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.
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.
oh that is super cool! Yeah, Microsoft did the OS for Dreamcast so I guess it makes sense that there could have been an attempt to port the WebTV experience to the console. Also, this sent me down a rabbit hole that makes me want to try to get a broadband adapter for my Dreamcast, as dumb as that would be, so thank you for this, but also f-you (affectionate -- I'm genuinely thankful to remember the fun I had as a young teenager with the most underrated video game console of all time).
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.
Ha, nice! For those who don't get the references, "Hello, citizen!" and "Remember, the computer is your friend" are quotes from the tabletop RPG Paranoia, which of course features an all-controlling computer which is decidedly not your friend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Carelon also does preauthorizations for various expensive procedures and such. I’ve had the displeasure of having to try to coordinate between my insurance provider and PCP’s insurance coordinator for authorizing some expensive blood tests. Insurance wanted the PCP to use Carelon, Carelon automatically denied it, the appeals process was designed to be as frustrating and opaque as possible.
(Unlike the OP, I didn’t have the patience to spend two years navigating the kafkaesque nightmare they did. I finally gave up after a couple months of being stonewalled by all the parties who would refuse to talk to one another and me trying to be the middle man. I never did get the blood work done. So much for preventative medicine.)
Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions.
Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.
Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.
Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.
Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.
Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.
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.