I've been a windows/linux/mac guy since forever (I do not care at all about the OS, I just care about getting shit done), and Windows is worse than the XP and 7 days, but not by much. A caveat here is that I'm assuming windows people are savvy enough to know about massgrave, and as such remedy 90% of the shit experience with vendors filling up an otherwise acceptable OS with a bunch of garbage.
The only thing in Win11 user experience wise that absolutely drives me up a wall is the new right click menu forcing me to hold shift to get the usable menu instead of the "Win 11 is smart and this new menu UI is easier to use" menu.
Other than that, it feels like win 10 (and 7 for the most part) for anything else that matters (for a normal user).
All of that being said, yes, the experience of a naive consumer buying a windows laptop is awful, but not due to the OS itself, rather the amount of bloated useless shit vendors ship with the installed OS.
Not entirely sure about that. With the coupons/ deals HP does, I landed a brand new HP 17" (17t-cn500) laptop with a intel core ultra 5 225u, 16gb ram and the 1920x1080 fhd screen upgrade for $588 tax included. Obviously not the same form factor as the Neo, but this is also a laptop for my kitchen that will spend most of its life streaming media and displaying recipes. I'm sure you can find something closer to the size of the neo with better specs for a similar price.
For my stereo setup, around $4000 for everything. It's also used for game emulators, kids to watch movies and cartoons, wife to watch whatever she feels like, etc.
Projector (Optoma laser) - $1200
110" powered retractable projector screen - $100
Mid tier PC - $600
DAC (Schiit modi 2) - $180
Amp (Behringer A500) - $100
SVS prime towers - $1000
SVS Sub - $750
All of my music is running off Jellyfin. I have a turntable that barely gets used but that's because I don't have enough space for it to keep it out of the reach/ damage radius of my kids.
You can of course do this for much less if you don't spend 2 grand on the audio part.
No one (corporate) supports it unless it comes enabled by default with whatever compliance service/ plugin used on their sites.
The best combo I've found so far is Waterfox + uBO. I'm sure there are others, but this works well if you don't want to use a chromium based browser.
Just replying for others because this confused the hell out of me until I said it out loud - Dippin' Dots, the ice cream treat you find at amusement parks.
Seniors had the fortunate, and unfortunate now, opportunity to grow up in a considerably more high trust society than we currently live in. I've seen multiple elderly fall for this same style of scam - in some cases it is due to aging and not having all of the mental faculties that were once available, but in many other cases it's because these people lived most of their lives when you weren't conditioned to assume everyone is lying to you until proven otherwise.
In some ways I envy them for living in a time period where immediate distrust wasn't the status quo.
Seniors had the fortunate, and unfortunate now, opportunity to grow up in a considerably more high trust society than we currently live in.
I question that. “Swamp land in Florida” has been a thing since before this retiree was born. Sales of similarly useless land in Arizona. Look up “California City” for another example. Cemetery plots, hmm, I’m sure I’ve missed others. Let’s not get started on car dealers.
I don’t recall a time, and I’m confident my parents will say the same thing, where one didn’t distrust a salesperson by default.
Timeshare scams far predate widespread adoption of the Internet by about two decades, and scamming was far from uncommon before that. Hucksters and charlatans have always been about us, but the level of sophistication today is higher because the tools available are more numerous and it's easier to target multitudes vs. single individuals.
> Comparing the two scenarios, we found that about half of the observed decline in US social trust may stem from: i) ever more unemployment experiences, ii) ever less confidence in political institutions, and iii) a slight but systematic decrease in satisfaction with income.
The government post Great Depression and New Deal was a much stronger regulator as well. They would regularly go after scammers and schemes. That is far less true these days since "regulation" is now a swear word to many people.
They had no term limits, a well whipped supermajority, and an immense amount of political capital. Nowadays, Presidents are term-limited, majorities are transient and fickle, and political capital is diffuse and quickly spent.
