I also suspect that the "Whitehall source" they have spoken to did not provide the full picture.

Rather than floating unenforceable legislation, I suspect this is more akin to making sure people who watch the BBC though the iPlayer app or the website have a TV License.

Word is expensive, proprietary and the XML it generates is unfathomable. There are so many better FOSS tools and systems that we could be using. If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered. You get version control though git and multiple people can contribute. If you're writing a book or article, then the graphic designers and typesetters are going to make the design decisions, not the author, so why bother messing around with fonts and colours and the infuriating placement of images and tables.

I authored a kid's book on coding, and the process was a nightmare. I authored in markdown, used pandoc to convert and then further edited in libreoffice, to be able to send stuff through in docx format. Then revisions were sent back in docx and I had to reverse the whole process, so I could maintain my plain-text version of the book. Then the proofs were sent through as PDFs, which I then had to markup for corrections. Many of the mistakes were due to the crappy way Word places images. In the end I just bought a copy of Word, and submitted to the way my publisher wanted me to work, which disrupted the authorial process.

It's time we ditched Word, in the same way we ditched VHS and DVD. It's an outdated technology that remains dominant just because everyone uses it at school, and then refuses to move on. If schools insisted that all homework was submitted in something like markdown, we'd see a dramatic change in a very short period of time. (BTW when I was teaching CS, my kids authored in markdown and submitted on GitHub)

Right, rant over - but I've been talking about this for years -http://coding2learn.org/blog/2014/04/14/please-stop-sending-...

These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people.

That's why online solutions like Google docs are popular. No special app, things look like expected, you can collaborate, and few people actually need any fancy features.

That's not such a big deal since you can obviously change the font. For a long time there were lots of text fonts but very few math fonts, and those math fonts that did exist would either have some symbols from Computer Modern or wouldn't have a suitably similar text font. But now there are a fair number of choices. Personally I like mathpazo (with Palatino for text) but I've found people used to Computer Modern can find this a bit much of a radical departure. (Edit: I've found a more conservative choice is Times for text and Utopia (MathDesign) for math.)

TeX does have a few small typesetting niggles. For example, if you set f(x)g(y) with normal small brackets around the x but large brackets around the y (because it's really a displayed fraction) then you'll find g is miles away from its argument but right next to f's argument. (I'll avoid opening the can of worms about what the root cause is here, but it's very clearly wrong in this case.) This is actually not that big a deal either - there are lots of problems like this but they're all fairly minor and small in number compared to the huge number of things typeset correctly. The only problem comes when people refuse to correct things because they assume that if TeX typesets it that way then that must be correct by definition.

TeX is like a programmable pocket calculator from the 1970s, way ahead of it's time but today it's something that conspires with Word, Google Docs, and other dull tools to suck out the oxygen for sharp tools.

Even I, happily maintaining some pages in reST, wouldn't want to inflict that on people.

WYSIWYG is a big part of what made the GUI revolution so successful. The computer for the rest of us, wouldn't be for the rest of us, if we had to worry about Git and how to render our file format.

I've had the same frustrations dealing with publishers and Word templates as you had. Your mistake is that you are conflating our experience writing a technical book with the vast majority of users who are not writing technical literature. A writing system for the masses should be as easy to use (for the basics at least) as paper and pencil. Git and learning even a simple markup language does not meet this standard.

I have not used Word for ~10 years, but not in the last ~20 or so years, after I realized how much time and effort it cost me -- nearly missed an important deadline because of a Word 2 vs Word 6 incompatibility that manifested in a very inopportune moment.

It's been around for almost 30 years. I'm constantly receiving documents from people who've used it for >25years. And there is never use of styles, often spaces instead of tabs, many "new lines" instead of a page break, and a host of other things like that. References are not dynamic (just typed out) meaning that an item inserted in the middle of a list makes many of them wrong.

The vast majority of people who have used it for decades use it mostly as a smart typewriter, because the "pro" features like styles require a lot of discipline and the "let's just press the bold button" is too easy and enticing.

WYSIWYG needs to die whenever anything professional is needed.

>Write markdown

You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.

Basically, when you try to set the properties of text (e.g. bold, fonts, ...) there are always anomalous behaviors involving:

* if you just start typing what font it is in

* selections (why is that the selection region seems to actively avoid the exact selection you want?)

There is something fundamentally wrong with the data model behind it that makes it impossible to implement in a way that makes sense 100%.

For your other objection (and maybe what you were also really getting at with your selection objection), maybe you'd like WordPerfect 5.1's "reveal codes"? :-) We can all agree that Microsoft wouldn't have hesitated to steal that feature if it would have benefitted them. The fact that they didn't is proof that formatting markup is something that was historically tried (or considered) and rejected, rather than something waiting to happen in the future.

