ICQ is closing down. It was really at its height in 2000 and that is when we integrated ICQ into Opera. We made a small (5k) client and it worked really well.
AOL had purchased ICQ and they were concerned about MSN taking users from them by connecting to their service, so they stopped supporting 3rd party clients. We contacted them, to see if they would make an exception for us, but they did not.
They said that if we removed our 5k client, we could maybe discuss bundling their client, but it was bigger than Opera, so that was not going to happen.
@jon Another perfect example of companies ruining an experience by trying to lock you into their ecosystem. Makes me love #Vivaldi even more than I already do.
@jon This was to be expected. First AOL dug a grave for the messenger, and now MailRU and VK have started doing everything to lure and bury ICQ in that grave. ICQ will finally be allowed to die in peace after all the bullying with unnecessary features and silly parodies of Telegram and WhatsApp
@ai6yr their 'custom date' interface is very buggy too, which is frustrating. Sometimes you need to cut out the last week or month of results when researching something.
As a related aside, some current event article I posted today had the preview here come up claiming it was from 1969. lol.
Good interview with Mehdi Hasan on the launch of his new media outlet, Zeteo, the end of his MSNBC contract, and what bought him to his current situation.
"The Israeli government is very good at putting out a spokesperson. Regev is one of the smoothest operators. Probably one of their best media performers. And that was, for me,” Hasan says, clapping and rubbing his hands together, “a challenge.”
3D illustration for a 2006 issue of the Dutch ComputerTotaal magazine, about parental supervision regarding MSN Messenger, which was a popular messaging application at the time.
I made the characters in the style of the MSN icons.
@metin That's really neat. I just looked up ICQ and apparently it's still going which is kind of impressive. The Web Design Museum has iterations of their website over the years https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/icq-1999
Ok, we’ll be watching the #eclipse from Shelbyville, Indiana (#GEZ) tomorrow. A nominal fee includes lunch. Probably spend the night in Madison (#MSN) prior to returning to Minneapolis (#MIC) Tuesday.
I suppose the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Web team are not (yet) in the Fediverse, but I hope they one day fix this problem. MSN has a similar issue. Or maybe it's a bug in the Mastodon software, but I see a lot of news story shares in the Fediverse that look like this.
Did you know that #MicrosoftEdge's new tab page relies on msn.com so heavily that when you set #MSN#unsanctioned in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps you can't use the new tab page anymore?
I used to use the Group Policies without Intune, but I learned that MSFT likes to set some of those policies I use obsolete and break my settings that way - these were usually related to blocking the MSN based "news", so I had to switch over to Intune which so far more reliable.
I think now I know why I experience this "static" new tab page without anything else than the lake with edge logo and the search bar.
It is because #Pihole has blocked the msn.com domain and all of its sub-domains, so #MicrosoftEdge has to fall back to a static page, which is chrome-search://local-ntp
@mjgardner There is a conscious attempt to get rid of #Rlang and the script is highly reminiscent of #perl. The push for #Python is kind of nuts given that the language is kinda slow and it shines only because of certain libraries written in #clang.
Going back to #perl, I will reiterate the same points I 've made in other fora: it needs a strong type system as an ad-on, a tabular data type that is more space efficient than an array of arrays to adapt to our #bigdata era.
#AI#GenerativeAI#MSN#Microsoft#Canada#Ottawa: "Late last week, MSN.com's Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the "cannot miss" attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft's AI model wrote, "Consider going into it on an empty stomach."
Titled, "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!," (archive here) the article extols the virtues of the Canadian city and recommends attending the Winterlude festival (which only takes place in February), visiting an Ottawa Senators game, and skating in "The World's Largest Naturallyfrozen Ice Rink" (sic).
As the No. 3 destination on the list, Microsoft Travel suggests visiting the Ottawa Food Bank, likely drawn from a summary found online but capped with an unfortunate turn of phrase."