You're not the first one to point to that xkcd in respect to this project. However, I don't think it is complete apt. If anything, Bedrock Linux benefits from the large variety of Linux distributions out there, rather than adding to the mess. If that issue noted in the xkcd comic didn't exist, this distro would not have any point. Think of it as bringing value from what is traditionally seen as a weakness.
I apologize, I literally just learned HTML/CSS within the last week to create the website. I've had other people offer to create a website for me who actually know what they're doing with respect to website creation - once they're done I'll gladly switch it away from what I'm sure is a poor example of a proper website.
What I am knowledgeable about is the content discussed within the website. Don't judge the book by its cover here, as I'm reasonably confident there is something unique in there.
There is a very specific definition of "free" being used in this context; opening up the software to modders in the fashion Valve has does not qualify. The wikipedia article on the subject explains it well. The importance of this definition of "free" and what could or should be done about it is what the debate here is revolving around; the definition of what does or does not qualify is well established by this point.
I might have a solution for you. While I agree with many of the responses you've received that it is not an easy problem to solve, I too have similar desire: to keep the benefits of my favorite distro without being restricted to them (for example, being restricted to only the desktop environments/window managers they have available).
I've been working on my own Linux distribution tentatively called "Bedrock Linux" which, in some sense of the word, allows me to pull packages from different Linux distributions. Your request here: "But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu" - is quite possible with my Linux distribution.
I'm cheating to achieve this by heavily utilizing chroots and PATH management so that the core of Bedrock Linux will know when and how to run what program from which distribution without having all of the incompatibilities get in the way of each other. I expect most of the people who have responded to you claiming your desire is impossible either didn't think outside the box enough for my solution to the problem, or do not consider it a legitimate solution.
While I would like to emphasize that this entirely works and that I have been using pre-release builds myself for over a year now, I have to admit that sadly the project isn't quite ready for public release yet. The most I have to show for it at the moment are the slides from a presentation I gave on it not too terribly long ago: http://opensource.osu.edu/sp12/bedrock
If you are interested, feel free to search for "Bedrock Linux" on your preferred internet search engine on a regular basis until the website is up. I am currently working with others on an internal alpha, and hope to have the first public release within a few months, but as I'm sure you understand, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if it slips past that deadline.
From the sound of it, XFCE is what you are looking for.
Either that or, if you don't mind the lack of uniformity (by default, you can hand-configure the uniformity in) no full-blow desktop environment but rather just a collection of applications. You can use, for example, openbox as your window manager (should be configurable as you desire), and any of a large number of standalone icon manager/bars I expect you can find in your repository. Pcmanfm is a nice, lightweight filemanager - or you could go grab nautilus or dolphin or thunar.
While I have your attention, I would also suggest looking into tiling window managers if you haven't yet. Awesome (that's the name), xmonad, i3, and dwm are a few to consider.
Actually the way I understand it all that it actually does is play each frame 5 times to reach the 120Hz, no tweening or anything of the sort.
Either you understand wrong, or you're missing something. For the vast majority of commercial 120/240Hz televisions playing the vast majority of commercial 30/60Hz content, there is an option to analyze the frames coming in and try to come up with some frames to stick in between. A source:
I'm sure you can find others with your search engine of choice. This is a feature which often be disabled. When disabled, the television can very well just stop updating more often than the source. It can just hold the same picture for twice/four times/whatever as long. If done properly, this should be 100% indistinguishable from a 60hz television. There literally isn't anything different about it beyond the fact the television has additional, unused capabilities.
I have seen video shot and played back on proper equipment at 48fps and it has basically the same exact look.
I have no experience with 48fps equipment. While you don't seem to be the only one to feel this way about it, I cannot think of a technical reason for it. Your comparision with 120/240hz televisions, though, is likely unfounded.
I believe it has to do with the fact that lighting and set design as well as the panning speeds, etc. all are holdovers from traditional 24/30fps and things are more noticeably "fake" because of it when you see it in full detail and the higher fps. That is just a guess based on my experience, I could be wrong and there could be a technical answer for it but it without a doubt feels and looks "wrong" especially in scenes without even motion just talking the speech is most certainly not the way it looks/sounds in real life.
I don't follow why that would be the case, but I have no experience such as lighting or set design - that could very well be the reason behind the Hobbit movie's issue.
I think people try to justify this as some leap forward or needed improvement but I'm as techy as it gets and I don't see it like that.
