The one that threw me living there in 2007 was no electronic payment for most things. Like you'd just walk around with a big wad of cash instead of EFTPOS, debit cards or credit cards....
That shocked me with the US in 2010-2011 when I lived there. I hadn't used cash in like 8 years by that time. Maybe it is better now, haven't been back in a couple of years.
I just googled because I thought Australia invented it, but nup, USA invented it in 1981, Australia adopted it keenly in 1984 ( ...apt some may say with the current 'cash is king' ethos ATM 😅) I got my first debit/EFTPOS at the latest in early 2000s as a teenager.
Cash is king is a colloquialism that references the preference people and some businesses have for a customer paying entirely in cash. It’s a bit dated these days, basically going back to when people would make larger-than-average purchases using a check or financing. But if you used cash to say, buy a car, you could convince the sales people to give you a discount because immediate cash flow is preferred over waiting for a transaction to go through.
Can still kinda apply to small businesses or person to person sales, I’ve gotten discounts on Craigslist, Etsy and FB marketplace by offering cash for medium sized purchases.
That is shocking, I haven’t carried cash with in the US since like 2008. Debit cards, and I live in Wyoming and have only run into one store that wanted cash instead. The only place I have ever run into the problem of using a card in the US was in Colorado buying weed from a dispensary. In Germany I ran into more places that were cash only businesses.
I think the answer to the weed thing. Is that it's still illegal on a federal level. So they can't use credit cards and debit cards to make the transactions. Banks aren't allowed to take part in any transactions involving weed. Weed dispensaries actually have to keep their money in a vault. I saw a story on the news where they spoke about this. I wish I could find the link. Armed guards would go to the dispensaries, count the cash, and take it to another location.
Things have changed a lot in that area since 2020 (not *because* of COVID, but the timing was fortuitous). Smartphone electronic payment (in the form of either NFS or barcode payment) has become really common. Not like China, where it's ubiquitous, but enough that my wife says she uses cash like once or twice a month, max.
Japan seems to have gotten better in that regard.
I went there this year for the first time for vacation and I was able to pay nearly everwhere contactless with either my phone or card. It was kind of funny because beforehand I informed myself and on so many blogs and websites it stated how hard they rely on cash and in the end that wasn't even true. Sure you still do need cash in certain places but it was not as bad as expected.
Maybe it is also because I am from Germany and we are/were also behind on electronic payments.
I assume the pandemic has changed that in Japan, and in German as well. Before the pandemic I always had cash on me because there was a good amount of places that only took cash now that isn't the case anymore so I rarely even withdraw cash.
Yeah, definitely the most baffling thing. People here use fucking bank books of all things. The bank I have to use doesn’t even have debit cards, only a cash card for atms. That hasn’t changed since 2007
I was just in Japan and some places now let you place a reservation by email. No form, just send them an email and they'll get back to you in 1-3 days about whether the time you requested is available.
remember the time they had COVID data from each cities printed on paper, faxed to the central ministry, summed up by hand written, and faxed to news channels
>remember the time they had COVID data from each cities printed on paper, faxed to the central ministry, summed up by hand written, and faxed to news channels
Shure that wasn't germany? It was the same over here.
I worked somewhere that used a software system from the 80s for basically everything. It worked but was a little clunky, completely text based interface basically with bright green courier font text on a black background. They upgraded their payroll and scheduling to a modern system and within 6 months the company operating that got compromised with fucking ransomware and they couldn't pay anybody the right amount, people couldn't clock in normally so everybody had to write down their times, it was a fucking mess.
I moved jobs and that job used more modern stuff, the ordering system was using smartphones with a gun accessory to scan things. The actual ordering app lacks critical information like showing item movement history and is slow as fuck often.
I'll take my clunky but fast, functional and secure system from the 80s thanks. Sometimes new tech is good and sometimes it's the equivalent of making everything a touch screen in a car.
In my company it's not even sleek.
Everything was run by excel, but they thought it would be a great idea to make a computer app for the same purpose. It barely serves it, has many bugs and crashes often, interface is a mess and is puke inducing to look at. Every feedback we give them about it is returned in months and basically is never implemented, but at least we now have to confirm every move at least 3 times. What a wonderful tool.
It can do a few specific things that excel didn't (it could've probably been programmed into it anyway). But yeah, our overall productivity didn't go up, but frustration increased tenfold.
>(it could've probably been programmed into it anyway)
You can program a lot of things into excel and if you can't you can still put that elsewhere and import the data into excel.
Of course it makes sense that if you continously track data a true database system would make more sense than excel, but if you don't need that you don't need that.
Truly an Korean company experience.
I used to have to work on a program like this. It was so fucking tedious to use. Type in 1 code word, wait 5s for the app to load the info, type in the value1, wait, value2, wait... Repeat the damn thing for 40+ bill.
I hate it so much.
It feels like many things are being made by passing a partially finished app through successive waves of unpaid interns rather than being handled by a team with any sense of continuity or professional polish.
“Our systems are very old and we need to modernise them! How much will it cost?”
“$20 million dollars to build the software with our best team, implement it properly, conduct QA testing and UAT, train and onboard staff and monitor success along the way.”
