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Comment Re:GMail doesn't even bother (Score 1) 260

Now that (that Google have a 20ish MB limit) is interesting. The other day a Gmail user tried to send me some photo files. They got a non-delivery report because my Postfix installation (yeah, I still run my own mail server: private mail server on the Internet!) had a default limit of something like 10MB. They tried again with fewer photos, this time two, and some whining about the earlier e-mail being rejected. I have since increased its limit to 16MB and we'll see how long it takes me to get more whining. I mean, I e-mail photos from my smartassphone too but on iOS it prompts whether to send small, medium, large, original and medium is usually a good trade-off between attachment/file size and visible quality.

Comment Re:Duck Duck Go was never better. (Score 2) 70

DuckDuckGo was, maybe still is, better than Google at returning relevant search results. About 10 years ago I was trying to find data sheets (pinouts and timing information for reading, mostly) for the ROMs used by HP 264X terminals, and what Google kept giving me was links that promised data sheet PDFs but really were pages demanding that I request a quote for the parts from whatever outfit had them up. Given that these were mask-programmed ROMs and AMD would supply them I really didn't think these outfits would be able to supply me with parts programmed to HP's specifications.

Comment Thousands of employees (Score 1) 60

"digital mortgage lender Better.com"

"the company’s 8,000 employees in the U.S. and India"

Sounds "digital" all right. What did this company think it needed 8000 employees for, if it had computers to do all the work? Why does it think it needs 5000? Front-end developers? Back-end developers? Middleware specialists? Speakers to bankers?

Comment Re:Near-zero pull-factor for Firefox (Score 1) 408

I think you're on to something there. Firefox's advantage (to me) is that I can have multiple instances of it running as separate process trees under separate profiles, and that these have separate configurations and cookie jars. Whether I can get that across to other people in ways that make sense to them is less than certain, and I am less than certain that I can't do this sort of thing with any value of Chrom*.

Comment Re:I moved to chrome for profiles (Score 1) 408

Firefox has had profiles since it was Netscape, which is long enough for Mozilla to have messed with the command-line interface that lets you start a new Firefox process (tree) using a specific profile (but on the other hand now has a GUI to them that can be got at as about:profiles), and now has something it calls "containers" that lets you achieve some of the same ends in what looks like different tabs in the same Firefox.

Comment Re:Um ... (Score 1) 39

No, there's no other Symantec, but it may help to notice that Symantec's business has since about 1990 involved a bit of purchasing other computer software companies for their products and goodwill.. Companies like THINK Technologies, Peter Norton Computing, and PGP.COM. Kind of like Computer Associates.

Comment Re:It's not a mystery... (Score 1) 269

One big reason that MS didn't get the pre-cell phone PDA market is that WinCE was portable and was available for several processor architectures, just like WinNT! So if you (as an end user) wanted to buy third-party software for your WinCE device, you had to know whether yours was Intel, MIPS, ARM, or PowerPC, or something like that; and your third-party software vendor had to support that processor architecture. Sure, they all used something like the Windows API, but the toolchains build separate executables and libraries for each processor. Mind, Palm having a 68000 simulator running on ARM didn't save them either. That they used it to keep the PalmOS application runtime environment pretty much the same (including the expectation that you'd build a 68000 PalmOS application) didn't make it smell any sweeter in 2007.

Comment Re:Will miss Google+ (Score 1) 30

Google sees everything anyone on Google does. Whether it's Docs, or +, or gmail.

Or netnews. Just because the webby Google "Usenet" archive is crap doesn't mean their interfaces aren't. Or elsewhere on the web. I am wondering how much of the web is intentionally "dark" in that it prevents Google's crawler(s) from fetching the pages.

Comment Real actual data (Score 2) 136

TFA is at the Mercury News web site, and credits Derek Hawkins at the Washington Post. But TFA says its source is a Medium post by the RIAA's Cary Sherman, and sure enough if you go to the RIAA's web site you can find a post with a link to the Medium post as well as to the RIAA's actual report: https://www.riaa.com/riaa-rele...

ProTip for submitters and editors: if TFA has a source, the source may well be on the web too, and may have real actual data.

Comment It's not just Yahoo's accounts (Score 1) 13

Considered properly, it's not just Yahoo's users, it's everyone who has corresponded via e-mail with someone who used a Yahoo mail address (and maybe including sbcglobal.net and att.net mail addresses), because those relationships have now (for some years) been mined by spammers, and now those folks are getting spam that at first glance appears to come from the user of the Yahoo mail address (same personal name in From: header, albeit now with different e-mail address).

Comment Re:It's just a Library service (Score 1) 119

Circulating libraries buy e-books from publishers, and at least some e-book licenses for libraries only permit a certain number of loans per digital e-book purchased. The justification for this is that paper books being loaned out accrue wear and tear and will be removed from circulation when they get too shabby.

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