Death of Blackberry
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Another major milestone in the death of Blackberry was reached yesterday. BlackBerry pulls the plug on its pioneering mobile phone - CBS News[^] It reminds me that technologies are as mortal as people. And as varied as people. In this case it is a long drawn out, painful death. Not a quick merciful one.
So many years of programming I have forgotten more languages than I know.
Had BB not made some incredibly stupid design decisions with their OS, I'd actually still be able to make use of my Playbook, like playing MP3s all day or showing my router's real-time bandwidth usage page. But no, they've gone out of their way to make sure the display powers down to save the battery (even when plugged in), with no way of telling it not to do that--the longest it'll go, as I recall, is 10 minutes. I've seen all sorts of workarounds being discussed on many different forums, but even those, over the course of years, are no longer applicable or simply never worked for me. I have an Android 4.x tablet that I can still use for these simple tasks. The Playbook is a comparatively nicer device, but has these artificial limitations built into it that render it completely useless.
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A number of years ago, one newspaper was interviewing arbitrary people in the street, asking for their reactions to the plans to drop the telegram service. Almost all of those asked were infuriated: They can't do that! It is an essential service for lots of people! Remember all those telegrams we received when we married 25 years ago? And when we had our church confirmation. What about getting essential messages out to those who can't be reached on the phone? ... "So, what do you think about the telegram service being closed down five years ago today? Have you missed it a lot?" We have had a number of old services being closed down without anyone ever noticing. Telegram service was one of them. AM broadcasts was another. Telex was replaced by Teletext, telex dying without anyone noticing, and when it was revealed, lots of people insisted that Teletext had to be kept alive 'forever': The protocol ascerted non-repudiation and reliable, exact time stamps, essential to numerous business functions. Email has none of that reliability. Yet, Teletext was closed down with noone lifting an eyebrow. Five years ago, Norway closed down all nation-wide FM broadcasts. This time, people revolted! There were numerous protest rallies, public meetings, there were several hundred debates in newspapers and other media, and at least two books published. Lots of the arguments referred to radio offerings that hadn't been heard for years, such as the detailed weather forecasts for the fishing banks or the daily time signal for setting your clocks right. The FM closedown started five years ago, and carried out region by region over a period of ten months. Then everything calmed down. None of the forewarned catastrophes did occur. Everybody who needed exact weather forecasts had been listening to the digital weather channel for years. Clocks were kept in synch. The authorities managed to broadcast essential messaged to the population even through the digital radio. The civil defense warning sirens that used to be controlled through signals on a subcarrier in the FM signal worked practically flawlessly when the signaling was moved to the TETRA network of the emergency services. Today, those who do not listen to digital radio very rarely listen to the community radios still broadcasting on FM. The handful FM activists of 6-7-8 years ago that still preach the blessing of analog technology are viewed sort of like those still trying to live by the hippie ideals of the 1970s. I never learned to shoe a horse, or milk a
trønderen wrote:
reactions to the plans to drop the telegram service.
My grandmother was a "telegraph operator". She had to listen to Morse code and write down the content of those telegrams. They were delivered at a blistering pace to rich people who could afford such an expensive service paid by the word. That's how the "telegraphic style" was born: drop verbs essential words only. Crackberry dead, Earth turns.
Mircea
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trønderen wrote:
reactions to the plans to drop the telegram service.
My grandmother was a "telegraph operator". She had to listen to Morse code and write down the content of those telegrams. They were delivered at a blistering pace to rich people who could afford such an expensive service paid by the word. That's how the "telegraphic style" was born: drop verbs essential words only. Crackberry dead, Earth turns.
Mircea
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trønderen wrote:
reactions to the plans to drop the telegram service.
My grandmother was a "telegraph operator". She had to listen to Morse code and write down the content of those telegrams. They were delivered at a blistering pace to rich people who could afford such an expensive service paid by the word. That's how the "telegraphic style" was born: drop verbs essential words only. Crackberry dead, Earth turns.
