Back in the day, old versions of Word only had "co-operation" in its dictionary, and would autocorrect "cooperation" to "Cupertino". This sounded like one of those urban legend things until I searched Google Books for some common constructs. You'll find hundreds of examples like the cupertino of and Cupertino Between (has some real uses but most aren't)
That particular number was for a line that often received vendor calls, so simply blocking/dodging calls wasn't an option. New number we got was fine though.
It comes and goes in cycles. For awhile I was getting several a day from the same company shilling security systems. I finally got them to stop when I worked my way through their system getting farther and farther along each call until I managed to get a tech dispatched to an abandoned house not far from me. They stopped calling at that point.
Depending on what I was doing at the time, I also enjoyed just letting them ramble on for awhile about their spiel, then give them an address in Canada or Australia or something. Really pissed them off.
Nowadays they're almost all initially handled by an automated speech thing (albeit some are scary good) so it's harder to have fun with them.
I've had to cancel a phone number over the sheer number of robocalls it got, rendering it useless. Even on my main personal cell phone I'll go through periods of several calls a week. I liked it better when there were real people on the other end you could fuck with rather than just robots.
I guess I was fortunate that I always lived in pretty big cities back in the day, so I never had a shortage of local BBSes to call. Although I did cause some family drama that I still get reminded of to this day when my little sister broke her wrist at gymastics and spent several hours in the hospital alone because I had the phone lines tied up and had *70'd despite being told not to.
There are actually a handful of dialup BBSes left that I still call now and then, and long distance is no longer a problem with Google Voice. It's fun.
I don't usually do the "internet pedantry" thing, but I have to correct you to Telix.;) Only because I still use it pretty often for various geeky things that aren't all that interesting and I have a lot of very fond memories of it. It was one of the very few shareware applications I registered as a kid - I didn't have a lot of money but I got a lot of use out of it.
I remember it from years and years ago as an IE shell for 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 that provided a lot of functionality that IE6 just didn't have - tabs, ad blocking, popup blocking, etc. It was hugely popular at the company I worked for at the time because we had an ActiveX IE-based CRM that required us to use IE, and it allowed a lot of features. Looks like they call it "Maxthon Classic" now.
I was recently installing some software, and the actual, official documentation from the vendor had you skipping the EULA and typing Y to agree (Linux CLI install, so you could either space through it or "q" to skip it). My team and I wondered a bit at the legal implications of what would happen if a vendor telling you to skip their EULA ended up in court.
I bought a WRT54G when they were first released and used it for years. I think it's ended up back in service three times after replacements have died over the years., and it's still carefully wrapped up in the closet for the day when my current one dies. Actually, my current one (a Linksys-Cisco E2500) also runs ddwrt and does fairly well. It's outlasted a couple replacements itself, most recently an ASUS N66U that decided to stop broadcasting wireless one day.
Many years ago I was driving an MR2 with a broken parking brake cable, and left it parked in first on a slight slope in the middle of a parking lot at work. An email went out to the campus email that an MR2 had rolled out of its parking space, so I ran down to assess the damage but somehow I'd left the wheel such that it'd pulled out of the parking space perfectly. It was still in gear, wouldn't move anymore from where it was, and hadn't made it more than about ten feet. No idea what happened, best I can figure is something happened that let the engine spin over a few times and let it move forward some.
Still drive an MR2, and I've always made sure to keep my parking brake working.
Untrue. I'm using a Thunderbolt Display with my Dell laptop right now. Just needs a real Thunderbolt port, which was somewhat rare on PCs until well after Macs.
There's a small but dedicated group of folks keeping telnet bbses around, and a few even are still dial-upable. But it really loses that local feel you got back in the day, knowing that pretty much every other caller was someone reasonably nearby. I remember going to a few BBS cookouts where folks would get together, and often it'd be a significant percentage of the regular callers. Can't really do that with websites.
Oh god, I had one of those Digicom modem things. IIRC it also presented itself as an MCI device to Windows, which let it do basic sound things. First "sound card" we had, if I'm remembering it right.