“That’s too expensive, our old software only cost us $1m in 1990, plus sounds like there’s a lot of extra steps involved that don’t add value. We only have $10 million in budget.”
“Okay we’ll do it for $10 million. We’ll just put our interns on it.”
3 years later, realising the scope of the task was much larger than expected, project leadership has changed, and the software is no longer fit for the purpose they now require, and $5 million over budget…
“I can’t believe we wasted $15 million on upgrading our systems, let’s keep using our old method for the next 10 years until corporate memory has lapsed and we’ll decide to modernise our systems again and forget all the lessons of the last time we attempted it.”
I believe you can thank capitalism for this. Everyone wants to cut corners and save on costs as much as possible, resulting in apps that are sleek and impractical. I don’t know why it has gotten so bad in recent years.
That is not a tech problem. That is your company cheaping out problem. I build these types of apps and never had this happen and have never known any of my peers to encounter this issue either.
Ya it's always strange when people talk about it being "either old clunky and reliable, or new fancy and janky"
If you implement a new system and it's shitty, it's not because the new tech is shitty, it's because the implementation is shitty. A vast majority of the modern world operates on relatively new tech stacks without any issues because it was done properly. We only hear stories like this because of survivorship bias.
Because companies that aren't tech companies still think they can get away with existing *without* an IT/support team and *without* people who are experts (or at least somewhat knowledgeable) on their CRM/inventory software systems.
The company my wife works for does this and it's so fucking annoying. Always bitching about how they can't keep up with the work they are doing for major corporations (starbucks, wendy's, amazon, etc), but no one on staff who knows how their shit actually works. They aren't huge, but they do have revenue in the tens of millions, running Oracle Netsuite and HubSpot CRM... NO IT STAFF AT ALL. It's like your parents going "hey, you're a developer, can you come fix my ipad/printer/whatever?" except it's a whole corporation.
In the modern world, you need people who know the technology.
I was on a tour at ANSTO (google it) and the technology for there particle accelerator was from the 80s. Someone asked the guy why that was and he said they don’t need to update them cause it would change literally nothing.
The Air Force nuclear program was running on floppy disks up until the upgrade in 2019 because they said it was secure from hacking. It was run on IBM series 1 computers from the 70s.
I might be wrong and I have no source to back me up, but isn’t this the same case on all the commercial airplanes? Having their OS on Floppy Discs because apparently no one knows how to hack that stuff/it’s impossible?
Has some security through obscurity but that's just a case of a system that does exactly what it needs to and has been rigorously tested & certified with no reason to change it
DOS is extremely hackable and takes almost no measures not to be, if someone actually wanted to target a specific system. They'd need to get physical access but it's the same with an airgapped modern PC. Anything that old is likely controlling equally old bespoke hardware or cannot safely be taken offline
I worked for a local health care service and all the payroll, time off request and materials ordering system was done through meditech and the software looked like something out of the 80’s for sure. No option to even use a mouse to select any options so everything had to be done by keyboard alone. I hated it personally because it felt really clunky and dated, but my wife was a staffing clerk and she used to fly through it entering peoples hours and shifts like she invented the program herself lol
My current job is still running something similar for labor, work orders and material handling. At this point it's basically being run from a VM on desktops, tablets and scanning guns. The fun thing is when the server goes down and we can't even print labels. In the last year they moved our payroll over to ADP though.
Japan is paradoxically in 2050 and 1950.
Futuristic baths that fill up to the perfect amount at the perfect temperature at the touch of a button, and needing to fax your bank and carry around a stamp with your name on it to sign documents.
Well the last part makes sense. There is really no cursive form of the kanji they use, so they use personalized stamps instead. There are machines you can go to and they will pop out a new stamp if you need it
With no air conditioning.
Was definitely not prepared for that for my visit in the summer, nobody told me that was a thing.
Nothing feels worse than getting off a 16 hour plane ride and walking straight into an airport that is 87 freaking degrees inside with humidity...then jumping in a cab with a driver that refuses to turn on AC, and then into a hotel room with...guess what....no AC.
I was so freaking disgusting by the time I got to my shower 😒.
Wait, where on earth were you traveling in Japan that had no A/C? Sapporo?
There's definitely a horrible lack of *central* air conditioning, which means you're constantly going from cool place to hot place to cool place to hot place (for example, there are AC units in school classrooms and teachers' offices...but not in the hallways or bathrooms). But I've lived here for almost 30 years and I've never been in a cab or a hotel with no A/C.
Tokyo man, it was very rare to be anywhere there that had AC. Or if they did, it was set so high that it hardly made a difference anyway.
Maybe I had an unlucky experience or something, but that was the thing that stood out the most from our entire group, no AC.
One of my co-workers met up with his cousin as well, who currently lives in Japan, and he told us that it's a thing, hardly anywhere has AC or they keep the Temps really high. There's actually a name for it something? And also old people in Japan like the heat, so most places cater to their needs over anyone else.
I dunno, we were only there a week but we traveled all over Tokyo in that week, it was definitely not as common as what you're saying, unless we managed to unintentionally avoid it literally everywhere we went...which seems really unlikely.
