thirdgen

iTrader: (26)

I felt like starting this thread to post anything you hate that is a recent change in your life. For instance, something you may have been around all your life, and now it's gone cause some fucked up way the world revolves today.
Here's my first contribution:

Today I went to AutoZone to buy oil on a super awesome sale that they're having, and I drove down towards Giant to buy some Penne noodles to go with my Sausage and peppers for dinner.
I see a huge sign that read something like "Everything must go" out front of Blockbuster. I go in there and they're not renting out movies anymore. I bought "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" and "Trailer Park Boys, the Movie" for $2.99 a piece. Good for me, but shitty for Blockbuster.
**** Red Box that Scumbag Credit card swipin **** hole.
I'll always remember you BlockBuster.
Then again, remember what was before Blockbuster though? What Blockbuster put out of business? The local mom and pop video rental store....that's what. So I guess I will just have to live by "History repeats itself" and "what goes around comes around". Moral of the story...wanna tell your grandchildren "I use Bill Gates's Face as a Urinal"? Come up with the replacement Wal-Mart, and you will be the richest human on the planet.

What do you guys miss that's gone, and what do you have to bitch about that is another page in the history books?

18psi

iTrader: (76)

I don't give a **** about blockbuster.
They put the others out of business and now got the same.
They were also overpriced as **** (around here it was like 4-5 bux for 2 nights or something ridiculous).

Who the **** rents movies anymore?
Even if you don't pirate them, you can sign up with netflix or the 100 others that do the same and get anything you want for cheap.

thirdgen

iTrader: (26)

They were overpriced. I was glad to buy that Trailer Park Boys Movie for $3 when I probably paid $6 to rent it.

rmcelwee

iTrader: (1)

You guys must have never used the mom and pop rental places. I vividly remember paying $20 to rent Blackula. Then we lost it and had to pay mom and pop another $60 to replace it:




To answer your question, I don't miss anything (if we are just talking about mom and pop's that get swallowed up by something else). This is a consumer driven country and things always get better. Prices get lower and selection gets better. I recently sold all my Tivo's and disconnected the USB drive off my Dish Network receiver I was using to store movies. I now only use a network drive and my old XBox to watch movies. Much better than screwing around with DVDs.

What I cannot stand is they no longer make the socks, underwear, and deodorant that I use. I just bought two cases (48 sticks) of the particular "flavor" Old Spice deodorant that I have been using for 20 years off Amazon. They stopped making it for some reason and I am trying to scavenge any of it I can find. Sucks to have to order it online but it is what I am stuck with.

thirdgen

iTrader: (26)

That's like Seinfeld I watched last night. Elaine bought a whole closet full of "sponges" cause they stopped making them. Condoms? What wants to use a condom?

baron340

iTrader: (5)

I hate my universities new online registration system. It took them like 10 years to get the old system bug free and apparently the hosting company went out of business. Now their new system is full of f-ing bugs. For example: it randomly decided one day that every student at the university was no longer attending classes that semester. Every single person had to manually go into their account and confirm that they were attending or it would drop our schedules. And on top of the craptastic way that it operates, it houses everything, financial aid, tuition, parking tickets, every thing. Hooray, shitty new online system.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I loved UF's online registration system when it was new back in '95.

Everyone had an "appointment date / time" which was based on seniority (specifically, enrollment type followed by number of credit hours earned.) PhDs first, then grads, then upperclassmen, etc. Obviously, the most desirable classes filled up first, leaving the freshmen and sophomores with lots of 7am courses taught by grumpy TAs for whom English was not a native language and who didn't want to be awake at that time either.

This was before the web had become totally ubiquitous, so it was done by logging into the VAX on one of several hundred VT-220 terminals around campus (or by dialup at a glorious 14.4) and running the registration application. If you tried logging in before your scheduled appointment, the system would kick you out.

Almost.

Turns out that there was a bit of a fundamental design flaw in the system. When you tried to register before your date, the program didn't simply kick you out immediately, it put up a screen informing you of when your appointment time was, and then you hit OK (or whatever the text equivalent of OK was- probably CR) to get kicked out.

It turns out that the screen which informed you of this was a separate process from the main registration application, and that the act of confirming this screen was what actually terminated the main registration app. So, if you had two terminals side-by-side (which was common) the protocol was as follows:

1: At terminal A, log in and attempt to register.

2: Receive screen informing you that you can't register yet.

3: Log into terminal B and list all active processes for your account.