Higher-framerate media is certainly a needed improvement for a certain demographic. You may not fit into it, but I can tell you with quite a bit of certainty that I would benefit from it I don't want to come off bragging, but I am sufficiently sensitive to framerate that 60Hz media is to slow for me. It still looks like a bunch of discrete steps that are all going really really fast, as opposed to a single smooth reality. Perhaps as I get older I'll lose this capability, but for the time being, it's jarring. I was in awe when I saw my first 120Hz monitor - dragging windows around actually looked smooth! In fact, it wasn't just me and my high-sensitivity that noticed the difference - everyone I showed it to were impressed. Here, the 120Hz display was being fed 120Hz content - just a standard Windows desktop, but still, 120Hz content, unlike the televisions with 30/60Hz content you've likely experienced. Sadly the colors, viewing angle, etc all had issues... I've been waiting for years for a good 120Hz monitor, but the market isn't providing. However, even if I did own such a monitor, it wouldn't be any better than 60Hz monitors if I don't have sufficient high-framerate media.
If you hit me with some high fps video that looks natural and enhances my experience I'm 100% for it but that is not what I've seen so far and it does not seem like this has achieved that either from the responses.
Agreed. Providing me with high-framerate media, but doing it wrong - whatever is causing issues with the Hobbit movie - isn't helping anyone. But that "wrongness" isn't because somewhere between 24hz and 1/planktime video looks wrong to humans. It's just various crappy implementation issues. Whatever the issue with the Hobbit movie is, for technical reasons, isn't the same issue your having with 120Hz/240Hz televisions.
I replied elsewhere to a similar comment, but I'll say the same thing here:
With 120/240hz displays, they're taking video at another framerate - perhaps 30 or 60 - and "upscaling" it to 120/240Hz. There is a chip in there that is looking at two frames, figuring out what changed, and making up frames to shove in between. It not only looked fake, it genuinely was fake. It really isn't any different from taking 480p and trying to upscale it up to 1080p - just you're doing it in the time dimension instead of x/y.
Seeing video that was actually sourced at a higher framerate displayed at that higher framerate usually doesn't generate the "fake" look you're talking about. That having been said, I have no idea what's causing issues with the Hobbit film.
What you're talking about is a very different issue. With that, they're taking video at another framerate - perhaps 30 or 60 - and "upscaling" it to 120/240Hz. There is a chip in there that is looking at two frames, figuring out what changed, and making up frames to shove in between. It not only looked fake, it genuinely was fake. It really isn't any different from taking 480p and trying to upscale it up to 1080p - just you're doing it in the time dimension instead of x/y.
Seeing video that was actually sourced at a higher framerate displayed at that higher framerate usually doesn't generate the "fake" look you're talking about. That having been said, I have no idea what's causing issues with the Hobbit film.
It is significantly cheaper to patch security holes in our current human-sustaining ecosystem project than to try to start a new one from the ground up.
One of the fundamental differences is that if some but not all notaries are comprimised you'll be able to know something is up. With CA's, if one is compromised, that alone could be used to MITM between you and just about any website.
Another is that you don't have to trust any particular notary. You can add/drop them quite easily. With CA's, however, if you chose you don't trust a CA you can't really be confident you're not being MITM'd at any website which has that CA sign their cert.
Basically, with notaries, you don't really have to trust any one in particular. You just have to have some that you do trust. Not even that, actually - you just have to trust that from the pool of notaries you're using not all are comprimised. Presumably if people support this, more notaries will become available and you'll get the diversity you want. Well, hopefully.
A more pertinent issue with Perspectives, as I see it, is that if someone MITM's very close to you (think the people who own/control the AP you're connecting through at a hotel), they could MITM *all* of the notaries as well. With the CA model, so long as the location you got your browser/certs/OS was from was secure - and all of the CA's are reliable - you're fine even through an evil hotel connection.
I think what you're missing is the fact that experiments done to calculate the speed of photons are completely different from experiments done to calculate the speed of neutrinos. It's quite feasible for an error to crop up in one group of experiments and not in the other.
Calculating the speed of photons via experimentation is *much* easier, since they're not nearly as hesitent to interact with other particles. Additionally, humanity has done way more experiments calculating the speed of light. We're getting pretty good at it. While it's certainly possible that we've got that part wrong - we were wrong when we thought Newtonian Physics explained everything - it's far, far less likely than the possibility that we just messed up something unique to this latest experiment.
