Comment Re:Bad idea idiots (Score 3, Insightful) 179
Not sure if you're trolling or not (you probably are), but in 2nd and 3rd world countries Internet Cafes and cellphones are the primary means of Internet access...
Comment Re:Slashdot community's constant hating on Firefox (Score 1) 315
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
Take a guess which one Mozilla cares about.
Comment Re:finally (Score 3, Insightful) 298
Regardless of who is setting the standard, it *is* an open standard, implementable by anyone who reads the spec. Flash is not. Big difference.
CERT Releases Basic Fuzzing Framework 51
infoLaw passes along this excerpt from Threatpost: "Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team has released a new fuzzing framework to help identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities from software products. The Basic Fuzzing Framework (BFF) is described as a simplified version of automated dumb fuzzing. It includes a Linux virtual machine that has been optimized for fuzz testing and a set of scripts to implement a software test."
Comment Re:Why the iPhone? (Score 2, Informative) 170
Because the full featured Firefox browser is coming to Android.
http://blog.vlad1.com/2010/02/02/android-progress-more-pixels-edition/
Comment To all of you selfish westerners complaining... (Score -1, Flamebait) 302
Fuck off.
Comment nobody would use it (Score -1, Troll) 249
suck it, you dumb slashdot filter
Comment Re:This is completely stupid. (Score 3, Insightful) 147
They hope to avoid liability.
Comment Re:Um...how do you figure? (Score 2, Interesting) 278
1: You're missing the point. The point is that developers will move to browser independent webapps rather than writing an iPhone+blackberry app+htc touch app, etc.
2: Web browsers are not appropriate for everything, but they're becoming increasingly faster, and increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks.
3: There's already lots of subscription websites - Mozilla need not do anything to support this - people can do this on their own.
4: The browser already has access to everything you listed: camera, accelerometers, GPS, and multitouch. And yes, the hardware is abstracted away by the platform and made available through a standard API.
Hand Written Clock
86
a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."
Comment Re:Saw this (Score 2, Insightful) 82
Isn't this more of a visualization than an instrument?
Bruce Perens On Combining GPL and Proprietary Software 218
jammag writes "Combining GPL and proprietary software is ever more common, especially in the world of embedded devices like cell phones. But the question is: how to combine them legally. As sticky as the issue is, there is an answer, as self titled "open source strategic consultant" Bruce Perens explains. The proper procedure entails fully understanding what type of open source software you're using, and knowing why you need to combine these disparate licenses. The problem, he notes, is that many companies don't know or care about doing this legally. 'They're used to just "clicking yes" with no regard to what they're committing themselves and their company to.' Hopefully Perens' guide can be read by more company execs — resulting in fewer lawsuits going forward (but we're not holding our breath)." update 21:31 GMT by SM: Bruce wrote in to make sure we knew he was not a lawyer, even though he is weighing in on a legal issue; updated to reflect.
Energy Star Program Needs an Overhaul 306
Martin Hellman writes "DeviceGuru.com ran my piece raising questions about the EPA's Energy Star program. For example, an Energy Star compliant TV that claims to draw 0.1 watts in sleep mode appears to do that — but only seems to sleep about 25% of the time that it is 'off.' The other 75% of the time it draws about 20 watts, for an effective sleep power draw from the user's perspective that is 150 times what the manufacturer claims. Based on the observations described, it is also questionable how many PC's really are sleeping when their screens are blank, even if the user has turned sleep mode on. Given the billions of dollars and tons of CO2 that are at stake, this situation demands more attention."
Scripts and Scaling In Online Games 61
CowboyRobot writes "Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems has written an article titled Scaling In Games & Virtual Worlds, saying that they 'should be perfect vehicles to show the performance gains possible with multicore chips and groups of cooperating servers. Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.' A group of researchers at Cornell wrote a related piece about improving game development and performance through better scripting."
Unemployment Claims Crash State Web Sites 233
1sockchuck writes "A sign of the times: a surge in filings for unemployment benefits has crashed online application systems in four states this week. Web sites in Ohio, New York, Kentucky and North Carolina have been knocked offline by unusually high volumes of jobless claims. Phone applications systems appearing to be faring even worse in many states. The thin silver lining: states are hiring workers for phone banks and buying new servers to prop up their web sites."
