I almost had to defer a procedure for one of my cats because my vet’s systems were all down. This meant they couldn’t process payments, schedule appointments, use their X-ray machine, or dispense prescriptions. (Thankfully, they had the ingenuity to get their diagnostic equipment online through other means, and our prescriptions had already been dispensed so we didn’t have to reschedule.)
I would imagine it’s the same story at human hospitals too that ran afoul of this. I wouldn’t expect life-critical systems to go offline, but there’s many other more mundane systems that also need to function.
When the iPhone came out, it was perfectly positioned. Smartphones weren’t new of course, but they were clunky devices with tons of compromise. The iPhone was designed to fix a lot of the problems around existing smartphones by having great built in apps, a great browser, and great usability thanks to many novel and intuitive forms of interaction. When it came out it was a must-have device and it solved so many problems for so many people.
For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.
I worked at WebTV not long after the acquisition. I was always impressed with the amount of capability they were able to extract out of such minimalist hardware. Even for their time they had a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM but managed to have a bespoke UX that was even capable of rendering Flash-based sites.
Even in the late 90s there was a community of WebTV hackers. One thing people focused on was the “tricks menu”[1] that required typing in a password to get into it. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about what the codes “meant”. The reality was they were just chosen to be something easy to remember that could be typed with only one’s left hand on those IR keyboards.
Apple’s approach to back compatibility was always give a stopgap to bridge generations. The irony is they would undergo heroics to support that back compat across generations (Mac 68k emulator, Classic environment, Rosetta, Rosetta 2) only to unceremoniously dump that work as soon as they could.
Microsoft can be almost religious about back compat to where long standing bugs won’t get fixed lest they break something (or special compatibility shims have to be built in to maintain those bugs for certain apps). You can’t run any Mac OS software from the 1990s on a modern Mac without emulation, but you can still run plenty of Windows software from the same time period as-is on a modern PC.
Of course one can argue which approach makes the most sense and there’s certainly merits to both.
Lots of memories reading the OP, some good, some not so good. I still think WPF was really wonderful. It had a steep learning curve but it was so versatile and modern in so many ways. It’s a real shame that Microsoft lost all interest in it when moving on to the far inferior (IMO) UWP. WPF could be used for writing huge and complex apps while UWP never seemed to be good for much more than toy apps in my experience.
Thank you for your detailed reply! I have no issues tolerating CPAP, so I’m not the target audience here. I’ve been seeing it advertised pretty heavily as of late and was curious about what the gotchas were.
My DME used to be Lincare was equally terrible. They were awful. They never had replacement consumables in stock, and I had to deal with months worth of delays to get things I needed. That’s why I went to CPAP.com (like OP) for a time. It was annoying having to coordinate with my insurance company to get reimbursements since they didn’t direct bill, but at least I would always have my equipment on time. (As a bonus, it was cheaper than Lincare to boot.)
Carelon also does preauthorizations for various expensive procedures and such. I’ve had the displeasure of having to try to coordinate between my insurance provider and PCP’s insurance coordinator for authorizing some expensive blood tests. Insurance wanted the PCP to use Carelon, Carelon automatically denied it, the appeals process was designed to be as frustrating and opaque as possible.
(Unlike the OP, I didn’t have the patience to spend two years navigating the kafkaesque nightmare they did. I finally gave up after a couple months of being stonewalled by all the parties who would refuse to talk to one another and me trying to be the middle man. I never did get the blood work done. So much for preventative medicine.)
Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions.
Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.
Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.
Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.
Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.
Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.
A million times this. Things seemed more broken than usual in Teams for me today like image attachments not working and such. I just figured it was Teams being Teams until someone informed me there was a service outage degrading things. That’s how low the bar is.
ㅋㅋㅋ is literally “kkk” but it’s shorthand for 크크크 (keukeukeu). There’s also ㅎㅎㅎ (hhh) that shorthand for 하하하 (hahaha). It’s much faster to just mash out those single consonants, sort of like keyboard spam laughing.
The microchips are basically little RFID widgets that are about the size of a grain of rice. The chip can migrate from between the shoulder blades to anywhere else, and the range is really poor - basically near-contact range.
I once tried a pet feeder that would read a cat’s microchip to determine if it would allow that cat to use it. It worked by having an arch with an RFID sensor that the cat would pass under and it would uncover the food for the matching cat. For one of my cats, it worked great because the chip was still between her shoulder blades in the usual spot. For my other cat it had migrated near her ribs and it didn’t work at all.
The problem isn’t the lead itself, it’s the phenomenon of tin whiskering that can happen with some Pb-free solder alloys where metallic hair-like structures grow from the solder and cause arcs or short circuits.
This was a fascinating read, not only for understanding about how Shazam works which is something I’ve long been curious about, but also a great primer on digital signal processing.
I would imagine it’s the same story at human hospitals too that ran afoul of this. I wouldn’t expect life-critical systems to go offline, but there’s many other more mundane systems that also need to function.