022 01:43
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In this context, "voting for Hillary" suggests that he preferred her to Sanders, which is rightfully deserving of mockery if true. I don't think that's a fair assessment of the ways in which Gravis/CRD can be irritating, though, because based on years of following the guy on Twitter I don't think he's a neolib.
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Jan 2, 2022 01:47
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