Comment Re:I worked on Guitar Hero for the Wii. (Score 1) 163
Mod parent up! Thank you for the informative post, my friend.
Comment History of the cone icon? (Score 1) 85
Kudos to the dev team! This is one of open source's great success examples. Now, since I am posting anyway...
Why does VLC use an orange traffic cone for its icon? It has always seemed misplaced to me.
Why does VLC use an orange traffic cone for its icon? It has always seemed misplaced to me.
Comment Re:Is Media Source Extensions supported? (Score 1) 147
MSE support isn't in Firefox 36.
The Youtube-only thing is currently being targeted for Firefox 37, and enabling it in general for 38 or 39 once the standards-compliance issues are worked out.
Comment Re:You don't say! (Score 1) 580
Half of the sample is below the _state_ average. As in, below the average of a different sample.
Ignoring average vs median issues, what this says is that folks in SV are no more likely to get their kids vaccinated than folks in CA in general are.
Comment Re: Does It Matter? (Score 3, Insightful) 288
Not many free options for devs on a mac or windows box. vmware isn't free
How is vmware not free? They have free products for both baremetal and desktop virtualization. vmware player has been able to create new VMs for six years now.
I think the only feature missing from Player that any significant number of people would care about is snapshots.
You are correct for Windows, but VMWare Player does not exist for OSX. They only publish Fusion.
Comment Well, that was fast. (Score 2) 175
First an investment in Cyanogen in the morning, then Outlook for Android in the evening. All in a days work. Maybe they'll buy XDA Dev tomorrow.
Serious Network Function Vulnerability Found In Glibc 211
An anonymous reader writes: A very serious security problem has been found and patched in the GNU C Library (Glibc). A heap-based buffer overflow was found in __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function, which is used by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls. A remote attacker able to make an application call to either of these functions could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the program. The vulnerability is easy to trigger as gethostbyname() can be called remotely for applications that do any kind of DNS resolving within the code. Qualys, who discovered the vulnerability (nicknamed "Ghost") during a code audit, wrote a mailing list entry with more details, including in-depth analysis and exploit vectors.
Comment Re:WTF is an Oort Online? (Score 2) 181
The funny part is, I bet HTML5Test doesn't measure what you thinks it measures...
Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 243
a given OSS component typically ossifying
Clever turn of phrase! (slow golf clap)
Comment I think you mean if( 2==x ) (Score 1) 388
So if(x==2) would lose you marks because it wasn't if( x==2 ) which would be considered better by that teacher than if( x == 2)
Keep those constants on the left, my friend.
Comment A job for Little Snitch (Score 2) 49
I noticed this with Little Snitch, which I recently installed on my laptop. It allowed me to prevent the queries, for which I was quite grateful.
I'm not particularly happy with all of Spotlight's newly introduced web search components, either -- I wonder if there's a way to turn that off.
Comment Re:Nothing of value was lost, (Score 1) 220
While most "free" apps are spammy or coercive, there are tons that are not.... I've written many such applications myself over the decades, and continue to do so.
Exactly. As hobbies go, it is rather cheap compared to other common first-world hobbies. I would estimate between hardware and developer membership fees it is at most $1000 per year. Contrast with annual costs of about:
Fishing on your motorboat: $1000 in fuel and $3000 in repairs and depreciation
Snowboarding: $500 in lift tickets, $1500 in travel/food/lodging
Interest Clubs (SCA, Poodle Fanciers, whatever): $300 in suppliesand $1500 in travel/food/lodging
I agree with others that there is a problem finding well-made apps that come from dilettantes, but from the creator's point of view the expenses are rather small.
Making a business out of writing apps, well, that's another issue entirely. There's a reason I've never seriously considered it!
Comment Re:No, you really havent avenged anything. (Score 5, Insightful) 1350
Unfortunately, Stephane Charbonnier is one of the people who were killed in this latest attack. I really hope you're right that Charlie Hebdo will keep going, but it's a lot easier to recover from physical damage to offices than it is from having the staff that make the magazine what it is killed.
Comment Colored pixels -- stars or noise? (Score 1) 97
The cluster of very blue-white pixels and wire diffraction are clearly stars. If I zoom into a fairly dark region, I see lots of red and yellow pixels as well. Are those sensor noise?
Comment Re:Macbook Air? Mac mini? (Score 1) 78
The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line
.... Apple probably wants to drop both but there's a contingent of very loud complainers who would raise the global noise level should Apple actually do so.
You're right. Some of that noise might well be internal. I bet Apple's own developers would be pretty unhappy without those product lines.
And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old
There's a bit of a GPU advantage. It was enough that when when I upgraded my 2009-era Mini-based DVR last month I went with the new Mini rather than a near-equivalent Macmini 6,2.