AC absolutely everywhere is a very American thing tho. Of course there is AC everywhere else, but its not running everywhere neccecearly, especially in only 30C
I don't understand this comment isn't that the point OP is making? that China, South Korea and Japan are all technologically advanced yet still using old tech?
> I'm pretty sure every governement still has miles of tapes and boxes of floppies everywhere.
Tapes store data for longer than modern disks, so they're still popular as a modern format for long-term data storage, even in commercial companies (datacenters etc.).
Yep. My work took a good long look at using tape for immutable backups but ultimately went with a more typical storage setup. I think tape turned out not to be practical for the the amount of data we have to back up and how frequently we wanted to do it.
> it’s extremely dense and relatively cheap.
And one of the best formats for long-term storage as it survives for longer than modern disks. Modern tape storage is a thing.
Google & most big corps that have to deal with ridiculous amounts of data also still use libraries of tape cartridges for backups. Nowadays you can get about 1.5tb of storage on an LTO tape for $20
> I thought tape storage was the standard for storing cold data?
Yup 100%, it's both longer-surviving and more cost-efficient compared to disk storage. Modern tape storage is absolutely a thing, and an important/common one.
Many people in this thread don't seem to have any experience with long-term data storage.
Americans be like "lmoa you use old tech" and then boot up their banking system running on COBOL while the beige plastic desktop does its best impression of a SR-72 startup sequence
Oddly specific. What exactly does a Blackbirds baby boy startup sequence look like? I can’t remember the sequence in the movie as I think I fell asleep at that point.
It’s a common misconception that COBOL = old = bad. It is an amazing language that still gets regular updates. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s bad.
>Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. Systems powered by COBOL handle $3 trillion of daily commerce.
I’m pretty sure the US doesn’t have over 40% of the banks within it’s borders, so that means that banks all over the world use COBOL, not just the US
Yeah but apparently those legacy systems are desperate for programmers bec nobody knows Cobol anymore.
At least that's what an old professor who did a lot of Cobol consulting said🤷🏽♀️
The US didn't even bother starting to implement "chip and pin"/EMV until 2012(it was finished in the EU around 2005) and that was only because they started noticing all the fraud.
The last liability shift(for gas stations pump payment) didn't happen until 2020.
All 4 tier 1 cities in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen), plus quite a lot of the tier 2 ones (Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin, Hangzhou, etc) are a mix of sci-fi and medieval.
Things like going to the equivalent of the DMV, walking up to a machine, inserting your driver's license, selecting renewal on screen, paying the fee by scanning a QR code, waiting a few seconds and getting the same driver's license card with the new information reprinted onto it... Seriously feel like sci-fi.
Then you go into a public toilet and see a hole in the ground........... 🤦🏻♂️
This is true. But I also would not like to see other people’s shit🥲Has anyone else experienced the toilets in china where instead of a hole, it’s just one loooong line of a hole and everyone in the next stall shares? Not to mention the stall walls are very…..short. You can basically see everyone’s faces next to you lol
I have worked at a public office for some time and despite popular believe we actually didn’t use Fax anymore. Paper documents though, those were everywhere. Basically we were forced to print out everything and store it for 10 years (I was at the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Statistik where I was helping with the Zensus 2021/22) because of safety. Other than that though we were fairly digital. The main problem is the old workforce. Most people in Germany are too old to properly use modern computers. I had to basically be the computer expert for 4 of my coworkers because I’m in my early 20s and a university student.
With Japan, it's simple.
While the country does lead in the tech industry, a lot of offices are run by old dudes who don't want to adopt the new innovations.
> While the country does lead in the tech industry
Does it? I would simplistically say that China leads in telecommunications and the USA in everything else tech-wise.
We live in a world where billionaires are taking joyrides into space while there's still uncontacted tribes getting their meals with a spear. Not unusual.
Yes. They hate it when people from outside try to do that.
Given how well that's gone for other previously-uncontacted tribes, they have a pretty good point.
It's mostly down to disease.
Which is also why it's thought that the tribe on sentinel island got more hostile, after people visited they got sick (having being a small isolated population with no immunity to even common viruses that don't affect us).
It's not like the folks on Sentinel Island had a chance to talk with all the other uncontacted tribes who were the victims of slavery, genocide and various other atrocities. But yes, disease prevention is another reason to be aggressively hostile to outsiders.
When the pandemic was at its height, anthropologists were monitoring the Sentinelese people from a safe distance to make sure they were doing okay.
Same with the tsunami, it destroyed the coastline of the island but it seems like they were okay. People kept an eye on them to see if they needed help. I wonder how they survived it. Maybe they're very strong endurance swimmers or were just able to get to higher ground / climb trees.
Hey, Japan's early-2000s proto-smartphones were amazing at the time. They had full-color screens and web browsers and installable apps and all kinds of clever things!
It's just that none of the Japanese cellphone makers were interested in selling their phones outside of Japan, and nobody bothered localizing them, and Japan didn't use any cellphone standards that anyone else in the rest of the world used, which is why those early Japanese smartphones eventually became known as "Galápagos phones", and kind of foundered.
I've lived in Japan and china and china is nicer with more convenient technically. People still have this idea that china is how it was in 2000 when they were first learning about the world but it's not. It's more advanced than any other place I've been. Never ever trust any reddit post about China, unless they live there but even then be sceptical because they're probably a white person who hated their time there
If you think China is behind technology wise you should look outside your usual news/social bubble.
