I've read that your personal machine uses a Loonson processor. Is there any particular reason you chose this architechture over x86, aside from avoiding the proprietary IP cores?

Well, guess that serves me right for being on the Firefox beta channel. I honestly don't even remember how long I've been using the FF16 beta. TFA didn't mention if beta users are affected, but I'm going to assume that we are.

I live in Taiwan and graduated from HS about 3 years ago. We had computer classes in our 1st year. They taught us how to click-and-drag and write a few lines of BASIC (I've forgotten it all since then). On another note, apparently the guy responsible for our school's infrastructure was an MSCE, so we got to learn about Microsoft Access and SQL during the computer club sessions which I attended.

Just got Cinnamon 1.6 and Nemo from their PPA. I was slightly upset that Cinnamon now puts window bars in the center of the panel instead of to the left, but one thing that really irked me was Nemo. I originally had Nautilus in charge of managing my desktop, but Nemo came along and replaced it, and in the process changed the text color for desktop items from white to a dull gray. As someone who uses a dark background this is simply unacceptable, and after an hour of grepping through possible config files for Nemo and googling (some folks over at Ubuntu Forums are having similar problems), I finally gave up and purged it (good thing Cinnamon 1.6 doesn't depend on it). In short, Nemo is probably an idea worth exploring, but it's not a complete replacement for Nautilus. Every desktop I've used, Windows included, uses white fonts with black borders. Why didn't the devs think of this first?

Aliyun is a concatenation on Ali and yun; the former is self-explanatory, and the latter means cloud in Chinese.

Perhaps by "California" he was referring to Apple.

I recall an old /. comment: "Achievement unlocked: go extinct twice". :)

The only type of floppy I remember handling is in 3.5" (I'm still a young'un), but I still remember a kid's science magazine (not published anymore here in Taiwan) teaching us to insert the 5.25" floppies all the way to the bottom, flip the drive bay latches 90 degrees to lock it in place, and boot from A: using MS-DOS. I still have a 5.25" drive cleaner (where the magnetic material is substituted with some kind of textile and packaged in a standard casing) lying around, though I have no actual disks.

For me, this is just another reason why we ought to be trying to clean up the mess we've made on our home planet instead of placing too much hope on a fallback habitable planet.

...use the TSA's devices for even greater precision on your body measurements. Wait, maybe not...

There's a Noscript equivalent for Chrome/Chromium called NotScripts.

Voted Perl, but why not awk? Sure it's old and clunky, but it should be found on any Unix-like OS...

Ah, I see your point now. I'm hoping to read about the actual patent itself, since it's conspicuously missing from the news. I'll just wait and see. No hard feelings. :)

I always thought that there was a difference between patent trolls and actual innovators; it depends on whether they put any effort into creating stuff. Apple has patents on a few innovations of their own, and patents on really obvious stuff that shouldn't have been granted a patent in the first place. A university (especially a public one like NCKU) is not as profit-driven as corporations (or so I believe). A patent troll exists solely by holding patents on stuff they did not invent themselves. By this metric, then, I believe neither are patent trolls. (Disclaimer: I'm a student at NCKU, which could be skewing my judgment.)

Either they had really short hindsight, or they knew all along. Either way, these guys are asses.