Looks like we could use a new thread!
It’s been more than 4 hours since the last one, so maybe we are all busy today.
I am super busy today with work stuff but I can see there’s lots of newsworthy stuff going on, so I’m just gonna put this up as a wide open thread and let you have at it.
I couldn’t really get anything done yesterday for my clients because f-ing Microsoft made some sort of change that left me unable to use any of their programs, so I was stuck until 6pm last night. Without email and Excel I was stuck, so I need to get caught up today.
Open Thread.
WaterGirl
I will sneak back in later in the hopes of find out what’s going on in the world while I am working.
jonas
If Adam or anyone else with some regional expertise wants to weigh in on what the hell is happening in Haiti, that would be great. Every time you think things can’t possibly get worse for that poor country, it somehow does.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder exactly what John Kelly thinks he’s doing by telling us these things now
dmsilev
The good news is that you’re now able to use Excel and Outlook. The bad news is, well, that you’re now able to use Excel and Outlook.
dmsilev
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Hitler did kill Hitler. That’s something.
jonas
Showing us, once again, that he’s a dickless coward and a moral cretin.
Ivan X
I like cheese.
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wasn’t that leaked shortly after Kelly was fired?
Ken
@jonas: Don’t forget helping Michael Bender sell books.
dmsilev
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: I don’t remember the Hitler stuff. His belief that the American dead buried in Normandy were suckers and losers came out before the election.
opiejeanne
This is not important news, but after cataract surgery, sometimes there’s a growth of membrane behind the lens. 20-30% chance, and I’m in that category; thought I was going blind. Treatment is easy, just a little zap with a laser, similar to having your annual eye checkup. My eye doctor gave me a referral to some people who do that sort of thing, and I talked to them yesterday about an appointment.
They do not require their staff to be vaccinated, and the receptionist coyly told me that she could not divulge employees’ health histories. Blamed it on the CDC and their own HR. She said I could put it off until September, but when I asked what happens in September she didn’t answer.
They want me to sign a “hold harmless” in case I catch COVID-19.
I have the appointment with them in August, but I’ve put in a call to my doc for a referral to another office that does this procedure. I live in Washington state and we don’t just have the Alpha and Delta Variants, we also have the Gamma, which is worrying because of its higher death rate.
I suspect that the offer to put this off until September is because that’s when the vaccines will have complete clearance and not just emergency approval, and they can require staff to be vaccinated. They can now, as the Methodist hospital system did in Texas, but they have chosen not to force the issue.
They’re a medical facility, for God’s sake. Parroting the line from HR that “We’re following CDC protocols” is not reassuring, and no matter how much they clean everything, which I assume they were doing before Covid, it’s not spread by fomites. It’s spread by droplets in the air, by breathing near someone who has it.
trollhattan
@jonas:
Heard some coverage on BBC, but the story is still unfolding. The killers self-identified as US DEA beforehand. Haiti is evidently full of armed gangs, but was this related to them or a political action? The president had controversy of his own.
ETA a Dutch journalist had an assassination attempt on him, but is alive in hospital.
jeffreyw
Mrs J is making banana bread, and I’m thinking about chicken ramen something. I managed to water my peppers.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “I like troops who don’t invade.”
piratedan
there’s a part of me (probably leftover from my squishy childhood) that has a hard time classifying all of these bigots as Christians… because bigots and racists can be of any color and ethnicity or creed, it’s NOT just Christians. However, I have a real issue that we’re not seeing certain people of faith stepping up and castigating those who shield their hate behind the stained glass and steeples.
I know a good many people of faith who perform good deeds, who do NOT support racism and fascism and I really wish they would show up and get pissed off that these folks are using “their faith” to give these MAGAs a patina of respectability and authority.
I’m not the biggest student of faith, but when these people advocate “old testament” theology its almost as if the New Testament is some foreign shore that has no lessons or morals that demand observance at all. We watch these people promote their collective hate wrapped in false piety and while I am no longer finding the need to park my keester in some pew on a weekly basis, I am still surprised that we don’t see anyone seizing the bully pulpit and decrying the desecration that these people are making of actual people of faith.
They first did this meaning jujitsu to Patriotism and now they’re doing the same to Christianity
VeniceRiley
Morning posts below reminding me of when a DC cop I knew used to infiltrate left wing groups. But she fit right in. Tiny skinny whippet dyke.
Lyrebird
@WaterGirl:
Good luck with the inbox!
Here I got stumped because my newer home machine didn’t come with Tex pre installed. Was blaming myself for not conforming more to the Microsoft Office world. Thank you for reminding me it’s just that tools break down.
opiejeanne
@piratedan: They’ve been at it for at least 25 years. I remember an article about a resurgence of church attendance (mega-churches and various hard-line smaller ones) in our local paper, quoting some new enthusiast of religion saying that he prefers the Old Testament to the New. We were regular church-goers at the time and were bewildered that this person identified as a Christian.
Also, it’s been more than 15 years since one of these told me online that he didn’t approve of the Sermon on the Mount.
Didn’t approve.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: Moise was assassinated last night, according to The Washington Post.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@piratedan: There are people speaking out but they get less air time. That said there are indeed too many “Christians” who seem to think the most important thing in the New Testament is that Jesus said we could all eat bacon. But then it seems like a lot of them think the 10 Commandments don’t apply to them so how seriously do they really take the Old Testament either?
CaseyL
@opiejeanne:
The subject is your eyes, your ability to see, so it is an important issue. Are you vaccinated? If you are, I’d just take the appointment and wear a mask for double protection. (Surface transmission doesn’t seem to be a danger, though even that might be different with Delta.)
(H’mm. “Different with Delta! – could be a good public health advertising point!)
MattF
@opiejeanne: I just had that ‘capsulotomy’ in both eyes (left eye a few months ago and right eye a few weeks ago) and I can tell you that it worked very nicely for me. My vision in each eye was seriously messed up for the rest of the day after the procedure but was OK the next day and then slowly improved to ‘excellent’ over the next week or two.
Ninedragonspot
A bunch of feminist and LGBT groups at Chinese universities, as well as a couple of LGBT NGOs in Guangdong, were removed from WeChat today.
I am guessing there are about three reasons for the crackdown:
1.A continued pattern of throttling expression in the civil sphere (a number of prominent feminists were kicked off Weibo a few months back)
2. Demographic angst (the government recently raised the limit on children to 3)
3. A rising tide of xenophobia (LGBT groups are “vectors” for Western ideology.)
Very depressing, and I worry what further anti-LGBT actions may be coming.
ian
I found this on Digbysblog.net and found it amusing
” And Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma is shocked, I tell you, shocked, that the chairman of the Oklahoma GOP has endorsed his primary challenger, which he claims is unprecedented (and is indeed highly unusual). What is the reason for this break with party norms? Lankford failed to object to the certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6.”
Lankford is a right wing republican who is not completely insane. He backed out of the Tulsa/Greenwood 1921 commission earlier in the year, claiming ‘political partisan interference’ with its work in order to shore up his right flank. Nice to see it didn’t do him any good with his right flank. Couldn’t of happened to a better guy. Of course, being Oklahoma, if he gets a successful primary challenge by someone to his right, that person is liable to win the general election.
opiejeanne
@CaseyL: Yes, we are vaccinated. And yes, they do require masks, and will check my temperature, and asked all those questions you get and will ask them again: sniffly nose? cough? trouble breathing? etc.
Yeah, I’m probably going to keep the appointment but it’s damned annoying that they want me to sign a hold harmless.
WaterGirl
@opiejeanne: I cheated and took a 5-minute break from work before making lunch.
Good for you for finding another provider. Also, my sister just had that done on both eyes (a month or two apart) and she was definitely apprehensive before the first one, but she said it was no big deal and barely mentioned the second one beforehand.
So at least maybe no need to worry about that one?
opiejeanne
@MattF: Thanks. How long ago was your cataract surgery? Mine was in 2018, but this nonsense has only started bothering me over the past couple of months. Slow growing?
Spanky
@WaterGirl: Your Microsoft issues were probably the result of MS scrambling to patch the PrintNightmare vulnerability.
MattF
@opiejeanne: I had cataract surgery around five years ago. I was warned, repeatedly, at that time that these additional procedures might be necessary— and that turned out to be true.
zhena gogolia
@opiejeanne:
Ugh. I hope you can find the right facility.
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: Yes, I think the procedure is probably no big deal, but I’ll be in close contact with their staff for an hour, and it was obvious from her comments that at least one of them is not vaccinated, and has not been required to be vaccinated
lowtechcyclist
@opiejeanne:
More like 45 years, since the rise of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell Sr. in the late 1970s. There was nothing ‘moral’ about the ‘Moral Majority,’
The only good news is that as they die off, they’re not being replaced. The Millennial and Gen-Z children of evangelicals, having grown up with the Internet, have had too many other sources of information to buy into what their parents’ pastors were preaching.
The bad news is, their loss of influence due to dying off is still gonna take some time.
opiejeanne
@MattF: I read about it too, before the surgery. I am glad there’s an “easy” treatment for it.
WaterGirl
@Spanky: No, that was someone else’s nightmare! This was related to 2-factor authorization, which in November they had announced would happen “sometime in 2021”, which was apparently this weekend.
But they also took the opportunity to make sure that older versions of Office could no longer be accessed through Office 365, which is the devil by the way, even though there was absolutely no reason to link the two, except to push people to upgrade when they don’t want to. Every version of Outlook has been worse than the last, so I am sticking with the last one that I didn’t hate.
I have always hated Microsoft with a passion. If there’s a stronger word for hating with a passion, I”m there.
At the end of the day, I was victorious, but fuck Microsoft.
I told Cole yesterday that I hate Microsoft as much as he hated PayPal a few years ago. He LOL’d. If you missed that rant, it was a great one!
Geminid
@opiejeanne: I listen to the local baptist radio station from time to time. There is very little preaching on New Testament passages like the Sermon on the Mount, but more on Paul’s crabby letters, and on Revelations of course.
There is a lot of preaching on the Old Testament, and it’s theme of the Hebrews sliding into idolatry, but then being brought back to the right path by a prophet and a righteous king. That’s how a lot of conservative evangelicals like to see life in America today.
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: These Christians’ interpretation of the “Old Testament” is also something that most Jews find absolutely foreign.
WaterGirl
@opiejeanne: Oh, absolutely! I was only speaking from the “try not to worry about the procedure itself” perspective.
VeniceRiley
@opiejeanne: I was shocked that I knew much much more about Covid than my dermatologist. I would ask staff to make my appointment with people who are vaccinated and willing to voluntarily reveal their status.
Anoniminous
@lowtechcyclist:
Fortunately we have a pandemic accelerating the dying. I expect Lambda variant to cut a wide swathe through the ignorant hick unvaccinated MAGA population.
