i have found the jankiest phone system ever constructed. just take this in for a minute, absorb its extremely dark energy
had to reverse engineer this shitshow with some friends but i got it sussed out now. those aren't network cards on the right, they're T1/PRI, and the ones with huge connectors are 24-port analog phone line cards
here's the inside. bottom card is a single board Pentium 4, but it's all going into a 14+ slot *ISA* (!) backplane feeding this bank of Dialogic phone cards.
the cables hanging out below the RJ-21 ports on the back are external power input - each card requires one of these big fuckoff power bricks because there's no way an ISA slot can power four of these beasts
the ribbon bus between the cards is particularly delightful - it's SCBus, a *TDM* interlink for telephony
speculating: when a call comes in on e.g. a T1 digital channel, the CPU makes the decision to terminate it to e.g. analog port 4, and then just tells the T1 card "send it to TDM channel 4, card ID 7" - those little dials next to the ribbon connectors set the card IDs
because this system is handling at least 96 lines (probably phone stations) there's absolutely no way the CPU *or* the ISA bus could handle all that data, so the cards just have their own private backchannel for it. beautiful
so it all makes sense but if you just look at it, it feels like it must have spent more time broken than working in its lifetime
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you won't find anything really interesting coming from nearly any media business because their revenue sources aren't "put out interesting writing which people can only get here, so they have to subscribe." now it's... god, I don't even know.
the way things sucked before was so interesting, and now it all sucks in the same way.
it's always the same thing. every day, the same thing. everything is bad for the same reasons. I used to complain about businesses. I gave up. There's no point. It's always the same explanation, and everyone already knows what it is.
thinking about how we've fallen so far from gods light. in 1994, a pc magazine writer tasked with covering doom bit their lip, thought a little, and said "i should put a complete map editing tutorial in there. maybe next to the cheat codes"
let me tell you why the future we live in sucks so much dog shit every single second of every single day: data. as recently as the 2000s, businesses were stumbling through life completely lost and had no idea what they were doing. now they know, and everything sucks
do you fucking know how many people got paid anywhere from a living wage to big bucks to sit around and "i don't know, do something", and then nobody knew how to figure out if the thing they did made any money, or in fact, if they did it at all?
I haven't even hit 100k subscribers and this is what my inbox looks like. every day i get emails
I now receive multiple shill offers daily. Most are "from" electronics "manufacturer" storefronts on amazon that likely do not exist as anything more than a sheet of paper in a government office in China and one of hundreds of rollstamps at a factory in Shenzhen.
I can't figure out the scam, honestly. I'm positive these "businesses" don't exist in any meaningful way - all the six-letter names you see on Amazon and Aliexpress cannot have staff and offices. There have to be millions of them, it's unthinkable.
so it turns out that the rubberized coating on the Latitude E6420 is not the only thing that high-test isopropyl dissolves. it strips the paint right off the plastic.
well, nothing to do but to do it
the upper 2" of paint are absolutely nuclear-grade. must be baked on there from years of heat, took as long to remove 1/3 of that part as it took to strip the whole rest of the thing