Dr. Richard Scolyer was at the forefront of this, and died only recently after a long battle against brain cancer at 59. His open letter is well worth the read.
Come on, a problem nobody really had? I wholeheartedly disagree. Data loss and the orthogonal problem of lacking free space on computers is/was a massive problem at enterprise scale and OneDrive, for all its many shortcomings, is well and truly into good-enough territory to cover the 80% case. I'd go so far as to argue that the scenario you've described is by far the less frequent one. And if it frustrates you, you're afforded the ability to designate files and entire folders to be kept downloaded at all times anyway.
Data loss and storage is always a challenge, that's why companies will have network drives, network storage that's not strongly coupled with your account acess. OneDrive doesn't solve the problem in a clean way. It adds an extra layer of brittleness.
Network storage does not handle the online/offline switching as transparently as OneDrive (or other cloud storage).
For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.
And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc
But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.
onedrive doesn't really handle online/offline switching well. Unless you configure it carefully, it will generally not keep stuff local and so things will break without an internet connection.
Network drives mean no local retention and no real good answer for Windows+Mac+Android+iOS clients to remotely access the files. It also doesn't solve sharing those files externally with granular permissions.
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
Technically speaking, Windows does support client-side caching on network drives. I've used it in the past for a highly limited number of users (read: me, on a personal share) and it works kind of like OneDrive/Dropbox/other cloud platform. But it's really rough and doesn't handle conflicts well.
With OneDrive if you edit a file offline and someone edits a file online AND it's not a file type edit it can attempt to merge (like with Office documents) you end up with "{name}-conflict.{extension}" files rather than deleted local copies. You also get version history of files and the recycle bin of files deleted from the cloud to recover any mistakes from.
Your alternative is that the contract was forged. Something easily falsifiable in court and absolutely devastating to any case brought, not to mention any follow-on charges that may result. Is that what you're putting forward?
I thought I was very clear above - my alternative is that even under the best light there were still clearly bad actions carried out by bricks and minifigs. When there is a grey zone I find it helpful to work out what the most charitable interpretation if it is still negative. Even when given the biggest benefit of the doubt Bricks and Minifigs is clearly acting in bad faith here.
My god, man. Go read the HN guidelines, this method of communication isn't only insufferable to read, but is actively making this place worse to be a participant of.
HN guidelines strongly encourage me not calling you an asinine twat, so I won't do that. As your other reply highlighted, no one's arguing thermodynamics with you. It's clearly a behavioural phenomenon, and one that isn't half as well understood as we may like to believe. It's at the intersection of advertising, biology, dietetics, economics, genetics, neuroscience, nutrition, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, the disciplines go on. Consider all the myriad ways those factors may interact and compound, then look at the statistics: that the overwhelming majority of adults fail to lose significant weight long term through "eat less" should tell you all you need to know about the state of the problem. If your conclusion is as simple as "they mustn't have considered to put the fork down and try harder, en masse," I feel it says more about you than anything else.
Scott & Tomoko's site, the former tiktok.com, was particularly touching as a time capsule of the pre-9/11 world. I wonder where, and who, they are now, if they are at all.
Statistically, if they had their first baby in 2000, they're probably still alive, right? (And hopefully living atop a huge pile of cash from selling their domain... One can hope.)
looking at the website on archive.org, at some point between the personal website and today's TikTok, the domain belonged to another company called TikTok, which seemed to be dealing with coupons
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-08/professor-richard-sco...
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