Matt McIrvin
@opiejeanne: Well, if it’s any comfort, I somehow managed to avoid getting COVID when I had my colonoscopy and knee replacement surgery during the absolutely massive wave in February, when I wasn’t even vaccinated.
The latter involved an overnight hospital stay, and I was annoyed that the only masks I was able to use were the type of disposable surgical mask that ties in the back, meaning they required two hands and were impossible to put back on with an IV stuck in your arm. I just kind of had to hope that the separation from the other patients was adequate and that enough of the staff were vaccinated/not carrying.
A few weeks later I went to outpatient physical therapy, where fortunately nearly all of the staff were vaccinated–except, I was told, for one member I didn’t interact with who had “sold her slot on eBay”. What that actually meant, your guess is as good as mine.
Betty
@jonas: From what I understand the President was corrupt, refused to hold elections and people have been protesting for quite a while. There is a lot wrong, stemming from many years of the elite (which do exist in Haiti) abusing the poor. The poor are always looking to get out.
Anoniminous
@dmsilev:
Line 166. “social medial companies”
lol
MattF
@Anoniminous: Right-Wingers mainly want to make Biden look bad. There’s an astonishingly high correlation between the local Biden/Trump margin and the local percent of vaccination. Correlation doesn’t imply causation… but causation does imply correlation.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I pre-ordered that book several weeks ago. Looking forward to reading it.
Unlike many folks who wouldn’t think of reading anything at all about TFG (and I completely respect that decision), I want to absorb every reliable narrative about his administration that I can get my hands on. The more details I know, the more aware and alert I am to the possibility of their happening again. I don’t expect a lot of you to agree with me, though, and that’s fine.
mrmoshpotato
@Ivan X:
Go on.
Booger
@Matt McIrvin: Colonoscopy AND knee replacement surgery? That sounds awkward, to say the least.
JoyceH
@MattF:
Amazing, though, that they’re willing to DIE to make Biden look bad!
Danielx
Listening to the sounds of flooring being torn up.
Fuck water damage.
Matt McIrvin
@Booger: Two whole weeks in between!
Roger Moore
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
This seems distressingly common in Christian apologetics. Rather than reading the Bible to figure out what the message is, they decide what they want to believe and quote mine the Bible for passages they can use to support those beliefs. So, for example, when they want to abandon Jewish dietary law, they flip right to Mark 7:15 (“There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.”) as proof that Jesus thought it was OK to eat anything. Because the Bible is so full of contradictions and ambiguities, it’s possible to find a quote somewhere that seems to make it OK to ignore any rule you don’t like.
FWIW, this approach is hardly a new phenomenon; it’s very common in the Christian Bible. There are plenty of mined quotes in the Gospels and Epistles that don’t support the point they’re being used to support when read in context. So contemporary Christians are in good company when they continue the tradition.
mrmoshpotato
@jeffreyw:
Sounds like something delicious.
Kayla Rudbek
It’s so hot here in Northern Virginia that I’m not sure if it was the heat index of 106 degrees or the radiation treatment that was making me feel bad on the way home from treatment today. Four Reed’s ginger chews on the drive home were required, and if my water bottle had a larger capacity, I might have bumped that up to 5 or 6.
Betty
@VeniceRiley: If you have been following Annie Laurie’s posts, you probably know more than most doctors. My recent interaction with doctors shocked me as to how little they understand Covid.
Roger Moore
@WaterGirl:
I’m personally a fan of “despise” and “loathe”. “Abhor” and “detest” are also good. It’s punchier when you can use a single verb that doesn’t need an intensifier.
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: I know, and thanks for the encouragement. :-)
S. Cerevisiae
@WaterGirl: I don’t remember the PayPal rant but I can definitely relate to it because I hate them too. I took the plunge in 2009 and bought a MacBook and have been extremely happy with them, once you go Mac you never go back.
Starfish
@CaseyL: She is taking her business elsewhere, and this will hopefully nudge medical professionals to start doing the right thing and firing their dodos.
What happens at this practice when someone with immune conditions or certain blood cancers needs eye care? Does the clinic just expose vulnerable people to the freedom of their irresponsible folks who should no longer be employed in the medical field?
NotMax
@Jeffreyw
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
:)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@S. Cerevisiae:
A good number of photographers have.
E.
@Betty:
Over a year of those near-daily posts! I know more about COVID than anyone I know, and it’s all from reading her post first thing in the morning while I wait for my coffee to be ready. I’ve done this every morning since she began posting.
opiejeanne
@Starfish: I wonder ifthe unvaccinated includes but is not limited to, the primary physician at this facility, and I think this is a very small facility with maybe 4 other employees, but I could be wrong. Maybe it’s the bookkeeper who only comes in on Thursdays.
karen marie
@jeffreyw: I bought bananas yesterday to make banana bread. I spice it up. I use walnuts, not pistachios, though they’d be good.
JCJ
@Roger Moore:
“loathe” is a great word. Likewise “loathsome”
mrmoshpotato
Yup. The Bullshit Machine runs on the money of morons.
Roger Moore
@S. Cerevisiae:
I’m going to say no to this. I used a Mac for a while, and I didn’t like the experience, so I went back to PCs. I don’t think their user interface is any better than a PC, and there are all kinds of problems with Apple’s domineering approach to computers. I want my computer to do what I want to do, not what the manufacturer decides to let me do. I also despise Apple’s approach to design.
germy
Starfish
I really do not love the gleefulness about the death of others that is happening in a lot of these threads that discuss COVID-19. If you want to encourage people to get vaccinated, do that. If you want medical professionals to behave in a way that does not expose their patients to COVID-19 risk, then do that.
This thing where we continue to politicize a disease that was unfortunately politicized by TFG is terrible. We can’t let him erode our own morality like this.
Black Twitter is having way too much fun with this video that is trying to encourage young people to go out and get vaccinated.
karen marie
@opiejeanne: I wouldn’t sign it. But that’s just me.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Vehemently detest Outlook? Use Thunderbird instead.
“Running rings around Outlook since 2004.”
Starfish
@opiejeanne: The percentage of doctors that have gotten vaccinated is quite high, according to the AMA.
Montanareddog
@trollhattan:
IANAJ(ournalist) and I am typing on my phone so how to unpack this succinctly?
Peter de Vries was shot 5 times, once in the head, and I doubt he will survive, let alone recover completely. The attack took place in broad daylight in the centre of Amsterdam.
De Vries is the most famous crime journalist in the Netherlands, frequently on TV, and has made many prominent enemies in organised crime.
Eyewitnesses noted the getaway car’s plate and the it was stopped fairly soon afterwards (the surveillance cameras can track plates so easily nowadays).
This is where it gets interesting. The 2 guys in the car were from areas associated with Ridouan Taghi, a Dutch gangster currently on trial in Amsterdam in a secure court, after extradition from Dubai. There is a state’s witness from his gang who is the main source of the case against Taghi. Over the last couple of years, this witness’ lawyer was assassinated, and his non-criminal brother.
Yet de Vries’ only connectoon to the case was that the witness asked him to act as a neutral observer in some witness-state negotiations in the past.
So the Dutch press are interpreting this a simple, giant fuck you to the Dutch state in the middle of the trial. And nothing to do with any of the other de Vries’ enemies.
VeniceRiley
@Betty: I do read AL posts but I was also obsessing on news aggregators, r/covid19 and medrxiv and other sites every day for the 1st year of this.
jeffreyw
@mrmoshpotato:
Major Major Major Major
Regarding Cheryl’s old nuke silo thread, here’s a good illustration of how it’s not a wind farm.
Anotherlurker
@S. Cerevisiae: I, too use a MacBook, but I have to say I am tired of their proprietary cables. I also harbor a deep, abiding hatred of the way they dumped ITunes .
I had about 300 albums committed to iTunes when they stopped their support and 250 of the albums I had there were disappeared. I was going to buy another iPod for back-up but I was told that they would not allow transfers from one iPod to another.
I had donated my CD collection to a local library about 6 months previous to finding out about Apple dumping iTunes.
Well, to make a long story short, I lost my iPod and along with it, 50+ years of musical memories .
In this instance, fuck Apple.
karen marie
@Starfish: The Chase branch closest to my house was closed yesterday “due to an emergency,” i.e., someone got COVID. I went to a different branch and half the bank employees were maskless. Yesterday 20 people died of COVID in Arizona. They’re trying to increase that number.
jonas
@Matt McIrvin:
If you ever want to see an evangelical’s eyes absolutely glaze over with incomprehension, explain how Jews interpret, e.g. Isaiah 53.
Steeplejack
@Kayla Rudbek:
I went out to lunch with my brother yesterday (Peter Chang off Highway 29 by Harris Teeter—pretty good but not back up to the before times), then made the mistake of going up to McLean to get batteries replaced in a couple of watches. Mission accomplished, but I felt hot the whole time I was out—the doughty Kia’s air conditioner takes a while to work up a cooling blow—and when I finally got back home I was exhausted and irritated. Reminder to limit the expeditions or just stay the hell inside when I don’t have to go out.
About as hot today (93°), but dropping below 90° tomorrow for a few days.
jeffreyw
@karen marie:
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
I had laser eye surgery about 25 yrs ago and it was far less a deal than I thought it would be.
JPL
@VeniceRiley: When YY_Sima Qian alerted us to the virus, it was horrifying what was happening. DIL casually mentioned a few days later that she had lunch with execs that had just returned. She works for a big box diy store. There was a pit in my stomach for days after.
This site has been amazing in keeping us up to date.
Steeplejack
@S. Cerevisiae:
You can use office on a Mac and still hate Microsoft! Win-win.
opiejeanne
@E.: Me too, thanks to Anne Laurie.
On February 27 I had an appointment with the hospital dietician, who poo-poohed the idea of a pandemic. We already had 6 confirmed deaths from Covid-19, 5 in that same hospital, and China had closed off Wuhan Province in January, and Italy was already identifying cases; their first deaths were February 22.
She left to visit her mother in Moscow the next day, and then flew home in a panic when Trump announced he would shut down travel to prevent the spread on March 11.
I did not continue the appointments. I know what to eat and what not to eat, and I know when I’m behaving badly with food.
jonas
No doubt. I know there are huge Haitian expat communities in NYC and Florida. And large number of Haitians among the migrants seeking asylum on the southern border as well.
NotMax
Early morn here yet but it feels as if the loginess which has been squatting on my shoulders for like the past week may have taken a day off, so perhaps will be able to work up the gumption to finally prepare the Instant Pot feijoada-like stew have been planning on making for a while, before the peppers purchased for it become colorful puddles in the fridge.
Frankensteinbeck
@mrmoshpotato:
A black man became president and trans women (they have trouble grasping trans men exist) are out and socially acceptable. From their perspective, they’re living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia that keeps spiraling farther down into Hell.
schrodingers_cat
@opiejeanne: I hope you can get all this sorted out soon. {{ }}
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: tbh dieticians don’t really know anything anyway? It’s mind blowing how little we know about health, beyond “sugar and cigarettes are bad, cardio and core strength are good, and take your statins”. (I am not a doctor, obviously, but I’ve had them agree with me on this!)
