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Comment Re:Gamers? no Nerds? yes (Score 1) 80

That sounds like a result in itself. By packaging the problem as a game, he's managed to enlist free help from random people on the internet - crowd-sourcing, if I can use that awful buzz-phrase. Perhaps its a victory for scientific marketing more than science, but a better algorithm is a real result that speaks for itself.

We also shouldn't be surprised that an extra few thousand people looking at the problem can come up with a better algorithm than "the professionals". Maybe the researchers were too close to the problem, maybe the other guys had a different perspective, maybe they were lucky... it doesn't really matter.

Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 1) 320

The problem with doing that is that such a sudden change will make their motives clear. They have to use this frog-boiling approach - essentially a very gradual declaration of martial law - so that nobody will notice a sudden change and complain.

Pedants: Yes, I know the frog boiling thing is a myth.

Comment Re:IdeaStorm's Top Ideas (Score 0) 324

You say that, but did you look at the numbers on that page? The OpenOffice recommendation has more than 100,000 upvotes. Why would 100,000 people who don't care show up on Dell's webpage to click on that arrow?

I work in a University where Dell is the main approved supplied for PC kit. I had to buy a work machine with XP even though the first thing I did was to install Linux. I wonder how many other forced-to-buy-Dell or don't-know-anything-but-Dell people there are out there who might buy FOSS if they could and it was cheaper?

Sure, a majority of people may not be interested in Linux or OpenOffice. But a significant minority might take the opportunity to go for an alternative to MS if one was made available.

Comment Somebody needs to pay these guys (Score 5, Insightful) 94

There have been several stories on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.

They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy.

Comment Re:NoScript and Adblock (Score 1) 207

I only use AdBlock and NoScript and there are no issues listed.

I do run a lot of windows, rather than tabs - usually half a dozen, some with sub-tabs, spread across many virtual desktops. Still, I've been running Firefox for about 4 or 5 hours today and it looks like this:

  3206 pzs 20 0 1132m 639m 28m R 1 8.1 92:38.58 firefox

which seems very high.

Comment NoScript and Adblock (Score 4, Insightful) 207

I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.

However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.

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