Is Chrome considered "open source" like firefox, or "closed" like Opera?
"Chromium" is like the "Darwin kernel" (MacOS X), which is open source, where Apple contributes and receives contributions, while creating their own environment on top (the rest of the OS) that is closed source.
"Google Chrome Browser" is a modified and closed adaptation of Chromium that adds google's branding and datamining-ware --I think it also added that Mozilla-dreaded H.264 decoder or some other licensed software that can't be open sourced.
You can definitely choose Chromium for the sake of privacy, but it's not as nice to pronounce so your friends can hear about it. Google's proprietary update daemon is also nowhere in the Chromium code.
I didn't know either. Google shows the official word, indicating that repo is a customization of the git file repository/version control manager. repo init preps a place in your HD and works across different repositories, aided by details from that manifest file you give it with the -u option.
repo sync does the actual updating of the code [or if needed, the very first download to your repo folder]
make is a unix compilation tool that by default runs scripts called makefiles. Those specify what to compile, in what order, what special options to use, and where to install each output file. Make automates a secuential process that can easily take minutes to hours. However, here make might be a special purpose binary here.
Ouch. That link is slashdotted or something, so all we got is that error. Which was great, decent reminder that MS hosting all your office documents on the cloud reduces your company's effective ownership of the files. One day IT blocks the domain inadvertently, or it gets DDoS'd by anonymous, or the local spyware kills it in your hostfile, or all the phones and internet go down at the company because of a cut cable... so then what do the managers do to access their files?
Hotmail is controlled by MS. IIRC, about a year ago they started displaying PPS (and maybe DOC) attachments in-browser. They did so while promoting the "works best with Silverlight... install" here.
So they have gathered enough statistics on Silverlight and any failures in display that always come from end-user feedback. Now, they are ready to entice corporations. The corps will have to approve Silverlight for their outdated browsers, or be faced with the same "degraded" fallback interfaces that result in reduced productivity that you already noted with Outlook's non-native execution.
You can include all trojans all you want. The victim knows what his "life's work" files are named like
Non-documents (that he did not write) will stick out like a green hat on an orange suit. I would be scared if he had received a netbook with all the docs in it. The trojans in that netbook can be assumed to already be running for maximum effect.
That goes to show that we fear social networks sharing this same kind of pictures with the world, because it is like a one-way looking glass into our life for an interrogator's anonymous perspective.
A thief's anonymity protects them, while we feel compromised never knowing how this thief could return to our life, and how they'll exploit weaknesses found by their original break-in. That is the true reason why we reinstall Windows when spyware hits our internet connected PC's --er, besides the predominant "man-hours saved" mentality.
If you have a low-key organization but a VIP machine where reinstalling is heavily punished, read along. Unless your spyware used Group policy lockouts preventing "Run", cmd.exe, taskmgr, regedit and system restore for even your admin accounts. I don't get why paywalled MS Group Policy into XP Pro, but left it present enough that spyware can 0wn your non-domain Home machines. Stop and reinstall anyway if you do see the above issues.
Create a new passworded admin account just in case your next boot automagically reinstalls the spyware --The root "Administrator" can be hard to log in as beyond safe mode, and some spyware auto-hoses only the original account, which you can contemplate nuking (copy your pics, docs, bookmarks and browser profiles first.)
Get processxp and Install/Run Avast but don't heal anything till the very end. Just check for anything it detects. AVs tend to partially uninstall stuff and I prefer spybot.
Run spybotsd + update to the latest file
TaskMGR or processXP and try to kill odd or randomized process names. ProcessXP can show DLLs and let you pause / kill them temporarily without killing your explorer shell. Note if there's respawning through a helper process and try to flash-kill both at once.
--------------------- Reboot in Safemode. If the spyware corrupted that, just reinstall.
Try system restore. Fails 50/50 for me on most disaster moments, but can save you the hassle of gioing through the below recovery steps...
Run SpybotSD (every year or so you need to redownload from their site and do a new full reinstall to get their updated engines) 1) reimmunize 2) clean BHO and ActiveX (lol, killing Java and adobe's doubius bits if I can) 3) Check process list and startup lists for more rand exes in temp folders. 4) Run a thorough check (all afternoon, check back every hour to OK any obscure file access errors). Checks last from 2 hours to about 4 depending on whether you updated your detection 5) While that happens, keep going below
Check the LSP [winsock extensions] section for weird injected stuff -if you have more than about 20, use their reset button. WinTCPfix might help if you are having internet problems.