Cheryl from Maryland
@opiejeanne: It’s good to hear that you are trying to find another facility for the procedure. Personally, I’d be having second thoughts about any medical office that made me sign such a document — assuming it would even hold up in court, but who has the money to find out? I’d also give them a horrible review on WebMD or similar.
Mike in NC
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The best thing Hitler did was shoot himself in the bunker, which sadly Trump lacked the courage to do.
artem1s
@S. Cerevisiae:
I decided to go bi-lingual back in the 90’s when I bought my first computer. I knew I would have to learn Office for my job, but preferred Mac’s OS for my personal use. Hands down Mac’s operating systems are better than MS and have a lot less compatibility issues. I miss Claris a lot. It was hands down the best word processor I have ever used. And there are some parts of the Mac version of Office I prefer to the MS versions.
I finally found a replacement for my Adobe CS6 that I really like – Affinity. No monthly subscription and will work on MS and Mac OS – they even have a iOS app that has almost as many features as the desktop version. I can work on my iPad and not lose any functionality at all. It’s very impressive software.
Roger Moore
@Anotherlurker:
You touched on many of the things I dislike about Apple. Their attitude toward compatibility is one of the worst. They regularly break common software every time they have a significant OS update, and often even when they have minor ones. In contrast, Microsoft skipped having Windows 9 because some ancient software had a crazy hack of looking for a 9 at the beginning of the Windows version to detect if it was running on Win 95 or Win 98 rather than Win NT, and they didn’t want to cause compatibility problems. That’s the kind of thing you do if you care about your users.
cain
@opiejeanne:
Literally, the bible calls these people out as does Jesus. Every one of these people look at life as performance art. All superficial nonsense – they are very religious and so so patriotic – look at em waving the flag – so patriotic – they go to church 2x a day all week. Yet.. has learned nothing from the words or even think deeply about them. Same with their patriotism – like their religion they prefer the old testament and in the same vein the only right that matters is the 2nd amendment.
I have a deep love for Hindu philosophy – but not much for a lot of people who practice Hinduism. Like Christians, a lot of performative art.
Wow, I just both sides my religion and Christian – lol :-)
ETA – Holy shit! #94!! 9*4 = 36, 3+6 = 9, 9 is 9 justices.. coincidence? I think not!
raven
@artem1s: I spent 15 years building online courses and we had to make everything cross platform. I had a PC but I’m firmly entrenched in the Mac ecosystem.
raven
@Anotherlurker: Remember Senuti?
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: I’ve been so disappointed with non-iPhone apple products since like 2017. They just aren’t even trying any more. It’s a brand primarily for conspicuous consumption now. So, so happy with the PC I bought last year. I use a newish MacBook for work and it just makes me even happier with my PC every day.
NotMax
@artem1s
Lawdy, how I miss Corel WordPerfect. Same holds true, times a jillion, for Metapad as a robust, no nonsense text editor.
opiejeanne
@jonas: Well, don’t leave us hanging. How do they interpret that verse?
cain
@Betty:
The sad thing is that – the poor given an opportunity will work their ass off.
I wish we could all get the govt we deserve and not the govt that pisses us off.
ETA – oh man.. #100! binary number for the win! ??????
Almost Retired
Um…..Trump’s law suit appears to only have one cause of action — A First Amendment violation. Against a private entity and an individual. Not the government. Am I missing something, or is this thing gonna be thrown out like a drunk in the bar at closing time? I suppose I could read it and see how they’re squaring this circle, but thanks to a couple clients, I’m already on stupid overload for today. And it’s only 11:00 a.m. here in Los Angeles. So…no…..I’ll just wait for a summary.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@artem1s:
Apple controls both the hardware and software side, there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues(there sometimes still are). Windows has to support a wide number of manufactures of both PC’s and peripherals.
Major Major Major Major
@Almost Retired: i believe it relies on the new conservative “common carrier” interpretation of social media, where they are now bound by the first amendment instead of protected by it. It will be laughed out of court.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ninedragonspot: A conference my wife really likes is being held in Hong Kong next year. She has no intention of attending.
Anotherlurker
@raven: I’m a computer illiterate who tried a Mac and found it to be intuitive for me. In other words, I didn’t have to think too much when using it.
I don’t know Senuti.
I also refuse to sign up for the pay service that they replaced iTunes with.
I’m now buying CDs again.
L85NJGT
@jonas:
530 years of Haitian history with the earthquake being the topper.
@Betty:
Bill Clinton believes land titling is a necessary prerequisite to political, economic and social reform. Without codified land rights as owners or tenants, those living at subsistence level are in perpetual serfdom to the oligarchy.
Ohio Mom
I fixed the health insurance snafu that I discovered on Monday — only took 48 hours.
I should feel proud and victorious but instead feel like I need a stiff drink.
Now I can catch up on all the threads I missed while I was on hold all morning.
Cameron
@Almost Retired: It’s also filed in the wrong state.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Yeah, have never warmed to Appleworld for computing.
Nothing against people who like them but I prefer my Macs with cheese, thank you very much.
;)
Almost Retired
@Major Major Major Major: The irony, of course, is that Facebook actually DOES have a 1st Amendment right to exclude speech that incites violence and to determine what sort of speech their platforms will amplify. Absolute idiocy. Even Giuliani wouldn’t touch this.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Major Major Major Major: I switched to MacBooks years ago and haven’t regretted it. One of the things I like about OS X is that it is Unix under the hood. So when I open up a terminal window to do geeky stuff, I feel like I’m on a real computer.
cain
@WaterGirl:
We are ready for you here in Linux desktop land. You have options! Join the GNOME community – (Part of the team since 1998!)
Just Chuck
@Roger Moore: Microsoft didn’t skip 9 because of poorly written software. They were perfectly willing to let that break, because that’s never been the proper API usage. They skipped it to avoid the brand confusion in users who are likely to autocomplete in their brains to “Windows 95” (or 98 I guess). Even if they don’t actually confuse one product with another, it’s not good marketing to even let that thought into the subconscious.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
I don’t think it’s gleefulness, but resignation and realization.
Vaccination is not just for one’s self. It’s also for everyone else. It’s how you slow/stop a pandemic. I don’t know your age but a lot of us were born before there were vaccinations for anything but smallpox. I knew/know 4 people with polio, all of whom lived within 5 miles of me. Those weren’t the only 4 people, just the ones I knew/still know. Everyone I knew had measles and there are side/after effects that I got from that, encephalitis. We have Covid vaccines, in a very, very rapid time frame, and medicine is dramatically better than it was when people alive today were born and people are refusing the vaccine because they want to live in the dark ages and screw the rest of us? Yeah I’m not gleeful they don’t want to take it and might die, I’m pissed that they are so fucking stupid that they deny that millions of people are dying, that their political, religious beliefs protect them and argue “You aren’t the boss of me!” Maybe we really haven’t come very far in the last million years, many humans are still just as stupid as those they follow, because many really are incapable of thought.
Eolirin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Powershell exists y’know. The new Windows Terminal is really nice too. And then there’s Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can run full native Linux apps, now with GUI, inside the Windows shell and seamlessly with the filesystem.
These conversations are always really difficult to navigate because everyone having them is coming from very different places in terms of their technical competency, user needs and preferences. There’s very little that’s useful about them in the end I think.
Ninedragonspot
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Next year seems so far away, I can’t even imagine what the landscape will look like then.
A policeman was stabbed by a “lone wolf” assailant a few days ago. That was the pretext needed for the machinery of “counter-terrorism” to kick into high gear.
jeffreyw
@Anotherlurker:
I have a ton of CDs. When I bought network attached storage I spent several grueling days ripping them to MP3s. These days Spotify does everything for me. I’ve kept a Netflix DVD scheme going, ripping movies to the NAS – mostly classics for when my ISP shits the bed and I can’t get online.
Just Chuck
@Eolirin: A shame the filesystem in WSL2 is still so slow. It’s sped up to “slow as molasses” compared to WSL1’s “glacial”, but I still boot to Linux for dev and leave Windows solely for games… which I haven’t played in months.
Eolirin
@cain: Oh God, you’re one of those. :P
@Just Chuck: MS wouldn’t have let the code break, they would’ve put in a compatibility shim, even though it was unsupported use of the API. They’re pretty dedicated to supporting legacy code even if it’s bad code.
Eolirin
@Just Chuck: It’ll get there eventually, between better hardware and further performance improvements.
Kattails
@WaterGirl: Luckily, my first computer was a Mac, and I was tutored by a friend who called Microsoft “the Evil Empire”. When I see the screen it looks like gibberish to me.
My photographer friend now uses a MacBook pro and hooks it up to a monitor, and I’m seeing a new iPad touted online. I’m on a 2016 Mac Mini, which my computer guys put a new solid state hard drive in so I’m able to run the newest version even at this level of antiquity, and I have a hand me down iPad. Fabulous online support, really patient people.
rikyrah
If it gets shots in arms, I am all for it
BlackWomenViews Media (@blackwomenviews) tweeted at 10:34 AM on Wed, Jul 07, 2021:
Yes it has come to this…and no I’m not mad about it. We gotta meet folks where they are at ?????♀️??♀️??♀️?????? #VaxThatThangUp
https://t.co/zp11dNv8vJ
(https://twitter.com/blackwomenviews/status/1412797222291390472?s=02)
Just Chuck
@Eolirin: Yeah you’re right, they’d have done a shim, there’s lots of them in the compatibility modes after all. They still didn’t change the product name for that reason. I think “10” just marketed better: there’s the association with scores for one. And after all, Apple had macOS X then (now just “macOS”, with a major version of 11)
Eolirin
@Just Chuck: I think in some cultures 9 is also an unlucky number or associated with death or something? But yeah, it wasn’t for compatibility reasons for sure. That’s what shims are for.
geg6
@Roger Moore:
Agree about Macs. I love my iPhone, but I wouldn’t have a Mac if you paid me to use one. One time a friend tried to talk me into one, but I found it terrible to use. Perhaps because I wasn’t used to it, but I found it less than useless. And I can tell you that the Mac lab here on campus is the least used computer lab on campus. Only the engineering students use it, I think.
rikyrah
???
CNN (@CNN) tweeted at 6:37 AM on Wed, Jul 07, 2021:
The FBI has infiltrated a “Bible study” group in Virginia that had members discussing surveilling the US Capitol and their wish for secession from the country after the January 6 riot, according to recently unsealed court records. https://t.co/jlGkSLxhcK
(https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1412737420123070471?s=02)
Frankensteinbeck
@Almost Retired:
A truly batshit insane argument that because politicians were discussing Section 230 that means FB and Twitter were threatened into censoring conservatives and thus are government agents subject to the 1st Amendment.
