This is a weird assertion. In major cities, as far as I know, everyone could receive them. And out in the boonies (rural Indiana, for example) there were ONLY UHF channels.
When were you watching? The US All Channel Receiver Act was passed in 1962. Prior to that UHF stations did struggle in the first decade of UHF TV in the US as few TVs had UHF tuners. The situation improved after that as they became standard and more and more people could actually watch the extra channels.
Oh yeah... every day half the mail I receive at work is flagged as "unsafe," and then the banner that tells you this in Outlook presents a button to "manage safe senders."
So I press it and add (for example) OUR OWN JIRA SERVER to the whitelist... which HAS NO EFFECT. Every goddamned day, every Jira message is flagged as dangerous and has blocked content.
I complained to Microsoft, who made up some pathetic excuse about how that's not what that button does... and how every person at my company should contact OUR IT department to have the senders of every E-mail they receive added to some OTHER whitelist, one at a time. Seriously.
The stupidity level at Microsoft today isn't funny. It's sickening. It's also offensive, wasting paying customers' time to the tune of thousands of man-hours daily (and that's probably just at my company).
I think C# and .Net are objectively better to use than Java or C++.
But the tooling and documentation is kind of a mess. Do you build with the "dotnet" command, or the "msbuild" command? When should you prefer "nuget restore" over "dotnet restore"? Should you put "<RestorePackagesConfig>true</RestorePackagesConfig>" in the .csproj instead? What's the difference between a reference and using Nuget to install a package? What's the difference between "Framework" and "Core"? Why, in 2026, do I still need to tell it not to prefer 32-bit binaries?
It's getting better, but there's still 20 years of documentation, how-to articles, StackOverflow Q&A, blogs, and books telling you to do old, broken, and out of date stuff, and finding good information about the specific version you're using can be difficult.
Admittedly, my perspective is skewed because I had never used C# and .Net before jumping in to a large .Net Framework project with hundreds of sub-projects developed over 15-20 years.
I attended one of the evangelist roadshows Microsoft put on when they announced .Net, back in the late '90s. We were developing Windows applications and using an SQL Server/ASP back-end.
We walked out of there saying WTF WAS all that? It was terribly communicated. The departing attendees were shaking their heads in bafflement.
I'm impressed that it has stood the test of time and seems to be well-done; I've never had occasion to use it.
Thinking back, you're probably correct, but it seems like they where actively trying to create something good back then. That might just be me only seeing the good parts, with .Net and SQLServer. Azure was never good, and we've know why for over a decade, their working conditions suck and people don't stay long, resulting things being held together by duct tape.
I do think some things in Microsoft ecosystem are salvageable, they just aren't trendy. The Windows kernel can still work, .Net and their C++ runtime, Win32 / Winforms, ActiveDirectory, Exchange (on-prem) and Office are all still fixable and will last Microsoft a long time. It's just boring, and Microsoft apparently won't do it, because: No subscription.
Swift is OK, but with the introduction of SwiftUI, we see some hypocrisy.
We were all told to "prefer structs" over classes in Swift, but structs are always passed by value.
We're also told to maintain "one source of truth" (which I'm sure a lot of us did anyway). But you can't do that when you're copying stuff all over the place.
So now what? I got so sick of trying to figure out how to pass structs into views for modification by the user that I made everything a class. What a relief. Now I could get back to work on functionality instead of constructing absurd gymnastics to get altered data back from a view.
I find the whole "structs are passed by value, classes by reference" thing hokey as hell and poor style. People reading the code don't know if the called function can change the passed-in object or not; they have to go see if it's a class or a struct. Lame.
From what I've seen in forums where people asked this, the answer is: nothing.
I only have two devices providing material to my media system: a Shield Pro and a Blu-Ray player. The Shield is the critical element, used daily for streaming and playing local media from a USB-connected SSD.
I hope Nvidia revises the Shield with up-to-date hardware and maintains its flexible nature. It's a pretty cool product. The biggest shortcomings I've encountered are the fault of moronic media companies. Great example: Spectrum (the cable company). These dolts have an Android application with which subscribers can watch content. But it doesn't run on Android TVs. It's called "Spectrum TV." It's so gallingly stupid that I hate rewarding them with money every month.
Oh, and I love how they addressed the goddamned Netflix button. If you so much as LOOK at the remote, Netflix launches in the middle of whatever you're watching. I actually removed the button from the remote entirely.
With a SofaBaton remote and some button reassignments using the Button Mapper app, everything is just right now, and pairing a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard was easy.
This is a weird assertion. In major cities, as far as I know, everyone could receive them. And out in the boonies (rural Indiana, for example) there were ONLY UHF channels.
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