Presumably because they'd already banned most of the communities like/r/jailbait dedicated to pictures of 14+ year olds - they were actually the original target of this anti-pedophile campaign by Something Awful.
If I recall correctly there's a subtle issue involving secure setuid Perl scripts, suidperl, and quirks of old Unix systems that mean even both noexec and ignoring SUID aren't sufficient.
There's various standard programs like pmount that do that for removable media already, but ISO mounting is a bit more obscure and quite often you genuinely do want to specify a specific directory where it should be mounted.
Thankfully, most websites haven't started casually expecting people to be able to open DOCX files in the same way that they do PDF files. What's more, Chrome seems to be worse about viewing files in external programs than Firefox - either I let random websites dump whatever files they like in my download directory with no prompt first (that's the default) or I have to mess about waiting for a save dialog to open and save them to disk manually and then open them. Unlike Firefox, Chrome doesn't give you the option to just open the file with an external program without downloading it somewhere permanent first.
They do actually present both sides of political arguments.
Yes, they very helpfully make sure to present both the right side and wrong side of each argument - they even make it clear which is which, just in case you might become confused. There's a lot you can do with a good straw liberal.
I think I probably count as having one of those pirate copies despite never obtaining a pirate copy of it and actually buying it twice as a result of the Humble Bundle. It's just that I installed it on two different PCs I own, they counted the number of pirates as the number of PCs that installed it minus the number of copies bought, and they did this prior to me buying it a second time as part of the bundle.
Were their news articles any less pro-SOPA propaganda, though? I don't think any of the news reports I've seen about the SOPA blackout in any of the mainstream news sources even mentioned why it was happening or why sites like Wikipedia were opposed to it, they just presented it as a bunch of websites protesting in support of piracy.
What if the datacenter the server is hosted in or an ISP along the path has been compromised? What if the target site's DNS has been modified to point to the attacker?
What if someone's running a phishing site using fraudulently-obtained EV certificates that display a nice pretty green message? That's not normally possible because EV certificates normally mandate OCSP checks that fail secure, but with these changes once an attacker gets their hands on one they'll have plenty of time to exploit it...
These days, a fair few links I open on the web turn out to be PDFs for whatever reason and it's a lot more convenient to view them in a browser tab than having to open a seperate application with another window.
The problem with PIC32 is that all the peripheral access libraries and headers are tied to Microchip's DRM-crippled payware version of gcc for MIPS and the license agreement forbids their use with a non-crippled version of gcc, or with any version of gcc that's compiled by anyone except Microchip. Oh, and until very recently they only released toolchain binaries for Windows.
That only appears to be true if you don't count good UI as a feature. Honeywell Prestige: jab at a tiny little onscreen button repeatedly to change the temperature, the time, or any of the other settings. Nest: has a nice big, intuitive rotating outer dial to turn.
Now you may have noticed that Honeywell is suing Nest over, amongst other things, a patent on that exact rotating outer dial. Honeywell do have a digital thermometer that uses it but it's essentially the dumbest digital thermometer you could possibly build. No timer to adjust the temperature when you're away or asleep, requires manual switching between heating and cooling mode, just a basic digital emulation of the most brain-dead analog thermometer you can handle. It doesn't even seem to have crossed the mind of anyone at Honeywell that maybe, just maybe, users of expensive digital thermometers want a decent UI experience or how to give it to them.
Their crime is making a superior competitor to Honeywell's expensive proprietary technology. See my comment upthread - all of Honeywell's expensive programmable thermostats use touchscreens with fiddly little onscreen buttons for everything. The only thermostat from them which lets you use a nice big rotating outer ring to adjust anything is a barebones digital emulation of the most basic home thermostat you can buy - no timer or programming features and requires you to manually switch between heating or cooling.
Ah, I beg their pardon. Honeywell do have one digital thermostat where you can rotate the outer ring to set the temperature. Except that's literally all you can do - there's no timer or programming features, it's an exact emulation of the most basic analog thermostat you can buy with a digital readout.
The interesting thing is that even though they've patented it and are suing Nest for patent infringement over it, it doesn't look like Honeywell have released any thermostat using the most distinctive feature of the Nest themostat - the rotating outer ring that's used as a means of input. The only Honeywell thermostats with rotating outer rings appear to be fairly dumb mechanical ones not covered by the patents, with all the even slightly intelligent ones using fiddly buttons or touchscreens.
Honeywell are genuinely suing Nest to stop them for offering a product that there's lots of demand for but that they've failed to produce themselves.
Also, that's not ARM, it's MIPS. Worse, it's Microchip's PIC32 version of MIPS, which uses a crippled version of gcc with optimization levels above -O1 disabled unless you buy a really expensive license from Microchip that's DRM-locked to one particular PC. I think there are also code size limitations in the free (as in beer) toolchain.
Also, that isn't going to work for Chromium because it requires the custom version of Flash that comes with Google Chrome, and there's no way to obtain and install that custom Flash plugin if you're a Chromium user - you have to download the none-Chrome version of Flash from Adobe, though chances are if you use Windows and aren't paying close attention that'll try and install Google Chrome too!
