My thinking exactly. Got Netflix couple of years ago because of the Witcher and since then I'm finding it hard to find anything watchable. I was going to say that they heavily favor quantity over quality. But not even that is true, since their selection is rather limited. The search result "we don't have X, but you might like A, B, C" which are usually the same and unrelated things over and over, appears way too often.
Netflix is far more robust and smarter than what you could ever strike them down for. These aren't people who just started a few weeks ago in the industry, and they are far from the people who are equally long lived dinosaurs who can't or won't keep up and dies in the past.
You're just not the target market anymore, and that's more than fine, because there's a few hundred million that are, and that number is growing, not shrinking, in fact they're growing faster than ever.
I'm not discussing Netflix's fiscal results. My comment is about their production quality, which I find to be low and their limited content selection. Obviously, that is my experience which I don't generalize to other people.
Yes, it's totally fine to be dissatisfied with a service and cancel subscription when you're no longer getting the value. I think that it's the rational thing to do.
What you describe is exactly how I felt about regular broadcast/cable. What you wanted to watch when you had time to watch might not have been on, so you channel surf until you find something. Maybe it was something you found interesting, or maybe you just got tired of surfing and just left it on whatever pissed you off the least. Very similar to doom scrolling a streaming platform’s listings where you realize you’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the menu but not actually watching anything.
I think it's less commitment and more of just waving the flag and just putting something on to just be mindless and zone out for a bit. The mental exhaustion of scrolling through banal entry after banal entry of pablum content just wears on a person. It's definitely first world problems though. I've started to just hit the power button when I find myself in that state and finding something else to do. Even if it's just playing with the four legged roommates.
At least with YouTube you can end up in weird and interesting rabbit holes (I recommend “moving large things with trucks” and “blowing up buildings” and “railway snow clearing”). Sometimes you even learn something.
All the cable/Netflix slop ends up being basically the same story.
I'm also finding that I'm getting far more value (both entertainment and educational) from YouTube than Netflix.
Lately, several months go by without me even touching Netflix. I'm at the stage, where I keep the subscription because of maybe one show in a year which I then watch in a week, when it's finally released.
I'd say the reality is even more ironic - they collect so much data and reports, pretending this is to help to improve the user experience, but in the end it makes the experience so much worse.
It still irks me to no end when a Microsoft product asks me to rate my experience. Teams is constantly badgering me to rate the call quality. Is there a threshold percentage of users indicating good/bad that would lead to any change?
I've been giving it one star consistently since it was introduced. It's still shit. I'd love to know what happens to that feedback.
I once had a teams bug wherein I couldn't join a call whenever Google Chrome updated as it would fail the version number check and give me an error telling me I needed to use Google Chrome. I took a screenshot of this patent insanity and sent it to Microsoft support. A bit of discussion later and the response was something like "we know that Teams is continually evolving software and is not perfect at this time".
It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some http request. I noticed that often the online version of these apps (namely Outlook) are more responsive than the desktop counterparts.
I guess it's because in web context, it's easier to do web calls async than sync. While it's perfectly possible to do async web calls in something like C++, or at least move stuff to a different thread, people just somehow don't. Maybe out of lazyness since the first Google result was sync, or because lifecycle management is harder if raw pointers are involved, or whatever else.
I'm guilty of this. Back when I was writing Java apps using Swing, I'd perform heavy blocking IO operations in button event handlers synchronously. Looking back, I realise how much haram I was committing.
It's because the default program structure in C and C++ makes functions blocking, with the caller assuming that if the callee returned it completed. Jamming a non-blocking program structure smack in the middle of a blocking system is never pretty, and most people prefer not to deal with the additional complexity. For the same reason, even though Windows has overlapped IO and other asynchronous IO mechanisms, most people prefer to use the synchronous functions.
For disk IO you usually get away with it, especially now with SSDs. For networking you don't even have to use overlapped IO, sockets can be used with window messages, winhttp can be used async, etc. I think "it's more involved" is a really shitty excuse, especially if we're talking about a Microsoft product, not some obscure shareware software a guy is developing in his shed in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not excusing this particular case, I'm just explaining the perspective of most developers regarding synchronous versus asynchronous operations. In this particular case there's no reason to do it synchronously, since multiple processes are involved anyway. The crash handler should definitely not be waiting on a network operation to let the process terminate (that's not even getting into whether crash dumps should be getting uploaded by default to begin with), and the fact that this is a central part of the operating system's UI is even more egregious.
