asparagus9001

Today, Gene Fourney is the CEO of IT company TechnologyWest in Denver. I thought this story wouldn't be complete unless I made an attempt to contact him. I emailed him, asking him some questions about NetWorks at the time, but he wasn't interested in reminiscing. "I'm not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks," Fourney wrote. "Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998."

Lmao, what is wrong with this guy? I found this whole article to be humorous and light and it was a fun look back on the old days. Tons of people have an "interest in revisiting it".

Given his location it strikes me that I have a solid chance of actually meeting this guy in person and sussing out why he's such a no-fun prick.

Defederation from this garbage ass instance when?

One of my favorite takes to throw out at random is "The Grateful Dead was the greatest country band of all time".

Now I'll admit I mostly say it to wind people up, but I don't not believe it, either. It hinges on two things: most people don't really think of country music as having bands (even when the singer, of course, has a backing band) and I think Workingman's Dead is a genuinely great all-time country album. American Beauty crossed genres a little harder but it has its bona fide country moments too.

What I'll say is - if you always dismissed the Dead as "17 minutes of masturbation via the electric guitar" (and you're not wrong either), at least give Workingman's Dead a spin. The tracks clock in at standard radio play length and I think it will give you a different perspective. If you still don't like it, fair enough.

Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There's no way around that.

The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.

I finally got out of accounting. It's really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you're a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I'm serious. I would be in favor of requiring every "small business" to be audited on a regular basis because I don't know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.

One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was "he's defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we're not the accounting police and that's why we don't sign his tax returns."

efficiency is when you have to recall your cars the most out of anybody because it's more efficient to get them out the door and in to the ~~suckers~~ customers hands and then fix them later

The funny thing is if you go back to George Bush - they were conceivably on the path to have a permanent majority if they ever got their immigration reform plan done. Latinos y centroamericanos are overwhelmingly Catholic and to various degrees on the conservative side of things, and the Republicans threw it all away to be racist.

I'll be praying for you when the wave of recalls start coming out

I'd really love to know what the percentage is that is or is at risk of truly being lost - this article just completely ignores that piracy exists. Maybe you can't buy game boy games or Metal Gear or Unreal Tournament anymore but the idea that they are inaccessible is just plainly wrong. I guess you probably can't advertise that in business insider (if only to prevent some ridiculous lawsuit from Nintendo) but it changes this number drastically.

I actually do remember stuff from the 90s and 2000s that's truly lost, and it's a damn shame, but the black flag will always provide.

Neat! I found that after some time playing the guitar I was able to fundamentally understand how a violin works. They're very similar instruments, in many ways (especially if you are playing pizzicato on the violin.)

I'm still no good at.... either one of them really, but I find that every time I even spend a month messing around with an instrument I gain a deeper understanding of how they all work, and music in general.

I'm going to assume that 4g works decently enough where you are at this point. Much the same thing happened during the 4g rollout - it was too sparse, the phone spent too many resources hunting for a 4g signal when 3g was right there. You end up with a less stable connection because it's constantly bouncing back and forth.

I think if you look up how to disable 5g on whatever phone you have (which is possible on any phone) and stick to 4g for now you'll find the performance is as good as ever - if not better, with some of the load from other users being pushed to 5g.

I worked for "a major phone company" when 4g was rolling out. It's unfortunate during this period, but I don't know how you prevent it. 5g will objectively be better for 99.9% of users at some point - it might not be now, but everyone has to sell a 5g phone to "future proof" and have another selling feature. I wish the companies would educate people a little more on the rollout but then you're basically telling them "this thing we're selling you isn't really ready yet". And I mean, if you live in a major city, it's working just fine... but not everybody does.

Yeah I dunno. The screen was pretty hard to see to begin with but it didn't seem to follow a pattern you would expect of like... log in > go to some kind of "purchased shows page" (I've never actually used nugs so I dunno exactly) > click on the show > get an error or anything like that. It was more like clicking around in the menu a handful of times and then just going back to youtube and loading up a different part of the same video. It was just super weird and janky.

Remember that time he said he was going to solve the COVID ventilator crisis and sent out a bunch of obsolete overstock sleep apnea machines that nobody wanted and weren't actually useful for the purpose? That was a good time.