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Author | Topic: Saying Goodbye to Keurig | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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There are two appliances I'm very attached to that both became famous. One is TiVo, which did not become ubiquitous, and the other is Keurig, which did.
I don't know why TiVo didn't become more successful right from its beginning at the end of the 1990's, but it didn't. I like it a lot. Eventually they got bought by Xperi which is now working much harder licensing the technology to others than they are improving the TiVo box, and the latest incarnation is the first to take a solid step backwards by changing the famously wonderful user interface. But it doesn't matter because the product category has run its course anyway. There's no longer a need for TiVos. In the day it was wonderful having your shows recorded and organized in nice lists that you could watch whenever you wanted. If you really liked a show or movie you could save it forever. I still have the TiVo recordings of the last two Patriots Super Bowl wins and all the seasons of The Good Place. But now there's no need for this recording capability as long as you're willing to pay for streaming. Want The Good Place? All four seasons are on Apple TV. Want to watch M*A*S*H from season one on? It's on Hulu. And so forth. I use my current TiVo far less than I did the first. Keurig has traveled a similar path of providing gradually diminishing satisfaction. I first encountered Keurig in the workplace, again around the end of the 1990's, and as soon as it became available for the home we got one. We bought tons of K-Cups, and since we were both working and could afford it, and since we're not coffee aficionados, we were very happy. Our first wore out after some years so we bought another, and then I took one to work (because work had stopped providing free Keurig coffee) and we bought another for the home. And then I retired and we decided to economize and stop buying K-Cups, which cost 50 to 75 cents each. They had always promised they'd get cheaper, but they never did. We decided to instead buy ground coffee and use reusable K-Cups. We found ground coffee we liked that only cost 5 to 10 cents a cup (remember, we're not coffee aficionados - we're not picky). And then the old Keurig failed and we bought a new one. The new one had a new "feature" - it could detect when you weren't using a genuine Keurig approved K-Cup. Some reusable K-Cup manufacturers made versions that could fool the new Keurigs, so we were still happy, though the new Keurig could be a bit picky about them. If they weren't positioned exactly right or if the top was wet or if the sensor got dirty the Keurig would reject them with a fairly friendly but after too many times very annoying "Oops" message. We finally had enough when the seal for the needle that sticks through the top of K-Cup started to leak. It wasn't exactly the seal that was the last straw, but a new seal can only be had on E-Bay for $37, and we feared buying a new Keurig and finding that the latest generation is even more picky about the K-Cups it allows. So last week we bought a Cusinart K-Cup brewer and it works great. It doesn't care what kind of K-Cup you use. So goodbye to Keurig. It was a nice run, but you wore out your welcome. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Tanypteryx writes: We recently signed up on Apple TV so I could watch Foundation. I was disappointed and will probably drop it before the next season. I read the Foundation trilogy in 1965, so while I realize the current Foundation series doesn't follow the books all that closely, I don't recall the books in enough detail to care. It's okay and I'll watch the next season. Invasion was another on Apple TV whose reach exceeded its grasp, but again it was okay and I'll watch the next season. I'm looking forward to Westworld season 4, Mrs. Fletcher season 2, Russian Doll season 2, and Upload season 2. I wish The Man in the High Castle hadn't ended. I'm in the middle of The Underground Railroad, but it's harsh and violent and hard to take and I only watch an episode every so often. I keep at it because I do enjoy shows that are done well. It's very annoying that seasons have declined from 30 episodes to 20 to 10 and 8 and even sometimes 6. Can't they keep a story arc going for more than a few episodes anymore? --Percy Edited by Percy, : Add a show.Edited by Percy, : Typo.
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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ringo writes: No, I'm not a Luddite. Nor am I a faddist. No, of course not. You're a Canadian! So was my mother, and she wasn't yet naturalized when I was born, so...hey, countryman! Actually, you have to file to claim your citizenship and I haven't done that. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
For decades I've been trying to remember the name of the show with the spaceship that I watched as a kid (we also had one channel in central NH). Nice to finally know. There are a bunch of episodes on YouTube, here's one:
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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User interfaces are getting worse and worse not because the designers are sinister cynics but because they're children who grew up in the age of "just keep clicking until something works, don't try to make sense out of it."
Not that I'm cynical... --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
We have one. It'd be a bit less convenient because it makes small cups, and it has no water reservoir.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
I was working for Digital when they made the VAX 11/780 announcement in the fall of 1977, in fact worked adjacent to the VAX hardware development team which was completely wrapped up in security. We were barely aware there was a lab on the other side of the wall.
