Re: stuff that used to be buried in menus

You could just hover over the icon and see what it does, in your own language. And as far as I remember there is a key-press that actually shows all of the text at once.

Then the rest of the time the icons actually save space. Dunno, doesn't seem all that crazy to me.

TIFKAM's lack of integration into the rest of windows though... stupid.

Paris because she is integrated into many functions.

Re: Disagreed

Except....

Your eye is a high-pass filter. I.e. the extra effort to increase pixel size comes to nothing the moment the pixels move around or have diagonal lines and curves.

Then you have to anti-alias them. So, at some point there is a trade-off between physical display density, how your eye works and computation, with a certain point of diminishing return on making the pixel smaller.

Re: paradigm shift

Believe you are wrong. Each AD instance actually runs jet as the underlying store and then builds replication on top of that. There are a few variants of Jet lying around, but they derive from a common source. AFAIK

Re: I never understood how this can be legal

There no market for Notepad and Calc? Actually, the bundling wasn't that big a deal, it was the OEM contracts.

Re: Have you tried Win 8 with a mouse

Not so much gibbrerish actually. USER32 is right at the bottom of everything before Win8 and USER32 is pants. (E.g. window move requires an application to respond to a move event before the move happens, resulting in freezing).

That said, they was probably a hybrid they could have chosen which ran the risk of blowing some apps up (or, gasp, having them render incorrectly in some interesting cases) which kept old apps and new apps in one place and still allowed an evolution touch.

Pure is poor....

Re: Blackboard patent

This. Patents shouldn't be accepted without a realization and a documented best mode.

Re: Is he talking about the Perl 5 source?

Because perl is executable line noise used by admin to cobble together small helpers together. When the start language has no decent syntax or rules, why bother with the code

Re: Planet? - By the current definition, not?

It can only be a planet if its roughly spherical (big enough to collapse to a sphere under its own gravity) AND its significant enough of a mass in its own orbit to have (largely) cleared it of debris. (Hence Pluto and Ceres don't count).

So, an exoplanet wouldn't actually be a planet by this definition. Perhaps they'll have to come up with a formal definition of exoplanet vs. dwarf planet. The good news is no kiddies are going to have to memorize exoplanets so no-one much will have to car or notice.

Re: Limits.

The faster you go, the slower it seems, to AN EXTERNAL OBSERVER, to you, you just go faster. Yes, and things get thinner relative to you, and external time speeds up, and in the other reference frame, you get heavier . And visible light turns to X-rays, I like how people forget that. Absent some serious field tech, the main problem is the stuff you are flying through, oh and going home, you don't get to do that.

Re: @Destroy All Monsters - "humans limited forever"

Even with relativity intact, you can get anywhere you like as fast as you want, (well, not counting pesky problems like getting bombarded with highly energetic particles caused by their relative blue-shift and the like). You just can't come back without massive time dilation. (See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Paradox).

So, kindof hard to run a Galactic empire, but, hey maybe that's for the best.

Re: They just killed .NET for Windows 8, why this now?

Because... this is web-tech? The output is still plain old Javascript.

Re: Relational DBs

Most NoSQL databases exist for a simple reason, the ability to blast the data across a very large number of nodes. It's a conscious trade-off, but at these kinds of scale (say 1 billion users) the relational model breaks down and the nice clean tables can't be efficiently joined, regardless. Doesn't mean that if you are writing the database for even a pretty large company you can't go relational.

Gravity?

Isn't it enough just to that the gravitation attraction within a galaxy is large enough to overpower expansion? There might be some net difference to a non-expanding system, but the galaxy as a whole would still not expand?

Paris, because like gravity, she sucks....

Re: Gee, revisionist much?

I said NT (as in 3.51, 4.0) HAD ACLs (as do all successor NT OS's). At the time almost all *NIXes did not. Also, I should distinguish between the Windows security *model*, which was pretty good and the actual security of the OS (buffer overruns and other exploits) which was somewhat bad (and of course the myriad of Apps written for Win95 that never bothered with this security nonsense and hence had to run as Administrator didn't help much either).

Gee, revisionist much?

Windows 95 kept the Win16 subsystem pretty much intact and then built a 32 bit kernel around it (and used semaphores to guard access to the non-reentrant 16 bit code). It also had to be very careful how it called into the old DOS core which was kept largely intact. It truly was an unholy mess, but seriously, adding threading and a 32 bit somewhat haphazardly protected address space is hardly a minor enhancement.

Windows NT was a complete kernel rewrite, SMP and 32 bit (and then 64 bit) from the ground up, largely platform neutral except for the HAL which ran initially on a wide variety of chips (including MIPS and Alpha). Win32 is just a subsystem inside of this with a kernel32.dll export to keep compatibility with Win95 win32 APIs. Win16 and the DOS v-mode support was also just a subsystem hosted on the kernel. Windows NT always had a security model actually somewhat in advance of *NIX (ACLs not just group, user, universe), and its only grown more sophisticated as the need to protect a user from themselves has become more important. (No, grandma doesn't care that the root account wasn't compromised if they lost all their data).

If you are going to open an orifice, try the one in front of your face rather than the one on your posterior.

Re: I still don't get why this only appies to MS

Point of order.

MS was found to hold a legally acquired monopoly in PC operating systems.

MS were found to be guilty of illegally trying to extend this monopoly to browsers by Penfield-Jackson, but this verdict was remanded to the lower court.

Subsequently MS settled with the DoJ meaning that no US court has found that MS did in fact illegally attempt to extend its legally acquired monopoly to browsers.

