That is definitely true, but the video itself seems to have had any reference to "The Onion" stripped out. Unless you click through to the YouTube page and read the fine print attribution, you won't see the word "Onion" anywhere.
So yeah, still they are idiots for accepting something so ridiculous as this as fact, and for failing to have any innate sense of skepticism about random shit on the internet that doesn't come from at least a moderately vetted news source, but you can't blame people for not knowing what The Onion is when the video says nothing about "The Onion" and most people probably clicked on it in an embedded form from Facebook or other websites.
Actually, the problem is that like the cable industry, *Facebook* acts like it has a sense of entitlement. Once they had a critical mass and growth rate, they decided they could shit all over their users and the users wouldn't defect, leaving plenty of eyeballs to advertise to and freeing them to engage in short-term profit-maximizing behavior.
Sadly, many of these dissatisfied users keep using Facebook even though they know it sucks and they hate it.
Publishers don't have to make ads that are so annoying. The more annoying you make the ads, the greater percentage of people will go through the effort to block them. If you keep ads relatively unobtrusive and low-key, 85% of people won't bother blocking them. This arms race was *not* started by evil consumers intent on destroying revenue streams. It was started by the *massive* escalation in annoying, blinking, animated awful advertising, popups, popunders, and all that destructive shit that took over the web and nearly destroyed it a decade ago.
It's funny how people have nearly forgotten about just how abusive it was. I mean, it was really, really disgusting. The web had become a complete crapware fest before popup blocking and adblocking became standard.
So many website operators demonstrated their complete willingness to shit all over the public that they forced our hands into using tools that default to block everything ad-like.
If these website operators can prove that they can be responsible about the kind of ads they run and the way they run them, then we'll change our tune. For example, I've enabled ads on Slashdot (I have the option, as do most long-time users) and disabled AdBlock on slashdot.org so that I can get ads and help pay the bills around here. I still leave Flashblock on because I hate Flash ads that screw with my browsing experience, but don't mind static ads at all. In fact, Slashdot is one of the few places I've ever seen ads that actually interest me.
Perhaps the future is some sort of contractual browsing experience - you go to a new site, and they want to advertise to you. They use a script to detect that you have ad-blocking enabled. Now, what they *should* do is display a page explaining that their ads pay the bills and requesting that you whitelist them to show you ads - in exchange, they promise not to spread malware or run obtrusive animated ads.
What's missing here is a mechanism for enforcement and trust. Right now I allow ads from Slashdot because it's a known, community-focused site that I visit a lot, and I trust that the editors won't spread crapware or barrage me with terrible ads, lest they lose their community entirely. The fact that the editors have chosen to allow me to opt out of ads entirely if I wish just goes to show they are good trustworthy folks. But with a random site I'm visiting once or twice, I have no reason to trust them to run ads, display Flash or Javascript or anything else that they could potentially abuse.
... which is exactly what DuckDuckGo uses as its data source to handle disambiguation. But Wikipedia is structured for humans and features a large volume of knowledge in human language form with some basic markup. It's not a bunch of information encoded in RDF tuples. Thus my point. Trying to get everybody on the web to re-encode the vast body of knowledge out there in RDF, explicitly referencing ontologies is a setup for failure. Sure, you might use some sort of tuple format to internally store information that you parse out of the human-language web, but that's different from what the "semantic web" set out to be initially.
The problem is that nobody wants to express information through RDF tuples and ontologies. Instead, they express information in human-readable text, with structural and visual markup. Search technology has come very far in terms of figuring out what information we actually want, with things like personalization, disambiguation (see DuckDuckGo for example), shopping/product search, and so on. All this stuff can be teased out of traditional web content with far less effort than trying to get every company and individual to express information through formal ontologies, etc.
So yeah, basically, the goals and use cases of the semantic web fall into two broad categories 1) stuff that data mining or search can do now and 2) stuff that requires hard AI or tons of human labor and thus won't be happening any time soon. This is why "ontologies" have become synonymous with fail.
Nonsense. If you put a small explosive charge in the ECU module of a car that was set to blow up and take out the electronic system with it if detected any unauthorized modifications or tampering with the vehicle, you'd see a class action lawsuit in a matter of days, even though it only affects a small percentage of people who modify their vehicles.
