381–390 of 450 posts
50 years ago if you wanted a job, you looked at the news paper.
Today if you want a job, you need discord, indeed, craigslist, hackernews, and a countless amount of other sources.
It has become counter productive for the end user.
Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and…
Absolutely. Same with turning on a TV these days. People used to flip a switch, now it's a highly technical process that takes a few minutes.
Other appliances are similar. Playing music, you used to turn on the radio and maybe dial in a station. Or put a record on the turntable, or a cassette tape in the deck and press "Play".
Appliances much the same. You had power and maybe one or two analog dial controls. Controls in your car were the same. Everything was tactile. Feedback was both physical and immediate. Nothing needed accounts or logins or apps to use.
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This has reached new heights when calling USCIS for immigration issues. You have to avoid certain trigger words or the callbot will shunt you into a loop that can only terminate with it sending you an email on how to do something on the website, then hanging up. If you say "operator" it will go on a spiel about how helpful it is and you should ask it a question. If you say "operator" again it will hang up on you. The…
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In particular, we don't want ideological or political battle (regardless of which flavor you favor) and we don't want flamewar tangents.
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That worked until my son was hit by a car, and my wife in her shock had no idea where her phone was. I’m still to this day guilty that I didn’t pick up the phone the first time it rang. The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.
What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?
There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things.
And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.
Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and…
There is also something incredibly "simple" about the end result of an analog connection - literally a pair of wires connected across thousands of miles. Digitalization has added so many layers people don't even know - it's sad that there aren't many actual direct analog connections you can make anymore to see how "realtime" it was.
I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off l…
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What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?
This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
> This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.
The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less! If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent…
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Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.
I'd like to experience that. I've never had a cellular voice connection that was even remotely as good as the old analog PSTN.
But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.
The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less! If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent…
That's funny - my experience is digital is much clearer than an old analog line.
But ISDN is all but gone, and all other digital voice systems are packetized and suffer awful, terrible, excruciating, reflex-fumbling latency. No matter how clear they are, I'm forever tripping on — no you go — okay as I was — go ahead — um okay — aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!