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Comment If you wanted ownership of the machine (Score 1, Informative) 186

Then an Android device was a bad choice.

1) Most of the important functionality (including the WebKit/Blink browser engine) are now embedded in Google Play Services, which you can't manage.

2) Total ownership of a device with a proprietary radio isn't realistic - even if you managed to install straight Linux on the thing (unlikely) the underlying firmware is in the bag.

3) Better to return that machine and go with a Yoga 2 Pro honestly. You'll have the ability to install Linux on it and have far greater control over your data.

4) A rooting tool is inherently untrustworthy as it exploits flaws in the target system. How can you truly know whether an oft-used method is trustworthy?

If you're not interested in the above, you don't really care about your data and shouldn't bother rooting it.

Comment Re:Looked into it for a friend's build (Score 3, Informative) 123

And they have spoken a bit of using both the integrated GPU and a discrete graphics card in tandem, similar to using two GPUs in Crossfire, but they haven't released the drivers for it, nor listed which cards will work, and the card they chose to demo it with was their bottom-end graphics card.

That's not very truthy:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/dual-graphics/pages/dual-graphics.aspx#3

Earth

Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia 169

New submitter onyxruby writes "On December 29th of last year a comet exploded over Sri Lanka. When examined by Cardiff University one of the comet samples was found to contain micro-fossils akin to plankton. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center tested additional samples with similar results. The research paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology. In practice this means that the argument that life did not start on Earth has gained additional evidence." Update: 03/12 16:59 GMT by S : On the other hand, Phil Plait says the paper is very flawed; the sample rocks the researchers tested may not even be meteorites.

Comment For a LIMITED TIME (Score 1) 437

I'm assuming no one has yet noticed that the $99 fee is not going to last forever. From Microsoft's sysdev portal:

Microsoft is pleased to announce that, for a limited time, VeriSign is offering the ‘Microsoft Authenticode’ Digital Certificate at a substantially reduced price by following the link below.

Moreover as others have mentioned here, it's not guaranteed that any hardware manufacturers will include the capability to register one's own keys. I certainly haven't heard of any yet.

Comment RMS said it best (Score 5, Insightful) 1091

In a recent interview with an Iranian Linux publication, RMS had this to say about the very issue addressed here - it's an opinion I share.

"LR: What's the best way to advocate Free Software? Some Free Software users engage in technical debates with Microsoft and Apple fans, trying to convince them GNU/Linux is more powerful. Another group focus on philosophical and cultural aspects of Free Software and try to make people care about their freedom. Which of the two mentioned approaches are more effective?

RMS: They are both "effective" but they lead to different results.

If you convince people that some free software is technically superior, they might run some free software, but they will remain ready to use nonfree software in the areas where that is technically superior. They will continue to judge an important question based on superficial issues. This is just a partial success.

However, if you convince people that they deserve freedom, they will start rejecting nonfree software whether it is technically inferior or technically superior, because they will see that free software is ethically superior. They will understand the important question and judge it right. This is a full, deep success.

Another weakness of technical arguments is that nontechnical people probably won't care about them at all. But they can understand ethical arguments. Ethical arguments are the only way we can convince nontechnical people to become free software supporters.

I figure that users can judge for themselves whether program A is more convenient than program B. So I don't try to convince them about that sort of question, except when someone has preconceptions about free software and has not tried it. I focus on talking about freedom. "

Linux

Submission + - WindowMaker development resumes, has first relase since 2006 (windowmaker.org)

brad-x writes: "A new team of developers have recently picked up development of WindowMaker, and they've added many new features including improved support for freedesktop standard menu layout and MacOS X style application and window switching from the keyboard, culminating in a new release, 0.95.2. A basic changelog on the newly redesigned website is available at http://windowmaker.org/news.php."
Open Source

Why Open APIs Fall Far Short of Open Source 163

itwbennett writes "451 Group analyst Jay Lyman opined in a LinuxInsider column that because of open APIs, 'non-open source software is often open enough.' Not so, says ITworld blogger Brian Proffitt. Sure, open APIs are an easy way for a small developer to 'plug into a big software ecosystem,' but it's a trap. 'If open APIs are the only connector to a software project, the destiny of that code lies solely in the hands of the owners,' says Proffitt. 'Which means that anyone connecting into the application will have to deal with the changes imposed from the top down.'"

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