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Submission + - Sid Meier's New Game is About Starships (gamespot.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The next game from the mind of veteran strategy and simulation game designer — Sid Meier — has been revealed. 2K and Firaxis Games have announced Sid Meier's Starships, a turn-based interstellar strategy game scheduled to arrive in early 2015 for Windows, OS X, and iOS (iPad). In the game, you control a fleet of starships as you journey through the galaxy to complete missions, protect planets and their inhabitants, and build a planetary federation. As you trek through the stars, you will be challenged to expand your federation's influence and reach. You shall also amass futuristic technology and take part in combat using a deep roster of customizable ships. When designing Starships, Meier was intrigued by the idea of exploring the next chapter in the story of Civilization: Beyond Earth. "What happens after we colonize our new home and eventually build starships to take to the stars? What has become of our long-lost brothers and sisters from the planet Earth?", Meier visions. "My goal was to create an experience that focuses on starship design and combat within a universe filled with interstellar adventure, diplomacy, and exploration."

Submission + - Questions Raised About Apple Software Quality 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”. "I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X. "With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart." I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."

Submission + - Google Drops More Windows 0-days

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's security researchers have published another pair of Windows security flaws that Microsoft hasn't got a fix for, continuing the disagreement between the companies about when and how to disclose security bugs. Like previously, these vulnerabilities were disclosed via the Google Security Research issue tracker. The first bug affects Windows 7 only and results in minor information disclosure of power settings. Microsoft says, and Google agrees, that this does not meet the threshold for a fix. The second bug is more significant. In certain situations, Windows doesn't properly check the user identity when performing cryptographic operations, which results in certain shared data not being properly encrypted. Microsoft responded quickly and said that the latter issue is being worked on. Yet this statement does nothing to address the underlying disconnect between the two companies' policies. It appears that Google is going to continue to publish flaws that haven't yet been patched, leaving dangerous security gaps for Microsoft customers.

Comment Re:Stupid question- no source- no accountability (Score 1) 186

by jones_supa (#48845489) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can I Trust Android Rooting Tools?

If you can't even begin to vet the source there is no accounting for the bugs and potential back doors. We don't know what the adversaries intentions might be. While it could be profit driven as is the case with most malware it could also be espionage, spying on dissidents, or something else. Of which there maybe no acting on the bug/backdoor. That would make it significantly more difficult to detect in a closed source application.

After that, the next step would be to get someone to provably audit that open source code. We have seen that open source is no guarantee that the eyeballs are actually there. Even some malicious party could distribute something heinous and just get away with it by saying "relax, it's open source".

Submission + - With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The lack of a vertical tab strip (or "Tree Style Tab" as the Firefox extension is called) has been under a lot of discussion under Chrome/Chromium bug tracker. Some years ago, vertical tabs existed as an experimental feature enabled with a "secret" command line parameter, but that feature was eventually removed from the browser. Since then, Google has been rather quiet about whether such feature is still on the roadmap. Now, a Google engineer casts some light on the issue. He says that a tree-style interface for tabs would be overly complex as a native implementation, but Google would back the idea of improving the extensions interface to support a sidebar-like surface to render the tab UI on, if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.

Comment Re:No, Microsoft sucks, but Red Hat may be worse. (Score 1) 361

by jones_supa (#48842987) Attached to: Linus On Diversity and Niceness In Open Source
It's just damn hard to do, as software is so complex these days. Even if you come up with a better idea of how things should be done, you need a good sized team to make it happen. That's why Red Hat takes the pie: it has the resources (armies of paid developers) to make this stuff happen. Well, there's always Kickstarter... ;)

Submission + - Geeks Who Run Linux On Macs

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Apple has always had attractive and stylish hardware, but there are always some customers opting to run Linux instead of OS X on their Macs. But why? One might think that a polished commercial desktop offering designed for that specific lineup of computers might have less rough edges than a free open source one. Actually there's plenty of motivations to choose otherwise. A redditor asked about this trend and got some very interesting answers. What are your reasons?

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