This really shouldn't be so different. Sure, it's a matter of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of dollars, but that doesn't make the product any less my property. And it's still a reasonably large expenditure on a piece of equipment that while you may or may not consider "serviceable" by anybody other than the manufacturer, doesn't mean the manufacturer can actually forcibly self-destruct the device.
Agreed. Chrome and Safari are both much more likely to have stability issues on both Mac and Windows, as far as I have seen. Safari 5 is a nice browser, but should be labeled beta. Chrome has an amazing Javascript engine, but the rest of the browser is mediocre (rendering of complicated HTML is significantly slower than Firefox, for example - just try scrolling to see it, or look at some non-Javascript benchmarks).
Resource utilization hasn't been an issue with Firefox in *years*. This was a problem with Mozilla in the pre-Firefox days, and even with early releases of Firefox, but 1) computers improved, got more memory and faster CPUs, and 2) they fixed the big issues.
The remaining complaints about supposed "memory leaks" are almost always related to misunderstandings about memory allocation and usage models than they are about actual system performance.
Everybody obsesses about Javascript benchmarks, but that's really a tiny fraction of the actual usage your browser gets on the web. I am convinced that Mozilla is throwing effort into Jaegermonkey as a marketing initiative because of the strange focus on Javascript benchmarks by the technology press in the last year and because of Google's very successful use of Chrome's Javascript speed in their marketing than because Firefox actually needs it on 95% of web sites.
A bunch of people spent several years of their lives to validate that his solution was correct. The point is that those people wouldn't have bothered unless the source of the proposed solution was credible - because there are tons of crackpots who post all sorts of theories on the internet that aren't worth spending minutes let alone years of your life trying to validate or disprove.
This is a very tired meme - Firefox is extremely stable and very fast - except for its Javascript engine, which is mediocre to crappy.
I run Firefox for weeks at a time without closing it. I can't keep Safari 5 up for more than a few hours. Chrome is stable, but the UI is awful and the actual rendering engine is slow and scrolling choppier than Firefox, and there's no proper Adblock. The faster Javascript engine is nice, but not worth it at this point.
And the crap about memory bloat - maybe it's because memory is cheap and plentiful and even my weakest desktop has 2 gigs of RAM, but I haven't noticed any issue with Firefox memory usage since version 1.x. The 2.x and 3.x versions seem great to me. Maybe it's because I don't leave 100 tabs open simultaneously, but I think my browser usage (a couple tabs at a time) is pretty typical, and I have zero issues.
Proof? As far as I know the only significant performance advantage of Chrome is in the Javascript engine. In rendering speed, scrolling smoothness and responsiveness, I have found Chrome to be inferior to Firefox. Undoubtedly Chrome's Javascript engine still dominates, but this is relevant for a small percentage of websites that use very intensive Javascript, and for web browsers on more limited machines than a modern laptop or desktop (i.e. netbooks or smartphones).
Also, Firefox is still miles ahead in terms of customizability. I still can't run a real Adblock on Chrome, just element hiders, and there's finally the infrastructure in Safari 5 for it, but it currently crashes all the time due to some issues with the extension infrastructure there.
Without Adblock and Flashblock the web is a slow, crawling mess and I wouldn't really want to use it.
Are those *active* minutes where the user has actually taken some sort of physical action in the last 60 seconds or so or are those just minutes where a browser is connected to Facebook (i.e. their Javascript polling mechanism in place)?
Anyway, looks like I'm an outlier. I log in to Facebook once or twice a week for 5-10 minutes, get rapidly disgusted, and leave. I used to leave Facebook logged in a lot and check it once every hour or two, then I realized it had become too much of a distraction and that when I left it logged in they used my login cookie for all these other unrelated sites on the web to push scarily personal information about what my Facebook-friends were doing on the web, so I blocked all that FB connect BS with Adblock and stopped leaving Facebook logged in when I wasn't actually using it. Realized how much time I was wasting with that crap too.
Moreover, it was 20% of Android apps require some sort of permission that gives them access to some subset of your personal data or phone functions in order to operate. Only something like 2% required permissions to access phone/contact features, most likely because they are dialer/launcher replacement/address book apps.
In comparison, on your desktop Windows machine, 100% of apps have access to your filesystem that contains lots of personal data. And all your apps pop up Windows requesting permission to modify your computer (i.e. root access) all the time. And nobody gets hysterical, they just click OK constantly.
