At that low a level it has complete access to memory, it can crash your system, or worse, and there's shit you can do about it. That's part of the reason for USB to be like it is. It provides very high level access, it is all controlled through the CPU. Means a lot of overhead, but also more security.
You say these words, but in reality it means little... poor and flaky driver support (Win2k and even XP) meant that 10 years ago when USB was announced, plugging in a keyboard with bad drivers meant it blue-screened your PC. The Mac wasn't much better - many USB devices just didn't work in the early days.
Thunderbolt is much much faster, and the once optical interconnects and cabling is supported it will really shine. In the meanwhile any hardware addition to your system, whether it's a PCI card or USB device can potentially mess up your system.
RP is right about our military spending. It is just wacko that we spend more now than we did when we had an actual hostile superpower (the USSR) to contend with.
One could postulate that we have an even more powerful hostile superpowers to contend with: the mega-corporations (hint: the story does not end well for the non-rich).
The company begged me not to do this, because the new person was likely to be someone who had purchased it online or some other such thing and not the original thief, and that person would likely not purchase another radio and subsequently wouldn't subscribe.
That's too sad - that person only got the radio through an ebay/craigslist sale of a stolen item, and that impacts the sellers bottom line?
First Sale Doctrine does not apply to stolen goods.
The Volt is not really an electric car. It's better described as a plug-in hybrid -- i.e. a hybrid with a much bigger battery that can be charged from the wall. Chevy does a good job of obscuring that fact, though. My point is that the Volt would be counted as a hybrid in the referenced survey.
BTW, don't get me wrong... I don't fault Chevy in any way for their marketing. They are very clear about what the Volt is and is not. They just have purposefully avoided using the actual terms "hybrid" or "plug-in hybrid".
I say good for them. As a hybrid owner, I think the "hybrid" brand is wearing thin, after being abused by nearly everyone in the industry (and in general). The original and 2nd gen hybrids (Prius, Insight) were pretty sweet vehicles compared to the competition. Then you had the "mild hybrid" trucks and cars that just stopped the engine at the light and silly half-measures. Then you had "flex-fuel" which also got marketed as a "hybrid", "hybrid" sports cars that only added power and no
The time has come for plug-in hybrids, and the Volt wherever I've heard it around here is not only incredibly silent (unlike my Prius when I accellerate from a stop), but damn quick. So the gas engine kicks in when driving past a certain range - that's a *feature*. Now whether it's worth the MSRP is another story entirely.
Personally (back on topic), I won't buy another hybrid because my current hybrid is doing great and faring quite well in it's 7th year. Perhaps that's the reason - no need to upgrade. If I did want to buy another vehicle it would be a Volt (ie, plugin), or full electric with full commute range like a Tesla Model S (drool).
. But with the government bond market paying next to nothing they're losing ~500 million a year to inflation, which is also close to nothing, but still more than MS is getting from sitting on the cash means they're losing PPP value
This is a questionable assertion. Do you know for a fact that Microsoft's "short term investments" are so focused on cash and bonds? Generally, companies like Microsoft short-term investments highly diversified and managed - I mean if you have $XXB, wouldn't it be worth paying someone or 10 a few million to manage it like a hawk?
Morally speaking, companies have an obligation to their communities.
- that's a load of crap. Companies have an obligation to make money for themselves, that's all
No, Companies (as a collection of people) have only a legal obligation to make money, but they bear the moral burden of an obligation to the communities in which their people live, and in which their customers abide.
As we forget and ignore this, we slide into a neo-feudalist state where you must swear fealty to your liege corporation.
There is a huge difference between donating to charities who do valuable work in your community and giving to the government.
The GP comment's point was that companies are amoral and thus you should expect no moral activities from them, and provided a counterpoint for that argument. I don't see your point - it's not like you are forced to choose - it's within standard mores to support both, within reason.
