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i) They don't fix the appalling font rendering issues on Windows promptly and as a priority. Most of Google's own web fonts are unusable in production because of this.

I haven't used Windows since about 2000, so I have no comment on this. I will point out that it appears work is in progress: https://code.google.com/p/chro...

ii) They don't follow standard most-recently-used order when ctrl-tab between tabs and they don't see the problem and close any bug report as won't fix.

I disagree with this one. The Chrome tab ordering is better. most-recently-used sucks when you have 20 tabs and have bounced around between them somewhat randomly (as is normal). It makes ctrl-tab completely unpredictable unless you're just jumping back one or two levels. The Chrome way is better.

iii) They start adding animations to html elements you can't restyle with CSS e.g. the zoom ease-in they added to select elements in a recent Chrome.

Got a link to more information? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

There were wide-spread issues on their recent releases. You can only auto-update if you are rock-solid.

Link? I certainly never noticed any issues, but perhaps that's -- again -- because I don't use Windows.

v) They fork from the web-kit project, a once high-point in cross company collaboration for the betterment of the web. Now... beginning of the end.

Nonsense. There is still cross-collaboration between Blink and Webkit, and Google isn't the only company working on Blink.

I also fundamentally disagree with the common /. meme that forks are bad. There is this mistaken notion that having all of the developers interested in a certain space collaborating on one implementation will improve the pace of development, but that view ignores the fact that software engineering isn't like ditch-digging; with software there are definitely diminishing returns on larger and larger collaborative groups, particularly if the software isn't of a sort that lends itself to crisp, well-separated modules. In practice, we tend to find that with sufficiently-important spaces (e.g. web browsers) the ecosystem is better-served by friendly competition among open source projects. That reduces the amount of inter-group communication needed to reach consensus on approaches and therefore increases the speed of iteration. The fact that all are open source means that when one project implements a great new idea the others can see the details of the implementation and more easily incorporate the idea, even if they can't actually use the implementation.

I think the "we should all work on one implementation" theory has basically the same merits as the old Soviet one-gigantic-factory model for production of goods. On the face of it one would think that producing many different designs for one type of product and then building all of them in separate production facilities, distributed through different distribution networks, etc., is very inefficient. One design, one huge factory to maximize economies of scale should be better, right? But history showed that the opposite is true, that a competitive market produces more goods, better goods and does it at a lower cost. The issues in software are different, but at a high level the emergent properties are similar.

vi) And now they are going to spend their time re-implementing a cross-platform widget toolkit.

They already implemented it. It's been used in ChromeOS for a while. My guess is that they've decided it will take less engineer effort to port and maintain Aura than to keep up with Gtk+. I also wouldn't be surprised if a goal isn't to remove some unused cruft from Chrome on platforms (like Windows) that don't tend to have Gtk+ libs lying around. I doubt Chrome uses more than a tiny fraction of the Gtk+ functionality.

AFAIKT Aura is a more than just a UI Toolkit, it's a complete Window Manager. A replacement for Gnome (wow! I hope that takes off!) Apparently it's been running on the Chromebooks. Here is Linus' take on the topic.

If Linus would just endorse a toolkit, then there would be One True Toolkit; this would be the most likely thing to drive an actual "Linux desktop revolution". I am not holding my breath.

Reading through the documents, it doesn't look like a trivial task to recompile all your GTK-2 apps against it. From the UI Toolkit standpoint, it looks like a combination of NextStep and Swing.

AFAIKT Aura is a more than just a UI Toolkit, it's a complete Window Manager. A replacement for Gnome (wow! I hope that takes off!) Apparently it's been running on the Chromebooks. Here is Linus' take on the topic.

The main reason I would be reticent to use it is because Google doesn't always have a strong commitment to backwards compatibility. So you may end up having to rewrite pieces of your code, just to keep them compiling. If you're ok with that though, go for it.