What a stupid meme this is. Android's permission model isn't perfect and could use some clarification and simplification, but it's much better than the other mainstream desktop OSes or phone OSes.
No. For example, ADW.Launcher gets permission to access phone/dialer functions. But it doesn't actually dial your phone itself. Since ADW.Launcher is open source, you can verify that it isn't doing anything funny for yourself.
I'm guessing there's a good reason it asks for that permission, as it probably is simply an overly-broad permission within the Android OS. My point is assuming that every app that accesses the phone/dialer system isn't necessarily dialing Fiji and running up your international phone bill.
But - outside of a few system critical functions where it's hard to tell why these permissions are requested, like launcher replacements, virtual keyboards, contact managers, email programs, and text messaging programs, if an app asks for a suspicious permission, people call them out pretty rapidly.
I think the system could be improved with a bit of simplification, but it's much better than no permissions system at all.
A fifth of applications rely on *permissions* that you, the user, must explicitly grant when you install them, that *allow* them to access private information.
That does not mean they do access that information, or put it to any sort of untoward use. Android practically screams at you when you install applications that need a bunch of permissions. Generally, sure, you ignore that if it just says "Read/write SD card" for example. But if something suspiciously asks for lots and lots of permissions, you might say to yourself "gee, this looks a little funny".
If 10,000 other people have installed it and everybody rates it 5-stars and there are no issues mentioned with it on the web, you can probably guess that it's not doing anything nasty with your information.
But the fact that Android extremely explicitly warns you about these permissions means that the only issue in my mind is there should be a more intense distinction in the UI between permissions like "Read/write to SD card" that lots of apps need, and "Access my contacts" or "Send text messages" which only a smaller number of apps need.
Make a web app that works from any modern browser, and use PDF to address print formatting - PHP, Java and every modern web-oriented language I've used has several libraries to output that stuff. That's what I've done with every modern web app that needs pretty printed output.
It's a bit more work than expecting HTML to just magically output in a consistent way on every printer from every browser, but you'll be much happier with the result in the end and you don't have to run around trying to micromanage which browser everybody is using.
Data persisting after a factory reset is certainly a mistake, though.
Unless that data is on the SD card, in which case it's not supposed to be erased by a factory reset.
The only error here is that there seems to be a bit of an undefined condition - apps caching temporary content to the SD card. There just needs to be a better mechanism to clear that stuff out. I think that would resolve this issue.
Windows 7, using SRWare Iron 5.0.380. But I've observed the same thing with official Chrome builds too. Perhaps I'll try to replicate on my desktop at home, which is also Windows 7 with a quad core Q6600, but a much beefier Nvidia graphics card (whereas my work desktop has some craptastic old ATI card in it).
Okay, I'll be more specific, since this is 100% reproducible for me. It's not a ping time issue, or a networking issue - pages load at perceptibly the same speed for me (i.e. I'm not sure which loads/renders the page faster, but it doesn't seem like the difference is that big a deal on most pages). Firefox may be marginally faster in this area, but that could just be an HTTP pipelining setting or something like that.
What drives me bonkers with Chrome is the scrolling of pages. When I mousewheel-scroll, which is how I generally browse all pages, on some pages I see perceptible lags between the scroll event and the rendering in Chrome. In Firefox, this is perceptibly instantaneous. In fact, on some pages, if I mousewheel-scroll too fast, I occasionally will even see Chrome miss some scroll events.
For some evidence that I'm not crazy, take a look at the latest benchmarks over at Ars Technica. The Javascript benchmarks are of course dominated by Chrome. But the HTML5 flying windows benchmark, Chrome seems to pull a whopping 3 FPS, whereas Firefox scores a 12. I don't know if this is a related effect, but it's evidence that outside of amazing Javascript performance, there are certain types of page rendering that Chrome does relatively slowly.
In fact, that URL provides a great example. Scroll down to the bottom of that page in both Firefox and Chrome. Now scroll up and down 10-20 mousewheel ticks at a time. See the lag in Chrome?
Same effect is visible on quite a few Slashdot.org pages. Basically lots of pages on the sites I frequent most seem to have laggy scrolling issues in Chrome.
I do like the process isolation of Chrome, and the Javascript engine speed is nothing short of remarkable. But it doesn't make up for these basic usability issues for me.
