Comment Re:Or Ug patented the wheel... (Score 1) 267
So because the software is burned to a chip that makes it acceptable?
Comment Re:Patent trolls (Score 1) 267
More at issue is not the fact that they have the patent, but that they're trying to suck money out of everyone by participating in the IEEE and not signing a Letter of Assurance. A Letter of Assurance doesn't mean that you won't make money or won't sue, just that you'll charge reasonable royalties (IEEE's all about co-operation). Their requested royalty rates are several dollars per sale, which is stupid when you're talking about a technology that should be used in the cheapest devices. They signed a letter of assurance for 802.11a but kept silent on g and n. Then they started suing when g was adopted.
Comment TCP/IP's history (Score 1) 267
It's a valid patent? How does it compare then if BSD patented their government-funded work?
Comment Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score 1) 1124
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function. This allows for a more intuitive interface for the standard user
Actually no. I've learned that there are two kinds of people in the world, problem solvers/designers, and those who follow. Those who follow don't think "logically," they are perfectly happy to spend time searching, or waiting for something to happen. If you give them options and possibilities to think about, they don't follow the same "logic" designers do, kind of like children.
Submission + - A 20th Anniversary Teardown of the Macintosh Porta (technologizer.com)
harrymcc writes: "On September 20th, 1989, Apple announced the Macintosh Portable, the first truly mobile Mac. It was big, heavy, and expensive--a disappointing seller at the time, and the subject of much mockery in the years since. (Apple radically improved on it just two years later with the first PowerBook.) Benj Edwards not only owns an original Mac Portable, but has conducted a thorough teardown, revealing everything from its massive lead-acid battery to the names of the Mac engineering team engraved on its innards."
Comment Re:Creator codes have been deprecated since 10.4 (Score 1) 214
If Apple did it right, then I'm pretty sure one can programmatically change the per-file association. Or probably even with the AppleScript.
No, they didn't do it right, they just chopped the functionality out. This is determined by the launch services database and the LaunchServices framework. The only thing you can use to "set" something using LaunchServices is the function LSSetItemAttribute, which only supports kLSItemQuarantineProperties. There's also stuff like LSSetExtensionHidden, but they didn't add anything for this.
There is no way to programatically influence what application a file should open in when running on Snow Leopard, and there was before. This is a significant loss of functionality. Text files are a great example of this; if I have a set of text files (or even XML) files that I like to create using with BBEdit because of BBEdit's feature set, I want to open them in BBEdit again. I don't want to save one, open an info window in the Finder, and select BBEdit from the popup menu, that's just stupid.
If I'm saving PDF compatible files in Illustrator with a
There are only two ways to set a file type in OS X: using a file extension (which is stupid, but supports the lowest common denominator) or HFS+ meta data (which is actually a good idea, because it's file meta data). There's no new extended attribute where you can set a UTI or other attribute that influences launch services other than quarantine (if you happen to find one, run to the top of a very large hill and yell loudly, preferably screaming the name of the attribute; then put a recording of it on YouTube).
Ideally, you'd have more file-system metadata to determine this kind of behaviour, but the "change" popup in the Get Info window only modifies the
Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army? 195
david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army."
Update: 06/11 21:26 GMT by T : J. Alex Halderman writes "My students and I have been examining the Green Dam censorware software. We've found serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any web site a user visits with the software installed. We also found that some of the blacklists seems to have been taken from the American-made filtering program CyberSitter. We've posted a report and demo."
Crank Caller Gets Employee To Trash Hotel 2
Sometimes being gullible can seem sweet or endearing. Sometimes it can lead you to smash windows, break sprinkler heads, shut off the electricity, and pull the fire alarm. Christina Bergmann was working the front desk at an Arkansas Holiday Inn, when a male caller "identified himself as an employee of Grennel Fire Sprinkler service." The man told her that there was a problem with the hotels sprinkler system. She "needed to pull the fire alarm to reset them." Christina, with the help of a destruction-loving hotel guest, proceeded to follow the caller's instructions — which resulted in damages to the hotel's windows, carpets and electrical system, totalling about $50,000.
Comment Re:The MacOS X approach (Score 1) 613
That's probably one of my biggest gripes. I was trying to restore a corrupted config directory for Aptana Studio (Eclipse), and I had to open it from the command line.
Well, if you knew the name of it you could have just done View > Go to Folder (Command-Shift-G), and typed (for example) ~/.subversion.
IE 8.1 Supports Firefox Plugins, Rendering Engine 283
KermodeBear writes in to note that according to Smashing Magazine, the newest version of Internet Explorer, codenamed "Eagle Eyes," supports Firefox plugins, the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines, and has scored a 71 / 100 on the Acid3 test. The article is pretty gee-whiz, and I don't entirely believe the claims that IE's JavaScript performance will trounce the others. (And note that the current Firefox, 3.0.8, scores 71 on Acid3, and Safari 3.1.2 hits 75.) No definitive date from Microsoft, but "sources" say that an IE 8.1 beta will be released in the summer.
Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster 191
An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published an article about MacRuby's new experimental 0.5 branch (project blog entry here). According to the included benchmarks, Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere."
Wii System Menu 4.0 Released 94
dougisfunny writes "The Wii System Menu 4.0 has been released. It adds a number of features that people have been waiting for, including the ability to use SDHC cards, as well as the ability to download and play things directly off of the SD/SDHC card rather than the internal memory. This was announced at GDC09 by Nintendo's President Saturo Iwata in his keynote address. More information can be found at Nintendo's website."
3D-Based CAPTCHAs Become a Reality 192
mateuscb writes "A new way of creating a CAPTCHA using 3D objects has become a reality. The idea was thought up independently by blogger Taylor Hayward and by the folks at YUNiTi.com. 'Similar to Hayward's idea, this new technology relies on our ability to identify objects in 3D instead of using alphanumeric characters. YUNiti's 3D Captcha, however, has three objects in the challenge and extends the list of images to any object, not limiting it to animals as in Hayward's idea. This increases the challenge's level of complication to prevent computers from successfully making the correct guesses.' I, for one, welcome the thought of not having to read more and more complex CAPTCHA. Lately, I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time."
Comment Functional (not procedural) (Score 1) 592
For me, learning functional programming in comp sci was the most eye opening. This was part of my programming languages course. We did functional programming in Lisp, but we had to use it purely -- we couldn't declare variables. That, combined with what my OS prof said once, something like "there is no useful program that doesn't take input and produce output," gave me proper insight to what a clean, purposeful software solution is.
With functional programming, where you have no variables, everything you produce is a function of your input. Constants and the source code itself consist of the input. And of course your only goal is to produce output.
You can make designs that achieve a lot of functionality with a small amount of code by following that idea. Lisp itself is proof of that.
You can also create emacs. I'll stop here.
Finding Fault With Google's Privacy Policy 155
orenh writes "Viacom has recently obtained a court order that requires Google to hand over a complete list of every video watched by YouTube users. These logs will include the login names and IP addresses of the users. Google are now asking Viacom if they can anonymize the logs before turning them over; Viacom hasn't responded yet. But this privacy nightmare could have been greatly reduced if Google had anonymized the data in advance. Google's privacy policy states that they keep personally identifiable information for 18 months. There is no real reason to do so; Google can achieve everything they need even if they anonymize their search logs after just one month, and it's time users told them to do so."
