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Comment Re:Seems like Red Hat should share a bit (Score 1) 236

When RedHat went public in August 1999, I recall that many contributors were allocated initial public offering (IPO) shares. It's been awhile, but I believe they were at a discounted issue price.

"It was clear that Red Hat wanted all the open source developers who
had made its success possible to participate in its public offering. ...
Red Hat Director of Technical Projects Donnie Barnes spent three
weeks scouring the Internet, digging up all the contributor lists to all
the open source projects he could find. Red Hat then had to craft a
letter to this list of developers. ...
The final result was that well over one-fifth of the developers on
the list were interested, eligible, and able to participate in the Red
Hat IPO."

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/34...

My point is that RedHat *was* interested in rewarding the original source developers.

Comment Re:Hacked Switches (Score 1) 86

Maybe you missed the part where this is an optional service. You can still save locally.

Optional, as in it's optional to play Fortnite, which *requires* an internet connection?

This is a Fortnite tax, which is unfortunate for my son as he now has no portable options from the Xbox One when we travel. Whatever happened to the good ole days of being able to own hardware without an ongoing subscription for the right to use it?

Comment Quicken 2007? (Score 1) 180

So what special exception will they make to kowtow to Intuit, who has steadfastly refused to update their Quicken 2007 locally hosted app. This 11 year old app is still used by many, and made use of Rosetta so its 68K code could run on Intel iron. When Rosetta was retired by Apple, Apple made special dispensation so that lazy intuit could still run this essential financial application on modern Mac OS with little modification, up to today under High Sierra. I have no doubt most of its code is the same 68K code from 2007.

I was an early adopter of Quicken back in 1988 and have 30 years of financial data socked away in it, and do not want all my financial transactions stored by Intuit in the cloud where they will keep it "secure". Yeah, trust Intuit. Quicken Essentials has a more limited feature set. They do not offer a true substitute, which is why so many of Intuit users have been stuck in time running an ancient release.

Comment Re:USA congratulates itself for working conditions (Score 1) 175

The Romans had Pax Romana (Latin for "Roman Peace"), which they extended to their conquests. No more wars. Good for society and business.

America should have a Pax Americana, where we extend our hard fought safe working conditions, environmental protections, and living wages to the rest of the world. If you do business with the largest economy, we expect you to abide.

It would be the best gift to the world of the true American dream.

Comment Re:Rendezvous with Rama (Score 1) 242

We could *already* get to it, if we really wanted. Dawn has reached a 10 km/s delta-v even with primitive ion thrusters and simple solar panels. With the DS4G thrusters currently in development, you could do twenty times as much.

Sounds like a job for Tony Stark aka Elon Musk!

Comment Re:Illusion of usablility (Score 4, Interesting) 189

At some point late in Steve Job's reign, Apple seemed to have purged all the UX expertise, instead allowing graphic designers and developers to do what thy will. In the past, actual usability testing had been used to defined documented user interface standards, and Apple's user interface group was top notch. I've been a Mac user since 1984, an UX designer in the '90-'00's , and have disappointedly watched this roller coaster going from "insanely great" to the "one sheet of glass" designer bullshit of late.

Safari started going downhill as iOS became dominant. Favicons are just part of the problem. In Safari, the Window tab, which lists all open browser windows, used to be sorted spatially. Frontmost browser windows were listed first. This placed windows you were currently using at the top of the list. Several years ago, some idiot decided to change this list to sort order to alphabetical, probably without realizing the original utility. How the %#$@ am I supposed to know what some web page is titled? Page title often changes within a site as the user navigates between pages, so with alpha title sort, the site position on the windows list arbitrarily changes.

Without spatial organization finding one of the dozen pages open in Safari is as difficult as finding an app somewhere on the many app pages in iOS, or trying to find an app to launch on the Watch cluster of similar round icons. It's a cognitive disaster, which reduces usefulness and place form far above function.

This is the decline which has brought us a "professional" laptop whose primary design criteria seem to have been "thinner" and "lighter", instead of the dozen other criteria which actual heavy-daily-users desire.

Ugh. Bring back "insanely great".
Now get off my lawn. Argh.

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