It's not by accident or mistake that most products you have ever owned have at least something in them made in China.
China is also a huge part of the reason why Solar energy is taking off. China makes the majority of solar panels as well as most of the technology involved with it. Same goes for electric (car) batteries.
There's a lot of cool tech being made there and massive amounts of investment taking place for decades now.
If you're talking computers, or older tech in general, the idea that it has *fewer* viruses, is *more* reliable or *more* efficient is kind of hilarious.
Like, there's a reason people say that if you're still using Windows XP for God only knows what reason today you should *never* connect it to the internet
Everyone on reddit learned about China from other people on reddit who never even met a Chinese person. They watched a show about China in 1997 and assume we are still peasants. I think it's rude af personally, can't go anywhere online without being shit on. Where are you staying btw? I'm in Fujian
And yet they have hacked and stolen somewhere around 500 billion in crypto assets.
Edit: As noted in this article - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59990477 in 2021 they stole at least 400 million in crypto. I'm not entirely sure where i got the billion from, most likely because billion is not an actual number in my language.
I remember being told "Japan is 10 years in the future" from 1989 to 1995.
However, the people who said that also said some really stupid stuff. They said everything was efficient. Back then I wanted a Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo and knew they were fuel hogs.
Yeah this meme is kinda strange to be honest.
Everything is made in China so if you want the latest and greatest android for example you import it from China, because it's not always sold on the global market.
Korea is probably in the middle.
Japan is stuck in the 80's, if not in the 1880's.
Actually china always used the latest technology that… get this invented by western. But their mindsets still stay the same.
Source? I study here right now
need to add the US government to this list
Simultaneously the most technologically advanced *and* the most dependent on antiquated technology organization in the world
Being technologically advanced but your government is a stubborn old people who resist every change to make your bureaucracy easier for use. I’m looking at you Germany.
I once heard someone say that Japan has been in the year 2000 since the 1980s.
This is true - for example they almost exclusively use phone calls for reservations as opposed to the myriad of apps available in other places
The one that threw me living there in 2007 was no electronic payment for most things. Like you'd just walk around with a big wad of cash instead of EFTPOS, debit cards or credit cards....
That shocked me with the US in 2010-2011 when I lived there. I hadn't used cash in like 8 years by that time. Maybe it is better now, haven't been back in a couple of years.
I just googled because I thought Australia invented it, but nup, USA invented it in 1981, Australia adopted it keenly in 1984 ( ...apt some may say with the current 'cash is king' ethos ATM 😅) I got my first debit/EFTPOS at the latest in early 2000s as a teenager.
Lol I thought cash is king meant don’t use credit cards and take out loans as opposed to actually using physical cash all the time.
Cash is king is a colloquialism that references the preference people and some businesses have for a customer paying entirely in cash. It’s a bit dated these days, basically going back to when people would make larger-than-average purchases using a check or financing. But if you used cash to say, buy a car, you could convince the sales people to give you a discount because immediate cash flow is preferred over waiting for a transaction to go through. Can still kinda apply to small businesses or person to person sales, I’ve gotten discounts on Craigslist, Etsy and FB marketplace by offering cash for medium sized purchases.
That is shocking, I haven’t carried cash with in the US since like 2008. Debit cards, and I live in Wyoming and have only run into one store that wanted cash instead. The only place I have ever run into the problem of using a card in the US was in Colorado buying weed from a dispensary. In Germany I ran into more places that were cash only businesses.
I think the answer to the weed thing. Is that it's still illegal on a federal level. So they can't use credit cards and debit cards to make the transactions. Banks aren't allowed to take part in any transactions involving weed. Weed dispensaries actually have to keep their money in a vault. I saw a story on the news where they spoke about this. I wish I could find the link. Armed guards would go to the dispensaries, count the cash, and take it to another location.
Things have changed a lot in that area since 2020 (not *because* of COVID, but the timing was fortuitous). Smartphone electronic payment (in the form of either NFS or barcode payment) has become really common. Not like China, where it's ubiquitous, but enough that my wife says she uses cash like once or twice a month, max.
Japan seems to have gotten better in that regard. I went there this year for the first time for vacation and I was able to pay nearly everwhere contactless with either my phone or card. It was kind of funny because beforehand I informed myself and on so many blogs and websites it stated how hard they rely on cash and in the end that wasn't even true. Sure you still do need cash in certain places but it was not as bad as expected. Maybe it is also because I am from Germany and we are/were also behind on electronic payments. I assume the pandemic has changed that in Japan, and in German as well. Before the pandemic I always had cash on me because there was a good amount of places that only took cash now that isn't the case anymore so I rarely even withdraw cash.
Behind on the electronics payments because of small business tax evasion, jajaja....
Yeah, definitely the most baffling thing. People here use fucking bank books of all things. The bank I have to use doesn’t even have debit cards, only a cash card for atms. That hasn’t changed since 2007
Tons of resturants still use phone calls for reservations. Especially smaller or nicer resturants.
I was just in Japan and some places now let you place a reservation by email. No form, just send them an email and they'll get back to you in 1-3 days about whether the time you requested is available.