I got it working in Linux the worst way possible - I booted DOS to load the firmware, and then loadlin'd over to Linux. Worked for awhile though until I got a real modem working (which was isapnp, another adventure all its own)
I think it's still in a closet or basement at my parents' house. Should pull it out and give it a proper burial
The deals come and go, and yes, they usually are clearances. I picked up a Coolpad Arise for $10 from Kroger a year or year and a half ago. Needed a low-end device for testing some work stuff and it was actually way nicer than I expected. They're still available, though usually in the $12-$15 range every few months. Right now there are a few Android-based Tracphones on Amazon for $6.99-$16.99.
I can only think of a couple apps that require SMS validation. And I still occasionally get texts on the Arise, despite having never paid a cent in service fees for it, so it might work anyway. Anyway it's probably possible to use a cheap flipphone for basic service and receive the texts there.
It can do voice commands, which requires the microphone. You can post pictures of accidents, traffic, etc which requires the camera. You can send notifications about arrival times and traffic jams to contacts via SMS and various social media platforms, and it can use those platforms to link up friends as well as post the arrival check-ins that people find popular. One of the issues of Android permissions is it's tricky to know exactly what they plan on doing with the access once they get it. An app may want access to Facebook solely to pull a friends list and bounce it off their userlist and friend up matches (a feature lots of people like), or it may spam up your feed with junk from itself.
You can argue the motivations and necessity of those, but there are legitimate features linked to the permissions. Up to you to decide whether or not you want to give up that info.
Certainly not for more than the five or ten seconds it takes to change the default back to your preferred media player because Quicktime stole the file association again, dammit.
I poked around setting up a private server a few years ago for my own use, and everything such as NPC location, models, specific skills, dialog, quests, quest text, any quest-scripting, player skills, skill handling, monster spawn areas, boss location and scripting, etc was all server-side. The raw content - images, textures, models, etc may be all client-side but at least as of the time I was messing with it (which I'll admit was several years ago) the server was responsible for the glue keeping it all together and making it a game. Otherwise you're just wandering around in a dead world. There were several databases available - those that tried to make it as much blizz-like as possible (advertised as such) plus various remixes and versions that usually played with superpowering everything.
I could see them going after them for copyright if they've directly copied the quest texts and NPC dialog and such.
I poked around with running a private server for funsies at one point years ago mostly for my own use, and virtually everything is controlled by the server. NPCs' locations, models, and dialogs, any scripting involving NPCs, monster spawn locations and attacks/spells/etc, Quests, quest text, any scripting that goes along with the quests, things like levelups and level caps, skill-handling... the server pretty much makes it the game. Without that you're just running around a dead, empty world. There were quite a few database sets of quests too - from full blizz-like (advertised as such) that attempted to recreate the official experience as closely as possible to various remixes and tweaks (mostly involving massively overpowering everything).
And even for things in the client, even if Blizzard distributes it for free, it's still their client. I'm pretty sure you have to accept the EULA before you even log in. It'll be an interesting court case all the same.
Most of the things on your end list were dismissed by plenty of people, but they tended to be the minority who didn't foresee various advances rather than even mainstream folks. I remember trying to use early VOIP programs on 14.4 and 28.8 dialup connections and they were largely useless. But while some people dismissed it as a "never work", others kept working on it and it became usable. Likewise there were plenty of people saying Youtube could never make it. This and this talk a bit about what some people thought about Youtube a year or so after it launched. It'll be interesting to see where things getting hyped now end up in a decade or two.
I think a lot of it depends on perspective too. A lot of times you have entrenched old-timers (for certain values of old - they may not be old age-wise) who aren't able to see the value in new things when they're comfortable with their current things. I was a kid when color monitors were getting to be a big deal and I remember being blown away at high-resolution color graphics. I also remember plenty of people first getting into computers who obviously wanted color screens - some people speculate this may be why Apple killed the IIgs since there was no color Macintosh at the time of its release and even well into the lifespan of color Macintoshes it still competed well in memory and graphics expansion for the cost.
Likewise things like sound cards were considered unnecessary by people who primarily saw computers as business and development machines while most of the general public ate it up. It's a little tricky to find primary sources anymore since the major magazines would have been pretty heavily into marketing them, but you can still turn up a few editorials from the late 80s and early 90s folks asking who would want such a thing in a computer.
