Ask Paul: July 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s a nicely diverse set of questions to kick off the weekend amidst our latest summer heatwave here on the East coast.

Outlook.com Inbox tabs

simont asks:

Have you heard anything more about mailbox categories/tabs coming to Outlook.com and the Outlook client? Apart from the leaked screenshots a few months ago, Microsoft hasn’t said anything about that feature publicly.

Not officially, but someone reached out to me (I think on Twitter, since I can’t find it in email) to show me a screenshot saying that Outlook.com was actually taking away most of its existing tabs (Promotions, Social, and Newsletters), leaving Focused Inbox as the only choice. So I’m not really sure what’s going on there.

The evolution of news

jwpear asks:

Have you read Loserthink by Scott Adams?

No, sorry.

One topic Scott covers is how the ability for news companies to instantly read what is driving up ratings and what is not has changed them from delivering information to manipulating our brains for profit. The goal today is to elicit an emotional response. Naturally, this makes the news more polarizing.

Yep. This is a huge problem, and as traditional news organizations disappear, they’re being replaced by tech companies and news aggregation services, which accelerates this change. My late-70’s-, 80’s-, and early 90’s-based education, coupled with the cold war, taught me that a free press is important to a free society. It pains me to hear people throw out “fake news” and talk of how worthless the press is. It feels like we’ve forgotten how important the press is and that some in the news industry have forgotten this too. If Watergate were to take place today, I’m pretty sure Nixon would remain in office. It’s just too easy to manipulate people and polarize them.

I could not agree more, and the acceptance of fake news may be the single biggest threat to democracy today.

I often wonder if writers/journalists today are/were required to take an ethics class covering topics in their field of work?

If you’re traditionally educated, probably. But most media today is more of the “blogger” variety with no formal training. I didn’t go to school for journalism, either, but I at least benefitted from many years of writing under the wing of a formal publication with very real rules regarding not just style but also ethics.

Not trying to make this political. Just thinking more generally. How do media companies run their business, and writers/journalists earn a living, while balancing that with a form of information delivery that doesn’t heighten emotions and polarize so much?

I don’t see this changing, sadly. It would require massive federal protection and regulation, and let’s face it, we have politicians that have come to power specifically because of fake news and the lack of this protection and regulation. We’re going to need a lot more outrage before there’s any change.

Sorry to be so negative. This bothers me deeply.

Used displays

hrlngrv asks:

You may not have an opinion about this because you may have no experience with it, but here goes. What do you think about 2nd hand monitors? I’ve been using a 1600×1200 one I bought 4 years ago daily, and it’s still chugging along just fine. I’m starting to consider replacing my 1280×1024 second monitor, but I don’t want a 16:9 replacement. Would it be accurate to say that if one doesn’t scratch the screen or drop the whole thing, monitors should have the longest lifespan of all peripheral hardware?

That I can’t say for sure, sorry. But for whatever reason, I always go new with displays, and displays are perhaps the only peripheral with which I’ve experienced many problems. (That said, the display I’m using with the Xbox One X is about four years old. It might be my oldest display.) I do wish there were 16:10 options, for sure.

I’m a big fan of refurbished but displays are the exception, for me at least.

Apple and Thunderbolt 4

Anlong08 asks:

This may have been discussed else ware, and since my college days I haven’t really kept up with the finer details of computer architecture so forgive the ignorance. The post about Thunderbolt 4 got me thinking. Did Apple say what they were doing with Thunderbolt compatibility when they drop Intel? It was may understanding that the interface was tied to the processor. There is quite a lot of hardware out there, not just docks, that is Thunderbolt based.

Yes, Apple says it will support Thunderbolt 4 in its Apple Silicon-based Macs.

Microsoft reorg

OldITPro2000 asks:

Paul, have you heard any more Microsoft reorg news beyond the changes in sales and support and Peggy Johnson leaving?

No, but given the COVID-19 pandemic and the news that Microsoft is not laying off anyone who worked in its retail locations, I think we can assume that layoffs will be minimal to nonexistent, at least. I am curious who will take over for Johnson. She’s still listed on Microsoft’s leadership page, despite her last day being three days ago.

Oh, Arizona

bschnatt asks:

Paul, I know that you used to live in Arizona (Phoenix?). What were the top 3 best things about living there, and the top 3 worst things?

Yeah, we moved to the Phoenix area in April 1993 and then moved back to Boston in August 1999. We lived in Scottsdale at first and then mostly in Phoenix proper.