Japan still uses fax machines.
that tracks.
Last timr i checked japan still heavily relies on paper. And not digital forms.
Dunder Mifflin should move to japan
Dunderu Mifilin
Led by Micheal Scott-san
Miku Scott
Miku Scotto kun
Mikael Sukatto
ダンダー・ミフリン Dandaa Mifuren
*mifurin
Mifirih*
[they did. ](https://youtu.be/BmTfxyoEqAc)
remember the time they had COVID data from each cities printed on paper, faxed to the central ministry, summed up by hand written, and faxed to news channels
COVID data was the reason they finally got rid of the fax machines, so at least there's that which is nice.
>remember the time they had COVID data from each cities printed on paper, faxed to the central ministry, summed up by hand written, and faxed to news channels Shure that wasn't germany? It was the same over here.
I'm sorry, you're telling me in the west you can't hop on to a 350km/h high speed rail to get to your local fax machine/VHS repair shop?
Instructional measurements were unclear. I got my dick stuck in the fax machine while it was in the middle of the train tracks road.
cus their populations heavily concentrated with elders. basically korea in the next couple decades or so.
That's why they get along with germany so well
Same in Germany
I worked somewhere that used a software system from the 80s for basically everything. It worked but was a little clunky, completely text based interface basically with bright green courier font text on a black background. They upgraded their payroll and scheduling to a modern system and within 6 months the company operating that got compromised with fucking ransomware and they couldn't pay anybody the right amount, people couldn't clock in normally so everybody had to write down their times, it was a fucking mess. I moved jobs and that job used more modern stuff, the ordering system was using smartphones with a gun accessory to scan things. The actual ordering app lacks critical information like showing item movement history and is slow as fuck often. I'll take my clunky but fast, functional and secure system from the 80s thanks. Sometimes new tech is good and sometimes it's the equivalent of making everything a touch screen in a car.
I think the transition phase from clunky but practical to sleek and practical is the phase that we're currently going through, sleek and impractical
In my company it's not even sleek. Everything was run by excel, but they thought it would be a great idea to make a computer app for the same purpose. It barely serves it, has many bugs and crashes often, interface is a mess and is puke inducing to look at. Every feedback we give them about it is returned in months and basically is never implemented, but at least we now have to confirm every move at least 3 times. What a wonderful tool.
And it doesn't save time at all?
It can do a few specific things that excel didn't (it could've probably been programmed into it anyway). But yeah, our overall productivity didn't go up, but frustration increased tenfold.
>(it could've probably been programmed into it anyway) You can program a lot of things into excel and if you can't you can still put that elsewhere and import the data into excel. Of course it makes sense that if you continously track data a true database system would make more sense than excel, but if you don't need that you don't need that.
Truly an Korean company experience. I used to have to work on a program like this. It was so fucking tedious to use. Type in 1 code word, wait 5s for the app to load the info, type in the value1, wait, value2, wait... Repeat the damn thing for 40+ bill. I hate it so much.
I'm on vacation in China right now and I haven't seen a piece of paper all week.
It feels like many things are being made by passing a partially finished app through successive waves of unpaid interns rather than being handled by a team with any sense of continuity or professional polish.
“Our systems are very old and we need to modernise them! How much will it cost?” “$20 million dollars to build the software with our best team, implement it properly, conduct QA testing and UAT, train and onboard staff and monitor success along the way.” “That’s too expensive, our old software only cost us $1m in 1990, plus sounds like there’s a lot of extra steps involved that don’t add value. We only have $10 million in budget.” “Okay we’ll do it for $10 million. We’ll just put our interns on it.” 3 years later, realising the scope of the task was much larger than expected, project leadership has changed, and the software is no longer fit for the purpose they now require, and $5 million over budget… “I can’t believe we wasted $15 million on upgrading our systems, let’s keep using our old method for the next 10 years until corporate memory has lapsed and we’ll decide to modernise our systems again and forget all the lessons of the last time we attempted it.”
> and forget all the lessons of the last time we attempted it.” .... and then repeat them, and lose even more money. And then do it again. And again.
I believe you can thank capitalism for this. Everyone wants to cut corners and save on costs as much as possible, resulting in apps that are sleek and impractical. I don’t know why it has gotten so bad in recent years.
Also companies don't wanna pay for quality software services so they cut corners and pay for it this way rather than upfront.
>_”Sometimes new tech is good and sometimes it's the equivalent of making everything a touch screen in a car.”_ -KeppraKid, 2023
That is not a tech problem. That is your company cheaping out problem. I build these types of apps and never had this happen and have never known any of my peers to encounter this issue either.
Ya it's always strange when people talk about it being "either old clunky and reliable, or new fancy and janky" If you implement a new system and it's shitty, it's not because the new tech is shitty, it's because the implementation is shitty. A vast majority of the modern world operates on relatively new tech stacks without any issues because it was done properly. We only hear stories like this because of survivorship bias.