Paying zero taxes while taking advantages of the benefits of government (public infrastructure, civilized society as consumer base, etc) is immoral. If you don't feel like the benefits are worth the price, move to Somalia or Sierra Leone - I hear there's near zero (governmental) tax obligations over there.
Unfortunately there's no good way to define practicing versus non-practicing. Is a law firm that employs some pimply-faced script kiddie who writes phone apps now a practicing entity? I think the real solution is to eliminate software and business process patents, they're like an architect patenting the idea of putting a window in an office at a specific location. Big deal.
I say, force the NPEs to do exactly that. It will a) force them to spend money - thus causing a slight but important barrier to trolling, b) increase employment (negligible but a worthy goal), and most importantly, c) if by some luck the troll actually creates an app/product that has sales, it would be put in exactly the position that practicing entities have - ie, having a stake and exposure to counter-litigation.
In short, forcing even a sham of practicing in the areas where they litigate will likely kill the whole practice of trolling - which is why the patent trolls will fight it tooth and nail... it voids their rent-seeking way of life.
All the seller should be required to do is to collect the use-tax where appropriate
Hmm, you're perhaps unaware that businesses collecting sales taxes on behalf of the buyer is a...law...
So, you want to require people to obey laws of States that they don't have a presence in. Which means all 50 States.
And since we can't have selective laws ("This law applies to whites only, for instance, or Walmart only, for another instance), that means that YOU would be bound by the laws of all 50 States.
When I mentioned " to collect the use-tax where appropriate", I meant, "where the company has presence in the state". Would you agree with a requirement to collect taxes in that case, or are you just trolling?
Yes, the Colorado law probably screwed up here, but if other states adhere to that simple clause it will be fine... and affiliates have been construed to be "presence in state" - feel free to argue that with the states, but that won't trigger a constitutional review.
And Ballmer sighs with relief at not having bought this turkey.
You think Yahoo would have kept all of it's employees pre-merger with Yahoo? Look at what happened to Skype. No, it would likely have ended up nicer for the shareholders, but the same for the employees - but 1-2 years earlier.
What I would do is send them another message saying you find their consolation gift unacceptable and you're moving all your business away from them. Then I would do that. Then, I would simply write up a detailed account of these events with a tl;dr of "got F'ed in the A by XYZ Inc" and just go out and drop that on every single forum and review site you can find for domain names and hosting.
Looks like this is the only recourse in many of these cases. Expect this to be made illegal soon.
Might be granny and auntie christmas purchase marketing. "the $60 game must be better than the $30 game... I'll buy junior the $30 game"
This is what is known as the Verblen effect [1]. Thing is, it doesn't just do to price it higher. The overall packaging needs to be better, and to look "richer" (curiously this likely leads to bullshot [2]). Playability (and replayability) are relegated to the bottom of the list, along with meaningful plot.
Funny thing, the verblen effect is likely altered by App Stores where there isn't any physical packaging, and lots of word-of-mouth. Of course, even in this genre, depth of game and complexity are diminished in order to give instant satisfaction to the buyer (note: the buyer is likely NOT purchasing for someone else - so again even digital packaging isn't nearly as important). In this space, reviews are king, and are already gamed.
Requiring a business (or individual) not resident in your State to abide by your State laws while they are outside your State is usually considered to be a bad thing.
Or do you really think you should be obligated to obey the laws of all 50 States, even those you've never even visited?
This is an asinine reduction of Dcnjoe's brilliant argument. It's not the retailer/business that is being forced to "abide by State laws"... it's the buyer. All the seller should be required to do is to collect the use-tax where appropriate (ie, if they have presence in-state). If they don't want to do so, by all means, they should refuse to sell to those states that are too restrictive or labyrinthine to be profitable.
1. Time is money. The time I would spend writing down the information I need to make the purchase at home, then finding it on the web, making sure it's the same product, entering my information to make the order, etc. It just takes too long and the price difference usually isn't enough to make it worth while. Plus, if I get home and the item isn't available online, I have to spend nearly an hour to go back to the store and buy it.
