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Comment Re:Bug Fixes? (Score 2, Interesting) 172

My feelings exactly. I bought a Nexus 7 (2013) last year and loved it. Then, at some unfortunate moment, I have confirmed the "upgrade". The result was ugly UI (not such a surprise, given the Google track record with arrogant GMail changes, but for Material UI they probably hired the brain behind Windows 8 tiles), performance like some 1$ chinese toy (screen massively tearing while scrolling text web page, ffs!), apps crashing just about all the time... and I find myself the great Android device maybe twice a week now.

On a positive side, it is only a tablet. But in near future, having a car botched by similar upgrade experiences, now that is going to be a completely different matter. It is time to realize that the Google is rotting like any other megacorp and no more true innovation (not to be confused with PR innovation) is going to happen unless some drastic measures are put in motion.

Comment Some experiences from Nexus 7 (Score 1) 437

Using Nexus 7 (model 2013) I have upgraded about a month ago, but it turned out to wrong decision. Everything is slower now, I observe more frequent crashes and the Material Design is ridiculous and incomprehensible. I don't understand thinking of Material Design designers, but it seems that while graphics is simplified without respect to intuitive understanding (infamous "triangle, circle, square" comes to mind) , procedures often became more complicated. For example, to access settings, 2 swipes and 1 touch (pull the top menu, expand the top menu, select Settings) are necessary now - quite a regression.

Comment Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off (Score 1) 142

I'm writing this on Firefox 22.0 / WinXP. Updates disabled for both. No antivirus, unless Sysinternals tools and system debugger count as one. Running it this way for more than ~3 years. Would you point out how exactly is a virus going to infect this machine, if I strictly adhere to a couple of basic information hygiene rules?

Comment Re:what a fuss about nothing (Score 3, Informative) 125

Firefox has this ability as well, it is not so obvious, though.
  • Go to a page with some search field, for example amazon.com title page.
  • In Firefox Search Bar, expand its pop-up menu; one of the items should be "Add Amazon Search Suggestions". Click it
  • Once again go to Search Bar pop-up menu, this time for "Manage Search Engines..."
  • Select the appropriate row and click "Edit Keyword..."
  • Type some reasonably short abbreviation, such as "ama"

You are done, now you can type "ama cthulhu" and there you go. I have there shortcuts for Google (keyword "g"), Wikipedia ("w"), YouTube ("y"), IMDB, CPAN and a couple of other sites and it is really efficient and comfortable.

Comment Redesign antipattern (Score 2) 237

I thing pattern encyclopedists may start a new file. My proposal:

NAME: Stuffing a modern redesign down the users' throats
TYPE: Antipattern
ACTORS: Site owner, Audience
RECIPE: Take a popular web site. Apply a new design that consists of all hip and trendy aspects, such as big spacing, all-caps etc. Remove a couple of functions or provide some obstructions. Make it confusing and inefficient. In Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution style, remove all alternatives that could resemble old way of doing things. When userbase starts to complain, take a firm stance. Arrogance may be used to make the message clearer (get inspiration from Google UX butcher Jason Cornwell).
RESULT: Enjoy your new redesing. Additionally, you can expect lower costs for site operation, as there will be sharp drop in net traffic.

Comment Agreed (Score 1) 237

"THIS SITE IS OPTIMIZED FOR USER INTERFACE FORMERLY KNOWN AS METRO"

I dont know what motivation there is for such change. Maybe the architect of Flickr redesign was fired from Y! and landed here. Or the guy who made me use "the new, better, shiny GMail interface" much less than ever before, to the point of driving me off. My point would be that we don't need "presentation for easy information consumption". If there is a site for complex, in-depth, not-easily-understandable news, information and discussion, this is (or used to be) it. If I need easy-to-consume contents, I go to 9gag.

But this farce, where grey comment frames look like forgotten WebDeveloper frame mode... visual clutter, clutter everywhere. Hey, despite the teaching of modern UX dogmatics, even excessive use of whitespace may be perceived as clutter. I have 1920x1080 resolution, full-screen Firefox - and I see 5 comments per screen (3 of them are one-liners)!!

Just to be clear - I am not afraid of change. To prove it, I will simply stop coming here once the "Classic" option is removed. It didn't hurt when I did this with Flickr, I will survive without Slashdot too.

Comment Re:What is Bruce Schneier's game? (Score 1) 397

The visible partition reports whole 1TB. Truecrypt does not "know" about the hidden partition nor tries to protect it. If you store 1TB of data in the visible part, you will damage whatever was stored in that hidden compartment (the hidden part is stored at the very end of the container file).

For example, I do have a file 2GB large. But it is 99% empty, as I store only passwords, private keys, scans of various personal documents etc. there, all together takes up a couple of megabytes. If there was a need, I could put a 1,5TB hidden partition there. I would argue that the container file size was based on some assumptions regarding future content...

Comment Re:can someone please explain (Score 3, Insightful) 229

If I remember correctly, Stuxnet targeted Windows machines in the first step too. There it infected developer tools and the damage-causing payload did get compiled into programs for those SCADA systems of certain importance. So Windows systems might not have any obvious importance at all, but they play a role of the weakest link surprisingly well.

Comment Re:Another aspect of this mystery (Score 2) 229

As an evil virus author, I would add another twist: make the plain-text part of the virus install the font (we know it does so). Few moments later, from within the encrypted code, uninstall the font (we have no clues what that code actually does).

Unsuspecting folks would devise infection detectors, which will give nice "false negatives".

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