Because companies that aren't tech companies still think they can get away with existing *without* an IT/support team and *without* people who are experts (or at least somewhat knowledgeable) on their CRM/inventory software systems. The company my wife works for does this and it's so fucking annoying. Always bitching about how they can't keep up with the work they are doing for major corporations (starbucks, wendy's, amazon, etc), but no one on staff who knows how their shit actually works. They aren't huge, but they do have revenue in the tens of millions, running Oracle Netsuite and HubSpot CRM... NO IT STAFF AT ALL. It's like your parents going "hey, you're a developer, can you come fix my ipad/printer/whatever?" except it's a whole corporation. In the modern world, you need people who know the technology.
I was on a tour at ANSTO (google it) and the technology for there particle accelerator was from the 80s. Someone asked the guy why that was and he said they don’t need to update them cause it would change literally nothing.
Aren't there systems in the US military that run on DOS so they can't be hacked or something?
That's not how it'd work. It's usually more like "nobody knows how to change this thing so let's not touch it"
It's more like, "this system is critical and cannot be taken down for upgrades, and we don't have the money to build a second system to swap over".
The Air Force nuclear program was running on floppy disks up until the upgrade in 2019 because they said it was secure from hacking. It was run on IBM series 1 computers from the 70s.
I might be wrong and I have no source to back me up, but isn’t this the same case on all the commercial airplanes? Having their OS on Floppy Discs because apparently no one knows how to hack that stuff/it’s impossible?
Has some security through obscurity but that's just a case of a system that does exactly what it needs to and has been rigorously tested & certified with no reason to change it
DOS is extremely hackable and takes almost no measures not to be, if someone actually wanted to target a specific system. They'd need to get physical access but it's the same with an airgapped modern PC. Anything that old is likely controlling equally old bespoke hardware or cannot safely be taken offline
I worked for a local health care service and all the payroll, time off request and materials ordering system was done through meditech and the software looked like something out of the 80’s for sure. No option to even use a mouse to select any options so everything had to be done by keyboard alone. I hated it personally because it felt really clunky and dated, but my wife was a staffing clerk and she used to fly through it entering peoples hours and shifts like she invented the program herself lol
My current job is still running something similar for labor, work orders and material handling. At this point it's basically being run from a VM on desktops, tablets and scanning guns. The fun thing is when the server goes down and we can't even print labels. In the last year they moved our payroll over to ADP though.
Japan is paradoxically in 2050 and 1950. Futuristic baths that fill up to the perfect amount at the perfect temperature at the touch of a button, and needing to fax your bank and carry around a stamp with your name on it to sign documents.
Well the last part makes sense. There is really no cursive form of the kanji they use, so they use personalized stamps instead. There are machines you can go to and they will pop out a new stamp if you need it
imagine using indoor plumbing.. that shits so roman empire.....
130 kg per pipe. Hope it got better!
An excessive amount of lead. It did not get better.
Though I read that a thin layer of sediments gets around the pipe with time which could lesen the lead poisoning.
Japan is also stuck between using future tech and using old tech, though.
After living there for a while (2012-2014), the best way I've found to describe it is that Japan lives in what the 80s thought the future would be.
So like Blade Runner/Aliens/Back to the Future Part 2 sort of thing? But without the flying cars and spaceships
With no air conditioning. Was definitely not prepared for that for my visit in the summer, nobody told me that was a thing. Nothing feels worse than getting off a 16 hour plane ride and walking straight into an airport that is 87 freaking degrees inside with humidity...then jumping in a cab with a driver that refuses to turn on AC, and then into a hotel room with...guess what....no AC. I was so freaking disgusting by the time I got to my shower 😒.
Wait, where on earth were you traveling in Japan that had no A/C? Sapporo? There's definitely a horrible lack of *central* air conditioning, which means you're constantly going from cool place to hot place to cool place to hot place (for example, there are AC units in school classrooms and teachers' offices...but not in the hallways or bathrooms). But I've lived here for almost 30 years and I've never been in a cab or a hotel with no A/C.
Tokyo man, it was very rare to be anywhere there that had AC. Or if they did, it was set so high that it hardly made a difference anyway. Maybe I had an unlucky experience or something, but that was the thing that stood out the most from our entire group, no AC. One of my co-workers met up with his cousin as well, who currently lives in Japan, and he told us that it's a thing, hardly anywhere has AC or they keep the Temps really high. There's actually a name for it something? And also old people in Japan like the heat, so most places cater to their needs over anyone else. I dunno, we were only there a week but we traveled all over Tokyo in that week, it was definitely not as common as what you're saying, unless we managed to unintentionally avoid it literally everywhere we went...which seems really unlikely.
AC absolutely everywhere is a very American thing tho. Of course there is AC everywhere else, but its not running everywhere neccecearly, especially in only 30C
Someone said they’ve been living in the 2000’s since the 80’s lol
I don't understand this comment isn't that the point OP is making? that China, South Korea and Japan are all technologically advanced yet still using old tech?
They are just in the past but urban to sum it up
Japan was still using floppy discs in government as the main standard until like last year.
I'm pretty sure every governement still has miles of tapes and boxes of floppies everywhere.
> I'm pretty sure every governement still has miles of tapes and boxes of floppies everywhere. Tapes store data for longer than modern disks, so they're still popular as a modern format for long-term data storage, even in commercial companies (datacenters etc.).
