I think Foxit is proprietary, but it's really, really fast; display speed between Foxit PDF Reader and Adobe Reader isn't even a contest. Last I checked it leaves Ghostscript in the dust too. I haven't used anything but Foxit for Windows PDF reading for a while now. Now, Poppler (which uses Cairo) is a different story: those libraries are pretty fast. Chromium might be able to do something interesting with a Poppler-based reader instead of Foxit.

"Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords." Yeah, it's called Gmail. At least the article summary was closer to reality than usual. Since we're on the subject: has anyone else been getting the suspicion that article summaries from other Slashdot editors lately are really kdawson also?

Is it a bad sign for my sanity that, when I read this in the RSS feed as "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become I..." my first thought was "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become Iowa"?

FSF should rename it "GIOL Is Often Linux" so we don't need the slash between the parts anymore. (OK, that sounds trollish, but it's barely dawn on a weekend, so it's as good as I get right now.)

They already did that: after changing from QuantumLink then making several years of "improvements" to AOL they ran out of gold they could turn into lead, and had to hop aboard the dot-com strategy of throwing up blindingly huge amounts of cash to get anyone to consider associating with them.

Of course real BBC World News America doesn't have any results for "malamanteau" at all. Not only is that alleged "BBC America News" at bbcnewsamerica.com fake, but its alleged postal address is "DHA Lahore" (that's military barracks) with no further detail.

I wonder how long people here were scratching their head for a response before one said "I guess I'll bite."

Not in that order.

Maybe it's not the kind of "whoosh" you think it is. Maybe he's just likes that sort of nasty.

Because, even with the overhead of the HTML, it isn't worth the server and bandwidth hit to send 22 pictures to people who might not care after the first 2 or 3, especially if the site is getting Slashdotted.

Well, that's a fair assessment. Of course, that's a monopoly tactic — any business that dropped support for that widespread of a product in a legitimate competitive environment would find themselves with no customers for the newer product because customers would be trying to migrate out from under that vendor at all costs.

I don't know what "pretty much end-of-life Windows XP" you speak of. I'm replying to this from Windows XP Media Center Edition. 10-20% of the computers on display at Best Buy last week were netbooks and nettops with Windows XP. Most HP workstations have "Windows XP Professional 32-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 32-bit)" and "Windows XP Professional 64-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit)" as options as of today; until this week (last week of December 2009), if I remember, they didn't have any operating system options except "Vista® Business 32-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 32-bit custom installed" and "Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 64-bit custom installed". Why? Because people who buy computers for a business environment will not buy Vista, at any price, for real production work — fair or not. I have clients who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows XP. Despite Microsoft again attempting to remove the previous OS from the supply chain by force despite overwhelming demand, just like they have before, XP is still being sold new on a very large portion of computers.

Ha! Sprint? Wait until you see what their proprietary firmware does to your phone. Verizon is probably worse now, but only because they took Sprint's castrated firmware strategy and ran with it. Most Verizon and Sprint customers don't even know what their phone's real software looks like. AT&T is probably jealous they haven't been able to keep up, but I'm sure they're working on it.

I seem to remember that IE 8 does something like this when it's first installed, asking if you want any IE extensions enabled at all, and whether you want IE extensions blocked until you approve them, or something of that nature. But suffice to say that I don't install IE often enough to remember for sure.