pscooter63

Everyone seems to have forgotten about Synology’s router offerings.  When my AirPort Extreme finally died, I rediscovered the older threads recommending it, and couldn’t be happier.  To be clear, I have no current need to expand with their mesh units, just the base.

That specification table… did anyone bother to proof the format/structure once it was published?

I’ve been in love with Apple’s leather cases since the original SE.  I don’t have grip issues with them, but they slip in and out of my pocket with much greater ease than silicone cases.  Plus I like how their patina ages with use, over time.

Just yesterday, my 365 suite (work) started throwing errors when I tried to open a Word doc.  Turns out I needed to reboot to complete a Windows update, but the OS (AND Office) was too stupid to tell me that.

A while back, my office shortcuts wouldn’t persist in my taskbar after a reboot.  It took six weeks of automatic updates to resolve that,  Just crazy, random things.

So I don’t miss Office after-hours.  This weekend my SO asked me to scan and enlarge a set of tiny device instructions to fit on a letter-sized hard copy, and Pages was MUCH less fiddly than Word ever has been.

ericesque said:

 to make way for the ill-fated Zune Marketplace and other similarly abysmal content delivery products. 

Whoa whoa whoa! Hold on a minute.  Zune Marketplace was absolutely ill-fated.  But “abysmal content delivery product” is a gross mischaracterization.  By Gen 3 Microsoft, in 2008, had competitive hardware for the day and in most respects better software and services than Apple has in Apple Music today.  

Sure, Zune had long since been panned by consumer electronics blogs, but gen 3 hardware was legit.  The desktop software would still hold up against Spotify and Apple Music in terms of usability and vastly outclasses either in style.  The music exploration and recommendations were excellent.  I still miss the playback visualizations.  They had social features baked in and had a web music player that was a first class citizen in their ecosystem. You could cast music between devices before the word “casting” had been coined.  Zune Pass gave you access to unlimited streaming of 14 million tracks and let you keep 10 each month.  While Apple was raising digital downloads to $1.29/track, Microsoft was offering discounted annual subscriptions at $149.  It was the equivalent of buying 10 songs on iTunes each month plus $1.75/mo for unlimited streaming.

Zune lost the battle of mind share, but 13 years later I’m still waiting for someone to step up and revive the golden age of streaming music.

Microsoft did what they always do: aim for a tactical target date, and release whatever is ready, regardless of the actual shape it’s in, come hell or high water. You said it yourself, Gen3… but as you also said, the ship of opportunity had long sailed, and most greeted it with a yawn, no matter how great it might have been technically.

Remember PlaysForSure?  Ballmer rode that horse for all of three years.  What kind of message did that send to the marketplace?  The mud brown Zune didn’t help, either.  Completely tone-deaf.