Comment Re:Bah! (Score 1) 95
A MeeGo phone would have prevented the plane from ever being built in the first place.
A MeeGo phone would have prevented the plane from ever being built in the first place.
But what if we required 2 CAs to agree? 5? 10? It would be up to the admins of the server to decide how many CAs they wanted to use, and users could decide for themselves how many are required to agree in order to consider the cert valid.
Interesting, but all that would do is spur companies to automatically obtain multiple certificates from multiple CAs. If such a system were compromised we'd be in the same situation as now.
Perhaps both avenues are required: Each CA may only service one tld (so a compromise at a
But even then the skeptic in me knows that the DigiNotar's of such a system will still be able to screw it up...
We really should be supporting these kinds of companies, not throwing our money at foreign oil/power interests.
Reminds me of Greece's debt and the Eurozone bailing them out: "They're losing enormous amounts of money so we should lend/give them more!". No matter how many subsidies you get, if you depend on them your business model is shaky.
If it's a question of when, not if, your company or country fails it's best to fail early. Bankruptcy is painful but it gives everyone involved a fresh start. Delaying the inevitable only makes it more painful in the end. Hopefully a slimmed-down company that does make a profit will rise from the ashes.
Found myself in the same boat a while back. Small-screen ereaders are cheap but rather awful for reading regular PDFs, large-screen ereaders are pricey but you can fit a single page on it.
In the end I went for a Pocketbook 902. They're cheaper than the other 10" ereaders and handle PDF/PS very well, together with a host of other formats and supports wifi+bluetooth. I've read a bundle of papers and a few ebooks on it over the summer and haven't regretted it, in spite of the manufacturer being unknown and the software being 'ok'. It runs on an ancient version of Android but you wouldn't recognize it from the UI.
Note-taking on it is next to impossible though (no touchscreen). If that's a key feature for you you might want to look at their premium model, a hacked DX or the Iliad.
I have a 10" Android tablet too (I splurged on gadgets, sue me) but I find reading on it not a lot more comfortable than on a regular monitor. Reading a quick paper is fine, it's great for couch-surfing and handles anything you can throw at it, but if you're expecting to read for hours on end I'd go for the Pocketbook.
Doing so hurts mozilla. userdefined search engines dont pay the bills.
I think mozilla could have used those $85m to fund a search engine of their own, that would avoid their reliance on google and make a much better investment than all those UI designers who keep breaking firefox.
KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.
Having used Xfce (since back when Gnome 2 came out) I agree with you: Xfce has always been the bastion of Gnome refugees.
Olivier Fourdan deserves a lot of credit: Xfce has a slow-but-steady approach for those of us that think a desktop environment should keep out of the way and let us work. Throughout the last 10 years he and his team has made massive changes to Xfce4 without impacting existing user's workflow.
I think the only change in my day-to-day desktop since 2001 has been adding a notification area (which naturally is optional) and Thunar (before Xfce was always lacking a good filemanager).
How much more expensive would gas have to be before we stop seeing one-person-occupied SUVs? $5/gal? $10/gal? And how many people would lose their jobs and livelihood if we did that? All so the one-man-in-an-SUV commuters can barrel along at 80mph getting 7mpg.
Over here in NL we're nearly at $10/gal, and most of Europe is between $7 and $9. Just came back from Spain where the prices are "only" $7/gal, those kinds of prices are a relief when you're driving 4000 miles.
These prices do work and make people get smaller, more efficient cars (like the Citroen C1, 50-60mpg). 7mpg simply isn't affordable for a daily commute or even a holiday with 4: you'll be paying $5k for a 4000-mile trip on gas alone.
They could have kept those teachers, hired their own in house programmers and got a better software package that they could maintain for decades
But that would have meant that those poor overworked civil servants in charge would actually have to manage an IT project, heaven forbid.
No, it's much easier to let others do the heavy lifting and simply pay the bills with our money.
And the internet does a collective *facepalm*
Regardless of the idiot in Labour who was responsible, the real surprise is that the ruling liberal party voted in favour of this filtering. It was probably a carrot for the christians who they need to stay in power, but still...
Politicians: Ignorant, stupid, malicious. Pick 3.
The amount of money spent on engineers paid to work on the code base is quite large and if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale
Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.
Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...
All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.
You want it to be there, holding everything up and easy to hand, but you don't want it to get in the way.
I think that every Linux distribution and DE developer should have this as a mantra.
For everything that has been developed over the last 10 years, a lot of it has been busywork that serves to only stroke the ego of the developers. Every desktop and every distribution should be easy to use, but most importantly shouldn't get in the way of the user. Switching interfaces (KDE 4, Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3, Unity) might be fun for developers (Ooo shiny 3D windows!) and keep them interested, users just can't give a damn and either are forced to learn yet another interface or switch DE/OS.
Look at Windows 95 -> Windows 7. Anyone comfortable with one can easily switch to the next. The interface might not always be pretty but it is consistent, gets out of the way and lets you get to work.
Just like XFCE4 actually, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more.
1999 called, it wants its rant back. Where have you been this last decade?
Seriously, with CSS (W3C, not coincidently the same maintainers of HTML) we have that web presentation language and it works pretty well across all major browsers. If you want to give your users a 'consistent user experience', CSS will force it upon them.
Even with differences between CSS versions and DOM implementations we have it much easier than when frames, white 1px images, ActiveX hacks and tables were the way to do "web design". Those 'designed for IE' labels weren't for show: getting that consistent user experience was a beast for a single browser and nearly impossible across multiple browsers.
Nowadays we have 3 major rendering engines: Trident, Gecko and Webkit. You have differences between IE-versions that you should test for, but it's rare that a Firefox or Chrome/Safari update would ruin your site. Between CSS being the norm and having a number of great Javascript libraries to work with, web development is a breeze compared to the old days.
Now get off my lawn!
I am not sure if there is any difference between EC2 or a cheaply rented VPS
When wanting scalability via Amazon primarily S3 makes the most sense. An EC2 instance can be flooded with requests just as well as a VPS or dedicated server can (although upgrading a EC2 instance is much easier), however offloading your media files to S3 and having your server stick to serving only HTML means bandwidth is a better way to help scale your system.
Slashdot will still flood your EC2 instance, but S3 can easily handle the load and help you survive a few seconds longer.
I have to admit that iOS is whupping our arse in usability when it comes to the iPad.
Exactly, and Google has no one to blame but themselves when it comes to poor Android tablet sales.
2011 would have been the year of the Android Tablet. Then manufacturers delayed until easter, OK. Now it's fall 2011 for most models except for those blessed by Google.
For now we can only choose between the overpriced Galaxy Tab and Xoom (on par with the iPad in price) or the Android 2.x el-cheapo tablets, where there probably is a huge opportunity for tablets between those two extremes.
Oh well, 2011 isn't over yet.
Slashdot's format is tuned towards debate, not discussion.
True, but isn't debate inherent when allowing people to comment on news items? Slashdot in my eyes has never been about solving other peoples problems. Slashdot is about venting opinions on the latest tech news.
Slashdot isn't a forum where you'd ask for help about your favorite Linux distro, for instance. You might have an excellent question but it might only be slightly relevant to the news item being discussed, and there only is a tight window of time in which you'll get any answers: before you know it the news article with your question drops off the front page. But even so you can have short-lived discussions on Slashdot.
On ordinary discussion forums you set the topic and the group sets the speed in which new topics are brought up. Much more useful for questions, for en-mass debate maybe less so.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart
