Comment Re:Incompetent key handling. No surprise. (Score 1) 146
Are we still talking about the people who roll out custom Android firmware?
Comment Re:Why NOT? (Score 1) 262
Quote: "Adopting a new image format in Web browsers is a big decision. Once a format becomes a part of the Web, it will have to be supported in perpetuityâ"adding overhead to the browserâ"even if it largely fizzles and only gains a small niche following."
It's akin to if Web browsers were required to support failed formats like ANIM or HAM or IFF.
In practice that doesn't seem to be the case; see, for instance, the state of MNG support in Gecko-based browsers. On the other hand, the adoption of APNG in Firefox has been a catalyst for its spread into wider use.
France Outlaws Hashed Passwords 433
An anonymous reader writes "Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, '[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.' If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely."
Comment Re:Everything and Nothing (Score 1) 467
Then again, ed is the standard editor.
Comment Re:Statistics, statistics (Score 1) 401
It truly amazes me how lazy developers are when it comes to supporting new things. They whine and bitch and drag their feet and blame MS, rather than just admitting they have to learn something new and doing it.
I'd expect that a lot of developers just don't see the significance, as long as they can get a product out that works in a reasonable number of real cases. That's where their bread comes from, after all.
Comment Re:Life Imagined As One Big RPG (Score 1) 176
It's an awesome flight, but you only get one shot and in the end you still mess things up?
Comment Truly (Score 3, Funny) 100
2011 will be the year of DisplayPort on the desktop!
Happy Birthday, Linus 376
Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"
EU Wants To Redefine "Closed" As "Nearly Open" 239
Glyn Moody writes "A leaked copy (PDF) of Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework replaces a requirement in Version 1 for carefully-defined open standards by one for a more general 'openness': 'the willingness of persons, organizations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest.' It also defines an 'openness continuum' that includes 'non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome.' Looks like 'closed' is the new 'open' in the EU."
Comment Re:Not true... (Score 1) 744
I just went on and put XP back on it though, I'm very seriously considering putting Ubuntu on it now.
I can heartily recommend it. The last release came into a bit of a weird spot as far as graphics drivers were concerned, but now everything runs a lot smoother again and the accelerated desktop is properly vsynced as well. Compared to XP, there seems to be less disk rattling and throttling of fans, though battery life is about equal.
Just do a bit of googling up front; there were a few minor issues with my Samsung NC10 too, but nothing people hadn't thought to pre-package fixes for.
Comment Re:Backups require a process (Score 1) 183
So that means that about 200 days
That's okay, it's not like he has to stand there turning a crank while the bits are being moved. Even Windows has the possibility of scheduling scripted events, which most likely is the method applied here.
Wolfenstein Being Recalled In Germany 625
D1gital_Prob3 tips news that Activision's recently-released shooter, Wolfenstein, is being recalled in Germany due to the appearance of swastikas in the game. Such symbols are banned in Germany, and the German version of the game went through heavy editing to remove them. Apparently, they missed some. Activision said, "Although it is not a conspicuous element in the normal game ... we have decided to take this game immediately from the German market." Reader eldavojohn points out a review that has screenshot comparisons between the two versions of the game.
Comment Re:I don't get it. (Score 1) 190
The sad thing is that I've met plenty of computer geeks who basically say that physics is useless. They then go back to their beloved computers without realizing the tragic irony of what they just said.
Still, you're making that remark using a web browser running on top of a software stack made up of at least a multi-tasking OS kernel, a dynamic linker and an assortment of userspace libraries, written in various high-level programming languages with optimising compilers. It's not as if the transistors came up with all that by themselves.
Physics in itself is important, there's just no need for most people to be physicists.
Comment Re:Almost competing (Score 1) 706
Right, because so many people have issues where Windows breaks on their hardware.
Only every time something in the driver APIs changes or the hardware vendor in question otherwise can't be bothered to do their part properly. Which, of course, is simply unheard of.
Comment Re:Its been done for years already (Score 3, Informative) 711
OS X reports disk space better than Windows, Finder reports a 2.5MB file as taking 2,572,834 bytes of disk space.
Which version of Windows are you talking about? There would seem to be a "Size on disk" field in the properties dialog of at least XP and 7, and I'm pretty sure it's been there in several older versions.
