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User: nctritech

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  1. Re:Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad... on It's Official: Users Navigate Flat UI Designs 22 Percent Slower (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Because that border offsets the tab-controlled portion from the tab-independent portion, so it does in fact add extra information. With the separator removed the common controls "become one" with the tab, indicating that each tab has its own OK/Cancel/Apply button that is distinctly separate from the others. Yes, you could probably still make use of the functions within the tabbed window without the section separator, but that's sort of like English without the Oxford comma. Not immediately realizing the purpose of the border doesn't mean it has no purpose or relays no information, but that's exactly how the "flat" design philosophy works. It's just information reduction extremism and it's very bad for usability.

  2. Re:Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad... on It's Official: Users Navigate Flat UI Designs 22 Percent Slower (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    It is "flat" in that the colors were not gradients and there wasn't anything about the UI at all that was designed to be "shiny" because Windows 95 was still back in the days when 640x480 256-color mode wasn't supported on a decent number of home computers. The need to support 16-color mode as the lowest common denominator meant that making it pretty wasn't an option. The low resolutions meant that padding space between elements was not an option past a certain limited point, but there was plenty of room between icons and Start menu items to read everything on the screen quickly. While 100% of the modern "flat" trend wasn't there, it definitely wasn't "popping" either. I'd argue that Windows 95 was "flat" design done right: just enough extra stuff like 3D button borders to make it highly usable, but that's as outrageous as it ever got.

  3. Re:Add in the 'low-contrast text' fad... on It's Official: Users Navigate Flat UI Designs 22 Percent Slower (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    There is a big slab of irony underneath this whole flat UI thing. We already had "flat" design in the past and it was perfect for our computers. Bring back that flat design and you get minimalism AND usability in one package. Readable fonts, scroll bars that aren't near-invisible or even hidden, distinct separation between controls and content...and somehow over the course of ~16 years we ended up with Windows 10. 1990 less Windows and 100x more pain.

  4. Re:3.18? on With Android Oreo, Google Is Introducing Linux Kernel Requirements (betanews.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    This kernel version hold-back bullshit is entirely the fault of proprietary-only driver providers like Qualcomm. They write a driver module and provide it as binary-only which ties it to a VERY specific Linux kernel configuration. They need to provide us with source code. The biggest problem with Android in particular and SoC platforms like ARM or MIPS is that all the hardware stuff is closed off and there are no standards. ARM and MIPS do not have the things that make x86 platforms so easy to write an OS for (ACPI, PCI, etc.) and as a result every "platform" requires specific knowledge about the platform like what GPIO pin on what controller to tie to what function. All that stuff should be burned into a ROM somewhere so the kernel can configure itself for the hardware without needing complex tweaks and hard-coded configurations at the kernel level to make it all work.

    Linux kernel drivers that are not open source are pure cancer. Lack of standard configuration specification and control methods are a secondary cancer. Given the state of things on non-x86 platforms, I'm surprised OpenWRT works at all. Bless those poor glorious developers at OpenWRT.

  5. Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit. on Employers Want More Open Source Workers, Says Linux Foundation Study (zdnet.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "89 percent of hiring managers report difficulty in finding qualified talent for open source roles"

    When your job ad demands 7-10 years of experience in a thing that isn't even 10 years old then yeah, you might have some difficulty "finding quality talent" because you're being ridiculous.

    Job ad bullet points are used as filters and do a great job (ha!) of filtering out all of the ideal candidates in favor of the ones that will gladly lie about their skill sets yet can't write anything more trivial than strcpy() on a whiteboard. Maybe you stop looking for "workers with cloud experience" and start looking for "workers that have great system administration skills who we'll train to use the specific 'cloud' thingy we're using this month." After all, what these job posts that demand a "hit the ground running" candidate fail to realize is that they have to train the new employee in the operations and peculiarities unique to their business anyway.

    Pay a decent wage and write realistic job applications and give everyone who applies in earnest a fair shake and you might not have so much "difficulty finding quality talent."