In any case, for a program as huge as Microsoft Word, I think this is all quite minor. How much of your day is really ruined if you start typing after some bold text, find that the new text is bold when you didn't want it to be, and have to manually turn it off again? It's a fundamental problem with the model, like you said, but has surprisingly tiny impact on usability. If this is your biggest objection, it's almost proof that the program is pretty good. (But I can sympathise with minor objections: I hate copy and paste works differently in Excel then any other program!)

I write a lot of stuff in the legal area (articles, books, contracts, court documents, etc) and there's nothing that comes close to Word.

For some time I had tried to switch to LibreOffice. My goal was to quit Word, which is the only software that still binds me to Windows/Mac (not interested in Wine). I hoped to finally be able to switch to Linux without any hiccups.

Unfortunately LibreOffice is not quite as good as Word. I use many of the advanced features of Word, and the more you use these in LibreOffice, the more you encounter bugs. At one point I had a .odt file with tons of cross-references in footnotes pointing to other footnotes. When I was ready to ship the document I found out that all cross-references were messed up and I had to redo them all.

Now it's true that LibreOffice has a huge and active community that works hard to improve the product, but as word processors are my main and most important tool for work, I need the most reliable software I can get. Unfortunately that is still Word...

On top of that I must add that I do need to properly format documents 99% of the times, and also on this I find Word slightly superior, even if admittedly on this is quite comparable to FOSS solutions. The only quite big problem at this regard is interoperability. Since I know that most, if not all, my colleagues/counterparts use Word, whenever I send a document I need to send something that "will just work" for them, which is a docx. This means that using anything other than Word might give some problems in relation to formatting, which in same cases is pretty important.

Markdown -- standard markdown isn't expressive enough (no tables for example), there are lots of extensions but none which are "standard".

LaTeX -- doesn't produce accessible documents, so is a non-starter in lots of areas (seriously, the PDFs it generates are some of the worst around when it comes to accessibility. Word's are amazing).

If we put aside the Word file format, and maybe the ribbon, is Word bad though?

I've been using it for decades, and have tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice too over the years - nothing comes close to Word.

Markdown is not suitable for "normal" users, but as a developer, I've come to prefer markdown for technical documentation and such (especially where I want a history, diffs etc), but I still use Word for a lot of other things.

Word is incredibly fully-featured - I use a lot of functionality, but am likely still only using a fraction of what it has. It really does have all your document editing needs covered.

Aside from the file format, I think Word is a fantastic piece of software. I have a few annoyances with it now and then, but it's been very dependable and kept me in good stead over the years.

> If we put aside the Word file format, and maybe the ribbon, is Word bad though?

Is the ribbon bad, though, or are we just living through 2003 era UI shock for 13 years now?

I lambasted the ribbon as was fashionable back then, but actually using it in 2020?

It's good. Like, legit amazing UI design. Makes it easy to peck through menus and find what you want. Structures chords for power users, and importantly makes those chords visually discoverable. I've found a pile of good keyboard shortcuts just by starting to slowly press a chord on the ribbon.

It's great for mouse users. It's great for noobs just learning the ropes. It's great for keyboard users who already know their stuff. It's amazing at facilitating the learning process into knowing your stuff

It's been great for 17 years. Do we still have to pretend it sucks because we were used to a different way of doing things?

Microsoft Office is quite useful, and probably good value for money. But it has never ever been free, and I’ve been buying it for work and home since Office 4.x on Windows 3.1 was the new hotness.

Consider someone dealing with inter-departmental collaboration on documents at a company in the 70s or 80s. They could potentially invent their own system, make paper copies mandatory, go full computer, or any number of solutions in between. Technology was considered hard and looked recognizably so, and management was less likely to question technical views and opinions about this. People were way less likely to get fired and generally visualized staying there for a while, so they were comfortable sticking to their viewpoints.

Today, your boss and their boss are all concerned with how to get the maximum amount of work out of you in the time you're at the company. So if you propose retraining everyone on Open Office or Markdown, because it has high potential for a better way of tracking changes or something, you'll get pushback from a) management, because the CEO is going to say “but I use Word all the time, why can't you just use that?” and b) the workers, because they know they will be forced to learn it on their own time rather than being given a proper amount of time to train and learn. [1]

I think modern society and modern work are slowly defaulting to the idea of quickly throwing in the towel and just using whatever technology is approved by the milieu. This is true even in our industry, consider this article [2] by Latacora [3] for instance: it's full of statements which approximately say “Just use CloudTrail”, “Just Use Jamf”, “Just Use Okta SSO” etc. If our industry is doing things like this to optimize extraction (even the article acknowledges that SOC2 is purely documentation optimized for selling to big companies), why would we be so surprised that publishing departments and such are optimized to Just Use Microsoft Word rather than a technically better system?