We used DecSystem 10/20 for timesharing back then, but by 1980 or so they'd been replaced by VAX 11/780's. In the early VAX's my recollection is that PDP/11 was not an emulation mode - the VAX 11/780 could actually run PDP/11 programs native. That's why "11" was in the name. If you had to run PDP/11 programs in emulation mode you might have been using a more recent model VAX than the 11/780. Debugging programs was a new world when we moved to the VAX's because instead of looking at PDP-11 object code (16 bits) or DecSystem 10/20 object code (36 bits) which I had years of familiarity with we were looking at VAX 11/780 object code (32 bits) which was completely foreign to us. One of the great innovations that happened around then was when compilers began putting file and line information in the objects. I was still figuring out VAX 11/780 object code when debugging programs when suddenly the high-level code feature was released and I never had to look at VAX 11/780 object code again. The debugging program on PDP-11's and DecSystem 10/20's had been around for years and was called ddt (it stood for Dynamic Debugging Tool, but we liked the pun on insecticide), but VAX's debugging tool was called something else, I don't recall the name. AbE: Maybe it was dbx. --Percy Edited by Percy, : AbE
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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dwise1 writes: When I complained about that on-line, somebody had the gall to say that there was no need for a user's guide because the main purpose of these devices is the experience of exploring and discovering how to do things. And that I was making a big mistake by depriving myself of the joys of that experience. F**k that s**t! The young mind is different. No matter what happens it treats it all as just interesting stuff. The attitude that older people have of "this is something routine I've done a million times, so get in, get out, and move on" hasn't developed yet. Some stuff I got used to as an adult kid I still haven't abandoned. The control and caps-lock keys used to be in opposite positions. I use the control key all the time everywhere, so I swap the control and caps-lock keys back to where they used to be before IBM's 1984 swap somehow took over. One article accurately reports, "Some people still angrily complain about it to this day," if I'm any indication. I'll complain angrily again now. Who in their right mind would position something as obscure as the caps-lock key on prime real estate? It hardly ever gets used. Stick it back in a corner - how about the same corner it occupied nearly forty years ago? I use Emacs where the control key is central, and I map all keys on any machine I use to Emacs keys. Apple has many Emacs keys predefined. The damage wrought to apps on phones and tablets with each release has no remedy that I can see. I had a large backlog of podcasts in iTunes, but podcasts went away in iTunes on Windows, and I don't know where they are now on my Windows machine. But my iPhone has the podcasts in the podcast app - how they got over there I have no idea. Apple's Music app keeps changing, perhaps in a good way, but who can tell because they make it more confusing at the same time. And while some apps change with each release, others remain stubbornly minimally functional for years and years. Why can't Apple's FaceTime a) let you zoom in and out of an individual tile; b) let you independently position each person's tile if you want; c) turn off a person's tile if you don't want to see them; d) display screen shots or images (you *can* share your screen and display them that way); g) show a video. FaceTime will display the shutter button even when no one's tile is selected and no picture can be taken. There's an icon on the little image of myself that I have no idea what it does - touching it does nothing except reverse the shading of the icon. My wife's iPhone doesn't have this icon. Yes, we're running the same iOS version. I've got a 12, she's got a 13. But the specifics aren't important. I only mention these details to show how confusing and inconsistent a simple app like FaceTime is. In different ways, the same is true of many other apps. Software quality was better when most consumers of software were also computer professionals, but now most consumers are unfamiliar with software and either don't really care if only some of the stuff they try works or blame themselves when it doesn't work or both. If they understood that most of the problems they have with their phones, tablets and computers were the result of poor design and poor quality of implementation and inadequate testing they might feel differently. I use IDrive for backups. A while back it would daily display a popup saying, "You have not backed up for 782 consecutive days." I finally called about it and was taken through an arcane sequence of steps. I quizzed the guy about why this would have any effect on the popup, and he was honest. He said there was no reason it should be related, but engineering had told them this made the popup go away. And it did. Maybe the next release will fix it permanently, maybe not. Who knows. Chrome just made a [sarcasm]wonderful[/sarcasm] change some months ago. Used to be when you dragged a link to another Chrome window it would open in that window. Now it opens in a new tab. Don't like the new behavior? Tough, there's no setting to enable the old behavior. It you want to drag a link to a specific tab you have to drag it to that tab at the very top. Dragging to a tiny tab (I often have 30 or 40 tabs open, so the tabs get tiny) instead of an entire window is a real pain and I rarely do it, so I put up with the new behavior, as much of a pain as it is. Sometimes I'll use Safari instead because it still behaves rationally. Software. Pah! I've got to go now, I'm installing more bugs in the board software. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Just a brief comment. They sound interesting and I'd like to give them a try, but I couldn't find any of them available for free on any streaming service I have, and I have Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Hulu, Disney, HBO and Paramount. I feel tapped out streaming-wise and am not willing to shell out more money. If anyone knows where any of them might be watched for free please let me know.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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Yes, found it on Amazon, thanks. Weird it didn't show up the first time I looked, have no idea what I did wrong.
--Percy
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