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Software

Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware 397

Posted by Soulskill from the do-not-want dept.
MrSeb writes "At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site's mailing list. Bothersome, perhaps, but certainly not inexcusable. They've got to make money off the site somehow, after all, and banner ads don't always do the job. Now, things have taken a turn for the worse: Cnet has begun wrapping downloads in its own proprietary installer. Not only will this cause the reputation of free, legitimate software to be tarred by Cnet's bloatware toolbars, homepage changes, and new default search engines — but Cnet is even claiming that their installer wrapping is 'for the users.'"
Microsoft

Windows 8 To Fight Piracy With the Cloud 404

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
MrSeb writes "With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quite so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won't be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page. There's also a good possibility that the recently-surfaced fast booting patent could come into play as well. If Microsoft does indeed have designs on using a remote server to push OS code to systems at boot time, that code would be a very clever place to embed activation-related programming. Even if a crack was discovered, it would be neatly undone during a subsequent start-up sequence — similar to the way Microsoft's now-idle Windows Steady State could turn back the clock on an entire Windows installation after rebooting." Microsoft has also indirectly confirmed in a recent blog post that Windows 8 will make use of an app store.

Comment Re:Suspicious timing (Score 1) 481

by Again (#35775956) Attached to: FBI Releases Document Confirming Roswell UFO

The problem with the Roswell folklore has always been that the story completely went away until the point in time when, coincidentally, the actual witnesses had died of old age.

If you want to read an eyewitness's account of what allegedly happened, then go read the book The Day After Roswell by Phillip Corso. I haven't read it but apparently it's interesting.
Biotech

Improving Nature's Top Recyclers 41

Posted by Soulskill from the i-bet-they're-twice-as-productive-in-michigan dept.
aarondubrow sends in this snippet from an article at the Texas Advanced Computing Center: "Over billions of years, fungi and bacteria have evolved enzymes to convert abundant cellulosic plant matter into sugars to use as energy sources to sustain life. It's a great trick, but unfortunately, these enzymes don't work fast enough...yet. So computational scientists at NREL, in collaboration with a large experimental enzyme engineering group, set about trying to understand and design enhanced enzymes to ... lower the cost of biomass-derived fuel to serve the global population (abstract)."

Comment Re:Status bar? (Score 1) 181

by Again (#35321424) Attached to: Firefox 4 Beta 12 Released; Fixes Over 650 Bugs

I thought experiments were carried out during the alpha phase, and the beta phase was only supposed to be used to fix bugs...

You're probably right.

Whatever the case, I'm loving the status bar that is not a status bar being moved back to the bottom. I had a very hard time getting used to it on top.

Comment Re:No, Power Ruins Everything (Score 2) 374

by Again (#35320242) Attached to: Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Mark Shuttleworth has gone off the deep end recently with a lot of his decisions for Ubuntu. Dropping Gnome for Unity, and in future even dropping X for Wayland. All in the name of some vague future usability bonus, but at the same time alienating a lot of software developers and Linux community members.

I agree with most of the points you made but I disagree with you in the quoted paragraph. I have a partition on my laptop devoted to the newest Ubuntu Alpha version and I have gnome shell on my laptop which I build every couple of weeks to see what changes are being made. In my opinion, Unity is by far the more usable of the two and is superior performance-wise. I do understand that both are in active development at the time though and this might change. I don't see shipping Unity as going off the deep-end at all.

I'm withholding my judgment on the decision to move to Wayland until it actually happens.

I recommend that you go and try gnome shell; it's not that hard to build. If I'm right, you're going to feel much better about Ubuntu's move to Unity. I could be wrong of course.

Comment Re:I agree (Score 1) 596

by Again (#35092090) Attached to: Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting"

Sounds like your computer must have problems. The only release I've found to be pretty poor was Visual Studio .NET 2002 release, they polished it up with a 2003 release, which is really what they should've just waited to release in the first place.

I did have problems with crashing one later release (2005) I think, but it turned out to be a plugin. Arguably, they could strengthen resilience against dodgy plugins but meh, so could the likes of Firefox etc. too, it's something the industry as a whole needs to improve on.

Well, I was using the 2008 version with some kind of Oracle database plugin. So that might have been the problem.

Comment Re:I agree (Score 1) 596

by Again (#35091110) Attached to: Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting"

I'm usually quite supportive of Microsoft because I honestly believe some of their products (e.g. Visual Studio) are best of breed, but this is just a joke. [...]

Did me and you use the same Visual Studio? Does it crash on you daily or was there something abnormally wrong with my computer when I used. I used it for four months and I hope that I won't be required to use it extensively again.
Programming

Naming Bi-Directional Streams In an API? 61

Posted by timothy from the will-never-forget-what-me-old-dad-used-to-say dept.
DingoTango writes "My coworker and I are designing an infrastructure API to manage data streams. It will allow a client developer to set up streams going to and from some invoked server functionality, and allow a server developer to write services that both consume and produce streaming data. Our quite civil disagreement involves naming: From the perspective of the client platform, the client's output stream goes to the server, and input stream comes from it. For the purpose of any ensuing discussion, let's call this the 'Local' perspective. However, if the client developer considers the service to be a widget, then the stream going to the service is the input stream and the stream coming from it is the output. Let's call this the 'Widget' perspective. As this is an infrastructure utility, we aren't able to name the streams according to function. What say ye, Slashdot? Is there any precedence, experience, or ungrounded yet vociferous opinion that will resolve this for us?"

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