Opinions expressed are my own, and not those of any employer, whether past or present.
- Not a lawyer, but for the last 20+ years I've dragged around (or recreated) a normal.dot file that has all the styles I use with the keybindings I like.
The productivity boost you get from having a consistent environment is insane. You never need to care about the ribbon, your documents look good, and your mouse/keyboard ergonomics are wonderful with a good normal.dot.
It's like people who have their vimrc or emacs config down to a fine art.
- Maybe, but imagine you are some EU commissioner, your choices look like this:
1. Fund a home grown alternative. Spend millions of Euros all the while fighting off a barrage of complaints that EUWord doesnt do things, costs too much, is burning taxes and productivity, etc.
2. Spend a nominal sum, but kick the project into the long grass, and hope that the US retreats from its stance back to the norm. "Maybe Word will be ok in 2027 after midterms, right? or 2029? Maybe I stick my fingers in my ears and tough it out"
2. is realistically what most politicians would do. Making tough, really difficult decisions is not something they like to do.
- > Google pretty much won the Office software war.
That's a "citation needed" if ever there was one.
- Not necessarily. PEN describes a ban as a book being removed from a library. If Mein Kampf was never in the library, there's no Mein Kampf to remove.
- You know you're old when you see the return of a design style you remembered from the first time around.
2002 era Frutiger Aero and Aqua seems to be echoed in 2025 Liquid Glass.
- It's easy to think that Word's functionality is what you see on the Ribbon, mentally map that to Google Docs, and think that the latter can replace the former. But Word is extremely deep. The templating and style sheets allow for a level of fine grained control that doesn't exist in alternatives. There are features that exist purely for the legal market, like Table of Authorities, and customizable line numbering and hyphenation.
Maybe one day there'll be a product to replace Word, but it won't succeed by claiming to be a generalist replacement but only as a niche product that solves a particularly painful problem for lawyers and then expands over time to capture more use cases.
- It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works.
example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
- Reminds me strongly of a program by Tim Hunkin from the 1980s: the Secret Life of the Washing Machine. Highly recommend.
- The weird thing I find with the Cybertruck is that I never see anyone using it for obviously truck-y things. For example, I've never seen a CT in the wild with the bed open.
You'd expect to see it hauling ladders or tools or towing horse boxes and so on, but nope. It makes me curious why. Is the truck overpriced for anyone who needs a truck to work? That seems unlikely, trucks are already north of 70,000 bucks. Are there no accessories like towing hitches? Seems unlikely. Is it just not a usefully sized bed? That would be a bizarre miss for a truck designer. I just dont understand it.
As a truck, is the CT any good, or no?
- What can it cost, $5?
- There's also the UK practice of deliberately mangling French for comedic effect, as in Del Boy's cries of "Bain Marie!" and "chateuneuf-de-paper!" on 1980s TV. Saying "Toot sweet" can fit right into that bucket.
- Second system effect is the curse of FOSS projects. It's been that way for decades. I don't see a reliable solution for the structural problem that doesn't somehow end up like a Benevolent Dictatorship. At the end of the day, designing complex systems by committee is hard to do. Maybe there is a maximum size of a group beyond which the communication matrix between the members starts to fracture?
- I honestly suspect that most of Microsoft have absolutely no idea what the regular, retail Windows experience is like because neither they nor their customers use it.
If you work at Microsoft you are on an ad free, LTSC variant of Windows that behaves more or less reliably. The IT team handle all the OneDrive stuff for you and make sure that it remains unobtrusive.
Re the second part of my statement, Microsoft only really care about the S500 accounts, the big corporations like, say, Toyota or John Deere. Those guys do not get the ad infested version of Windows. They get something much more elegant and Microsoft outsource any drama by getting favored partners like Accenture and Avanade to deliver it.
You can be a billion dollar corp and not register on Microsoft's radar, being relegated to the "small medium biz" segment. As far as retail users or mom and pop businesses, Microsoft has zero interest in them. These are the people griping on techcrunch and Reddit. They get the ad filled, inscrutably weird versions of Windows.
