jonbiggums22

A couple years ago I stayed at an AirBnB and there was an old rotary phone in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I found it was merely placed there as an antique curio and wasn't hitched up with service. I felt a little cheated honestly.

In my case I turned driver updates off since they kept installing a broken video driver that left me with black screens on boot.

Youtube may have exasperated the situation, but gear obsession in hobbies certainly predates even the internet, much less youtube. It seems kind of natural, mastering your tools takes time and maybe talent. Buying them just takes money.

I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall:

Peter: Ain't it a crime.

Stephen: What?

Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.

The only XP had over 2000 IMO was 64-bit support. Which isn't even part of the XP most people are talking about since it was an uncommonly used variant based on server 2003.

If you'd been using Windows 9x you'd appreciate XP just because the install didn't rot itself to pieces every 6 months from DLL hell. But the rise of internet downloaded crapware and malware managed to keep your reinstall skills sharp during that era for another reason.

Certainly better than where we are now but I never really loved it. It was to heavy for me, the search doesn't find files that are there reliably and the update system system sucked. Windows 7 always developed disk sucking WinSxS folder cancer, a particularly fatal disease during the early SSD era where space became a premium again.

It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.

I think it was just that the ethics legal moat creation strategy had failed and the ethics teams no longer served any purpose to company leadership.

Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.

Don't forget selling the driving data to insurance companies, private investigators, law enforcement, etc.

Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore.

VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.

The floppies were actually a bounty since they were rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids, which he instead kept in his office reached for when he needed to copy that floppy.

Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around.

The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text.

The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.

I remember a Yahoo article where they supported getting rid of their testers as the metrics showed the number of new bugs was greatly reduced after. It left me wondering why they were paying those testers to put the bugs in the software in the first place.

Works for the engine size limits. Aren't all 2litre engines actually 1950cc?

And then there is storage/parking and maintenance cost and time. This is really why the SUV is so popular in the US. It has OKish cargo space for dump runs, family trips, etc even if it is oversized for the daily commute. But the base cost of a vehicle is so high you might as well get one that can get all the jobs done.

This is why I think people ending up locked into vendor implementations of passkeys will be a thing. We had a totally open standard, TOTP, and there were still (somewhat successful) efforts make it non-standard like the Symantec VIP Access you mentioned. How many authenticator apps do I have to install? I was hoping for one!

FWIW when I was researching this for my own accounts I believe I saw in passing that someone had figured out a way to extricate the TOTP secret from VIP Access to use in a standard TOTP app. I didn't look into it much though since none of my current accounts require it and it just seemed something to avoid.