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Comment Re:. . . The end of Google . . . (Score 2, Insightful) 294

And the beginning of the next search giant.

Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?

You mean that of a "good search engine?"

Google used to be the good search engine. They've already abandoned it. Do a search for a monetize-able term like "insurance." You'll get 7 ads before you get a single search result. Google is an ad engine, not a search engine.

I switched my Chrome bar to duckduckgo a few months ago... I don't have anything against Google. They make a great browser, awesome web mail, and cars that drive themselves. But their search engine is no longer of quality... this isn't even a "final nail", just yet another symptom.

Comment Dockable! Dockable! Dockable! (Score 1) 399

I develop on a Dell laptop now and I run windows on it. I run Ubuntu 12 LTS in a virtualbox rather than as the main OS because I really like hot-dock capability, and it has never worked right in Linux. With Windows (7) I can hit that button and go to a meeting, snap it back in and have my dual-big-screen developer workstation. Devs aren't going to work on a single screen, so why bother with a high-res one?

The screen is so you can take notes, and check a server or DB from a meeting when you're away from your desk. The dock and the 2 roomy monitors that accompany it are for the real task of development.

If they can't support smooth docking and undocking (hopefully better than Win7--I would love for it to put my window positions back where they were last time I was docked) then this product will be a flop with me. Am I the only dev who thinks in terms of docking?

Comment Re:ALL IS GOOD !! (Score 4, Insightful) 270

Why are we signing petitions? It's primary election season. Let's make an example of one of the congressmen-for-hire.

the Tea Party came to power when Scott Brown defeated an incumbent in a primary contest. Let's get an incumbent SOPA supporter out of office because he supported SOPA.

Primary congressional elections are where the real electoral power is... and we have a tendency to ignore them. I believe that nothing less than a primary loss from a SOPA or PIPA supporter would get their attention.

The problem is they get $50,000 for their campaign fund for supporting it. The solution, obviously, is to make it cost them more than $50,000 worth of publicity for supporting it.

Lamar Smith, who introduced SOPA, is currently running uncontested for the Republican Primary in his district.

Comment Lamar Smith still needs to lose his job over this. (Score 5, Informative) 495

This is good. The next step is to keep Lamar Smith from getting re-elected. Right now he's running unopposed for the republican nomination in a district that includes parts of Austin, a very techie town. With the right amount of national support for "Anybody but Lamar Smith" he can and should lose his seat over this.

Comment Re:Firefox - Too little, too late (Score 1, Flamebait) 330

Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.

Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.

That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...

  • Firefox - dev browser. Loads my in-progress web apps, plugged into all the debugging tools I use.
  • Chrome - documentation browser. I load docs related to dev in chrome, and also gmail if I'm on a network where google apps aren't hanging
  • Opera - casual / non-work-related browser. Opera is kind of a sucky browser compared to other options. By using it for non-work-related activity, I can ensure that I don't enjoy screwing around all day.

There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.

And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.

That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.

Comment not Ballmer, the whole company. (Score 1) 410

The name of the company is Microsoft. Microcomputer Software. The old way of looking at computing is desktop computers. It worked very well for them when desktop computers worked, because that was the company. The new (and most likely, long-term future) way of looking at computing is the Internet. Microsoft never really got the Internet. IE only became significant years late, and only because of the desktop OS monopoly. Bing probably won't.

Comment Re:Slavery (Score 2) 403

I'm guessing what GP intended to say is 400,000 is the population Foxconn employs in Shenzen... that is, 10 out of 400k Foxconn employees have committed suicide in the past year, vs 45 out of 400,000 Americans.

There are other factors, like age, that come into play here, but if the facts are fairly even, this is a non-story. I've worked at an American company with 3,000 employees, and one of them committed suicide in 4 years I worked there... If I'm doing the math right, that is the equivalent of 33 suicides per 400,000 employees per year. Napkin-math says it's a non-story.

Comment Re:That is why we have stupid political parties. (Score 2) 143

However political parties leader will not waver too far off their ideology core as the group in the hole still follows that ideology.

Occams razor says "divide and conqueror" makes more sense to explain why we have two political parties.

I disagree... you're assigning malicious intent to some unnamed entity and judging its motives. I think a much simpler explanation is the two-party system is simply emergent behavior from the U.S.'s winner-take-all system of electing representativess. In governments where the leaders are selected differently, you have different results.

Comment Re:Not just Republicans (Score 2) 369

There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.

Which is why it won't happen. The one thing democrats and republicans will work together on is to stop anything that would enable the rise of a third (or more) party. They will use every legal trick, and probably more than few illegal ones, to stop this.

The only way this is going to change is for the american voters to wake up and start voting in mass for third party and independent candidates, especially the ones with little campaign funding. That campaign funding comes with some serious strings attached...

I hate to say it, but this is why it's never going to change. As the advertising industry has known for years, and as Coca-Cola bases its business model on, changing the minds of the masses is simply a matter of spending enough money.

As long as people consume entertainment that they don't pay for (such as television, radio, and most websites for that matter) people are going to consume advertising, opening a portion of their minds to the highest bidder. As long as people freely offer their minds to the highest bidder in exchange for a sitcom, phony partisan "news" report or video of a cat falling off a TV, the ones with the most money (read: the establishment) is going to have the most influence the masses.

The only thing that might change that is if people start starving or otherwise feeling primal physical discomfort as a result of the establishment / status quo keeping on doing what they're doing. That's a possibility, but not one that I hope for.

Comment Weapon? (Score 1) 253

There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.

Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities ... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)

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