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Comment Re:Right (Score 1) 41

Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Word can't even draw text while scrolling at speeds above a crawl because its rendering engine is such pathetic trash, so very much no. It also can't keep its UI drawing reliably if left running for a few days, even after windows are forced to refresh some elements won't draw until every window is closed (since they all run under one executable like it's the fucking 1980s because Microsoft doesn't trust their inter-process clipboard functionality to work correctly) and so on. Every part of office is hot garbage, and Word is absolutely not an exception.

Comment Re:Strange crossovers (Score 1) 115

Removing server features from workstations was a step ahead of the pack.

Into a hole.

It's an upgrade

It isn't.

Apple has all the money, they can afford to do both things and it's weird they haven't. Having a meaningful management system is a huge part of selling computers, to corporate and educational users. Back before all computers were on an IP network, when they didn't have security beyond antivirus, you could get away with not offering management.

Those who have demands closer to the old day workstation solutions are better served by other OS'es, but we're a blip on the consumer axis, not a norm.

Apple has a solid alternative to Windows for business use, if only they offered a full suite. They could be digging into that market. That's what NeXTStep really was supposed to be, a Macintosh-ish system for business use. Their prices were even more hallucinatory than Apple's at the time, which prevented any real adoption more than any lack of software, especially since they had very good compatibility with other environments (including, for example, a Netware client.) It's quite confusing what made them think they could get those kinds of dollars for a 68k when the PC was just getting fast. We can't ask Jobs now, though.

Comment Re:Where's the surprise? (Score 0) 115

I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

Comment Re: Poettering (Score 0) 115

I just want a way to write a scheduled task with one line instead of an entire config file.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

Another thing I would like is to be able to just put startup scripts in one directory and have them run instead of doing all kinds of configuration

That's /etc/boot.d

Comment Re:Surprise? Everybody's been saying it. (Score 1) 115

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.

Comment I actually noticed this positively (Score 2) 76

I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.

Comment Re:Why stop there? (Score 1) 98

Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

Comment Remember AltaVista (Score 3) 76

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

Comment amazing (Score 5, Insightful) 123

It's hilarious to see a federal government sue a state for banning an insanely unregularly shitshow.

"Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange,"

This is your future, United States. Just the dumbest shit spoken imaginable, in the service of protecting the freedom of separating people from their money, 24/7, backed up by an administration who nakedly wants dumb people to do dumb things - oh, the ways in which such policy posture enriches them personally? Totally unrelated.

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