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Submission + - In major shift, Firefox to use Yahoo search by default in US (cnet.com)

mpicpp writes: Google's 10-year run as Firefox's default search engine is over. Yahoo wants more search traffic, and a deal with Mozilla will bring it.

In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States.

"I'm thrilled to announce that we've entered into a five-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox across mobile and desktop," Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post Wednesday. "This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years."

The change will come to Firefox users in the US in December, and later Yahoo will bring that new "clean, modern and immersive search experience" to all Yahoo search users. In another part of the deal, Yahoo will support the Do Not Track technology for Firefox users, meaning that it will respect users' preferences not to be tracked for advertising purposes.

With millions of users who perform about 100 billion searches a year, Firefox is a major source of the search traffic that's Google's bread and butter. Some of those searches produce search ads, and Mozilla has been funded primarily from a portion of that revenue that Google shares. In 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, that search revenue brought in the lion's share of Mozilla's $311 million in revenue.

Comment As a beekeper (Score 5, Informative) 252

I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.

Comment Re:Great experience with Asus RT-N16 (Score 1) 196

Agreed. I've had my RT-N16 for about a year. It is great with DD-WRT (I guess it supports Tomato, but I haven't had a need to upgrade). I did have problems with mine overheating (not overclocked or anything), but some left over heatsink coolers from way-back and an ancient graphics-card cooling fan completely fixed the issue for me.

The RT-N16 seems to have some quality control issues, but for the price, there was nothing better when I bought mine. There may be better options now though.

Comment Re:So sad! (Score 1) 359

I loved my RX-7s. I've owned 2 1st gen 13B RX-7s, 1st in high-school then a 2nd in college once the 1st gave up the ghost (mostly due to upstate NY winters). They were a pain in the ass in the winter, with the manual choke, and an engine that was really easy to flood, and they ate catalytic converters, but it was a very pretty car, and I still pine for mine occasionally.

Comment Re:ubuntu's rocky upgrade road (Score 1) 320

I've been running lucid for a few days, and I think quality control has significantly slipped in Ubuntu. Yes they are only betas, but with only 2 weeks left before release, I have seen lots of bugs still remaining. Within a couple days I found that screen-saver crashes often, several apps can't properly auto-disable PulseAudio anymore and don't work without hacks, PHP 5.3.2 segfaults, themes didn't install fully on upgrade, and (of course) the memory leak which results in Lucid using up all the RAM in my system (yes I've submitted bugs (or found previously submitted tickets) on most of these already). Other things like Wine segfaults seem to be resolved by reinstalling, but overall this upgrade has not gone smoothly for me. I've been, overall, happy with (X)Ubuntu over the years, and like the 6 month cadence, but, in my opinion, they should really focus more on quality for their LTS release. I certainly wouldn't recommend an upgrade to 10.04 in its current state, though I plan to stick with Ubuntu personally. Generally, I consider Ubuntu to be a more user-friendly and more current Debian, which I like, but I guess I should learn not to be an early adopter if I care about stability.

Earth

Permanent Undersea Homes Soon; Temporary Ones Now 122

MMBK writes "Dennis Chamberland is one of the world's preeminent aquanauts. He's worked with NASA to develop living habitats and underwater plant growth labs, among other cool things. His next goal is establishing the world's first permanent underwater colony. This video gets to the heart of his project, literally and figuratively, as most is shot in his underwater habitat, Atlantica, off the coast of Key Largo, FL. The coolest part might be the moon pool, the room you swim into underwater."

Comment Re:MythTV automatic commercial skipping (Score 1) 536

I love MythTv, and have been using it for years and years, but it is absolutely not easy (though I have more obscure hardware, and have never used mythbuntu). I've also tried being a sysadmin for my friends' myth boxes....I would never wish that on anyone. The stability has always been the biggest issue. Random crashes are extroadinarily annoying. With Firewire, I found recording very unreliable, image quality is very dependant on the capture method. But I haven't seem anything that can support my High-Def recording with auto-commercial detection, and for that,I'm willing to stick with it.

I've heard that you can run 'Play On!' in a virtual-machine on windows to convert netflix to upnp streams (which can then be watched on Linux). I haven't tried it myself though. Certainly not ideal, but perhaps viable for those certain use models.

Also Blu-Ray is still really hard in Linux. I've considered a Windows MythTV frontend with a linux backend which might give me the flexibility I want, but I don't think there's a good integrated solution for that.

Space

Pics of the Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century 97

Vinod writes "Yesterday thousands of people around Asia witnessed the longest solar eclipse of the century. Although it was not clearly visible in some parts due to overcast weather, thousands of people gathered to view this spectacular event. Yesterday's solar eclipse lasted for 6 to 7 minutes, making it the longest solar eclipse of the century. Here is a collection of 33 beautiful images of the solar eclipse from around the world."

Comment Re:As long as.. (Score 5, Interesting) 251

According to a-v comparatives:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/corporate-reviews

Microsoft's AV software is very good. It has low false-positives and generally scored quite well. If the same capability is free, I don't see a reason not to recommend its use. I certainly don't work for a-v comparatives, but they were around before Microsoft was in AV business, and their top rated software changes pretty freqeuntly. I'd call them reasonably unbiased, but judge for yourself.

Security

Steam Hacked, Credit Card Numbers Taken 141

An anonymous reader writes "DailyTech reports that Valve's Steam content distribution system has been compromised. According to the article a hacker claims to have 'bypassed Valve's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including: screenshots of internal Valve web pages, a portion of Valve's Cafe directory, error logs, credit card information of customers, and financial information on Valve.'"
The Internet

Submission + - Woman has house robbed after fake Craigslist post

flanksteak writes: The Seattle Times is reporting that a woman in nearby Tacoma had her rental property stripped of almost everything after someone posted a fake craigslist announcement that everything in the house could be hauled away no questions asked. When contacted, craigslist said they would release data about the poster if they were issued a subpoena.
Education

Submission + - Science fair project exposes GlaxoSmithKline lies

shadowspar writes: "Despite claims made by GlaxoSmithKline that their Ribena soft drinks are high in Vitamin C, two New Zealand high school students found in their science fair research project that at least some formulations of the drink contained no detectable levels of the vitamin. As a result, GSK has been fined over $200,000 by the NZ Commerce Commission and ordered to run newspaper ads admitting that some of their drinks contain no Vitamin C."
Announcements

Submission + - Electrically Conductive Plastic Polymer

AustinSlacker writes: "A Fox news article is reporting that a Dutch researcher is announcing a breakthrough in plastics. "Paulette Prins of the Delft University of Technology (Technische Universiteit Delft) demonstrated that specially rebuilt plastic conducts electricity just as well as the silicon wafers that are commonly used to make the semiconductor chips that are the brains of cell phones, MP3 players and other portable consumer electronics."

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