I would imagine it’s the same story at human hospitals too that ran afoul of this. I wouldn’t expect life-critical systems to go offline, but there’s many other more mundane systems that also need to function.

For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.

[0]: https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/WebTV_for_Dreamc...

Unfortunately the acquired talent that brought us the wonderful Hiptop/Sidekick devices were then wasted by being sucked into the Kin boondoggle.

Even in the late 90s there was a community of WebTV hackers. One thing people focused on was the “tricks menu”[1] that required typing in a password to get into it. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about what the codes “meant”. The reality was they were just chosen to be something easy to remember that could be typed with only one’s left hand on those IR keyboards.

[1] http://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/Services/Gallery/...

Microsoft can be almost religious about back compat to where long standing bugs won’t get fixed lest they break something (or special compatibility shims have to be built in to maintain those bugs for certain apps). You can’t run any Mac OS software from the 1990s on a modern Mac without emulation, but you can still run plenty of Windows software from the same time period as-is on a modern PC.

Of course one can argue which approach makes the most sense and there’s certainly merits to both.

Lots of memories reading the OP, some good, some not so good. I still think WPF was really wonderful. It had a steep learning curve but it was so versatile and modern in so many ways. It’s a real shame that Microsoft lost all interest in it when moving on to the far inferior (IMO) UWP. WPF could be used for writing huge and complex apps while UWP never seemed to be good for much more than toy apps in my experience.

(Unlike the OP, I didn’t have the patience to spend two years navigating the kafkaesque nightmare they did. I finally gave up after a couple months of being stonewalled by all the parties who would refuse to talk to one another and me trying to be the middle man. I never did get the blood work done. So much for preventative medicine.)

Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.

Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.

Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.

Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.

Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.

I once tried a pet feeder that would read a cat’s microchip to determine if it would allow that cat to use it. It worked by having an arch with an RFID sensor that the cat would pass under and it would uncover the food for the matching cat. For one of my cats, it worked great because the chip was still between her shoulder blades in the usual spot. For my other cat it had migrated near her ribs and it didn’t work at all.

This is one such example of a failure in space due to tin whiskers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_IV

Don’t get me started on the GUS. That was such an incredible sound card for its time.