Proof that Forbes lies? Because looking at Apple's published, audited financial information, I see an income before taxes of $17.7 billion - and they pay $4.6 billion in taxes, about a 23% tax rate. Now, if you are privy to some secret information you could make history and become a "Woodward and Bernstein" level famous journalist by revealing counter information and having Tim Cook and the rest of the executive team sent to prison for violating SOX laws...

It seems to me that Forbes is telling the truth. And the published, SOX-compliant reporting from Apple backs that up.

I understand you may be intending it as a joke, with a bite, but they do tell you the information they use/store up front.

https://developers.google.com/...

Did you actually measure it (adrobench storage read/write test for example) and did not find any difference?
I'm assuming not and since Nexus 5 is fast to begin with there isn't any *noticable* difference.

Only recently (KitKat release) Google added TRIM support for encrypted volumes. Without that the performance difference between unencrypted (with TRIM) and encrypted (no TRIM) was very noticable after device was used for some time.
Unlucky for owners of older devices (1st gen Nexus 7, Galaxy Nexus) it does not work. This problem is very serious on 1st gen Nexus 7, to the point where it becomes unusable if encryption is used: https://code.google.com/p/andr...

How does Comcast's DNS look like when tested by namebench?

Does it find the same problem?

Do not use comcast DNS... just use googles.

https://developers.google.com/...

Good idea -- otherwise, Google might miss out on some of your browsing activity if you're using another browser, use their DNS to make sure they can capture all of your activity.

Do not use comcast DNS... just use googles.

https://developers.google.com/...

No it doesn't.

And that, folks, is how you can tell apart arrogant people who are spouting propaganda from arrogant people who don't. The guys spouting the propaganda habitually make up lies. They put words into people's mouths that they would have liked them to have said, because it would prove their point.

Google finds exactly one place on the whole of the internet, in which this quote appears:

Japan Marks 3rd Anniversary of Tsunami Disaster - Slashdot
slashdot.org/.../japan-marks-3rd-anniversary-of-tsunami-disaster
Slashdot
1 hour ago - ... else (Score:2). by JoeyRox (2711699) writes: "An unfortunate wave and harmless radiation that inconvenienced a small group of our citizens" ...

You may recognize this as your very own sorry piece of shit.

For people who hate "deletionists", they are remarkably concerned over an article's resurrection.

Yeah, but other saying goes: You don't have to help the terrorists by making it easy for them.

By giving the information to a government, they are helping the terrorists.

Nice, thanks. I already have Avast! Anti-Theft, data encryption, and a 10 digit password, but the more the merrier. My last line of defense: I put all my money/financial apps in a folder called "PlsDontH4x". 'Cause you never know where asking nicely will get you...

No, android does not have full device encryption unfortunately. Only the encryption of /data partition. In most cases this should be sufficient though.

I'm not sure about external sdcard for devices that have it. I have Nexus so emulated sdcard is part of /data and it gets encrypted. If that is not the case with external sdcard, tough luck.

Also, doesn't look like google particularry cares about older devices and device encryption. See this issue for example (TRIM support on encrypted volume): https://code.google.com/p/andr...
I'm not holding my breath to ever get this resolved for my 1st gen Nexus 7.

After encrypting the phone with a good passwd/pin, go to all apps -> Google Settings app -> Android Device Manager, and enable "Remotely locate this device" and "Allow remote lock and erase". Then if it does get stolen, you can use the Device Manager app or https://www.google.com/android... to find it or remotely wipe it. Then go to your Google account settings at https://security.google.com/se... , select your device and "Revoke Access". If you used an application specific password for your Android device, go to https://accounts.google.com/b/... and revoke it. Change your Google password. If you used 2-step verification, move the Google Authenticator to a different device, and re-seed the keys with a new QR code. It is scary how much important private stuff we keep on these portable smartphones, tablets, etc these days, and how screwed we could be if that falls into the wrong hands.

