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Comment: Still corrupts places.sqlite (Score 1) 189

by kopo (#35450054) Attached to: Firefox 4 RC1 Released

RC1 still managed to corrupt places.sqlite (the History/Bookmarks database) when I tried to upgrade from Firefox 3.6, just like one of the last 4.0 betas. I had to install a portable edition of FF 3.6, open a backup of my profile with it, and set up Sync in both installations before I could use my existing browser history in the new installation.

Oh, and it now takes about 2 seconds to switch between tabs on a 3-year-old PC.

Comment: Why would you ever use a debit card? (Score 1) 511

by kopo (#31866442) Attached to: What Can Be Done About Security of Debit Cards?

This is something I've never understood. Why on earth would you ever use a debit card when a credit card can be used instead? As long as you keep your account balance at zero, you have nothing to lose by using a credit card. And you gain a few legal protections against fraud; your own money generally isn't exposed.

Do debit cards have any advantages at all?

Comment: Re:Why would it be a shame? (Score 1) 368

by kopo (#30834452) Attached to: NYTimes Confirms It Will Start Charging For Online News In 2011
To be honest, the New York Times' tech and science reporting (and that of most major news organizations) is largely incompetent. They're able to cover the business side well, but the technological aspects are usually described vaguely and inaccurately. For the Slashdot crowd, this means that the NY Times is not a highly relevant source for "news for nerds." (It is, of course, a great news source for many other subjects.)

Comment: Progressive refinement, not progressive JPEGs (Score 1) 91

by kopo (#30121478) Attached to: Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 Demonstrated
The video narration is inaccurate. What you see there is not a progressive JPEG loading (they might be using progressive compression for the JPEG, but it doesn't matter).
What you're seeing is progressive refinement, which is a raytracing rendering technique that starts to show an image immediately and continuously adds detail (rather than rendering the image in full detail immediately). The light and dark splotches you initially see are a typical artifact of low-detail radiosity rendering.
More information here.

Comment: Re:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score 1) 290

by kopo (#28464811) Attached to: The Imminent Demise of SORBS

It wasn't the listing of the shared host that was the problem. It was the fact that the university's filters resolve URLs in message texts to IP addresses, and block messages based on that criterion alone, rather than merely influencing a spam score. If you get a bounced message like this, you can't even report it to an administrator on the university mail network without removing all the URLs.

Block lists are useful, but, as several people in this article's discussion pointed out, they're not accurate or granular enough to be used for deterministic blocking. And this particular usage, resolving link URLs to block messages, is illogical for many more reasons.

Comment: Re:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score 1) 290

by kopo (#28449067) Attached to: The Imminent Demise of SORBS

filter *URL's pointing to a PBL'd IP that are embedded in a message*!!!

My university does that, too. I run a student organization site that has a university subdomain, but is hosted on a shared host. The host inexplicably got listed in the CBL several times, and that screwed up email for the organization staff, and mailing lists for hundreds of students for days at a time.

I didn't realize anyone else used this brilliant filtering scheme.

"...[Linux's] capacity to talk via any medium except smoke signals." (By Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center)

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