danielton1

Fun fact, it's a carryover from when dial service was first implemented in the United States!

In the beginning, you'd pick up the phone and hear "Number please?" and then you'd tell the operator the central office name followed by the number, like "Bubbling Brook 3-2468" or "Murray Hill 5-9975"

Once dial service was implemented, you'd instead hear the dial tone and then dial the first two letters of the office name, followed by the rest of the number (BU32468 or MU59975), using this arrangement of letters.

Once phone numbers went to all-digits around 1961, the letters on the dial got repurposed for numbers like these. Of course, they got repurposed again for T9 texting and contact search.

AT&T has an old video about this topic

Former gas station manager here.

The vast majority of people fill up in the morning. Then they accused us of making them late for work.

I have an industrial job where I'm on my feet all day, and most of the day, I have various pieces that are at different stages in the process all at once. Everybody else in my department also has ADHD. It's a cakewalk for me, but I've noticed that most neurotypicals struggle with it.

I would get way too antsy sitting in an office or at home all day.

The issue is that the GNOME devs have made it VERY clear that they don't want you doing this.

Ubuntu originally came out because Debian Sarge took much longer than usual to get released, and everything in Debian Woody was woefully out of date in 2004. KDE 3 and GNOME 2 had been out for a while but the latest Debian was shipping KDE 2.2.2 and GNOME 1.4. Ubuntu's philosophy was to provide a more up-to-date distro for regular people.

I've been using Linux long enough that I used Debian Woody.

Yeah, and the GNOME team sees people using extensions, breaks them, and says "No, you WILL use it OUR way or else!"

Whenever I've tried GNOME, I'd say about 75% of the extensions I've seen recommended as recently as a year prior were now broken on the latest release. And apparently GNOME really hates the idea of a systray/AppIndicator even though most distros and users want it, other desktops have it, and Mac and Windows have it

Yeah, we're definitely going backwards. Americans blame the unions and worship the billionaires and politicians that are making everything worse.

Before Ubuntu existed, most distros aimed at newcomers shipped with KDE as the default. I'm not sure why Ubuntu went with GNOME as the default, but since Ubuntu came out, everything shifted to GNOME.

GNOME is definitely not going for a single UI that will please everyone. They're going for a UI that you WILL use THEIR way, or else. And they WILL break any extensions you use within the next release or two. Which is an odd design philosophy for a desktop for an OS aimed at people who like to tweak.

I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I'll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.

Funny how it's getting harder and harder to find a job in the US that isn't 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.

In my area, once T-Mobile became a viable option as a home ISP, Spectrum freaked the fuck out and went nuts chasing people down at the grocery stores and telling people T-Mobile is bad. Spectrum was the only option in town for a very long time, so they got very expensive, and now T-Mobile is offering 5 times the speed for half the price. It's insane. Yeah, T-Mobile isn't perfect, but it's nice to finally have some competition.

The DNC needed to do a lot better to challenge Trump and they failed miserably. They propped up a guy who could barely form a coherent sentence. If they really, seriously believed Donald Trump was the existential threat to this country that he totally is, they should have been up front about Biden's mental health in time to hold a real primary.

Kamala Harris didn't lose because she is a woman of color. She lost because (A) she's a terrible candidate who can't answer questions consistently, as also seen when she ran in 2020, and (B) people felt like they were lied to by the Dems so long that they lost faith in the entire political process and didn't show up to vote. To act like Trump lied and the DNC told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is just plain wrong. The truth is, in a democracy, nobody is owed any votes, ever, and you can't just blame the citizens.