  6. Re:Andreas Gal is right on Inside Mozilla's Fight To Make Firefox Relevant Again (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Chrome was only ever faster when you switched. Once the DBs and caches fill up, Chrome gets slower than Firefox, but by then you've already been impressed and switched because "it's so fast!" I tried out both browsers on a fresh install of Windows once to see how fast they go when fresh and they're pretty much the same. Limiting the size of the browser cache is helpful for all browsers and goes a long way towards keeping them running decently.

  7. Re:Firefox 57 on Inside Mozilla's Fight To Make Firefox Relevant Again (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    No more Tab Mix Plus though. Man, that extension is super useful.

  8. Low-capacity phones get hammered out of the box on Are App Sizes Out of Control? · · Score: 1

    I have a phone that's a year or two old which I don't really need more than 1-2 apps on because it's not my main personal phone. This phone has 4GB of total flash storage, of which 2.25GB is the Android system. What's very interesting is that when I set up this phone and my Google account, the built-in apps auto-updated and they have to use the remaining free space to do so.

    It ran out of space halfway through.

    What I had to do is turn off auto-updating, remove all the app updates for apps I didn't use, and now I have to constantly hand-pick updates. Just updating the Google Play {Newsstand,Music,Movies,Books,Games,KitchenSink} crap that almost no one actually uses is enough to kill off most of the phone's remaining storage. App bloat today is obscene. There is no valid excuse for triple-digit megabyte app sizes in all but a very small set of cases, especially for Web-centric stuff like LinkedIn.

    All of this app bloat would easily explain why expensive 8-core Android devices today are far slower than the HTC Dream with Android 1.5 that I originally started with.

  9. Re:sexually-repressed fake christian prudes on Senators Propose Bill Targeting Websites That Facilitate Sex Trafficking (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    This is no different than every other stupid moral panic we've endured. If it's not terrorists in every neighborhood, it's pedophiles behind every bush and tree. If it's not pedos swarming the backs of local park bushes, it's out-of-control high-impact sexual slavery in every motel room even if no pimp or underage person is ever involved and everyone consents to what's going on. Anger and fear are the only two emotional states that cause the logical side of the brain to completely shut down. These moral panics exist solely for the purpose of power grabbing. It was never about protecting lives, children, or women; it has always been about making you afraid enough that you'll support permanent removal of the rights of yourself and others to conduct your respective lives as you see fit, giving that control to the authoritarian politicians that crafted the panic in the first place, and thanking them profusely for protecting you from others by making you a little bit more of a slave to the government and its very real slippery slope of control.

    See also http://reason.com/blog/2017/06... and https://www.psychologytoday.co... and an interesting thing I found along the way http://www.acadiau.ca/~thomson...

  10. Re:Security software won't stop social engineering on Ask Slashdot: Should Average Consumers Install More Than One Antivirus Program On Their System? · · Score: 1

    What you are saying is a stretch, plus email clients all stopped downloading remote content by default a looooooong time ago. Gmail pre-downloads the images for you and serves them up from a Gmail server so you don't even have to access the remote content or open the email to cause retrieval, rendering most such tracking bugs useless.

  11. Re:For once use the microsoft shit on Ask Slashdot: Should Average Consumers Install More Than One Antivirus Program On Their System? · · Score: 2

    To be completely fair, NoScript is a real pain in the ass to use. Some websites have 20-30 external domains from which they load JS snippets. Figuring out which one the comments section loads from, for example, is sometimes just impossible. If it's facebook.net or disqus.com or fyre.co it's kind of obvious, but if it's douchebagmediamagicsnortingcdn.tv it's not nearly as simple to figure out.

  12. Re:Security software won't stop social engineering on Ask Slashdot: Should Average Consumers Install More Than One Antivirus Program On Their System? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You missed the point. Manipulating the person behind the keyboard always wins. Actual malicious software is nowhere near as big of a problem as it used to be. The bad guys figured out a long time ago that it is way easier and safer to manipulate the user into willingly giving up their credentials and money than to attempt to exploit software flaws in their computers. Sure, there are still malicious things out there, but getting infected with them is a symptom of the same problem: the person using the mouse willfully takes an action that harms them.

