Comment Java's strengths are "not easy to ignore" (Score 5, Funny) 371
Challenge Accepted!
Comment Re:Esoteric material? (Score 1) 329
I'm convinced that he only got that job because Hunt and Health start with the same letter. There was an Embarrassing Incident in his previous role as Culture Secretary.
Richard III Suffered an Ignominious Burial, Researchers Find 145
An anonymous reader writes "Richard III may have been the King of England and the subject of a Shakespearean play, but even that couldn't keep him safe from ending up in a hastily-dug grave that ultimately became part of a parking lot, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity."
Music and Movies Could Trigger Mobile Malware 88
mask.of.sanity writes "Lights, sounds and magnetic fields can be used to activate malware on phones, new research has found. The lab-style attacks defined in a paper (PDF) used pre-defined signals hidden in songs and TV programmes as a trigger to activate embedded malware. Malware once activated would carry out programmed attacks either by itself or as part of a wider botnet of mobile devices."
Comment Re:Fascinating ... (Score 1) 320
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?
DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.
except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.
Well, that's utterly dodging the question. iTunes has two prices for most of its movies - £1-5 for a "rental" you must watch in a 30 period, or £8-15 to "buy" and you can keep until Apple go out of business. I kinda agree that the "buy" option is a long-term rental in disguise, and I wasn't arguing against you wanting to remove DRM from it. But the explicit "rental" option does have a considerable price discount, and makes it clear what you are getting (and what you are not getting) for your money. Are you saying that iTunes "rental" option should send a non-DRM movie file, and just ask you nicely not to keep it?
What about something like Netflix? You pay one month at a time, for one month's access to their library. It's explicitly a rental arrangement, and if they go out of business you don't lose anything you'd paid for in the past. Do you think their movies should be without DRM too? How do you stop someone from buying a subscription, downloading enough movies to occupy themselves for a year, and then cancelling the subscription after one month? Or is that not something that should be stopped, and Netflix would have to "just alter their business model" to cope with people doing it?
Comment Re:Fascinating ... (Score 1) 320
So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?
Comment Disambiguation (Score 1) 344
Why would we need so many people to work with Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes anyway?
Comment Re:terrorism, pure and simple (Score 1) 285
Can we quit tossing around the bloody "T-word" every time a crime is committed? This is VANDALISM.
No, I think the OP's remark is entirely justifiable.
This particular news item may only have been about mixing up samples and vandalizing a lab, but in the UK there have been numerous examples of animal rights protestors setting bombs and making death threats to academics. Life-threatening intimidation with an expressly political aim is precisely the definition of terrorism.
Comment Re:Animal Cruelty (Score 3) 285
vandal != terrorist. You're not allowed to get away with that.
No, I think the OP's remark is entirely justifiable.
This particular news item may only have been about mixing up samples and vandalizing a lab, but in the UK there have been numerous examples of animal rights protestors setting bombs and making death threats to academics. Life-threatening intimidation with an expressly political aim is precisely the definition of terrorism.
Comment Update too little too late (Score 3, Informative) 299
The "update" (retraction) of this story was posted after the story had left the front page. Slashdot readers are only going to see yesterday's unjustified criticism of Apple and their supposed agenda. How many times in the next six months are the Android-trolls going to refer to this story as an example of Apple's control-freak tendency, without being aware that it was based on a lie?
Comment What's it for? (Score 2) 49
The only use I can see for new TLD is to distinguish between different possible uses of the same name. e.g. consider how many web sites now have $(thing)-movie.com or $(thing)-band.com : if
I just don't see a case for corporations buying their own TLD. Is there a substantial usability or branding difference between www.disney and disney.com? Everybody will just type "disney" into the address bar anyway, it will find the right site even if it has to go via google...
Why Hasn't 3D Taken Off For the Web? 320
First time accepted submitter clockwise_music writes "With HTML5 we're closer to the point where a browser can do almost everything that a native app can do. The final frontier is 3D, but WebGL isn't even part of the HTML5 standard, Microsoft refuses to support it, Apple wants to push their native apps and it's not supported in the Android mobile browser. Flash used to be an option but Adobe have dropped mobile support. To reach most people you'd have to learn Javascript, WebGL and Three.js/Scene.js for Chrome/Firefox, then you'd have to learn Actionscript + Flash for the Microsofties, then learn Objective-C for the apple fanboys, then learn Java to write a native app for Android. When will 3D finally become available for all? Do you think it's inevitable or will it never see the light of day?"
Comment Re:Yeah I remember that (Score 2) 64
You may both be thinking of the ZX80 or ZX81, which used this hack to drive the screen. The ZX Spectrum (released 1982) had proper display circuitry and did not suffer from this issue.
The ZX80's display hack was all a cheap way to get the data streamed out of RAM. To do this they placed the cpu's program counter(!) at the start of display memory, every time it tried to execute an instruction it would read a byte from memory - which was picked up to generate the display - but the data wasn't returned to the CPU and instead it was fed a byte of zero bits. 0x00 is the NOP instruction on Z80, so it would just increment the program counter and read the next byte. This means successive bytes appear in sequence on the data bus, without having to include a second agent that was capable of making accesses into the RAM - a considerable design simplification. Later, for the Spectrum, a separate circuit which generated and incremented its own address was able to access memory, and it had to be arranged that it would get priority over the CPU (which meant the CPU was considerably slower when running programs in the bottom 16k of memory).
Comment Re:Wrong % (Score 1) 738
Developers had been on the App Store. And now they're in both, because you have to be crazy to turn down an installed base of 400 million customers for your app.
A lot of developers aren't on both though, and that's because it isn't crazy to ignore 400 million users if you don't expect any of them will pay.
Comment Re:Wasn't there a time when... (Score 1) 396
I'm actually an advocate for taking the action film to its logical conclusion: a film entitled Blowing Stuff Up, about nothing at all, that features at least 90 minutes of well-known stars in a world of explosions, car chases, gun fights, etc doing what they're doing for no particular reason. Hey, at least it wouldn't pretend to be something sophisticated.
Sounds like Top Gear...
