“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

  • 4 Posts
  • 206 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I’ve been a user since Dos 5.0 and Windows 3.0.

    Today I mostly use Linux Mint on my dual boot laptops and need to convert my main PC over to dual boot Mint next. I rarely boot into windows at home and if it wasn’t for proprietary software at work running only on Windows I would have been done sooner.

    I was mostly able to go from XP to 7 and avoided Vista and 8 altogether. Windows 10 was sort of ok with the ability to go back to a Windows 7 control panel when needed but it always felt half baked and unfinished to me.

    I’ve just not been interested in 11 at all and the tidbits I’m hearing about Co-pilot reminds me of not only Clipit but the forcing of IE/ Edge constantly on user’s especially after every larger update but to mention resetting the default PDF reader to edge. In a work environment of 20 plus shop PC’s I was managing for low tech skill employees it was a pain in the ass chasing down the changes that were not made on my behalf.

    What will be the Co-pilot’s flavor of this new round of BS from Microsoft? The forcing of a cloud account is another headache I don’t want to deal with either.

    I will say Mint just mostly does what I need for my web browsing and general productivity needs without the constant game of trying to keep it the way I want it versus what MS wants for me with every update.

    I’m at the stage of get off my lawn and screaming at a cloud in the sky next. That cloud is MS these days when adding in the annoyances of their Android keyboard *Swiftkey injecting Co-pilot and Bing into my searches. I’ve not played in Office 365 for a bit now but I can only imagine it’s just as bad now.


  • I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.

    Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.

    WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!





  • That’s pretty cool.

    It’s been awhile since I last used a iPhone 13 Pro Max for work but I do recall the constant announcements there with previous models when Apple would announce yet another great “new” feature for iPhone that Android users already had for a year or two at that stage.

    Samsung also made some good media campaigns on the announcements and used the lineups for new iPhones fairly well in their advertising.

    I will say I thought the iPhone 13 camera was pretty goof, the battery life was too, and within the Apple walled garden the texting of videos was nice. The overall user experience for me wasn’t a good fit. I like to browse the web without ads and watch videos without them too. Some of that can be done with a iPhone but it’s clunky and the web browsers are just safari.

    There’s other customizable options I prefer that I can do with Android that isn’t an option yet for Apple but I do know they will be able to at some stage.

    Overall the whole apple vs android has been great for consumers. If it wasn’t for the competition between Apple and the Android products neither group would be as far along.





  • I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn’t stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.

    Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don’t have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.

    Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don’t want to have happen to their systems.

    I can’t blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don’t like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that “want to be different” but actually the same as all of their friends.





  • I’ve seen people argue the real numbers of the decline for China are much worse than they have shared and they may already be past the point of no return like Japan and South Korea. It’s going to be interesting to see how they handle an aging population.

    Asia does have a more recent tradition of kids being the retirement plan so they might fair a little better than places like the US where that is not the norm anymore. The US with their infrastructure crumbling from underfunding and a general lack of care, should provide a good side by side comparison of the ride down with the differences of family versus industry support of seniors.