  13. Security software won't stop social engineering on Ask Slashdot: Should Average Consumers Install More Than One Antivirus Program On Their System? · · Score: 1

    Let me know when antivirus software stops people from calling phone numbers on scare pages in the browser or believing that "Microsoft" is actually cold-calling them. The threat model has changed so much between the DOS days and today that the only truly effective security is not falling for scam artist trickery. I get bombed with targeted scams like "check your WHOIS data" that links to somewhere that definitely isn't my hosting provider all the time and I have to talk down "DO NOT TURN OFF COMPUTER, THIS IS MICROSOFT, CALL US" complaints from frightened people almost daily. 80% of the time those people have already willingly allowed the stranger to use their computer remotely.

    I'm glad Syskey is getting tossed from Win10; in the meantime I load a reg file on everyone's machine that sets Notepad as the debugger for Syskey to make using it difficult, but I can't do anything to stop them from choosing to get "Microsoft" scammed.

    I have only a single-digit count of computers with actual infections on them in the past year. I've seen hundreds of them with "COMPUTER HELP.txt" files on the desktop.

  14. Reality: companies want pre-trained worker bees on Top Established and Emerging Tech Companies Prefer To Hire Highly Educated Candidates, Not Dropouts (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    There are some things that you learn when pursuing certain degrees which would be fairly difficult to learn on your own, but most job minimum education requirements out there are less about getting someone who has learned some advanced stuff and more about having a worker that has been trained for the job you want to assign to them on that worker's own personal dime instead of the company's. As a bonus, most degrees incur debt on par with an expensive car or a mortgage and the debt plus interest can potentially take decades to repay in full, so not only do the degree-demanding companies get a worker bee they didn't have to spend money training, they also get a more loyal worker bee starting financially well in the red and who can't afford to just walk away if the employer treats them badly.

    You're practically guaranteed to not become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but that doesn't mean you require a degree to succeed. Persistence and constant autodidacticism are far more valuable things than a college degree. A degree is no substitute for persistence or personal desire to learn and grow.

  15. Re: California has bad politics on Tech Jobs Are Surging in Seattle, Declining in Silicon Valley (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't know if this is what you meant by "home" but this is a residence that exists in the area and is under $400K. https://www.zillow.com/homes/f...

    I would seriously love to hear about why this absurdly cheap seaside trailer is not a good place to purchase. I enjoy learning that kind of thing. "Trailer park" is obvious, but what else do you notice?

  16. Re:Crap. on Avast Now Owns CCleaner After Acquiring Piriform (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    Uh, yes, I know what I'm complaining about. Avast will install previously unavailable components during updates without asking the user. I think the real problem is that you don't know what I'm complaining about.

  17. Re:Crap. on Avast Now Owns CCleaner After Acquiring Piriform (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    Well...that was a fat waste of money. At least they got rid of AVG as it was; it got to the point that AVG being installed was a performance death sentence.

  18. Crap. on Avast Now Owns CCleaner After Acquiring Piriform (betanews.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    I install CCleaner on PCs all the time and tell people to run it at least once a month. Of course, ever since one of the major version bumps (I think 4.0?) I've had to precede that with a file called "ccleaner_disable_monitoring.reg" so I don't have to go into settings and manually disable the "active monitoring" crap that the program then warns you and "ARE YOU SURE?!?!?!111" smacks you for trying to turn off. I used to install Avast on everything too since it was free and didn't slow the machines down as much as other options, but now I have to un-check a bunch of boxes in the installer and every new iteration and they keep adding useless "modules" that annoy the crap out of everyone, so as of Windows 10 I just tell people Windows Defender is fine and leave it at that.

    It'll be interesting to see how they intend to modify their products. Also, when did AVG become a re-skinned Avast? That was surprising.

