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Comment Asinine (Score 1) 285

by saberworks (#54848857) Attached to: Public Service Announcement: You Should Not Force Quit Apps on iOS

This is asinine. And it's made worse by the fact that when you do use the app-switcher to switch to an open-in-the-background app, it's actually showing you a screenshot of the app as it was sometime prior to it getting frozen. When I reactivate the calculator app (not from a force-click, but open in the background), it shows a screenshot of calculator and I start tapping the numbers, but then the app actually becomes active and many of my taps were missed. I'd like it better if it showed a loading screen or something that would indicate that the app isn't ready yet. These things really aren't as quick as they say they are.

Comment Love kindle, but... (Score 4, Interesting) 206

by saberworks (#54328941) Attached to: As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20%

I love my kindle but ever since the various publishers and amazon settled and they started setting their own prices, the ebook prices are way too expensive. In a lot of cases they are more expensive than the print copies and they have way more restrictions. I can't lend or give them to my brother (some pubs allow lending but only N times and only for 2 weeks at a time, which is absolutely ridiculous). I can't donate the book to a library if I don't plan to read it again. I would be ok with these restrictions if the ebooks were cheaper.

The other thing that sucks on amazon/kindle is trying to find decent books. I have to go visit B&N to find new sci-fi/fantasy novels because the search/discovery on amazon is terrible. For every 1 fantasy novel by a major publisher and a well-regarded author, there are about 500 indie "books" that are just terrible. (Yes, there are some gems in there, but it's really difficult to find them.) It seems like amazon is just concerned with the volume of books on their store, not the quality of them. If I could filter out the "kindle unlimited" books from all of the lists it would make things a lot better.

Comment Canceled (Score 1) 158

Just a couple of days ago I canceled my netflix subscription because of the user-hostile behavior of their roku app. Just clicking a show to read a more detailed description or get a list of actors in it would cause it to play automatically. Hit back, then select it again, it autoplays again. It's impossible to browse the catalog and add shows to my queue. Their support channel is useless, they just say they'll pass the suggestion on. There are threads on reddit and the roku forums with many people complaining about the same thing. Netflix also had a blog post about this "new feature" but after they got hundreds and hundreds of complaints they just turned off commenting and deleted all the existing comments. I know it's only $8/month but I'm not interested in giving any more money to these people. And we've been subscribers almost since the beginning.

It's nice that I could cancel online without calling in to support (a lot of online services don't let you cancel online). But it's telling that there was no survey asking why I canceled.

Comment Old English (Score 1) 171

by saberworks (#50782331) Attached to: Square Enix To Concentrate On Remaking Their Back Catalog

I loved the old Dragon Warrior games on NES. However, when they remade Dragon Quest III they changed all the old english dialog to modern english. Everything also got all cutesy and I sort of remember a new integrated collectible item deal. All that crap they added on just annoyed me and took away from the core experience of the game. I'd love to play more remakes but stay true to the originals!

Comment Confusion? (Score 3, Insightful) 25

by saberworks (#30754582) Attached to: ModSecurity 2.5

There seems to be some confusion -- this isn't a product to secure apache, it's a product to secure your web applications running on top of apache. It's designed to detect and prevent attacks on your app, not on the apache server itself.

Comment Re:The disc is DRM (Score 2, Informative) 213

by saberworks (#30752058) Attached to: Nintendo Wii To Get Netflix Streaming

It will suck on Roku, too, if you have a crappy/inconsistent connection. If it ever drops below a certain threshold, it will just degrade the quality to the next lowest stream it thinks it can support. Roku is worse than xbox/ps3 in that it seems to remember the resolution you usually stream at so even when the connection gets better (other times of the day, for example), it takes it a while to realize it and start getting the higher quality streams.
Censorship

Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision 128

Posted by kdawson from the speak-we-will dept.
2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."
Linux Business

How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users? 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-implied-support dept.
Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"

Comment Filter Lines (Score 4, Interesting) 702

by saberworks (#25666243) Attached to: (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?

Use visual mode (shift-v) to highlight lines, then shell out to external programs to filter them, such as perltidy. To do that, with lines highlighted, type !perltidy (assuming you have it on your machine). This lets you filter specific lines instead of the whole file.
Science

Scientists Examine Dinosaur Skin 96

Posted by samzenpus from the beyond-wrinkled dept.
jd writes "Fossilized skin from a dinosaur in China is allowing paleontologists a better understanding of what dinosaur skin was like. A tear, caused by a predator, shows that below the scales of the Psittacosaurus was a thick hide comprised of 25 layers of collagen. Other than the multitude of layers, this is very similar in nature to modern shark skin. The gash caused by a predator allowed the skin and the soft interior to be fossilized along with the bones. This is not the same dinosaur that had been reported previously on Slashdot, which was found in South Dakota, although the process and extent of fossilization is very similar."

Halo 3 Causing Network Issues 306

Posted by kdawson from the maybe-just-a-coincidence dept.
Recently at my university where I'm a student and a sys admin, we have been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peak gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the 25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but university students attempting to access network resources such as our UNIX clusters were satisfied.

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