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Comment Re:Great (Score 2) 202

now Google have to support not only a web browser but a Pdf viewer

I don't think that's relevant. Each of Google and Adobe have lots of other software that they have to support. The fact that the PDF viewer sits inside the browser doesn't really affect its maintenance.

both have a long history of being insecure

...unlike Adobe Reader?

I would rather think that Google will either drop the ball on either the browser part or the PDF part in the long term.

Why? They're both important and need to be maintained.

Expect to hear news of security exploits in Chrome based on their PDF viewer.

Expect to hear news of security exploits in all popular software. I'm already sick of hearing about exploits in Acrobat.

I think a move towards multiple viewers will help PDF as a standard, and a move away from Adobe's software in particular will mean less resources used to just open a PDF. Personally, I think the likes of Evince and Sumatra are best for lightness and accuracy.

Comment Re:Now with all those dead features. (Score 1) 42

"TRD" does remind me of turd, but all the other examples are absolutely ridiculous.

WIMP is not a product, and it's the only word you can make out of those letters. It's memorable. I think it's a lot better than PWIM.
It's not Wince, it's Windows CE. Kia is not Kay-eye-ay, it's Kee-ah.
Nestea: interesting. I have never thought of that. Dynasty: not interesting. In fact, the thought of being more reminded of "die nasty" than actual dynasties tells me you need a better education.

Comment Re:I have shit to do (Score 0) 222

Whoops, I moderated you off-topic instead of flamebait, so I'm replying to cancel it.

You can give out about desktop Linux distributions all you want, but to say that your company doesn't use OSS because you'd be dealing with bugs and wasting time is just wrong. OSS is used by (almost?) all of the most successful companies in the world, and that's not just because it saves money.

Comment Re:Lets all point and laugh (Score 1) 120

First paragraph of TFA:

US entrepreneur Elon Musk recently unveiled plans for a train that would travel at speeds of up to 1,200 kilometers an hour. As promising as his design might be, skeptics would argue he's merely continuing a long tradition of revolutionary transit concepts which inevitably end up thwarted by reality.

In other words, the article is drawing attention to the idea that current visions of the future might be just as infeasible as those shown in the article.

Comment Re:Amazing ... (Score 3, Interesting) 212

This is just an opinion, so please don't badger me for evidence. I'm not trying to troll anyone, so do reply if you disagree with me.

It seems to me that Microsoft has no idea why people have been buying their products this whole time. In the last few years, they've been banging on about the "experience" of using Win7/8/Phone, as if the people who buy Microsoft products do so for the unique Microsoft Experience. In other words, that they buy Microsoft products for much the same reason as one might buy an Apple product. I would argue that this hasn't been the case since the excitement of Windows 95. Even XP was only a small step up from 2000 at the time. By and large, people buy their products because a) they believe it to be pretty solid and/or b) it's the standard. If more solid alternatives exist, and the MS product isn't the ad-hoc standard, they don't make a big impact in the market.

Now, you might say that no, they've been talking about the "experience" because that's what all the cool, profitable kids are up to. That may well be the case, but if you watch their adverts, it goes a step further than trying to convince you of a top-quality experience: they tend to allude to "the Windows/Office/MS Bob experience you love", as if it were an existing truth. It's always struck me as curiously arrogant, coming from a company which deliberately strangled the competition to gain its dominant position. What I don't know, however, is whether they've misread the market that badly, or they're trying to get people to believe there already is such a demand for a specifically Microsoft experience, in order to create this demand.

Comment Re:Definitely (Score 4, Interesting) 385

I agree with this. What I'd like to see is equations added in, where helpful, in the same way as small images in a body of text. Then you could put a caption below, just to say something informal but informative about the equation. I think that way it would be easy for people to decide whether they want to read it. Some people aren't going to want to, so it's important that it's not something you have to read through in the article itself.

Comment Re:Full disclosure where due (Score 3, Interesting) 161

This question is such nonsense. Who's keeping it a secret? There's an [edit] link above every section of every article. A tagline isn't a full description of an object.

Also, the fact that people track changes on articles, with lots of people tracking popular and worthwhile pages, means that the quality is high on most pages that matter. They're also locked when necessary. It is very easy to tell roughly how reliable a given page is, and starred pages are always good. If I only heard a description of Wikipedia, I would guess that it's open to serious abuse and misinformation, but in fact, the system works.

Comment Re:wayland (Score 1) 259

You are the one who is complaining about lost features, but hasn't given an example. The main example being repeated is network transparency, but I honestly can't work out why I should care. What other differences convince you of X's superiority?

Here's a challenge: tell me what is missing, and why it's bad. I am a fair man, and if your reasons are good you'll win me over. But this:

The problem is that what you need isn't necessarily what other people need. There are people who don't use the mouse, would you be happy if Wayland skipped implementation of mouse support?

is total nonsense. If you cover all the usage cases of the old system, why are you replacing it? Some features are more important than others, and it is perfectly sensible to talk about "the average user", since the features needed by different people overlap, with some features needed by very few people (e.g. network transparency), and others by almost all (e.g. mouse support).

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