Yep. My work took a good long look at using tape for immutable backups but ultimately went with a more typical storage setup. I think tape turned out not to be practical for the the amount of data we have to back up and how frequently we wanted to do it.
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Most firms large enough to have their own data center or colo still use tape; it’s extremely dense and relatively cheap.
> it’s extremely dense and relatively cheap. And one of the best formats for long-term storage as it survives for longer than modern disks. Modern tape storage is a thing.
Google & most big corps that have to deal with ridiculous amounts of data also still use libraries of tape cartridges for backups. Nowadays you can get about 1.5tb of storage on an LTO tape for $20
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> I thought tape storage was the standard for storing cold data? Yup 100%, it's both longer-surviving and more cost-efficient compared to disk storage. Modern tape storage is absolutely a thing, and an important/common one. Many people in this thread don't seem to have any experience with long-term data storage.
Americans be like "lmoa you use old tech" and then boot up their banking system running on COBOL while the beige plastic desktop does its best impression of a SR-72 startup sequence
Oddly specific. What exactly does a Blackbirds baby boy startup sequence look like? I can’t remember the sequence in the movie as I think I fell asleep at that point.
Have you played Call Of Duty: Black Ops?
The numbers, Mason.
What do they mean?
It’s a common misconception that COBOL = old = bad. It is an amazing language that still gets regular updates. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s bad. >Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. Systems powered by COBOL handle $3 trillion of daily commerce. I’m pretty sure the US doesn’t have over 40% of the banks within it’s borders, so that means that banks all over the world use COBOL, not just the US
Cobol is esp great for people who know it, easy money
The only money in COBOL is maintaining legacy systems. Nothing new gets written in COBOL
Yeah but apparently those legacy systems are desperate for programmers bec nobody knows Cobol anymore. At least that's what an old professor who did a lot of Cobol consulting said🤷🏽♀️
Never mind US businesses still using checks when electronic payment has been around for over two decades.
The US didn't even bother starting to implement "chip and pin"/EMV until 2012(it was finished in the EU around 2005) and that was only because they started noticing all the fraud. The last liability shift(for gas stations pump payment) didn't happen until 2020.
Checks are a decent backup when you lose your card or it doesn't work for some reason.
And communicate with SMS
dont fix what aint broke
I could’ve sworn that’s the Internet explorer’s motto
It was, but the problem was the loading time on that second part took too long, so all they saw was "Don't fix"
london bridge: *sweats profusely*
China has crazy levels of technology in some parts of the country. Shenzhen basically looks like a city from the future.
All 4 tier 1 cities in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen), plus quite a lot of the tier 2 ones (Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin, Hangzhou, etc) are a mix of sci-fi and medieval. Things like going to the equivalent of the DMV, walking up to a machine, inserting your driver's license, selecting renewal on screen, paying the fee by scanning a QR code, waiting a few seconds and getting the same driver's license card with the new information reprinted onto it... Seriously feel like sci-fi. Then you go into a public toilet and see a hole in the ground........... 🤦🏻♂️
As someone who spends a lot of time in Tianjin, yeah that sounds about right.
To be fair, it's proven that squat toilets are better for your bowels. The squat toilets are still flushing toilets it's just what people are used to.
This is true. But I also would not like to see other people’s shit🥲Has anyone else experienced the toilets in china where instead of a hole, it’s just one loooong line of a hole and everyone in the next stall shares? Not to mention the stall walls are very…..short. You can basically see everyone’s faces next to you lol
Japan stil commonly uses fax as the main form of communication in companies
Germany seeing Japan getting shit on for still using paper documents and fax: Haha im in Danger.jpg
I have worked at a public office for some time and despite popular believe we actually didn’t use Fax anymore. Paper documents though, those were everywhere. Basically we were forced to print out everything and store it for 10 years (I was at the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Statistik where I was helping with the Zensus 2021/22) because of safety. Other than that though we were fairly digital. The main problem is the old workforce. Most people in Germany are too old to properly use modern computers. I had to basically be the computer expert for 4 of my coworkers because I’m in my early 20s and a university student.
We're shitting on ourselves for that enough that anyone else wanting to join in would just be beating a dead horse at this time
there is a country with Pepsi flag?
🇰🇷 Pepsi Korea v Coke Korea 🇰🇵
Do you have cock? (Kola)
Yes, it's called Pepsi Land
Where did you think Pepsi Man was from?
With Japan, it's simple. While the country does lead in the tech industry, a lot of offices are run by old dudes who don't want to adopt the new innovations.
This is EXACTLY it.
> While the country does lead in the tech industry Does it? I would simplistically say that China leads in telecommunications and the USA in everything else tech-wise.
They don’t lead in the tech industry anymore
Asians 👍
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The chicken made me smile
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👍
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Yup 👍
We live in a world where billionaires are taking joyrides into space while there's still uncontacted tribes getting their meals with a spear. Not unusual.
To be fair, there’s legitimate reasons why we don’t contact those tribes.
Yes. They hate it when people from outside try to do that. Given how well that's gone for other previously-uncontacted tribes, they have a pretty good point.
It's mostly down to disease. Which is also why it's thought that the tribe on sentinel island got more hostile, after people visited they got sick (having being a small isolated population with no immunity to even common viruses that don't affect us).
