Welcome to the very first weekly NoiseDraft! We get bored pretty easily here at The Noisecast which usually leads to a violent atmosphere of drunkenly berating each other. In order to make things a bit friendlier, we’re going to be doing a weekly mock draft whose topics can be as serious as they are loony. For those unfamiliar with a mock draft, think of it like selecting teams back on the playground in grade school. You’d have two captains and a group of kids and each captain would pick people for their team, one by one. The same basic concept applies here, except that there are more than just two captains. Most of the Noisecast staff is participating so each week there is a new topic and a new selection order. Once a selection is made, it cannot be re-selected by another person.
Each week the topic and the selection order will be different. Feel free to email us topic suggestions and feel free to continue the draft in the comments below. Remember, you can’t pick something someone else has already chosen! So here’s the list of picks for the very first ever Noisecast mock draft, tech we’d banish from existence!
1. Steven – 3D Movies and TV
This shit is both terrible and painful. Shoving it down our throats won’t make us accept it. The 3Dfication of media must stop NOW.
2. Chris – DRM
This stuff makes me want to punch nuns with kittens because it holds back almost every method of mobile entertainment I want to use.
3. Ray – Flash web advertisements
Advertising is important, but it doesn’t make me want to check out your product anymore if you advert pops out and covers up whatever I’m trying to look at.
4. Ron – Cables
Every kind. I’m obsessively neat and cabling really gets in the way of it. I’m also lazy so setting them up properly is annoying.
5. Ben – Embedded music on websites
What the fuck is this, Geocities circa 1996? Not just music either, any audio that auto plays. Especially flash ads for shit I don’t care about.
6. Alberto – Auto Tune
Really I hated working with people in the early 2000’s that wanted to use ProTools to help their non singing asses “sound like Ashanti.” Today Auto-Tune is not used for pitch correction in post production, it’s the whole fucking song. Let’s kill this like 5 years ago.
7. Marian – The Fax Machine
It’s so damn ancient, it takes forever to send and receive documents, it hogs the phone line, and it ends up looking horrible! It’s just as frustrating to use now as it was years ago. Why do people refuse to embrace the simplicity of a beautiful .pdf attachment sent through a quick email?
8. Eric – Automatic *anything* in the bathroom
Seriously, tech. I like you. But I’m not comfortable with you seeing me naked.
Eric, I’m still an advocate for automated soap/towel dispensers in the bathroom, having encountered one too many dispensers that looked like the previous 10 users were a) wiping their asses with their hands, or b) rebuilding their engine in the parking lot/driveway.
Marian, blame the medical industry for keeping the grasp firm on archai(c)-tech. While the entire industry is slowly migrating to a digital landscape, there is the one factor, that in order for certain things to happen that require a signature, a fax is the only way to acquire one legally apart from getting it in person or through the post office. At this point email doesn’t cut it. I’m breezing through HIPPA right now but my interest in backing up my claim is low at the moment.
This is the process at the place I left(small-business, 12 employees)
!. Get Dr./patient/power-of-attorney signature over fax.
@. Add fax w/ signature to existing order w/ physical, paper documents.
#. After services are complete, patients records w/ fax signature are scanned on flatbed to physical storage as .tiff. Each file contains anywhere from 20-50 pages.
It’s done this way almost everywhere as an industry struggles to keep pace with an ever-expanding world, and places that have made the leap still have to wait for those who haven’t.
Ben, being that I’m a bit older then you, embedded website music is your disco.
Ron, I aways feel better when I’m able to forget the nest that resides behind my entertainment center and computers. You fucked that up. But nothing a beer or two can’t fix.
Ray, you’re preaching to the choir.
Chris, I’ve always approached DRM like this; I pay for the movie with cash or I pay with time invested circumventing their binary walls.
Steven……Steven, Steven, Steven. I couldn’t agree more. While my screen name was originally derived from another source, it is a direct expression of my feelings toward the medium. What ever happened to good old fashioned cinematography, where each frame of the movie was like an individual work of art, not some movie studio ghetto-holodeck version ocular crack. 3D, jeezus, make it go away.
You can also scan a signed document. Don’t give me excuses, I want results!
Actually, email is more than sufficient. Documents sent via fax are only done so because people simply want to cling to this technology. As Marian points out, documents scanned to pdf work just fine. Did you know that banks such as JP Morgan Chase don’t actually receive faxed documents on a recipient fax machine in their legal departments? The reason for this is that the documents received are too many for straight-to-paper output on a fleet of office machines for staff to regularly check. Emails are a more manageable inbox that doesn’t require a heap of paper to sift through upon receipt. With just about every office multi-purpose printer being capable of scanning to pdf format, that covers the requirement for signed documents sent electronically. The entry level cost and convenience and ubiquity of supporting hardware makes faxes largely obsolete. The one and only thing that would make a fax machine valuable is as a backup for when an office’s T1 line is down, in which case emails are inaccessible and the fax line would probably be operational.