Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

I sent a fax today
To see if i still feel

a backward step we all accepted long ago: printer manufacturers not bothering to update drivers for older models

sorry, HP LaserJet 1012, you're in perfect working order but suddenly my Mac can't talk to you anymore

I don't know if this fits, but certain channels slightly speeding up old TV shows to squeeze in more ads into the same runtime. Noticed this today watching Gunsmoke with dropframes on TVLand, which was followed by an an un-doctored Andy Griffith that ran 35 minutes with ads.

Radio stations are notorious for speeding up songs and have been doing so for decades. Not surprised at all by this.

Seinfeld plays sped up by 7.5% in repeats to fit in more ads

(and on streaming they cut out about a quarter of the picture)

yeah I noticed that picture cutting on Prime recently, bothered me at first but made my peace with it fairly quickly - particularly because if I ever replay Seinfeld I only need it on in the background whilst doing something else.

Pan-and-scan 4:3 versions stretched to 16:9 is the only way to watch films properly.

i sometimes see Charmed repeats on 4 music and they are doing exactly that for those.

this explains why I've kept complaining when I put Nick at Night on that everybody's voice sounds a wee bit 'higher pitched' on Friends.

I can foresee a day when I have my own separate television that does not play through speakers or connect to Chrome or Home or anything else, and which has just one remote, which does not need to be programmed. This television will not require the intervention of a fucking tech person to turn on so that I can just watch my quizzes when I want. Jesus.

That wincing high frequency 'hear things from the perspective of a character who just survived a bomb going off or might be about to have a seizure' sound that is in SO many dramas now and goes on for over ten seconds or more sometimes...I need an auto-mute button for this.

have we talked about 2FA and password complexity and how both are gigantic buckets of bullshit yet

pretty much why I'm always locked out of everything

xp - I have definitely experienced comedic results of 2FA

the classic:

Person on Computer: it's asking me for a code
Person with Account: are they sending me the code?
Person on Computer: your number ends with 9032?
Person with Account: yeah
Person on Computer: yeah they are sending you the code
( time passes)
Person on Computer: did you get the code?
(time passes)
Person on Computer: okay I'm having them send the code again
Person with Account: sorry, got another call -- here's the code
Person on Computer: I had them resend it, that was the old one
Person with Account: (sends screenshot with previous code)
Person on Computer: no, there should be a new one
(time passes)

remote learning with Teams and OneNote feels like it belongs here now. It seems like the primary source of stress in my household these days.

OneNote worked two years ago when I used it in my last teaching job, but now that I really need it, it does not work. I spent a full class period trying to get kids to activate their OneNotes, only to find that it's too mysteriously glitchy to be worth bothering with.

Teams is Microsoft’s “hey, we need a tool that competes with this one simple bit of functionality. and a tool that competes with this thing. and wouldn’t it be cool instead of just offering an alternate to Slack and Zoom, we also shoved a full-fledged document management suite in it that’s a thin wrapper over SharePoint?”

arrrrgh

I have no idea how they’ve fucked OneNote, which worked fine for me a few years ago, but I suspect it also has the blood curse of SharePoint now

I just call whatever Microsoft application I’m currently using DickPunch because that’s what using them feels like

I dare not speak the name of any product Microsoft has that seems slim and useful because they’ll overhear me and decide it needs a handful of kitchen sinks

tbf Teams functions pretty well for me at work, I even kind of like the built-in wiki, but the way it’s organized with our daughter’s school apps - especially OneNote - is just a nightmare to try and navigate. And she’s the age where she’s absolutely determined to do everything independently no matter how infuriated she gets so like 90% of the time she just winds herself up into a meltdown and refuses all help.

We're a mostly MS Office workplace and while our Slack's been going for a while it's been mandated from on-high (as in campuswide) that we have to use Teams at some point next year. I've poked around in it -- seems useful enough for what we do that I can live with it, but obviously it's just a bit of extra randomness.

