> There's nothing like WeChat in the west yet. I'm not sure this strong lead is still there.
China has a lot of really impressive technology and innovation happening. An app store inside a messaging app is not what I would point to as groundbreaking from a technology standpoint.
It's not an app store inside a messaging app, it's a mega app. You can do literally everything with it, from home banking to payments to filing for divorce and booking a doctor.
I had XM (before the Sirius merger) and cancelled it >10 years ago. The process was difficult enough that I would never even remotely consider signing up for them again. If it had been more painless, I may have resubscribed at some point. Instead, they've completely poisoned their brand with me permanently.
I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for those - entire industries that I write off because of bad behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions.
I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.
We bought a new car last April. We also had XM radio about fifteen years ago. Much like GP comment, we will never sign up for SiriusXM ever again, so much so that we didn't even bother with the "free" six month subscription with new car purchase...because I don't want to do deal with canceling, or deal with anything to do with SiriusXM. I'll sing a cappella at the top of my lungs before I'll be so desperate as to turn on SiriusXM.
That's right, SiriusXM can't even give us their service, that's much they poisoned that water well.
That’s how I feel about non-Tesla EVs. Well Rivian is good, other than lack of charging network; I’d never get one due to that gap. But legacy manufacturers have burned their bridges.
I'm a massive Disney Parks and Imagineering fan and I'm embarrassed to say I'd never heard of Lanny before today. Really glad to see he's getting the general recognition he deserves.
I wonder what sort of rate they'll get at Mars distance (400 million km)? Psyche's orbit is beyond Mars, so we're likely to find out if the spacecraft stays operational.
My n=1 but yes, it's impeccable. I have Comcast cable internet + TV. Perhaps 10-15 years ago it went out whenever there was bad weather and remained down even after power had been restored after an outage.
I can't remember the last time it went out (outside of power outages). At least 10 years.
Boston area here, and genuinely can't complain for the past 15 years over 3 different cities or parts of Boston.
About 6 years ago I had some spottiness when I had moved, but a call had a senior tech rolled out, it was identified as too strong a signal as I was so close to the head-end in the building, put an attenuator on the connection to get it smack in the middle of its target range and it was perfect after that.
Even right now my bill has dropped from $90 to $80, and again recently from $80 to $75 with no contract, for 1.2Gbps down, 35Mbps up. In which I actually get the full 120% over-provisioned speed all the time. No bandwidth cap in Massachusetts, either. I run my own DNS servers in my homelab, and with the network equipment on UPS backup, even power outages have failed to cause a service interruption in the 4 years at my current location.
My area is going to soon start piloting its municipal fiber rollout soon. That I'm looking forward to as it'll give another option and increase competition. I look forward to having improved options -- likely at lower prices still, since the cities are targeting 1Gbps symmetrical for $50/mo -- one way or the other in the coming year or so.
Not for me. Seems to have short outages every week or two. Had about two weeks recently during which, about half the time, the outages were severe enough to show up on Comcast’s tracker.
Ebbets Field Flannels is basically the only sports merchandise I buy these days but since they were bought by Lids last year, Fanatics now has a partial stake in them too. Thankfully I haven't noticed any change in product quality, but its only a matter of time.