If this is what you really are concerned about, you are doing it wrong - Redlaser, Amazon Price Scan, etc will a) find if the product you want is on ebay/amazon and b) how much it costs there.
I don't do this, but this is a *major* issue for retail stores - and is likely why your WalMart and others buy stuff that simply doesn't exist in other stores (ie, that particular product is "versioned" for that retail chain only), thus eluding the price-matching attempt.
For what it is worth, Best Buy does have a high value for me as a showroom. And for when I absolutely have to have something that day.
If there's a Fry's Electronics near you, the same day purchase experience is a world of difference. Too bad Fry's isn't capable of branching out further - they're flawed, but much, much better than your average Best Buy.
Battery issues are coming to an end, soon enough the range anxiety crowd will be recommended a therapist instead of a bigger battery. Average-Joe-priced electric cars are already going 100 miles on a charge and doing an 80% quick charge in half an hour. That's over 3x the average American's daily driving distance. The vast majority of cars could be replaced with electrics right now.
The only thing we really need petrofuels for is non-tiny aircraft, and in the short term, non-huge boats.
Look, I'm totally revved up for an electric car, but my daily distance is about 75 miles (used to be 15, but that's another story). I wouldn't feel safe on range unless it's about 2x.. otherwise I'd probably be driving a Leaf right now. For the moment my 7 year old Prius does decent (53mpg avg).
I'd say once range hits about 150mi and there are charging facilities at workplaces, adoption of EVs will greatly speed up.
Shortly after the iPad 2 was released, it was an "okay" update on the first one, but relatively lacklustre. It was hard to think much of that at the time, but it and the increase in legal attacks started to really set the stage for what was going on at Apple.
The June/July period came and went, with no iPhone release, it didn't seem too big a deal but when the iPhone4S eventually came, it came late and was a major dissapointment
Do you work for the Enderle Corp or some "technology analyst" firm that feels they can ignore market reality? Those products you state as "disappointments" were the best-selling and most profitable products of their respective markets. Just because you can't see past the horizon doesn't mean the earth is flat.
Rich, Elected, Prophetized, etc... you get what you want by appealing to others. That some have the rootkit to the human psyche and are willing to use it to profit themselves is nothing new at all.
That's what we used to call it when I was coding smalltalk in the 90s - we would identify sore-spots that couldn't be effectively coded in Smalltalk, rewrite those parts in pure C, and call them via DLL (we used Visual Smalltalk which easily worked with external libraries).
This doesn't invalidate the assertion that Smalltalk+(a bit of C) is more efficient to develop in, but it does stretch it a bit to say that Smalltalk "isn't slow". The tradeoff in being able to pull up a walkback on any data element in the system (unlike Java, Smalltalk allowed you to convert primitive data elements into full-blown objects only when "inspecting") far outweighed the performance aspect, and we could optimize as needed.
The downside to such an optimization scheme is that it does tie you to particular libraries, OS and machine architecture if those assumptions are not independent in the C code. It's also a pain to deal with two code languages if you aren't somewhat fluent. Code-generators in the primary (slow) language are somewhat helpful if you have lots of C to write.
If I have a choice, I don't want him in my country.
You know, this isn't just your country. If I had a choice, I would reject plenty of folks from my country. Your judgement about deportation being a punishment should be weighed on every crime.
This kid did something stupid and he might get deported to a country he didn't grow up in, and might not know at all. Other kids do stupid stuff like this all the time (even resulting in injury or death), and if they get punished at all, don't get sent to an effectively unknown country.. maybe they spend some time doing rehabilitation or restitution, or perhaps some incarceration (very unlikely 10 years).
I love Google Docs, but I'm very surprised that your organization isn't completely dependent on Excel - there are very few competitors that provide the power it does combined with the relative ease-of-use... leave alone the fact that every enterprise app provider often allows "export to excel (and pdf)".
