Comment Re:Writing specs IS programming (Score 1) 547
There are plenty of open source technical specs.
Comment Not an immediate cure (Score 2, Insightful) 501
Firefox has already committed to supported theora natively. Are they going to dump that now that VP8 is open? Or are they going to support two codecs now? That would just recreate the problem an open source VP8 was meant to solve.
More problematically, patents. I doubt most people owning h264 patents want an open source competitor, and the media companies are probably more comfortable with an IP protected media format. Google has a lot of money, but patent battles could carry on for years and put the ubiquity of VP8 into doubt, much like the problems with BSD.
Comment Re:irritating scrabble players (Score 1) 377
Well the issue is that there are many words no one will ever come across in their entire life except on a scrabble board. I immediately lost interest in scrabble as soon as I realized winning was a measure of memorizing disused words.
Comment Re:Awesome (Score 2) 356
Really? I browse slashdot every day and have for the past 10 years and I don't recall hearing anything about "Songbird". I find it implausible that it's been widely heralded as the Linux iTunes alternative.
Comment Re:And Java?... (Score 1) 392
Unlike Solaris, Java is open. It's GPL'd. If that's not good enough, you can get JDKs from other vendors like IBM. Oracle might try to close Java development. However, it could then be forked by open source developers. An outdated FAQ seems to show some binary only pieces remaining in the JDK downloads, but I'm not sure how critical they are. And they may have been replaced by now anyway. Hopefully they are less problematic than "Open" Solaris's closed bits.
Comment Re:Brilliant Plan (Score 1) 2424
I guess it's a matter of increasing the fines down the road then. In Virginia, I can get auto insurance or pay 500 a year for not having it. It's cheaper to have auto insurance.
If the current fines aren't enough I'm sure the insurance companies will lobby for greater fines. They've had their nose deep in it since the beginning of this process--I'm sure their actuarials have done the calculations and know where they stand.
Comment Re:GPU acceleration and Opera (Score 2, Insightful) 391
I don't see any fundamental difference between native support of jpeg and native support of video codecs.
Comment Re:Not Stallman! Not ever! (Score 1) 737
If there was no such thing as software copyright, nothing would change for the purposes of my job. Yes, I program for a living, and no, I don't work for an "open source" company. There's tons of business code out there that won't write itself, and will always need to be paid for. My employer pays me for my time and expertise, not my creations per se.
Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
"Limited Edition" SSD Has Fastest Storage Speed 122
Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."
Comment Re:30 to 40 thousand lines isn't large by any meas (Score 3, Interesting) 532
I inherited a code base of 1.5 million lines of code at the last job I was at. Thankfully I wasn't the only one responsible for it. My advice to the original poster is to add lots of logging information. Log statements should document what the code is doing at any point in time and tell you where it is doing it. If it's java you can get the stack trace from anywhere--this is very handy for logging.
Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos 428
wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.
Comment Re:you can say whatever you want (Score 3, Interesting) 307
MS software for such things is mostly a waste of money. You'd have to be using fairly advanced features of Office software to notice any differences between open office and MS office.
Using open source applications in their current form is really not that hard, especially for people coming from a Windows world. If an employee can't handle that, then they probably aren't clever enough to handle most office work.
I also don't buy that admins are more expensive for Linux than Windows, though I'd consider evidence to the contrary. I agree that the cost of employees eclipses all other business expenses. I just can't see that Windows ability is really any cheaper than Linux ability.
For all that, however, MS license costs are nowhere near as ridiculous as stuff like SAP, AIX, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, and Oracle.
Comment Re:And yet the public... (Score 3, Informative) 373
Just researching La Hague, looks like a non-issue. They found an increase, but it was not statistically significant.
Comment Missing the real issues (Score 5, Informative) 143
The backdoor in question is likely only available on Google's internal network. If it's guarded by VPN, this is fairly secure. Of course, there are many ways to hack into a company's internal network, as the Chinese hack demonstrates. But the law enforcement interface isn't uniquely problematic in this regard. Once you're into the internal network, there are all types of things you can do.
The real problem here is pen register taps, and it's application to email. The police can get as much "traffic analysis" information as they want without a warrant. This law enforcement interface was designed to allow easy access to this information, further invading our privacy through warrantless activities.
* All email header information other than the subject line, including the email addresses of the people to whom you send email, the email addresses of people that send to you, the time each email is sent or received, and the size of each email that is sent or received.
* Your IP (Internet Protocol) address and the IP address of other computers on the Internet that you exchange information with, with timestamp and size information.
* The communications ports and protocols used, which can be used to determine what types of communications you are sending using what types of applications.