Hmm... if you are trying to encrypt your communications with *Facebook* something tells me you are worrying about the wrong people getting their hands on your personal data.
So.. Firefox is taking a stand on H.264 for good reason, and in the process given WebM an opportunity to get off the ground. This isn't such a big deal for now because 99% of web video is still being served via Flash at this point. I don't know where that debate will end up, but I wouldn't bash Firefox for that.
As for revenue from Google, I'm not aware of that revenue going away. If it did, I'm certain one of the other search players would be willing to pay for default premiere placement in Firefox - as long as Firefox keeps its significant market share, of course. In any case, Google isn't in the business of killing other browsers off that compete with Chrome, Google is in the business of getting eyeballs to see ads and as long as Firefox helps them do that, a few million bucks a year is a drop in the bucket for them.
People have been bashing Firefox's performance in light of Chrome/Chromium's Javascript scores, but the reality is that Firefox's HTML rendering performance, scrolling smoothness, etc. are all significantly better than Chrome. I don't care if you have the fastest Javascript engine in the universe - that only matters in the small, small number of websites with intense Javascript activity. I do care if the other 95% of sites that use only minimal amounts of Javascript feel slow, choppy and crappy when I scroll around on the pages. The Javascript engine is amazingly good, but the "Chrome is fast" thing is more marketing and meme than reality. Try it for yourself. I've tried Chrome on my Core 2 Duo Dell office desktop running Windows 7 and rapidly reverted back to Firefox for this reason.
Also - no proper Adblock in Chrome is a dealbreaker for me. Element hiding is insufficient. I'll consider going back to Safari on my Macbook once Adblock for Safari 5 stabilizes, but for now I've realized that Firefox with the Grapple Delicious theme is superior for most purposes to Safari 5 (again, except for the faster Javascript engine in Safari - although page rendering in Safari 4 or 5 is very nice, fast and smooth unlike Chrome, but Firefox is just as good).
Basically, I don't get the Firefox is dying meme. Sure, Firefox could use a better Javascript engine, and that's being worked on right now (JagerMonkey project), to handle the edge cases where the JIT doesn't work right now. I think these affect benchmarks and marketing more than day-to-day usability though.
I call BS on your story. A judge wouldn't order somebody jailed for 8 years for violating a restraining order that they had never been notified of. I'm guessing, as usual with these stories on Slashdot, there's more to what actually landed the guy in jail than you are saying. Otherwise it would have required any two-bit lawyer and a finding of fact that he had never been notified of the restraining order.
My guess - he pled guilty to violating a restraining order to get charges dismissed for the other stuff he actually did that he was never convicted of (like a bad case of domestic violence or something comparable). That seems to be the common theme here on Slashdot when people say "so-and-so was put in jail for X years for Y minor offense! Look how unfair the justice system is!"
Obviously, there are miscarriages of justice out there, but they usually occur where there's at least an accusation of a far more significant crime than violating a restraining order.
The issue with Chatroulette is that there's complete anonymity. No persistent identity, no reputation, nothing to enforce any sort of social norms.
If you want to meet new people via video chat, I am sort of sad to admit, but doing it in the context of a social networking site like Facebook might make more sense. Not that I specifically advocate Facebook, for a variety of reasons, but it's there and lots of people use it.
There are several Facebook apps that let you do this - because you are connected in to your social network there and there's a relationship to people's real identities, there's just naturally going to be less trolling and stupid behavior. Check out AmigoChat for one (I know the guys that wrote this one which is why I mention it). I'm sure there are others too.
Obviously this isn't a guarantee that there won't be weirdos or pervs, it's just likely that you'll see fewer people exposing their genitals in an unwanted manner. In any case no algorithm is ever going to filter out all the pervs.
There's a good reason for that too. As the original post suggests, it's hard to generate that much revenue as a standalone open source company. But if you really are saving your clients 90% over what they spent before, you are generating a lot of *value* in the marketplace.
It's often easier for a large company with lots of product lines to capture some of that value by bundling hardware and software, or software and their brand-name services, or layering their proprietary software with your open source software, or simply using the software to power their own service offerings. A standalone company whose only products are open source has a lot fewer paths to generate revenue and capture some of that value they create.
Slashdot Mirror
That is definitely true, but the video itself seems to have had any reference to "The Onion" stripped out. Unless you click through to the YouTube page and read the fine print attribution, you won't see the word "Onion" anywhere.
