Your story reminds me of working pre-pandemic, and going on an afternoon walk with a coworker. He was into pokemon go and he wanted to attend an event (raid?) before we walked. I followed him down the street where he stood at a certain deserted spot and waited. All of a sudden, people just started appearing, some from cars, some coming from between the bushes, some walking down the street.
the raid started, they all silently stared at their phones, and at some point they all looked up, looked around and walked away.
all mostly in complete silence.
who knew this was a precursor to more of the same, maybe throughout society.
I’ve only ever used Outlook when forced to by an employer and I find it a dreadful application to use. I would guess that most people prefer something else. I would imagine that most people tend to stick with the default email app on their computer (no idea what that is on Windows as I’ve managed to avoid having to use Windows for 7 years now).
The default mail app on Windows is now called Outlook for Windows, no relation to the Outlook in Office (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot), and it's a significantly worse barely functional webview. It also replaced the entire Calendar app, which was decent.
Yes the do have an one time purchase option. You get 5 years of updates but no new features. I have it on my home computers. But new features are not a big deal since the differences are not big anymore (just like mobile phones.)
I kind of wonder if we can also fix the "every device has internet access" problem.
All consumer routers let anything out. Your TV, your refrigerator, your microwave oven have unfettered access to the mothership - and data collectors/advertisers.
I think with 5g and 6g these devices might be getting other channels, and the two combined will just give us a huge proxy for the routers they are banning.
> I had deleted the app when they announced that as a paying subscriber I would be getting ads.
I completely cancelled Prime when they sent that email. To hit me with a monthly charge when I’m already paying a yearly fee just felt so cheap. I was already pretty unhappy with the direction Amazon had been heading; that email was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
My Amazon purchase volume dropped by 60% the following year, and another 10% the year after that. My goal is to get it down to 0, or at least in the single-digits of yearly orders.
They just doubled the "get out of watching ads" fee. Also, most of their good content is now in the "Now playing" section, where you can't seek around or choose episodes. Of course, it also has unskippable ads, even if you paid to remove them.
I strongly recommend purchasing a USB bluray player + then buying shiny metal disks to feed it (or finding your public library, of course!)
Used + overstock disks are << $10. I go to the store and grab what I want. I typically leave with about 30 movies / TV seasons for $100. They're far higher quality than the content that is included with amazon prime, and typically cost about 10% as much as the "buy movie" price for the same film.
A difference between cable and streaming is that cable has DVRs that let you skip commercials if you want, while streaming tech introduced unskippable ads.
> cable has DVRs that let you skip commercials if you want
The last time I had DirecTV several channels had managed to have unskippable ads in recordings. Paramount was egregious with this and was the first channel I saw with this "feature" enabled.
for example I read kindle books on my phone in dark mode (white text on a black background). Having the brightness all the way up isn't fully bright white text, it is more like brightish grey.
To get bright text to read in bright environments, I set the kindle app to black text on white background, then use accessibility to invert colors. I get noticeably brighter text on a black background.
"SmolNet, or Smallnet, is a movement focused on small-scale internet networking that promotes low-resource servers and user communities, serving as a counter to the centralized and bloated nature of the World Wide Web. It includes alternative protocols like Gemini and Gopher, emphasizing simplicity and community engagement."
the raid started, they all silently stared at their phones, and at some point they all looked up, looked around and walked away.
all mostly in complete silence.
who knew this was a precursor to more of the same, maybe throughout society.
reply