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Comment Still cheaper than having incompetent server staff (Score 1) 95

While increasing costs are sneakily driven by providers, the biggest cost saver of the cloud is simply having competent people handling your infrastructure. Most self-hosted/in-house infrastructure teams are run by amateurs or understaffed people led by people who have no clue about the back-end. Removing people not qualified for this type of service/decision-making definitely prevents problems such as obsolescence and many security issues.

Comment Return to a better form of native (Score 1) 136

As has already been pointed out, as long as interpreted language with huge overheads such as Javascript, Java, .NET, Python and the like are still the norm with no acceptable native replacements (C++ does not offer the flexibility that attracts programmers to those languages), the pollution caused by dynamically recompiling code to run even the simplest of programs won't reduce. Another aspect that needs to be addressed is programmers living in fantasy worlds where optimisation is the compiler's job and running things on the cloud makes inefficiency magically disappear. Train programmers with an understanding of the hardware and optimisation and your reduce energy consumption while making better programmers overall.

Comment "compared to analogous Intel Macs" (Score 1) 123

Where are the comparisons with actual high performance Intel computers in PCs? Macs have been using outdated Intel technology for years, this performance boost is only relevant to the Mac crowd who is unaware of greener pastures elsewhere (at least when it comes to overall system performance).

Comment Winamp's already said it'd take years to return (Score 1) 117

There's nothing strange about the lack of updates, anyone having read the Winamp forums (alive through all this) knows that they had to remove large parts of the AOL code and had already announced a very tentative 2015 re-release date. They've started alpha builds recently, so everything is proceeding smoothly.

Comment Re:Fuck Mozilla (Score 1) 316

Ever heard of different needs of different people? When you temporarily need a tab for later you keep it open that is why tabs exist, having multiple web pages organised and instantly available instead of hidden behind layers of clicks. If you've ever done extensive online research on a subject out of personal curiosity tab multiplication is a normal process and tab groups are a great way of going about it. Mozilla barely advertised the feature and hid it in a corner of the customisation UI with no way for the casual user to discover it, of course it did not gain traction. I use it regularly and am frankly sad to see it go as it was just a case of badly advertised features.
Open Source

Linus's Thoughts on Linux Security (washingtonpost.com) 291

Rick Zeman writes: The Washington Post has a lengthy article on Linus Torvalds and his thoughts on Linux security. Quoting: "...while Linux is fast, flexible and free, a growing chorus of critics warn that it has security weaknesses that could be fixed but haven't been. Worse, as Internet security has surged as a subject of international concern, Torvalds has engaged in an occasionally profane standoff with experts on the subject. ...

His broader message was this: Security of any system can never be perfect. So it always must be weighed against other priorities — such as speed, flexibility and ease of use — in a series of inherently nuanced trade-offs. This is a process, Torvalds suggested, poorly understood by his critics. 'The people who care most about this stuff are completely crazy. They are very black and white,' he said ... 'Security in itself is useless. The upside is always somewhere else. The security is never the thing that you really care about.'"

Of course, contradictory points of view are presented, too: "While I don't think that the Linux kernel has a terrible track record, it's certainly much worse than a lot of people would like it to be," said Matthew Garrett, principal security engineer for CoreOS, a San Francisco company that produces an operating system based on Linux. At a time when research into protecting software has grown increasingly sophisticated, Garrett said, "very little of that research has been incorporated into Linux."

Comment Misnomers (Score 1) 88

There's an ongoing trend with technologies that are somewhat similar to sci-fi tropes but do not do what those devices do that is worrying these days, recent examples: 1. Hoverboards that require metal surfaces instead of floating over anything (you know, hover?) 2. Tractor beams that are actually high intensity wave generators, need a medium to travel through and do not have anywhere near the level of power and flexibility an actual tractor beam has (it's not even a beam!) This is not to diminish the achievement of the existing technologies but please stop calling them by the wrong names.

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