Most places mean someone who does development and operations. They see it as a term for someone who has responsibilities on both sides, not a specialty.

In my experience DevOps Engineer has been infrastructure + operations while having a good grasp on code but writing application code was almost never part of the role. Almost every position had a coding interview round though.

It's hero culture and it's a curse people beg to keep.

I'm not who you're replying to, but maybe alternatives need better marketing. However I'm going to check this out and if I have a good experience I'll recommend it to people I know in the future instead. Thanks.

Fix or recall daily cares not for how it was abused.

That's likely due to most phone lines not supporting the full 56k speed. In most areas you would be lucky to get 33.6k or 28.8k.

How is that related to phone lines, and not the dial up access point you’re dialing into?

iirc ISDN did require a special phone line, but 56k was fine over regular lines.

> but 56k was fine over regular lines.

Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.

And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.

This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.

56k modems didn’t always negotiate to the full 56k. The handshaking allowed connections at much slower speeds. It depended on the quality of the line. This is the US - we didn’t have ISDN, at least no one I knew had it in 1996.

ISDN was available near me in 1996 (Southern California, Pacific Bell) ... but nobody I knew had it. It cost a lot for the install and monthly, and there was no unlimited local calls tariff like there was for a regular "analog" lane. You'd have to be pretty serious to want that.

56k modems is an application of Shannon’s Theorem.

You only got max speeds where the noise was low enough.

In order to get 56k, you needed to be on a reasonable quality line, and there needed to be an all digital (PRI) connection between the Telco end of your phone line and your ISP.

If your line was noisy good luck. If your line had loading coils in the path between the CO and you, that would help your voice calls but make 56k harder to achieve (and was definitely problematic for DSL). Most telephone lines had loading coils every wire mile between the CO and the customer. If you had any of the older wonky stuff telcos used to magic more pairs for customers out of thin air, chances are they wouldn't work at 56k.

> If your line was noisy good luck.

I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".

FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.

Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...

Word on the street is you could get them to care if (you told them) faxing wouldn't work.

Nowadays, good luck getting a dial tone. Afaik, no telco actually cares about phones these days.

i think they're saying the actual speeds you'd get. i'd get faster speeds late at night (just me?)

sometimes you'd also reconnect because the handshake got messed up and you'd connect at 33.6 instead of 'real' 56k

I remember both and I'm thankful that we were able to leave it behind.

Pretty sure that aggressive defense is required for trademarks and not copyright. However it may be interesting whether or not it's still protected by copyright.

This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience.

The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.

Vinyl is just more cumbersome to make and ship and store, there's no way the price goes down. As someone who only likes vinyl for the art size I'd almost wish CD longboxes or something similar would come back.

Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.

I had my album printed on vinyl a while back. We had very specific instructions on how to prepare it, but it was effectively two files, one for side A and one for side B, and we were told the padding margins for start/end to leave. All vinyl has likely passed through some digital format for the last 45 years.

We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.

I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful.

You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.

I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.

The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you.

Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.

This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…

PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.

True, PHM was not the best example.

You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre.

And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.

> You seem to be stating a general rule

I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.

I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener.

I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better.

One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.

Has nostr evolved beyond brocoins at this point?

No