Check your firewall for opened ports, especially with Windows Live Remote Desktop (some name to that effect) sharing newly enabled.
Check IE, Firefox and Opera for proxy settings redirecting your web traffic to local sniffers. If you find this or te firewall changes, you should reinstall because someone's watching you closely and might have other hooks in your OS.
Clean the (legacy) Startup folder for yor Start Menu and the one under the "All users" Folder Check registry for startup programs in your account. If you have the time, repeat for the.DEFAULT profile regkey Check the services.msc list --some sneaky processes lacking "company info" show you a path to a temp folder or Windowd \ System32
Sort windows\system32 by date to see if any exes, bat files or dlls have download dates you don't remember having "caused." Might wanna move manually (safe mode, usually) and/or rename exe to "bad" in case the file has some "critical function" for your shell thanks to the spyware injecting itself. I haven't had a virus like that in years. The most you'll see is "such and such exe file could not be found on the next boot." If you know the exact date and time of infection, do a C:\ search for that date on *.* and include system, hidden and all other stuff. You'll get some folders / program names that can be googled from another PC for gravity of infection and steps to counter.
If spybot is finished scanning, Fix the "problems," and reboot to gauge the effectiveness
Some sneaky spyware doesn't die unless you also install and run adaware or waste anoter hour with updating and sweeping w/ MSAntispyware.
Reboot a few times and recheck process lists. Rerun Spybot to ensure stuff was removed.
Honestly , now to do a _bing_ search I have to log into a facebook account or how is this suppose to work?
Facebook-enabled sites can take a look at your cookies and enhance news sites from all over the world. It's not a giant leap to suppose that even when you're signed out, the cookie blasts out who you are for any of those sites to use should you visit them.
Knowing that, the logical answer is that MS is going to get enhanced access to your computer's crosssite FB cookies, and that their databases will be able to query FB based on that ID they can conveniently sniff.
The idea is simple: The internet was originally a connection of computers, which is what we all do and love here on/.
Then, eternal september set in, and it was bad. And then, social networks exploded, and that internet which was meant to be just the largest public collection of information on Earth changed. It became, truly, the largest collection of people on earth, sort of like a nation.
Picture all those septemberites we hated so, multiplying rapidly and stretching their hand out of your computer screen. Our families have joined them and the yakking extends to even our own real life. When 10% of the people on Earth are FB members, it feels almost like a religion that we are being forced to join, if we didn't already succumb. So it's almost like a willpower struggle for those who look but don't join, and find new ways of being lured, or seeing their our friends be tricked.
When enough friends are inside we are no longer the mayority of informed internet viewers. They are. That "savvy" geek in us who pulled family and friends out of their couches to learn about "this new internet thing" decades ago is no longer in control, because the tables have turned, even if we love control because computers is what we grok. The geek in us is being forcibly pushed by all their friends to leave the soul-less, information abundant PC... and create information for THEIR web instead: join parties, take photos, tag stuff, respond to personal requests, rate, rate, rate and be social again, because the internet thing's inertia is no longer in our direction, and we're all being dragged away from what we all learned to love about internet anonymity and static forums of yesteryear.
Unlike a lot of comments advocating savings in cutting the leased equipment, I am OK with continuing to lease the providers box and so on, after having tried OTA, boxless basic programming and using the box as prescribed.
However, likethis epinion review for US service says response times for digital boxes are horrible. They are the most easily noticeable problem even by visitors. Analog boxes are simple, have lightweight remotes and lack today's "lightshow" happy LEDs.
Today, the java-fication of everything has caused boxes that freeze, slow down and have unpredictable behavior mindful of home routers. At least home routers include power buttons. Our New York digital boxes from TimeWarner take 30 seconds and 5 minutes after being plugged in. That is more than most computers, on devices designed 10 years ago, where almost everyone still chose TV over their PC for daily entertainment. I mean, current overjava'd cellphones don't take that long to boot, DVD consoles don't take that long to load videogames, and even 1970 B&W TV's don't take that long from cold to tubes-warm-enough-for-an-image.
Having Cable Box competition will result in a mozilla-javascript-like war. Then CableCo's replacing their OCAP (java) OS so that faster startup and response times are back the way they were with our brainless analog boxes. You will have more attention paid to VCR-recording, picture in picture features, and even the stupid way the CableCo boxes REMOVE the date/time signal from the carrier, even though my equipment is capable of reading it when I remove the box and know the exact channel. And we will finally be able to upgrade every few years, instead of being stuck with just one or two rented box models for decades to come.
