You’re not wrong, but as privacy conscious consumers we have more ways to force Microsoft and other tech giants to bend the knee than just disengaging with their product and leaving less savvy users to fend for themselves. One such example is legislative action, take a look at how the EU has been wielding their internal market to force companies into more pro-consumer practices. Another is class action lawsuits, there’s a long history of successful suits resulting in lasting change.

You might not agree with me on whether those options are the right path forward here, but I feel that we, as security and privacy conscious owners have a duty to speak up about these things for the majority that can’t or won’t due to their technical abilities.

Why does every mention or discussion of any annoyance in Windows immediately turn into a “install Linux” thread on here?

Sure, Linux might solve the immediate problem for the affected individual (and probably introduce a bunch of new ones as Linux isn’t always as easy to use as advocates try to convince people it is) but it doesn’t solve the larger issue - Microsoft needs to be held accountable for horrible design decisions and anti-consumerist practices.

Not everyone can, or will, switch to Linux. No matter how hard people champion that cause. And even if they do, it’s a process that will take time. In the immediate, lots of people stand to benefit from Microsoft not pulling this sort of bs, and it’s entirely justified to complain about it to make them walk back this decision.

I love how all Germanic languages can pull that stunt. Be it German, Swedish, Dutch, they all have this magic “turn a sentence into a single word” ability.

I know it’s a joke, but with the level of scrutiny Germany has attracted for its dark history there’s litle chance people wouldn’t have heard of it by now ;-)

You’d be surprised how many people don’t know the difference between being sore and having pain, but I digress. I never wanted to discuss semantics, just make a jokey comment about trading pain for discomfort. Forget I mentioned it.

I think there’s a non-zero percentage of people that confuse being sore with having unexplained pain. And there’s probably also another group of people that think they can excercise without being sore, given how lots of people exercise tout it as fixing all pain, which might set incorrect expectations.

Anyway, I am just sharing my own experiences.

To be fair though, the soreness from regular exercise is what you get in the tradeoff. I have both a regular cardio and strength program I run through every week (5 days of exercise) and a pretty active lifestyle (2 days of outdoor activities every week (hiking, mountainbiking, splitboarding,etc)) and I am generally sore at least somewhere in my body.

Morrowind memes in the wild. What a time to be alive!

I need to re-read the lyrics to that song, it’s one of my favorites by APC.

Thanks. I did not know that, but after reading into it 10000 days now feels a lot more personal.

Other than James Hetfield noone springs to mind in the category “Musicians’ moms killed by Christian science”. Who else were you referring to?

I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don’t have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.

Yes, but at the time Excel didn’t support concurrency either ;-)

Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that’s only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.

Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn’t, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that’s how they envisioned it to work.

Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.

Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)

Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.

This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.

That was the most infuriating thing about this whole post to me. Elon’s braindead take is on brand and expected at this point, but that chart (or worse, the reaserch behind it) is the true crime here.

It’s been that way for a while now.

When online patching became a thing most games studios quickly figured out they could push the game to press in whatever state, then work on fixing the bugs in between code complete and GA, and simply push those fixes as a launch day patch.

And commercially, it makes sense. The greatest the game is on the shelves, the earlier the investors see ROI. It’s just a shame if this calculated gamble backfires and the degree find way too many bugs to fix in the window between code complete and release. That’s when you get Cyberpunk 2077…

This annoys me too, but I find that lots of shops turn off the headlight’s automatic mode when brought in for service. This leaves hapless drivers unaware of the fact that they are driving around with just their DRLs on until they either get a ticket, complain about it to the dealer, or figure it out on their own.

I know you’re being funny, but to answer the question I posited: every summer, after people came back from towing their caravans up through the mountains, my dad’s shop would be replacing loads of clutches with people complaining about the weird smells their car started making. Or the sudden trouble they had shifting.