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Comment Re:Android (Score 2, Informative) 235

They were "persuaded" to go with Windows instead of Android. source. Make of that what you will.

Taiwan companies making tablets are being "persuaded" by Intel and Microsoft to promote x86-based tablets over ARM models, according to a controversial claim today. Both ASUS and MSI had made it clear they were producing Tegra-based ARM tablets with Android at the start of the year but have suddenly shifted much of their attention for the Computex show in early June to systems using Intel's chips, usually Atom processors, with Windows 7 as the OS. ARM-based tablets would still be at the expo and ship in the summer but would be secondary focuses at most.

Comment Re:Get out of my way! (Score 0, Troll) 249

I use activities to keep groups of applications separate. For instance, I keep all my development apps in the one activity screen, and all my internet apps in another. Structuring your workspace in this sort of advanced hierarchal way does a lot for productivity. I work faster, and my machine is uncluttered and easy to navigate even with dozens of programmes running. It's good, you should try it.

Yes. Why are your applications not showing up in the tray? Maybe there is a problem with your brain.

You can either have a standard desktop with icons all over it, or have them appear inside a Plasma widget. It's up to you. I decided not to have any icons on my desktop at all, and no widgets. Icons look ugly and there's usually applications running on top of them any way.

Modern KDE doesn't get in the way of your applications unless you want it to. To say otherwise is to be wilfully ignorant.

Comment Re:I try every new KDE4 release, but... (Score 4, Insightful) 249

The Plasma desktop doesn't crash for me. Maybe you need to check with your package maintainers about that. But you know what? The bitterness about 4.0 comes up in every single goddamned KDE thread. But it just doesn't matter any more. Seriously. KDE 4.4 is stable enough, and it looks like 4.5 is going to be even better. It's okay. You can let go.
KDE

Sneak Preview For Coming KDE SC 4.5 249

omlx writes "KDE SC 4.5 is in feature freeze right now. Therefore, I decided to share some early screenshots with you. In general there are no major changes; it's all about polishing and fixing bugs. There are a lot of under-the-hood changes in libs, which as end users we cannot see. KDE SC will be released in August 2010." Note: you can also try out a beta of the release now, if you'd like.

Comment Re:Can it accept add-ons yet? (Score 2, Informative) 347

Yes we all know it has extensions. But Chrome doesn't have Noscript. It does have Javascript-blocking and whitelists but it's an all or nothing choice for each website, which is less than ideal. Chrome also has an adblocker, but it isn't a proper adblocker; it just hides the ads. So clearly, the you are wrong, and Chrome is still not a good choice of browser for the GP.

Comment Re:Correction (Score 1) 347

No, you're wrong. Chrome's deb installer automatically adds the Google repositories, so Linux users get updates for it like they for any other package.

But there really isn't any point in running Chrome instead of Chromium on Linux any way. They're the exact same thing except for the logo and Googe's stalky tracking system, and Chromium usually has better package management.

Comment Re:How are these misses? (Score 1) 280

Almost everything Gates wrote about the web in that book was added in the second edition. Before that, it was only mentioned in passing. But it just so happened that was the year the web really took off. So he and his publishers sought to fix this glaring mistake. It isn't really very difficult to predict something in retrospect, is it?

Comment Re:"Traditional Operating System" (Score 1) 263

I'm curious as to why they even bothered to say anything but "without Windows" when they clearly meant "without Windows".

Because netbooks are also sold with Ubuntu or Xandros installed on them. Netbooks are commonly sold with instant-on environments and a general purpose operating system on the hard disk. But hardly ever are desktop computers and laptops sold with nothing on them at all except for an instant-on operating system environment. Hence the use of the term "traditional".

Comment Re:No mention (Score 4, Insightful) 1046

I was thinking the same thing. Apparently, subverting the peer review process to keep contrarian papers from being published is OK; complaining about it in public is EVIL.

You're right. Here are some of the conclusions the scientists have made about climate change.