The question is, what part was messed up.
If you want a more specific guide for using bumblebee with your specific laptop/distro combination, you may be able to find one if you look around. For example:
I can't vouche for bumblebee; I've never actually tried it myself. However, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for. Let's hope it's a solid project, as Optimus is becoming more and more popular and nVidia doesn't seem to have any plans to support it on Linux, with a open source driver or otherwise.
Grendel by John Gardner is a brilliant re-telling of Beowulf from Grendel's point of view. Very deep. Nihilism, Solipsism. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a "from the villain's POV" with some philosophical, uhh, "isms."
For the pre-made policies, you're correct, AppArmor isn't necessarily much more friendly than SELinux.
However, if you want to make your own policies, SELinux is a nightmare. AppArmor is _much_ easier.
Personally, I prefer TOMOYO Linux over the both of them. There's also SMACK, if you don't like any of the aformentioned three.
There's security benefits to customizing the policies to your own usage; if you're paranoid enough, I'd recommend doing so. There's certain liberties pre-made policies need to take to cover wide audiences that you won't have to. If you aren't going to make your own, however, it's more or less a wash between SELinux/Fedora and AppArmor/Ubuntu.
[quote]I like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.[/quote]
It'd be interesting to see how much of a dent this makes in their total income - it may be feasible that this was, in fact, simply a clerical error depsite the fact it'd be huge for the vast majorit of us. This doesn't justify it, of course, but I wouldn't rush to assume it was obviously malicious and intentful.
If you want a real challenge, try co-op. At parts like the turbo tunnel or snakes, if either person messes up you both have to start over.
In fact, at one point the game crashes in co-op. You have to kill off one player before you get there, get through the part with one person, then bring back your partner.
Not exactly, but close. It's easy enough to test: have the newer generation play the older games and newer games. If the trend TFA discusses was primarily a result of a difference in generations' skills, older games wouldn't seem any more difficult than newer games to the same people.
From what I've seen, younger gamers who grew up with games struggle just as much with the NES's Super Mario Brothers just as much as I did when I was there age, and they breeze through more modern titles the same way I do now.
One difference between the newer gamers and the old guard, from what I've seen: patience. Rather than spending months trying to get through Super Mario Brothers as the author in TFA did, it seems the newer generation would likely just get frustrated and give up and go play something else.
That's not to say today's youth have any more patience than yesterday's; rather, there's far more people gaming now than previous. This difference comes from the addition of what is often called ``casual gamers''. That catagory didn't exist as we know it now back in the wild west of the NES days.
There simply isn't as much money in difficult games as easy ones today. The NES's Battletoads wouldn't sell to the vast majority of today's audience.
why do they keep changing how control panel looks/works, I would like some freeking consistency.
The not-so-savvy computer users out there won't notice or care about improvements under the hood. Making visual, easily noticeable changes is about the only way to ensure the average end-user even realizes it's a different OS.
The annoying changes for you and me lead to more sales, in theory, from the layman.
Surely, if unwanted pop-unders can slip through in Firefox, likely so can other unwanted things.
That's a non sequitur. Consider: The Firefox developers do not view disabling pop-unders as anywhere near as important as ensuring the browser is secure. The fact that the developers did not put the time and effort into disabling pop-unders does not mean they aren't able to keep Firefox secure.
I'm not saying that Firefox is secure so much as that your reasoning is faulty. You could try to argue that the Firefox developers don't have care about end-user complaints, or something along those lines, with that anecdote. It's not, however, proof against Firefox being secure.
That'd be an odd statement from anyone familiar with Judaism itself, as opposed to someone generalizing it along with other religions.
According to most Jews' interpretation of Jewish law, saving lives takes priority over nearly everything else. This is why, for example, taking pig insulin is perfectly okay.
Consider the stereotype of Jews being doctors. Jews, in general, don't like throwing lives away.
I realize you meant that as a joke, but in case anyone was curious it is okay under Jewish law (as interpreted by most Jews, reform conservative and most orthodox) to receive something along those lines.
For the most part, if it's for medical purposes, pork is fine. Saving a life takes precedence here.
Slashdot Mirror
We are :D
You're not the first one to point to that xkcd in respect to this project. However, I don't think it is complete apt. If anything, Bedrock Linux benefits from the large variety of Linux distributions out there, rather than adding to the mess. If that issue noted in the xkcd comic didn't exist, this distro would not have any point. Think of it as bringing value from what is traditionally seen as a weakness.
