Comment: So that is what happened to my batteries... (Score 4, Interesting) 103
Comment: It is not just about skipping ads. (Score 1) 210
- Improved readability wrt fonts and layout.
- Single page view.
- Removal of ads, sidebars, navigation bars, etc.
By far, my favorite feature is the dramatically improved readability. Because I am 50 years old, I find it difficult to read small fonts - and find myself zooming in web pages frequently. Safari Reader helps me overcome these following web design difficulties:
- Hot-shot designers who think using an 8-point, charcoal grey, esoteric font on a paisley background is the epitome of style.
- CSS fails - typically clipping left or right edges of text if the font size is bumped.
- Navigation bar fails - typically obscuring the first lines of text if the navigation bar wraps.
- Gross layout fails - most any MSN site when opened in tabs in Safari.
- Fixed size text frames the size of a business card, forcing me to scroll down to see the second paragraph of text.
- Same as the previous, but without the scroll bar, so I never see the second paragraph of text. [Hey, when rendered at 8-points, it all fits in the box!]
- Pop-over or hover ads that obscure the first 2 paragraphs of text. [I said I wouldn't talk about ads, but this is very different than a banner ad or side-bar ad.]
Comment: I turned down the "opportunity" ... (Score 3, Insightful) 97
Back in 2002 or 2003 I was offered a job with these guys [or possibly a similar firm] to port the software to Mac OS X. Once I was informed that the product I would be working on was to be used to spy on a company's employees, I chose to decline. When I started in my career almost 30 years ago, I vowed to myself that I would pursue it with the utmost integrity. This was way over *my* line.
Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive? 252
from the back-from-the-living-dead dept.
Comment: It cures cancer... (Score 1) 191
Marvell's Moby tablet will be an always-on, high performance multimedia tablet capable of full Flash support and 1080p HD playback and supporting WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, GPS and both Android and Windows Mobile platforms for maximum flexibility.
It cures cancer
Comment: Re:Now I just need to create a bot (Score 1) 311
Comment: Did similar back in MS-DOS 2.11 (Score 4, Interesting) 582
Back in the early 1980s, I was doing development on MS-DOS 2.11 - the first real working version of MS-DOS that resembled Xenix more than CP/M.
I was using a combination of Lattice C and assembly language to do my day job. But I was upset about the libc bloat that Lattice C would drag into the program. Over the Christmas break, I sat down and wrote a tiny version of libc, with the 60% of the calls I actually used. Most of them were either thin wrappers on top of MS-DOS Int21 calls, assembly language implementations (the string functions), or reduced functionality (printf didn't handle strange alignments, floats or doubles), and custom startup/exit code. I also structured the library so that the linker would only link in functions that were actually used. For simple executables, I saw the on-disk file size drop from 10KB-20KB down to 400-600 bytes. Another thing that reduced on-disk file size was to create
I was also writing the handful of unix commands that I couldn't do without (ls, cat, cut, paste, grep, fgrep, etc). Since I was implementing dozens of Unix commands, each statically linked to libc, it was very important to reduce the over-all size of each executable. Most of the smaller trivial commands were less than 1KB in size. I think the largest was 4KB. I also had an emacs clone* that was 36KB when compiled and linked against my tiny lib.
For the longest time, I carried around a bootable MS-DOS 2.11 floppy, with my dozens of Unix commands, an emacs-like editor, Lattice C compiler, tiny libc, and some core MS-DOS programs. It allowed my to have my entire development environment on a floppy that I could stick in anyone's machine and make it usable.
* We had a source license for Mince, orphaned by Mark of the Unicorn, a tiny emacs-clone that ran on CP/M, MS-DOS, and Unix. We had enhanced it significantly.
Comment: Re:-1 Troll and Uninsightful (Score 1) 1197
*Some* people? Try *most* people. Cost is a *huge fucking problem* in the US healthcare system.
Actually most people with employer-provided health insurance are insulated from the true cost of the insurance. Since the employer considers the insurance benefits to be part of the employee compensation, the companies actively avoid discussing the level of that compensation.
What if employers simply increased employee salaries by the cost of insurance premiums and forced the employees to write the check for the premium? Once the employees see just how much health insurance premiums cost and they wrestle with the 15%-40% annual increases; then the populace will finally demand reform.
Comment: Re:that's the place, but... (Score 1) 134
Was it Disk Drive Warehouse? I think that was around there.