Category Archives: Technology

Dish Network Customer Service

Or not.

I have been on hold for 37 minutes. At 24 minutes the repeating music was interrupted to tell me that “We are experiencing an extremely high call volume.”

What this means is that Dish has chosen to provide poor service by understaffing their customer service.

As if my time, other customers time, is worth nothing. bo

Happy that we are already using Fubo for the Women’s World Cup because Dish does not carry our local Fox Channel. Dish is on their last legs in this household.

NB: It is now 48 minutes.

Apple Music and Breaking Home Sharing

Apple appears to have killed some of the old with the roll out of all the new music related items yesterday:
Apple removed Home Sharing support for music in iOS 8.4
from all devices except the Apple TV.

    The reason for the removal of Home Sharing for music in iOS 8.4 most likely centers around the licensing agreements concerning Apple Music. It’s entirely possible that Apple doesn’t have the rights to allow content obtained via Apple Music to be streamed over WiFi like Home Sharing requires.

Given the current intellectual property environment this is fine.

But what about  music that was not obtained via Apple Music. For example, all the music I have bought over the years and uploaded into iTunes?  This is and will likely continue to be 100% of my music.

Eliminating all of our music from Home Sharing is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    The obvious solution to the problem is to switch to Apple Music’s family plan, which allows families of up to 6 to access Apple’s catalog of content for $14.99 per month. Home Sharing originally launched in 2011 as part of iOS 4.3.

This may be solution for music sourced from Apple Music. It is not, though, a solution for music sourced from anywhere else.

The obvious solution is to allow Home Sharing for all tracks except for those with DRM sourced from Apple Music and that have not been purchased.

Is this step backward the beginning of the end of the nice ecosystem that Apple had been building?

Forgotten Story of the Original iPhone

The Forgotten Story of the Original iPhone Released in 1998

    And thus, the iPhone technology—or, more crucially, the iPhone name and trademark—passed on to Cisco. Cisco would briefly use the iPhone name to market a line of VOIP telephones under the Linksys brand.

I can remember when the Cisco sales team added this stuff to their best, greatest, you must buy now  list though I think they didn’t like to have to peddle the Linksys stuff.