Windows 8 is almost literally like going back to the 1980s. And the default wallpapers are all vomit-inducingly ugly. I agree that every UI designer at Microsoft should be fired and go spend their time making hideous public sculptures in major metropolitan cities that I don't live in like all their po-mo art school friends.

I'm amazed that Windows 8 is so advanced it's incapable of the "classic" Windows 2000 look that every other Microsoft OS in the last 15 years could do. And from a usability point of view, I could write a book on why Flat UI sucks. As far as I'm concerned the last version of Windows that wasn't eye-gougingly ugly by default was 2000. Actually, Windows 7 wasn't all that bad, but I still strongly prefer the "classic" look. But of course, Microsoft is so hypnotized by this whole "Flat UI" nonsense that they won't let me have it any more. Or they are so incompetent their state-of-the-art software can't display a 15-year-old UI scheme. Either way, stupidity or malice, it's really pathetic.

Flip a couple bits in the registry, make a SKU and charge and extra $100. They've been doing that for 20 years.

And the only pro feature I wanted (the Unix prompt)

What are talking about, Powershell? You can install that on any version of Windows. If you are talking about an honest-to-goodness Unix prompt then install cygwin or something that gives you bash or some other Unix-style shell.

Or is there something else I'm not aware of?

Mr Ellison is the head of a software company called Oracle.
If your computer is a car, then software is the fuel that runs it.
Hope this helps.

If your computer is a car, then Oracle software is the crank in the front that you use to start it up.

You're not the only one who had that thought.

I wish every native English speaker could communicate as well in English as you do. There's no need to apologize.... ... unless, of course, one of your first two languages is Klingon.

You do realize the code that generated the "hockey stick" graph won the the IOCCC back in 1999.

1. It brings all the music up to the same levels. In this way, it's a bit more 'democratic' with the music, all the parts will be equally hear-able.

Yes, because it all sounds like white noise.

2. they falsely associate 'aggressive' music with loudness wars

But the loudness wars were real.

3. Related to my second point, the real hear-able issues due to the loudness wars are incredibly minor, psychologically.

You may think so, but a lot of us don't. The heavy compression (and this is audio compression, not digital compression, which is a completely different thing) destroys the quality of the sound. This is an objective truth. Perhaps that kind of crushed sound might be desirable by some artists as a style or effect, but when old music is being remastered to have no dynamic range and to clip, it is severely damaging to the quality of the sound and the ability for a listener to hear everything in it. That definitely has nothing to do with changing tastes, because we're talking about the same music.

Rock 'n' roll isn't dead. You just can't hear it on the radio or other mass media any more. But it hasn't gone anywhere.

Thanks, AC, but everything you've said about me is simply wrong. You might find it more rewarding to listen to what people say rather than pigeonhole them into your preconceived stereotypes. The people you talk to certainly will.

Try reading what I write next time.

I never said I know they are terrible today. I said I stopped listening to them because I no longer liked what they were doing. The worst criticism I made was that they seemed to be "phoning it in".

I also said, "They were a talented bunch of guys who were never above reinventing themselves every couple albums, like a lot of good, creative groups."

Apparently you can't read. Perhaps /. would appear better to you if you could.

The early 90s was when I stopped listening to the radio. The current trends were not interesting to me and the "classic rock" format was painful to listen to because the repertoire was so ridiculously limited. There's plenty of "classic" rock music I like, but you can only listen to the same few dozen songs so many times before you just get sick of them, no matter how much you like them.

Radio seriously self-destructed in the 90s and was no longer a medium to experience anything even remotely new or challenging. (I suppose there were still small college stations, etc., but that's about it.) The last time I heard something cool and new on the radio was when the local classical station played that great and memorable battle song from "The Phantom Menace" by John Williams. The last music I bought after hearing it on the radio was probably Matthew Sweet or Echo and the Bunnymen around 1990 or so.

From everything I hear (which isn't much), pop music is simply horrible right now. The autotune epidemic is insane, and every singer sounds like crap because of it. I've heard autotune put to creative uses... back in the 70s vocoders were used in much the same way, but vocoders weren't used as a replacement for actual singing, just as a gimmick or hook for effect. Nowadays, everything sounds like a PDP-1 singing "Bicycle Built For Two" except without the interesting melody.

It wasn't always like this. There literally was much more variety in decades past.

For the real world, eh? Let's see. Optimism will not stop...

Well, not with that attitude it won't.

U2 didn't used to be terrible, but at some point in the late 90s or early 2000s they seemed to start phoning it in. I haven't listened to anything new by them since then.

I'm a pretty serious music junkie, and while I usually listen to progressive rock and jazz fusion, I liked U2's stuff starting in the late 80s and my wife brought me an appreciation for their earlier stuff. They were a talented bunch of guys who were never above reinventing themselves every couple albums, like a lot of good, creative groups. This was back in the days when a significant amount of popular music was interesting and creative.

I'm surprised that Apple would be so tone-deaf to think everyone would automatically want this new album pushed to them. It wouldn't bother me (but I don't own any Apple devices and you couldn't pay me to use iTunes), but I can guarantee I'd want a very easy way to get rid of it if I didn't like it. I haven't spent decades curating a collection of music just to have it be carelessly junked up.