So yeah, still they are idiots for accepting something so ridiculous as this as fact, and for failing to have any innate sense of skepticism about random shit on the internet that doesn't come from at least a moderately vetted news source, but you can't blame people for not knowing what The Onion is when the video says nothing about "The Onion" and most people probably clicked on it in an embedded form from Facebook or other websites.
Actually, the problem is that like the cable industry, *Facebook* acts like it has a sense of entitlement. Once they had a critical mass and growth rate, they decided they could shit all over their users and the users wouldn't defect, leaving plenty of eyeballs to advertise to and freeing them to engage in short-term profit-maximizing behavior.
Sadly, many of these dissatisfied users keep using Facebook even though they know it sucks and they hate it.
Publishers don't have to make ads that are so annoying. The more annoying you make the ads, the greater percentage of people will go through the effort to block them. If you keep ads relatively unobtrusive and low-key, 85% of people won't bother blocking them. This arms race was *not* started by evil consumers intent on destroying revenue streams. It was started by the *massive* escalation in annoying, blinking, animated awful advertising, popups, popunders, and all that destructive shit that took over the web and nearly destroyed it a decade ago.
It's funny how people have nearly forgotten about just how abusive it was. I mean, it was really, really disgusting. The web had become a complete crapware fest before popup blocking and adblocking became standard.
So many website operators demonstrated their complete willingness to shit all over the public that they forced our hands into using tools that default to block everything ad-like.
If these website operators can prove that they can be responsible about the kind of ads they run and the way they run them, then we'll change our tune. For example, I've enabled ads on Slashdot (I have the option, as do most long-time users) and disabled AdBlock on slashdot.org so that I can get ads and help pay the bills around here. I still leave Flashblock on because I hate Flash ads that screw with my browsing experience, but don't mind static ads at all. In fact, Slashdot is one of the few places I've ever seen ads that actually interest me.
Perhaps the future is some sort of contractual browsing experience - you go to a new site, and they want to advertise to you. They use a script to detect that you have ad-blocking enabled. Now, what they *should* do is display a page explaining that their ads pay the bills and requesting that you whitelist them to show you ads - in exchange, they promise not to spread malware or run obtrusive animated ads.
What's missing here is a mechanism for enforcement and trust. Right now I allow ads from Slashdot because it's a known, community-focused site that I visit a lot, and I trust that the editors won't spread crapware or barrage me with terrible ads, lest they lose their community entirely. The fact that the editors have chosen to allow me to opt out of ads entirely if I wish just goes to show they are good trustworthy folks. But with a random site I'm visiting once or twice, I have no reason to trust them to run ads, display Flash or Javascript or anything else that they could potentially abuse.
... which is exactly what DuckDuckGo uses as its data source to handle disambiguation. But Wikipedia is structured for humans and features a large volume of knowledge in human language form with some basic markup. It's not a bunch of information encoded in RDF tuples. Thus my point. Trying to get everybody on the web to re-encode the vast body of knowledge out there in RDF, explicitly referencing ontologies is a setup for failure. Sure, you might use some sort of tuple format to internally store information that you parse out of the human-language web, but that's different from what the "semantic web" set out to be initially.
The problem is that nobody wants to express information through RDF tuples and ontologies. Instead, they express information in human-readable text, with structural and visual markup. Search technology has come very far in terms of figuring out what information we actually want, with things like personalization, disambiguation (see DuckDuckGo for example), shopping/product search, and so on. All this stuff can be teased out of traditional web content with far less effort than trying to get every company and individual to express information through formal ontologies, etc.
So yeah, basically, the goals and use cases of the semantic web fall into two broad categories 1) stuff that data mining or search can do now and 2) stuff that requires hard AI or tons of human labor and thus won't be happening any time soon. This is why "ontologies" have become synonymous with fail.
Could be worse, they could always bring back Jon Katz. Worst. Editor. Ever.
Nonsense. If you put a small explosive charge in the ECU module of a car that was set to blow up and take out the electronic system with it if detected any unauthorized modifications or tampering with the vehicle, you'd see a class action lawsuit in a matter of days, even though it only affects a small percentage of people who modify their vehicles.
