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User: Derek+Pomery

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  1. Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the on Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long · · Score: 1

    Eh, looks promising, might give it a shot, but frankly, I don't much trust the main gnome folks anymore after the fun that was gnome3 launch.

    MATE works, gaining momentum, family members are all happy (and they were not happy with gnome 3 I can tell you that... my poor mom). I don't really have much incentive to switch.

  2. Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the on Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long · · Score: 3, Interesting

    MATE, personally. I've used XFCE4 in the past, but still has just a few too many rough edges for me.

    Surprisingly, MATE did rather well in his tests, here. Better than XFCE4. Shame MATE still isn't ported to ARM.

    http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/

  3. Re:Okay, that's half-way there. on GNOME 3.10 Is Now Properly Supported On Wayland · · Score: 2

    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMTU "GNOME 2 Fork MATE Desktop Aims For Wayland"

  4. Re:this has me wondering on Cruise Ship "Costa Concordia" Salvage Attempt To Go Ahead · · Score: 1

    Erm, I'm not tooootally sure what you mean, but, here's the chain.
    1) You provide a link to goo.gl/maps/something
    2) Reply worries that this could be a redirect to some evil website, even though goo.gl/maps only ever redirects to maps.google.com
    3) I point out this /maps fact, and also strip down the link he provided to make it a bit shorter

    The extra stuff in the link doesn't have any tracking info in it. Google just adds it to try to make a version of the page that matches what you've been doing (zooming, panning, your search parameters and such).

  5. Re:this has me wondering on Cruise Ship "Costa Concordia" Salvage Attempt To Go Ahead · · Score: 1

    Well, some blogs and such don't play nice with long links.
    Also people sometimes needs to copy and paste them.
    As such, google offers a link shortening service right in google maps (click the chain link icon).

    Note the url has /maps/ in it - he couldn't send you to something evil unless it was on google maps, which I suppose there might be stuff here and there.

    He could also have trimmed some of the junk in the URL tho...
    https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=21.401534,72.199316&t=h&z=15

  6. Re:coalesce on A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs · · Score: 1

    But, eh... Only works for the simple case I guess...
    (? IS NULL OR foo LIKE '%'||?||'%') AND
    (? IS NULL OR bar = ?) AND
    (? IS NULL OR (A = ? OR B = ? OR C = ?)) AND
    (? IS NULL OR baz = to_date(?||'-'||?,'YYYY-MM'))

  7. Re:coalesce on A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs · · Score: 1

    Ah. Good point. Avoids a bit of spam in the binds. Fair 'nuff.

  8. Re:coalesce on A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs · · Score: 1

    That doesn't seem to be a big improvement on readability to me, but sure, why not :)

  9. Re:Translation on A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs · · Score: 2

    Yep.
    select 1 from
    table where
    (? IS NULL OR foo = ?) and
    (? IS NULL OR bar = ?) and
    (? IS NULL OR baz = ?)

    where foo, bar and baz are all optional.

  10. Re:Private Browsing on Epic: A Privacy-Focused Web Browser · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was kinda curious what he meant, myself, so I checked out this old-ish paper.
    http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/privatebrowsing.pdf

    I don't know if things have changed much, but their fairly thorough review seems to indicate firefox and chrome are pretty similar.
    Looking at their table, one possible area of concern they listed (that Chrome might no longer have a problem with) is zoom level.
    That could give information to a site that it is the same person, if they cared, although, that seems to be a pretty minor leak, given all the other information you could be revealing even if you hid your IP (a la panopticlick).
    Looks like Chrome retains it from the non-private session, Firefox does not. The download list thing doesn't seem like a big deal. Depends on what you're using it for I guess.

    Some leaks they fixed...
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3493
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21341

    Open issues:
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=867
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=34593 (I'm not a fan of this one either, but multiple private windows in Firefox do the same thing)

    Back in 2010 Flash added support for private browsing in their plugin (that is, wrt local storage) in Firefox. I have no idea if/when that got added to Chrome.

    I saw one complaint that disabled plugins (like Flash) in Chrome were reactivated in Incognito, but I don't know enough about the browser to check that.

    Anyway, they seem pretty similar to me.

