Viewing profile — takluyver

Certainly the app ecosystem was part of the challenge, and Microsoft spent a fair bit of effort trying to both encourage developers to make apps, and filling obvious gaps (like You…

And to underscore the scale of that challenge, Microsoft couldn't make Windows Phone a significant competitor to Android & iOS.

The XZ utils backdoor made it into Debian repositories undetected, although it was caught before it was in a stable version. Debian repositories are quite secure, but also pretty l…

If you get 'verified' by Google and sign your app, sideloading shouldn't change. That means money and ID checks, or a free 'hobbyist' carve out if you have If you don't want to pla…

There's going to be a lot of people who don't have a laptop/desktop handy right now - because they're out of the house, because it's unplugged in a cupboard, or because they borrow…

Huh, indeed. I still can't find much information about this, but this page is very informative: https://jwodder.github.io/kbits/posts/term-fgbg/

They can? Is this a recent thing? I remember wanting to detect the background colour years ago, and not finding any way to do it.

Also, power users are the ones who will find and change the setting - that's pretty much what being a power user means. Picking defaults that work for novices makes sense, even if …

Not unlike Firefox, Gnome has a lot of hidden options which aren't exposed in the regular settings UI. There has been an option to control 'primary paste' for 9 years, and it's exp…

A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password…

There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a bro…

That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clea…

I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink …

I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what…

> starting from near total market domination That's not really accurate: Firefox peaked somewhere around 30% market share back when IE was dominant, and then Chrome took over the t…

My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and the…

I'm sure they would love to. They've been trying to make their own app store (Galaxy Store) a thing for over a decade. But cutting ties with Google would mean no Google Apps and no…

> we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities Some of the bigger open source…

The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?

OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for…

And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federa…

The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.

It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.

If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreeme…

Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of cou…