@Almost Retired:
Yes.
geg6
@NotMax:
Don’t know about WaterGirl, but I have no choice but to use Outlook since that is what my employer requires. Some of us don’t really get to choose what we use.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kattails: Photographers who do relatively easy post production can use Macs, those that do a lot of post use PC’s. They’re cheaper and more expandable.
Just Chuck
@Eolirin: No doubt that’ll happen. Hell, I remember back when there was a paravirtualized Linux that ran on Windows, the ext3 filesystem was actually faster than real linux, probably due to some smart I/O scheduling. Or maybe they just didn’t implement
fflush.
Tho I do suspect Linux has more than caught up since then.James E Powell
@Starfish:
It says 96%, which is great, but 4% unvaccinated is bad. It only takes one doctor on FOX to justify a “your doctors say yes, mine say no” anti-vax conspiracist.
Starfish
@Ruckus: I am of the age that I had a teacher with leg braces who had gotten polio as a child. My mom and her siblings who grew up in another country have huge scars on their arms from however the smallpox vaccine was done.
The memory of people dying of serious diseases due to vaccine-preventable diseases was fading, and I had to navigate a lot of anti-vaxxers, so I would say I am probably a couple of decades younger than you if not more.
NotMax
Wave of nostalgia from looking at the scheduling on the Film Detective channel*. Films listed as starting at 1:13. Or 9:44.
Like the earliest days of HBO, when one movie would end and, with minimal or no filler, the next would start up.
*goodly amount of grade Z drive-in stuff (I think they may have the market cornered on movies with the words beast or creature in the title), interspersed though with enough obscure noirs and – well, not gems exactly, call them rhinestones – suitable for switching on and letting run as accompaniment whilst undertaking something more substantive.
JoyceH
@Ruckus:
Maybe you experience it as resignation. For me it’s more throw-up-my-hands exasperation. “Okay, just DIE then!”
The Post had a long article about hospital nurses in Appalachia during the worst of the pandemic, and they described it as fighting a war that their neighbors didn’t even believe was taking place. People still insisting the pandemic is a hoax when their mom is on a ventilator.
Apparently the vaccines are due to be fully approved (rather than emergency use authorization) by September, at which time it’s expected that the military will require its members to be vaccinated. There’s an a-hole Congressman (Massie from KY) who claims to be hearing from service members that they’ll ‘quit’ if they’re required to get the vaccination. Seems this genius is under the impression that because we have an All Volunteer Force, that means members can just up and quit whenever they feel like it.
You can walk into any Walmart, go up to the pharmacy and say, “Hey, give me a COVID vaccination”, and get it right then and there. But NOOOO, they saw on Facebook that it will make them sterile.
So – “Okay, just DIE then!”
rikyrah
Folks been watching Pool Kings during lockdown… And someone in the inflatable market saw an opening???
Hot, Sexy, Ratchet God Warrior (@SoAlmondie) tweeted at 1:29 PM on Tue, Jul 06, 2021:
Me:
Nobody:
Other grandparents:
My mom: I bought a lil pool for the backyard so Ivy can just swim here when she’s home.
The pool: https://t.co/GjA5YpO88v
(https://twitter.com/SoAlmondie/status/1412478944289435649?s=02)
Barry
@jonas:
”
“Showing us, once again, that he’s a dickless coward and a moral cretin.”
He’s another member of the “I was for real part of the Resistance, trust me!” group.
Since one of the jobs of the press is to whitewash the ‘in’ group, he’ll be helped by many flattering arguments.
James E Powell
@Anotherlurker:
Almost the same for me, only I sold all my CDs to a store and I didn’t have an iPod. Given how passionate most of us music people are, I’m surprised there was no violence.
Gravenstone
Did they happen to have thick Russian accents when they did so? Seriously, unless this is the textbook definition of “rogue agents”, no way in Hell do American government employees announce themselves to the world right before opening fire on the head of a foreign government.
geg6
@Ruckus:
Oh, I don’t know, I’m kinda gleeful about them dying. The world will be such a better place without them and if the last five years have taught me anything, it’s taught me that for sure.
Roger Moore
@opiejeanne:
My employer has been absolutely paranoid about COVID from very early on. They made a coworker coming back from China in January of 2020 quarantine for 2 weeks before he was allowed to return in person, which is when I started seriously thinking about it getting here. When the first positive results were reported here in the US, I started stockpiling shelf-stable food because I was worried about being unable to shop for weeks at a time.
Major Major Major Major
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: This was the only thing keeping me in Macs for a while, but Windows Subsystem for Linux is actually really good, plus *nix commands are in Powershell. Suits my purposes just fine, and I can get a significantly more powerful computer, with a real graphics card, for the same price.
@Just Chuck: WSL2+zsh loads faster on my PC than iTerm2+zsh on my work macbook. I guess the latter was pre-native-zsh though, don’t know the speed on a fresh install.
VeniceRiley
Almost time for the soccer thread! *bounce bounce Tigger bounce.
Steeplejack
What do people use other than Outlook? I used to use it, then didn’t (because of changing computers, dropping out of a “business” context and other stuff), have been bumping along with the generic Gmail Web interface (which I don’t like) for quite a while. Writing (long) stuff in Word and then copying it over, which is tedious.
I’ve been thinking of going back to Outlook, which I liken to a 40-pound wristwatch—it tells time, but that weight!—but I have some nagging concerns that I never get around to researching. The main one is whether Outlook on my computer would hoover up my incoming mail so that I then don’t see it on my phone or tablet. (Old—perhaps very old—version of Outlook used to download email to its own storage on the computer and then erase it from the Gmail server. I’m a little fuzzy on that, but I think it’s true.)
JPL
@rikyrah: Although not all evangelicals are white supremacists, there is a large segment who are. Early on the Klan knew if they could take over state government, they could control the message. Because of gerrymandering, I’m see some of that in GA with evangelicals. It’s just a more acceptable term. IMO
Disclaimer.. I’m not a historian, and I didn’t sleep in a Holiday Inn,
NotMax
@Steeplejack
See #70 above.
Of course there’s also non-free tools as well, but that’s an equine of a variant hue.
Major Major Major Major
@Almost Retired:
They sure do! I’m pretty sure that Rudy would join one of these suits, though, if he hasn’t already. It’s conservative orthodoxy now: we must nationalize the means of tweet production!
Betty
@cain: Yes, I know. Many have emigrated here (Dominica) and are always being hed up to locals as models of a good work ethic. I think if you’ve known that kind of hardship, you will take advantage of every opportunity to make your life better.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack:
This is to do with the difference between POP and IMAP email protocols. IMAP is newer and keeps the source of truth on the server. POP is older and downloads the message locally, then removes it from the server. You can pick which you want, for most email providers, iirc.
WaterGirl
Soccer thread is up for the 3 pm game.
Betty
@L85NJGT: That would help, but I understand the government keeps taxes low to please the elite so don’t have the resources to invest in people with things like education.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
My experience with MS and Apple is the exact opposite of yours. 100% completely opposite. My first computer was an Apple, in 1977 or 78. In the early 80s I switched because the manufacturing software I needed was on MS boxes. I was on MS products until 2012. MS software was a major part of my business life for 30 yrs. It was crap and the only reason I used it was the manufacturing software that all ran under MSDOS. That’s not to say that Apple was always perfect or is today, but until the last iteration of dos it has been a mess, some times far worse. Did it work – yes. Did it work efficiently – no it didn’t. Did it work all the time – no it didn’t. My experience with Apple, Unix, Dos, is that Unix was/is best, Apple is close, likely from being based upon Unix and MS is/was far behind, in every way possible. I started programing computers when punch cards were used with Fortran so it’s not as if I’ve got no experience. And as I implied, current Windows is not bad, which is something I wouldn’t have said up to maybe about 2 yrs ago. I like Apple better, because I’m used to it, and yes it, like everything else humans ever touch it isn’t perfect. But my experience of 45 yrs of using computers, from behemoth mainframes with punch cards/Fortran to my current iPhone, is that Apple out performs in every way, anything out of MS.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Ruckus: I was in the Post Office today mailing a package — a man with bro clothes and hair came in without a mask and proceeded to lecture us all about how we should be mask-free. Before the clerks could let him have it (do not mess with a postal clerk) another patron lit into him, and then before he finished his business, I thanked the man as even though my husband is vaccinated, getting breakthrough COVID while needing a kidney transplant could put an end to hopes for a transplant. The man and the clerks say “see” to the bro, who slunk out. They then told me they were hoping my husband gets his transplant soon. All these maskless idiots just think about themselves.
Miss Bianca
@S. Cerevisiae:
Ahem. I’ve used Macs by preference since 1984. But my next laptop, Mac or no, will be converted to Linux (like my old one is now). I now no longer perceive a functional difference in annoying/maddening tendencies between Apple and Windows systems. And I *refuse* to have to go through the Mac App store every time I want to download something onto my computer, which is apparently a thing now.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Yeah, I bookmarked that. Will check it out.
Almost Retired
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh my, that’s….um…….a creative argument. Thanks for taking one for the team and reading this dreck so we don’t have to.
NotMax
@Cheryl from Maryland
Thinking is not standard equipment, it’s an optional add-on.
:)
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I think there are two big things to understand about diets:
Almost Retired
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks for the link to your excellent post on section 230 from December. That explains a lot.
Robert Sneddon
@Eolirin:
I’m running 64-bit Windows 10 on this desktop, a modern Ryzen 5 AMD platform. I use a 32-bit graphics program (Corel PhotoPaint) which is copyrighted 1998. It was written for Windows 98 and it works 99% perfectly on this machine with zero patches or upgrades since it was released. A couple of things don’t run properly, like pressing F1 to start the Help (which is a hook into a Win 98 subsystem that’s no longer supported) but the rest of it, It Just Works.
Apple, not so much — a photographer friend who uses/used Aperture on a Mac like his life depended on it had the ability for him to run it on modern Apple hardware and OS releases eroded away from underneath his feet by Apple’s Fuck You, We Got Your Money approach to marketing.
Just Chuck
@Ruckus: Speaking of performance, the new M1 macs are ridiculously fast, blowing the doors off anything Intel-based. I now have a macbook Air that’s faster than the monster PC I bought only a year before (tho that PC will scale to bigger workloads) and does it with only 30 watts.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks for the clarifying tip. I think my previous life with Outlook started so far back—God, was I coming from AOL?! CompuServe?—that the setup was not optimal. It was definitely back in the ’90s, and I guess I never updated the settings.
NotMax
@Robert Sneddon
Kickass processor. Lurve my machine with that. (Older now, in computer years, Ryzen 5 2600 six-core and 16GB of RAM.)
JPL
@Cheryl from Maryland: I’m so proud of you.