In fact, I'm not sure that Chromium can sandbox the Flash plugin at all.
Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.
Anandtech has a decidedly pro-Intel leaning in general. If memory serves me correctly they only reported on the problem at all once every other site had done so, and even then only because their readers were giving them hell for failing to report on the fact that drives Anandtech had recommended were failing en-masse and eating people's data.
I think some of the SSD brands intentionally disable all access to user data once they detect a single failure, which doesn't really help. Probably very profitable for data recovery firms though.
Technically I've almost never had Chrome crash either... however, after I leave Chromium open for a few days, every single new page I open or existing page I try and view freezes, a message pops up about the process handling that page not responding, and nothing short of completely restarting it will make it usable again - killing the offending subprocesses does nothing. Also, it used to have a similar bug for ages where after leaving it open for a while every page turned white. Plus, on opening it up again it's essentially unusable for several minutes until every page has loaded - the tab bar is responsive, but every page I turn to strobes white and stays there.
I believe - from having seen other people complain about some or all of them on Slashdot - that these are common bugs. (Oh, and Google Chrome is of course entirely capable of crashing your entire PC, though thankfully I doubt it even tries to enable hardware-accelerated rendering on mine.)
I believe that Tizen is indeed pretty much dropping Qt. There is also still a seperate desktop version of KOffice, it's just that it hasn't been getting much love aside from the big code merge to split away the core code in order than it can be used on mobile. I don't think that KOffice has been co-operating much with KDE in general either - the mobile office application was as I understand it not aimed at KDE at all.
Chrome's built in PDF reader is a proprietary bundled plugin, and I think it's largely developed by Adobe too. Certainly it's not available to users of the open source Chromium; neither is the bundled Flash plugin. (Of course, downloading the Flash plugin installer from the Adobe website will try and install Google's proprietary version Chrome if you're a Windows user and not very careful about which download you choose. Apparently it even does it silently and without prompting unless you manage to find and download the none-Chrome installer.)
I think Calligra Suite has mostly been focused on developing office applications for Nokia's now-dead Meego phones, as were most of the KOffice devs prior to the fork, so don't expect it to have improved much as a desktop Office application. (In fact, I seem to recall that some of the patches merged to make it more suitable for Nokia's use even broke functionality in the desktop applications.)
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably because they'd already banned most of the communities like /r/jailbait dedicated to pictures of 14+ year olds - they were actually the original target of this anti-pedophile campaign by Something Awful.
If I recall correctly there's a subtle issue involving secure setuid Perl scripts, suidperl, and quirks of old Unix systems that mean even both noexec and ignoring SUID aren't sufficient.
There's various standard programs like pmount that do that for removable media already, but ISO mounting is a bit more obscure and quite often you genuinely do want to specify a specific directory where it should be mounted.
Flash is still incredibly unreliable in Konqueror even as of KDE 4.8 and also tends to be a major source of crashes in my experience.
Thankfully, most websites haven't started casually expecting people to be able to open DOCX files in the same way that they do PDF files. What's more, Chrome seems to be worse about viewing files in external programs than Firefox - either I let random websites dump whatever files they like in my download directory with no prompt first (that's the default) or I have to mess about waiting for a save dialog to open and save them to disk manually and then open them. Unlike Firefox, Chrome doesn't give you the option to just open the file with an external program without downloading it somewhere permanent first.
They do actually present both sides of political arguments.
Yes, they very helpfully make sure to present both the right side and wrong side of each argument - they even make it clear which is which, just in case you might become confused. There's a lot you can do with a good straw liberal.
I think I probably count as having one of those pirate copies despite never obtaining a pirate copy of it and actually buying it twice as a result of the Humble Bundle. It's just that I installed it on two different PCs I own, they counted the number of pirates as the number of PCs that installed it minus the number of copies bought, and they did this prior to me buying it a second time as part of the bundle.
Were their news articles any less pro-SOPA propaganda, though? I don't think any of the news reports I've seen about the SOPA blackout in any of the mainstream news sources even mentioned why it was happening or why sites like Wikipedia were opposed to it, they just presented it as a bunch of websites protesting in support of piracy.
What if the datacenter the server is hosted in or an ISP along the path has been compromised? What if the target site's DNS has been modified to point to the attacker?
What if someone's running a phishing site using fraudulently-obtained EV certificates that display a nice pretty green message? That's not normally possible because EV certificates normally mandate OCSP checks that fail secure, but with these changes once an attacker gets their hands on one they'll have plenty of time to exploit it...
These days, a fair few links I open on the web turn out to be PDFs for whatever reason and it's a lot more convenient to view them in a browser tab than having to open a seperate application with another window.
The problem with PIC32 is that all the peripheral access libraries and headers are tied to Microchip's DRM-crippled payware version of gcc for MIPS and the license agreement forbids their use with a non-crippled version of gcc, or with any version of gcc that's compiled by anyone except Microchip. Oh, and until very recently they only released toolchain binaries for Windows.