After encrypting the phone with a good passwd/pin, go to all apps -> Google Settings app -> Android Device Manager, and enable "Remotely locate this device" and "Allow remote lock and erase". Then if it does get stolen, you can use the Device Manager app or https://www.google.com/android... to find it or remotely wipe it. Then go to your Google account settings at https://security.google.com/se... , select your device and "Revoke Access". If you used an application specific password for your Android device, go to https://accounts.google.com/b/... and revoke it. Change your Google password. If you used 2-step verification, move the Google Authenticator to a different device, and re-seed the keys with a new QR code. It is scary how much important private stuff we keep on these portable smartphones, tablets, etc these days, and how screwed we could be if that falls into the wrong hands.

After encrypting the phone with a good passwd/pin, go to all apps -> Google Settings app -> Android Device Manager, and enable "Remotely locate this device" and "Allow remote lock and erase". Then if it does get stolen, you can use the Device Manager app or https://www.google.com/android... to find it or remotely wipe it. Then go to your Google account settings at https://security.google.com/se... , select your device and "Revoke Access". If you used an application specific password for your Android device, go to https://accounts.google.com/b/... and revoke it. Change your Google password. If you used 2-step verification, move the Google Authenticator to a different device, and re-seed the keys with a new QR code. It is scary how much important private stuff we keep on these portable smartphones, tablets, etc these days, and how screwed we could be if that falls into the wrong hands.

I use Cerberus. It's available on the store: https://play.google.com/store/... Though if you download it direct from their website then you can flash it straight into the ROM, meaning that even if someone does a factory wipe on your phone it will still be installed and you can remote into it: https://www.cerberusapp.com/do... With it installed, you register your phone on the website, then sign into your account on the phone. From there you can carry out all sorts of commands, including GPS tracking, location history, call and SMS logs. You can even call or message the phone, get it to display messages, record audio, video, take pictures, all sorts. And finally you can wipe the SD card, wipe the phone, or reboot it. I don't remember how much it cost, but it was only a couple of pounds. I've never had my phone stolen yet, but I occasionally log into the site to check that everything is working and it always does what I want it to, so I've had no complaints with it.

I have a site that is free and has three semesters of Java lectures called: http://sites.google.com/site/f...

I have a Java site: http://sites.google.com/site/f... They're pretty self explanatory. Three semesters worth.

Maybe you should read another book, any of many:

"I am against nationalism but in favor of Zionism. The reason has become clear to me today. When a man has both arms and he is always saying I have a right arm, then he is a chauvinist. However, when the right arm is missing, then he must do something to make up for the missing limb. Therefore, I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew I am from today a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts."

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://www.eltwhed.com/vb/arch...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

Being opposed to nationalism is one thing. Being opposed specifically to Zionism (or reserving one's public opposition specifically to Zionism) is another. Being opposed specifically to Zionism because the existence of Israel would be violently rejected by followers of pan-Arabic nationalism (qawmiyya) is most definitely another.

Maybe you should read another book, any of many:

"I am against nationalism but in favor of Zionism. The reason has become clear to me today. When a man has both arms and he is always saying I have a right arm, then he is a chauvinist. However, when the right arm is missing, then he must do something to make up for the missing limb. Therefore, I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew I am from today a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts."

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://www.eltwhed.com/vb/arch...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

Being opposed to nationalism is one thing. Being opposed specifically to Zionism (or reserving one's public opposition specifically to Zionism) is another. Being opposed specifically to Zionism because the existence of Israel would be violently rejected by followers of pan-Arabic nationalism (qawmiyya) is most definitely another.

Maybe you should read another book, any of many:

"I am against nationalism but in favor of Zionism. The reason has become clear to me today. When a man has both arms and he is always saying I have a right arm, then he is a chauvinist. However, when the right arm is missing, then he must do something to make up for the missing limb. Therefore, I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew I am from today a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts."

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://www.eltwhed.com/vb/arch...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

Being opposed to nationalism is one thing. Being opposed specifically to Zionism (or reserving one's public opposition specifically to Zionism) is another. Being opposed specifically to Zionism because the existence of Israel would be violently rejected by followers of pan-Arabic nationalism (qawmiyya) is most definitely another.