The Thin Black Duke
OK, it appears your humble wordsmith made a whopping $5.97 from Medium last month. Sigh. It’s a good thing I’m not doing this for the money. Anyway, here’s my essay on Quentin Tarantino’s bigoted stereotyping of the legendary Bruce Lee in the monstrously overrated Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I think one of the worse things that can happen to a filmmaker is when he’s crowned a “genius” during his lifetime.
Ohio Mom
I’m awfully late but my advice to opiejean is, it might be annoying to not see well as you could but it isn’t a cascading medical emergency.
You have time to find an opthomologist who actually believes in medical science.
P.S. I had that exact same procedure and it was such a nothingburger I forgot about it until my eye doctor reminded me I’d only had the one eye done and she is still waiting to see if the other really needs it.
Major Major Major Major
@Almost Retired: aw thanks!
Ruckus
@geg6:
I wasn’t say none of us are gleeful, just me.
Also I didn’t put down the gleefulness, it’s fully understandable. I live in a city where over 60% of the pop is vaccinated and yet the highest I’ve seen on the city listing on the CA website is over 80% and I’m pissed that my area is 25% less vaccinated. If I lived someplace where it’s in the 30-40% range I’d be extremely pissed off, and likely celebrate every Covid death in town, one less infection point. Here’s the CA % by city map.
Chief Oshkosh
@Major Major Major Major:
And even that is often wrong.
Starfish
@The Thin Black Duke: How many articles did you create, and what did the engagement on them look like?
The one piece that you mentioned that I read was thorough and thoughtful.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
So do you use Outlook? When I worked for companies it was de rigueur, and even as a consultant I found it useful for organizing tons of email. Now, as a retired shut-in, I don’t need all the bells and whistles. But I do like how there is (a substantial subset of) Word built into Outlook for composing. The text formatting in generic Gmail on the Web is abysmal. And it would be nice to sort various people’s emails into separate folders, which I probably could do in Gmail but which would be tedious to implement.
James E Powell
@Ruckus:
According to that map, my zip code has a tad over 28K people 12 or older. 46.7% are vaccinated. It’s Trump country. Some people still have their flags out. And that sign that says “Prayer changes things” with US flag decor on it.
Ruckus
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Actually they don’t.
If they thought at all about themselves they’d wear a mask and shut the fuck up. But they don’t think. Period. It might be that they are unable to think. It might be because it hurts them to think. But likely it is that they are remora humans, they attach onto someone who to them seems like a leader, but is only in it for the money, say a republican politician, or a faux news presenter. They wouldn’t know an actual leader he saved their lives. I used he in place of any other description because they only see males as having any stature, for example of their ignorance of reality, see Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris or really any number of other examples.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
My mom uses Thunderbird. Most of the other people I know either use Outlook, webmail, or some email client that’s only available on Unix.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Related issue, which you might have thought of, as a writer: how are future biographers and historians going to cope with the move to email and social media and the corresponding drop-off in paper correspondence? The electronic stuff is much more ephemeral and harder to save, in my experience.
I was thinking about this because at lunch last week a friend who’s doing a major decluttering gave me a packet of letters that I wrote to her back in the ’80s! And we got to discussing this topic.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: I use the gmail web interface but I also write like 0.3 emails per day. Back when I did use email clients I used Apple mail and outlook and thunderbird and they all have pluses and minuses but that was a long time ago.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Thanks for the info.
Delk
Ha! Two of trump’s attorneys have AOL emails on the suit they filed.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: You’ll be unsurprised to learn that this is a pretty hot research area in archival science. Email isn’t so much of an issue since it’s easy for an individual or institution to retain a copy, and they’re natively very metadata-rich and linked. Social media is a lot harder. There are organizations archiving zillions of tweets, but a site like Facebook is a bigger issue because of its mishmash of privacy settings and general hostility to API users. But all of this probably leaves us better off than where we were before, when all those conversations were ephemeral because they were in person–if they happened at all!
Pennsylvanian
Wow, the level of computer geekdom is very high here. Some of you are using words I’ve never heard of. I am the luddite in my household, so that’s probably a given. The spouse is an Apple fan so the whole entertainment system/phone/TV is compatible with that and it works for me. I still never got the hang of iTunes. Every time I ever tried to do something there I fucked it up, and then I don’t know how, but like a useful idiot, I got signed up for that $15 a month music thing they have now for a few months before I realized it.
I want so much to be a better nerd. Hope springs eternal, I guess. Or at least it used to.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks for the context. I actually use email a fair amount. I’ve always been a serious letter-writer, and I loved it when email took us back to the days of Sherlock Holmes and Victorian novels, when you could put a letter in the morning post and know the recipient would get it that evening (in London, at least).
And I wonder where the yoots today express their deep thoughts. Twitter and TikTok don’t seem optimal, but maybe that’s just me.
Steeplejack
@Delk:
So my RWNJ brother is not the last guy in America with an AOL email address?! ? Good to know.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
Electronic media is kind of weird because it is both easier and harder to preserve than physical media. As long as it’s still readable, it’s incredibly easy to duplicate electronic media, which makes it way easier for a copy to survive. On the other hand, it doesn’t have the inherent longevity of a good quality physical medium, so it takes more effort to keep it available. I assume serious archivists are working really hard on systems to make sure electronic media are regularly transferred to newer formats.
FWIW, I don’t have any really old paper letters, but I do have 20+ years of personal email on my computer, and about the same on the email server at work. And all of that is searchable, so I have a chance of actually finding something interesting in it if I choose to look.
ETA: The other wildcard is file formats. At work, I have some very old data files that have been preserved intact for almost 30 years, but I’m not at all sure there’s software capable of reading them anymore. OTOH, my 20 year old JPG files work perfectly, and probably will for a very long time to come.
Pennsylvanian
@karen marie: People use pistachios in banana bread? I didn’t even know that was legal, and I’ve been making banana bread for, um, a very long time. Seems an odd combo. My recipe has only shortening, sugar, eggs, bananas, flour, baking soda and salt. Walnuts optional. Pistachios? I’m skeptical.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Maybe for institutions, not so much for individuals. For a long time I lugged around my old AOL email data file from the ’90s, hoping at some point to convert it to Outlook or something accessible. (I think tools for that came along later.) And even within Outlook there have been format changes over the years that have made it hard to maintain/convert old data files.
Again, I suspect these issues are easier for organizations with IT staff to deal with than they are for (non-techie) individuals.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
A Spamticle for Liebowitz.
:)
cain
@Eolirin:
Yep! Every family has to have one of em. :-) I’m even more dangerous than just that. Hell, I’ve had Linus Torvalds over for dinner at my place along with most of the area’s kernel developers. (Linus and I live in the same city)
Being part of a desktop project is pretty rad – and you rub shoulders with some amazing programmers and architects. Writing a desktop is bloody hard – and the engineering that we had to do from the early days to make Linux do things on par with the other platforms was difficult – let’s put it this way – android and others would have a much harder lift if it wasn’t for us.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Pennsylvanian: I keep obediently doing the upgrades that Apple makes me do, and every time iTunes upgrades they move everything around and change how to do things.
I did finally figure out a couple of sharing features I never got working till recently: How to make my purchases visible to my wife, and how to share my library over the home network. Those are two different things as we discovered when I closed the laptop and the music stopped playing.
cain
@Robert Sneddon:
I think Microsoft has done some phenomenal work on maintaining backwards compatibility. I think Windows 10 is an incredible piece of engineering and they should be proud of the work that has gone into it. Very stable.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: The local Harrisonburg radio station has a smalltown-type morning show, with a daily quiz that people answer for small prizes. One day last week the question was, “Only 20% of people under 25 years old have bought one of these. What is it?” Answer: “A postage stamp.”
cain
@Just Chuck:
Yeah – as a former Intel employee, you can bet those folks are worried. You can blame it on their past CEO – Brian K. who fucked up so many things – he was also a Trump supporter – so you can bet anything those assholes touch dies.
I got laid off because of one of his stupid schemes to get rid of older workers – but that lead to a loss of some organizational memory and expertise and consequently stuff like 7nm has suffered.
Low Key Swagger
Hey NotMax (or any other film buffs) the mention of Norma Rae the other day had me wanting to watch it. Did a search on my Roku and it couldn’t even recognize it as a legit title. My Google-fu isn’t the strongest but am I to understand that it is not available for streaming in the U.S.? Is this some sort of property rights thing?
Ken
@Major Major Major Major: So… They’re building wind turbines that are almost ten times larger than the old kind?
laura
@Kayla Rudbek: Ice Cold Canada Dry BOLD Ginger Ale! Seriously Kayla, give it a try. It comes in airline size cans and 2 liter bottles. Keep on keeping on getting better.
Ken
Surely there’s some small hope that there will also be sanctions, and possibly even disbarment?
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
I actually have a big folder full of saved spam for just in case I ever have to retrain my Bayesian classifier.
Steeplejack
@Low Key Swagger:
Looks like it’s not available anywhere. Weird.
I’ll say again that the search feature at JustWatch.com is the best resource I have found for looking up films and TV shows and where they are available.
Martin
It’s not that Christians are predisposed to bigotry – you’re right – everyone walks that path. The issue is that Christians can extract cultural and political power from their bigotry, that nobody else can. That allows them to institutionalize it and protect it, where everyone else gets their bigotry constantly challenged and attacked.
As a result, whatever bigotry I may possess can’t be institutionalized and weaponized. It’s limited to me personally. That’s not how it works for white Christians that align with the GOP. In fact, their bigotry is quite often in service to protecting the institution, not the other way around. Take away the institutional power of the GOP, and I’m guessing a fair bit of the bigotry would simply go away. It would no longer be a fight worth waging.
NotMax
@Low Key Swagger
At this moment in time not streaming nowhere.
Place to check on this or other titles, for future reference: Just Watch. Kept very up to date with what’s where (and whether free or not).
boatboy_srq
@Anotherlurker: Same here.
Apple makes a(n, individual,) amazing product. But long-term customers have been repeatedly scr3w3d by Apple missteps.
Starting with the untimely death of the Apple II ecosphere, followed by the fiasco of model naming conventions (who would guess that a Quadra 600 is newer and more powerful than a Quadra 700? Only Apple marketing), then killing off the best mass-market higher-fidelity DAP in the marketplace (iPod / iPod Classic) without keeping the audio chipset in some other variant, and most recently with the software update either too large for older devices or designed to slow them down in the name of (supposed) extended battery life.
Apple has proven that they have no interest in their consumer base beyond persuading them to buy newer products from them. Quality means (a) little, long term functionality means nothing, field repair is not merely exasperating but warranty-voiding (not helpful to business users), accessories – frequently multiple expensive accessories – are disposable, content protections are irregular and routinely frustrating.
Low Key Swagger
@Steeplejack: Thank you. I just bought a dvd on Ebay.
Martin
This is new. I have a helicopter loitering over my neighborhood broadcasting an amber alert to people on the ground. Guess they figure the kid didn’t go far. Hopefully they can find him soon.
boatboy_srq
@Low Key Swagger: There arw a number of films falling down the memory hole. I had a similar experience with Kiss of the Spider Woman. No clue what is happening, especially with storage pricing dropping so rapidly of late.