Lack of extensions is not a "critical bug." Being unusable for several major webmail clients for many years is, because there's no excuse --chrome, firefox and safari have not affected in years.
Before Opera dares allowing extensions to "standard" web content, they must make sure this "standard" is usable.
Firefox is the most compatible of my mother's 4 alternative browsers, but she hates its slowness on this single core pc. I can't recommend Opera to people like her because hotmail and yahoo are both broken.
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
The same thing happened with B/W cellphones: "you build it, they will come" attacts purchasers. It also pays the aging engineers' bills and increases eyeball share because of perceived "innovation," even if you prefered the old tech.
Today's public using color phones is paying good cash for standard features that open the door to, say, viewing pr0n pics. Won't be long because the same is applied to the Casio natively or via some hack.
Featuritis comes at a price: never-improving prices and never-improving battery life for what is basically pig-lipstick rehashes of ancient tech.
Regarding the configuration screens on the PC side: that's a very old design flaw. I own FF7, their first FF series PC game. I bought it about 3 years after its launch, but it seems complaints had not been raised loudly enough. I wasn't bothered back then because it was one of my first 3D PC games.
I played FF11 (online like FF14,) and remember the installer and the menus taking long. Around the same time, I got City of Heroes, and remember that everything regarding resolutions and so on, was done in the client. Heck, Unreal Tournament (1999 or so), saw wise to not "geek out" forcing us to configure it from the OS.
Another thing I hope they're not still doing is playing old MIDI files for background music. Back in FF7 / PC they botched the final boss theme because their orchestrated, song for the end of the world with magnanimous vocals was just a MIDI missing the vocals and the original reverb and feeling. They did force you to install a Yamaha Player, which is how they emulated the feel of the original, but didn't sound like the raw WAV renditions from the playstation vocals, required processing power, and I remember had some licensing expiration date.
Square Enix's Japanese development needs more American devs. Not in the game idea teams, but in their usability and GUIfication teams.
Non-geeks detect viruses because of system instability (IE or explorer shell crashes, multi-spyware slowness and malicious tampering eventually being the deathblow to spywared PC's TCP connectivity.)
It's the silent ones that live the longest, because no tech ever gets called to check out the PC's weird behavior. Even if the virus is well-coded does not make it "well-tested."
Updates are a lot cheaper to distribute in terms of manpower and avoided disk costs, but the reach of updater software is a tad overrated.
The corportate viewpoint is that good enough is good enough, and that certain updates aren't free or slow down the PC's after a few months of dribbling featuritis. Exhibit B: Windows XP will stick around another 4 or 5 years till all old hardware is dead or too slow for Adobe Flash v15 with probably mandatory HD being a drag for less-fortunate souls on low-end broadband or single-core PC's.
Exhibit A: Firefox version 3.5 is big percentage of FF users, but many computers have auto-updated to 3.6 for a whole year --strange, since FF's default auto-updates on windows if your profile has enough rights.
Speaking of rights, compatibility-and-security-conscious admins disable the nasty auto-updater apps and daemons that Apple, Google, Java, Adobe Flash, Adoble Acrobat (PDF) and OEM's install. Those are meant for home users who are otherwise incapable of having planned, researched upgrades and will just stop consuming new content that isn't allowed to reign freely under corporate environments.
It's called "offline support". Otherwise, web applications would stop working when the client machine disconnects from the Internet.
Good: that's just like they always have. Why isn't Java's nearly inexistent offline support (via the Java WebStart platform) raising the same privacy concerns?
Because it is nearly inexistent. If corporations want an offline app, they have to develop offline software. WebApps are useless when unplugged since their data is across the web.
I screwed up my percent maths. The point is that 9.81 - (9.81 * 0.01) = 9.71m/s/s. Since nobody from Mount Everest ever reports regular floating in their gravity observations, gravity must be pretty mundane, so age won't have noticeable differences yet:)
Well... relativistic fountains of youth without entering orbit are out of the question. Cornell astronomer Dave Rothstein's "Ask" page cites pretty negligible gravity changes. Across the earth, he calculates within 0.01% of g for local geology (rock density and so on) differences.
Heights are more significant than that 0.01% change, but still won't reach a single percent: 0.2% * g for a 5 kilometer difference. Mount Everest is 9km above sea level. If 9.81m/s/s is changed by even that single percent, we only get g=9.80m/s/s.