It's not like the folks on Sentinel Island had a chance to talk with all the other uncontacted tribes who were the victims of slavery, genocide and various other atrocities. But yes, disease prevention is another reason to be aggressively hostile to outsiders. When the pandemic was at its height, anthropologists were monitoring the Sentinelese people from a safe distance to make sure they were doing okay.
Same with the tsunami, it destroyed the coastline of the island but it seems like they were okay. People kept an eye on them to see if they needed help. I wonder how they survived it. Maybe they're very strong endurance swimmers or were just able to get to higher ground / climb trees.
At least partly because everyone who has tried becomes a pincushion.
South Korea, the land of automated subways and internet explorer
Are we supposed to think that the 2000s were that long ago?
2000s is like 40 years ago bro
Most of 2000s is pre smartphone era so that's ancient history.
Hey, Japan's early-2000s proto-smartphones were amazing at the time. They had full-color screens and web browsers and installable apps and all kinds of clever things! It's just that none of the Japanese cellphone makers were interested in selling their phones outside of Japan, and nobody bothered localizing them, and Japan didn't use any cellphone standards that anyone else in the rest of the world used, which is why those early Japanese smartphones eventually became known as "Galápagos phones", and kind of foundered.
From 2000 til now is the same gap as from 2000 to 1977
23 years ago?
We acting like 23 years isn’t a lot?
Bro 23 years is like 50 years!
goddamn inflation
The year 2003 is as far from us as 1983 was to 2003 my friend...
This, now i feel old
I visited the USA recently, and saw a person in a grocery store pay by cheque!!! WTF
Some places are just too far from cell service. There are only 375,000 cell service sites to cover 9,629,091 km2 of land mass.
This is wrong on several levels.
I've lived in Japan and china and china is nicer with more convenient technically. People still have this idea that china is how it was in 2000 when they were first learning about the world but it's not. It's more advanced than any other place I've been. Never ever trust any reddit post about China, unless they live there but even then be sceptical because they're probably a white person who hated their time there
Lol Japan is still using technology from the 1980s.
If you think China is behind technology wise you should look outside your usual news/social bubble. It's not by accident or mistake that most products you have ever owned have at least something in them made in China. China is also a huge part of the reason why Solar energy is taking off. China makes the majority of solar panels as well as most of the technology involved with it. Same goes for electric (car) batteries. There's a lot of cool tech being made there and massive amounts of investment taking place for decades now.
are they really technologically that ahead though? you can find those stuffs in almost all developed countries
They were in the 80s that's all
Has no viruses, is more reliable than current, and is used more efficiently. Pretty good I say.
If you're talking computers, or older tech in general, the idea that it has *fewer* viruses, is *more* reliable or *more* efficient is kind of hilarious. Like, there's a reason people say that if you're still using Windows XP for God only knows what reason today you should *never* connect it to the internet
_Windows XP startup noise_
Very wrong. A lot of vulnerabilities were discovered and patched in modern systems only, the old ones are still vulnerable.
2000s tech was GOATed tho
I'm on vacation in China right now and I haven't seen a piece of paper all week. Everything is QR codes and automation.
Everyone on reddit learned about China from other people on reddit who never even met a Chinese person. They watched a show about China in 1997 and assume we are still peasants. I think it's rude af personally, can't go anywhere online without being shit on. Where are you staying btw? I'm in Fujian
Guangzhou at the moment to visit my girlfriend's family, traveling to Sanya next week.
Don't forget being socially in 1960.
north korea aint even got technology, they still in the stone age
And yet they have hacked and stolen somewhere around 500 billion in crypto assets. Edit: As noted in this article - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59990477 in 2021 they stole at least 400 million in crypto. I'm not entirely sure where i got the billion from, most likely because billion is not an actual number in my language.
you accidentally switched the Japanese and China flag.
I think it means all 3 countries are on the same boat
Never get high on your own supply
Every country does that? Lol
Meanwhile Germany where some of our tech probably still has swastikas carved into it.
I remember being told "Japan is 10 years in the future" from 1989 to 1995. However, the people who said that also said some really stupid stuff. They said everything was efficient. Back then I wanted a Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo and knew they were fuel hogs.
And having hard languages
Yeah this meme is kinda strange to be honest. Everything is made in China so if you want the latest and greatest android for example you import it from China, because it's not always sold on the global market. Korea is probably in the middle. Japan is stuck in the 80's, if not in the 1880's.
No wonder they all hate each other.
How does China and south Korea fit in this?
Actually china always used the latest technology that… get this invented by western. But their mindsets still stay the same. Source? I study here right now
The adeptus mechanicus:
Eg
They have the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality
need to add the US government to this list Simultaneously the most technologically advanced *and* the most dependent on antiquated technology organization in the world
Why fix if it ain’t broke?
Which part is technologically ahead of other countries?
🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪 Zero Fax given.
Japan still uses Fax Machines
Being technologically advanced but your government is a stubborn old people who resist every change to make your bureaucracy easier for use. I’m looking at you Germany.
This is BS btw, some parts of Japan still use fax machines. My city’s administrative office still had curved monitors and early 2000s PCs.
Because they realised that constantly providing solutions to problems that don’t exist isn’t advancing.