I have the feeling most replies are US centric, assuming sticking with your carrier forever and travelling abroad max once a year.
If you are based in Europe but not the EU, thus not covered by the common telecommunication roaming laws, the 'couple of seconds of swapping tiny SIM cards' become a complete nuisance.
Locally I already use two carriers, one prepaid with my phone nr that is barely used and a data only (unlimited) plan for <100USD/yr. Crossing the border always require me to juggle three SIMs and not to lose any of them in the process. Just last week I missed my tram at the airport because this process.
I also already experienced two SIMs with technical issues needing replacement... this is a technology that should have been abolished / disincentivised by law years ago.
I understand your criticism concerning eSIM UX, these issues are however not due to the underlying technology but purely corporate choices.
The future is obviously getting rid of completely unnecessary SIM slots and the faster we iron out the toothing issues the better.
One of my major buying criteria for my next phone is eSIM support, currently ruling out XIAOMI.
A 'normal internet user' has an email address, the format of which is probably specified in some decades old RFC.
Nothing else but the format should be checked and ANY kind of error should be properly communicated.
I had two situations recently that cost me a substantial amount of time and effort, due to f**ed up email handling and non-communication to the user.
Once I tried to sign up to Pinterest with my personal catch-all domain using the emai [email protected]. Only received random errors no matter what browser and IP I tried, had to contact 'support' (three levels of bots) to eventually find out that 'pinterest' is a reserved word because of which they would not accept my email.
Second situation in a hotel trying to connect to WiFi via a captive portal. Using email [email protected] (which I used to check in and was thus required to use in the portal) the page just refreshed again and again without throwing a user facing error. After significant back and forth at the reception I was educated that I was only allowed to use private / personal emails (meaning GMail). My own domain wasn't personal enough...
Both situations could have been rectified easily if proper errors would have been communicated.
In Europe just using debit cards is perfectly viable in 99% of the cases, however when it comes to car rentals you are still in some locations forced to provide a 'real' credit card.
I write 'real' since most of the FinTechs like Revolut, N26 etc often issue debit cards that may fail in exactly that situation. It doesn't help if your account is flush with 10k USD and a car rental could easily block 2k for claims on your debit card, some will just not accept Revolut & co. Thus I am always forced to carry an emergency backup credit card from a major bank just to be on the safe side...
Very much looking forward to the day some other means of international payment (crypto?) will be generally accepted.
I really like the following visualizations. I arrived at the link from the Swiss newspaper tagesanzeiger.ch for which the visualizations were prepared I believe:
I have also been using mailhero.io since it has first been mentioned on HN.
Lately I do however have issues with mails not being forwarded / blocked at the service. I contacted the developer but as of today no feedback. Obviously this is a free service, which also means that I sadly cant rely on it. I am willing to pay for such a service and will try Maskmail / Othermail, but actually I would prefer an open source solution on an own (micro-)server...
See the original German news report concerning the IETF TLS discussion on making TLS 1.3 compatible with 'passive network monitoring' requirements e.g. asked for by banks etc:
I used the Bloomberg terminal until 2010 so things might have changed since then. The breadth of the data is unrivaled as far as I know, enough examples have been given in the comments. Concerning the data quality I do have to object though, in my area of expertise (mutual funds at the time) Bloomberg data was far from perfect and there were better quality data sources available. I dont doubt that they deliver reliable real time quotes from stock exchanges etc.
Excel integration was generally good, at the time I used the Terminal you had however to decide between two types of applications. The original Terminal which is linked to one PC, i.e. can only be accessed from one specific PC at work and not from home, or the 'Bloomberg anywhere' edition, which I believe was launched as some kind of remote application from a browser and could be used at any PC. The issue with the latter option was that it did not offer Excel integration.
I never liked the UI, some windows application with a lot of 'Terminal' baggage from the 1980's. I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application, not replacing the old 'Terminal' application that current users are accustomed to but to on-board new users on a modern platform with a long term migration path to shut down the current application for good. Otherwise they might be replaced by a newcomer eventually...
https://www.money.net/ seems to be such a potential newcomer, especially considering the much more reasonable price point and the use of current technology.
Cloudberry Backup (closed source, proprietary, 30USD) with Backblaze B2 (0.005/GB/month).
Once it is setup it runs in the background and just does its thing. I just migrated from Cloudberry/Glacier to Cloudberry/B2 and dont see any reason for using Glacier any more. Data is locally encrypted.
Servers that don't log and can't without hard drives, ports physically glued shut.
https://www.ovpn.com/en/security