Maybe you should read another book, any of many:

"I am against nationalism but in favor of Zionism. The reason has become clear to me today. When a man has both arms and he is always saying I have a right arm, then he is a chauvinist. However, when the right arm is missing, then he must do something to make up for the missing limb. Therefore, I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew I am from today a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts."

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://www.eltwhed.com/vb/arch...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

http://books.google.com/books?...

Being opposed to nationalism is one thing. Being opposed specifically to Zionism (or reserving one's public opposition specifically to Zionism) is another. Being opposed specifically to Zionism because the existence of Israel would be violently rejected by followers of pan-Arabic nationalism (qawmiyya) is most definitely another.

http://www.google.com/dashboar... draws a much more accurate depiction of every espect of my life, and it's just one piece of paper away from the government. Today the stasi espions would be unemployed.

AC wrote: "Some jobs are not possible to do with a never-ending flow of interns and indian mechanical turks. For some tasks you need dependable people who have years of insight into the business model of your company and who have the kind of intimate knowledge of your IT infrastructure that takes years to acrue."

This is so true. There is a lot of "domain knowledge" in many fields, even if the underlying programming issues may often be the same (how to write and maintain good code as part of a team). If you only know one or the other, it is hard to do the job well. And it takes time to learn both.

And a big danger for new people is they don't know what they don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FourLev...
http://processcoaching.com/fou...

And for someone who has gone up the learning curve on both domain knowledge and technical & teamwork knowledge, it may take increasing or new challenges to keep things interesting. For whatever personal reasons, some people care more about certain problem domains at some moment than others. See Dan Pink on how the biggest motivation to do good work comes from a combination of purpose, mastery, and challenge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Game psychology suggests a sense of "flow" is best achieved by matching the challenge to be only slightly more than the skill level:
http://www.jenovachen.com/flow...

On making work into play, Bob Black write about this in 1985 in The Abolition of Work", and Theodore Sturgeon in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://books.google.com/books?...

Although E.F. Schumacher made a good point here too:
http://centerforneweconomics.o...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

There is some tension between Schumacher's point and Black's point, so resolving it may take a deeper level of analysis.

You hate IMDB so much you don't just link to that as the first attempt, but to a pay site that self censors for most of the planet?

I forgot about IMDB - good call. Why didn't you link to it?

I linked to Netflix because that's where I saw it, and before posting I checked to verify that it's still available for streaming, so others could view it as well. I do not know how pages on Netflix, IMDB, or other websites appear from other countries, nor do I research website availability across the slashdot demographics before posting links. Besides, someone could just do a Google search based on what was in the post to find more information.

I've had better luck with Chromebooks. Cloud printers are now very common, and in many cases buying a new printer costs little and is a big improvement anyway. For a list of printers that can work this way, see: http://www.google.com/cloudpri... I hate trackpads anyway, and I've had excellent success with normal mice on a Chromebook. Apple components often don't like working with non-Apple components, that may be the problem there. And all built-in laptop speakers are bad; if it matters, get speakers, they're cheap.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/... I've moved my mother from WinXP to a Chromebook three months back, and because she was already using Chrome beforehand, she took to it while hardly noticing it was different. I haven't needed to help her once to do what she normally does (email and web).

I think that the United States has a vested political interest in controlling the sale of oil. Which is not to suggest that you are wrong per se, but I think that the US oil policies are better understood in the context of hegemony than fair trade. However, the oil industry has been putting all of their propaganda efforts towards lifting this ban; I mark a half-dozen articles in Forbes alone within the last two years. As long as they can keep away from any concerns about national security, they might get their wish.

I'd like to read the court's judgement to better understand the reason, but while the FAA may seem overbearing in this case, the FAA is charged with public safety, and they take it very seriously. Anyone that did complain to the police or the FAA had Good Reason. Incidents with RC aircraft are not uncommon. I have to agree with the FAA on this one. If someone is appearing to be reckless with their aircraft, regardless of the type, it needs to be addressed.