So yeah, "widespread" might be a bit overreaching but there was certainly significant pushback and derision towards many of the listed things by at least some groups.
I did DSL Support for MindSpring/Earthlink in the 1999-2001 timeframe, and in general we leased lines from the ILECs in the areas. It was always a challenge because we were basically middlemen between our customers and the ILECs, so we'd always get stuck with the phone companies saying everything was fine, and our customers saying they weren't. Some ILECs were better than others - QWEST was completely useless; BellSouth could be ok depending on specific tech and the phase of the moon; AT&T was a mixed bag depending on geographic area.
"Sync at the NID" came to be the big bad word we all hated, because not everyone was capable of it (elderly, etc), and not all NIDs had test jacks. If you were lucky the customer could run an extension cord, unplug the house wiring, and plug the modem into the test jack to test it. If you weren't, you'd spend sometimes days arguing with the ILEC about it. Sometimes we outright lied and told them there was no sync at the NID so they'd at least do something if it was a case where the customer simply wasn't able (Probably at least once a week I talked to an elderly person who simply wasn't able to get all the required bits out to the phone box and deal with it). By the time I got out, regulatory stuff was getting real bad and most of the ILECs were getting pissier about supporting us with anything. May have been about when you had that problem. Towards the end we'd have ILECs literally refusing to roll trucks if we hadn't crossed every t and dotted every i.
I'm having trouble remembering a specific one, but a lot of games and apps for classic Mac OS (7-9 mostly) included Easter Egg pictures, sounds, and text if you opened them in ResEdit. Usually they'd be something along the lines of "What are you looking in here for?", "Stop trying to bypass the registration!", etc kind of things. There was a little shareware app that tweaked menus that had the author singing Daisy, Daisy I'd love to find again, but I can't remember the name of it.
And yet it's still Webkit. Are there any major non-IE browsers left which aren't Gecko or Webkit/Blink? As in, could use them for day to day browsing including multimedia, social media, major sites, etc etc? Opera was the last major one I knew about. Servo could be interesting if it makes it.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, old versions of Word only had "co-operation" in its dictionary, and would autocorrect "cooperation" to "Cupertino". This sounded like one of those urban legend things until I searched Google Books for some common constructs. You'll find hundreds of examples like the cupertino of and Cupertino Between (has some real uses but most aren't)
That particular number was for a line that often received vendor calls, so simply blocking/dodging calls wasn't an option. New number we got was fine though.
It comes and goes in cycles. For awhile I was getting several a day from the same company shilling security systems. I finally got them to stop when I worked my way through their system getting farther and farther along each call until I managed to get a tech dispatched to an abandoned house not far from me. They stopped calling at that point.
Depending on what I was doing at the time, I also enjoyed just letting them ramble on for awhile about their spiel, then give them an address in Canada or Australia or something. Really pissed them off.
Nowadays they're almost all initially handled by an automated speech thing (albeit some are scary good) so it's harder to have fun with them.
I've had to cancel a phone number over the sheer number of robocalls it got, rendering it useless. Even on my main personal cell phone I'll go through periods of several calls a week. I liked it better when there were real people on the other end you could fuck with rather than just robots.
I guess I was fortunate that I always lived in pretty big cities back in the day, so I never had a shortage of local BBSes to call. Although I did cause some family drama that I still get reminded of to this day when my little sister broke her wrist at gymastics and spent several hours in the hospital alone because I had the phone lines tied up and had *70'd despite being told not to.
There are actually a handful of dialup BBSes left that I still call now and then, and long distance is no longer a problem with Google Voice. It's fun.
I don't usually do the "internet pedantry" thing, but I have to correct you to Telix. ;) Only because I still use it pretty often for various geeky things that aren't all that interesting and I have a lot of very fond memories of it. It was one of the very few shareware applications I registered as a kid - I didn't have a lot of money but I got a lot of use out of it.
I remember it from years and years ago as an IE shell for 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 that provided a lot of functionality that IE6 just didn't have - tabs, ad blocking, popup blocking, etc. It was hugely popular at the company I worked for at the time because we had an ActiveX IE-based CRM that required us to use IE, and it allowed a lot of features. Looks like they call it "Maxthon Classic" now.