  19. Re:It makes sense. on Oregon Passes First Statewide Bicycle Tax In Nation (washingtontimes.com) · · Score: 0

    Ignoring the weight of the rider which is going to be the same if they're in a car or on a bike, your car is a 2500- to 3000-pound chunk of metal. The heaviest bikes you'd consider riding on the street are in the 30-40 pound range. Please tell me you don't think that a 40-pound bike causes the same wear on a chunk of asphalt that a 3000-pound car does. I noticed that you specifically said "build and maintain bike paths" to imply that bikes are getting their own "free roads." This is not the case at all. Outside of dense urban areas, "bike paths" are either the same road that cars travel on or are thin sparse scenic paths meant for mixed use that are not always usable for getting to point B like a road. In places that do have dedicated bike LANES, what's the cost of maintenance? It's not really more than maintaining the asphalt road that the path is already a part of. The bike lane is just a slight widening of the road that would be there anyway and a little bit of paint to tell cars to try not to accidentally kill the bikers.

    Look at it another way: if someone rides a bike to work instead of driving a car, they're trading out 3000 vehicle pounds 20 days a month on each inch of asphalt for 40 vehicle pounds instead, an amount that won't wear the asphalt much more than sun and rain. If anything, people riding bikes should be paid proceeds from highway use taxes to encourage continued bike use.

  20. Re:Not going to happen on Australia To Compel Technology Firms To Provide Access To Encrypted Missives (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    GET /c51f657cd28a29a207d827267934226b59bf44e8.html
    Host: slashdot.org
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
    Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
    Keep-Alive: 300
    Connection: keep-alive
    Pragma: no-cache
    Cache-Control: no-cache

    c51f657cd28a29a207d827267934226b59bf44e was actually a piece of encrypted data. How would an ISP block this without blocking the entire IP, server name, or banning all HTTP transactions not to a machine on a whitelist thereby killing access to most of the web? Assume that c51f657cd28a29a207d827267934226b59bf44e8 can be replaced with any string of characters, including paths or even further "encoded" as recognizable dictionary words, i.e. GET /alphabet/monkey/snorkel/crotch/scam/dead/muppet/orgy.php

  21. Re:Remember kiddos on Insider Trader Arrested After He Googled 'Insider Trading,' Authorities Allege · · Score: 1

    That statement reminds me of Congressional healthcare plans. I bet the wacky laws regarding healthcare with no solution in sight get fixed real fast if Congress has to purchase theirs through the Obamacare exchanges like every other citizen.

  22. Re:No one gives a flying fuck about this on Insider Trader Arrested After He Googled 'Insider Trading,' Authorities Allege · · Score: 1

    It also shows that the government routinely uses third parties to get around your constitutional rights and collect information on you. This is why laws that make your data your property (for search and seizure and legal proceeding purposes) even when on someone else's server are needed. Your internet search history being demanded is something that they should have to let you defend against, not a third party like Google that has no interest in the matter.

  23. Re:How about Mozilla fixes the memory leaks instea on If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The Firefox memory leak problems were fixed a long time ago. Remember that a memory leak is when a program allocates memory but never frees it even when it doesn't use it ever again. Certain add-ons cause excessive memory consumption but Firefox itself doesn't have any significant memory usage problems. I can leave several windows with 10-30 tabs each up for weeks at a time and never hit 2GB of memory usage, and that's with quite a few add-ons and the enlarged pointer/data size of a 64-bit program as well. As for the interface crap, it's shitty but I've adjusted to it so it's not as big of a deal most of the time. The hamburger menu thing is still really stupid and I wish I could print preview the "print selection" option.

  24. Adblock Plus is available for IE, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and a few other browsers, as well as any browser (Pale Moon, Chromium, etc.) based on the previously mentioned browsers.

  25. RTFA: the title is misleading on If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You (cnet.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.

    NEITHER OF THOSE IS "DECENTRALIZATION."