In some cases I wonder if the Office team had internal coding policies against threading because they aren’t sure about thread safety on some legacy structures. I remember reporting the issues Outlook had blocking UI waiting on network calls in the Office 97 beta (oh, was I an optimistic teenager) and multiple decades later that’s still affecting users.
I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...
The new calc app has always been a travesty. Taking at least a full second or more to load, with an obnoxiously large interface. The original calculator opened instantly and had a completely functional ui. I get angry every time I need to launch calculator on a machine I have not configured with SpeedCrunch. Almost better to use Excel.
> The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.
I can't stand this and it happens in a lot of places. It seems like pure metric chasing. We made it load faster boss. Well, no you can't use it but it yet but you should have been more specific!
If I open word doc over the slow VPN Word forces itself to the foreground only to show me a file loading dialog.
It's also worse for mixed keyboard and mouse operation [1], because some of the buttons (2nd, the trigonometry, functions and history submenus) now retain input focus after clicking on them, so pressing Enter operates that button again instead of completing your calculation.
[1] If you can't remember the shortcuts for some of the more obscure functions – never mind that they're also badly documented and you have to find the list of shortcuts by searching for them yourself on the web. I have a memory that way back – possibly not even in Windows 7, but only XP – the calculator included an offline help with all the keyboard shortcuts listed. Nowadays the Windows 10 calculator doesn't include any sort of help at all, not even a link to the online help.
Ouch! I hope you mean Excel 2010 or earlier; all the later ones are so slow to launch or open document that I tend to leave Excel and files (that I'll need to access quickly) open until something forces a reboot or until I bork Excel's state by QAing or triaging somebody's unfortunate VBA (sometimes even mine, too; shhh!). This remained true on a performant gaming computer while working from home. It was always a delight, remoting into somebody's machine that still had a functional Excel 2010 on it.
It takes away freedom and agency for devs which makes small things also suck where mainly complex things needing multiple programmers did without agile.
Since agile is so process heavy.
I imagine there are no dev owner of calc.exe anymore at MS.
I wonder how much improvement can be had by installing an application firewall and restricting everything that doesn't need networking for its primary functionality.
Not much. A lot of this sort of functionality is offloaded onto opaquely named services. So now you have decide if some access should or should not be allowed; but with very little information as to what process will in the end use that access. I used Glasswire for a long time, and when you install it on a new machine you get a lot of allow/block notifications; but then if you go back and look at the 'rule set' that was build up that way some months later, it's really hard to see what was blocked for what reason and if you actually should be blocking it.
One example is embedded IE/Edge views. It seems that those are a process of its own (sometimes), likely out-of-process COM instances. But if you want to allow one program to access the network that way but not another one, well there is (to my knowledge, and I haven't really looked into this) no way to do that. Same for the 'background download' service, the search service mentioned in the OP (although that's only used internally by Windows afaik, but by several sub-components), etc.
Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Whether that's by design I don't know. I blame engineers and marketing/product people equally for not showing enough restraint (i.e. the trope of 'just because they could... asked if they should...' etc). But nobody cares about my opinion on this, and the majority of users don't realize or care - and even if they do, they're as powerless as I am, individually.
It's been a while since I used Windows with any kind of seriousness (and the last version I did was 7), so I wasn't aware that this kind of thing is offloaded to separate, shared processes like that.
> Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality.
Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet. Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files. No one I know uses any of the cloud crap they added in the latest versions. The only use case when networking might be needed in Word/Excel/Powerpoint — and even then, it's most probably handled by a system service — is printing to a networked printer.
(when working with a file stored on a remote server, shared over SMB or something similar, that's definitely handled by the system and appears as a local file to applications, albeit on a very slow disk)
"Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet."
shrug I think the same, but it's a fact that new versions of Word heavily integrate with Sharepoint and Teams. I don't use that functionality (at least not a lot), but for some businesses it's the primary use case, and it's how Word can manage to stay relevant even when competing with Google Docs. The concept of 'files' is going away slowly anyway, like it or not. (I don't, but again, nobody ever asked me). There's more - like, when you install a new spell checking language pack, something accesses the internet. It's most likely the installer/automatic updater 'service' that does this, but then you're again in the 'what's this process for anyway' territory.
