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Comment Is there a light-weight XFCE distro? (Score 1) 91

Yes, XFCE is a nice light-weight window manager. Is there a light-weight distro that uses it? Ubuntu wants 5-10GB of disk, even for Xubuntu and Lubuntu. TinyCore can do a graphical environment with maybe 100MB, but is a bit too minimalist for me - I want something that can keep security update working with no more work than apt-get/yum/etc. I need a window manager, browser, shell, and maybe a C compiler or so, and I want something under 0.5 GB so I can keep a few spares on a desktop and spin up lots of cloud instances as well.

Comment Re:Can someone please answer (Score 2) 420

I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

Her Tumbler account (Swiked) shows the initial photo asking what color is the dress. A day or so later she posts a second picture of someone wearing the blue/black version, stating:

this is the dress as i saw it on the day of the wedding. blue and black. It's just that one photo bUT it's so weird???!??

Here's the thing, she does not say the second photo is the same dress ON THE DAY of the wedding, only that the photo shows what she saw.

What most likely happened was she took the first picture on a different day and because it's white/gold, it took on the cast of the lighting to give a blue hue and her friends had a disagreement over the color which started the whole thing, especially if someone is red/green colorblind.

Second, if you look at the top edge of the dress in the first picture you can clearly see what would be considered "virgin" light, i.e. light which is not reflected but directly falling on to the dress. If the claim is that our eyes are fooling us because of the bright background or because we can't be sure what the lighting situation is, this light should produce a different color under it, just as light shining across a rippled surface can produce different colors.

Except it doesn't. There is no transition from the slice of light to the shaded portion. It's one continuous tone. In fact, as the picture shows, there are multiple shadows of different angles and lighting conditions which should produce different colors, but they don't. For instance, under the cape/shawl toward the upper right, the area under the shadow is darker but not a different color.

Further, if our eyes are being deceived by the bright background, covering up all but a small portion of the dress should reveal the true colors because then there would be nothing to confuse us. Except that doesn't work either, the dress stays as white/gold with a blue hue.

And finally, if you look at the edging in the middle of the picture then down to the lower left corner (our left), you can see shadows under the gold edging. If the dress in the picture was blue/black you would not see such distinct shadows as are shown in the picture.

So, the dress in the original picture IS NOT the same dress she shows a day or so later but is the same style.

One final thought. The opposite of blue on the color wheel is gold and the opposite of black is white. However, if you look at what is blue and black in the "good" picture, they are not the correct parts. The bodice is blue which means in the reversed portion the bodice of the original picture should be gold and the edging should be white. Except that is not what is shown. The bodice is white and the edging is gold.

And for the record, I am not red/green colorblind. I pass all the Ishihara color tests without issue.

Comment Fragmentation is terrible for hardware owners (Score 1) 136

How many Android phones have you had that didn't require you to either wait for your carrier to provide an update (and they never do), or give up and root the machine to install Cyanogenmod or whatever, or you just bought a new shiny phone to replace it? My HTC Aria is so hopelessly vendor-locked I doubt it's worth putting Cyanogen on it (the OTA upgrade from 2.1 to 2.3 never succeeded.) My newer Samsung did get upgraded to 4.4.2, but my Coby tablet running 4.0.4 isn't the version the manufacturer sells today, so I doubt they'll bother with customer satisfaction.

I haven't been able to Google up a good reference to Android documentation from Google that says how a regular user can upgrade their own Android version, as opposed to "Wait until your vendor ships an upgrade!"

Comment Re:Why Not? (Score 1, Interesting) 320

They borrowed it from Republican Mitt Romney who referenced Republican Newt Gingrich.

Which makes sense when one considers the voodoo Republicans have with trickle down economics (witness the wonderful state Kansas is in) or that swallowing a small camera can somehow lead to being able to perform a gynecological exam.

Comment What can go wrong? Concrete, that's what (Score 1) 421

The easy way to turn things white is to make roads out of concrete instead of asphalt. The catch is that the process used to make cement in most of the world involves heating calcium carbonate enough to bake out a CO2, leaving calcium oxides / hydroxides, so it's a surprisingly large generator of greenhouse gasses, more than making up for any albedo gains. Oops.

Comment Re:Mossad connection is a red herring (Score 1) 113

Israel doesn't have a lot of revenue sources or natural resources, so high-tech products like software are important to them, even more so than growing oranges on Palestinian land. And everybody has to serve in the army, except a few specially exempted groups, so just about everybody with a college education has been in the Army before they got that high-tech job, and a lot of them did computer jobs in the Army as well as marching around with Uzis, because every army these days needs computer technology. That doesn't mean that every high-tech company in Israel, or even every sleazy adware company in Israel, is a front for Mossad.

Homeland Security has two highly obvious reasons to put out urgent guidance to remove crapware - there's a Congressional partisan squabble that's caught their budget in the crossfire, so they want to get positive press mention rather than the negative mention they'd get if they didn't do that, and the NSA's just gotten caught bugging every computer in the world so Homeland Security needs to talk about anybody else they can being dangerous and scary.

Besides, if it really was Mossad, they'd have done a much better job.

Comment Dude, we want a UNICORN pony! (Score 2) 113

Not just any boring vanilla pony - we want a unicorn pony and rainbows and the whole bit!

Lenovo probably will fire somebody, for embarrassing them, but it won't change the number of vendors of crapware out there. Lenovo's certainly not going to take the kind of financial hit that Gemalto did when the public found that the GCHQ had pwned all the SIM cards they sold. Maybe one or two adware companies will lose a non-trivial percentage, but there's a market for sleazy advertising and there's a market for having software companies pay to Add Valuable Features to your hardware.

Comment Hey, it's Inman from the Oatmeal (Score 1) 105

It probably took him a while to draw all the cards (though they're mostly cartoon-level drawings, which is a little easier), and they actually did spend a bit of time play-testing and tinkering with it to get a playable-more-than-once game. But dude, it's a card game about Exploding Kittens, and that's consistent with the humor he's well-known for, so he's not going to freak out his core audience, and they'll presumably attract half the people who've played Cards Against Humanity as well.

And yeah, it presumably took them a lot longer to figure out how to get this produced and printed in volume and fulfilled than to design the game.

Comment I would *hope* he got paid a lot! (Score 1) 448

There are only three good reasons for promoting climate change denialism.

  • - Protecting corporate interests, and
  • - Supporting the political party that protects those corporate interests, and
  • - Annoying people who oppose that political party.

Protecting corporate interests by promoting bad science is something you shouldn't do at all, but if you're going to do it for them, they should be paying you really well. Supporting that particular political party's protection of their corporate sponsors' interests by promoting bad science is something cynical enough you should also only do if they're paying you well for it. (They pay their other marketers well.) Annoying liberals is something you can do for lolz is something you can do for free if that floats your boat.

If you're going to do "scientific research" to disprove climate change, and you don't get some outrageously large "research grant", you're getting ripped off, and you should at least go join a union like the Screen Actors' Guild so you can get paid scale and overtime. (SAG union rules presumably say the studio is supposed to pay for costumes, but if you need to spring for a white lab coat and some glassware and blinkenlights to make a demo tape, that's probably ok, even if they use that in production.)

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