> My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.
I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
I don't think the assumption that SMS is enough is valid anymore.
My wife's elderly aunt has a flip phone that can receive SMS but not MMS. We just went thru an "identity verification" procedure with a major bank last week that sends MMS, not SMS, and could not reach her flip phone.
The whole ordeal was a huge pain in the ass and if my wife and I weren't there to help her it would have been completely impenetrable to her.
You will be the "boomer" some day. I wish people had more empathy.
An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.
I used to laugh about the 'picture signs'; like the universal nose in book sign that means library. Or the airport logo on the exit sign on the freeway.
Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.
Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.
When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"
Well context is important and this was in directly response to the (spurious strawman) claim that if you can't spend $500 on a phone then you are excluded from society.
Even on NES a lot of games use CHR-RAM so arbitrary bitmaps are at least possible, though only a small part of the screen is unique without some rarely used mapper hardware. Zelda and Metroid mostly just use this to compress the graphics in ROM, Qix is a simple example with line drawing, Elite is an extreme one.
I made a demo of the Mystify screensaver using the typical 8KB CHR-RAM. Even with a lot of compromises it has pretty large borders to avoid running out of unique tiles. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1_MymcLeew8
I know the RS-25 engines[0] (aka SSME, Space Shuttle Main Engine) were "reusable" in an academic sense (needing a ton of refurbishment after each use) but it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean and it makes it hard for me to feel good about the Artemis program. It's irrational but it makes the kid who loved the Space Shuttle (which, itself, was a political pork barrel and a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of program) sad.
> it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean
They are functionally obsolete. Chances that we’re still using SLS in ten years is slim. Any resources going towards refurbishment are better spent on Starship and Blue Moon.
And all of that reuse was so expensive that it set back reusable rocketry for decades as the common wisdom said it was uneconomical - even after it was demonstrated that you could have reuse without expensive refurbishment.
I'm reminded of Ian over at Forgotten Weapons which has presented several rifles which were converted from the old thing to the new thing, say bolt action to semiautomatic.
Each time the government looked at existing stock, thought "hmm surely we can save money by refurbishing these old firearms".
And just about each time they at best ended up with a subpar weapon that cost as much as a brand new model designed from scratch. And often something which cost way more...
The idea looks better on paper than it usually is.
Microsoft 365 is a reasonable alternative. It's easy to buy and even tiny Customers can get a degree of real human (read: tier 1 is unhelpful contractors that you have to fight thru) support.
It's still repugnant to me, as compared to self-hosting, but I would never self-host for a greenfield SMB Customer today. The economics don't make sense and the talent pool of knowledgeable and reasonable sysadmins is dwindling by the day. (I wouldn't want to make a Customer so beholden to me if they were willing to pay for it.)
I miss being able to spin-up an on-prem email server on a box with reasonable hardware redundancy, some external USB disks to rotate for off-site backup, a UPS, a couple consumer-grade "business class" Internet connections, and a contracted "backup MX" to catch email in the event of an outage. It was a good enough for a lot of small SMBs who had a physical office, and was cheap.
It's not. Support is about on par with Google for SMBs. I had a client get locked out of the admin panel for about 2 weeks before getting through with support.
The difference is that everyone's account kept working during that time so business kept on as usual, just the admins couldn't change anything.
The sad thing is I don't think anyone did anything unusual and it was some kind of bug of Microsoft's end.
Good to know. I'm only dealing with 7 M365 tenants regularly and we have "break glass" accounts in each one (not tied to Customer's SSO, MFA unrelated to other admins, email address outside the tenant) to try to minimize the possibility of getting locked out, but I know it's always a possibility.
Moving the MX for the domain and limping along from backups is my worst-case contingency but given that there's no place other than M365 to restore the backups to it isn't a very good strategy.
The economics make perfect sense once "30 days of a suspended business email with no timely recourse" shows up as a line item. That USB disk and a UPS is looking pretty cheap right about now.
OP really should be moving the MX somewhere else and going into disaster contingency mode. It sucks, but there's a level of survival there they should be willing to accept, at least temporarily.
Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
My "callsign" at work for many, many years was a result of the entire C-suite hearing me laughing about Microsoft Critical Update Notification Tool and sending a manager down to figure what the hell was going on in the test lab.
> "Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
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