My point - I think your view on how software 'should' behave is the same as mine, but the reality is that our view is outdated. It's just not how software works in 2023.
It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.
I did just block Word from accessing the network at all. I guess I'll find out over the next few days in what ways it will break.
(that's another thing - most software nowadays doesn't even handle not having network access gracefully any more, if at all. Sometimes you just get blank parts of a window (presumably when embedded HTML views silently fail) and there is no way to 'reload' those parts of the UI. Or windows that don't open at all, so it just looks like a button doesn't do anything. And so on. It's disgraceful and like I said upthread, many of today's engineers just think it's normal, or are told to implement it that way against their own convictions. I mean I understand why things are they are, I just don't agree with the lack of effort in fighting back against the drivers of that outcome.)
> It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.
I don't know glasswire, but on Commodo firewall you can set a rule to allow access to your local network by default (or any range of IPs) and ask about external access, which would be a way to solve your problem with explorer.
Yeah I should probably look into it more. Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? What I needed from Glasswire was click-to-allow on each network access, I couldn't find that in any product I tried a few years ago before I decided on Glasswire.
> Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus?
Yep, just pick the firewall from the installers and make sure you uncheck everything except the firewall during the install (they are tricky, these guys):
after installing go through and (again) disable everything but the firewall. I also use their firewall to block their firewall (hah) from updating. Once you do this it works fine as a standalone firewall and the only reason to ever update it is if you reinstall or upgrade Windows.
EDIT: It does per-app blocking great; that's why I use it. I tried glasswire and didn't like it (or maybe they wanted to charge me money, I forget).
I am a bit confused about Portmaster and Safing. The documentation on Safing constantly refers to Portmaster. Does portmaster do anything besides act as a local firewall?
explorer.exe is also responsible for the Windows "shell" (Start menu, taskbar, system tray, desktop background), at least historically. I think more of this started to be done by Metro and UWP subprocesses since Windows 8. (But explorer.exe is ultimately still important—if you kill its process, you lose everything but alt-tab and control-shift-escape). So I'm not too surprised that it would request network access given how much it's doing.
> Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files
That might have been the case 20 years ago (and even then Office had functionality to self-update).
Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents.
Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now—VS Code can download and update itself and any extensions, connect to remote SSH hosts and GitHub Codespaces, use extensions that themselves connect to the Internet (like Copilot), etc.
People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs (consider Rufus, an ISO burning program which can update itself, download ISOs to burn to USB drives, etc), and it’s counterproductive to just blanket-ban everything from accessing the Internet, as things are likely to stop working as expected.
> Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents.
How many people do actually use these features in these programs? I myself have always seen them as nothing but bloat, a symptom of the IT industry utterly lacking a notion of a project being finished and not needing any further work. Maybe these features should come as plugins that you can optionally install. At least that's how I'd do it.
Usually, when someone wants to collaboratively edit a document or a spreadsheet, they use Google Docs. It being web-first also helps.
> Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now
And as an Android developer, I despise how Android Studio, or the Gradle Android plugin, or both of them, can just shamelessly download 100-something megabytes of some crap without asking, expecting that you have a network connection capable of that, sometimes not even showing the fact that they're accessing the network in the UI, and refusing to operate if that download fails. Eclipse didn't do that. Though it was terrible in many other ways.
> People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs
Honestly, I expect smallest programs to be complete and not need any updating.
Wouldn't that make things worse? Those applications usually expect to be able to make these calls. So now, instead of lagging once in a while when the home base is having troubles, it will lag all the time.
> Wouldn't that make things worse? Those applications usually expect to be able to make these calls. So now, instead of lagging once in a while when the home base is having troubles, it will lag all the time.
Not necessarily. The lag may be waiting for the remote server to respond to a request, and the app may move on quickly if it can't open a connection at all. It's not totally uncommon to work totally offline (e.g. on an airplane), so there's a decent chance the test that scenario.
This is actually one of the things that I appreciate from React. Because the view is synchronous you need to explicitly bail out on loading states (`return <ProgressSpinner/>`). In general you are presented the option to do something while the async work is running and other parts of the UI almost always work.