Rather than relocating somewhere far and high near india, for more substantial rejuvenation, I suggest a big cheap vat of skin lotion.
10.10's 64-bit flash [prerelease] is real fast on my Intel laptop at 1.7Ghz. However, fullscreen semi-randomly freezes when your pre-screensaver fade kicks in. I found that it wasn't a firefox issue --Chrome was affected too. I turned off Compiz but the problem continued: audio keeps coming out of the speakers, but the last frame stays on the screen. Alt-tab and so on do not refresh, but I later found evidence that my ALT-F2 did start processes. Eventually I did CTRL-ALT-ttynumber and logged in to "kill -11 gnome-session" and then CTRL-ALT-7 to log in again.
Flash IS a deal-breaker, though, and I might uninstall it and research the 32bit wrapper thing.
About the unemployment point if all jobs were for robots: thinking back to how 10% unemployment in the US is hammering every company in that nation, I can't even consider the riots and anarchy if... companies made zero profit because near-100% unemployment causes zero cashflow through food-consuming, customer-service-needing humans:)
Facebook tagging is similar in annoyance. You can either prevent tagging completely, or let everyone tag pictures of their dog in your name, and block each tag *individually*.
Nobody can just suggest a tag for you to approve, and I suspect groupds will not be modified. The implementation of FB groupds copies the much-maligned Google Buzz default to "share and friend everyone I know automatically" to balloon user bases as quickly as possible. Whatever datamining is going on at FB, they want to profit from their 500 million userbase by avoiding the failure-prone "default-deny-all" and "default-ask-all-users" GUIs. Because a good firewall blocks every port by default and won't ask at all, but nobody buys it except for the truly dedicated customizers. For everyone else, there's the known-process-whitelist model, the guess-process-behavior model, and facebook's successful, but insecure allow-all-transmissions-until-user-complains model.
An account on slashdot is like a dynamic bookmark allowing you to keep track of subjects that interest you.
[...]
would slashdot be better if you could mark a post without replying to it?
That's insightful, especially the bit about grandchildren reading it as your memoirs, and obituaries including content from your posts. Frightening, too. Our social lives used to be so much more intractable 15 years ago. Now, to just keep bookmarks for ourselves, we are keeping them for anyone at all who wants to look, even when we... go away from this world. It's like freezing our brain's goals in some piece of silicon for others to ponder after you're dead.
Anyway, I thought about the "bookmark" feature functionality... for a while I was posting AC because I didn't want my old comments (1999/. account) to dissolve due to/.'s once-enforced 24-comment horizon. When posting AC, I would bookmark the comment if I thought it brilliant, especially when it got high scores. Keeping track of it across multiple browsers, OS-loginprofiles-partitions and even machines became hellish, so I started using the FF extension "Read it Later" to easily go back to old comments... I tagged other users' comments ocassionally, and my list grew too unwieldy once a dozen or so comments with diverse and obscure-seeming titles were showing up where I had little recollection of what thoughts caused me to bookmark the posts.
The moral of the story is, that I wouldn't enjoy just bookmarking stories, and seeing my own comments reacting to the stories and/. posts is the best way to use/.
Everything else would sort-of be like having a heavily AI-based RSS feed of all slashdot posts catered to my interests --without having posts of my own to digest.
"Those users are putting their cases on wrong." - Steve Jobs, master of customer service
Awesome, Mr. Jobs! I'll file that next to the sage/. advise for getting back the missing vertical resolution from switching from 4:3 to a16:10 laptop: "Rotate!"
Specially an evil ex-girlfriend w/ FB access is out to get me, who lack it. They'd have pictures to post igniting the false belief that I'm the one posting, in a mirror image of chan board trolls posting pretending to be naked chick depicted there.
Just hoping obscurity will keep others from using the corporate joke on me. Access to my office email can be compromised to create an FB account for it, so any evil boss w/ access might want to sink you in front of upper management by leaking something in your name --though FB will never authenticate based on your biometrics or government ID (playing police state retroactively on 500 million old users would be its downfall.)
I can bet most perpetrators would NEVER come forward after impersonation-posting --what the heck could I do to prove it then, if it might just look like feigned ignorance and FB is never gonna bother to provide IP logs in my defense for free? I want to see Zuckerberg defend against legal cases for this. This must already have ruined someone's day and gives me fear for remaining outside FB.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Chrome considered "open source" like firefox, or "closed" like Opera?
