It's entirely reasonable to expect the basic functionality of document and spreadsheet editors to edit documents and spreadsheets. If an editor no longer can edit, it's no longer functional. Microsoft seems to know this which is why they removed the "continue to function" clause from their end-of-support page.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
> They've done it countless times throughout their existence.
Exactly. As such I no longer consider them accountable when they do this kind of thing. It's the buyers' fault for not voting for better with their wallets, and I have 0 sympathy for them.
This feels like a modern version of people writing regex to validate email addresses: employing a complicated, yet incomplete roll-your-own approach as the wrong solution to a problem
Actually, noise is the opposite of signal. Data harvesting companies hate noise because strong signals are profitable. It's why Google successfully pushed for people to use their real identities online initially through Google Plus and why they also displayed such an unprecedented backlash against the AdNauseum browser extension after it came out
Universties usually have restricted access and a userbase of people who are more intelligent than the general population. They should have much higher hope than popular social media sites that cater to the bottom of the barrel
Restricted access, yes but I'd argue intelligence, tech-savvy, and common sense aren't really the same thing.
There's two big issues I saw on a large University network (talking something like 60k users).
Issue one was account compromises. I cannot tell you how many times faculty, staff, and students would get emails that were clearly phishing and fall for it. Things like, filling out a Google Form with their username and password, despite literally every Google Form saying "never ever put your password in these things."
So then you pair this with universities offering web hosting for students and stuff, and now you've got a bunch of porn being served from your school's web servers because you've got students with no idea how email and phishing work being given university email addresses.
Issue two is their decentralized nature. You'll have some person you've never heard of pop up and say "I run a lab, can I get ailab.(university).edu to point to (university)ailab.com?"
You can try to throw up some road blocks and hassle the user about "why did you do all this and not come to IT sooner, we can host a website for your lab, we have branding guidelines you need to meet to use our domain." Then feathers start getting ruffled, jimmies get rustled, people start flexing about the grant money they pull in, deans get involved, and next thing you know, you're making a CNAME to an off-site domain that you'll never get real control over.
Then that professor or whoever leaves, that pet project of theirs goes away, that off-site domain expires, scammers buy it up and now you've got porn from off-site webservers but using your own domain.
People can be intelligent enough to push our knowledge boundaries into new frontiers, but not have enough common sense or tech-savvy to reach out to IT before setting up a website for their lab.
I have better hopes of social media sites keeping porn out because you can't have dick-measuring contests about the millions of dollars of research grants you're pulling in and get exemptions to policies. They just take the porn off and tell you no, you can't do that.
You have to understand the time period. Microsoft was huge and had won the browser wars, and had become a convicted monopolist.
Google's "don't be evil" was a way for them to say "we're regular Joes, just like you; we're not Microsoft, and we're not going to do bad stuff like they do".
Early in Google's history, I took that sentiment as saying that they were one of us (Internet people), and weren't going to act like Microsoft (at the time, regarded by Internet people as an underhanded and ignorant company). Even though Google had a very nice IR function and general cluefulness, and seemed destined to be big and powerful.
And if it were the altruistic Internet people they hired, the slogan/mantra could be seen as a reminder to check your ego/ambition/enthusiasm, as well as a shorthand for communicating when you were doing that, and that would be respected by everyone because it had been blessed from the top as a Prime Directive.
Today, if a tech company says they aspire not to be evil: (1) they almost certainly don't mean it, in the current culture and investment environment, or they wouldn't have gotten money from VCs (who invest in people motivated like themselves); (2) most of their hires won't believe it, except perhaps new grads who probably haven't thought much about it; and (3) nobody will follow through on it (e.g., witness how almost all OpenAI employees literally signed to enable the big-money finance-bro coup of supposedly a public interest non-profit).
I took it to mean, prioritize long-term growth over short-term income. But the slogan was silly even back then, like obviously an evil company would claim to not be evil.
FWIW, it absolutely was believable to me at the time that another Internet person would do a company consistent with what I saw as the dominant (pre-gold-rush) Internet culture.
For example of a personality familiar to more people on HN, one might have trusted that Aaron Swartz was being genuine, if he said he wanted to do a company that wouldn't be evil.
(I had actually proposed a similar corporate rule to a prospective co-founder, at a time when Google might've still been hosted at Stanford. Though the co-founder was new to Internet, and didn't have the same thinking.)
Is it really worth the tradeoffs of having significantly smaller storage space, reduced screen size, and clicking through way more often, just to not have to move your eyes as much horizontally?
For me seems to be. I keep it in my front shirt pocket, pull it out to read all the time. I've gone through 8 books on it so far this year. That's 7 more books than I read on my Kobo by this time last year given how convenient it is to take it everywhere. Granted I'm usually a paper book reader so my Kobo was always just a travel device, but the Xteink makes it so easy to squeeze reading in everywhere.
Just wait until you get older and need to increase the font size. Now you're down to 2 words/line and you get carpal tunnel or De Quervain's from the constant clicking to page. I'm only half kidding.
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