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User: David+Gerard

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Comments · 2,952

  1. OpenJDK? on Oracle Knew of Latest Java 0-Day Security Hole In August · · Score: 1

    I presume OpenJDK 7 is also vulnerable, since Oracle JDK 7 is basically OpenJDK 7 with some proprietary libraries.

    Is OpenJDK 6 vulnerable? It's actually OpenJDK 7 cut down to pass JCK 6. Has anyone tested it?

  2. Re:Targeted customers on Chromebook Takes Top Place In Laptop Sales On Amazon · · Score: 4, Funny

    To buy that thing, one has to order it via Amazon - and fact is that, even today, not many people know how to order stuffs from Amazon.

    Well, Ubuntu can help with that! If you search for drivers for your NVidia card, it'll return a link to golf clubs on Amazon.

    With the one-click ordering they plan for 13.04, a search for NVidia drivers will see the golf clubs show up at your door the next day. With customer service like that, Canonical will be unstoppable.

  3. Re:It's not dead. on Windows 8 Even Less Popular Than Vista · · Score: 1

    (Was there any other major change? I can't think of any)

    FAT32 was pretty important at the time.

  4. Re:Jared Lanier == Clifford Stoll on What Turned VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Against the Web · · Score: 1

    Clifford Stoll's book was nuanced and he actually had a track record of achievement. Lanier feels the world owes virtual reality a living.

  5. Lanier: Why people should pay more attention to me on What Turned VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Against the Web · · Score: 1

    When I noticed myself getting mean online I thought, "Something has gone terribly wrong." It was obvious the rest of the ARPAnet had a social problem, not just me being some sort of asshole.

    My book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is ruffling virtual feathers across the ARPAnet. And so it should, because I invented virtual reality. Wikipedia, which is a tissue of lies, says so. Prospect magazine's Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll lists me. Also, my hair is much better than yours. And I'm fifty. According to Wikipedia, so I'd better change my birthday.

    Today, the web is a bland place. It's all user-generated content — silly clips on YouTube, spiteful anonymous comments on blogs about my books, endless photographs of people at a bar with their friends or up a mountain with an ironing board. It was much better back in the early days of the ARPAnet, before we let the commercial users on. These words will mostly be read by numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. You know, the peasants. Virtual reality is far more ennobling, but you never hear people talking about that any more.

    The ARPAnet only creates banal mashups of old culture. Salvagers picking over a garbage dump. Only the old-world economy of books, films and newspapers creates original content like Lawnmower Man or Battlefield Earth. Everyone knows that real artists have no influences. This stuff the kids are into these days is just noise!

    The ARPAnet is also killing music, according to my good friends at the RIAA. Did you know there's no music in Spain any more? It's true!

    Will we — meaning I — be able to live off our brains in the future, or will we just have to give our creative works away for free? If we can't live off our brains then we'll need a form of SOCIALISM just to survive. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM! Until the Wikipedia Corporation finally builds a good interface, for goggles and power-gloves.

    Open source and open content are a cancer. The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn't have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, so I'm going to call it Digital MAOISM, which is COMMUNISM. Update, five years later: Here is a detailed retcon explanation of why I was not just trolling for headlines by calling Wikipedia COMMUNISM, but was speaking precisely and you just weren't thinking hard enough: [snip 10,000 words]

    Also, you should get into virtual reality more.

    You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is published on papyrus scroll and hand-illustrated by monks. You cannot have a copy until you have fought your way up the mountain and proven yourself worthy.

    Photo: Lanier's starring role in Battlefield Earth.

  6. The other thing about Google Apps on Google Challenging Microsoft For Business Software · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The other thing about Google Apps is that it's designed for Chrome and if it works on anything else that's nice but they don't care and it's Not Supported. (You can also use Chromium.)

  7. Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies on Google Challenging Microsoft For Business Software · · Score: 1

    While Microsoft did pull every scurvy trick you can think of with IE, it is both true and important that Netscape 4 was such a rickety piece of shit that IE was actually better to use; that Netscape passed up the chance to release an open source Netscape 5 based on the old code base; and that Mozilla took just too fucking long.

  8. Re:Summary implies that tablets are not a fad on Acer Rethinks the "Tablet Bubble," Launching $99 Tablet · · Score: 1

    Netbooks are usable as computers for doing actual work on. I lived on my netbook for a couple of years, including for work from home. Trouble is that the whole point is to build them with the cheapest possible parts, so it basically fell apart. (Now using overpriced oversized company laptop. Faster, though.)

