He was a part of the story. The book The Founders goes into the beginnings of PayPal, Ebay, the other players, Elon being brought in, and Elon’s origins. A good read and it’s not all about Musk.

I wonder if $45,000 even covers the cost of 1 or 2 of those clean ups?

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!

I’m wondering the same thing for my Ryzen 7 3700X as I’ve seen a lot of press recently for these chips…

I’m impressed. It speaks to the strength of the Apple brand. Meta should benefit if this becomes the next thing despite the differences.

Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it’s required.

Amazing how the companies that “care about employees” don’t care so much these days…

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.

They missed using Access incorrectly with too many users and too large of a database.

I think this was the stock that the eventual “he ducks” crowd came from

I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn’t always seem to work the best for long.

It’s too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.

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.

That’s what they want us to think. /s

Don’t forget the smartest, and the most open freedom speech guy evar!

My Volvo Brick is offended and would like to have a word!

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.

The real truth!

I hear it’s not a lot of fun with the Provincial Government being in on the ground floor of this stuff especially when it comes to ending alternative power generation, not allowing health care professionals refer to vaccines and what they are for publically, and I’m sure the list goes on from there which is fun to endure.

I was referring to my local redneck relations and friends in BC.

In years past I’ve had shorter wait times due to late night injuries from sports or hockey. I’ve always driven to smaller hospitals on the edges of town.

I’m not sure today how quickly that would go. A couple of years ago I broke a bone in my foot during a road trip in northern BC. They treated me in a small town were I was the only patient that day. I was treated by a GP and Nurse on a 2 week rotation from Saskatoon as there was no BC doctors for this small town. They didn’t have the air cast I needed but told me I could deal with that at my ER when I get home to Vancouver.

A week later when I got home I spent 8 hours one day at the local ER before I left due to a crazy medial situation that was erupting in the ER that I felt uncomfortable with, then the next day when I returned it was another 4+ hours waiting to see a doctor for the cast. Then I was able to get a referral to a specialist from there.

Most people would prefer to go to a drop in clinic before ERs but often the clinics are full for the day by the first hour they are open. There’s limits on how many patients they can see. If you have a illness many can’t wait the 2-4 weeks it takes to see a family GP so the walk in clinics (which are becoming more by appointment only) become that next stop before the catch all of the ER. I can’t imagine the BS those sick that need a note for work from a Doctor do.

I had a minor surgery in the summer. There was minor complications afterwards. It was 2 weeks before I could even do a phone consult with the family GP and then the walk in clinics were full. I was lucky to have one of the local clinics have me to wait around at the end of the day to see if they could squeeze me in to tend to my bandage issues. If they didn’t I was looking at a 2-3 day game of trying to find a clinic each morning.

In Vancouver I know someone that went to a thing called “Urgent Care” on a Sunday to get meds for her senior mother that had covid. The urgent care was there to take the load off the ER. After waiting 3 hours in there to see a healthcare person they were told they don’t issue prescriptions there and they would need to go to the ER for the prescription which was another long wait. It’s a good thing she wasn’t too sick /s.

There are issues with the timing of prescriptions, how far out they can be issued, and combined with the time frames it can take to see your GP many end up at the ER as a stop gap measure especially seniors if they lose track of their prescriptions.

There are also huge issues with nurses/care aids doing home care. Often there aren’t enough and seniors that rely on them for in home care need to wait for a day or two extra for those visits when there is enough staff. I saw this with my senior family members first hand just before Covid.

I fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better from here.

I would have to suspect if they haven’t already reduced hours or closed the facility it’s in small towns. They often can’t find enough staff so they close down and residents then need to make drives to the next major city to get treatment.

Often this involves multiple hour drives on icy and snow covered roads this time of year.

That said in the greater Vancouver area it’s not uncommon to wait 8+ hours in the ER for less severe cases. Often the ERs become overflow for drop in clinics that cannot handle the volumes.

Often the ER is the stopping place for those needing prescription renewals too as GPs (if one has one) can be 3-6 weeks out for bookings and I’m told there’s a mismatch to the renewal length maximums.

Ideally, never get sick, old, or need meds and there’s no issues… /s