..... a new format that doesn't seem like it will ever be feature-complete.

What features do you see WebP lacking. It uses the RIFF container format that allows XMP metadata, which itself can include EXIF data. It includes lossless and lossy modes, animation and alpha channel (transparency). What do you think is missing?

Well, it's Android, so try MessagEase or a Dvorak keyboard, or any of a hundred others.

Well, it's Android, so try MessagEase or a Dvorak keyboard, or any of a hundred others.

WebP has support for animation, with the advantage of supporting lossy compression in the animation. Even lossless and lossy compression together in the same animation: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/faq#why_should_i_use_animated_webp. WebP may not necessarily be a replacement for JPEG, but perhaps it will become the new animated image format of choice.

The resistance to support WebP in Mozilla seems to be more politically motivated than technical.

Why not add JPEG-XR as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

"JPEG XR[3] (abbr. for JPEG extended range[4]) is a still-image compression standard and file format for continuous tone photographic images, based on technology originally developed and patented by Microsoft..."

Keyword in bold. Still, a very nice format.

The resistance to support WebP in Mozilla seems to be more politically motivated than technical.

AMEN!!!! WebP is modern. JPEG, GIF and PNG are all older than most pop stars. Why do we use the image compression equivalent of MPEG1 still?

Seriously, this is so dumb. I continue using Firefox for two specific reasons (tagged bookmarks and Pentadactyl) but Vimperator and Pocket are making Chrome more tempting. I choose WebP (using the official encoder I build directly from Google's repository) for my online photo storage. Decades of photos and scans I would estimate occupy about 1/8th the space of JPEG with little perceptual difference. WebP really shines on very clean, noise-free images and occasionally I'll have 5 megapixel images compress down to under 200kb (variable block compression, it's the 21st century.

Few points about WebP. It might be nice for Google to fix encoder crashes with extremely large images, and maybe improve that GIF2WEB converter.

It is nice that Google provides an installer that makes Windows transparently handle WebP. Would love to see better support for it in KDE apps.

I provided a link to the Gardasil issue which are admitted to. From this page the reports are roughly 25,000 reported serious problems from the vaccine. Looking at the total of 600,000 vaccines given that is a 4% chance that a person can have a serious side effect. The numbers I provided were actually being extremely kind to Gardasil.

OK, let's look at the data carefully. Start with the CDC summary: 57 milion doses, 22,000 reports to VAERS. Of those, 8% were serious. That works out to about 3.5 in 10,000. Given that VAERS is self-reported and doesn't require an actual diagnosis or necessarily any evidence that the issue was vaccine related, even that data is pretty overstated. Hopefully, we're using the same definition for "serious" (which for these purposes is typically "hospitalization, chronic injury, or death"). I suspect we're not, because anything with a 4% chance of serious side effects would be considered straight up poison and ripped from the shelves.

On to the NHS site. It gives no numbers for such "serious" side effects, but does gives other stats:

>10% for redness at the injection site or headaches.
>1% for fever, nausea, painful limbs.
~0.01% for hives

Self reported and without statistics (more like VAERS) are a series of disorders, most of which are not especially serious, but a couple of which are moderate to severely serious (Guillain Barré syndrome). Of course, the HuffPo site you linked notes that the statistics thus far have shown that those serious disorders appear to occur in the HPV vaccinated population at the same rate as the population at large, so it's rather hard to claim that the vaccine was the cause.

It's amazing to me that we're using the same sites and you're coming up with numbers that don't appear to be anywhere in those sites. The best I can come up with is that your methodology takes all possible reactions including "redness at the injection site", takes the 10% probability of that, notes that there was an unconfirmed case of Dutch elm disease in there, and says "Dutch elm disease (or similar) in 10% of cases!"

It's really not difficult to Google "gardasil vaccine harm" to find all kinds of reports on the vaccine.