Mircea
One service I wonder if was known in other countries: For celebrations, like anniversaries or marriages or church confirmations or childbirths, you could send a greeting telegram with a standard text. The text was selected from a catalog so large that the chances of receiving identical texts from two greeters was fairly small. Over the telex network was transmitted nothing but 'STX329 42 John Maria'. At the receiving telex station, standard text 329 was then printed out on standard formula 42 (which was usually with a pre-printed picture in full color), the text followed by the name(s) of the sender(s), John Maria. Standard telegrams were delivered on small format paper slips - simple forms for time and date and a few lines of text. These greeting telegram forms were like A4 size. When my parents married, they received so many such telegrams that it filled a thick book: They had it bound, with gold print on the brown leather back of the thick volume. These standardized greeting telegrams of course had at price tag higher than the few words transmitted (the standard text could be several lines, maybe even a short poem, and would be very expensive to transmit in full), yet a lot cheaper than any everyday telegram. I don't remember how long it was offered - the service was closed down in 1980. Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
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One service I wonder if was known in other countries: For celebrations, like anniversaries or marriages or church confirmations or childbirths, you could send a greeting telegram with a standard text. The text was selected from a catalog so large that the chances of receiving identical texts from two greeters was fairly small. Over the telex network was transmitted nothing but 'STX329 42 John Maria'. At the receiving telex station, standard text 329 was then printed out on standard formula 42 (which was usually with a pre-printed picture in full color), the text followed by the name(s) of the sender(s), John Maria. Standard telegrams were delivered on small format paper slips - simple forms for time and date and a few lines of text. These greeting telegram forms were like A4 size. When my parents married, they received so many such telegrams that it filled a thick book: They had it bound, with gold print on the brown leather back of the thick volume. These standardized greeting telegrams of course had at price tag higher than the few words transmitted (the standard text could be several lines, maybe even a short poem, and would be very expensive to transmit in full), yet a lot cheaper than any everyday telegram. I don't remember how long it was offered - the service was closed down in 1980. Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
trønderen wrote:
Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
I wouldn't know. Never got a telegram in my life. My only contact with telex service was during the early '80s when I made a system for distributing telex messages using a PDP11 instead of telex machines. In those days airlines had their own private telecommunication networks (one of them was SITA) and people would receive telex messages on punched tape on one machine, read the destination address, put it in another machine and forward it. I had the hunch that a computer could do that better and faster. In the process I learned more than I wanted to know about Baudot code and message dispatching intricacies.
Mircea
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trønderen wrote:
Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
I wouldn't know. Never got a telegram in my life. My only contact with telex service was during the early '80s when I made a system for distributing telex messages using a PDP11 instead of telex machines. In those days airlines had their own private telecommunication networks (one of them was SITA) and people would receive telex messages on punched tape on one machine, read the destination address, put it in another machine and forward it. I had the hunch that a computer could do that better and faster. In the process I learned more than I wanted to know about Baudot code and message dispatching intricacies.
