71–80 of 130 posts
I cannot imagine why people prefer an established, well-documented, open exchange format over some closed, proprietary, and probably obfuscated one.
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all of that can be obviated if the hotel offered an online payment system I spent the weekend making reservations at nine hotels for a two-week trip. Of the nine, three could be paid online. Two could be reserved online, but will have to be paid with plastic at check-in. Two had web sites, but I had to call to make a reservation. Three didn't have web sites at all. The vast majority of lodging options in the United S…
This Aug 2015 article says US hotel room supply broke 5 million rooms: https://www.businesstravelnews.com/Strategic-Sourcing/U-S-Ho... and this Mar 2015 infographic on HotelNewsNow.com shows over the 10 biggest brands having over 4 million rooms, worldwide. http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles/25511/10-largest-hotel-... Some of those brands have hit 1 million rooms each, so I think it's safe to say that the vast majo…
You and I apparently travel different places, so my experience is different than yours.
But you're right about booking.com having the best chances of booking online in very small places.
Every single hotel that caters corporate clients in the USA still uses fax. We don't get reservations through fax, but that is the best way to get credit card authorization. A lot of corporate booking systems are automated to send out Fax for credit card authorization after they book the room online. Also, it's much better for our Front desk staff, as they don't have to constantly check the email. There is only 1 fax…
If I may, I would add that it is (obviously) unheard of computer viruses sent by FAX, whilst - besides the "benign" (if we can call it so) spam - a generic hotel e-mail is bombarded by phishing attempts and more generally "check this attachment (enclosed invoice)" or "booking confirmation check the attached image for credit card number" kind of letters, so, besides the time needed to open the e-mail, the e-mails are…
[1] https://blog.checkpoint.com/2018/08/12/faxploit-hp-printer-f...
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Mail delegation covers "anyone can send it out" and 'there is only 1 fax number". Automatically print covers "paper automatically appears" and "don't have to constantly check the email". What exactly are you hoping to modernize (other than "technology A has been around longer than technology B"). If it's hardware e.g. a physical fax machine with a physical line and you want to get rid of that line there are existing…
> "fax is insecure" Fax is not secure. Something like "Sender goes to the machine, and he punches my number or identification and it prints the document at my hotel"
This is fairly common at hospitals (when they don't have a fax server setup) and manifests as "oh the fax didn't come through" (even though it definitely sent successfully).
Anybody has thought of sending faxes with QR codes? Receiving systems that have the ability can get the fax's information quickly via QR code, instead of having to OCR the fax. If the system doesn't support the capability, it's just ignored (by the fax machine and humans).
Might be helpful.
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Faxing is to email as VoIP is to the PSTN Until we can get over the threshold of assuming nobody has a fax machine anymore, faxing is here to stay. Once we push that threshold, the remaining users can be forced out (by not having fax as an option, and faxing will fizzle away over time). Think of it like supporting IE6. A lot of the holdouts for IE6 were large health care organizations and VA/gov centers... the same e…
Faxing is a headache for a lot of people. The problem is that the industries that use fax are in a position to force it on others. Certain healthcare departments, some mortgage related stuff, financial garbage, etc. Places where if you HAVE to do business with that entity for some reason, and the say "fax this to us", you're stuck hunting down a fax machine or using an online service. They thus have no reason to chan…
Just because they prefer fax doesn't (usually) mean that it's the only way it can work. It doesn't mean you have to do it their preferred way.
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This is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.
Everyone has a camera on a device that can send emails. Unless the internet went down and for some reason the phone system still worked, I can't think of any scenario where fax is better than emailing photos.
Also, even when you have both an internet connection and a camera, there remain numerous possible reasons why you may not want to use the internet to send certain things.
I'm certainly not saying that everyone should start faxing, but I totally understand why there may be a substantial minority for whom it makes sense at least from time to time.
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This is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.
Everyone has a camera on a device that can send emails. Unless the internet went down and for some reason the phone system still worked, I can't think of any scenario where fax is better than emailing photos.
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How secure do I need my restaurant take-out order to be?
There are jurisdictions outside of the US that transmit health records by fax to avoid them being subject to the USA PATRIOT Act when they transit routers in the United States.
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What about them? (Can you send a fax over those media, and are they protected similarly?) Or are you asking a different question? If it's not on a phone line, then it's not afforded those legal protections. None of those communication media you just mentioned are using a phone line as a transport mechanism. (They're also not similar to fax from a UX standpoint.)
>Or are you asking a different question? I was asking whether those protections applied to only landlines, or all telephone conversations (eg. cellphones). >If it's not on a phone line, then it's not afforded those legal protections. This sounds problematic considering that for PSTN, "phone lines" only cover the last few miles of transport[1]. Does that mean you can't tap outside someone's house (where it's a phone l…
(And it was illegal, although now, in the USA, I don't think it would be anymore.) Largely depends on what TLA you are, and whether or which secret court you derive your authority from / are required to report to for renewal of your secret warrant.
Of course the GP was about doctors in Germany, and this 641a business was about an NSA facility operated on an AT&T switching office in San Francisco, USA (so this does not also preclude that.)
I think based on what I know about Germany and privacy laws, the court would use a favorable liberal interpretation of "phone line" to mean, say, any connection that begins and ends with a phone line, and terminates with a dial-tone. I don't know much about German courts though, so take that only for what it's worth.