4: Kill the "you can't register yet" process and log out.

5: Go back to terminal A, and find that you are sitting at the main registration screen.

6: Register for classes. Nothing before noon.


This gravy-train lasted for over a year.

curly

iTrader: (25)

It's weird knowing GI Joe's is no longer around.

and thirdgen, it's my opinion that something is already starting to replace walmart, Amazon.

What can't you buy on Amazon? They often have free shipping, and for the past 3 years I haven't walked into a single store to buy a Christmas present.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

... I should add, that's one thing that, in all honesty, I really miss. Weak, easily cracked software deployed in critical infrastructure positions, and weak informatics security in general. It's just to damn much work nowadays, and people are paying attention. Hacking used to be easy and fun. Now your average blogging site has better security than the Kremlin, the phone system itself is, for all intents and purposes impenetrable (not to mention worthless), and people go to prison for this ****.

I really miss the simplicity of computing twenty years ago.

kenzo42

iTrader: (6)

Phreaking (red box/black box/green box/cheesebox, etc)

turotufas

iTrader: (7)

I bought some beer last night and the mother ****** at the counter asked to SCAN my drivers license.

bluemax

iTrader: (3)

I hate how high gas prices are.

hornetball

iTrader: (4)

I miss contracting with actual U.S. companies that employ actual U.S. citizens to do the work.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I kind of missed out on that whole era. My local CO had already upgraded to ESS by the time I began to take an interest in such matters, and I never really progressed very far into that area. I mostly just read about such exploits in the annals of Phrack and the Cult of the Dead Cow, with a certain sense of wistfulness.

I did, however, discover that the David Lightman trick worked on the payphone which was outside the old gymnasium on our high school campus. Didn't even have to unscrew the mouthpiece- just stick a paperclip into the center of it and ground it to chassis. Worked every time. I also discovered that the center terminal of the mouthpiece has ring voltage on it if the line rings while you are performing this trick, and this is not a good thing to have happen if you're trying to look inconspicuous while depriving Bell South of twenty cents in the middle of a crowded area. How on earth ring voltage managed to get transmitted to the mouthpiece while the receiver was off hook (or, for that matter, how the line was able to ring in the first place while the receiver was off hook) is something that I still don't understand to this day.

rmcelwee

iTrader: (1)

I used to know several pay phone tricks back in the day. I was going to Marshall University and had a crowd around me and told everyone "Hey, watch this!". I think I was doing a trick which made the phone ring and then play some "songs". It didn't work for some reason so I hung up the phone. About that time the phone dumped its guts of about $20 in quarters. You can imaging how many people were begging to learn what I did <G>...

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

About the most fun I ever had with pay phones (banks of such devices made this trick more fun) was to dial some special number that would ring once followed by you hanging up the phone and running away. About 20 seconds later the phone would ring back with no one on the other end. It was just some call-back test thing, but hitting up a line of pay phones and running away would always be fun because every stranger walking by would answer the phones....which would ring for several minutes if left ringing.

I do miss $.69 gas (I know it wasn't that long ago).
I miss Sport Compact Car.
I miss being able to buy allergy medicine that worked without having to get it from behind the counter and having my license checked.

chicksdigmiatas

iTrader: (11)

It was .89 for me on the gas. Sport compact went to hell when dave coleman left. I hate the drivers license scanning, i feel like i am being tracked. I hand them my military ID when asked. Then I tell them it is a Government offence if they scan it. Win.

pdexta

iTrader: (17)

I hate "convenience charges" that not only make something more convenient for me but also for the person/organization/government taking my money. Seriously? It's "convenient" for everyone, why the hell are you charging me more? If anything they should have "inconvenience charges" for these old women that insist on writing checks for everything, ugh.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

The credit card issuer imposes a service fee on whomever you are paying, and they are simply passing this fee along to you, with a reasonable markup. Same reason gas stations have different prices for cash vs. credit.

By comparison, banks do not charge a fee to retailers to process your checks. Granted, the use and handling of checks imposes more internal overhead at the retailer, but it's a different bucket-o-money.

My favorite was the "zone charge" that Cinci Bell used to collect from me when I lived in Maineville. Why? The short version boiled down to "because you live in the sticks, 25 miles from the CO."

trickyrix

My buddy and I were talking about how much p0rn has changed since we were kids. We've come a long way from hiding that rogue early-80s Hustler mag in a ziploc bag in the bushes.

Thank you, internet.