I've tried to use Google Docs but the lack of features in the spreadsheet app makes it ineffective for a good solid number of use-cases that my colleagues and I rely on (and I'm not a data analyst or numbers-driven manager either). Do you have specific Google Docs apps you're running that meet your needs?
Wait, so desktop operating systems, with many different screen sizes and resolutions do not handle resolution independence as well as the ipad? The ipad which had to exactly double the resolution of the previous model so it could just be linearly scaled up by a factor of 2?
So why should I as a user care about all this? Perhaps Microsoft should push 1080P or some other resolution as "standard" and ensure shit looks good on that resolution for all "Microsoft HD certified" apps - that's effectively what Apple does... then, when it's time to push a better resolution, instead of herding cats, they just create a new "Microsoft 4k certified" and make it easy for devs to migrate their apps to the new certification... perhaps they can even enforce this "cerifitcation" as part of some App Store?
The problem is apps do not. There's nothing Windows can do to fix that.
Sorry, there is something Microsoft could do (and you may find it unacceptable)... give massive incentives to go along with their resolution-independent effort, keep ALL of their 1st part apps compliant, and then leave the non-resolution-independent 3rd party apps to wither and look stale.
The only issue with all the above is that for a consumer, upgrading a Windows PC can be very costly - even just OS+Office would cost $300 or more, and that doesn't include all the other (even 1st party) software that would need to be re-licensed. With the App Store concept, users pay once for a product, and new revisions (with the exception of in-app purchases or new titles ie, AppHD or App2.0) of the same software are expected to be free for the lifetime of the account.
Thus you see another disruptive wedge Apple pushes against Microsoft - once people believe that all their Apps should be "pay once to use everywhere across all my devices, including upgrades to new revisions and new display resolutions", Microsoft's licensing strategy is endangered (in the consumer market at least).
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At that low a level it has complete access to memory, it can crash your system, or worse, and there's shit you can do about it. That's part of the reason for USB to be like it is. It provides very high level access, it is all controlled through the CPU. Means a lot of overhead, but also more security.
You say these words, but in reality it means little... poor and flaky driver support (Win2k and even XP) meant that 10 years ago when USB was announced, plugging in a keyboard with bad drivers meant it blue-screened your PC. The Mac wasn't much better - many USB devices just didn't work in the early days.
Thunderbolt is much much faster, and the once optical interconnects and cabling is supported it will really shine. In the meanwhile any hardware addition to your system, whether it's a PCI card or USB device can potentially mess up your system.
RP is right about our military spending. It is just wacko that we spend more now than we did when we had an actual hostile superpower (the USSR) to contend with.
One could postulate that we have an even more powerful hostile superpowers to contend with: the mega-corporations (hint: the story does not end well for the non-rich).
It's not just Best Buy, it's a service provided by a third party: The Retail Equation.
Best Buy is implementing the solution. I doubt the solution provider makes this change mandatory... follow the money.
The company begged me not to do this, because the new person was likely to be someone who had purchased it online or some other such thing and not the original thief, and that person would likely not purchase another radio and subsequently wouldn't subscribe.
That's too sad - that person only got the radio through an ebay/craigslist sale of a stolen item, and that impacts the sellers bottom line?
First Sale Doctrine does not apply to stolen goods.
The Volt is not really an electric car. It's better described as a plug-in hybrid -- i.e. a hybrid with a much bigger battery that can be charged from the wall. Chevy does a good job of obscuring that fact, though. My point is that the Volt would be counted as a hybrid in the referenced survey.
BTW, don't get me wrong... I don't fault Chevy in any way for their marketing. They are very clear about what the Volt is and is not. They just have purposefully avoided using the actual terms "hybrid" or "plug-in hybrid".