That only appears to be true if you don't count good UI as a feature.
Honeywell Prestige: jab at a tiny little onscreen button repeatedly to change the temperature, the time, or any of the other settings.
Nest: has a nice big, intuitive rotating outer dial to turn.
Now you may have noticed that Honeywell is suing Nest over, amongst other things, a patent on that exact rotating outer dial. Honeywell do have a digital thermometer that uses it but it's essentially the dumbest digital thermometer you could possibly build. No timer to adjust the temperature when you're away or asleep, requires manual switching between heating and cooling mode, just a basic digital emulation of the most brain-dead analog thermometer you can handle. It doesn't even seem to have crossed the mind of anyone at Honeywell that maybe, just maybe, users of expensive digital thermometers want a decent UI experience or how to give it to them.
Their crime is making a superior competitor to Honeywell's expensive proprietary technology. See my comment upthread - all of Honeywell's expensive programmable thermostats use touchscreens with fiddly little onscreen buttons for everything. The only thermostat from them which lets you use a nice big rotating outer ring to adjust anything is a barebones digital emulation of the most basic home thermostat you can buy - no timer or programming features and requires you to manually switch between heating or cooling.
Ah, I beg their pardon. Honeywell do have one digital thermostat where you can rotate the outer ring to set the temperature. Except that's literally all you can do - there's no timer or programming features, it's an exact emulation of the most basic analog thermostat you can buy with a digital readout.
The interesting thing is that even though they've patented it and are suing Nest for patent infringement over it, it doesn't look like Honeywell have released any thermostat using the most distinctive feature of the Nest themostat - the rotating outer ring that's used as a means of input. The only Honeywell thermostats with rotating outer rings appear to be fairly dumb mechanical ones not covered by the patents, with all the even slightly intelligent ones using fiddly buttons or touchscreens.
Honeywell are genuinely suing Nest to stop them for offering a product that there's lots of demand for but that they've failed to produce themselves.
I've generally found that Konqueror has really awful stability issues these days, actually, plus a lot of web pages just plain don't work properly.
Also, that's not ARM, it's MIPS. Worse, it's Microchip's PIC32 version of MIPS, which uses a crippled version of gcc with optimization levels above -O1 disabled unless you buy a really expensive license from Microchip that's DRM-locked to one particular PC. I think there are also code size limitations in the free (as in beer) toolchain.
Also, that isn't going to work for Chromium because it requires the custom version of Flash that comes with Google Chrome, and there's no way to obtain and install that custom Flash plugin if you're a Chromium user - you have to download the none-Chrome version of Flash from Adobe, though chances are if you use Windows and aren't paying close attention that'll try and install Google Chrome too!
In fact, I'm not sure that Chromium can sandbox the Flash plugin at all.
Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.
Anandtech has a decidedly pro-Intel leaning in general. If memory serves me correctly they only reported on the problem at all once every other site had done so, and even then only because their readers were giving them hell for failing to report on the fact that drives Anandtech had recommended were failing en-masse and eating people's data.
I think some of the SSD brands intentionally disable all access to user data once they detect a single failure, which doesn't really help. Probably very profitable for data recovery firms though.
Technically I've almost never had Chrome crash either... however, after I leave Chromium open for a few days, every single new page I open or existing page I try and view freezes, a message pops up about the process handling that page not responding, and nothing short of completely restarting it will make it usable again - killing the offending subprocesses does nothing. Also, it used to have a similar bug for ages where after leaving it open for a while every page turned white. Plus, on opening it up again it's essentially unusable for several minutes until every page has loaded - the tab bar is responsive, but every page I turn to strobes white and stays there.
I believe - from having seen other people complain about some or all of them on Slashdot - that these are common bugs. (Oh, and Google Chrome is of course entirely capable of crashing your entire PC, though thankfully I doubt it even tries to enable hardware-accelerated rendering on mine.)
I believe that Tizen is indeed pretty much dropping Qt. There is also still a seperate desktop version of KOffice, it's just that it hasn't been getting much love aside from the big code merge to split away the core code in order than it can be used on mobile. I don't think that KOffice has been co-operating much with KDE in general either - the mobile office application was as I understand it not aimed at KDE at all.
No PDF reader in Chromium either, and unlike with Firefox I don't think anyone's figured out a way to integrate a non-proprietary one with it.
Chrome's built in PDF reader is a proprietary bundled plugin, and I think it's largely developed by Adobe too. Certainly it's not available to users of the open source Chromium; neither is the bundled Flash plugin. (Of course, downloading the Flash plugin installer from the Adobe website will try and install Google's proprietary version Chrome if you're a Windows user and not very careful about which download you choose. Apparently it even does it silently and without prompting unless you manage to find and download the none-Chrome installer.)
I think Calligra Suite has mostly been focused on developing office applications for Nokia's now-dead Meego phones, as were most of the KOffice devs prior to the fork, so don't expect it to have improved much as a desktop Office application. (In fact, I seem to recall that some of the patches merged to make it more suitable for Nokia's use even broke functionality in the desktop applications.)