"Chromium" is like the "Darwin kernel" (MacOS X), which is open source, where Apple contributes and receives contributions, while creating their own environment on top (the rest of the OS) that is closed source.
"Google Chrome Browser" is a modified and closed adaptation of Chromium that adds google's branding and datamining-ware --I think it also added that Mozilla-dreaded H.264 decoder or some other licensed software that can't be open sourced.
You can definitely choose Chromium for the sake of privacy, but it's not as nice to pronounce so your friends can hear about it. Google's proprietary update daemon is also nowhere in the Chromium code.
I didn't know either. Google shows the official word, indicating that repo is a customization of the git file repository/version control manager. repo init preps a place in your HD and works across different repositories, aided by details from that manifest file you give it with the -u option.
repo sync does the actual updating of the code [or if needed, the very first download to your repo folder]
make is a unix compilation tool that by default runs scripts called makefiles. Those specify what to compile, in what order, what special options to use, and where to install each output file. Make automates a secuential process that can easily take minutes to hours. However, here make might be a special purpose binary here.
Ouch. That link is slashdotted or something, so all we got is that error.
Which was great, decent reminder that MS hosting all your office documents on the cloud reduces your company's effective ownership of the files. One day IT blocks the domain inadvertently, or it gets DDoS'd by anonymous, or the local spyware kills it in your hostfile, or all the phones and internet go down at the company because of a cut cable... so then what do the managers do to access their files?
Cloud indeed.
Hotmail is controlled by MS. IIRC, about a year ago they started displaying PPS (and maybe DOC) attachments in-browser. They did so while promoting the "works best with Silverlight... install" here.
So they have gathered enough statistics on Silverlight and any failures in display that always come from end-user feedback. Now, they are ready to entice corporations. The corps will have to approve Silverlight for their outdated browsers, or be faced with the same "degraded" fallback interfaces that result in reduced productivity that you already noted with Outlook's non-native execution.
You can include all trojans all you want. The victim knows what his "life's work" files are named like
Non-documents (that he did not write) will stick out like a green hat on an orange suit. I would be scared if he had received a netbook with all the docs in it. The trojans in that netbook can be assumed to already be running for maximum effect.
That goes to show that we fear social networks sharing this same kind of pictures with the world, because it is like a one-way looking glass into our life for an interrogator's anonymous perspective.
A thief's anonymity protects them, while we feel compromised never knowing how this thief could return to our life, and how they'll exploit weaknesses found by their original break-in. That is the true reason why we reinstall Windows when spyware hits our internet connected PC's --er, besides the predominant "man-hours saved" mentality.
If you have a low-key organization but a VIP machine where reinstalling is heavily punished, read along. Unless your spyware used Group policy lockouts preventing "Run", cmd.exe, taskmgr, regedit and system restore for even your admin accounts. I don't get why paywalled MS Group Policy into XP Pro, but left it present enough that spyware can 0wn your non-domain Home machines. Stop and reinstall anyway if you do see the above issues.
Create a new passworded admin account just in case your next boot automagically reinstalls the spyware --The root "Administrator" can be hard to log in as beyond safe mode, and some spyware auto-hoses only the original account, which you can contemplate nuking (copy your pics, docs, bookmarks and browser profiles first.)
Get processxp and Install/Run Avast but don't heal anything till the very end. Just check for anything it detects. AVs tend to partially uninstall stuff and I prefer spybot.
Run spybotsd + update to the latest file
TaskMGR or processXP and try to kill odd or randomized process names. ProcessXP can show DLLs and let you pause / kill them temporarily without killing your explorer shell. Note if there's respawning through a helper process and try to flash-kill both at once.
---------------------
Reboot in Safemode. If the spyware corrupted that, just reinstall.
Try system restore. Fails 50/50 for me on most disaster moments, but can save you the hassle of gioing through the below recovery steps...
Run SpybotSD (every year or so you need to redownload from their site and do a new full reinstall to get their updated engines)
1) reimmunize
2) clean BHO and ActiveX (lol, killing Java and adobe's doubius bits if I can)
3) Check process list and startup lists for more rand exes in temp folders.
4) Run a thorough check (all afternoon, check back every hour to OK any obscure file access errors). Checks last from 2 hours to about 4 depending on whether you updated your detection
5) While that happens, keep going below
Check the LSP [winsock extensions] section for weird injected stuff -if you have more than about 20, use their reset button. WinTCPfix might help if you are having internet problems.