  9. Full sentences on IRC on Ask Slashdot: Typing Advice For a Guinness World Record Attempt? · · Score: 1

    Use IRC a lot, and always type in full, grammatically correct sentences with correct punctuation. This alone got me from 55wpm to 90wpm.

  10. Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'! on The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics · · Score: 1

    It's not just the world that changes, it's you. A group is its own worst enemy.

  11. Re:Misleading title on original article on The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics · · Score: 1

    A Slashdotting used to be hundreds of thousands of hits. My last Slashdotting got a total of 6000. Hacker News was more of a practical problem (that led to me installing WP SuperCache, which is fantastic, particularly in mod_rewrite mode).

    The "Slashdot effect" is largely dead on Slashdot.

  12. Infographics are rubbish anyway on The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mostly it's PR companies.

    Tom Morris outlines the problem: Infographics are porn without the happy ending.

  13. Re:Time to fork on Linux Nukes 386 Support · · Score: 1

    They didn't drop it - you can still get a 486 kernel for your Geode. I'm running Debian on mine, for example. There was a bug for a while where it failed to detect a Geode as not being a 686-equivalent.

  14. Re:Dammit on Linux Nukes 386 Support · · Score: 1

    I tried the Win 7 beta on a P4 with 1 gig. It ran pretty well, actually. Memory was a bit cramped, but you could do stuff with a bit of hard-disk rattling.

  15. Re:wine on Darling: Run Apple OS X Binaries On Linux · · Score: 1

    This is pretty much incorrect and has been since about 2005. It was somewhere in the middle of the 0.9 series that Wine went from mostly not running things to mostly running things. Usually it's the newer stuff that doesn't work yet (and keeps Wine dev going) - but it's the old abandonware, that just one program, that keeps people on Windows, and Wine increasingly can be expected to run that stuff.

    But yeah, it did take over a decade to get that complete.

  16. How the Dash already works on Ubuntu 13.04 Will Allow Instant Purchasing, Right From the Dash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "I wanted to update/install my nvidia drivers, so I opened the dash and typed "drivers". IT DISPLAYED GOLF CLUBS on sale at Amazon!"

    Presumably the new version will buy them for you as well.

  17. Re:Specifically for Wikipedia.. on How Can Wikipedia's Visual Editor Top Other Word Processors? · · Score: 2

    There's several billion words of legacy content generated over ten years. Starting over was considered, but it's not a happener.

  18. Re:And Paypal's response will be, on WordPress To Accept Bitcoins · · Score: 2

    2013 will be the year of Bitcoin on the desktop!

    (Just imagine: all those juicy unencrypted wallet.dat files, sitting on Windows machines on the Internet. Why phish when you can just steal directly?)

  19. Re:Yay Cortex A-15! on ARM Announces 64-Bit Cortex-A50 Architecture · · Score: 1

    x86 will linger like COBOL or Java or Win32.

  20. Valve wants to be the Linux App Store on Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming · · Score: 3, Informative

    Steam is already an effective and popular app store on Windows. And they hope to become the proprietary app store on Linux. That's why Valve is so dead against Windows 8 - Microsoft could take away their status as the app store.

  21. Re:Imran Khan - Sportsman on Pakastani Politician Detained By US Customs Over Opposition To Drone Strikes · · Score: 1

    Yes. It is important to this story that Imran Khan is still hugely famous in the Commonwealth, i.e. the cricket-playing countries.

  22. Re:Good riddance to geo-blocking on Australians Urged To Spoof IP Addresses For Better Prices · · Score: 1

    Players in Australia are actually required to be code-free, or easily made code-free.

  23. Very important on Australians Urged To Spoof IP Addresses For Better Prices · · Score: 4, Informative

    Choice is really highly respected in Australia. This makes this an extremely mainstream issue, not just of geek interest.

  24. Re:what does RT do that the ipad doesn't? on A Look At Competitors to the Surface and iPad · · Score: 1

    Its special trick appears to be a version of Office built in.

  25. Piracy: The Better Choice(tm) on FCC To Allow Cable Companies To Encrypt Over-the-Air Channels · · Score: 4, Informative

    That is all.