How do you separate the good from the bad? What do you do when Microsoft changes the good things into bad things?
My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.
Services are bad - that is what the first part of the story is about.
However I do not think it is different for any online service. Any American company would have to cut off services to an individual (or organisation) subject to sanctions (the main example given). The same might apply to other countries for various reasons. There are various reasons a service might fail, or cut off a particular customer (lots of reasons, lots of examples in previous HN discussion).
What has changed is that the typical MS customer is a lot more dependent on MS services - MS 365, Python in Excel ONLY works in the cloud, people used hosted email instead of their own Exchange installation...... That means MS cutting off a customer would mean all their IT would cease working. They can just shut down any organisation with that level of dependency if they are ordered to, or decide to, do so.
I consider C# / .NET to be one of the best options for application development.
Many would consider both VSCode and Visual Code pretty good. There might be better alternatives, but generally I'd say they are more good then bad. Github is also a good product. Maybe not exactly a develop tool, but Power BI is also fairly good.
Borderline developer / enterprise solution: SQLServer is great to work with. Maybe not the best relational database server, but it's every bit as capable as MariaDB and I'd prefer it over Oracle.
Before Microsoft bought it you could still search it / codesbases without making an account. Alone for that additional pain I would argue they instantly made it worse.
Wrong about "inconsistent", the ribbon follows predictable patterns. Home tab always has basic formatting, Insert always has objects/media, etc. What changed is intelligent positioning based on context.
Office 95's menus were consistent in the worst way - consistently buried everything under nested submenus. Finding mail merge meant File→Tools→Mail Merge→Options→Setup. Now it's Mailings tab, right there.
It is a tool for people who write words. That is its prime purpose.
People write words for people to read the words. That is the prime purpose.
It is a tool for readers and writers.
I am both.
I can read a menu, and scan through submenus, about 10-20x faster than I can page through buttons on a tabbed bar. The replacement is dramatically inferior in legibility and so in efficiency.
That is 1 way it is worse.
A menu bar takes a single line of text. It works perfectly in a text-only display. A ribbon bar takes many lines of small intricate graphics. It is dramatically and measurably and demonstrably inferior in its use of screen space, its use of pixels, its adaptability to other displays, its functionality for those with restricted vision or restricted computer display abilities.
This is a 2nd way it is worse.
It is not re-orientable; I can't move it to one side to use a widescreen more efficiently. Because of its poor and fixed layout I can see less of my document, meaning it hinders the primary purpose of the tool.
This is a 3rd way it is worse.
It does not interoperate with other UI paradigms. Right now I am typing on an old Mac with macOS. Word is the only Office app on it. The oldest 64-bit version of Word I can find. It has to duplicate the entire UI both in the Mac's mandatory global menu bar and in the clumsy bolted-on Windows-centric ribbon. This demonstrates the inefficiency and poor design.
This is a 4th way it's worse, although for me, it means I can ignore the ribbon and use the menus.
I read fast. I cannot squint at tiny icons and try to guess their functions quickly. It's slow. The ribbon defeats muscle memory and defeats fast reading.
This is a 5th way it's worse.
The ribbon is context-sensitive. I can't just remember what is where under where relative to the first menu, because it changes depending on where the cursor is, what is selected, what tab I left it on last time. In a menu tree, if it's left open, I tap ESC once and I am at a known place and can start over. Not with the ribbon.
This is a 6th way it's worse.
I speedread and I have good colour vision. Some people can't see colours. Some can't see fine details. Some can't see at all. A screenreader can just read all of a menu, but it can't describe icons and it can't say "then there's a vertical line and in the next section, it starts..."
The ribbon fails at accessibility.
This is a 7th way it's worse.
Menus can be accessed and manipulated in a consistent way with keyboard controls. Up/down/left/right/enter. 5 keys and you have total control. You can use this with a mouth control if you have no use of any limbs. This is good for people with motor disabilities but it is also good for keyboard-centric users with no disabilities. This is good design: it's adaptable and it's flexible and it fits different needs. But also, you can use letters to leap faster through the menu bar, so power users and touch-typists can navigate faster. All blind people who can type are touch typists; they have no other option. So this feature that aids accessibility also aids power users.
None of this applies to the state-sensitive context-sensitive ribbon. That is an 8th way it's worse.
You are wrong, and what's more, you are wrong on multiple levels, some of which I have itemised. I could get to 10, I suspect, but I have a job to do and this is not it.
Stop defending bad design. Learn to look deeper at good design that lasted decades and learn to ask why things you don't like so much survive and are widespread and have not been replaced by novelties you like.
What blows my mind is how short sighted it is. Even the oligarchs benefit from scientific research. Even the oligarchs lose money when our industries move to other countries.
Onirim is good but the phone app is better since there’s so much shuffling. Cursed?! is one of my favorites. Galdors Grip is really cool in that you can play it in hand, you don’t need a table, so you can play it anywhere.
Since you brought it up, I personally switched to jujutsu and prefer it greatly. I regularly help coworkers deal with issues in git and keep dropping hints like `in jujutsu this would've been done way easier like this!`. Nobody bites yet since I think most of them don't want to use the CLI but maybe someday if enough people keep talking about it the inertia will get to the point that we can get some really slick GUIs for jj.
Basketball is also the problem, refereeing specifically. Refs are humans and make mistakes but it’s hard to watch and not feel like there’s blatant favoritism to star players or certain teams.
There are the L2M reports that detail all the mistakes they make in the end of the game and way too often they’re game altering.
Then there’s the inconsistent approach to the rules. They’ll suddenly decide they want to push a rule, call every tiny infraction on it, then 10 games later it’s like the refs collectively forgot the rule exists at all.
It all makes for an extremely frustrating experience for the players and the fans.
The Lakers have a statistically impossible +/- in free throws shot. There is favoritism and the league isn't even remotely trying to disguise it...is that really different than any other arena though?
I don’t see any probability analysis in that at all. If there is something about a team composition and strategy that leads to a large free throw differential you’d expect that to persist across consecutive seasons. Going back further you see other teams with similar strategies and free throw differentials.
Your link doesn't have any probability analysis either. Just supposition that the raw data isn't valid because it looks similar to a 2 year run the Hornets had.
Is it wildly inconceivable that the refs propped up the Hornets for a couple of years? No. Does the only quantitative evidence presented in this thread suggest the refs are propping up a below average Lakers team? Yeah.
Do you think the refs are nearly as biased against the Warriors as they are for the lakers? Or is it more likely that the warriors shoot from outside a lot and play fairly aggressive defense?
This has always bugged me across all sports. For instance in baseball, while it's gotten a lot better over the years, the inequality of how strike zones were applied was annoying.
My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.