  • (i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
  • (ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
  • (iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
  • (iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
  • (v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Well go on then, refute them. I eagerly await your reasoned discourse replete with accurate facts and figures explaining why it is all, in fact, a crock and a sham! If the evil money-grabbing scientific conspiracy community won't accept or peer review your findings, then I'm sure Slashdot will. What have you got to lose, eh?

Comment Re:Sadly... (Score 1) 764

They look around, find scads of data that fits their model, and with enough data, declare the "debate is over".

Don't forget that if the data _doesn't_ fit your model, you get to 'adjust' it until it does.

'Global warming', sorry, 'climate change' is now potentially a multi-trillion dollar global industry if the banks get their 'crap and trade' laws passed. Does anyone really think that a little thing like the truth is going to be allowed to get in the way of those fat profits and bonuses? Ten years from now we'll be shivering in the dark because the price of power and heating has been massively increased to make fat-cats like Al Gore even richer, sorry, to prevent 'global warming'.

Goddamn straight. After all, everybody knows there's no money to be made in oil. It's in goddamn WINDMILLS and shit.

Comment Re:The great thing about this: MS doesn't know why (Score 2, Interesting) 472

Obviously Microsoft is doing this in an attempt to gain some market share again.

If that were entirely true, then the browser would be made to work on XP systems. XP is still the most widely-used operating system on planet earth, remember, at least for a few years yet. I understand that Windows 7 is the best OS they've come out with and all that, but a lot of people aren't looking to upgrade to 7 any time soon. Desktop users and businesses alike. It's hard to see how much marketshare they can claw back by making it Vista+ only.

Comment Re:Missing role: deleters (Score 3, Insightful) 160

It's much worse than that. Articles aren't deleted because people assume no-one will want to look at them. Articles with hundreds, even thousands of hits a month are commonly deleted because they are seen as not being notable enough for inclusion. The reasons why are usually because there aren't enough sources to prove that the article in question is notable, or the sources are of a sketchy nature (blogs and the like). The actual guidelines themselves say that articles should have the best citations that people can find--often enough mentions on blogs simply have to do. The notability guidelines are being taken as literal truth by a huge number of wikilawyers, who will mercilessly use it as a weapon to nominate articles for deletion. They'll then use other trollish guidelines as absolute law to rubbish the citations people dig up to try and save the article from being deleted. I've seen it happen way too many times now, and I just don't have the patience to dealwith these sorts of fuckwits.

Comment Re:no training wheels (Score 1) 198

True, but software of a very poor or insecure nature is usually unlikely to make it into most Linux distributions. Well-maintained repositories and package managers pretty much ensure users don't install buggy pieces of crap (for most purposes, any way). People install badly-written software for Windows by combing the web for dodgy-looking downloads; that just doesn't happen in Linux. Well, except for new users who have difficulty reconciling themselves with the limitations of repositories, any way.

Then again, many distributions are starting to include features for one-click installations of random software and repositories. At least on the one hand it'll stop people from complaining that "omg installing software too hard in loonix", but on the other maybe we'll start seeing people suffer from buggy, cruftinated Linux systems.

Comment Re:This makes sense (Score 1) 502

Only because terribly written software was used to writing all over the place all the time. Vista only requires root for the same kind of things linux does. The only other complaint was that it showed an inordinate amount of alerts for the same thing, file copying into protected folders, which was fixed in SP1. I'd still prefer the Vista SP0 4 dialogs to what Nautilus does (i.e, tell me to get fucked.)

One of the major reasons for having the UAC dialogues in the first place was to try and stop developers from writing applications that needlessly require to be run as admin. In that sense, it has been at least somewhat successful. There was a similar purge of root-hogging daemons in Linuxland about ten years back.

Comment Re:they need something based on the rules of crick (Score 1) 294

I'd been trying to make this joke all week, but despite reading the wiki page on Cricket, I couldn't write the joke to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about. Three strikes and I suppose now *I'm* out.

Don't feel so bad about it. The OP got it wrong too. If you get bowled leg-before-wicket (LBW), then you're already out.

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