Check your firewall for opened ports, especially with Windows Live Remote Desktop (some name to that effect) sharing newly enabled.
Check IE, Firefox and Opera for proxy settings redirecting your web traffic to local sniffers. If you find this or te firewall changes, you should reinstall because someone's watching you closely and might have other hooks in your OS.
Clean the (legacy) Startup folder for yor Start Menu and the one under the "All users" Folder .DEFAULT profile regkey
Check registry for startup programs in your account. If you have the time, repeat for the
Check the services.msc list --some sneaky processes lacking "company info" show you a path to a temp folder or Windowd \ System32
Sort windows\system32 by date to see if any exes, bat files or dlls have download dates you don't remember having "caused." Might wanna move manually (safe mode, usually) and/or rename exe to "bad" in case the file has some "critical function" for your shell thanks to the spyware injecting itself. I haven't had a virus like that in years. The most you'll see is "such and such exe file could not be found on the next boot." If you know the exact date and time of infection, do a C:\ search for that date on *.* and include system, hidden and all other stuff. You'll get some folders / program names that can be googled from another PC for gravity of infection and steps to counter.
If spybot is finished scanning, Fix the "problems," and reboot to gauge the effectiveness
Some sneaky spyware doesn't die unless you also install and run adaware or waste anoter hour with updating and sweeping w/ MSAntispyware.
Reboot a few times and recheck process lists. Rerun Spybot to ensure stuff was removed.
Honestly , now to do a _bing_ search I have to log into a facebook account or how is this suppose to work?
Facebook-enabled sites can take a look at your cookies and enhance news sites from all over the world. It's not a giant leap to suppose that even when you're signed out, the cookie blasts out who you are for any of those sites to use should you visit them.
Knowing that, the logical answer is that MS is going to get enhanced access to your computer's crosssite FB cookies, and that their databases will be able to query FB based on that ID they can conveniently sniff.
Why does /. hate social networks so much?
The idea is simple: The internet was originally a connection of computers, which is what we all do and love here on /.
Then, eternal september set in, and it was bad. And then, social networks exploded, and that internet which was meant to be just the largest public collection of information on Earth changed. It became, truly, the largest collection of people on earth, sort of like a nation.
Picture all those septemberites we hated so, multiplying rapidly and stretching their hand out of your computer screen. Our families have joined them and the yakking extends to even our own real life. When 10% of the people on Earth are FB members, it feels almost like a religion that we are being forced to join, if we didn't already succumb. So it's almost like a willpower struggle for those who look but don't join, and find new ways of being lured, or seeing their our friends be tricked.
When enough friends are inside we are no longer the mayority of informed internet viewers. They are. That "savvy" geek in us who pulled family and friends out of their couches to learn about "this new internet thing" decades ago is no longer in control, because the tables have turned, even if we love control because computers is what we grok. The geek in us is being forcibly pushed by all their friends to leave the soul-less, information abundant PC... and create information for THEIR web instead: join parties, take photos, tag stuff, respond to personal requests, rate, rate, rate and be social again, because the internet thing's inertia is no longer in our direction, and we're all being dragged away from what we all learned to love about internet anonymity and static forums of yesteryear.
Are these the 33 gold miners Chile saved from doom 2 days ago? Wow. Skills transfer in awesome ways these days.
Unlike a lot of comments advocating savings in cutting the leased equipment, I am OK with continuing to lease the providers box and so on, after having tried OTA, boxless basic programming and using the box as prescribed.
However, likethis epinion review for US service says response times for digital boxes are horrible. They are the most easily noticeable problem even by visitors. Analog boxes are simple, have lightweight remotes and lack today's "lightshow" happy LEDs.
Today, the java-fication of everything has caused boxes that freeze, slow down and have unpredictable behavior mindful of home routers. At least home routers include power buttons. Our New York digital boxes from TimeWarner take 30 seconds and 5 minutes after being plugged in. That is more than most computers, on devices designed 10 years ago, where almost everyone still chose TV over their PC for daily entertainment. I mean, current overjava'd cellphones don't take that long to boot, DVD consoles don't take that long to load videogames, and even 1970 B&W TV's don't take that long from cold to tubes-warm-enough-for-an-image.
Having Cable Box competition will result in a mozilla-javascript-like war. Then CableCo's replacing their OCAP (java) OS so that faster startup and response times are back the way they were with our brainless analog boxes. You will have more attention paid to VCR-recording, picture in picture features, and even the stupid way the CableCo boxes REMOVE the date/time signal from the carrier, even though my equipment is capable of reading it when I remove the box and know the exact channel. And we will finally be able to upgrade every few years, instead of being stuck with just one or two rented box models for decades to come.
