logbiscuitswave (u/logbiscuitswave)

logbiscuitswave commented on CrowdStrike debacle provides road map of American vulnerabilities to adversaries nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

AceyMan · 2 years ago

/set Devil's Advocate mode:

from the reporting so far, no one has died as a result of the Crowdstrike botch. For my money, that sounds like it's not being used in 'critical industry'.

/unset

There were several 911 service outages included in the news yesterday, so I would definitely say agree those fall into the category. I haven't seen how many hospitals were deeply affected; I know there were several reports of facilities that were deferring any elective procedures.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.

logbiscuitswave commented on The Vision Pro is a flop disconnect.blog/the-visio... · Posted by u/myaccountonhn

afavour · 2 years ago

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logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.

logbiscuitswave commented on What Is WebTV? goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/s... · Posted by u/joebig

filmgirlcw · 2 years ago

I never had a WebTV or MSN TV, but I always liked to watch the stupid infomercial, which I frequently did as a little kid. Then I got a Dreamcast, which had similar technology built in if you used the “internet” disc or whatever (I even had the official Dreamcast keyboard), and I realized how awful the whole experience was in 1999, especially compared to the Windows 98 computer I had in my bedroom, roughly 3 feet from the TV with the Dreamcast.

I do remember in the early 2000s when I was a high school student working at Best Buy, trying to help an older man get a replacement for his WebTV that he had a warranty for. I think we might have still sold an Ultimate TV model for him to get, but I don’t remember the specifics. What I do remember was how much he loved and used that thing, in a way that was fairly shocking to me, given how slow and unoptimized the systems were by then. I’m hoping I was able to convince him to spend his $500 credit or whatever on some eMachines package that would honestly still been a piece of shit, but would have been way better than the primitive low-memory WebTV, but who knows. That man loved that WebTV. That was one of the first times I got to see just how change-averse people can get when it comes to technology, and in retrospect, situations like that one helped me develop empathy for users.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

Fun fact: in Japan there was a WebTV client for the Dreamcast [0]. The very first “Dreamcast” I saw was a Katana dev kit at a WebTV office.

[0]: https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/WebTV_for_Dreamc...

logbiscuitswave commented on What Is WebTV? goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/s... · Posted by u/joebig

heleninboodler · 2 years ago

Andy Rubin was also a very early WebTVer; probably one of the first two or three employees, and was there through the Microsoft acquisition.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

Andy Rubin also was a founder of Danger Inc. which was also eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Unfortunately the acquired talent that brought us the wonderful Hiptop/Sidekick devices were then wasted by being sucked into the Kin boondoggle.

logbiscuitswave commented on What Is WebTV? goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/s... · Posted by u/joebig

miesman · 2 years ago

I worked at WebTV after it was acquired by Microsoft. My officemate was a dev that fixed browser crashes on the box. 90% of them were for porn sites. Which meant that he was paid by Microsoft to visit porn sites all day

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.

[1] http://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/Services/Gallery/...

logbiscuitswave commented on Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries irrlicht3d.org/index.php?... · Posted by u/st_goliath

KerrAvon · 2 years ago

I feel the need to note that Apple’s attitude to compatibility was always more nuanced than Joel portrays it in this post: they did actually try to maintain compatibility in classic Mac OS. They weren’t quite as obsessive about it as Microsoft was, and would sometimes deliberately break with the past to improve maintainability of the OS, but it was not in their interest to break apps and they knew it. To this day, there are hacks even in modern macOS to support badly behaving apps.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.

logbiscuitswave commented on Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries irrlicht3d.org/index.php?... · Posted by u/st_goliath

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

20 years on, and so much of this still resonates with me: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... especially after reading the OP.

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.

logbiscuitswave commented on How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days aphyr.com/posts/368-how-t... · Posted by u/tl

_qua · 2 years ago

It's a lot more involved than CPAP. You need to have a low enough BMI to qualify which excludes a not insignificant proportion of apnea patients. You need to have predominately obstructive sleep apnea since the device can't treat central apneas (where you just stop attempting to breathe). You need to be fit enough to tolerate surgery. You usually need to have an induced sleep study where you get put to sleep with propofol while someone uses a nasal endoscope to watch what part of your airway becomes occluded when you sleep to see if it's even something that can be treated with the device. And then even after all that the device essentially zaps your tongue to make it move and open your airway and for some people they find this intolerable, and the device needs to be turned off. After all that I think it's effective in about 50% of people.

So given all of that, I think it's better to work on trying different masks and other strategies for getting used to the mask before considering the implant.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.

logbiscuitswave commented on How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days aphyr.com/posts/368-how-t... · Posted by u/tl

_qua · 2 years ago

As someone who treats people with CPAP, it’s absurd how many people get them and then don’t use them hardly at all. Yes there’s an adaptation period where you need to get used to using it, but you do need to use it for it to do anything. It doesn’t seem crazy for insurance to want to not keep paying for something that is sitting under a pile of clothes in the corner.

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

How do you feel about the new surgical options like Inspire Sleep as an alternative for people who can’t tolerate CPAP?

logbiscuitswave commented on How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days aphyr.com/posts/368-how-t... · Posted by u/tl

seattle_spring · 2 years ago

I'm a Kaiser member and have to get CPAP supplies through a company called Apria. It has been the absolute most godawful experience I've ever had dealing with a company. Worst than a thousand Comcasts. I genuinely don't understand how you could be a CPAP patient with Kaiser without dealing with Apria?

logbiscuitswave · 2 years ago

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.)