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Comment Re:OtherOS (Score 1) 534

Yep. Add to it the fact that the update that kills otheros is only required if you want to keep using "your" ps3 (how is it yours if it obeys another party not you and it's arguably illegal to change this?) for games and sony online content. That is, if you value OtherOS (like I do), you pretty much already dedicated the box to doing only linux. Combine the various hacks that will allow you to escape OtherOS with this fact and the net result is that you can either stay in the now-unsupported sandbox with its six SPUs or else you can hack "your" ps3 to get the full seven SPUs (and perhaps play games again). I only see win here.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - The New Humble Indie Bundle (humblebundle.com)

Trelane writes: The Humble Indie Bundle is back, and with all new games and still no DRM! Like its predecessor, which earned over a million dollars and therefore had its constituent games open sourced, the new Humble Indie Bundle supports Linux, Mac, and Windows. This bundle contains Braid (yes, Braid for Linux!), Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos, and Revenge of the Titans. Also as before, the customers specify the price as well as how the money is divided up, with the charities this time being the EFF and Child's Play Charity. As before, the donation share and average donations are being tracked, and the current totals are Linux and Mac at roughly a sixth each (averages of $14.02 and $7.84, respectively) and Windows at about two thirds, with an average contribution of $5.66. There's some coverage over at LWN and Ars Technica.
The Internet

Submission + - McDonald's hacked and customer data stolen

An anonymous reader writes: McDonald's servers were recently compromised and hackers were able to get access to customers' e-mail addresses, names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, genders, as well as certain information about their promotional preferences and Web information interests. The sites affected were: McDonalds.com, 365Black.com, McDonalds.ca, mcdonaldsmom.com, mcdlive.com, monopoly.com, playatmcd.com, and meencanta.com. The restaurant chain is warning customers to be cautious of anyone claiming to be from McDonald's contacting them by phone or e-mail, and asking for personal or financial information. McDonald's has also set up a FAQ page for affected customers with 13 questions and their corresponding answers.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Patches Record 40 Vulnerabilities (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: Today Microsoft released 17 security bulletins which address 40 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, SharePoint Server and Exchange. This brings the total count for 2010 to 106 bulletins. Of note, only two of the bulletins are rated Critical, 14 are rated Important and one is Moderate. In addition to the bulletins released today, Microsoft is announcing plans to extend the Office File Validation feature currently available in Office 2010, to Office 2007 and 2003. This will help protect those using older versions of Microsoft Office from file parsing vulnerabilities.

Comment TFA vs TFS (Score 4, Informative) 54

Summary:

One of the things Microsoft has done well for many years now (since they got called on the carpet about Windows 95) is providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind. Their current push is for a set of APIs called User Automation.

Article:

For the [non-minor visual, physical, and audio as well as any other] disabilities, access is via an assistive technology (AT) that mediates the user experience. This is where our the accessibility challenges lie. The challenges stem from the fact that Microsoft Windows doesn't provide a real accessibility infrastructure - as compared to UNIX systems with GNOME, the Java platform, or Macintosh OS X. In Windows, virtually all of the information needed by assistive technologies has to be obtained by patching the operating system, replacing/chaining video drivers, reverse engineering applications, and/or using proprietary COM interfaces to get at the data within an application. The first accessibility API Microsoft put forth for accessibility - Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) - fails to provide most of the information needed for screen reading and other AT uses, and is being supplanted in future Windows releases. What this means is that for an application to be accessible in Microsoft Windows via a particular assistive technology, that AT vendor has to have made a significant investment in customizing their product to that application. The greater the customization investment, the "more accessible" an application is deemed to be, at least via that particular AT. For example, the Windows screen reader with the largest market share, JAWS, has made a huge investment in customization of their product to Microsoft Office (and in contrast made a much smaller investment in customization for WordPerfect). For this reason blind folks generally feel that Microsoft Office is "accessible" (and that WordPerfect "isn't as accessible") - not because of work done by Microsoft or Corel, but work done (or not done) by Freedom Scientific, the creator of JAWS.

Quoth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_UI_Automation

In 2005, Microsoft released UIA as a successor to the older Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) framework.

Seems to be a decade missing there.

Comment Re:You can't fix stupid (Score 1) 968

Personally, I like to map the right Menu key to Compose. Compose+- L -> £; Compose+' e -> é; Compose+^ a -> â, etc. There's even Compose+m u -> ! Oh, and the quite important Compose+= c -> It's what helps me write little snippets of German and things when I'm in the US without going whole hog and using a German keyboard layout.

Comment Original blog posts (Score 1) 360

Too bad TFA didn't link to the original blog post (http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/09/09/js-benchmarks-closing-in/) nor the update (http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/16/reporting-a-bug-on-a-fragile-analysis/) (in which a bug is allegedly filed, though nobody else can apparently see it).

Comment Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score 2, Insightful) 317

The non-MSFT-beholden vendors (e.g. System76 and ZaReason) still have Linux netbooks, notebooks, desktops, and workstations. Oddly, given economies of scale, in much, much wider variety than the big, MSFT-beholden vendors. I dunno about you, but I've taken my money to the Linux-supporting little guys (who have better service anyway).

Comment Re:It's not the energy (Score 1) 287

(and, to be sure, that isn't the entire picture; proteins are ginormous and extremely complicated, so "ionizing radiation" is too much of a simplification. To be generous, you could say that we could go up to 100nm, which still leaves us 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the wifi wavelength. heating may do damage, just like any other heating, but you're gonna have to work harder to do the damage, and see the corneas comment above for additional details).

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