I apologize, I literally just learned HTML/CSS within the last week to create the website. I've had other people offer to create a website for me who actually know what they're doing with respect to website creation - once they're done I'll gladly switch it away from what I'm sure is a poor example of a proper website.
What I am knowledgeable about is the content discussed within the website. Don't judge the book by its cover here, as I'm reasonably confident there is something unique in there.
There is a very specific definition of "free" being used in this context; opening up the software to modders in the fashion Valve has does not qualify. The wikipedia article on the subject explains it well. The importance of this definition of "free" and what could or should be done about it is what the debate here is revolving around; the definition of what does or does not qualify is well established by this point.
Happy to, I'm glad you found it interesting!
I've not considered such things, but I'll look into it for the long-term future. Adding Android to the mix would be interesting. Thanks!
I might have a solution for you. While I agree with many of the responses you've received that it is not an easy problem to solve, I too have similar desire: to keep the benefits of my favorite distro without being restricted to them (for example, being restricted to only the desktop environments/window managers they have available).
I've been working on my own Linux distribution tentatively called "Bedrock Linux" which, in some sense of the word, allows me to pull packages from different Linux distributions. Your request here: "But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu" - is quite possible with my Linux distribution.
I'm cheating to achieve this by heavily utilizing chroots and PATH management so that the core of Bedrock Linux will know when and how to run what program from which distribution without having all of the incompatibilities get in the way of each other. I expect most of the people who have responded to you claiming your desire is impossible either didn't think outside the box enough for my solution to the problem, or do not consider it a legitimate solution.
While I would like to emphasize that this entirely works and that I have been using pre-release builds myself for over a year now, I have to admit that sadly the project isn't quite ready for public release yet. The most I have to show for it at the moment are the slides from a presentation I gave on it not too terribly long ago:
http://opensource.osu.edu/sp12/bedrock
If you are interested, feel free to search for "Bedrock Linux" on your preferred internet search engine on a regular basis until the website is up. I am currently working with others on an internal alpha, and hope to have the first public release within a few months, but as I'm sure you understand, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if it slips past that deadline.
From the sound of it, XFCE is what you are looking for.
Either that or, if you don't mind the lack of uniformity (by default, you can hand-configure the uniformity in) no full-blow desktop environment but rather just a collection of applications. You can use, for example, openbox as your window manager (should be configurable as you desire), and any of a large number of standalone icon manager/bars I expect you can find in your repository. Pcmanfm is a nice, lightweight filemanager - or you could go grab nautilus or dolphin or thunar.
While I have your attention, I would also suggest looking into tiling window managers if you haven't yet. Awesome (that's the name), xmonad, i3, and dwm are a few to consider.
Actually the way I understand it all that it actually does is play each frame 5 times to reach the 120Hz, no tweening or anything of the sort.
Either you understand wrong, or you're missing something. For the vast majority of commercial 120/240Hz televisions playing the vast majority of commercial 30/60Hz content, there is an option to analyze the frames coming in and try to come up with some frames to stick in between. A source:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379206,00.asp
I'm sure you can find others with your search engine of choice. This is a feature which often be disabled. When disabled, the television can very well just stop updating more often than the source. It can just hold the same picture for twice/four times/whatever as long. If done properly, this should be 100% indistinguishable from a 60hz television. There literally isn't anything different about it beyond the fact the television has additional, unused capabilities.
I have seen video shot and played back on proper equipment at 48fps and it has basically the same exact look.
I have no experience with 48fps equipment. While you don't seem to be the only one to feel this way about it, I cannot think of a technical reason for it. Your comparision with 120/240hz televisions, though, is likely unfounded.
I believe it has to do with the fact that lighting and set design as well as the panning speeds, etc. all are holdovers from traditional 24/30fps and things are more noticeably "fake" because of it when you see it in full detail and the higher fps. That is just a guess based on my experience, I could be wrong and there could be a technical answer for it but it without a doubt feels and looks "wrong" especially in scenes without even motion just talking the speech is most certainly not the way it looks/sounds in real life.
I don't follow why that would be the case, but I have no experience such as lighting or set design - that could very well be the reason behind the Hobbit movie's issue.
I think people try to justify this as some leap forward or needed improvement but I'm as techy as it gets and I don't see it like that.
