the moderation system worked ok where there were more users, and it felt like more of an "honor" to be awarded it, even if it was random. Now there's barely anybody doing it, so yeah, I agree, just let everybody vote. Not sure that making it public will be an improvement, but given the incredibly low stakes, maybe no harm.

I'm sure that would be nice for her, now that her husband has passed away.

wow, slashdot really is just about dead if 2 hours late I can be "first post" (remember that!?).

Sad. And here I was hoping to see the regular linux/windows flame wars and maybe even a discussion of how usable wine is these days.

No need to speculate on the future, It's already quite good if you are willing to pay a tiny bit, and tons better than we have grown to expect from the text to speech built into our OS or phones.

I suspect the number one unintended consequence of this is to encourage AI from the start for almost all characters, so that there is no pesky contract issues like this.

But also, real actors in video games? Is that even a thing, today? (Other than for voice over, where gen-ai is fast approaching equal quality).

Gosh, remember when things of import actually happened in the tech world and not just graphical redesigns?

I used to "work" 8-10 hour days but tried an experiment of 4 hours, but really 4 hours, at max output. As far as I could tell I was equally productive under both regimes. I made the experiment permanent.

If you think you need 60 hours a week from your employees, maybe what you really need is 1.5x the number of employees.

The ribbon was never disable-able from the very start, presumably because they knew everybody would fight change. Myself perhaps to the extreme.

outlook 2003 is starting to be non-usable, however outlook 2007 does still work with most pop/imap servers, and didn't get the fresh coat of ribbon that the rest of the suite did. Yes, I'm currently using it.

lucky for me I use Office 2003, the last non-ribbon version.

Clever!

Thankfully no forced upgrade of my win10 device. Guess not being able to install win11 is more of a feature than a bug!

Silverlight was pretty much a nonstarter, so I shed no tears on that, and I don't for one recall that many other people complaining either. I rate that as a good business decision.

VB, for all of it's haters, filled a niche and was somewhat unique and it's pretty surprising they treated it so badly. That said, they would claim that they didn't kill it (vb6) but rather modernized it (vb.net). In my mind mismanagement is different from active antipathy. Did they finally kill VB.net? given how unpopular that direction was for the VB user base that seems reasonable to me too.

Meanwhile what they've done with Windows since version 7 has been ugly, a good example of lacking vision and any sense of why people use their OS in the first place. But you can't argue they've killed it in the sense of abandoning it.

If there is any single thing you can consistently say about Google for the last decade it's that they are aimless - starting and killing new products on a whim and mostly pursing change for the sake of change rather than any value add (The debacle with messaging apps is a good example of all 3). If I worked for that company I'd slack off, in person or remote, because I would know nothing I would do would matter. Indeed, if I was forced to work in the office at such a place, I'd be all the more eager to look for somewhere else more motivating to work, so if anything "return to work" would be likely to hurt the company than help. Assuming I'm actually a useful contributor ;-)

I signed up for emails from the RNC and Trump campaign. And dude, those guys sound like total scammers. For instance, one has this actual link text in it:

Don’t miss this chance to put YOUR NAME on the Official JD Vance Birthday Card!

I mean, come on. At least it's truth in advertising, sounding like the scammers they are.