It actually does make all parts of an online set of meetings easier in that you can have files attached to channels and reference them directly from a video meeting in that channel

However, we’ve done that multiple times now and each time someone has to helpfully say “you have to click on the group, then the channel, then click this weirdly worded thing at the top to switch from chat to attached videos (or whatever)” and the person who says this on our non-Teams chat system gets a dozen upvotes for good content

They also have a few things (notably the interface to share a file during a live video meeting) where the description text and the link to open the file are in the same typography and there’s no indication which text is a link

I just call whatever Microsoft application I’m currently using DickPunch because that’s what using them feels like

I don't have a dick but although Google Sheets has vastly improved recently, DickPunch Excel makes it easier to "hide columns and rows"

You can spend $10,000 and still not get a laptop with a keyboard that is as good as one from 20 years ago.

FWIW, on the subject of microsoft, I am very confused about the difference/overlap between Teams, OneDrive and Sharepoint. I had some staffers ask if they could share files they were prepping for me in Teams rather than OneDrive and I am unable to discern what's different except that there is a "T" symbol.

i don't mind teams since it's sort of a happy medium between email and something like skype chat for a lot of work interactions but it's funny watching things shift from "file attached to email and good luck finding it" to "file embedded in teams chat and good luck finding it"

the thing that really gets me about the whole office 365 suite is that Microsoft fucking made all of it and designed all of it to work together and yet it just doesn't integrate that well.

Also, I am forever getting confused between my own files, my "team's" files, and the files a team or other person shared with me.

Only use teams for online meetings but were a big Slack company, we even made Slack shoes. The one MS program I support is ToDo which is a rebuilt Wunderlist, which was the only to do app I liked.

Teams is just adequate for meetings. Skype for Business was way better in my view.

And Teams's use for file storage / collaboration offers no advantage over SharePoint (because it is in fact just a front-end for SharePoint). If I am using Teams for files I just immediately open the directory in SharePoint, where I can do more of what I want to do.

So all that Teams has left to recommend it is chat rooms and wiki, which I see no real point for if you already have email and phones and such.

Can't speak to OneDrive as I never use it.

I used to use a really nice web-based outlining/list making tool but I can't remember what it was now. Super minimal. You'd click a plus sign to create a new entry.

Ah found it! Workflowy - https://workflowy.com/

> Workflowy

i hate it already

i know, i really do like it though

lol I've finally gotten used to MS Teams and we've mostly worked out the tech kinks.

has some inferiorities to WebEx that I'll never get over but w/e

Found Teams to be way better than Skype for Business which we were using before. I guess these things in large part depend on what you use them for. For us it's mostly chat and meetings and I find it works better than most other software for this kind of stuff.

lol Skype for Business is a complete garbage fire of a program

or known by its earlier name, Lync

and before that, Office Communicator!

did anybody use Sametime back i nthe day

love sporadically getting “this message can’t be delivered” messages for inexplicable reasons

sometimes Skype for Business would transmit my messages out of order if the server got congested

"The bathroom is overflowing on the third floor"
"Hey, do you have a moment to discuss an issue?"

uhh it works good enough let’s just slap a revised gui on the client and change the name, no one will be the wiser

yeah, for us what happened was that we were told that Skype for Business was what we were going to be using (mostly just for instant messaging, this was pre-pandemic when we did pretty much all meetings in person). A couple of weeks later, somebody figured out that we have Teams included in our Office 365 subscription and everybody just gradually switched to that.

I definitely remember the messages out of order thing. Also that the conversation history would always be missing huge chunks of exchanges.

yup. MS Teams is much better about that

Ok I don't need five different ways to ask someone to give me a piece of information. Every "innovation" so far has just multiplied the ways in which something can go wrong or get missed.

1995: You called me on the phone and I either answered, or I wasn't there so you left a message.

2000: You sent me an email and I either responded, or I didn't, so you sent me another email or you called me on the phone.

2005: You sent me an email and I either did or didn't respond. Then you called me and I did or didn't answer. Then you sent me an IM that I did or didn't answer. You came over to my cubicle and we worked it out.

2010: You sent me an email, sent me a text, called, and IMed me. I either did or didn't respond to those. You walked over to my office and left a Post-it on my monitor.

2020: You sent me an email, sent me a text, called me, IMed me, put a message in the group Teams chat and on our slack channel and our Discord server. I either did or didn't respond to any of those.

All I see in this relentless chain of "progress" is the number of different ways in which I need to ignore someone before it becomes clear that I am, in fact, ignoring them.

you never tried the "Fuck u and take ur needless bullshit down the hallway" reply?