Higher-framerate media is certainly a needed improvement for a certain demographic. You may not fit into it, but I can tell you with quite a bit of certainty that I would benefit from it I don't want to come off bragging, but I am sufficiently sensitive to framerate that 60Hz media is to slow for me. It still looks like a bunch of discrete steps that are all going really really fast, as opposed to a single smooth reality. Perhaps as I get older I'll lose this capability, but for the time being, it's jarring. I was in awe when I saw my first 120Hz monitor - dragging windows around actually looked smooth! In fact, it wasn't just me and my high-sensitivity that noticed the difference - everyone I showed it to were impressed. Here, the 120Hz display was being fed 120Hz content - just a standard Windows desktop, but still, 120Hz content, unlike the televisions with 30/60Hz content you've likely experienced. Sadly the colors, viewing angle, etc all had issues... I've been waiting for years for a good 120Hz monitor, but the market isn't providing. However, even if I did own such a monitor, it wouldn't be any better than 60Hz monitors if I don't have sufficient high-framerate media.
If you hit me with some high fps video that looks natural and enhances my experience I'm 100% for it but that is not what I've seen so far and it does not seem like this has achieved that either from the responses.
Agreed. Providing me with high-framerate media, but doing it wrong - whatever is causing issues with the Hobbit movie - isn't helping anyone. But that "wrongness" isn't because somewhere between 24hz and 1/planktime video looks wrong to humans. It's just various crappy implementation issues. Whatever the issue with the Hobbit movie is, for technical reasons, isn't the same issue your having with 120Hz/240Hz televisions.
I replied elsewhere to a similar comment, but I'll say the same thing here:
With 120/240hz displays, they're taking video at another framerate - perhaps 30 or 60 - and "upscaling" it to 120/240Hz. There is a chip in there that is looking at two frames, figuring out what changed, and making up frames to shove in between. It not only looked fake, it genuinely was fake. It really isn't any different from taking 480p and trying to upscale it up to 1080p - just you're doing it in the time dimension instead of x/y.
Seeing video that was actually sourced at a higher framerate displayed at that higher framerate usually doesn't generate the "fake" look you're talking about. That having been said, I have no idea what's causing issues with the Hobbit film.
What you're talking about is a very different issue. With that, they're taking video at another framerate - perhaps 30 or 60 - and "upscaling" it to 120/240Hz. There is a chip in there that is looking at two frames, figuring out what changed, and making up frames to shove in between. It not only looked fake, it genuinely was fake. It really isn't any different from taking 480p and trying to upscale it up to 1080p - just you're doing it in the time dimension instead of x/y.
Seeing video that was actually sourced at a higher framerate displayed at that higher framerate usually doesn't generate the "fake" look you're talking about. That having been said, I have no idea what's causing issues with the Hobbit film.
It is significantly cheaper to patch security holes in our current human-sustaining ecosystem project than to try to start a new one from the ground up.
One of the fundamental differences is that if some but not all notaries are comprimised you'll be able to know something is up. With CA's, if one is compromised, that alone could be used to MITM between you and just about any website.
Another is that you don't have to trust any particular notary. You can add/drop them quite easily. With CA's, however, if you chose you don't trust a CA you can't really be confident you're not being MITM'd at any website which has that CA sign their cert.
Basically, with notaries, you don't really have to trust any one in particular. You just have to have some that you do trust. Not even that, actually - you just have to trust that from the pool of notaries you're using not all are comprimised. Presumably if people support this, more notaries will become available and you'll get the diversity you want. Well, hopefully.
A more pertinent issue with Perspectives, as I see it, is that if someone MITM's very close to you (think the people who own/control the AP you're connecting through at a hotel), they could MITM *all* of the notaries as well. With the CA model, so long as the location you got your browser/certs/OS was from was secure - and all of the CA's are reliable - you're fine even through an evil hotel connection.
I think what you're missing is the fact that experiments done to calculate the speed of photons are completely different from experiments done to calculate the speed of neutrinos. It's quite feasible for an error to crop up in one group of experiments and not in the other. Calculating the speed of photons via experimentation is *much* easier, since they're not nearly as hesitent to interact with other particles. Additionally, humanity has done way more experiments calculating the speed of light. We're getting pretty good at it. While it's certainly possible that we've got that part wrong - we were wrong when we thought Newtonian Physics explained everything - it's far, far less likely than the possibility that we just messed up something unique to this latest experiment. The question is, what part was messed up.
