WashedOver

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’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 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.

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.

Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

Good luck on your journey!

I recall at one point Windows 10 was going to be the last version of the OS and they would just maintain that. I’m wondering if they said that to get the last of the Windows 7 and XP users to finally move to 10?

Coming up to 16 years since I cut the cord and hardly anyone I know that is younger has cable. It’s internet and then streaming.

My father when he passed in 2013 was paying $160/mth for old HD cable for his old 35" RCA tube set before I bought him a LCD TV that required a upgrade to modern HD channels. He didn’t have internet with that either. So while they were scamming him for this old 480p HD packages he wasn’t alone I’m sure.

I will say at new year’s I was at someone’s place that only had internet and for the group of us he brought out a HD Amazon antenna to watch the ball drop at midnight on local broadcast TV.

The amount of commercials was jarring. I’m not looking forward to when they bring those to streaming services that are currently hemorrhaging billions.

You Dawg, that’s still a big FU! HP for me…

It appears there has been a few that caught this. I was surprised they were so far down the Consumer’s Report list for reliability as it was but honestly I don’t really think of the brand that much as it’s something my parents owned when I was a little kid then they moved onto Toyota and domestics.

It’s not to say others are better. I’ve was surprised by Ford’s decent down the list but not by Jeep’s continued place down there and I’ve owned many Jeeps.

I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?

Reminds me of movies portraying early Apple and the issues with playing media and the adding of more RAM to the first Mac to get through a similar presentation.

The Macs being presented would never have that much memory when sold in the market but it was portrayed as those production models.

Not sure if it really mattered in the end as the consumer received that new Apple experience they coveted. I still recall those Macs were easier to use than the Apple IIc they replaced in my high school at the time.

I wonder how Oprah’s compares? Her’s is so large she was able to get access to a small road that cut across an island closed to the public.

Former President Drink Bleach was a source of many quips or words, good words for those reading along at a 4th grade level…

I’m glad to hear that. Often I’ve driven rental cars and *last time I struggled to find the gear shifter which was replaced by buttons on the dash.

I’ve also seen just a video of a Tesla only new driver struggle to drive a ICE car because it had a gear shifter and didn’t automatically brake. I’m feeling like a dinosaur now…

I just heard about GM this morning in my tech news. I didn’t realize that about Ford too.

I’ve drawn a line in the sand with my vehicles at about 2011 for tech. I love tech and I love cars but just not into the current versions of everything being touch screen controls.

Give me knobs for climate controls, gear shifters, and gauges for the rest. They don’t need all of these computer systems that fail or become outdated as soon as they are released like the manufacturer’s nav systems. We also don’t need them to stop working completely because a sensor failed and can only be replaced by the dealer.

My phone in a holder can be the smartest part of the car for me thanks.