  11. Re:Don't build big *concave* glass buildings on Building Melts Car · · Score: 1

    Construction on the Vdara began in 2007 and completed in 2009.
    Major news coverage of the Vdara death ray appears to begin summer 2010.

    Construction on the Walkie Talkie began in 2010. They'd reached the basement level by January 2011 according to Wikipedia.

    It seems to me that implies plenty of time to alter the design of the rest of the tower.

    On the Vdara:
    "Designers foresaw the issue, and thought they had solved it by installing a high-tech film on the south-facing glass panes"
    (didn't work, looks like they were excessively optimistic or didn't count on the parabolic effect, just reflection)

  12. Re: Or... on The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise · · Score: 1

    http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/media/supp_coral04a.html
    http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/coral04_reefs.html
    http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0103/feature2/
    "For 20,000 years, since the peak of the last ice age, its coral base has gradually followed the rising sea level and slowly developed into the splendid, living atoll it is today."

    The reef is constantly growing and shifting. As water levels incrementally rise, new coral will build up over the "dead stuff"
    It really isn't a big deal. Witness history. The Maldives have been there for a very long time, and water levels have been rising for a very long time, considerably more rapidly than now.

    The coral is considerably above the rock at this point, just due to continuing to grow as water rises and rock subsides.

  13. Re:Or... on The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise · · Score: 1

    Hrm.
    The Maldives at least should be fine. They are coral atolls which always lie at sea level, regardless of what height the ocean has been in the past (coral grows).

    Wikipedia says satellites show a rate of 3.3mm per year. There's no evidence at present of an accelerating trend. So, 33cm in a century.

    NOAA says:
    "growth rates of 0.3 to 2 centimeters per year for massive corals, and up to 10 centimeters per year for branching corals"

    Maldives should be fine.
    Louisiana could have trouble, especially since it has already been losing land. Loss of sediment from upstream, destruction of the delta.

    Although delta systems themselves, assuming nothing else is screwing with them, also tend to lie at sea level. The problem ofc is if massive immovable structures are built on them. I guess that's similar to people who build on barrier islands made of sand.

    I suppose New Orleans could just a bit higher levees, since they have them in place anyway.

  14. Re:Le sigh. on CoreText Font Rendering Bug Leads To iOS, OS X Exploit · · Score: 1

    It was more a response to the simplicity of text rendering parent post...

  15. Re:Le sigh. on CoreText Font Rendering Bug Leads To iOS, OS X Exploit · · Score: 2

    FWIW, you don't *have* to use Java for coding on Android, just like you don't have to use objc for coding on iOS.

    Our game has a Java frontend (that's needed) but the game library and the libraries it bundles with (sdl, physfs, netlib), are C (or in the case of the game engine, pascal).

    And ofc most of Android itself is absolutely not Java.

    For UIs, you can use pretty much anything, even Javascript. They aren't really that demanding...

  16. Re:Le sigh. on CoreText Font Rendering Bug Leads To iOS, OS X Exploit · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did you know that TTF fonts are turing complete?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Type_Font#Hinting_language

    "It really worries me that the FreeType font library is now being made to accept untrusted content from the web.

    The library probably wasnâ(TM)t written under the assumption that it would be fed much more than local fonts from trusted vendors who are already installing arbitrary executable on a computer, and itâ(TM)s already had a handful of vulnerabilities found in it shortly after it first saw use in Firefox.

    It is a very large library that actually includes a virtual machine that has been rewritten from pascal to single-threaded non-reentrant C to reentrant C⦠The code is extremely hairy and hard to review, especially for the VM."

    http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/

  17. Re: Who the hell wants an Ubuntu phone? on Using Kickstarter Data To Predict Ubuntu Edge's Success · · Score: 1

    er. trying *Unity* - I guess my brain was thinking on Mint, which was a great solution.
    Love the mint menu for MATE.

  18. Re: Who the hell wants an Ubuntu phone? on Using Kickstarter Data To Predict Ubuntu Edge's Success · · Score: 1

    Hm. I haven't used Unity in ages (switched back to MATE after trying it for a few months) but I seem to recall you can shrink the icon size quite a bit, and pin/unpin to customise what apps you want.

