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Comment Re:Big Myth #1 (Score 2) 339

You need to do your research.

If you had said bill gates of the gates family, you'd be right. They were wealthy.

Jobs wasn't wealthy. Was adopted. Did not have a good relationship with his bio father when he finally turned up (tho it was a reasonable adoption case- young pregnant mother and father with no means). He also denied his daughter was his daughter for several years when he knew better.

Jobs started from the middle income layer- did not do the ivy league college bit- did not have a silver spoon in his mouth.

But I'm sure some good ideas came from wealthy pompous people. They have more time and they have the money to try their ideas.

Comment Re:Microsoft would be onto a winner if... (Score 1) 378

Can you point me to a new input medium aside of keyboard and mouse that offers better control in a desktop environment?

Yes the digitizing pallet. That's been used by artists for a long time. It is also particularly important for people who need to operate laptops one handed, like workers who are standing.

I want a DESKTOP operating system. If something else works better on a tablet, do something else on a tablet. Simple as that. Even Apple was smart enough to know that one size fits all works in operating systems about as well as it does with underwear.

Microsoft has always believed in ubiquitous computing. That people want to run the same applications in different environments and not buy their applications over and over and over. It may be that Apple is right that people do want to do that, but I have trouble believing the same people who whine constantly about how much Windows upgrades cost really want to pay 4x over for the software.

Comment Re:Microsoft would be onto a winner if... (Score 0) 378

What would make sense? You still open files. You still save them. And you still need to close them (or have some means of releasing locks on them so that they can be moved/copied/backed up/etc).

You don't open them anymore. You do a destructive overwrite not some sort of data append. So you don't need to close. Now if you think about, why do you save them? You already have the system regularly saving updates anyway, saving is cheap. Why bother with you saving? Instead maybe have something like marked versions.

This is, essentially, what an idea "Event Viewer" should be doing.

Exactly but it isn't quite that simple. Because you don't want to just view them you need to have a queue that passes messages back and forth. The human may want to pick between dozens of events and understand which ones are easy or important or time critical or...

When you're talking about a 55" TV, you're talking about what? SD Widescreen? HD? SHD? 4K? What? Resolution's the issue, not the device itself.

No... not at all. As pixels get physically bigger ratios have to change. For example the amount of white space between characters in a font increases much more slowly than the size of a character needs to increase. That is a 5 point font magnified 200% is not the same as the 10 point font. Resolution is not the only issue. DPI matters a great deal.

More important than that though is that size of screen determines how long a person will want to use it. Sligh increases in screen size induce drastic changes in willingness to engage for extended periods. So for example the average phone (4" screen) is 30 seconds. The average watch slightly more than a second. Average 15" screen is 1/2 hour.

But forcing everyone (including enterprise partners, where retaining costs MONEY), over to a new UI paradigm when there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the old one, is Just Fucking Stupid.

The rest of the post was about what was intrinsically wrong with the old one.

Face it. Standard desktop is 1-3 monitors, a keyboard, directional controller (mouse or mouse simulant (rollerball, touchpad, or joystick)), speakers and a microphone.

I don't have to face it because it is not true. Besides quibbling with whether microphone / speakers are really standard the big point is that work has been migrating away from desktop / laptops now for almost a decade. The form factors on which people want to work are shifting. So that's not standard. The work moves.

And there was DEFNITELY no reason behind applying that crap to Server 2012!

  I do see the reason for mixed factor laptops like the Yoga or Surface. Microsoft traditionally wants the server GUI to be close to the desktop GUI to reduce training complexity. I don't think it goes beyond that.

Comment Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? (Score 5, Interesting) 468

Agreed and trapster and other apps do the same crowdsourced speed trap locating trick.

Trapster had better audio alerts but they don't work on my new phone so I use waze now.
It also flagged "likely" speed traps even when the police were not yet reported in the location.

Using the app to locate a speedtrap is about as productive as driving along the road and observing parked police cars then circling back around and attacking them now that you know where they are.

The police have a problem because they have been killing united states citizens at a rate of roughly 1200* citizens per year (via 528 validated trustworthy news source reported face page reports). More of those citizens killed by united states police were children than all the citizens killed by the police forces of england, france, and germany combined. It is literally (not figuratively) about 120* citizens vs under 20 citizens in england, france, and germany total per year.

Not to mention countless beatings, illegitimate property seizures, and a solid reputation of "good cops" standing aside doing nothing while the "bad" cops commit crimes.

*People who are police officers killed about 1450 citizens but 528.com found that about 200 of the killings were not related to their police status or police duties.

** I support the police and donate to the police fund but our police are out of control and have terrible community relations. We need to get them out of dealing with drug gangs and drug money and swat teams and military equipment. Move that activity to the FBI and return the police to ordinary police enforcement actions. Having a tank and heavy automatic weapons misleads them into killing 7 year old girls when they were at the wrong address.

Comment Re:Microsoft would be onto a winner if... (Score 0) 378

Nobody would mind a better OS, but when the GUI has reached the pinnacle of usefulness, why try to force a change?

Because your assumption is way off. The GUI wasn't at a pinnacle. A few examples:

1) The file: open, save, close is really designed around a dual floppy paradigm. It makes no sense at all with SSD hardware.
2) As the number of system services require notification increase integrated notification handling becomes key
3) As device types become much more variable (ranging from a watch to a 55+" TV) graphics need to switch more readily
4) As input devices became more variable applications needed to take better advantage of them.
etc...

Windows 7 was not a pinnacle. It did some things reasonable well on some particular types of hardware that were rapidly becoming less important and mainstream for an ever shrinking percentage of the population.

Comment Re: Why oh Why (Score 1) 105

That's not what they said. What they said was that they considered modules to be data not code and thus not covered by the GPLed i.e. no linking occurred. An explicit statement from the copyright holder that action X is not a copyright violation is a very strong endorsement. Better yet of course would be an explicit written and signed license permitting it, but the statements could and would be considered by the court in a lawsuit.

Comment Re: Why oh Why (Score 2) 105

I'm seeing the same 30 characters for Teradata and Sybase. When I look at the 2008 SQL standard (last version I own) I get totally lost in the notation and I'm just not that motivated, I'm going to take their word for it. As for everyone else that matters I'd say those two matter.

As for it being big enough. Table names can have synonyms and be accessed functionally via. PLSQL. Oracle itself tends to use table names like X12A with another table that uses a descriptor. If you want documentation Oracle provides a means for documentation.

In any case This issue certainly isn't a huge constraint with Oracle. My point is that they are tremendous innovators whether one particular limitation annoys you doesn't change that.

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