Define "mod-friendly." My guess is "not very" but there's this:

The reason I say "not very" is that presumably that's intended to satisfy modders due to an otherwise complete lack of modability.

Of course, that may be designed to bring something like mods to consoles in a way that Microsoft and Sony will allow, so who knows.

Then that's new since they originally moved it to the App Store, because I remember having to enter a credit card number to be allowed to download the "free" download. I don't remember whether or not the Apple Account I created was for that or not (pretty sure I needed it earlier solely to get access to Apple's Developer Program through my employer), but I do remember being forced to enter a credit card number despite Xcode being free.

Odd, that's what the Comcast rep told me that last time I looked into getting faster Internet. Are you telling me that Comcast lied directly to me? Because as far as I can tell through their website, it's true, the only way I can get the faster tier is to upgrade to "Triple Play," it's just not offered any other way. And in order to use "Triple Play" you have to use their Xfinity box. I specifically asked if I could keep my cable modem and they flat-out told me "no."

That's all I can get without doing the "Triple Play" bullshit where I'd have to get TV and home phone service too, as well as install their own router and in-home wifi Xfinity thing.

So, yes, it's effectively all they'd offer me. Getting a faster speed would require me to rent a cable modem from them despite the fact I already own a DOCSIS 3 capable modem and have a working wifi router.

No, of course I can't watch it, I don't own an 8K TV or let alone a 4K TV.

But what I'm more curious is: can I even stream it? Because I'm stuck with Comcast, so I'm limited to something like 20Mbps download speed. ("Something like" because that's the maximum, not the guaranteed, which is 0Mbps. Yay monopolies!) 4K video on YouTube apparently requires more than that!

So forget watching it, I can't even stream it in real time.

And I live in an area where there "is" competition. I could also get the same 20Mbps speed from RCN, plus Verizon offers FiOS in the area! But not to me, despite it literally running down the street I live on.

Unless you have NoScript installed, then it does literally nothing.

Half the point to the original Phoenix browser was to allow shit like Reader Mode and Pocket to be offered as optional addons.

Firefox seems to have entirely forgotten this.

Firefox is multithreaded. Apparently it's using 86 threads right now as I type this.

I haven't a clue what those threads are doing since nearly everything clearly takes place in the UI thread given the number of times the browser freezes to deal with JavaScript, but - it's got a whole lot of threads for some reason.

This sounds like a feature almost no one can even use.

I'm curious how many Slashdot readers even have a VR headset. I sure don't nor do I have any interest in getting one. It's one of those things I might be interested in "some day" but at present, I've done an Oculus Rift demo before. It was neat but it didn't make me think "I need to get this!"

This seems like a feature that not only does no one want, that nearly no one can even use.

Maybe hold off on the VR support until there's an install base? Or anyone actually wants such a thing?

These days I'm pretty sure it's just "download it from the App Store" - to the point where I'm not sure you even can download it any other way.

But that does mean you need to a valid Apple Account and it also means you need a valid credit card. It was fun convincing someone to let me "use" a corporate credit card to download a free copy of Xcode.

And OS X isn't the worst for that. Windows 8.1 has this lovely thing where if you drag a file over the directory tree in Explorer, it will spin up every single goddamned disc and network drive and freeze the drag operation until it's done.

Nope! You need to pay them to do that, and there's a limit to how many devices your organization can install apps to. I'm not sure what the limit is for the base plan since I only have ever used the Apple developer program through my employer. But there's a whole process to get a device "provisioned" to be able to run apps you're developing and there's a limit based on your plan with Apple.

No, of course not, Xcode is a free download and you can write programs and apps for any iDevice for free. (Ignoring the cost of the Mac you need to buy in the first place, of course.)

You just can't let other people use them without forking over $100/year. (At all for iOS or without making users disable scary security dialogs for OS X.)

My best guess is that they really wanted to include a "massively multiplayer" game in some fashion and what better representative of MMOs is there than WoW?

But I agree, they would have been far better served just leaving MMOs out entirely than including WoW in the first iteration. WoW probably deserves to be in a "gaming hall of fame" - eventually.

There's a huge catalog of games and genres that are just flat-out more deserving of recognition than MMOs in general and WoW in particular. WoW can wait.

Microsoft hasn't made a JVM in - well, over a decade, at this point.

Java applets are "safe" because they're sandboxed. By default a Java application can do anything a native application can, and just blindly running a native application in the browser is clearly a horrible, horrible idea.

The majority of Java vulnerabilities are new and clever ways to escape the sandbox, thereby gaining the ability to do anything the user could do.

Of course there have been other neat vulnerabilities like CVE-2014-6601 where apparently Java's JIT can be tricked into just running native code and this can be exploited remotely. I'm unclear on the exact details of that one.

Yep.

First thing a new installation of Skype does is download every single message you've received for the past several months, I think.

I haven't tried deleting a history file (they're actually SQLite databases) but I think the same thing happens in that case: Skype sees that it isn't up to date on messages and redownloads them.