I say good for them. As a hybrid owner, I think the "hybrid" brand is wearing thin, after being abused by nearly everyone in the industry (and in general). The original and 2nd gen hybrids (Prius, Insight) were pretty sweet vehicles compared to the competition. Then you had the "mild hybrid" trucks and cars that just stopped the engine at the light and silly half-measures. Then you had "flex-fuel" which also got marketed as a "hybrid", "hybrid" sports cars that only added power and no
The time has come for plug-in hybrids, and the Volt wherever I've heard it around here is not only incredibly silent (unlike my Prius when I accellerate from a stop), but damn quick. So the gas engine kicks in when driving past a certain range - that's a *feature*. Now whether it's worth the MSRP is another story entirely.
Personally (back on topic), I won't buy another hybrid because my current hybrid is doing great and faring quite well in it's 7th year. Perhaps that's the reason - no need to upgrade. If I did want to buy another vehicle it would be a Volt (ie, plugin), or full electric with full commute range like a Tesla Model S (drool).
. But with the government bond market paying next to nothing they're losing ~500 million a year to inflation, which is also close to nothing, but still more than MS is getting from sitting on the cash means they're losing PPP value
This is a questionable assertion. Do you know for a fact that Microsoft's "short term investments" are so focused on cash and bonds? Generally, companies like Microsoft short-term investments highly diversified and managed - I mean if you have $XXB, wouldn't it be worth paying someone or 10 a few million to manage it like a hawk?
Morally speaking, companies have an obligation to their communities.
- that's a load of crap. Companies have an obligation to make money for themselves, that's all
No, Companies (as a collection of people) have only a legal obligation to make money, but they bear the moral burden of an obligation to the communities in which their people live, and in which their customers abide.
As we forget and ignore this, we slide into a neo-feudalist state where you must swear fealty to your liege corporation.
There is a huge difference between donating to charities who do valuable work in your community and giving to the government.
The GP comment's point was that companies are amoral and thus you should expect no moral activities from them, and provided a counterpoint for that argument. I don't see your point - it's not like you are forced to choose - it's within standard mores to support both, within reason.
Paying zero taxes while taking advantages of the benefits of government (public infrastructure, civilized society as consumer base, etc) is immoral. If you don't feel like the benefits are worth the price, move to Somalia or Sierra Leone - I hear there's near zero (governmental) tax obligations over there.
Unfortunately there's no good way to define practicing versus non-practicing. Is a law firm that employs some pimply-faced script kiddie who writes phone apps now a practicing entity? I think the real solution is to eliminate software and business process patents, they're like an architect patenting the idea of putting a window in an office at a specific location. Big deal.
I say, force the NPEs to do exactly that. It will a) force them to spend money - thus causing a slight but important barrier to trolling, b) increase employment (negligible but a worthy goal), and most importantly, c) if by some luck the troll actually creates an app/product that has sales, it would be put in exactly the position that practicing entities have - ie, having a stake and exposure to counter-litigation.
In short, forcing even a sham of practicing in the areas where they litigate will likely kill the whole practice of trolling - which is why the patent trolls will fight it tooth and nail... it voids their rent-seeking way of life.
Hmm, you're perhaps unaware that businesses collecting sales taxes on behalf of the buyer is a...law...
So, you want to require people to obey laws of States that they don't have a presence in. Which means all 50 States.
And since we can't have selective laws ("This law applies to whites only, for instance, or Walmart only, for another instance), that means that YOU would be bound by the laws of all 50 States.
When I mentioned " to collect the use-tax where appropriate", I meant, "where the company has presence in the state". Would you agree with a requirement to collect taxes in that case, or are you just trolling?
Yes, the Colorado law probably screwed up here, but if other states adhere to that simple clause it will be fine... and affiliates have been construed to be "presence in state" - feel free to argue that with the states, but that won't trigger a constitutional review.
And Ballmer sighs with relief at not having bought this turkey.
You think Yahoo would have kept all of it's employees pre-merger with Yahoo? Look at what happened to Skype. No, it would likely have ended up nicer for the shareholders, but the same for the employees - but 1-2 years earlier.