Mircea
In the late 1970s we built a Message Switch / Data Interchange system for QANTAS. The Message Switch component was a replacement for torn-tape switching, including passenger manifests. Baudot NNNN and ZCZC were used as start/end of message markers, easily visible on the tape with a couple of nulls each side. The apocryphal story is that the previous systems of multiple airlines fell in a heap when a Polish Symphony Orchestra went on a world tour. The Data Interchange component I sometimes think was Randall's inspiration xkcd: Standards[^]
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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In the late 1970s we built a Message Switch / Data Interchange system for QANTAS. The Message Switch component was a replacement for torn-tape switching, including passenger manifests. Baudot NNNN and ZCZC were used as start/end of message markers, easily visible on the tape with a couple of nulls each side. The apocryphal story is that the previous systems of multiple airlines fell in a heap when a Polish Symphony Orchestra went on a world tour. The Data Interchange component I sometimes think was Randall's inspiration xkcd: Standards[^]
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
Yep, I was doing the same thing in another corner of the world. Fun days... :)
Mircea
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One service I wonder if was known in other countries: For celebrations, like anniversaries or marriages or church confirmations or childbirths, you could send a greeting telegram with a standard text. The text was selected from a catalog so large that the chances of receiving identical texts from two greeters was fairly small. Over the telex network was transmitted nothing but 'STX329 42 John Maria'. At the receiving telex station, standard text 329 was then printed out on standard formula 42 (which was usually with a pre-printed picture in full color), the text followed by the name(s) of the sender(s), John Maria. Standard telegrams were delivered on small format paper slips - simple forms for time and date and a few lines of text. These greeting telegram forms were like A4 size. When my parents married, they received so many such telegrams that it filled a thick book: They had it bound, with gold print on the brown leather back of the thick volume. These standardized greeting telegrams of course had at price tag higher than the few words transmitted (the standard text could be several lines, maybe even a short poem, and would be very expensive to transmit in full), yet a lot cheaper than any everyday telegram. I don't remember how long it was offered - the service was closed down in 1980. Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
There used to be a similar service in Israel, but with a much smaller selection of messages.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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One service I wonder if was known in other countries: For celebrations, like anniversaries or marriages or church confirmations or childbirths, you could send a greeting telegram with a standard text. The text was selected from a catalog so large that the chances of receiving identical texts from two greeters was fairly small. Over the telex network was transmitted nothing but 'STX329 42 John Maria'. At the receiving telex station, standard text 329 was then printed out on standard formula 42 (which was usually with a pre-printed picture in full color), the text followed by the name(s) of the sender(s), John Maria. Standard telegrams were delivered on small format paper slips - simple forms for time and date and a few lines of text. These greeting telegram forms were like A4 size. When my parents married, they received so many such telegrams that it filled a thick book: They had it bound, with gold print on the brown leather back of the thick volume. These standardized greeting telegrams of course had at price tag higher than the few words transmitted (the standard text could be several lines, maybe even a short poem, and would be very expensive to transmit in full), yet a lot cheaper than any everyday telegram. I don't remember how long it was offered - the service was closed down in 1980. Maybe this greeting telegram service was used only in Norway. Or, did you have a similar service, where you paid a comparatively low fee for a (possibly lengthy) standard greeting, in other countries?
The picture and colour features sound novel, but I think every country had a standardized code that you could send, which would then be translated into the actual text on the receiving side before being printed and delivered: [Indian standard telegram codes](https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/news-photo/standard-phrases-list-of-greetings-for-telegram-message-at-news-photo/173215619) This lives on in gamerdom, for instance, if you type 11 in AoE2 chat, it's a laugh: [Taunts | Age of Empires Series Wiki | Fandom](https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Taunts)
Cheers, Vikram.
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The picture and colour features sound novel, but I think every country had a standardized code that you could send, which would then be translated into the actual text on the receiving side before being printed and delivered: [Indian standard telegram codes](https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/news-photo/standard-phrases-list-of-greetings-for-telegram-message-at-news-photo/173215619) This lives on in gamerdom, for instance, if you type 11 in AoE2 chat, it's a laugh: [Taunts | Age of Empires Series Wiki | Fandom](https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Taunts)
Cheers, Vikram.
Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
This lives on in gamerdom, for instance, if you type 11 in AoE2 chat, it's a laugh: Taunts | Age of Empires Series Wiki | Fandom
In network forums for Norwegian librarians, there was a tradition for using Dewey codes in their arguments. I have even seen debates so heated that people threw Dewey insults at each other: You are nothing but a 564.68! Maybe this was/is common in other languages as well. One good thing is that Dewey based arguments can be understood by anyone, regardless of language. Except that you must be fluent in the Dewey language :-)