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[1] Think back: when was the last time you had a proper training about how to use a certain piece of software by people from the company building it, or at least certified trainers? These were way more common back in the day.

[2] https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html

[3] A very respectable security company focused on startups.

Basically, it's a "good enough" WYSIWYG, and a number of industries have standardized on it, in spite of the fact they should actually use an open standard + tool that actually fits their needs. I think screenwriting might be the one industry to escape Word, since they use Final Draft as I understand it.

Because Office/Word has become the hammer of the document writing world.

It isn't an issue that it's a bad product and better products our out there (and there are).

It is that everyone is expected to know how to use word at a basic level. From Secretaries to VPs and CEOs, almost universally these people can open a word document, edit it, and save it.

Because of this expectation, it is easier to throw money at Microsoft and have the tool you can expect everyone to use.

Non-technical folks do not want to reach for CSS to apply formatting to a text document. Heck, neither do I.

Shouldn't the work of incentivising more women be outside of the tournament and not bend the tournament altogether?

"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.

It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.

If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody.

If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so. They aren't stopping you from playing them.

They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.

I'm not convinced that this is completely true.

The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.

In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.

In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).

on the other hand, in this young age physical development between boys and girls can be very different. so maybe separation is necessary because of that.

then they can have their own tournaments - of course, no one should actively stop them. I am more concerned that an organization managing the tournament decides to create a new category rather then putting in the effort to bring everyone to the same playing field. I mean is that not the decades long battle that made it all the way to the workplace? Should we also create female software engineering roles, and female CEO roles bc the CEO market is crowded by tech bros? If you have $1B, and you have to solve this problem, how do you split it, that's my question.

Any kind of treatment that doesn't follow the law of jungle is discrimination. We need to think which one of them are better for our societal outcomes as a whole.

judging by the response I assume "positive discrimination" ain't mainstream anymore in the US

The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.

It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.

Kinda slow, though. I'm hoping that's just early scaling problems.

At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.

The average smartphone owner cannot be trusted to switch away from privacy-degrading technologies even if the alternative is good. Look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify; it's a Keynesian beauty contest, and ChatGPT has more mindshare than Siri.

2. Use leaded solder - lead-free is a pain. If you're not doing this for hours every day, even without ventilation, you'll be fine.

3. Heat the pads you're soldering to, not the solder. I used to tell kids to hold the iron to the pad for a count of three, then feed the solder in.

4. Two additional tools I find helpful - a solder sucker and copper wick.

I have to disagree with that. Almost every time I've been called in to rescue a frustrated novice at the soldering bench (which has happened a lot), I've found them using the thinnest tip they could find with the temperature cranked to 400°C or higher because nothing was melting. It's fine to have an iron that can exceed 400°C (and I can't think of any I've used that couldn't), but that capability should be rarely used.

A heavier tip -- generally the heaviest that will fit between obstacles on the board -- at a lower temperature is much more forgiving.

The small tip has little heat capacity, significant resistance between the thermal reservoir (the heavy body of the tip) and the contact point, and usually very little contact area with the work. That makes the temperature at the joint highly sensitive to tip position, surface contamination, and copper geometry on the PCB. A thick trace or ground plane connection sinks heat from the joint so well that it will never melt, but a small pad on a thin signal trace will quickly get hot enough to detach the pad. Gunk on the board or oxidation of the tip adds more variability. And the high idle temperature makes for fast oxidation of the solder coat on the tip and then the plating, which creates more problems and frustration when you're new and don't recognize those symptoms.

A fat tip provides a large thermal reservoir right at the contact point and usually creates a larger contact area that's less disturbed by a bit of contamination. The much lower thermal resistance brings the joint temperature closer to the iron's thermostat setting, allowing you to keep that setting lower -- I'll go as low as 300°C for SnPb on a not-too-heavily-coppered board, maybe up to 350°C for lead-free. That gives you consistent heating of a wide range of targets and is much less likely to lift pads even with the long dwell times that often happen while a novice is learning. At the low end, it slows tip oxidation enough to make it almost a non-issue. And less flux charring means less gunk on the board to interfere with the next joint.

Predictability makes the whole learning process much smoother, and running small tips at high temperatures creates all sorts of issues that are hard to see or understand until you've got some experience behind you. When in doubt, use more copper before using higher temperature.

From memory when I ran a production line with soldering stations ventilation is equally (and possibly more) important for lead free solder.