[hoof_marks]

Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it.

Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads.

Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required.

Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable.

Most importantly old BSNL (India) Landline tariffs- you could talk for hours and still the billing would come per call-wise. Simple unbeatable !!

Non- Microsoft Keyboards- here they are out of market. THe MS keyboards go out of tune/get stuck over time.

Softwares that would never needed to update- These days it is a harassment to see every software on my PC requiring to update. Now its gone to mobile phones. God knows what is it that they do in updates.

Tap water- 2 decades ago we would drink water straight from the tap or just plain filtered. Its impossible now. The water is too contaminated and needs added filtration devices at home/work. or bottled water.

Paper bags at the grocery shop. They've vanished giving place to cheap plastic bags. And many products are now using plastic wrappings that would come with paper ones.

A more silent neighbourhood- these days its high intensity horn blaring.

[anexprogrammer]

What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?

UK tap water is great (Well, outside of Greater London where it's basically limestone slurry). I've never bought bottled or filtered aside from the brief time I was in London.

At least two brands of UK bottled water were bottling northern tap water and selling it. Business idea I wish I had thought of!

[hoof_marks]

Indeed its India, Calcutta I'm talking about. True 20 years back (1996 and before.. vaguely) that's when we were children the Ganges water was clean. It is too polluted now to drink it straight away. And nobody really drinks it taking it straight from the tap. There were times when NGOs offered large earthen pots of cool water free on the streets. In my home we have a non-electric Ceramic water filter. But the current norm is electric RO +UV filters.

Arsenic is present in ground water in south Calcutta and is a health problem. Municipal water is arsenic free. It is treated with Chlorine.

Much/All of this pollution is self created by polluting the rivers. Individually, industrially and socially.

I believe that using bottled water should be an exception and availability of tap/filtered water at public places should be a norm. But bottled water has become a necessity and a fad today.

I do admire the places mentioned where you enjoy pure water still. I know that in New York the water comes from upstate reservoirs. I also think many places water fountain is available at public places/streets for drinking. If you know the cities you've seen this let me know I'll make a note of it.

[bbgm]

We were boiling water before drinking and using filters in India in the 80s. The decline started a long time ago.

[david-given]

Tap water in the UK is heavily chlorinated. If you go to a country which doesn't chlorinate tap water it's like night and day.

(I live in Zurich. The water company here say that comparing Zurich tap water with bottled mineral water is unfair --- their tap water is considerably better.)

[anexprogrammer]

Not sure if it's down to how hard the water is in each area, but here (NW England), a fairly soft water area, you never notice the chlorination. You notice the chlorine quite a bit in London, along with the free limestone in every glass.

[amouat]

Tap water in the UK varies greatly around the country. The water in Edinburgh seems pretty good, some other parts of the country taste surprisingly different.

[BjoernKW]

If I'm not mistaken he's talking about India. It's common advice (for travellers at least) to only drink bottled water in India.

[anexprogrammer]

He mentions 2 decades ago it being fine, so I presume not India. The advice to only drink bottled in India was common 20 years ago too.

[hoof_marks]

India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking.

These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.

[x0x0]

Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)

[tushar-r]

It still is, We don't drink tap water in Bangalore either. Very very rare to see folks drinking water straight out of the tap - the water supply isn't potable.

Most urban households have some kind of filtration system in place. The water supply infra is quite bad, with frequent contamination due to leakage.

[pmontra]

If it's India they have a problem of arsenic contamination of groundwater, plus bacterial contamination of surface water.

[tluyben2]

Dutch tap water is great too. Joy to drink.

[qb45]

> What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?

Tap water quality varies from place to place. For example, in SV (at least Sunnyvale, Santa Clara) it stinks so badly that I barely care whether it meets safety standards or not. OTOH, in my home city it's pretty fine and at some other place I lived it was halfway between.

[martinml]

I miss the search feature in Windows XP too. But Agent Ransack is a very good replacement and it even integrates with the file explorer. Try it!

[fsloth]

Yes! Agent Ransack has become an indispensable tool in my daily work. With SSD and Agent Ransack i can do searches over ludicrous number of gigabytes within a heartbeat and usually find whatever it was. Yes, there are gnu tools for windows but from usability point of view Agent Ransack is way better (if we presume the tragick default cmd.exe as the command line, at least)

[hoof_marks]

Wow it has Regexp. Let's see how it goes. Looks good. Thanks.

[freshyill]

Tap water varies greatly even over a small area. New York City, for example, is extremely proud of the quality of its water, which comes from reservoirs upstate. I noticed it was good before I ever found out that it's something they like to boast about.

In DC, however, the chlorine is over the top, especially at times when they're flushing the lines.

I find that most places are somewhere in between these two extremes, even just outside the cities, where different municipalities have their own reservoirs and sources.

As for paper bags, why not just use a reusable bag. In many places in the US, plastic bags are taxed (5¢ or so), with the funds going to clean up rivers. It's led to a major change in behavior.

[hoof_marks]

True in states near the Himalayas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh the water is drinkable and pure. Down below at the plains it gets contaminated.

Organized shops charge here an extra for the plastic bag. Majority of grocery shops hand out ultra thin plastic bags which will choke the rivers and environment. But important thing is public attitude. The attitude now is to collect as many of these bags as one can. So there you go. If the municipal corporation enforces a separate charge or ban, things will shape up. I do use a reusable bag. I've stopped using plastic bags.

[an_account_name]

Per-call billing sounds crazy - there should never have been a time in circuit switched or packet switched networks when that would have correctly captured costs.

[Turing_Machine]

I don't know about the OP's situation, but at one time most phone calls were completed by a human operator looking up circuit numbers and physically connecting the two customers using a patch cord.

I suspect that under that model, the operator's time was the dominant cost involved in placing the call.

[Turing_Machine]

IIRC, the pricing model was something like this:

1) The customer paid a fixed monthly charge for having phone service at all. This covered the capital costs of the wiring to the customer's premises. 2) On top of that, the customer paid a per-call fee. This covered the cost of having a woman (usually) ask what number you wanted, locate the proper jack, and physically plug your circuit in to the circuit of the person you wanted to reach.

It's probably no coincidence that the local service operator was one of the first parts of the phone system to be automated away (nor is it surprising that phone companies continued the per-call charge long after its justification went away :-)).

[govg]

> BSNL Tariffs

They have the unlimited thing now right, where you can make calls at night and they're free?

> Tap water

Are you talking about India or the US?

[lucb1e]

> Are you talking about India or another country?

Fixed that for you.

I believe there are several other options besides the US.

[hoof_marks]

true India.

[jamesrcole]

> Tap water ...

> Paper bags at the grocery shop ...

> A more silent neighbourhood ...

Just out of curiosity, what area or country do you live in?

[vshan]

I presume India, since he mentioned BSNL.

[awqrre]

I don't do any updates on mobile unless I have a reason (apps usually degrade over time)... but I do do my Ubuntu updates.

[stephenr]

> "just plain filtered" ... "needs added filtration"..

Wut?

[messel]

Read this again with the voice as Nick Offerman