Comment 15 minutes (Score 2) 47
Clearly all the Slashdot commenters are busy patching their bosses' JBoss servers against this vulnerability.
Free Software Faces a Test With Qt 177
An anonymous reader writes with an article in TechRadar. From the article: "Thanks to Nokia's jump to Windows Phone 7, from the frying pan into the fire, its Free Software darling, the Qt toolkit, has been left living on vague promises and shell-shocked, hollow enthusiasm. Nokia has pledged some continued investment, bonuses for developers who stick with the platform and even a phone or two that might use it. But the truth is that Qt is deprecated, the project has stalled, and its future is uncertain."
TwitPic Will Sell Your Photos, But No Cash For You 102
Andy Smith writes "Twitter picture-posting service TwitPic has defended its plans to sell users' photos, but still won't cut users in on the deal. TwitPic founder Noah Everett claims that the move has been made to 'protect' users of the service."
Comment >> According to the slides, ... (Score 0) 623
From TFA:
>> According to the slides, the Ceylon Project aims to create a programming language and SDK for business computing, designed with an eye to the successes and failures of the Java. It is built to run on the JVM
>>> the Ceylon Project is built to run on the JVM
Whoops!
Comment Nintendo Exec Says Phone Games Are Dying (Score 2) 350
"Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata went on the offensive today against his smartphone counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by individuals like Peter Vesterbacka is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Iwata said that innovation wasn't coming from independent game coders, but from large and established companies like his own. Iwata also pointed to the major concern over the price model for smartphone games. Compared to games on established consoles, which hover around fifty dollars, mobile titles like Angry Birds run for 99 cents and make their developers little money due to the policies of online app stores. At these price points, "there's no motivation [for] high-value video games," Iwata said. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for console games had yet to be completely figured out."
Okay, not exactly, but Iwata-san did say something against smartphones at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a mere 13 days ago.
Comment Re:confusing multiple negatives (Score 1) 104
Mandate from CRTC disallows operation.
Decision from cabinet to overturn the mandate allows operation.
Ruling from court to reject the decision disallows operation.
Unscrambled as requested.
Comment Re:Miking up 'open' and 'standard' (Score 1) 663
There's a mistaken assumption here: Google doesn't save $6.5 million as long as Youtube is still encoding H.264 video. This is a purely political move on Google's part.
That is right, but if Google and Mozilla get their way, Google will have saved themselves $6.5 million a year by not needing to encode H.264 anymore for YouTube, and everyone else for not needing to put in support anymore. I seem to have tripped up in my explanations again.
Comment Re:Miking up 'open' and 'standard' (Score 1) 663
The other side of that coin is that, if Google decided to include H.264 support in Chrome, other browser makers, without or with little money, could have been unable to pay the royalties needed to be paid to patent owners to support it in their browsers. Does Google saving itself $6.5 million annually pale in comparison to Google saving itself and everyone else up to $6.5 million annually?
The Web does not need H.264 to function, so if everyone drops support for it preemptively, then even the small browser makers (I'm thinking of Flock here, which is based on Chromium but has a user base of its own) won't need to pay royalties to anyone.
This is like the GIF patents by Unisys* driving adoption of the PNG format, except that the patents are being assessed now because we know of a few formats that are** suitable for the job but unencumbered already. For instance, WebM can, like H.264, be implemented by anyone, but in addition to that, WebM intentionally doesn't require that royalties be paid. It can become a standard, like PNG originally wasn't a standard but then became an ISO/IEC standard 8 years later.
________________
* = As well as other factors such as the lack of true-color support, alpha and ICC in a lossless format, but that's off-topic.
** = May not be for now, due to lack of hardware acceleration, but could become in the future. Some people don't really care about power usage or CPU usage, so it's already suitable for them.
Comment A New Idea... (Score 4, Insightful) 167
Disable your ad blocker. Ding, instant shitload of ads.
Rogue Satellite Shuts Down US Weather Services 202
radioweather writes "On Sunday, the drifting rogue 'zombie' Galaxy 15 satellite with a stuck transmitter interfered with the satellite data distribution system used by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS), effectively shutting down data sharing between NWS offices nationwide, as well as weather support groups for the US Air force. This left many forecasters without data, imagery, and maps. Interference from Galaxy 15 affected transmissions of the SES-1 Satellite, which not only serves NOAA with data relay services, but also is used to feed TV programming into virtually every cable network in the US. NOAA's Network Control Facility reports that the computer system affected was NOAA's Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) used to issue forecasts and weather bulletins which uses the weather data feed. They also state the problem is likely to recur again this month before the satellite drifts out of range and eventually dies due to battery depletion."
Comment Re:And in other news... (Score 1) 382
That's because you can't really use HTML 5 to make an ad that is going to be served to users of IE below version 9, in all of which support for HTML 5 does not exist.
So what do you use to advertise IE 9? Either Flash, or Java, or HTML 4 + JavaScript, or some other solution.
Java is bulky. HTML 4 + JavaScript is not that fast in IE 8 and earlier, so it's liable to freeze IE up and disrupt page navigation. Other solutions may mess up even further. You're left with Flash.
UK Wants ISPs To Be Responsible For Third Party Content Online 158
An anonymous reader writes "A key UK government minister, Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries), has ominously proposed that internet service providers should introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the Internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint. Vaizey anticipates that Internet users could use the 'service' to request that any material deemed to be 'inaccurate' (good luck with that) or privacy infringing is removed. No doubt any genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression."
Comment Google is an ISP? (Score 4, Funny) 71
And I thought Google TiSP was just a joke...
Comment Re:http://www.jerseys-2010.com (Score 2, Funny) 148
I believe you meant http://www.jerseys-2010.xn--mgba3a4fra/
Comment The ccTLDs in question (Score 4, Informative) 148
Iran, Islamic Republic of. ccTLDs: xn--mgba3a4f16a, xn--mgba3a4fra.
The Unicode whitelist on Slashdot is preventing us from having the Farsi reading, so see here.
