epo

I use the magic trackpad on a 27" iMac, it is a wonderful input device and exactly fast enough. There are always clueless users who don't know to adjust tracking speed just like there are always clueless Apple haters who want to believe that Apple would not have provided a tracking speed preference control to allow users to tune devices to their needs.

According to http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/xerox/star8010.shtml Xerox had an optical mouse in 1981, I know for sure it had one in 1985 because that was when I was using them.

Rolls Royce. Make a law affecting every nation on the planet? Best of luck wth that.

America has a huge number of graduates who are unemployed or working at menial jobs, the supply is far from limited.

If you need something for a couple of hours use a provider who supports that charge granularity. What is silly is criticising a firm for not doing something which they do not claim to do. I could just as justifiably call them silly for not selling ice cream.

And the world has moved on, something Microsft seems to very poor at adapting to.

Fascinating. Please share your insights about drink driving, we'd love to know.

> 50 bytes may not seem like a lot, but when you’re serving 500 million pageviews per month, it adds up.

This is rubbish. What matters is how many packets of data go through the network. It is packets which are the unit of transfer and which are handled by intermediate nodes. The difference between say 2340 and 2290 bytes is of no material consequence whatsoever, it may cause one less packet to be sent but probably won't. To think it does have a consequence is to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what happens in the network and in endpoints. None of these '50 byte savings' accumulate anywhere in any meaningful or measurable sense whatsoever. So no, it doesn't "add up" to anything.

And if you're going to downvote me explain why I am wrong and how the benefit of these mythical 'savings' can be demonstrated.

Another fan here. How gratifying and unexpected to find such a niche story on the HN front page, won't last.

They are supposed to guard the people but job security and mission creep means their priority becomes guarding themselves. This should come as a shock, unfortunately it does not.

Tries to compare Apple's behaviour to McCarthyism. Hilarious really, the kind of paranoid, whining nonsense that is only taken seriously by witless Apple haters, the sort that downvoted you without comment, presumably.

The danger is two-fold: firstly the USA is losing friends abroad, 'allies' are realising that at best they were slightly favoured underlings but never equals. At least this is explicit from the outset with China.

Secondly, America's power and influence is fading, slowly admittedly, but fading nonetheless. Like here in the UK your turn will come when you realise what it is like to be yesterday's bully boy. Ours came with the break up of Empire, yours may come when the world calls in your debts or builds walls to isolate your corrupt financial structures.

America was once admired and respected. Now it is increasingly like some blundering fat tourist in a brothel, people pretend to be nice to you because they want your money. But really, nobody is your friend.

Coined '63, published '65 according to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

I'm old enough to have read Computer Lib ('74) when it came out, I have a first edition which I imported into the UK by sending some sort of international money order to a US bookshop. For some reason I also have a second edition.

In other words, you can't name them either.

No, you shouldn't be impressed. It only shows that some cacheing scheme can deliver data this quickly. One byte reads possibly, perhaps the same byte read one million times. Almost nothing to do with MySQL performance in fact.

The IUPAC standard name is aluminium, aluminum is listed as a variant (but only at the insistence of Americans I'd bet). What we mock is the pretentiousness of claims like "more legitimacy". Insecure, much?

Doctor Who was first broadcast in the UK on November the 23rd 1963. To be accurate the Google doodle shouldn't be visible in your country before the 23rd. That said, it is early afternoon of the 22nd in the UK, the doodle wasn't visible on google.co.uk late morning but it is now.

Silly example, who decides what is 'an extremely large number of records'? Whoever has a view about this should monitor and police the limit. If you are saying that you can't protect against every eventuality so you may as well guard against none, then that is asinine.

Applications should enforce correct application behaviour regardless of user behaviour. Databases should maintain database integrity regardless of application bahaviour.

If this requires duplicated effort then so be it.

The check constraint should only be applied when the column is updated so depends on your usage.

Comments suggest article is a spoof. Flagged.

Have you never seen or heard of political advertising? Any form of marketing which creates comparisons tries to create a lesser impression of the thing which isn't being peddled.

And my point is that some very smart people work in marketing. People who think they can avoid being influenced are delusional.

That's the point of marketing. What is silly is being a poseur, like many people on HN, and pretending you are above all this. Different people just respond to different styles of marketing.

You're either trolling or you have a mental health problem (depression perhaps?).

Dbvisualizer (http://www.dbvis.com/) works with lots of databases and is really pretty cheap. Disclaimer: no connection other being a long term customer, I use it with Oracle, MySQL and Postgresql.

Oh please. Come back in 10 or 20 years time and say it is not a fad. Technology cycles are getting so compressed that everything is a fad now. The whole thing being fuelled by the immature and inexperienced who know nothing about the past and consequently think they have nothing to learn from it.

"Skill" as a catch-all term is a meaningless word bandied about by those trying to sound as though they know what they are talking about.

There are two sets of attributes, the first (commonly called "skill" but perhaps better called "technique") describes how well you can carry out the "motor" activities of your job. The other, and more important in critical circumstances, is "judgement".

To describe it by analogy with driving, in the beginning you concentrate on developing experience in operating the vehicle, eventually this becomes more or less automatic. People call this skill and they are wrong, it is a set of learnt reflexes. More important is judgement, knowing how to maintain road awareness, knowing when and how to overtake, when to speed up and when to slow down etc, etc. NB when people talk about the dangers of drinking and driving it is impaired judgement they are mostly talking about (although there is some impaired skill such as poor reaction times which stops them getting out of problems their degraded judgement has got them into).

Judgement comes with experience and follows skill acquisition. With surgeons you would hope they know how to make a cut (they have technique). What you really want is someone who knows where and what to cut (they have judgement).

And yes, all of this applies to programming and systems design.

Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.

That would be called "convention".

I quite like the cynical suggestion that they overclocked the devices to get decent benchmarks on release and are now dropping it back to get better battery life. Fits in with what I'd expect from Microsoft.

He's not dismissing it. He is saying we have got our priorities wrong.

You are being intellectually dishonest by adopting an artificially contrarian position and trying to pretend he was saying we had to choose one or the other just, it seems, for the sake of having a contrarian position.

You are wrong, but despite having an idiotic opinion you're not an idiot, tempting as it is to think that. You are just someone who thinks that just because they can form a banal opinion that means the opinion has any worth. It doesn't.