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Comment WiGLE EULA (Score 1) 113

You are right, of course, it merely follows people, it says nothing of signal paths, and can't distinguish no-signal areas from un-visited areas.

If trilateration signal in a given area is marginal, the data collection should mark the area as marginal. If marginal area surrounds unvisited area, one can be fairly confident that the border is between a visited area and a no-signal area.

For wifi mapping, this is redundant

Not if Mozilla plans to make the data available to the public under terms more permissive than the WiGLE EULA. It could be an example of what Google's Greg Stein called "license pressure".

Comment A PC is rebooted monthly and suspended more often (Score 1) 246

The summary says it is an issue in the first 15-60 minutes after startup. Servers are generally up for longer periods of time

If by "uptime" you mean wall time between reboots, I don't see how it differs. A desktop PC is rebooted monthly to install updates, and it is put to sleep (suspend) after hours. A server is the same; it just doesn't sleep unless it's used only during business hours.

Comment CORRECTION (Score 1) 246

Thank you Anonymous Coward for the correction:

one and a half years

Touché. But that's still 18 months of the server being able to do its job of serving instead of sitting and looking for updates, 18 months of one fewer annoyance that might push IT into "screw it, I'm switching to Linux" territory.

Comment Exponential algorithm (Score 5, Informative) 246

I seem to remember reading that the time used by the previous update conflict resolution algorithm scales exponentially with the number of updates issued for a particular platform. Until recently, the number of updates wasn't big enough to cause a problem, but after 12 years of updates, this has changed.

Comment Windows Server 2003 supported until mid-2015 (Score 5, Interesting) 246

Suppose if they didn't get it over the holiday and it wasn't done by April 8th, they could have perhaps saved themselves all the bother and turned off all update checks

Windows Server 2003 is supported longer than Windows XP despite using the same update mechanism and nearly the same kernel. Extended support for Windows Server 2003 ends on 7/14/2015, and this problem will only get worse for servers over the last two and a half years of extended support. So there's a benefit for making a fix for Windows Server 2003. And if the same fix applies to Windows XP, it doesn't cost Microsoft that much to release the fix for both, and the gesture of goodwill could help deter companies from switching to GNU/Linux or OS X instead of buying Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell.

Comment Encoded videos vs. encoders (Score 1) 247

As I understand that press release, MPEG-LA has committed to refrain from charging a royalty for making already encoded videos available to the public without charge. It didn't mention anything about royalties for obtaining lawfully made encoder software in the first place, such as the encoder needed to thumbnail a 1080p video down to 720p, 480p, 360p, and 240p.

Comment Data overages and malware (Score 1) 731

How does a 10 second ad for a Chevy ruin your life?

By incurring data overages. Web page: 0.1 MB. Web page with video advertisement: 1 MB or much more. This tends to add up when a satellite or cellular ISP gives each subscriber only 5000 MB per month. And as others have mentioned, malware authors like to install their crap through Flash Player vulnerabilities.

Comment Travel requirements; transitivity of trust (Score 1) 731

So how would a small-time publisher (such as an individual with a blog) who doesn't fly much get his key signed by someone who lives out of his home town? That's the problem I've always had with the concept of a web of trust: while each city can become strongly connected, the few people who travel often act as bottlenecks in the trust graph. In addition, I have some doubts about the transitivity of trust. Just because you verify someone's identity doesn't necessarily mean you trust him or her to verify other people's identity.

Comment CNAME under the publisher's domain (Score 1) 731

thing is, the advertisers will never do that - simply because their business model relies on tracking impressions and so forth. Hence they have to serve the ads on their own web platforms.

Then each publisher (operator of a web site that includes ads) could make a subdomain that is a CNAME (DNS-based alias) pointing at the ad server. In this way, the ad server will share the same public suffix as the rest of the publisher's site. So how will your browser be able to tell it from a subdomain that's actually operated by the publisher?

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