XKCD: It's more than a comic

Randall touches on a real problem in our information society.

When I first got Google Voice, I used it as a backup for a while, mainly so I could text on my itouch. Then when I switched my service, I ported my main number to GV so all I'd have to do was to people to stop texting my old GV number. And I swapped the number GV was forwarding to when I changed services again (though cellular web wasn't working on that service, so if I didn't have a forwarding number already saved for new texts, I'd have to text them on my service number).

Now I've converted my GV account to Fi, and so I only have one mobile number. I technically have a landline, but I haven't had a phone plugged into it in almost a year.

It's the whoknowshowmanyth comic recently about technology that is becoming outdated but is still widely used, apparently not finding its real place among newer innovations.

There's a(n) (inter)national infrastructure for phones. Apps that do the same thing don't really make phone calls obselete. If anything, the problem is frequent migration from service to service

edited 23rd Jan '17 12:52:08 PM by frosty

And, of course, phone companies that try to put you over a barrel whenever they can. $10 a month for the privilege to own the smart phone that you said you're giving me for free? Which doesn't include the data plan? And you're only offering smart phones now? Oh, and you claim that you have no idea how data charges got lodged for a day on which the phone was off and nothing can be done about them? *sigh*

Internet mostly uses the same infrastructure that is used for phones. And yes, internet voice call apps cannot replace phones because internet is just not reliable enough. There are a lot of technologies which are (rlatively) old, bulky, expensive, and difficult to use compared to some shining new technology, yet they are still being used because they are just that much more reliable. And because so many people are already using it. Also, new technologies tend to have other, more subtle disadvantages. Yet, it is interesting to see the new and shiny things trying to compete with the old and reliable ones.

I think that these comics (the current one, the e-mail one before, then before that the IRC one, and who knows what else I forgot about) are actually trying to tell us that these old technologies are not as outdated as they seem to be at first sight. It's just they start to get less funny after some time. IRC may be an exception (not in funnyness, but in usefulness), because that really has very few legitimate applications right now. All I can think of right now is that if you want to host your own chat service (e.g. on a local network or a corporate VPN) then it's one of the cheapest to set up.

Edit: Phone service has another advantage. You can switch providers while keeping your old number. In the EU there is a law that providers have to let you do it, at least between mobile networks within the same country (I don't know whether it's applicable to landlines too). No internet service can do it, not even e-mail (you can redirect it, but for that you still have to keep your old service).

edited 23rd Jan '17 2:01:45 PM by petersohn

My phone company tried to do the same thing with charging me for data when I didn't get a data plan or use data. I had automatic payment set up for my regular charge, so when I got a notice saying I owed extra charges I went down to their store and got them to remove the charge and deactivate my data entirely. I try to keep my phone plan to a minimum because the phone companies are horrible, oligopolist scammers.

With every coffee shop having wifi now, it's not like I need it on my phone.

But phones are definitely still necessary. My Internet drops my connection randomly on a continous basis because of some kind of congestion on the line - I sure don't need that when I'm on the phone.

Generally, I'm more likely to find new technology useless and counterproductive, rather than older tech being obsolete. Like the new trend of defaulting to cloud computing. So, whereas previously I could access all my stuff whenever I wanted, now I can't use anything because the Internet's acting up? For a long while, my ipad had a habit of dropping all my books on the cloud whether I wanted it to or not, so when I got on a long plane flight somewhere without wifi, suddenly oops, no books. This is why I went back to bringing physical books when I travel - they don't run out of batteries, either.

edited 23rd Jan '17 2:42:46 PM by Galadriel

I spent almost a year nursing along a smartphone that couldn't connect to network data. My choices for wifi were basically Mcdonald's, Starbuck's, and Taco Cabana. I was frequently in situations where I needed to look up something on the road and couldn't because I didn't have internet. I do have mobile internet now, but I'm on a tight data allowance and I try to save most recreational internet use for wifi.

I haven't seen carriers saying both "this phone is free" and "you're paying off this phone for $5 a month". The point of switching from free-with-contract to installment plans is so they can advertise cheaper service rates while being more transparent about how you're paying for your phone. I have seen some no-contract providers advertising "your phone is free if you switch to us", which I take to be a loss leader to get conversions.

