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By that logic we should require DNA testing because, you never know, someone might go to a polling place and lie about their name and have a fake ID too.

You never can be too careful!

Also, maybe someone inside will take their ballot from them.

IMHO this voting thing is too risky. We should just go back to having a ruling family /s


The office icons are rather subtle but do sorta illustrate what they do if you look carefully - the word icon is a list, the excel icon is a spreadsheet, and the powerpoint icon is a pie chart.

That you have to look closely is kinda crap lol. Whoever designed the icons was more obsessed with consistent branding instead of making icons that make sense.

Looking at the start menu, some MS icons are great. Paint, Notepad, Calculator are all fantastic.


Office doesn't exist any more. Product suite was renamed to Copilot 365.


I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but it's the Office mobile app that was renamed to Copilot 365. They haven't yet thrown away the entire Office brand


The word Office no longer appears on office.com.


Just like Twitter is now X, full stop? With the difference that the "Office" brand is much older and has much more staying power. Besides, the desktop application suite is still named the same AFAIK.


The current icons really aren't that good. Looking at apple specifically: The facetime and messages icons are almost completely indistinguishable. Get angry and say I'm blind, but so is a lot of the userbase - like legitimately, legally blind people.

The camera icon on iOS is just a fucking camera lens with a grey background. No context.

The calculator one is actually pretty good.

The photos one is also bullshit lol.


FaceTime is a video camera, messages is a speech bubble. They look nothing alike except they share the same colors?


they share so much visual language that I always do a double-take when I am about to click on MacOS.

You’re right that in isolation they are visually distinguished, but our eyes don’t see colour uniformly, and these icons do not exist in isolation.

I guess frosted white on green is not a good combination for quickly discerning shape.


I agree with your conclusion that the sweet spot is in the middle, because I could easily explain to my mom "click the icon that has a pen and paper" and it would be very obvious. The current icon is completely ambiguous crap.


Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.


I believe Microsoft biggest achievement is being capable to stay relevant for the past 50 years, largely due to enterprise.

If you take a close look as an user, all their products is half-baked in some way (inconsistent behaviors, dark patterns, poor support, etc.), good enough so they can lock you in and hold your data hostage with time.


> largely due to enterprise.

And government bribes, and piracy, and giving Windows for free to some Universities in exchange for being included in curriculum.


You either die a hero or live long enough to become IBM


That and Teams is free with an Office 365 subscription (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot -- geez).

Same reason why Google Chat and Meet are super popular now despite Slack and Zoom being infinitely better (free with Google Workspace)


> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.

IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.


I don't see how it's Apple's choice?

Google sells PiP, background playing etc. as part of YouTube Premium (not Apple!). Google serves browser clients a player that can't do those things, because they want you to pay for them. Vinegar is a browser extension that replaces Google's player with Apple's plain HTML5 player. Apple's plain HTML5 player does all that stuff for free.


> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!

???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.


> Say you order food online — you’d want a notification to update you, instead of having to manually refresh a webpage

Browsers have a notification feature where websites can send you notifications, and it's usually enabled by default.


It has to ask for permission for that


What's messed up about red light cameras is they can actually be useful - if used correctly!

The correct use case is "We seem to have a problem with red light runners at this intersection, so let's find out why by temporarily deploying red light cameras here."

I've seen this done and the city in question found out. They were able to make some changes to the light timing and at several intersections, that caused the amount of red light runners to drastically drop. (It was stuff like the left turn light not turning green when the straight forward light did).


The only experimentation that you need to to is extend the damn yellow lights. Long enough duration of yellow lights reduces accidents to nearly zero. This has been proven over and over 1000x. The data has been out there for 40+ years. There's zero need for red light cameras.


Those things should just be illegal. I can't even imagine how much energy and plastic/paper/food goes to waste in those damn things.


An entire hotel probably wastes less from the mini fridge specifically than a family of 4 for a year.


It's in the ballpark if you include all energy source for the family.

100 rooms times, say, 50W (5kW) is 43,000kWh. That's over 10 UK families of 4-5 (4100kWh/yr) for electricity, or 2 if you include gas usage. So for Americans, it's probably must closer to parity.

The fridge does dump heat into the room, so it has a small additional penalty for the aircon in hot countries, but a small, but inefficient compared to a heat-pump, heating offset in cold countries.


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