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Comment Looking at this with a very wrong scale in mind (Score 5, Interesting) 486

A few years there was a great story in Wired about breaking locks. In summary, even the world's most secure locks are not meant to survive more than 10-15 minutes. And it tells the story of a few experts that broke down one of these locks in under a minute. 3 minutes on a car lock? Either the hackers haven't figured out the best way to break in yet or the security is actually amazing. Wired story

Comment No, there wasn't (Score 2) 220

If memory serves me right, in Matrix the energy was generated off bioelectricity and body heat. Here, instead, is a biofuel cell powered by sugar and oxygen. That's like comparing a solar power cell to an internal combustion engine. Now what this invention does replicate is a parasitic organism, or, if the cell actually does something useful, a symbiotic organism.

Comment Re:Could rapid release be the cause of this? (Score 1) 213

Thank you. That's the first comment here to point out the probable source of the problem rather than campaign for Linux. That's exactly what scared me when I heard of FF going crazy with boosting up version numbers. Sure, even before you sometimes had to wait for developers to update their plugins and extensions to work with new versions, but the quicker FF changes things, the harder it gets to keep up. By the time McAfee fixes the bugs, FF will be another few versions ahead, with new issues cropping up.

Comment Re:Let the truth finally come to light (Score 1) 213

I've used two recent Norton products. They take up about 12 MB of RAM and occasionally a couple % of CPU while scanning. Did you mean a 5-year old PC or 25? The only slow down I can attribute to them is that programs take a fraction of a second longer to start since antiviruses usually scan launched executables, but that's hardly noticeable.

Comment They got everything wrong again (Score 1) 330

I've spent years waiting for mobile OS's to approach desktop OS's interface and system features - I really hate seeing a phone with specs good enough to run XP on and a pretty decent resolution but has a GUI that's more reminiscent of a ten-year-old flip phone and apps that look like flash games from around same time. Instead, Microsoft is trying to ruin a desktop OS.

Well, the good news is, it looks like at least the old interface is hiding somewhere below this tile/touch/swipe thing. Considering most laptops and desktops don't have a touchscreen, we can assume all that stuff they demo'ed will be turned off by most people to just use what looks exactly like Win7. At which point people will wonder what's the point of upgrading.

Comment how about same standards? (Score 1) 160

Clearly, they will not calculate in same scenarios or with same or with reasonable use figures. Maybe pageflips matters more, or standby time, or whether wi-fi is on, or some combination of them. Nook also claims it fits "thousands... of songs" in 8 GB (and decimal ones, at that) of space; an average song in my music library is about 9MB (and that's with a lot of old low-bitrate stuff) so that doesn't quite add up either. Pretty sure their amount of books fitting in memory is based on like fifty-page text files.

What we really want to see if a comparison, done under EXACTLY same conditions, by an independent source, run on all the different devices. It can be multiple tests, i.e. separately done pageflips and continuous use and standby and some sort of use scenario. The important part is that the measurements are done in same way for the results to be comparable, and then from there you can estimate which one works better for you. This is a good chance for Wired or CNet or PCMag or gizmodo or any of scores of others to step in - if you trust them to be independent of course.

Comment Re:hmm (Score 1) 570

To continue your thought, the argument can be made that the loudest supporters of the TSA are overly nymphomaniac and likely sexually expressive. So a TSA touched you, it's not like they actually want to have sex with everyone they grope. What are you, a free love hippie, not having physical contact is a crime against humanity?

Comment Re:Grasping at straws! (Score 1) 274

Yeah my first thought was how anyone with slightest knowledge of statistics would laugh at this test. A blank page, a mysterious "news site" (which was probably one of MS sites tailored for IE), and something weird that's not even supported by one of the tested items. That's meaningless. You want a large range of sites, with every kind of content, say webmail, video, large image photo gallery, social networking sites, and so on and so forth. And not just loading a page but have the user move the mouse over stuff, click on pretty buttons and links and menus and so on. Oh, and include plenty of plug-in content like flash and other video/audio/animation, maybe a bit of Java to top it off. This is a hand-picked joke of a test, lamest attempt at marketing I've seen in a while.

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