Posts by AngryCTO

The Walton kids are ABSURDLY wealthy – and you're benefitting

Just the wrong questions being asked

Mr Worstall first argues, somewhat correctly, that Walmart creates value to the American retail business. It is clear to anybody that large distributors can be a lot more efficient than the local grocery. Still, their monopsonistic business practices are well documented and are causes of concerns.

Then the author puts an equal sign between the fairness of the company to earn 3% of $136b / year (fine with me) and the fairness of 4 individuals to own 50% of the company shares, when the company employs 2.2 MILLION people. They had 50% when the company was 100 people big, and they still have 50% when the company got to 22,000 (00s) people. Is their contribution to the company 250,000 times larger than another employee's? Who can argue that in good faith? Fixed equity is the cornerstone of inequality. It is absurd to measure their contribution to the company using a measure 50 years old.

And, most probably, they also inherited this fortune by paying a pittance in tax. Inheritance tax should be exactly the same, if not larger, to normal income tax.

I QUIT: Mozilla's anti-gay-marriage Brendan Eich leaps out of door

Shame!

His forced resignation as CEO is a real shame. It is similar to he being forced to resign for supporting gays, but worse, as this is is reverse discrimination of a member of the majority by a very aggresive minority.

Forcing someone out of job for their political / personal views is a bad move no matter the affiliation. The only criterias should have been technical and managerial skills, which he had a lot. The board proved cowardice. Mozilla will pay their mishandling of the online lynching by stagnation or decline, as they will adopt a CEO with better social skills, and less technical skill.

Gay marriage is very much a political issue, because it has no clear "truth", as opposed to sexual liberty. It is generally accepted that what two consenting adults do in the privacy of the bedroom is nobody's business but their own. However marriage is a public institution, strictly correlated with making and raising kids for most of human history. It has little to no sense besides it.

And btw, anybody who watches politics today knows that many people have absolutely NO shame to twist the facts, the truths and throw tantrums for their political ends. Why should we pay the shameless mob any attention?

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

AngryCTO

It is funny that the author gets excited about windows' contents shown while dragging/resizing, that was in Win95, right?

As to the horror of Unity, never again. It is a massive waste of productivity:

1. The icons are missing text. Imagine a GUI where all buttons would have icons, but no labels. That is what Unity is. Some of us read text faster than icons. They are complementary in fact.

2. The hidden scrollbar, puah. Everytime time I need to drag-scroll I waste a few secs trying to activate the scroll.

3. The forced grouping of similar running apps under the same icon. God forbid that you are running several Wine apps, they would all be grouped under the same icon.

4. The Dash. It would be unusable if not for the search box.

5. Almost zero lack of configurability of the Unity panel.

6. The entire concept is so '90s. When will we see a HTML based desktop, extensible to no end like Firefox is?

I reckon it is retarded to force users to do things your way. An OS should have a few knobs to allow people to revert to the old way of doing things, especially since these tweaks are trivial. After running Mint I chose KDE on OpenSuse, because KDE on Ubuntu is too unstable. Although KDE seems to have TOO many options.

Marvell stuck with $1.17 billion patent bill

Fabulous news!

Everytime I see a large US company getting hit with an absurd amount over a patent infringement lawsuit, I reckon the day is brighter. When SMEs get out of business because of absurd patent laws, nobody hears their plight. It takes a large company to make any kind of large political noise to change the absurd system, which can be described as technological slavery. The power of a zaibatsu is only limited by the power of another zaibatsu.

I reckon it is a fabulous

Everytime I see a large US company getting hit with an absurd amount over a patent infringement lawsuit, I reckon the day is brighter. When SMEs get out of business because of absurd patent laws, nobody hears their plight. It takes a large company to make any kind of large political noise to change the absurd system, which can be described as technological slavery. The power of a zaibatsu is only limited by the power of another zaibatsu.