This really shouldn't be so different. Sure, it's a matter of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of dollars, but that doesn't make the product any less my property. And it's still a reasonably large expenditure on a piece of equipment that while you may or may not consider "serviceable" by anybody other than the manufacturer, doesn't mean the manufacturer can actually forcibly self-destruct the device.
Agreed. Chrome and Safari are both much more likely to have stability issues on both Mac and Windows, as far as I have seen. Safari 5 is a nice browser, but should be labeled beta. Chrome has an amazing Javascript engine, but the rest of the browser is mediocre (rendering of complicated HTML is significantly slower than Firefox, for example - just try scrolling to see it, or look at some non-Javascript benchmarks).
Resource utilization hasn't been an issue with Firefox in *years*. This was a problem with Mozilla in the pre-Firefox days, and even with early releases of Firefox, but 1) computers improved, got more memory and faster CPUs, and 2) they fixed the big issues.
The remaining complaints about supposed "memory leaks" are almost always related to misunderstandings about memory allocation and usage models than they are about actual system performance.
Everybody obsesses about Javascript benchmarks, but that's really a tiny fraction of the actual usage your browser gets on the web. I am convinced that Mozilla is throwing effort into Jaegermonkey as a marketing initiative because of the strange focus on Javascript benchmarks by the technology press in the last year and because of Google's very successful use of Chrome's Javascript speed in their marketing than because Firefox actually needs it on 95% of web sites.
A bunch of people spent several years of their lives to validate that his solution was correct. The point is that those people wouldn't have bothered unless the source of the proposed solution was credible - because there are tons of crackpots who post all sorts of theories on the internet that aren't worth spending minutes let alone years of your life trying to validate or disprove.
This is a very tired meme - Firefox is extremely stable and very fast - except for its Javascript engine, which is mediocre to crappy.
I run Firefox for weeks at a time without closing it. I can't keep Safari 5 up for more than a few hours. Chrome is stable, but the UI is awful and the actual rendering engine is slow and scrolling choppier than Firefox, and there's no proper Adblock. The faster Javascript engine is nice, but not worth it at this point.
And the crap about memory bloat - maybe it's because memory is cheap and plentiful and even my weakest desktop has 2 gigs of RAM, but I haven't noticed any issue with Firefox memory usage since version 1.x. The 2.x and 3.x versions seem great to me. Maybe it's because I don't leave 100 tabs open simultaneously, but I think my browser usage (a couple tabs at a time) is pretty typical, and I have zero issues.
Proof? As far as I know the only significant performance advantage of Chrome is in the Javascript engine. In rendering speed, scrolling smoothness and responsiveness, I have found Chrome to be inferior to Firefox. Undoubtedly Chrome's Javascript engine still dominates, but this is relevant for a small percentage of websites that use very intensive Javascript, and for web browsers on more limited machines than a modern laptop or desktop (i.e. netbooks or smartphones).
Also, Firefox is still miles ahead in terms of customizability. I still can't run a real Adblock on Chrome, just element hiders, and there's finally the infrastructure in Safari 5 for it, but it currently crashes all the time due to some issues with the extension infrastructure there.
Without Adblock and Flashblock the web is a slow, crawling mess and I wouldn't really want to use it.
Are those *active* minutes where the user has actually taken some sort of physical action in the last 60 seconds or so or are those just minutes where a browser is connected to Facebook (i.e. their Javascript polling mechanism in place)?
Anyway, looks like I'm an outlier. I log in to Facebook once or twice a week for 5-10 minutes, get rapidly disgusted, and leave. I used to leave Facebook logged in a lot and check it once every hour or two, then I realized it had become too much of a distraction and that when I left it logged in they used my login cookie for all these other unrelated sites on the web to push scarily personal information about what my Facebook-friends were doing on the web, so I blocked all that FB connect BS with Adblock and stopped leaving Facebook logged in when I wasn't actually using it. Realized how much time I was wasting with that crap too.
Moreover, it was 20% of Android apps require some sort of permission that gives them access to some subset of your personal data or phone functions in order to operate. Only something like 2% required permissions to access phone/contact features, most likely because they are dialer/launcher replacement/address book apps.
In comparison, on your desktop Windows machine, 100% of apps have access to your filesystem that contains lots of personal data. And all your apps pop up Windows requesting permission to modify your computer (i.e. root access) all the time. And nobody gets hysterical, they just click OK constantly.