The two-graphics-card scheme you're talking about was developed by nVidia; it is called "Optimus."
There is an open source project to get this stuff to work with Linux/X11, called bumblebee. See here:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/
If you want a more specific guide for using bumblebee with your specific laptop/distro combination, you may be able to find one if you look around. For example:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1763742
I can't vouche for bumblebee; I've never actually tried it myself. However, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for. Let's hope it's a solid project, as Optimus is becoming more and more popular and nVidia doesn't seem to have any plans to support it on Linux, with a open source driver or otherwise.
Grendel by John Gardner is a brilliant re-telling of Beowulf from Grendel's point of view. Very deep. Nihilism, Solipsism. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a "from the villain's POV" with some philosophical, uhh, "isms."
Good question. Mine reports 10,2,161,22 installed (can't they figure out how to use decimal points?)
Many cultures use commas instaed of periods for the decimal mark. Specifically, see here.
For the pre-made policies, you're correct, AppArmor isn't necessarily much more friendly than SELinux.
However, if you want to make your own policies, SELinux is a nightmare. AppArmor is _much_ easier.
Personally, I prefer TOMOYO Linux over the both of them. There's also SMACK, if you don't like any of the aformentioned three.
There's security benefits to customizing the policies to your own usage; if you're paranoid enough, I'd recommend doing so. There's certain liberties pre-made policies need to take to cover wide audiences that you won't have to. If you aren't going to make your own, however, it's more or less a wash between SELinux/Fedora and AppArmor/Ubuntu.
[quote]I like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.[/quote] It'd be interesting to see how much of a dent this makes in their total income - it may be feasible that this was, in fact, simply a clerical error depsite the fact it'd be huge for the vast majorit of us. This doesn't justify it, of course, but I wouldn't rush to assume it was obviously malicious and intentful.
If you want a real challenge, try co-op. At parts like the turbo tunnel or snakes, if either person messes up you both have to start over. In fact, at one point the game crashes in co-op. You have to kill off one player before you get there, get through the part with one person, then bring back your partner.
Not exactly, but close. It's easy enough to test: have the newer generation play the older games and newer games. If the trend TFA discusses was primarily a result of a difference in generations' skills, older games wouldn't seem any more difficult than newer games to the same people.
From what I've seen, younger gamers who grew up with games struggle just as much with the NES's Super Mario Brothers just as much as I did when I was there age, and they breeze through more modern titles the same way I do now.
One difference between the newer gamers and the old guard, from what I've seen: patience. Rather than spending months trying to get through Super Mario Brothers as the author in TFA did, it seems the newer generation would likely just get frustrated and give up and go play something else.
That's not to say today's youth have any more patience than yesterday's; rather, there's far more people gaming now than previous. This difference comes from the addition of what is often called ``casual gamers''. That catagory didn't exist as we know it now back in the wild west of the NES days.
There simply isn't as much money in difficult games as easy ones today. The NES's Battletoads wouldn't sell to the vast majority of today's audience.
Fucking turbo tunnel.
why do they keep changing how control panel looks/works, I would like some freeking consistency.
The not-so-savvy computer users out there won't notice or care about improvements under the hood. Making visual, easily noticeable changes is about the only way to ensure the average end-user even realizes it's a different OS.
The annoying changes for you and me lead to more sales, in theory, from the layman.
Surely, if unwanted pop-unders can slip through in Firefox, likely so can other unwanted things.
That's a non sequitur. Consider: The Firefox developers do not view disabling pop-unders as anywhere near as important as ensuring the browser is secure. The fact that the developers did not put the time and effort into disabling pop-unders does not mean they aren't able to keep Firefox secure.
I'm not saying that Firefox is secure so much as that your reasoning is faulty. You could try to argue that the Firefox developers don't have care about end-user complaints, or something along those lines, with that anecdote. It's not, however, proof against Firefox being secure.
That'd be an odd statement from anyone familiar with Judaism itself, as opposed to someone generalizing it along with other religions.
According to most Jews' interpretation of Jewish law, saving lives takes priority over nearly everything else. This is why, for example, taking pig insulin is perfectly okay.
Consider the stereotype of Jews being doctors. Jews, in general, don't like throwing lives away.
I realize you meant that as a joke, but in case anyone was curious it is okay under Jewish law (as interpreted by most Jews, reform conservative and most orthodox) to receive something along those lines. For the most part, if it's for medical purposes, pork is fine. Saving a life takes precedence here.