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Comment Re:External Forces = Pressure (Score 2, Informative) 383

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or trolling, but I'll bite:

I've been sitting my ass on mobiles for 10 years. That's all my phones except my first brick of a Sony, that couldn't fit in my backpocket.

Out of all the perverted treatment I subjected my phones to, the only one that got hurt was an Ericsson T28: its screen got cracked when I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. That's my full weight landing on a thin glass+electronics+thin metal/plastic shell, and the phone was still working but the LCD was barely readable.

Compare that to 2 out of 6 iPhone owners I know -- they got their screens cracked: one vibrated itself off a table, and the other one got dropped on concrete. I know I've dropped my phones many-a-times from varying heights, and none got hurt. Probably because other manufacturers build their devices for real-world use, and test them as such: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zES6byXbOaE -- jump to about 6:00 and witness the bending test, aka ass-sitting-on-cellphone-test.

Does Apple test the iThingies like that? Do they bake them to unbearable temperatures? Probably not, because this looks like a design flaw easily uncovered with a bit of prodding/bending/overheating.

Microsoft

Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One 964

wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.
The Internet

Domain Tasting "Officially Dead" Thanks To Cancellation Policy 102

Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."

Comment Re:Fit PCs (Score 1) 121

You're right, it won't under linux.

Actually the GP is rather wrong in saying it will run linux. If you want to use your GMA500, you're stuck with a specific kernel version, a specific mesa, and a specific x.org, with no upgrade path for now.

The Z series Atoms are nice, the chipsets paired with it are very low power, the PowerVR graphics kicks ass, and that tiny box is really sweet. But if you want linux, you have to stay away from Poulsbo.

Comment Re:And spam filters suck against it (Score 1) 102

At some point I started getting russian spam. Useless since I can't read it, but still annoying since Gmail didn't recognize it as spam. So I came up with this filter:
Matches: from:(.ru)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

It works for most of it, and the few that didn't come from .ru addresses I'd flag manually as spam. But I haven't seen one pass through in quite a while, so I guess Gmail got better at russian.

And some unrelated anecdotal food for thought: I started getting german spam one week after ordering from amazon.de.

Comment Re:He fails to see.... (Score 3, Insightful) 132

Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

I run Debian testing. It's very much a rolling release, and you're somewhat protected against obvious bugs by the nice policy. Of course, you can get more rolling than that and go full unstable. And throw in some experimental if you're feeling brave.

The nice thing is you can mix-and-match. Most of my packages are testing, some are unstable, and right now i have a touch of experimental. With some APT pinning, you get a rolling release where you can decide per-package how bleeding edge you want to be.

This is my laptop/desktop. For servers I mostly stick to stable, and if i really need a newer package I can pin it from testing, or look for it on backports.org.

The Internet

Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad 572

Reservoir Hill writes "The NY Times has an article investigating why, unlike the articles on Wikipedia which in theory are improved, fact checked, footnoted, and generally enhanced over time, the photos that go with Wikipedia articles are so bad and in many cases there is no photo at all for even well known public figures. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto on Wikipedia because Wikipedia runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited. 'Representatives or publicists will contact us' horrified at the photographs on the site, says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. 'They will say: "I have this image. I want you to use this image." But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.' Recent photographs on Wikipedia are almost exclusively the work of amateurs who don't mind giving away their work. 'Amateur may be too kind a word; their photos tend to be the work of fans who happen to have a camera,' opines the Times's author. Ultimately the issue for professional photographers who might want to donate their work is copyright. 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"

Comment Re:Expect to see much more of this in the future.. (Score 3, Insightful) 250

Whoever modded the parent as troll is a moron. Offtopic maybe, but not troll. Go ahead and mod me down too.

The parent is right. I've had my paranoid period and tried NoScript; the web was so damn broken, and clicking to allow JS over and over again turned so tiresome that I turned to everything whitelisted by default, and finally uninstalled NoScript after the AdBlock fiasco.