What a stupid meme this is. Android's permission model isn't perfect and could use some clarification and simplification, but it's much better than the other mainstream desktop OSes or phone OSes.
No. For example, ADW.Launcher gets permission to access phone/dialer functions. But it doesn't actually dial your phone itself. Since ADW.Launcher is open source, you can verify that it isn't doing anything funny for yourself.
I'm guessing there's a good reason it asks for that permission, as it probably is simply an overly-broad permission within the Android OS. My point is assuming that every app that accesses the phone/dialer system isn't necessarily dialing Fiji and running up your international phone bill.
But - outside of a few system critical functions where it's hard to tell why these permissions are requested, like launcher replacements, virtual keyboards, contact managers, email programs, and text messaging programs, if an app asks for a suspicious permission, people call them out pretty rapidly.
I think the system could be improved with a bit of simplification, but it's much better than no permissions system at all.
A fifth of applications rely on *permissions* that you, the user, must explicitly grant when you install them, that *allow* them to access private information.
That does not mean they do access that information, or put it to any sort of untoward use. Android practically screams at you when you install applications that need a bunch of permissions. Generally, sure, you ignore that if it just says "Read/write SD card" for example. But if something suspiciously asks for lots and lots of permissions, you might say to yourself "gee, this looks a little funny".
If 10,000 other people have installed it and everybody rates it 5-stars and there are no issues mentioned with it on the web, you can probably guess that it's not doing anything nasty with your information.
But the fact that Android extremely explicitly warns you about these permissions means that the only issue in my mind is there should be a more intense distinction in the UI between permissions like "Read/write to SD card" that lots of apps need, and "Access my contacts" or "Send text messages" which only a smaller number of apps need.
Otherwise, this is basically a hatchet job.
Chrome's rendering engine is slow and sucks. Javascript is much faster, but that's it.
Make a web app that works from any modern browser, and use PDF to address print formatting - PHP, Java and every modern web-oriented language I've used has several libraries to output that stuff. That's what I've done with every modern web app that needs pretty printed output.
It's a bit more work than expecting HTML to just magically output in a consistent way on every printer from every browser, but you'll be much happier with the result in the end and you don't have to run around trying to micromanage which browser everybody is using.
Data persisting after a factory reset is certainly a mistake, though.
Unless that data is on the SD card, in which case it's not supposed to be erased by a factory reset.
The only error here is that there seems to be a bit of an undefined condition - apps caching temporary content to the SD card. There just needs to be a better mechanism to clear that stuff out. I think that would resolve this issue.
Windows 7, using SRWare Iron 5.0.380. But I've observed the same thing with official Chrome builds too. Perhaps I'll try to replicate on my desktop at home, which is also Windows 7 with a quad core Q6600, but a much beefier Nvidia graphics card (whereas my work desktop has some craptastic old ATI card in it).
Okay, I'll be more specific, since this is 100% reproducible for me. It's not a ping time issue, or a networking issue - pages load at perceptibly the same speed for me (i.e. I'm not sure which loads/renders the page faster, but it doesn't seem like the difference is that big a deal on most pages). Firefox may be marginally faster in this area, but that could just be an HTTP pipelining setting or something like that.
What drives me bonkers with Chrome is the scrolling of pages. When I mousewheel-scroll, which is how I generally browse all pages, on some pages I see perceptible lags between the scroll event and the rendering in Chrome. In Firefox, this is perceptibly instantaneous. In fact, on some pages, if I mousewheel-scroll too fast, I occasionally will even see Chrome miss some scroll events.
For some evidence that I'm not crazy, take a look at the latest benchmarks over at Ars Technica. The Javascript benchmarks are of course dominated by Chrome. But the HTML5 flying windows benchmark, Chrome seems to pull a whopping 3 FPS, whereas Firefox scores a 12. I don't know if this is a related effect, but it's evidence that outside of amazing Javascript performance, there are certain types of page rendering that Chrome does relatively slowly.
In fact, that URL provides a great example. Scroll down to the bottom of that page in both Firefox and Chrome. Now scroll up and down 10-20 mousewheel ticks at a time. See the lag in Chrome?
Same effect is visible on quite a few Slashdot.org pages. Basically lots of pages on the sites I frequent most seem to have laggy scrolling issues in Chrome.