I was on my parents' T-Mobile contract for years (and actually stayed on the plan after the contract expired with no phone upgrade/contract re-up for a long time. Don't do that with free-with-contract plans, you're paying for a phone you already own outright) and then switched to Verizon for two two-year terms. I kept my phone from the second term and moved it to Straight Talk. Voice and text worked fine, but I only ever got a data connection once, when I was out in the sticks at my grandparents' house, and only 1x. I went to Fi after about a year, but because I have no credit history, I had to buy my new phone outright.

My biggest gripe about using a Google-designed phone is that they're of the opinion that Cloud storage makes SD cards obsolete, so I have to fit everything I want into the 16 GB internal storage or run up data.

edited 23rd Jan '17 4:00:45 PM by TParadox

I would never buy a phone that does not have external SD card. First, there are things that, for privacy reasons, I don't want to store in the cloud. Second, because mobile data access is just too expensive and unreliable. Where should I store my music collection while traveling? Streaming music from the cloud may work on broadband connections from home, but not from mobile. Also, there is a difference between syncing your data with the cloud so you can access it from anywhere and storing your data only on the cloud without a local copy. Google Docs may be good for short term collaboration projects, because they can be edited by multiple people simultaneously, but you want to have a local copy of more important documents (which you don't want multiple people to edit simultaneously anyway).

Not sure how funny this is given that it deals with a very serious subject: depression

There are a lot of serious subjects that can be broached well with humor.

Well, at least the alt text is funny. Really.

Well, the BSOD is a form of "no, YOU deal with it." :D

I wonder if I'd still recognize it as depression if I weren't already primed by both the link text here and the strip title there.

Otherwise, I might have just called it apathy.

Or sarcasm. Am I a terrible person if my first impulse is to slap her?

It is a malaise I've been feeling frequently through the past political cycle.

Obscenity filled comments is something that I have been guilty of doing when dealing with a particularly annoying piece of code, but I usually try to remove most of them afterwards.

I don't think I've ever been tempted to leave actual obscenities in my comments; rather, when I've hacked together something particularly difficult, I'll celebrate with something dry and snarky.

I leave snarky comments wherever I go. Including on work I have to turn into a teacher or supervisor, just changed to white font so it can't be seen

Well, it is better than leaving no comments at all, which tends to be a problem among student coders (and many professionals as well, apparently).

Well, I'm a professional, and with the people I work with, the general culture is that code should be self-explanatory, and comments should only be used if necessary. Even then, the comments should be clear and precise, and snarky comments in production code is frowned upon. Snarky comments in code review, however, is quite common.

It happened one time that the version control system hated us if we tried to create a particular file with a particular name, so we named the file <original name>.f***you. It wasn't real production code, though, just a prototype.

On the same lines, this is what happens when I add print statements to a code to try understanding where it went wrong (if a debugger is unavailable for some reason). I usually begin printing "I am in function foo" then if the resolution takes more time this becomes "Moo 1" or "Kwak 2" and if I'm really stuck it devolves into whatever swearword or Engrish word I can think of. Of course, this gets removed once the bug is fixed... but some occasionally get forgotten (though never at the third stage so far).

Then there was the time I had to write a program for a school project and named all functions and variables with swearwords (I was a student, I was angry, and it felt kinda fun). I think I changed that before delivering the project, though.

A good way to deal with that problem is to use compiler directives to control when your debug functions run. It can be as simple as a master #define debug in your header, and then you wrap all the debug code in #ifdef debug <stuff> #endif, or whatever the equivalent is in the language you're using. Saves so many headaches down the road. With makefiles, you can define the debug constant in your compile script, so you don't even have to change your code. "make debug"... such a powerful command.

With respect to school projects, I got in trouble in my Advanced Placement Computer Science class when I used abbreviations for all the built-in keywords in my program, since I hated typing them out. We weren't supposed to do that, since the premise of the class was that we were all total newbies.

I was the guy writing advanced problem-solving code and helping everyone else out. You're going to dock me a letter grade because I wrote code that you couldn't read easily, despite it being syntactically and stylistically correct? Seriously?

It was much later that I learned why having code that's readable to others is important.

edited 26th Jan '17 2:14:13 PM by Fighteer

When you write code in collaboration with potentially dozens of other people? And they have to understand how your code works to know what values to pass to it, and what preparations they need to make to set your code up to run?

And because sometimes you have to read your own code months after writing it, once you've forgotten what all your clever shorthands referred to.