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Comment Re:Way too confusing (Score 1) 1264

It still is Ubuntu. The benefits of Mint over Ubuntu are more or less cosmetic. Ubuntu's benefits over Debian are a little more substantial than that. But *ubuntu, Mint, Debian are in many ways the same distro. The fact that there are 5-odd distros to choose from is not a problem IMO. It's choice and choice is good. It's only the remaining 95 that can be confusing when taken into consideration.

Sorry, my point should have read "Power users WHO are happy with Windows/Macs ..."; IOW, people who are comfortable with an OS recommend that OS to others. Then there's also fanboism :S

Comment Beat Graphene to Market? (Score 5, Interesting) 67

So, Silicene has just been observed for the first time under a scanning tunnel microscope, has had its properties only theoretically proposed, and is hoped to be "as miraculous as Graphene". Nevertheless, the author of the article already believes that it will beat Graphene to the market? Sheesh! Are all headlines nowadays conjured up by a dedicated company full of marketing types?

Comment Re:Way too confusing (Score 4, Interesting) 1264

I don't know why people are even considering the 95 out of 100 distros that can simply be written off for any number of reasons. There are only a handful of players of worth when it comes to a reliable, user-friendly desktop for average use. These are in no particular order:

-Ubuntu
-Kubuntu
-Mint
-Fedora
-Debian
-SuSE
-Arch

The above list can be trimmed down even further if you merge all the Debian derivatives. Everything else > /dev/null.

If I consider average users to be Mom and Pop types who are basically simply after a browser, spreadsheet and Picasa, I always install Kubuntu. The only hardware issues I face nowadays tend to be related to the webcam and printer. Those are usually solved pretty quickly.

IMO, the reasons why Desktop Linux has not yet taken off are:

-Bundling
-Power users are happy with Windows/Macs and its the power users who advise the average users.
-Work culture; people stick to known poisons.

Comment Turn on the CU? (Score 3, Interesting) 228

"In a process called ‘reflashing,’ the Mercedes system can turn on the car operating system (CU), download the new application, then cut itself off."

So the car is regularly polling a server and can switch itself on? That sounds decidedly unsettling.

Could somebody elaborate on the diagnostic capabilities of these cars? Do they alert you if your brakes are inefficient or if your tyres are wearing out? I'm too poor to afford one to know :(

Cheers.

Comment Re:This is what is needed (Score 1) 410

I believe that the preferences page is/was buggy as I used to have the same issue until I visiting it again and re-saved.

You can also access the same preferences page by clicking on the "gear" icon above the comment subject field. However, saving any changes will force a page refreshing and consequently result in a loss of any data in the comment textarea. Very friendly.

Comment You guys don't get it. (Score 1) 410

What we always want is fresh, interesting news coupled with better editing. You might be incorporating new features, but you're falling behind on these core requirements. I don't know whether I switched off some button somewhere. But I'm happy that I'm seeing far fewer book reviews (and I use the word review quite wrongly) nowadays.

Google

Google 'Account Activity' Jumps Into Personal Analytics 64

An anonymous reader tips news of a new feature announced by Google today: Account Activity. Writing on their official blog, Google's Andreas Tuerk said, "If you sign up, each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services. For example, my most recent Account Activity report told me that I sent 5 percent more email than the previous month and received 3 percent more. An Italian hotel was my top Gmail contact for the month. I conducted 12 percent more Google searches than in the previous month, and my top queries reflected the vacation I was planning: [rome] and [hotel]." You may remember from earlier this month that Stephen Wolfram began showing some of the extensive personal analytics data he has collected over the past 20 years.
Government

Counterterrorism Agents Were Told They Could Suspend the Law 369

politkal writes "According to the FBI's internal inquiry on counterterrorism training, the FBI taught agents that the Bureau 'has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedoms of others;' that agents should 'never attempt to shake hands with an Asian;' that Arabs were 'prone to outbursts' of a 'Jekyll & Hyde' nature." Even better: "That review, now complete, did not result in a single disciplinary action for any instructor. Nor did it mandate the retraining of any FBI agent exposed to what the Bureau concedes was inappropriate material. Nor did it look at any intelligence reports that might have been influenced by the training."

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