I do like the process isolation of Chrome, and the Javascript engine speed is nothing short of remarkable. But it doesn't make up for these basic usability issues for me.
Hmm... if you are trying to encrypt your communications with *Facebook* something tells me you are worrying about the wrong people getting their hands on your personal data.
So.. Firefox is taking a stand on H.264 for good reason, and in the process given WebM an opportunity to get off the ground. This isn't such a big deal for now because 99% of web video is still being served via Flash at this point. I don't know where that debate will end up, but I wouldn't bash Firefox for that.
As for revenue from Google, I'm not aware of that revenue going away. If it did, I'm certain one of the other search players would be willing to pay for default premiere placement in Firefox - as long as Firefox keeps its significant market share, of course. In any case, Google isn't in the business of killing other browsers off that compete with Chrome, Google is in the business of getting eyeballs to see ads and as long as Firefox helps them do that, a few million bucks a year is a drop in the bucket for them.
People have been bashing Firefox's performance in light of Chrome/Chromium's Javascript scores, but the reality is that Firefox's HTML rendering performance, scrolling smoothness, etc. are all significantly better than Chrome. I don't care if you have the fastest Javascript engine in the universe - that only matters in the small, small number of websites with intense Javascript activity. I do care if the other 95% of sites that use only minimal amounts of Javascript feel slow, choppy and crappy when I scroll around on the pages. The Javascript engine is amazingly good, but the "Chrome is fast" thing is more marketing and meme than reality. Try it for yourself. I've tried Chrome on my Core 2 Duo Dell office desktop running Windows 7 and rapidly reverted back to Firefox for this reason.
Also - no proper Adblock in Chrome is a dealbreaker for me. Element hiding is insufficient. I'll consider going back to Safari on my Macbook once Adblock for Safari 5 stabilizes, but for now I've realized that Firefox with the Grapple Delicious theme is superior for most purposes to Safari 5 (again, except for the faster Javascript engine in Safari - although page rendering in Safari 4 or 5 is very nice, fast and smooth unlike Chrome, but Firefox is just as good).
Basically, I don't get the Firefox is dying meme. Sure, Firefox could use a better Javascript engine, and that's being worked on right now (JagerMonkey project), to handle the edge cases where the JIT doesn't work right now. I think these affect benchmarks and marketing more than day-to-day usability though.
I call BS on your story. A judge wouldn't order somebody jailed for 8 years for violating a restraining order that they had never been notified of. I'm guessing, as usual with these stories on Slashdot, there's more to what actually landed the guy in jail than you are saying. Otherwise it would have required any two-bit lawyer and a finding of fact that he had never been notified of the restraining order.
My guess - he pled guilty to violating a restraining order to get charges dismissed for the other stuff he actually did that he was never convicted of (like a bad case of domestic violence or something comparable). That seems to be the common theme here on Slashdot when people say "so-and-so was put in jail for X years for Y minor offense! Look how unfair the justice system is!"
Obviously, there are miscarriages of justice out there, but they usually occur where there's at least an accusation of a far more significant crime than violating a restraining order.
The issue with Chatroulette is that there's complete anonymity. No persistent identity, no reputation, nothing to enforce any sort of social norms.
If you want to meet new people via video chat, I am sort of sad to admit, but doing it in the context of a social networking site like Facebook might make more sense. Not that I specifically advocate Facebook, for a variety of reasons, but it's there and lots of people use it.
There are several Facebook apps that let you do this - because you are connected in to your social network there and there's a relationship to people's real identities, there's just naturally going to be less trolling and stupid behavior. Check out AmigoChat for one (I know the guys that wrote this one which is why I mention it). I'm sure there are others too.
Obviously this isn't a guarantee that there won't be weirdos or pervs, it's just likely that you'll see fewer people exposing their genitals in an unwanted manner. In any case no algorithm is ever going to filter out all the pervs.
There's a good reason for that too. As the original post suggests, it's hard to generate that much revenue as a standalone open source company. But if you really are saving your clients 90% over what they spent before, you are generating a lot of *value* in the marketplace.
It's often easier for a large company with lots of product lines to capture some of that value by bundling hardware and software, or software and their brand-name services, or layering their proprietary software with your open source software, or simply using the software to power their own service offerings. A standalone company whose only products are open source has a lot fewer paths to generate revenue and capture some of that value they create.