Steeplejack
@Low Key Swagger:
?
ETA: Just for comparison, here’s what you would see at JustWatch for a movie that is available.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I have several non Apple programs on my computers. They all work within the system but they are obviously not Apple products. But everyone of them functions well. I couldn’t make that statement about their MS versions, all but one I’ve used in both places.
Now here’s something different than arguing about MS/Apple.
Today, while I like Apple better, I used MS computers at work up until, well I’m not allowed to type that word, I no longer do. Right now, other than actually being different and needing to be learned to be used, none of the programs work better or worse and while I like Apple operating systems better, they both work. Apple had a patch in the 80s that they didn’t really seem to understand their customers and MS didn’t seem to understand computers and humans, both of them have come a very long way. I’ve owned Android and iPhones, and hands down the Apple is better than my Android experience. I’ve owned both Apple and MS based computers and my experience is that Apple works better. But. And it’s a big, firm, round but, today, the difference is far less if your metric is getting things done. Today it’s experience and what you actually try and accomplish with your computer. My experience is that Apple products can actually last a lot longer. I have a friend whose wife still uses her Mac from 2011. It still works, it just can’t be upgraded any more. It’s still supported by Apple and of course they’d like her to buy new. But it still functions. Only one of the MS based computers that I ever owned had that kind of lifetime, I have a ASUS netbook running XP that still works. I don’t use it but it still functions. But the kicker is that MS won’t support it unless I upgrade the software, which it won’t run. My Android phone had the same problem, upgrade or it won’t work on the networks and it couldn’t be upgraded. I know people still using iPhone 6 and it still works fine. It won’t upgrade but it doesn’t have to to work.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: In Massachusetts, parental consent is still required for minors 12 and up to get vaccinated, and there are teenagers whose antivaxxer parents won’t let them get the shots. That in addition to the kids under 12 who can’t get them in any event.
I’m seeing some sentiment online amounting to “let it rip, anyone who is unvaccinated at this point deserves it,” and these kids are part of the reason I don’t accept that.
SeattleDem
@Anotherlurker: The files for iTunes music are stored on the hard drive, buried in the Music folder that is at the same level as the Desktop folder in the directory tree. I’ve been keeping all my music ripped from CD’s, digitized from albums, recorded on cassettes, etc, in each generation of iTunes and Music backed up on my Macs over the years, occasionally putting a selection onto whichever Windows boxes I was issued at work over the years. If you ever synched you iPod to your Mac, all the music is till sitting there, orphaned.
NotMax
@boatboy_srq
Streaming is like the world’s largest jukebox.
Other than ‘original’ programming, what the choices are gets swapped out periodically. Doesn’t necessarily translate to any particular title becoming unavailable forever.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Speaking of computer geekery, have people heard the story about how Toy Story 2 was deleted? I’ve run into it in several places, I think it must have been mentioned in a newly-released “behind the scenes” video or something.
It’s pretty horrifying, but the most horrifying part was that there was apparently no effort to impose file protections, so some random person could accidentally execute “rm -r -f” in the wrong place and BOOM! years of work wiped out.
Also the backup system wasn’t creating usable backups, which they discovered after the disaster.
Wouldn’t you think a company which lives and dies on data would have some safeties in place? (He asked naively).
End of the story if anyone is wondering, is that they found one employee who had taken a fairly recent copy of the movie home, and they restored most of it from her computer. And then they decided to trash the movie anyway, and rewrote it with only a few months to go before the release deadline.
Steeplejack
@boatboy_srq:
I read an article recently—maybe linked from here—that said the “universe” of available movies has actually declined as streaming has proliferated. Something something about the popular mainstream movies driving out the obscure and niche films. (Not exactly sure how that would work, but apparently it’s a thing.) And supposedly Netflix has reduced its DVD service, which would be a fallback.
Martin
@boatboy_srq: I think this is a misread.
Apple very heavily invests in retiring technical debt. They are brutally aggressive with it. Now, that’s something that I personally like – because I too like to retire technical debt.
In the end, Apple users and non-Apple users wind up in the same place, but Apple forces you there way earlier. And being aggressive about it means that you don’t always get to wait until all of the cheap hardware and peripherals are on the market. You kind of have to do it when things are a bit pricier.
But this has often manifest as proprietariness, but sometimes its the opposite. All of my devices are USB-C PD powered, which means I can replace my wall outlets with ones that have 2 USB-C PD connectors and plug in devices anywhere without a power brick and using standard cables. I even have a USB-C powered soldering iron.
It’s a bit unfair to drag Apple II and Quadra stuff into this, as that company died in 1997.
But the reason why things like iPhones have such high resale value is that they don’t break. They last vastly longer than anything else on the market. Are they hard to repair – sure, because they so rarely need repair. People don’t replace their iPhones when they break, they replace them when newer models can do things they want that older models can’t do. iOS 15 coming out this fall will still support the iPhone 6S which came out 6 years ago. We’re still getting security updates for even older devices.
So I think you’re a little out of step with modern Apple. They moved their Macs from Intel to ARM and not only would you be damn hard pressed to tell given the level of compatibility, in most cases your x86 apps run faster on the new machines than they did on the Intel ones. That required a massive technical investment on their part to preserve that degree of compatibility.
The Thin Black Duke
@Starfish: Thank you. After getting past my writer’s block (knock on wood), I’ve written half a dozen essays. Oddly enough, the one that’s receiving the most hits (1.7k) is the Harrison Ford piece. Go figure.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
On the flip side there has been a boomlet in small and niche channels, with ad-supported streaming.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
I’d l0ve to see a JustWatch-type site that catalogues all the streaming services.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Steeplejack: At least twice recently I’ve purchased a DVD of an older movie I wanted to watch once, simply because there was no other way to see it.
We’re not talking about very old movies either. One was “Sister Mary Explains it All” (2001), and the other was “Next Stop Greenwich Village” (1976). Although, I suppose you yutes would consider that last one a “very old movie”, practically a silent film.
It happens with I’d guess 10% of the films I want to see. Either I buy the DVD or I just give up.
And it’s fairly common that a more recent film is not available on DVD or streaming, though I can’t remember any such titles off the top of my head.
When I was still subscribing to Netflix DVDs, a number of titles from my queue got pulled before I could get around to watching them.
And at least one streaming series has been pulled that I was really looking forward to watching.
Zelma
OK, you’re making fun of folks with an AOL email address. I still have an Earthlink email. I’ve had it for 24 years and am afraid to give it up. Bet many of you didn’t know it still exists! I’ve become a computer Luddite. Once upon a time I was pretty competent for a historian. But since I retired 14 years ago, the technology has passed me by. My first computer was an Apple 2E way back in the mid-80s and I’ve been an Apple user ever since. Have a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an I phone, all of which are much smarter than I am.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Recently found out the Viki channel (subsidiary of Rakuten) is available on the Roku. Can be used without signing up for an account (albeit kind of clunky when accessed that way as doesn’t keep track of where you were on any program in case you need to stop and go back to pick up later), free and paid tiers. Cornucopia of Asian titles, even in the more limited selections offered on the free tier.
opiejeanne
@Ohio Mom: Thanks. I’m thinking of putting it off until late September. Now that I know what it is I’m not worried. Even though I knew about the possibility, I didn’t realize that’s what this was.
You’re right. It’s an annoyance, not an emergency.
Martin
@cain: Curious your take on this.
I don’t think Brian K. is specifically to blame here. Intel’s advantage was always the combination of semi-proprietary x86 control and being able to leverage that to out-invest everyone on process. That created a positive feedback loop where the fastest processors were from Intel, so you wrote x86 code to get that performance, which could only be made by Intel or a court-mandated licensee. But this also required that x86 sell enough that it could outspend everyone. And this worked great, for a long time.
But mobile, and particularly mobile with Apple broke that system. Apple had ARM at their disposal, which let them source from almost anyone, and fab almost anywhere. And because Intel wasn’t willing to retire their technical debt, they struggled to keep up with ARM on perf/watt, which wasn’t a big problem for traditional desktop/servers, but is a massive issue for mobile. That allowed Apple to do two things:
Yeah, I think Intel could have held this off a bit longer, but I don’t see how Intel could have pushed x86 to 8 wide decode and 5nm in the timeframe that Apple was able, because Apple is only obligated to one party – Apple. And they can employ all of their other assets to help get to that point. Intel is obligated to everyone else, and they don’t have that kind of freedom. Apple threw 32 bit ALUs out the window years ago. Intel could only dream of doing that, even under the best leadership.
Robert Sneddon
@Martin:
So how does my friend run 32-bit x86 Aperture on modern Apple hardware under a modern Apple OS? Answer, he can’t because Apple doesn’t really do compatibility, it does “buy new stuff when we tell you to” and “your existing workflow is not our problem”. Microsoft can’t do that to their business clients so they have to support backwards compatibility for a lot longer than really makes sense.
Apple is very innovative, it’s usually the market leader for new tech like SSDs and USB-C and such. It occasionally gets lost down a dark alleyway, see Thunderbolt for an example but generally the best-in-breed tech is usually found first wearing an Apple logo with the competition following along later. It’s a pity the Apple walled garden has spikes and barbed wire around it.
James E Powell
@Low Key Swagger:
Maybe Bezos bought the rights for Amazon, then kept it from streaming anywhere. It’s probably not true, but I’d like to spread the rumor.
Steeplejack
@Zelma:
EarthLink
wasis (semi-?)legit. It didn’t have the negative cachet that AOL did.Er, maybe I’m thinking of MindSpring.
debbie
@Almost Retired:
I love that it’s being referred to as a LOLsuit. That’s exactly what it is.
boatboy_srq
@NotMax: Streaming in high fidelity is a relatively new evolution (Pandora, Spotify and SoundCloud all default to 128kbit or lower), and I have a somewhat obscure library with a chunk of stuff either terminally out of print or that was for decades “not available in your country.” I keep watching, but until iTunes or Spotify posts things like The Judys “Washarama” in its entirety then I am not convinced.
Regardless of all of that, playing from such at higher fi requires better DACs than Apple ships these days. And connecting to home or mobile audio requires either new cabling with each Apple gen or Bluetooth 4.x or higher at both ends. Been there, done that, prefer TOSlink.
boatboy_srq
@Steeplejack: EarthLink is. They bought MindSpring ages ago. They still offer a surprisingly good DSL service if you need that, along with the conventional mailbox/web presence.