Unfortunately, I could come up with far more than three worst things and far fewer than three best things. When I visited Phoenix several years ago for the first time in several years, I was driving around and looking at old haunts and asking my wife what I should do/see because I couldn’t think of anything I really cared about still. She couldn’t either.

So, the worst thing was the heat, by far. People there used to tell us that we’d get used to it, that you’d “go from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned office,” but that’s nonsense. This is a place that sees its first 100-degree day in April and its last 100-degree day in October, and it’s unbearable. We had a string of 100-degree days 76 days in a row the first year we were there. I burned my feet through sandals, twice, walking out on the asphalt to get the mail.

We lived in several apartments in and around Phoenix, and we bought our first house there, in 1998. It was in the literal middle of the city, right below 24th and Camelback, and … it was a city, even though the neighborhood was sort of suburban-looking. What this means is that police helicopters fly overhead all night long with spotlights looking for people or chasing cars. And the streets are all huge, wide, and have really high speed limits. Phoenix might have been the capital of high-speed crashes in the middle of intersections because cars in one direction would blow through the red lights all the time. Horrific. One time I went into a grocery store and this wiry guy with no shirt on had a Glock sticking out of the back of his pants. When I complained to the manager, he said it was legal as long as it wasn’t concealed, so I left my cart of groceries and never went back there.

When my son was one, he came down with bacterial meningitis and almost died. The hospital he ended up in was a hellhole that I felt could have contributed to his problems. It just didn’t seem safe, and we were put in a room with a little girl who had been born with all of her organs on the outside of her body, and she was enduring multiple operations to try and put them back in. She screamed all the time. It really added to the ambiance.

Basically, I hated Phoenix. I made some friends there, of course, and I still keep in touch with a few of them. I have a sister who lives there. But I’ll never visit again if I can help it.

Not sure about “best,” but … What did I like? Not much. The nearby Salt river allowed tubing and that was fun. There was a used book/electronics store chain that had huge retail locations I loved. Bookmans, I think. (Though these days I’d probably not go very much.) We had a few favorites restaurants, one of which, Pizzeria Bianco, was/is world-class and literally has the best pizza in the United States (sorry New York and everywhere else, it’s not even close). That’s about it.

Of course, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if we hadn’t moved to Phoenix. It was there that I met the person who got me started with writing. For that, at least, I am eternally grateful.

The drought in southwestern states is now being described as a “megadrought”. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, and this is particularly problematic for Phoenix because it doesn’t have its own water supply. Instead, it relies on drainage water from the Colorado River, which is mostly controlled by other states, and that water supply can’t meet the city’s demands today, let alone in the future. Phoenix, like Las Vegas, is unsustainable. And when you drive around and look at all the perfect lawns with the never-ending sprinklers pissing away that water supply, you just have to wonder what people are thinking. That entire city should be desert landscaping.

God, it’s like scratching at a scab. 🙂

What’s the deal with Windows 10X?

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Any news regarding Windows 10X? Initially, it seemed to be a lightweight OS, something like ChromeOS, and then it was targeted towards dual screen devices, making it seem more of a mobile OS. Then it seemed to be a candidate to potentially become the replacement for Windows, with all the baggage that brings along. Have you heard any insights into where it stands now?

Initially, it was LiteOS, and we thought it was a Chrome OS competitor, remember that? It’s like ancient history all of a sudden.

Anyway, there’s no news since Panos Panay delayed/canceled Surface Neo and the (true) rumors that this platform simply wasn’t ready to be tested publicly, let alone put in a shipping product. So it’s at clear that holding back Windows 10X, and targeting more traditional single-screen PCs/devices was the right call. But beyond that, it’s unclear. I’d like to see Microsoft offer this system for testing in the Insider Program. Or even adding its UX and container architecture as options for Windows 10 desktop in the Dev channel. It seems like there are some good ideas there, at least.

It seems, hearing the rumors of 10X, and watching the development of Teams, that Microsoft does not understand the idea of simplicity.

This is true. And while I’m not defending this at all, I will at least say that Microsoft rapidly expanding Teams with new features and turning it into an extensible platform is at least in keeping with its strengths. I hate seeing Teams turn into a bloated, unusable beast, but this is exactly the type of success that Microsoft is always looking for. I can’t remember who said this, but I had been referring to Teams as “the next Outlook,” but someone high up in the Microsoft 365 org said it was more like “the next Windows.” And … yeah. It’s a fair point.