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Comment Freedom of expression (Score 1) 359

Free software sometimes carries limitations: the program might not be as featureful as a proprietary counterpart. The proprietary software might give me more freedom in the sense of getting my actual task done in the best way possible. Maybe it has better toolset to allow expressing myself artistically more freely, or maybe it has better hardware support so I have more freedom to choose among various hardware devices. Have you thought about freedom from this perspective?

Comment Re:Really? (Score 2, Informative) 698

Good UIs should be designed to work with a single mouse button, because that means that they'll also work well with a touchscreen. There's nothing wrong with making some things faster with the right mouse button, which is how most Mac applications work. The right mouse button for the context menu was inherited from NeXTSTEP, where the 'normal' menu was a floating version and you could cause a copy of it to pop up wherever the mouse was with the right mouse button (RISC OS took this further and didn't have any kind of menu bar, using the middle mouse button to produce the menu on demand. Using RISC OS with a touchscreen or pen tablet was... interesting, and it only just counted as discoverable because the machines shipped with a mouse with the buttons labelled).

Comment Re: My Pet Peeves (recent Windows laptop keyboards (Score 1) 698

When I'm reading a document, I'll do two-fingered scrolling on the trackpad to navigate. I only use home/end and page up/down when I'm typing, to navigate within the document, and then I already have both of my hands on the keyboard. The function key can be pressed with the knuckle of the little finger of the left hand, so is pretty easy to hit.

Comment Re:The Microsoft key!!!! I've never used it...ever (Score 1) 698

Windows-R brings up the run dialog, which will autocomplete program names and used to be the fastest way of launching programs on Windows (it's well over 10 years since I last regularly used Windows, so I don't know if this has changed). Windows-D showed the desktop and Windows-F the system find dialog. All of these were pretty useful, but the key was still quite under-utilised.

Comment Re:The Microsoft key!!!! I've never used it...ever (Score 5, Informative) 698

Control and alternate already have well-defined meanings. Control is for entering control characters, alternate is for entering alternate characters. OS X uses both. UNIX keyboards used to come with a meta key, but this fell out of use as software was written for PCs without such a key. On OS X, the usage of the command key is inherited from classic MacOS: It's the modifier that you hold for commands. This means that the OS X terminal is the only graphical terminal that I've come across that doesn't suck for copy and paste. On OS X, every single program including the terminal uses command-C for copy and command-V for paste. The terminal is therefore free to use control-C for sending the character that they terminal recognises for SIGINT. Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac). Most desktop environments for Linux inherited a load of bad UI design from Windows before adding their own mistakes.

Comment Re:memresistor? (Score 1) 172

The difference between persistent and temporary storage is important. Being able to have 128GB of RAM in a laptop that consumes no power when not being read or written would be a huge win (one of the reasons phones have limited RAM is that DRAM draws power all the time) would be very nice.

Submission + - North Korea Tightens Ban On 'Songs Of Resistance' (dailynk.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to root out elements that can lead to potential political instabilities in the country, North Korea is stepping up music censorship and scrapping all cassette tapes and CDs that contain state-banned songs even if homegrown. Kim Jong-Un is believed to have issued such orders out of concern that certain songs could instill people with criticism or resistance against the leadership. The local propaganda departments are going to people's homes to comb through music records. Some women have gotten so angry that they've stormed into the local propaganda offices complaining that they incinerated their goods without even telling them.

Comment Re:Correct link to TRA (Score 1) 119

An alarming number of those hold for Chromium and they all stem from one core issue: Google developers do not understand how to design APIs. A lot of the bundled projects could be entirely separate repositories and shipped as shared libraries if they did, but gratuitous API churn means that they have to keep copies of things like v8 and Skia for Chrome and build the whole thing at once. It's fine to do the aggregate build thing if you want LTO, but it should be a performance optimisation, not a requirement of the software engineering workflow.

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