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Did Microsoft do anything right in 2025?
(www.pcworld.com)
they euthanized xbox
Old Yeller, but something strange is wearing his corpse the next day
They pulled the plug on Ensemble Studios and then like 10 years later they noticed that a lot of people are still playing and modding their old Age of Empires games, so they went ahead to produce shitty remakes that look like mobile games and after that they proceeded to continue the series with live-service trash.
Fuck those fuckers @Redmond. Now I feel dirty everytime I look at my old AoE Game Discs.
Yes, they borrowed a macOS feature and put it in Microsoft Office.
On Windows, exotic/lesser-used symbols are inserted either via GUI via the CharMap.exe application, or via keyboard shortcut by holding in ALT and striking an "ALT Code," but only on the number pad. The number row above the letters doesn't count. Why? Nobody really knows. Anyway, on a Mac, you hold Option and optionally hold Shift, and press a key. For the em dash, it's Shift+Option+Hyphen.
Since ChatGPT and others have popularised the em dash, people want to use it more. Those of us who have used it all along can tell you from memory, on Windows it's ALT+0151. I can do that keyboard shortcut in my sleep. (Been using Windows for over 30 years. macOS, only a few.) It's way easier on the Mac, though. And, this year, Microsoft brought it to Office. In Word, Excel, Outlook, or the others, you can hold Shift and the Windows key (which is exactly where Option is on a Mac keyboard; where Windows users have the Left Alt key, we have ⌘ (Command; Windows users can see that symbol because it has an older meaning, on maps: it means "point of interest")) and strike hyphen to insert an em dash. If you're a Mac user who knows the Mac shortcut, the exact same muscle memory will serve you in Office on a Windows machine.
Unfortunately, it's only for Office. The same trick doesn't work in, say, Notepad. It's aggravating because Word will convert two hyphens without a space to an em dash anyway (maybe other Office apps, I'm not sure).
Classic Microsoft: borrow a feature that everyone wants decades late and sorta bungle the stealing process.
Ctrl-shift-u puts Linux into Unicode input. Enter 0151 and hit return. It's been that way for generations, similar to OSX/MacOS.
Ctrl-shift-u puts Linux into Unicode input. Enter 0151 and hit return.
It works in Firefox but not Kate, any idea why that is?
I mean they encouraged a lot of people to give Linux a try!
Betteridge's law of headlines surely applies
No, Microsoft has never done anything right
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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