Not sure about exact EU rulings, but get your facts straight.

Deployment to any client?

Its platform neutral, one app to deploy to any client. Any other option you might name is platform specific.

Paris, 'cos she's not very picky either.

Re: ...I'm sorry, but...

The EU has the position to ensure fair competition of ANY businesses within its jurisdiction. I'm not taking a position on whether Google is a monopoly and/or has abused it position. But your statement is violently parochial and seems to match what the commission is really up to.

Re: @Eadon

Win7 was Vista stabilized and made efficient, also with some time for the driver/apps ecosystem to catch up. Saying it was based on XP is basically just stupid and wrong, otherwise as a trivial example, why are Vista drivers compatible with 7 (as a rule) and not XP? I normally don't get involved with drivel like this, but would it kill you to think before you started typing?

Re: No fair switching the units!

As an engineer that means anything up to $499 million. Or did you mean $0.00000000 billion.

Yeah, I know I'm being a pedant, so were you....

Re: Quad Core?

WinPho 7.5 runs on a single core because its based on the WinCE kernel which doesn't do SMP. Android, based on Linux, does, so it uses them. This really says nothing about how WELL each one uses them or if they are required.

Re: Question:

US Supreme Court, as opposed to the (Washington) State Supreme Courts. But, most appeals get rejected way before it reaches the highest court.

Re: Excellent

Don't see why a GPU couldn't directly get the result of a DMA transfer after the host CPU set it up? File Systems would pretty much be a CPU thing though.

Re: is it bullshit Friday or something?

The comparison between Fire and Android and Linux and BSD is just silly. Linux and BSD are completely different kernels with a common POSIX abstraction layer and some shared user-space libraries. All android variants (including fire) share a custom linux kernel with a large amount of common user-space libraries, including VMs (Dalvik), UI controls, etc. The amount of UI customization and vendor specific extensions on top varies.

Re: LibreOffice

How is this relevant to a cloud offering? The reason you use a cloud solution has to do with improved collaboration and less client state to manage. It's not obvious how something modeled on a local, heavy client solution factors in (except to add extra commoditization pressure on full client office).

Re: PowerShell

I think everyone is missing the point of why a new shell was invented. Basically, it was an attempt to define a richer way to pipe together operators than input and output streams of text. The idea was that if you exchange objects then a human can always view them (through appropriate deserialization) and code can operate on it in a more predictable way. Hence kluges like grunging through human readable output with sed and awk could be avoided.

That at least is the idea, and motivates why other shells weren't deemed sufficient. How well this all really works is more open to debate.

Re: Reinventing the wheel

Java - because Sun and then Oracle really messed up by locking the language down to the extent that no-one can really leverage it for a client platform well. If you think MS were alone on this, witness Dalvik and android.

C# - because its from MS, basically. Not that I have an inherent bias against MS technology and certainly C# is what Java would be if Sun had bothered to continue developing it, but because the rest of the planet doesn't necessarily hold this view.

Re: Shades of VBScript

Except that Dart cross-compiles to JS. So, you don't really have to implement everything twice. If the Dart VM does end up being significantly faster than JS, then, there might be a significant win in getting the performance benefit where Dart is available.

No ripping of JS out of Chrome required. Either JS VMs catch up in performance, or eventually other browsers adopt Dart because it really is faster and then don't want web apps to suck on their browser compared to chrome.

Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)

I think the point is that somewhere in his chain in a non-RDP client. Then, yes, this does go sadly south. Windows TS client actually handles mapping of the windows key and even Ctrl-Alt-Del (Ctrl->alt->break instead) really well.

Having suffered through no machine for a bit, I've really started re-appreciating TS client.

Re: Stealing focus...

What version of windows are you using? Win 7 just blinks the app in the task-bar if it wants attention. App-launch does steal focus though.

I've found OS/X much more obnoxious than Win 7 when it comes to focus stealing.

Re: Do these guys really think that's large ...

Google already does. It's third party drivers that are largely closed.

Its not about the code...

Its about color fidelity of images. Its impossible to get visually correct reproduction of an image when the surrounding UI is colorful. Which is why professional photo manipulation software is monochromatic.

Re: Fork !

Why on earth would they need to fork the code to do this? It's pretty much all C. They might need to build a different set of binaries for different target and even have some #ifdef's in there for optional compilation.

That's hardly a fork.

M&M Store

That one surprised me. No idea there was that much M&M branded merchandise.

Fine with unions, not fine with...

them interfering with interfering with managing poor employees out. For example, in our school district, the teachers union insists on compensation based on seniority and not performance and similarly when we were forced to downsize the workforce (property taxes paying for schools has consequences when the housing market busts) insistes on keeping more senior teachers over more competent younger ones.

This is utter bollocks.

The Nt kernel always been pretty modular

It's the user space that a total intertwined mess where everything depends on everything else, sometimes cyclically.

Oh god, Godwin's Law

OK, just a reference to Fascism... Seriously, as someone who grew up in a real police state, comparing the current PotUS to a Fascist is just silly. Guy is about as centrist as you can get and only bat shit crazy libertarians could have the stupidity to believe otherwise.

What about smaller increments...

Not many market are growing by hundreds of a percent?

No Excuse

I would get a ZERO for any answer in any Engineering exam that wasn't in SI units (and only powers of 1000 of those, so no cm thanks). You don't get to pick and choose. Whoever chose Imperial, contracted with anyone using Imperial or knew that someone on the project was using imperial and didn't hit the breaks should be fired, probably retroactively.