Old School
@Low Key Swagger:
Looks like Norma Rae is a 20th Century Fox movie, so I think that means Disney has the streaming rights. Maybe it’ll show up on Disney+ someday
Edit: Looks like Hulu is where it might end up.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore:
No kidding. When Adobe first introduced PDF, I thought “why would anybody need that?” But now I’ve learned that if I want to archive a human-readable file, I’d better at least have a copy in PDF. Lots of old stuff I’ve kept that I can’t read anymore.
natem
@Zelma: FWIW many of us were making fun of folks with AOL email addresses in 25 years ago
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
I’ve heard there are a number of TV shows that are kept off streaming by issues with music rights, and the same may be true of some movies. If the studio only got the theatrical rights to the score, they may need to renegotiate for video, streaming, etc. Depending on the copyright situation, they may not think it’s worth bothering. Congress really ought to do something about compulsory licensing to straighten the problem out.
NotMax
@boatboy_srq
I was referring to video streaming.
When it comes to music services, that’s terra incognita. Happy enough with my records and reel to reel tapes for tuneage.
Roger Moore
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
This is sadly common. If you aren’t testing your backups, you never know if they’ll actually work when you need them. Too many people learn this the hard way.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
True about TV shows, at least. Before ubiquitous streaming, lots of complaints from people when their DVD boxed set of some “major” show had different songs from when the episodes aired, because the studios didn’t want to pay (allegedly) extortionate royalties on songs that their producers happily contributed to the hot broadcast series to get air play and recognition.
And, yes, the whole “rights” landscape is screwed up in many ways.
ETA: Oops, forgot the important detail that the TV studios would release the hot series on DVD with substandard (cheap) songs replacing the original songs on the broadcast versions.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Also too, tracking down who owns clearance, usage and distribution rights can be a thicket of surpassing tangle.
Kay
The story of Ruby Bridges is now “critical race theory”:
You wouldn’t believe some of this stuff.
I’m interested in panics. I wrote a law school paper on the child sex abuse/satanism panic. That came about because of a cultural shift too- it coincided with (college educated) women with small children working outside the home in large numbers-it was the fear around that. Lower income women had always worked.
That’s my personal theory- it wasn’t in the paper :)
They have so little faith in their own children’s ability to think about things. Kids completely understand unfairness and unkindness, so I think that’s how they would approach the story. It’s almost insulting to grade schoolers to think they can’t handle reading it.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
I have used Mac tools when visiting Apple folk, and could manage to do trivial tasks OK. But no fun, and obviously hard to do non-trivial things. Yet at work I was forced to use MS and develop custom tools running on the windoze platform — also no fun.
S
@S. Cerevisiae:
I’m going to say no to this. I used a Mac for a while, and I didn’t like the experience, so I went back to PCs. I don’t think their user interface is any better than a PC, and there are all kinds of problems with Apple’s domineering approach to computers. I want my computer to do what I want to do, not what the manufacturer decides to let me do. I also despise Apple’s approach to design.
So now we use Linux, lately Ubuntu, which provides updates you can accept or reject as you choose, and which so far in the 15 years we’ve been a Linux establishment have never hosed up the functionality of our local network or the laptops/desktops we use to surf or edit photos.
Low Key Swagger
When our internet went out last year for a week, I dropped by a used media store and bought 70 dvd’s for 12 bucks. I love owning dvds and don’t understand why people dump them at these low prices. I mean, sure, streaming is widely available, but owning the movie just feels better to me. If you’re gonna call me a dinosaur, you must tell me what type. Personally, I like velociraptors.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
The problem is that as a user, IDGAF about Apple’s technical debt. I care that the software I use and depend on keeps working. I don’t get an OS because it’s pretty or free from technical debt; I get it so I can run the software that actually does what I care about. If the OS company breaks my previously working software in the name of reducing technical debt, that just means they’re pushing their problems onto me.
It also means I can’t trust them for anything really important, because they’ve proven their willingness to break stuff. Yes, I can survive if every piece of software I depend on is still actively supported, but that’s not a good place to be because there’s no guarantee it will stay supported. Especially in a business where supporting oddball hardware is important- and I am in that kind of business- that’s an absolute deal breaker.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
PDF is good, but it’s only useful for a fraction of the stuff that’s out there. The stuff I’m thinking of are scientific data files, which can’t really be converted to PDF. The equipment that created them was getting long in the tooth when the files were made 30 years ago, and I sincerely doubt there’s anything that can read it today. OTOH, some of the files that are only a big younger are still supported by the manufacturer through a file format converter. I guess the old format isn’t changing, and the format it’s converting to is a well defined text format, so the converter is easy to maintain.
jackmac
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Proud Mac guy since late ’80s!
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: Aperture was discontinued 6 years ago. Why is he still running it, and if he needs that workflow then he should keep using his 6 year old computer. This is not a new concept in computing. Does he not realize that migrating off of Aperture was easiest 6 years ago, and will get harder with each successive year.
How is Thunderbolt a dark alleyway? It’s still being developed. It now tunnels USB 4 over a USB-C interface, so if you have Thunderbolt, you can plug any USB-C device into it with no problem. It was the only possible interface for external GPUs and other devices and was designed to address limitations not just in USB but all other interfaces, but at a cost. And co-developed with Intel.
Kathleen
@dmsilev: In Bill Gates’ America Outlook and Excel use YOU!!!
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
I run Linux at home. I actually have a Windows box I bought for games and the very rare serious program I couldn’t run on Linux. That’s now down to about zero things, so I haven’t used the Windows box in a very long time; I don’t think I’m ever going to get another. At work, everything runs Windows, and I’m fine with it.
boatboy_srq
@Martin: I had a whole book in reaponse to this but I see others making similar points. So I will just leave it at this:
The Quadra reference is entirely apt because it showcases the beginning of the trend: a trend where Apple just does not care about potential consumers who don’t get it. The iPod classic might have run out of parts: no reason not to source better DACs and amps for iPod Toich or iPhone (HiBy and Shanling did it after all), yet Apple did nothing. Retiring the minijack might save wear and tear on the device but it makes 3.5mm-connected earbuds uswless, and the good ones cost as much as the phones – and before you smirk over first-world-problems I will point out that my nym and avatar are what they are because I lived aboard for some years and I could better justify the $500 Sennheisers than the $15k audio rig for which I had neither the means nor the space.
Not everything is solved by new tech. Not everything old is tech debt. And not every user experience is magically better using something straight from the assembly line.
TomatoQueen
@Old School: I am a longterm victim of Comcast/Xfinity, paying eye-watering sums so I can haz what the old spider calls “high speed” internet, with a cutesy name and laughable performance–that’s the provider available to me and I need it for my job. Along with that nightmare comes remarkable TV offerings that I’ve yet to research thoroughly,I just stumble about and say LookitThat when I find something that isn’t comic books. Just now I stumbled into Norma Rae, all ready to stream, likely because Disney and Disney Plus are included in the old spider’s offerings.
Martin
@Roger Moore: It’s also your technical debt. See the above discussions of old file formats. How many people have old documents on floppies or CD-ROMs, figuring that they’ll always be able to scavenge up a device to read them, but forgetting that just because you can access the file doesn’t mean you can open or convert it any longer.
When Apple says ‘hey, we’re moving on from optical drives’ that’s a signal that you should as well, because that is now the easiest time to do so. For a lot of people their complaints about Apple pushing them is really a reflection of debt that they have accumulated that hasn’t yet come due.
My first real tech job was migrating a project off of code and a data set that started in 1972. This was in 1993. 21 years later and I’m trying to source hardware that people in europe left in a closet somewhere. I’m writing data converters and validators. I didn’t see that project through to the end, but they did finally get there – in 2007. It took almost as long to retire that debt as it took to accumulate it, and when they were done, most of the work I did to start them off needed to be retired.
Apple simply makes it hard to procrastinate on this stuff, but they also make it more difficult to get trapped in bad decisions. Microsoft may proclaim that Word is backward compatible, and it is to a certain extent, but it’s not really. Same with Excel, etc. So part of this is dropping your dependency on proprietary file formats, and all that. And if you’re doing that with your own content, regularly maintaining it, retiring your own technical debt, depreciating code, etc. you’ll find that Apple doesn’t really present much of a burden.
Kayla Rudbek
@rikyrah: that’s even better than the 12’ wide pool my toddler nephew got for his birthday last week! (A gift from my sibling’s coworker who wants grandkids and doesn’t have any)
Martin
@boatboy_srq: Regarding the DAC on the iPod, I know the guy who managed the IPod. He was an audiophile and had some room in the budget to put a nicer DAC in it. For models he oversaw, they tended to have better DACs than the models he didn’t oversee.
The reason they didn’t source better ones consistently was because the budget either didn’t allow it, or because they felt the budget was better spent elsewhere. The number of people who in the last 20 years ever referenced the quality of the DAC on the iPod is 3: You, him, and one other person. The tens of millions of other people that bought one neither noticed nor cared. They wanted more storage space or battery life instead. Understand that Apple designs to price – they have a price point to hit, they set a budget, and they cram as much in as they can under that budget. That can take strange forms – pricing the power cable down to the inch. Changing the packaging so they can recover some budget by making it cheaper to ship. People complained about the first Mac Mini adopting 2.5″ rather than 3.5″ drives, but they saved so much money in shipping and warehousing due to the overall smaller form factor that the 2.5″ drive was actually cheaper than a corresponding 3.5″ drive would have been.
But the 30 pin iPod also output a digital signal, which you could feed into whatever DAC you wanted. Lightning does as well.
And while the loss of a 3.5mm connector might be inconvenient for you, it lowers the frequency and cost of repairs for upwards of a billion other users. I mean, you could have gone with a $5 Lightning to 3.5mm adapter. Not sure why that’s not acceptable. I’m guessing you were already running a 3.5mm to ¼” adapter, and you can get Lightning to ¼”, so it’s not even an additional adapter.
Tazj
@Low Key Swagger: The thing about streaming services is someone always has an eye on you. I’m not ashamed about what I watch and no one will ever care but it is strange when you watch something and the next day there’s an email that asks you how much you enjoyed that movie or series, or it reminds you to finish something else. I suppose they’re similar to shopper’s discount cards in that way, a record of your likes and dislikes to help the business.
These services also change the movies they offer or increase their monthly prices.
I can understand why if you had the chance to get buy some movies you like you’d take it.
Robert Sneddon
@Martin:
He uses/used Aperture it because he’s used to using it, he knows how to drive it instinctively (a bit like me and my twenty-year-old copy of PhotoPaint I run on Win 10). He’s got plug-ins and filter sets, scripts that work with Aperture to do a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to re-learn or work around or bodge. He’s running it on an unsupported OS that doesn’t understand modern hardware, he’s working with larger and more detailed images on slow CPUs and he is pissed at Apple because they lured him in with a best-of-breed program and then pulled the rug out from under him.
Sorry, should have said Lightning, Apple’s not-quite-industry-standard funny-connector version of the Intel Thunderbolt spec. Everyone else in the world ended up going USB-C which has transport for everything nowadays. Another friend of mine who obsessively buys Apple kit has a number of older Lightning peripherals which either can’t plug into his new Shiny! or need extensive dongle chains which only Apple sell Ka-ching!