I was recently installing some software, and the actual, official documentation from the vendor had you skipping the EULA and typing Y to agree (Linux CLI install, so you could either space through it or "q" to skip it). My team and I wondered a bit at the legal implications of what would happen if a vendor telling you to skip their EULA ended up in court.
I bought a WRT54G when they were first released and used it for years. I think it's ended up back in service three times after replacements have died over the years., and it's still carefully wrapped up in the closet for the day when my current one dies. Actually, my current one (a Linksys-Cisco E2500) also runs ddwrt and does fairly well. It's outlasted a couple replacements itself, most recently an ASUS N66U that decided to stop broadcasting wireless one day.
"You come upon a sweetroll in the middle of the road..."
Many years ago I was driving an MR2 with a broken parking brake cable, and left it parked in first on a slight slope in the middle of a parking lot at work. An email went out to the campus email that an MR2 had rolled out of its parking space, so I ran down to assess the damage but somehow I'd left the wheel such that it'd pulled out of the parking space perfectly. It was still in gear, wouldn't move anymore from where it was, and hadn't made it more than about ten feet. No idea what happened, best I can figure is something happened that let the engine spin over a few times and let it move forward some.
Still drive an MR2, and I've always made sure to keep my parking brake working.
Still works indeed. Cost me four cents or so in Google Voice credits to call it, probably, but it worked.
Untrue. I'm using a Thunderbolt Display with my Dell laptop right now. Just needs a real Thunderbolt port, which was somewhat rare on PCs until well after Macs.
There's a small but dedicated group of folks keeping telnet bbses around, and a few even are still dial-upable. But it really loses that local feel you got back in the day, knowing that pretty much every other caller was someone reasonably nearby. I remember going to a few BBS cookouts where folks would get together, and often it'd be a significant percentage of the regular callers. Can't really do that with websites.
Oh god, I had one of those Digicom modem things. IIRC it also presented itself as an MCI device to Windows, which let it do basic sound things. First "sound card" we had, if I'm remembering it right.
I got it working in Linux the worst way possible - I booted DOS to load the firmware, and then loadlin'd over to Linux. Worked for awhile though until I got a real modem working (which was isapnp, another adventure all its own)
I think it's still in a closet or basement at my parents' house. Should pull it out and give it a proper burial
The deals come and go, and yes, they usually are clearances. I picked up a Coolpad Arise for $10 from Kroger a year or year and a half ago. Needed a low-end device for testing some work stuff and it was actually way nicer than I expected. They're still available, though usually in the $12-$15 range every few months. Right now there are a few Android-based Tracphones on Amazon for $6.99-$16.99.
I can only think of a couple apps that require SMS validation. And I still occasionally get texts on the Arise, despite having never paid a cent in service fees for it, so it might work anyway. Anyway it's probably possible to use a cheap flipphone for basic service and receive the texts there.
It can do voice commands, which requires the microphone. You can post pictures of accidents, traffic, etc which requires the camera. You can send notifications about arrival times and traffic jams to contacts via SMS and various social media platforms, and it can use those platforms to link up friends as well as post the arrival check-ins that people find popular. One of the issues of Android permissions is it's tricky to know exactly what they plan on doing with the access once they get it. An app may want access to Facebook solely to pull a friends list and bounce it off their userlist and friend up matches (a feature lots of people like), or it may spam up your feed with junk from itself.
You can argue the motivations and necessity of those, but there are legitimate features linked to the permissions. Up to you to decide whether or not you want to give up that info.
Certainly not for more than the five or ten seconds it takes to change the default back to your preferred media player because Quicktime stole the file association again, dammit.
I poked around setting up a private server a few years ago for my own use, and everything such as NPC location, models, specific skills, dialog, quests, quest text, any quest-scripting, player skills, skill handling, monster spawn areas, boss location and scripting, etc was all server-side. The raw content - images, textures, models, etc may be all client-side but at least as of the time I was messing with it (which I'll admit was several years ago) the server was responsible for the glue keeping it all together and making it a game. Otherwise you're just wandering around in a dead world. There were several databases available - those that tried to make it as much blizz-like as possible (advertised as such) plus various remixes and versions that usually played with superpowering everything.