I'm not sure it was like that. Back then they had scams. Postal scams, work-at-home scams, beauty product scams, etc.
One possible different might be the internet. Allowing scammers access to so many people makes it easier to fish. There was probably an increase in scamming after the mainstream use of the telephone.
> Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable
Just had to deal with this recently. My gas oven control panel died and one would think to replace the control panel ($300 ish part), but I had my doubts. Pulled everything apart and hooked up a meter to what should be the power coming from the cord, no continuity. Took apart everything on the top two levels of the stovetop to find a thermal switch buried under there that had failed. That thermal switch is forever OOS (was $35 at least for a replacement if you could find one), so I hopped on amazon and bought a 5 pack of microwave thermal safety switches with the same cutoff temps for $6 that fit the push connectors. 10 year old higher end gas oven was fixed for about $1 in parts.
Probably would have been at least $200 from an appliance repair company just for the labor of having to take apart the entire stovetop to get there. Not sure how many people would even bother although it was about $2k new.
Had I been able to work on it for an entire day, it probably would have been around 3-4 hours, but took longer because I had about 30-45 mins a night and then had to clean up so the kids didn't get into the mess.
The oven was down for about a week as a result, but you can make do with an air fryer and a toaster oven for quite a bit.
For an experienced tech I assumed at least $50 for the house call and then a few hours for the disassembly and reassembly.
Yes. No one learned any lessons the last time around with "put everything on the blockchain".
Or maybe they did learn you can make a profit off of hype alone, but it's not making the end user or anyone else's life better as a result. Who cares - line goes up, people get promotions.
Perhaps I'm being particular here, but that wouldn't be a cocktail - it would be a mixed drink (and is called such in the article) based on the definition of a cocktail at the time:
"a stimulating liquor comprised of spirits of any kind, with sugar, water, and bitters included"
I've never thought about this before, but I think there's a good argument that tea technically falls in the category of bitters.
After all, bitters are just an infusion of plant material. What is tea but an infusion of plant material?
On the other hand, bitters generally include many different plants and seems to be quite concentrated, while tea is just one plant and isn't as concentrated.
I guess asking whether tea is bitters is kind of like asking if hot dogs or tacos are sandwiches...
I assume that bitters must have a base of alcohol, but only because I'm not aware of any bitters that don't use alcohol as the solvent to create the extract.
I once went to a class once on bitters-making and learned that they can be made with water, alcohol, or oil to extract the flavors, and that all three versions will result in different flavors because they will extract different compounds in differening amounts.
(Also that some plants will have poisons that might be extracted in one method but not another, so you always want to research first.)
Obviously oil-based bitters aren't going to be compatible with cocktails because they won't mix in most cases.
But you can definitely make water-based bitters, if you want to avoid the flavors that alcohol extracts. But I think you'd then still add alcohol afterwards simply for preservation purposes, since you want a bottle of bitters to last for months/years and not need to bother with refrigeration.
You aren't dealing with the enterprise site at that point - rather a public frontend that uses some enterprise-y backend.
The real fun begins when you get into the actual enterprise frontends for internal use like SAP Netweaver and Sailpoint, which end up being quite a lot like the broadcom experience in the article.
It's a racket. It might not be as common today, but I remember when there were lots of people whose career was based on their SAP expertise, and the reason they got hired was that no one else could deal with that crap if anything went wrong. Once a lot of those people get into big companies, their career is based on preventing their employer from dumping SAP (or equivalent) for something better. So, it's like they have agents inside all the large companies that use their stuff.
The only thing in Win11 user experience wise that absolutely drives me up a wall is the new right click menu forcing me to hold shift to get the usable menu instead of the "Win 11 is smart and this new menu UI is easier to use" menu.
Other than that, it feels like win 10 (and 7 for the most part) for anything else that matters (for a normal user).
All of that being said, yes, the experience of a naive consumer buying a windows laptop is awful, but not due to the OS itself, rather the amount of bloated useless shit vendors ship with the installed OS.