Nothing is likely to change until Linux gets its act together and delivers a credible threat to Microsoft on the desktop. However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$ and start selling ad space on Ubuntu to "preferred OEM" partners like Dell, whereupon we'll be back to the days of PCs filled with bloatware.
- Nerd question: what are the in-wear physics of this item?
It looks like a mass on a spring: the phone is a relatively heavy weight, and the wool pocket and strap are naturally springy.
So during everyday wear, does this thing bounce around? It seems like it would be impractical.
- Thing is, screenshots are fast, and the same technique works across every app. If you work in a field where you might be filing trouble reports from web app A, native app B, website C,... its just easier to use the same technique across the board. Win+S or CMD Shift 4, and move on with your life.
Not nice for the recipient maybe, but hella efficient for everyone else, and there are many more people in the latter camp than the former.
- I don't think the attackers are after your credit card records as much as they are after using your network as one base amongst thousands of others to perform illicit compute, generate traffic to a victim network, etc. That is: the attack is outbound from you to the victim, not inbound to you as the victim (at least not beyond the initial beachhead).
- Well, they can mess up the filesystem, eg corrupting it via shenanigans with the power, or nuke their home directory, config, etc. Enough that the next boot doesn't just work and get them back to where they were. Uncommon, but very possible.
Re the distro, I think that you should aim to minimize the "irrelevant" cognitive load on the kid and make them feel ownership of their environment. So yeah, I would rather learn how to help them do things in Zorin knowing that they chose it because they liked the colors than ram stock Ubuntu or god forbid Arch down their throat because it's what I or their parent ran. There'll be plenty of time for that once you know they are into it. And no harm done if they aren't.
- There are both practical and philosophical aspects to this. Practically, you might want a somewhat locked down solution with the root account locked and the ability to wipe and reinstall remotely. Are you and your friend up for that? If kiddo barfs the system (they're kids, they will, and it's ok!) your friend is gonna need to be up and running quick. PXE boot, kickstart, recovery USB stick, etc.
Before investing time you might also get a several distros on live USB sticks, boot each one up with the kid and parent, and see which one they like best before you install it. Make the kid part of the process.
Depending on the age of the child, make the computer discoverable. The full app store might be too much for younger children (mummy what's a flatpak?) But you might preload a "basic" and an "intermediate" app, eg Minecraft and scratch and then a (simple!!) Python IDE. And put them in discoverable, kid friendly places on the start menu.
Games. Lots of games. Both for their fun value and for teaching the motor skills of mouse and keyboard. Curiosity apps like Google earth.
For older kids, compatibility with their friends is important so make sure that things like LibreOffice, chat etc Just Work. No 13 year old wants to be the Odd Kid with the Bizarro Parent Computer. You can involve them in thinking about what it means to have choice in computing and to not just be a consumer, but they're still kids facing natural social pressures.
I could go on all day. One last point. After the thing is all set up and has been running for a few weeks, check in with the child and parent. What do they like? What do they not? And fix those issues.
- Unsung heroes perhaps but don't underestimate the impact of Dell, ie "x86 getting good enough" was more than just about clock speed and branch prediction type stuff. Mass production of x86 servers killed Big Unix as much as advances in the chips.
After all, Unix on x86 was very widely deployed thanks to SCO, who had a lock on the retail POS and store backend type of IT, but who ran on PCs that were not what we would call servers today.
However once Dell mastered volume production of servers to similar build quality as the Sun SS20 pizza boxes at a fraction of the cost, they had the runway to build bigger and better servers and it was all over for Big Unix.
This isn't a Dell post, but they offered both Dell Unix and Solaris for a time, before Sun tried to fight them off with Cobalt rack servers. But it was too late.
fortran in 1955, cobol in 1965, visual basic in 1993, delphi in 1995, visualage in 1998(?), Power Automate in 2022, vibe coding in 2025...