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Comment Re:Them Brits is smart (Score 2) 40

I know, don't feed... but you're wrong :)

http://www.economist.com/node/...

Brits have some of the healthiest teeth in the world, but it's a different culture here than in the US. In the US, if you're poor, you don't get your teeth done because it's expensive. Here it's free-for-all due to the NHS, but the NHS budget is such that it would be considered a waste to spend taxpayers money on the cosmetic treatments such as the capping and polishing and whitening that are so common in the states. Straightening is normally only done when there's a medical need for it. Obviously, all the same cosmetic treatments are available privately but most people balk at the cost even without the cultural bias - free private dentistry is a perk of my job but still no-one goes for american-style white gnashers.

Haven't had a cavity or anything in fifteen years but by american standards my teeth might well be considered horrible since they're not pearly white (thanks, tea, coffee and fags!); personally, I don't like perfectly even white teeth since to me they look like a horse just jumped out of a toothpaste advert.

Now, if you'd have brought marmite into the conversation you'd have had a point.

Comment Re:Microsoft: Support XP users (Score 1) 341

But the updates will only be created for EN_GB and there'll be no way to translate that into american english. Commonwealth nations will be able to install them, although all of those XP machines in australia and new zealand will need to be turned upside down in order for the bits to line up properly.

Comment Re:The big problem with Linux security. (Score 2) 220

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you may be confusing file permissions with ACLs; the two are not the same thing. ACLs only started appearing in common filesystems in the 90's and to use them in the early days of linux you'd frequently have to force the enabling of xattr (if your filesystem supported it); the first reference I can find to POSIX 1E ACLs in either FreeBSD or Linux is round about 2000 and I started using them myself in 2002, they're still far from common.

Comment Re:150 tabs? (Score 1) 142

Different people respond better to different ways of working. Frankly, looking something up and then closing it drivers me utterly crazy - since I'm the kind of person that forgets about something once they can't see it. Doorway amnesia, out of sight, out of mind and all that. Please don't assume that because you find the "having lots of tabs" approach not your cup of tea that everyone is like that.

I suspect that much like the GP I've got a highly spatial memory, so I'll know pretty instinctively that the web GUI for the SAN was opened about 15 tabs to the left of where I am now. I'll know that cluster of about ten tabs over yonder is where I'm keeping some pages open for the IRPStackSize issue I'm looking at - stuff I might have had a fix applied but will want to keep my reference docs on hand after the users get back to me with testing reports in 48hrs time - because not all problems are things where I can go "there, I've fixed it, don't need to think about it again now". Going to the lengths of categorising it as a bookmark for something that you might only need once is a lot of overhead, and relying on page content search in the address bar doesn't give me context of whether it was a page I had open that had useful information on it, or whether it was useless fluff that happened to have a particular term in it. So keeping some windows/tabs open for comparatively long periods of time is what works best for me.

I don't like to use tree-style tabs or tab grouping as I find them visually cluttered.

Unlike the GP however, personally I haven't had any significant problems with FF27 and ninety hojillion tabs. I used to be one of those FF users who would continually bitch and moan about resource usage (because my FF would hit the 1.8GB ceiling every 24-48hrs and either slow to a crawl or crash) but since about version 20 or 24 or something, memory utilisation has dropped - both in the amount of memory used for particular dataset and the amount at which the memory bloats/leaks/fragments over time. Commit rarely goes over 1GB now (although when it does it usually means FF will soon need to be restarted). my biggest problems with FF now are its inherently single-threaded nature; load a set of tabs for certain websites and you'll often see a core pegged at 100% for 30s or more. Annoying.

All the above is YMMV, my 2 pence, etc.

Comment Re:Shades of WinAmp 3 ? (Score 2) 199

Users should have the ability to roll back any upgrade

When the curators of your device/app store/whatever take an X% cut of whatever moolah you spend on the application or attached subscription services, surely there's a vested interest from both parties for you not to have the ability to keep reinstalling the appallingly stone aged one that still works just fine but doesn't make them any money...? Rent seeking then becomes more profitable for both the creator and the curator, so as long as you ignore the whims of your consumers it's a win/win.

Comment Re:To be an obvious joke it needs to be funny (Score 1) 220

Your UID suggests you should have seen this style of troll back when it first came around - a quick google returns dozens of hits for slashdot alone. It's intended as a joke, and is mocking the mindset (less present now than it was then) about UNIX/linux being seen by people who never got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Oracle as both too basic for business but yet still somehow intractably complicated.

So... whoosh. You might not find it funny but it's certainly not deadly serious and certainly isn't going "ha ha, they use LUNIX!".

Next bombshell: Linyos Torovoltos not actually a real person.

Handhelds

Replicant Hackers Find and Close Samsung Galaxy Back-door 81

gnujoshua writes "Paul Kocialkowski (PaulK), a developer for the Replicant project, a fully free/libre version of Android, wrote a guest blog post for the Free Software Foundation announcing that whlie hacking on the Samsung Galaxy, they "discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a back-door that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system." They then replaced the proprietary program with free software.

While it may be a while before we can have a 100% free software microcode/firmware on the the cellular hardware itself, isolating that hardware from the rest of your programming and data is a seemingly important step that we can take right now. At least to the FSF anyhow. What do others think: is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?"
Science

How Tutankhamun's DNA Became a Battleground 89

First time accepted submitter superboj writes "Everyone wants a piece of Egypt's most famous pharaoh, including the media, the Muslim Brotherhood and even the Mormon church. But while scientists have been trying to excavate his DNA and prove who he was — Egypt's turbulent politics have been making progress hard. Will experts be able to make a major discovery? And what happens if they do?"

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