Lack of extensions is not a "critical bug." Being unusable for several major webmail clients for many years is, because there's no excuse --chrome, firefox and safari have not affected in years.
Before Opera dares allowing extensions to "standard" web content, they must make sure this "standard" is usable.
Firefox is the most compatible of my mother's 4 alternative browsers, but she hates its slowness on this single core pc. I can't recommend Opera to people like her because hotmail and yahoo are both broken.
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
The same thing happened with B/W cellphones: "you build it, they will come" attacts purchasers. It also pays the aging engineers' bills and increases eyeball share because of perceived "innovation," even if you prefered the old tech.
Today's public using color phones is paying good cash for standard features that open the door to, say, viewing pr0n pics. Won't be long because the same is applied to the Casio natively or via some hack.
Featuritis comes at a price: never-improving prices and never-improving battery life for what is basically pig-lipstick rehashes of ancient tech.
Regarding the configuration screens on the PC side: that's a very old design flaw.
I own FF7, their first FF series PC game. I bought it about 3 years after its launch, but it seems complaints had not been raised loudly enough. I wasn't bothered back then because it was one of my first 3D PC games.
I played FF11 (online like FF14,) and remember the installer and the menus taking long. Around the same time, I got City of Heroes, and remember that everything regarding resolutions and so on, was done in the client. Heck, Unreal Tournament (1999 or so), saw wise to not "geek out" forcing us to configure it from the OS.
Another thing I hope they're not still doing is playing old MIDI files for background music. Back in FF7 / PC they botched the final boss theme because their orchestrated, song for the end of the world with magnanimous vocals was just a MIDI missing the vocals and the original reverb and feeling. They did force you to install a Yamaha Player, which is how they emulated the feel of the original, but didn't sound like the raw WAV renditions from the playstation vocals, required processing power, and I remember had some licensing expiration date.
Square Enix's Japanese development needs more American devs. Not in the game idea teams, but in their usability and GUIfication teams.
Non-geeks detect viruses because of system instability (IE or explorer shell crashes, multi-spyware slowness and malicious tampering eventually being the deathblow to spywared PC's TCP connectivity.)
It's the silent ones that live the longest, because no tech ever gets called to check out the PC's weird behavior. Even if the virus is well-coded does not make it "well-tested."
Updates are a lot cheaper to distribute in terms of manpower and avoided disk costs, but the reach of updater software is a tad overrated.
The corportate viewpoint is that good enough is good enough, and that certain updates aren't free or slow down the PC's after a few months of dribbling featuritis. Exhibit B: Windows XP will stick around another 4 or 5 years till all old hardware is dead or too slow for Adobe Flash v15 with probably mandatory HD being a drag for less-fortunate souls on low-end broadband or single-core PC's.
Exhibit A: Firefox version 3.5 is big percentage of FF users, but many computers have auto-updated to 3.6 for a whole year --strange, since FF's default auto-updates on windows if your profile has enough rights.
Speaking of rights, compatibility-and-security-conscious admins disable the nasty auto-updater apps and daemons that Apple, Google, Java, Adobe Flash, Adoble Acrobat (PDF) and OEM's install. Those are meant for home users who are otherwise incapable of having planned, researched upgrades and will just stop consuming new content that isn't allowed to reign freely under corporate environments.
It's called "offline support". Otherwise, web applications would stop working when the client machine disconnects from the Internet.
Good: that's just like they always have. Why isn't Java's nearly inexistent offline support (via the Java WebStart platform) raising the same privacy concerns?
Because it is nearly inexistent. If corporations want an offline app, they have to develop offline software. WebApps are useless when unplugged since their data is across the web.
I screwed up my percent maths. The point is that 9.81 - (9.81 * 0.01) = 9.71m/s/s. Since nobody from Mount Everest ever reports regular floating in their gravity observations, gravity must be pretty mundane, so age won't have noticeable differences yet :)
Well... relativistic fountains of youth without entering orbit are out of the question. Cornell astronomer Dave Rothstein's "Ask" page cites pretty negligible gravity changes. Across the earth, he calculates within 0.01% of g for local geology (rock density and so on) differences.
Heights are more significant than that 0.01% change, but still won't reach a single percent: 0.2% * g for a 5 kilometer difference. Mount Everest is 9km above sea level. If 9.81m/s/s is changed by even that single percent, we only get g=9.80m/s/s.
Rather than relocating somewhere far and high near india, for more substantial rejuvenation, I suggest a big cheap vat of skin lotion.
10.10's 64-bit flash [prerelease] is real fast on my Intel laptop at 1.7Ghz. However, fullscreen semi-randomly freezes when your pre-screensaver fade kicks in. I found that it wasn't a firefox issue --Chrome was affected too. I turned off Compiz but the problem continued: audio keeps coming out of the speakers, but the last frame stays on the screen. Alt-tab and so on do not refresh, but I later found evidence that my ALT-F2 did start processes. Eventually I did CTRL-ALT-ttynumber and logged in to "kill -11 gnome-session" and then CTRL-ALT-7 to log in again.
Flash IS a deal-breaker, though, and I might uninstall it and research the 32bit wrapper thing.
About the unemployment point if all jobs were for robots: thinking back to how 10% unemployment in the US is hammering every company in that nation, I can't even consider the riots and anarchy if ... companies made zero profit because near-100% unemployment causes zero cashflow through food-consuming, customer-service-needing humans :)
Facebook tagging is similar in annoyance. You can either prevent tagging completely, or let everyone tag pictures of their dog in your name, and block each tag *individually*.
Nobody can just suggest a tag for you to approve, and I suspect groupds will not be modified. The implementation of FB groupds copies the much-maligned Google Buzz default to "share and friend everyone I know automatically" to balloon user bases as quickly as possible. Whatever datamining is going on at FB, they want to profit from their 500 million userbase by avoiding the failure-prone "default-deny-all" and "default-ask-all-users" GUIs. Because a good firewall blocks every port by default and won't ask at all, but nobody buys it except for the truly dedicated customizers. For everyone else, there's the known-process-whitelist model, the guess-process-behavior model, and facebook's successful, but insecure allow-all-transmissions-until-user-complains model.
An account on slashdot is like a dynamic bookmark allowing you to keep track of subjects that interest you.
[...]
would slashdot be better if you could mark a post without replying to it?
That's insightful, especially the bit about grandchildren reading it as your memoirs, and obituaries including content from your posts. Frightening, too. Our social lives used to be so much more intractable 15 years ago. Now, to just keep bookmarks for ourselves, we are keeping them for anyone at all who wants to look, even when we... go away from this world. It's like freezing our brain's goals in some piece of silicon for others to ponder after you're dead.
Anyway, I thought about the "bookmark" feature functionality... for a while I was posting AC because I didn't want my old comments (1999 /. account) to dissolve due to /.'s once-enforced 24-comment horizon. When posting AC, I would bookmark the comment if I thought it brilliant, especially when it got high scores. Keeping track of it across multiple browsers, OS-loginprofiles-partitions and even machines became hellish, so I started using the FF extension "Read it Later" to easily go back to old comments... I tagged other users' comments ocassionally, and my list grew too unwieldy once a dozen or so comments with diverse and obscure-seeming titles were showing up where I had little recollection of what thoughts caused me to bookmark the posts.
The moral of the story is, that I wouldn't enjoy just bookmarking stories, and seeing my own comments reacting to the stories and /. posts is the best way to use /.
Everything else would sort-of be like having a heavily AI-based RSS feed of all slashdot posts catered to my interests --without having posts of my own to digest.
"Those users are putting their cases on wrong." - Steve Jobs, master of customer service
Awesome, Mr. Jobs! /. advise for getting back the missing vertical resolution from switching from 4:3 to a16:10 laptop:
I'll file that next to the sage
"Rotate!"
Good point.
Specially an evil ex-girlfriend w/ FB access is out to get me, who lack it. They'd have pictures to post igniting the false belief that I'm the one posting, in a mirror image of chan board trolls posting pretending to be naked chick depicted there.
Just hoping obscurity will keep others from using the corporate joke on me. Access to my office email can be compromised to create an FB account for it, so any evil boss w/ access might want to sink you in front of upper management by leaking something in your name --though FB will never authenticate based on your biometrics or government ID (playing police state retroactively on 500 million old users would be its downfall.)
I can bet most perpetrators would NEVER come forward after impersonation-posting --what the heck could I do to prove it then, if it might just look like feigned ignorance and FB is never gonna bother to provide IP logs in my defense for free? I want to see Zuckerberg defend against legal cases for this. This must already have ruined someone's day and gives me fear for remaining outside FB.