What I would do is send them another message saying you find their consolation gift unacceptable and you're moving all your business away from them. Then I would do that. Then, I would simply write up a detailed account of these events with a tl;dr of "got F'ed in the A by XYZ Inc" and just go out and drop that on every single forum and review site you can find for domain names and hosting.
Looks like this is the only recourse in many of these cases. Expect this to be made illegal soon.
Might be granny and auntie christmas purchase marketing. "the $60 game must be better than the $30 game... I'll buy junior the $30 game"
This is what is known as the Verblen effect [1]. Thing is, it doesn't just do to price it higher. The overall packaging needs to be better, and to look "richer" (curiously this likely leads to bullshot [2]). Playability (and replayability) are relegated to the bottom of the list, along with meaningful plot.
Funny thing, the verblen effect is likely altered by App Stores where there isn't any physical packaging, and lots of word-of-mouth. Of course, even in this genre, depth of game and complexity are diminished in order to give instant satisfaction to the buyer (note: the buyer is likely NOT purchasing for someone else - so again even digital packaging isn't nearly as important). In this space, reviews are king, and are already gamed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
[2] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12
Requiring a business (or individual) not resident in your State to abide by your State laws while they are outside your State is usually considered to be a bad thing.
Or do you really think you should be obligated to obey the laws of all 50 States, even those you've never even visited?
This is an asinine reduction of Dcnjoe's brilliant argument. It's not the retailer/business that is being forced to "abide by State laws"... it's the buyer. All the seller should be required to do is to collect the use-tax where appropriate (ie, if they have presence in-state). If they don't want to do so, by all means, they should refuse to sell to those states that are too restrictive or labyrinthine to be profitable.
1. Time is money. The time I would spend writing down the information I need to make the purchase at home, then finding it on the web, making sure it's the same product, entering my information to make the order, etc. It just takes too long and the price difference usually isn't enough to make it worth while. Plus, if I get home and the item isn't available online, I have to spend nearly an hour to go back to the store and buy it.
If this is what you really are concerned about, you are doing it wrong - Redlaser, Amazon Price Scan, etc will a) find if the product you want is on ebay/amazon and b) how much it costs there.
I don't do this, but this is a *major* issue for retail stores - and is likely why your WalMart and others buy stuff that simply doesn't exist in other stores (ie, that particular product is "versioned" for that retail chain only), thus eluding the price-matching attempt.
For what it is worth, Best Buy does have a high value for me as a showroom. And for when I absolutely have to have something that day.
If there's a Fry's Electronics near you, the same day purchase experience is a world of difference. Too bad Fry's isn't capable of branching out further - they're flawed, but much, much better than your average Best Buy.
"...Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to profits".
Privatized profits, socialized losses - socialism for the rich and megacorps.
Battery issues are coming to an end, soon enough the range anxiety crowd will be recommended a therapist instead of a bigger battery. Average-Joe-priced electric cars are already going 100 miles on a charge and doing an 80% quick charge in half an hour. That's over 3x the average American's daily driving distance. The vast majority of cars could be replaced with electrics right now.
The only thing we really need petrofuels for is non-tiny aircraft, and in the short term, non-huge boats.
Look, I'm totally revved up for an electric car, but my daily distance is about 75 miles (used to be 15, but that's another story). I wouldn't feel safe on range unless it's about 2x.. otherwise I'd probably be driving a Leaf right now. For the moment my 7 year old Prius does decent (53mpg avg).
I'd say once range hits about 150mi and there are charging facilities at workplaces, adoption of EVs will greatly speed up.
Shortly after the iPad 2 was released, it was an "okay" update on the first one, but relatively lacklustre. It was hard to think much of that at the time, but it and the increase in legal attacks started to really set the stage for what was going on at Apple.