General question for the class... Is there any way to stop this? Is there some entries we can add to the hosts file so that Windows and Office will instantly return as failed, rather than timing out?
Hosts file would be your first way assuming you trust MS to honor that convention. You can always consider using a way that is not reliant on Windows goodwill ( for example, Pihole would allow you to limit various unwanted IPs based on your custom list; technically, your router should be able to do it too, but it varies wildly by mfctr/model ). That said, I am not that familiar with that functionality in Excel and it is not a given that it would fail gracefully if it is actually stopped from calling mothership.
That looks like exactly what I was looking for, cheers. Windows auto-identifies the download as a virus, but I see the author has a page about this frustration on the website.
If you want to put in the effort you can sniff the hostname lookups and if it's done halfway dedicated name, as an entry for 0.0.0.0 to the hosts file.
happens a bunch on mobile for me too. if I'm on unreliable wifi / cellular, it's easier to go into airplane mode than wait for Spotify to try to complete a remote call when searching my library
I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.
For me it was a combination of IDE that allowed very easily to merge different assets (text, vector graphics, sounds) with basic scripting and a timeline.
Now you kind of have to think in code, and architect the site as a whole, there's less creative impulse, or simply messing around to find something cool. This interactive messing around has to be visual, ideas should be easily copy-pastable, etc.
Because it was easy to experiment with the whole interactive media, and you didn't really have to worry about differences in player (no touch, no mobile, player was independent of browser), you could create wild stuff in very short amount of time, and everyone could play with it in the same way.
I loved Flash. Sure, it wasn't accessible, wasn't SEO-friendly or searchable or linkable, and had no future in mobile, but it was a magical creative canvas quite unlike anything available now.
Think there’s positives and negatives. Some of the stuff possible with canvas is amazing and wouldn’t have even been possible at all in flash really and it does integrate as a first class citizen on the page, doesn’t feel janky like flash did sometimes.
But on the other hand a 12 year old can’t figure it out in a week and ship an animation they made from scratch to the web.
I'd say the major advantage was you had an IDE that had a canvas to draw on, a visual timeline to aide your animation, tweening, powerful scripting - much like Swift, and compilation (ship a self contained SWF binary).
For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc.
I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
The Flash interface is primarily visual. It looks more like a video editing app, with timelines and layers.
- Click button X, run Timeline 1.
- Click Button Y, run Timeline 2.
- Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse.
That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement.
The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
You could “draw” the whole website, create fairly complex animations and interactions, script everything, and then just publish it.
Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.
That might be the original motivation, but post-7 Windows UI is anything but unified or consistent. New and legacy UI toolkits are mixed in the system shell itself. There are still parts of the good old Control Panel that haven’t been ported to the new “immersive settings” app. Already in a clean Win 10 installation, you can spot at least 3 different styles of context menu, depending on which part of the desktop you right-click.
Google’s UI has been cycling between bad and worse. That goes across the board - websites, Android, apps, everything.
I have never come across a Google product and thought “this is a well designed and clear to use program”. Except perhaps Google Search and Gmail of old - between circa 2005-2008.
To a state where users need a (another) datacenter to access/view/use even trivial apps with “reasonable” responsiveness. There are services already being offered to this end [1].
Electron is not exactly an epitome of a resource efficient framework either. If I was to compare efficiency, I’d choose a native baseline, such as the X window system or WinAPI. Granted, these APIs are low level and not as rich in features. Typically, the user calls some sort of “mark as dirty” function to mark a region of the window to be updated on the next refresh cycle, thus not wasting resources on portions of the screen that were not touched.
I like the concept of decoupling storage from the editor app. I wish more SAAS providers recognized this as an important product feature. It would allow deployment of hosted services in much wider range of scenarios, where privacy and data ownership is a big concern.
In addition to what has been said in this thread about office culture, politics, internal processes, etc. I believe a big factor in reducing work-related stress in any job, is actually being competent at your job.
What I mean is, work in a domain you know something about, with tools and technologies you know well. Be comfortable with your skills and know they are on par with the task you've been given (and also know when they are not). Don't put more on your plate than you can take.
Of course, being too comfortable can result in stagnation. Sometimes, we need to push ourselves or be pushed in order to learn and grow. Let your superiors know when a task is outside your comfort zone. A good mentor will try to push you, but also let you fail gracefully.