Robert Sneddon
@Martin:
I’m no audiophile myself but I have heard it said that the nobody-ever-bought-one MS Zune had really good audio stages, better than the iPod in some people’s opinion.
Major Major Major Major
What turned me against MacBooks, ultimately, was the butterfly keyboard. The company in a nutshell: aesthetics over functionality. They kept that keyboard for YEARS! Why would I buy a product like that. If I’m dropping $2500 on a laptop it should at least work.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
So the butterfly effect really did change your future.
;)
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
Part of what’s going on is that even as it distinguishes itself through its software, Apple is still a hardware company at heart. They see hardware as the real profit center and software as a way of selling hardware. Relatedly, they place a very high value on technical quality over compatibility; they’ve never seen a standard they were willing to stick to if they thought an alternative solution would do better, especially if they could be the only one selling that alternative.
This has its ups and downs. Apple always has really pretty looking hardware, and often it’s well thought out. They generally pay for high quality components, so the higher price is compensated for by a long lifespan. OTOH, they will often have proprietary technologies and connectors you can only get from them at a massive premium. And sometimes their commitment to design elegance means they eliminate too much stuff, and you wind up needing an inelegant dongle to achieve something that would have been easy if they had just included ports for backward compatibility.
I understand why people who like Apple really like them, but they are not for me. There are two Apple stories that really underline what I dislike about them. One was one of their laptops when they first started using USB-C charging. They had a beautifully elegant solution that let them do anything with a single port, but they took it too far by including only one port on their cheaper model, so if you wanted to do more than one thing at a time- charge your laptop and use a wired peripheral- you needed a dongle to do it. The other was Bendghazi. They pushed their design aesthetic of ultra-thinness too far and hadn’t bothered testing against real-world use patterns, so they wound up with a design that failed when heavy people sat on their phones. Rather than admit to a mistake, Apple blamed people for keeping their phones in their back pockets, even as other manufacturers tested extensively for that exact use case because they knew it was so common.
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: How was it pulling the rug out? He had 6 years of support – time he should have been using to migrate. Apple wasn’t ambiguous about future versions of Aperture. He knew it was EOLed, and 6 years seems like plenty of time to move to Lightroom or something else.
Lightning isn’t an implementation of Thunderbolt. It’s separate protocol that is dynamically signaled like Thunderbolt, but not related. Apple would have loved to move to USB-C – I mean, who the fuck do you think designed the connector? But Apple couldn’t convince the USB working group to adopt a new connector until 2 years after they committed to Lightning. Blame the USB working group for that one. Apple had no idea when Lightning came out that USB-C would get support, and the existing micro/mini standards couldn’t support the USB 3.1 features/PD that Apple was able to implement 2 years earlier.
As evidence that Apple doesn’t want to be there, they started migrating iPad to USB-C three years ago, and they’re almost certain to retire it from iPhone in favor of purely wireless Qi charging (like Watch), eliminating yet another point of failure on the device. Apple was the first to go all-in on USB-C – it’s what they’ve wanted for years.
In terms of Lightning peripherals, that’s why the MFi program exists, to ensure they fully support the spec.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
My problem is that I’m dealing with expensive (thousands of dollars) to very expensive (over a million dollars) pieces of scientific equipment. This stuff has a practical lifespan of over a decade, but the manufacturer will generally stop providing software support well before the hardware has given out. I’m not going to scrap a very expensive mass spectrometer because Apple has decided they want to retire some technical debt in a way that breaks my instrument software. Nobody else does, either, which is why I haven’t seen a scientific instrument running on a Mac in at least a decade. There are some instruments (and a lot of data analysis software) that run Linux and many more that run Windows.
Just Chuck
@Roger Moore: Amazed that they didn’t do DR drills at least every quarter. That’s standard practice in any big IT organization, which is like half of what Pixar is about.
Just Chuck
@Robert Sneddon:
No, everyone was going MicroUSB (A) at the time, which still had a vastly inferior connector. Hey, did you hear the inventor of USB died? They had to flip his coffin over and re-bury him. Plus, how many of you have had to have the cable bend just so so it would make a connection and charge? Or had a port that did that with every cable? Doesn’t happen with lightning connectors, they’re literally solid.
Patricia Kayden
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: Depends on the model of iPod. Some were very good, some less good. Didn’t really depend on the cost of the iPod – some iPod Nanos had better DACs than bigger iPods. Again, just depended on what they had room in the budget and their priorities.
But the DAC is an odd hill to die on. I know that at one point the decision was between a processor/component pipeline that could handle lossless audio and a better DAC. Which part of the device do you want making your audio sound worse?
And audiophiles are such a hard group to please because of their reputation for being marks, buying gold-plated connectors for digital signals as if that makes any fucking difference whatsoever. So often what the audio community demanded was kind of dumb, and while I’m not accusing anyone here of that, in general listening to the demands of the audio community is a really good way to put yourself out of business.
Meanwhile, everyone ignored the advances Apple was making in audio file compression and pipelines because it didn’t fit nicely into their pattern of 1-upmanship.
So yeah, sometimes the hardware wasn’t great. Sometimes it was surprisingly good. But Apple wasn’t in the audiophile market. They didn’t care about people who argued over which studio reference headphones were more danceable. They were selling devices that were appealing to damn near everyone else on earth, and far more interested in solving the problems of how to crack the music sales industry open, which is arguably their greatest and most enduring legacy around the iPod. They made it easy for the rest of us out here to buy music and listen to it. It came with some sacrifices that we were willing to make.
Roger Moore
@Just Chuck:
I suspect Pixar built their own stuff from the ground up rather than bringing in a bunch of established IT people. That can be good if you’re trying to do something really groundbreaking, because it means you aren’t tied to old ways of doing things. It can also be terrible, because it means you wind up rediscovering all the ways people before you have screwed up. Nobody believes data loss will happen to them until it’s too late.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Bendghazi is funny. A number of sites tested other phones at the time and they were even easier to bend. That’s continued to this day. From what I’ve been told, those phones saw no increase in warranty claims. They only bent if you tried to bend them.
The whole controversy made the poster of the original video a fortune in ad revenue on YouTube. The GOP wishes they were as good at generating outrage as that guy was.
I thought the single port MacBook was a valid criticism. Apple didn’t continue that model.
Just Chuck
@Roger Moore: I have to imagine they at least brought in experienced sysadmins. Who knows, said admins might have been screaming about the need to do DR drills, but were ignored.
Lessons learned I guess.
Martin
@Roger Moore: That’s a somewhat different set of problems.
I mean, if you’re shelling out that kind of money for equipment, why are you relying on Apple and not the vendor to maintain support? Do you have any idea how much equipment we have where I work where the control app EOLed on Windows 2000, so we now need to build an entire VPN and support stack just for that one machine because it’s unable to be secured any other way? Sure, we can plug the cable in, but the machine will get rooted in about an hour. Again, my first real job was migrating off of hardware that was installed on site when I was 3 years old. It couldn’t integrate with jack fucking shit. But that wasn’t HPs fault. It was bespoke hardware for that project. It was their responsibility to manage their technical debt, not HPs. And they didn’t do it.
I mean, I get that you can’t mandate in your contract with the device manufacturer that they provide software and connectors for computers for the 3 decades that the equipment will probably last, but that’s not Apple or Microsofts fault – it’s the fault of a scientific device industry that can get away with fucking you. Trust me, I’ve spent a lot of time down that path.
Just Chuck
@Martin: The new Macbook Air only has two. Now I haven’t really needed more, and Thunderbolt supports daisy-chaining anyway. But still, I just wish they weren’t both on the same side >:(
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, they really stepped on their dick on that one. At least they will replace them for free outside of warranty. Lot of celebrating when they got rid of that design.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
The real genius behind Bendghazi was the naming. Nobody would remember it today if it didn’t have such a humorous nickname.
And I can understand the thinking behind the single connector MacBooks. Somebody figured the main time you’d be plugging in peripherals was when you were using your laptop as a desktop replacement, in which case you could use a proper dock. In other cases, some kind of dongle would be an acceptable, if kludgy, solution. It’s not that it’s an insuperable problem; it’s that it’s a clumsy solution when the whole point of the design is that it’s supposed to be elegant.
2liberal
that has to do with the incoming email server being pop3 vs imap.
from a google search:
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/email/protocols-pop3-smtp-imap/
Martin
@Roger Moore: Apple certainly does push some things too far sometimes. My biggest complaint about a 1 port machine would be the inability to plug it in from the left or right. I have a 4-port MacBook Pro and I’ve plugged in a USB accessory maybe 3 times in the last 3 years.
So for me, fewer ports would be fine, but I’d be pretty irritated if I didn’t have one on each side of the machine, just to avoid having the power cable cross over me.
Martin
@2liberal: Boy, there shouldn’t be any POP servers still out there.
But you can configure Outlook to leave mail on the server or copy and delete it on an IMAP account. Steeplejack should check his settings. I think it can also be set server level so if your employer for instance doesn’t want to store the mail on their servers, they can force the client to download it.
Original Lee
@Steeplejack: Ha! Until I was forced to change, my CompuServe address had 4 digits in front. We have never dropped AOL because of the huge pain in the butt archiving those old emails off-platform would be.
Robert Sneddon
@Martin:
He had paid a couple of hundred bucks for Aperture, he had (I think) purchased plugins for Aperture that did specialist stuff. Now Apple requires him to pay again for new software, hopefully find equivalent plugins, learn a new interface, build new workflows and with no guarantee they wouldn’t pull the same trick again down the line because they’re Apple and they don’t have to care about backwards compatibility. What he’s doing AFAIK is trying to keep old hardware and an out-of-date OS version working instead.
I recall the disaster Apple inflicted on the video editing world about ten years back when they dumped their industry-leading Final Cut Pro software overnight for the consumer-grade Final Cut Pro X version that had a “publish to Facebook” button but no compatibility with the workflows the TV and movie world had been using until then. FC Pro at that point was a 32-bit package and badly needed an upgrade but kindergarten 64-bit FC Pro X was not what the industry wanted. Tough, “we have your money” said Apple and the creative folks who billed 200 bucks an hour went elsewhere.
cain
@Martin:
Yes, it was only a matter of time – Intel was mostly doing a lot of gate keeping and Apple really wanted platform level control. Arm allowed them to do that and with some really great results.
cain
@Roger Moore:
My hero!! :-) With office 365 – I don’t really need Windows anymore. I pretty much do everything on Linux – and if there is a problem – well I know all the right people to chat with on improving the situation.
Ivan X
@Anotherlurker: you can reinstall iTunes with a free app called Retroactive and you can transfer music off iPod with a paid app called iMazing.
S. Cerevisiae
@NotMax: What’s the word?!!
@NotMax: WordPerfect? Seriously? Good lord I thought that Word 95 was an upgrade from that.