The June/July period came and went, with no iPhone release, it didn't seem too big a deal but when the iPhone4S eventually came, it came late and was a major dissapointment
Do you work for the Enderle Corp or some "technology analyst" firm that feels they can ignore market reality? Those products you state as "disappointments" were the best-selling and most profitable products of their respective markets. Just because you can't see past the horizon doesn't mean the earth is flat.
A lot of people got elected that way.
Rich, Elected, Prophetized, etc... you get what you want by appealing to others. That some have the rootkit to the human psyche and are willing to use it to profit themselves is nothing new at all.
That's what we used to call it when I was coding smalltalk in the 90s - we would identify sore-spots that couldn't be effectively coded in Smalltalk, rewrite those parts in pure C, and call them via DLL (we used Visual Smalltalk which easily worked with external libraries).
This doesn't invalidate the assertion that Smalltalk+(a bit of C) is more efficient to develop in, but it does stretch it a bit to say that Smalltalk "isn't slow". The tradeoff in being able to pull up a walkback on any data element in the system (unlike Java, Smalltalk allowed you to convert primitive data elements into full-blown objects only when "inspecting") far outweighed the performance aspect, and we could optimize as needed.
The downside to such an optimization scheme is that it does tie you to particular libraries, OS and machine architecture if those assumptions are not independent in the C code. It's also a pain to deal with two code languages if you aren't somewhat fluent. Code-generators in the primary (slow) language are somewhat helpful if you have lots of C to write.
If I have a choice, I don't want him in my country.
You know, this isn't just your country. If I had a choice, I would reject plenty of folks from my country. Your judgement about deportation being a punishment should be weighed on every crime.
This kid did something stupid and he might get deported to a country he didn't grow up in, and might not know at all. Other kids do stupid stuff like this all the time (even resulting in injury or death), and if they get punished at all, don't get sent to an effectively unknown country.. maybe they spend some time doing rehabilitation or restitution, or perhaps some incarceration (very unlikely 10 years).
I love Google Docs, but I'm very surprised that your organization isn't completely dependent on Excel - there are very few competitors that provide the power it does combined with the relative ease-of-use... leave alone the fact that every enterprise app provider often allows "export to excel (and pdf)".
I've tried to use Google Docs but the lack of features in the spreadsheet app makes it ineffective for a good solid number of use-cases that my colleagues and I rely on (and I'm not a data analyst or numbers-driven manager either). Do you have specific Google Docs apps you're running that meet your needs?
Wait, so desktop operating systems, with many different screen sizes and resolutions do not handle resolution independence as well as the ipad? The ipad which had to exactly double the resolution of the previous model so it could just be linearly scaled up by a factor of 2?
So why should I as a user care about all this? Perhaps Microsoft should push 1080P or some other resolution as "standard" and ensure shit looks good on that resolution for all "Microsoft HD certified" apps - that's effectively what Apple does... then, when it's time to push a better resolution, instead of herding cats, they just create a new "Microsoft 4k certified" and make it easy for devs to migrate their apps to the new certification... perhaps they can even enforce this "cerifitcation" as part of some App Store?
The problem is apps do not. There's nothing Windows can do to fix that.
Sorry, there is something Microsoft could do (and you may find it unacceptable)... give massive incentives to go along with their resolution-independent effort, keep ALL of their 1st part apps compliant, and then leave the non-resolution-independent 3rd party apps to wither and look stale.
The only issue with all the above is that for a consumer, upgrading a Windows PC can be very costly - even just OS+Office would cost $300 or more, and that doesn't include all the other (even 1st party) software that would need to be re-licensed. With the App Store concept, users pay once for a product, and new revisions (with the exception of in-app purchases or new titles ie, AppHD or App2.0) of the same software are expected to be free for the lifetime of the account.
Thus you see another disruptive wedge Apple pushes against Microsoft - once people believe that all their Apps should be "pay once to use everywhere across all my devices, including upgrades to new revisions and new display resolutions", Microsoft's licensing strategy is endangered (in the consumer market at least).