About how bad of a language JavaScript is or isn't: I personally like it, though I'd prefer Lua, or say, Python; but JS is here to stay and it serves its purpose. Except that purpose isn't replacing HTML, or turning HTTP into something it was never meant to be. Back when I was coding JS, we were doing it to improve the user experience, not replace it altogether. Nowadays "web developers" use [insert random JS framework] for everything, but the problem is so, so many use it in braindead ways. You middle click on a thumbnail expecting to open the image in a new tab, but you just get the same page with a nice # added at the end. And then there's the idiots doing <a href="javascript:">, and the utter idiots with an attitude that do onclick="submit_something_via_post" and figure out they know better how the web is supposed to work... These are usually the same idiots that will do broken browser detection based on the User-Agent string, and usually fail miserably if your browser sends along "Gecko", but not "Firefox". Say, something like "Iceweasel". For a nice example of how far this stupidity goes, try browsing VIA's site.

You want to use XHR when clicking on a link? Or submitting a form? That's all fine and dandy, but don't break the web. It's becoming more and more like flash, with the sole difference you can view-source.

If you're building Google Docs or Meebo, all hail JavaScript. But for mostly everything else, lack of graceful degradation with JS disabled is pure idiocy. Not just because there's paranoid people browsing with JS disabled, but because there's blind people using the web, and people with antiquated handhelds, or simply stuck in a console trying to fix nvidia's latest fuck-up. Of course, it would take building the site / web app properly from the bottom up: HTML, server interaction, CSS, JavaScript. But the "developers" these day start with YUI or Dojo: some shiny animation is the end purpose in on itself, not an improvement to conveying information.

By the way: did you try GMail with JS disabled? It works. It probably works in lynx too, since it works in elinks just fine. That's the way JS is supposed to be used.

</rant>

Enlightenment

Submission + - OLED Breakthrough Yields 75% More Efficient Lights (inhabitat.com) 2

Mike writes: "Researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently announced a breakthrough in OLED technology that reduces the ultra-thin lights' energy consumption by 75%. The discovery hinges upon a new method of creating "surface plasmon enhanced" organic light emitting diodes that boast 1.75 times increased emission rates and double the light intensity. With OLED's popping up everywhere from keyboards to cell phones, tv screens, and lamps, the development marks an exciting step towards an entire spectrum of more energy efficient electronics."
Government

Submission + - Clinton answers calls for Firefox in State Dept (clinton09-state-firefox.tk) 2

rs79 writes: "At the 26:33 mark of a State Department question and answer session Hillary Clinton answers calls from an employee requesting to use the Firefox web browser. Hilarity ensues. Citing costs, to which the audience cheers "it's free", an explanation is given by a state dept staffer about the cost of free software followed by an appeal by Ms. Clinton to let the government know whenever something is done in a very cost ineffective manner at the 29:10 mark."
Movies

Submission + - LoTR lawsuit threatens Hobbit production (bloomberg.com)

eyrieowl writes: J.R.R.'s heirs are suing for royalties on the LoTR films. Apparently they haven't gotten any money due to some creative accounting. Peter Jackson ought to understand...he had to sue the studio for much the same reason.

As for The Hobbit? FTFA: "Tolkien's family and a British charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, seek more than $220 million in compensation...[and]...the option to terminate further rights to the author's work".

As much as people want to see The Hobbit, I hope the Tolkien's get everything they are owed and more.

Comment Re:Does it ... (Score 1) 205

Interesting, I forgot Pandora was supposed to use it as well. Good luck to them, but reverse engineering 3D features in GPUs is damn difficult as nouveau shows. There's also the beagleboard, which IIRC has a blob available only for 2.6.27, but these devices obviously don't give enough incentive to PowerVR to keep developing their linux drivers.

Too bad it's so damn difficult having open-source GPU drivers. Kudos to Intel and ATI, but Intel's hardware is not there yet, and ATI sold their low-power/embedded designs to Qualcomm. Maybe they'll be nice about it when their Snapdragon devices come out.

Portables

Submission + - Middle East phone company pushes snoop on RIM (theregister.co.uk)

Anonymous Coward writes: "The register reports that Etisalat, the UAE phone company has pushed snoop software on blackberries using a remote update. More at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/15/etisalat_blackberry_snooping/ and a must read on blackberrycool.com where users have decompiled the .jar file in question and are analysing the code. Any /.ers want to take a crack at it? http://www.blackberrycool.com/2009/07/uae-spying-on-citizens-through-an-etisalat-blackberry-update/ [...] I put up the original JAD/JAR/COD File along with the unpacked classes and decoded ones in one zip file at http://iihs.net/registration.zip and attached it here for those interested in having a look. There are interesting references in the software to alternate APN, as well as some BB PINs to relay certain messages through. The whole thing seems VERY fishy. [...]"

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