Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day…

Regardless, I switched off brave because I was tired of getting ads in the browser. Been using ff for a while now

Yeah … I wasn’t sure when I wrote it and didn’t think it’d matter tbh

Not only for iPhone, but for Mac as well. It’s easy to install bsd on a machine when you have access to the best hw engineers and documenters on the planet.

Thank you, exactly

Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI

For phone calls that’s just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.

There’s an old saying in computing. “you improve usability by taking away options and features” apple didn’t necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it “popular” by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they’ve made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn’t want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn’t want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn’t invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn’t invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They’ve done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

“Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows”

I’ve tried this. Guy next to me was playing a video game on full blast that I can hear over my noise cancelling headphones. I asked him if he could turn the sound down.

He said “F you! This is my console. I do what I want! You’re the only one complaining so shut the f up”…

Right, I get that. I’m just thinking that the song isn’t about racism. Other than the fact that he’s black and has the black man’s blues. If the song was talking about his life as a black man or how he ended up a bum that would be different. But it’s the way a child sees a black guy with killer guitar playing skills. Very innocent

Call me naive, but I always thought Curtis Lowe was about society not respecting bums who play good music for beer/wine money aka the starving artist. Even though the protagonist loved him as a mentor/entertainer.

Racism or the fact that he was black wasn’t the main factor in the issues the protagonist is singing about, just that he happened to be black… though I’m betting it didn’t help the way people/protagonist’s mom viewed the two of them spending so much time together

I always say him as an inspiration to Bleeding Gums Murphy and Lisa in the Simpsons.

Just my 2 cents. I agree with the rest of your list though.

Similarly, I dated a woman named Annie a few years back. Everyone of my geekier friends, when I introduced her, asked, “are you ok? Are you ok Annie?”!

The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.

I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.

I end up just pirating it myself.

Not after we demonstrate the power of raising prices princess!

Hmmmmm. Let’s see here.

People don’t like cable, because it’s too expensive and inconvenient

People start pirating

People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.

People don’t like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.

People start pirating again…

I wonder what happened?!?!

Similar. MacBook pro from mid 2014 for personal stuff

Life well lived for me is the following.

1. My life ends in a comfy bed surrounded by friends and family having died before becoming a burden on them.
2. I’ve made a positive impact on those around me
3. I’ve left my children/family in better financial shape than I was born into (which, frankly, was pretty good already)
4. I traveled and saw what the world has to offer

Yeah, life is meaningless, and we’re one small speck in a universe so big it breaks our brains to think about and we only last a similar amount of time in regard to the vastness of time itself. . … so I might as well make myself and the people around me feel good

As far as the short term? Have a good conversation with friends/family, go for a walk through a nearby forest.

1 Pi 4 for two things

1. Download media over a persistent VPN that auto-moves to my NAS
2. Fun play toy as a dev box to test new tech and try to stay current and keep my Linux skills sharp since I use osx at work

1 ends up blocking 2

I really want to buy like 5 or 6 with temp sensors to put around the house to see how good my heating/ac are working, and confirm wifi strength

I was 14 and just got a cable modem when Napster came out. I just got introduced to modern music, had no way to pay for it other than asking my folks. Let’s jump on the pirate ship!

Now I’ll let you do the math on my age, I have very stable income, and a fair amount of disposable savings, and I still pirate pretty much my ears will be hearing. Plex has equal or better tools for watching/listening than every other service I’ve tried (shuffling episodes is my favorite)

I go to concerts, watch movies in the theatre, read physical books and support creatives in other ways… so I feel different about that…

I also started noticing this when itunes came out. You could only listen to music YOU PAID FOR on devices you’ve authorized. Then soon after I saw this, a friend was down on his luck but had a very good and varied cd collection. He started selling them to second hand shops and his friends.

I ended up seeing this dichotomy and thought to myself… this sucks. Let’s just pirate it…

I should note the amount of physical unread books I have on my shell are similarly rationed to the amount of music I haven’t listened to or movies I haven’t watched yet that I’ve also pirated