Here is a link to the Google search results of alien abduction cases. You'll note a variety of sources with a lot of different anecdotes, as well as more serious academic sources. Depending on which site you go to, you get very different results. My concern here is that your idea of "education" is reading all of the sites and averaging what you read.

And as mentioned before, we don't know that the vaccine is truly effective.

From the FDA in 2013: The vaccine is effective against HPV types 16 and 18 which cause approximately 70% of cervical cancers, and against HPV types 6 and 11 which cause approximately 90% of genital warts.. Maybe there's some cutting edge research (or web site rumor mills) that indicates otherwise. Maybe those unnamed sources are even right. But they're usually not.

Or did you not know about these [therefusers.com]?

200 cases out of ~60 million doses? I'm definitely willing to believe that. But not 4%. I'd say that's an excellent result and that compensating the rare problem case is perfectly reasonable. I mean, giving peanuts to 60,000,000 people is likely to cause adverse reaction

The resistance to support WebP in Mozilla seems to be more politically motivated than technical.

Why not add JPEG-XR as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

The resistance to support WebP in Mozilla seems to be more politically motivated than technical.

What's a bios parameter?

On a more serious note have you in the past 5 years used a computer where the default bios settings weren't correct?

Only very recently have I seen any BIOS'es default to AHCI. Running drives in IDE-compatibility mode in 2014 is just silly. If I were buying a thousand PC's from Dell, I'd give them a list of BIOS settings to configure.

I can't speak for data ownership for the others but at least Google has its Inactive Account Manager which lets you "will" your data to someone else. You can also, at any time, download all your photos, video, and other content using Google Takeout.

I can't speak for data ownership for the others but at least Google has its Inactive Account Manager which lets you "will" your data to someone else. You can also, at any time, download all your photos, video, and other content using Google Takeout.

Does Apple have anything like Google's Inactive Account Manager?

https://www.google.com/search?...

I would like to ask a stupid question. If my employer is doing this, and I'm using Chrome to look at, say, https://mail.google.com/, when I click on the little green lock next to the URL to view the Certificate Information, and my company's name is NOT present (the cert path is GeoTrust Global / Google Internet Authority / mail.google.com) can trust that to mean my company is not intercepting that traffic? Or can my company make it appear this way and still be intercepting my traffic? I suspect there are a number of people who would like to know the answer to this. I'm hoping it's not as stupid a question as it sounds.

"So many developers hired" [citation needed]

Oh, fuck off back to wikipedia. Maybe you should stop off at google on the way.

The very title of your comment makes it hard not to blow the whole comment away.

And the first word of yours did very much the same. Your point?

Why do you want HL3 so bad?

Because the first one was good, we were told that episodes would be released in quick succession but in fact it's been seven years since the last instalment. Episode 3 will have to compare favourably to Christ's second coming to live up to the cumulative anticipation felt by the community.

It's not done, them working "really super hard on it" isn't going to make art/the process/their feelings toward the game any better any faster.

The last time I checked, working "really super hard" on something gets it finished sooner. From this I infer that Valve are either a. not working hard on it or b. constantly shifting the goalposts à la DNF.

My use case is our floor workers all have very restricted access to the internet at their non-user specific workstations. Since we use Google apps for our mail here I needed a way to allow access to our corporate gmail, but not their personal ones. Since all accounts are on the google.com domain I can't just block via fqdn, I need something to intercept which account they are accessing and restrict based on that.

Heck, google even documents how to do it right here https://support.google.com/a/a...

You Google skillz are also (apparently) invalid. A Google search for "rebirth windows" returns this link on the first page which provides instructions for getting it to work on Windows 7/64.

You can buy licenses at

http://www.amigaforever.com/sy...

You can also buy legit ROM licenses for Android based emulators at

https://play.google.com/store/...

The open-source AmigaOS-alike named AROS includes their own ROM equivalents now as well. (Be careful! WinUAE has old ROM included, Aros Vision needs newer ones (included in directiry “boot” of the distribution))

http://www.natami-news.de/html...