That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about the idea open source developers being paid.

But very few people use open source, in any serious way. If they had to pay for it, a lot less people would use it. Eventually, it would not be worth maintaining.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

*ow!*

uh, found it...

Not only have I seen that, but I have experienced it.

My socket set and ratchet isn't trying to convince me to be in a relationship with it, to be in love with it, to be something of an equal to it.

Even our pets as living beings capable of expressing themselves are not able to communicate at our level.

Large language model AI is attempting to spoof being human, to mimic being us. There are already examples of people becoming very, VERY upset when their AI-boyfriend or AI-girlfriend is taken away by companies revising the AI standards and interaction rules. This is unhealthy. The relationship needs to remain that of tool user and tool, because anything more than that is one-sided and subject to terrible abuse by anyone that managed to co-opt that system.

The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough. Machines should be useful tools serving us, where our emotional connections to them are still based on tool-user and tool.

Especially once they started to use DOCSIS technology to push faster Internet services. And they were able to keep up (mostly) with fiber Internet, They now offer symmetric 1.2 gigabit speed Internet with DOCSIS 4.0, which has started its national rollout. I expect Comcast once it achieves near-natonal coverage of DOCSIS 4.0 to push it to 4 gigabit symmetric access.

In short, I expect Comcast to be less in the cable TV business and more in the cable modem Internet business. And very likely they may widely offer a cloud storage DVR with effectively unlimited storage to save video from cable TV channels and streaming services for later viewing.

There are some apps that only run on Windows. Also, Windows is the standard in government and corporations.

I have all that already in FreeBSD. But, I guess it's all about the apps.

IMO: this would be so much better than being bedridden, or needing constant care. He was active and in good spirits until his final days.

Google AI Overview:

According to reports from March 20, 2026, legendary actor and martial artist Chuck Norris died at age 86,remaining active and training until his final days. Only 10 days before his death, he shared a video of himself sparring on his 86th birthday, demonstrating his continued fitness and dedication to martial arts.

Key Details Regarding His Final Activities:

- Final Training: Even with his recent health issues before passing, Norris was reported to be in good spirits, training and staying active up until his last week.

- Birthday Post: On March 10, 2026, he posted a video on social media celebrating his 86th birthday with training exercises, saying he was "leveling up" rather than just aging.

- Lasting Legacy: Throughout his later years, he continued to engage with fans and maintain his physical health, ensuring he remained active.

My current phone has three cameras on it, two for regular use and one for selfies. If they increased the resolution of the cameras, they could easily change it to two cameras.

Similar concerns here, both for F-droid apps and DJI's - which require installing from an APK downloaded directly from DJI to get the latest version. I only have a handful of apps I sideload, and when I'm not updating those I tend to have the ability to sideload turned off for the modicum of additional security afforded against inadvertant user error. If I either need to go through this 24-hour process every time I update the apps, or leave sideloading permanantly enabled (which I'd be more likely to do, I think), then this is yet another user-unfriendly move by Google that is almost certainly more about being self-serving than anything else.

If I wanted a walled garden, I'd have bought an iPhone.

I could. I don't look at it as a phone so much as a foldable tablet with a screen sufficiently large as to be actually useful.

If it also happens to work well as a smartphone when folded down then that could likewise be useful.

Trouble is, it needs to be no more expensive than a phone and a tablet separately purchased in order for most potential customers to justify it. If it costs more than both combined then scant few will bother adopting it.