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Comment And yet people use webmail (Score 3, Insightful) 217

Why would *anyone* involved in something as sensitive as WikiLeaks trust a webmail provider of any kind, or any third-party email storage? Run your own mail server, download your mails immediately, and store all emails locally on an encrypted drive. That won't protect new emails in transit (that's what GPG is for), but it'll protect existing emails. I can understand people using webmail when they don't really care. But in this case, it seems ridiculous.

Comment Re:Firefox will be dead by mid-2012. (Score 3, Insightful) 247

Of the competitors, only Chrome is open. And while it seems like a fine browser, and I keep it around to check web-page rendering in WebKit, I can't stand it for normal usage for a pile of reasons:
  • The upstream packaging tries to install a new sources.list entry and cron-update itself. *Bad* software, don't mess with my package management, no biscuit. Fortunately Chromium doesn't do anything that crazy.
  • Chrome desperately wants to pretend that all monitors have 96 DPI, so I have to lie to it and say I want much bigger fonts than I do, just to get something readable. This also means that sites can't use CSS lengths like "8.5in" and get something actually 8.5 inches wide on my screen.
  • Chrome ignores all of my system font configuration that says how to render fonts, producing blurry fonts so bad they literally make my eyes water. (It does Mac-style blurry anti-aliasing, whereas the rest of my system does anti-aliasing that produces crisp lines.)
  • Chrome downloads and shows ads on the "new tab" page by default.
  • Chrome zooms images and text together, with no option to just make text bigger and leave images un-blurry.

Comment Re:Resolved? (Score 1) 134

A third party *has* mediated, and made it clear that if the two parties don't come up with a solution then the issue will go to trial, and nobody wants that.

Personally, I don't find it at all clear why Google owes a single penny for scanning books and making them searchable, *without* allowing non-public-domain books to be seen in their entirety. They might wish to make some kind of deal to allow more access to non-public-domain books, but that has nothing to do with fair use of existing books, and if snippets and search don't count as fair use then I don't know what does.

Comment Re:I don't see the problem (Score 1) 184

Still not the same thing; that just gives you the overall diff between RH kernel versions or between the RH kernel and upstream. Other Linux distributions provide full split-out patches and/or git trees of every individual patch they've applied to their kernel, to which many individual changes occur between package revisions.

Comment Re:I don't see the problem (Score 1) 184

It doesn't matter at all for CentOS. It matters for other Linux distributions that want to collaborate with Red Hat and with upstream. Digging a fix out of the Red Hat kernel becomes a lot harder with only a monolithic patch. And without fine-grained patches, any kind of conflict between the megapatch and other kernel patches becomes incredibly difficult to troubleshoot.

Intel

Submission + - Intel announces a BIOS Implementation Test Suite (lwn.net)

Josh Triplett writes: Intel announced the release of a BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), a bootable pre-OS environment based on GNU GRUB2 that tests how well (or how badly) your BIOS has configured your platform hardware. BITS also includes Intel's official power management reference code, so you can override your BIOS's initialization with a known-good configuration. "In addition to those changes to GRUB2 itself, BITS includes configuration files which build a menu exposing the various BITS functionality, including the test suites, hardware configuration, and exploratory tools. These scripts detect your system's CPU, and provide menu entries for all the available functionality on your hardware platform. You can also access all of the new commands we've added directly via the command line."

Comment Re:H.264 (Score 1) 399

Back in the days when browsers were starting to embed images, were gif and jpeg royalty free? Or did we just live in a simpler time before patent trolls.

GIF required royalties to write, but not to read. Hence the existence of libungif: "a specially modified version of giflib which is free of the Unisys LZW patent. It can read all GIFs, but only write uncompressed GIFs."

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