    The requirement to make a launcher using a text editor is seriously annoying tho.

    When I was trying mint, I found it more convenient to create a .desktop file to add to the sidebar by booting into Gnome2/MATE.

  19. Re:already passing it on Are We At the Limit of Screen Resolution Improvements? · · Score: 1

    Well, I'll agree his font isn't probably very useful, I'm sure he's just doing it for the heck of it, or for some ridiculously constrained circumstances, but, apart from making a recognisable B in a 3x3 space, seems distinguishing B and E is pretty easy.

      @
    @@@
    @ @

    @@@
    @@@
    @@@

      @@
    @
      @@

    @@
    @ @
    @@

    @@@
    @@
    @@@

  20. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    I guess I should say, didn't even feel like a...

    Anyway. Sandy was definitely spread over a large area, which helped diffuse it further.
    You can talk about total energy, but if the storm is spread over the entire continent, it isn't very interesting.

    Most places make clear the storm surge was the worst damage, and that would certainly have been helped by having been spread out, while, the results inland would have been significantly less.

    The need for storm surge protection for New York City had been known for years prior.

  21. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    http://m8y.org/tmp/temp.jpeg

    A rough approximation of shapes, as near as I can make out from landmarks.
    Sandy is larger, but, doesn't seem to be that much larger to me.

    And, as noted in comment to AC, my experience of Sandy in maryland was *very* different from that of people in NJ and NY (as in, barely felt like a tropical storm in the impact on our counties in terms of power loss and damage).

  22. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    So I measured the two pics in google maps for an approximate estimate of what to my eyeball looked like two pretty big storms, only Irene with a more definite central eye.

    From the bottom of Sandy to the top (where, admittedly there's clearly a bit of weak storm cropped, but Irene is clearly a lot wider and more of a spiral, so would win on width)
    versus
    From the bottom of Irene to the top of the pic.

    Both were (very approximately) ~915 miles from top to bottom in those pics.

    From the far left of the storm sweep of Sandy to the eye (which is out on its lonesome in the ocean), measured horizontally.
    ~740

    The width of Irene in the shot is massive, and hard to work out due to the coastline being obscured, and similar to the case of Sandy, goes off frame to the right.
    But I got, approximately:
    ~845

    Soo. On those pics, again very approximately, ~900x~750 for Sandy and ~900x~850 for Irene. I think they are comparable.

    I can tell you that in our part of Maryland, Sandy was mostly a dud. The derecho did more damage to the house and trees - the winds didn't really feel like much at all. I don't think we got any gusts that came close to tropical storm strength.
    Not to minimise what happened to New York and New Jersey, just because Sandy clearly covers all of Maryland, to mention that it didn't really feel like much of a storm to us experiencing it in eastern Maryland. The power went out for maybe... 5 minutes. I checked the outtage map along the shore from BGE. There were a number of outtages, but again, not as bad as the derecho.

  23. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    Erm. Right. Point of pic, really, was that as hurricanes fall apart into tropical storms, they are almost always huge things that cover like most of the east coast.

    Compared to pics of hurricanes falling apart into a tropical storm as they track up the coast that I recall and could find of the past, Sandy seems pretty typical.

    The dramatic part was the high tide and pushing that storm surge up against New York City which was woefully unprepared despite warnings in the past (shades of Katrina).

  24. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    As I recall Sandy was a tropical storm when it hit.

    Found a pic of Sandy
    http://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/10/Hurricane-Sandy-on-October-29-2012.jpg
    Compared to...

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg/932px-Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg

    The size doesn't seem that dramatic.

    So. Not sure what the monster part was. Apart from, ofc, the fact that it hit at an unusually high tide.

    I believe most of the damage was storm surge, not due to land covered, or rain fall.

  25. Re:So what happens ... on Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study · · Score: 1

    The entire US is overdue for a Category 3, not just New York.

    A quick google search...
    http://images.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=category+3+landfall+USA

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bJhUmJyxrQs/ULy7NL1QbAI/AAAAAAAACQw/RlSJLqrsz5Y/s1600/hurrdrou0613.jpg

    looks promising.

    Anyway. Pretty obv been awfully lucky recently.