I could see them going after them for copyright if they've directly copied the quest texts and NPC dialog and such.
I poked around with running a private server for funsies at one point years ago mostly for my own use, and virtually everything is controlled by the server. NPCs' locations, models, and dialogs, any scripting involving NPCs, monster spawn locations and attacks/spells/etc, Quests, quest text, any scripting that goes along with the quests, things like levelups and level caps, skill-handling... the server pretty much makes it the game. Without that you're just running around a dead, empty world. There were quite a few database sets of quests too - from full blizz-like (advertised as such) that attempted to recreate the official experience as closely as possible to various remixes and tweaks (mostly involving massively overpowering everything).
And even for things in the client, even if Blizzard distributes it for free, it's still their client. I'm pretty sure you have to accept the EULA before you even log in. It'll be an interesting court case all the same.
Most of the things on your end list were dismissed by plenty of people, but they tended to be the minority who didn't foresee various advances rather than even mainstream folks. I remember trying to use early VOIP programs on 14.4 and 28.8 dialup connections and they were largely useless. But while some people dismissed it as a "never work", others kept working on it and it became usable. Likewise there were plenty of people saying Youtube could never make it. This and this talk a bit about what some people thought about Youtube a year or so after it launched. It'll be interesting to see where things getting hyped now end up in a decade or two.
I think a lot of it depends on perspective too. A lot of times you have entrenched old-timers (for certain values of old - they may not be old age-wise) who aren't able to see the value in new things when they're comfortable with their current things. I was a kid when color monitors were getting to be a big deal and I remember being blown away at high-resolution color graphics. I also remember plenty of people first getting into computers who obviously wanted color screens - some people speculate this may be why Apple killed the IIgs since there was no color Macintosh at the time of its release and even well into the lifespan of color Macintoshes it still competed well in memory and graphics expansion for the cost.
Likewise things like sound cards were considered unnecessary by people who primarily saw computers as business and development machines while most of the general public ate it up. It's a little tricky to find primary sources anymore since the major magazines would have been pretty heavily into marketing them, but you can still turn up a few editorials from the late 80s and early 90s folks asking who would want such a thing in a computer.
So yeah, "widespread" might be a bit overreaching but there was certainly significant pushback and derision towards many of the listed things by at least some groups.
I did DSL Support for MindSpring/Earthlink in the 1999-2001 timeframe, and in general we leased lines from the ILECs in the areas. It was always a challenge because we were basically middlemen between our customers and the ILECs, so we'd always get stuck with the phone companies saying everything was fine, and our customers saying they weren't. Some ILECs were better than others - QWEST was completely useless; BellSouth could be ok depending on specific tech and the phase of the moon; AT&T was a mixed bag depending on geographic area.
"Sync at the NID" came to be the big bad word we all hated, because not everyone was capable of it (elderly, etc), and not all NIDs had test jacks. If you were lucky the customer could run an extension cord, unplug the house wiring, and plug the modem into the test jack to test it. If you weren't, you'd spend sometimes days arguing with the ILEC about it. Sometimes we outright lied and told them there was no sync at the NID so they'd at least do something if it was a case where the customer simply wasn't able (Probably at least once a week I talked to an elderly person who simply wasn't able to get all the required bits out to the phone box and deal with it). By the time I got out, regulatory stuff was getting real bad and most of the ILECs were getting pissier about supporting us with anything. May have been about when you had that problem. Towards the end we'd have ILECs literally refusing to roll trucks if we hadn't crossed every t and dotted every i.
I'm having trouble remembering a specific one, but a lot of games and apps for classic Mac OS (7-9 mostly) included Easter Egg pictures, sounds, and text if you opened them in ResEdit. Usually they'd be something along the lines of "What are you looking in here for?", "Stop trying to bypass the registration!", etc kind of things. There was a little shareware app that tweaked menus that had the author singing Daisy, Daisy I'd love to find again, but I can't remember the name of it.
And yet it's still Webkit. Are there any major non-IE browsers left which aren't Gecko or Webkit/Blink? As in, could use them for day to day browsing including multimedia, social media, major sites, etc etc? Opera was the last major one I knew about. Servo could be interesting if it makes it.