It's not that hard to get a certificate from a commercial certificate authority. Sure it costs some money, but then so does buying a SSL certificate, or a Java code signing certificate, etc.

You can get them from Verisign, Equifax, GlobalTrust, etc. Then you avoid the 'Test Mode', and you also have the advantage of being able to sign your application itself, which gives you a nicer warning dialog than the default 'This application has no digital signature' popup you get when trying to open a downloaded EXE (which I'm sure nobody even reads anymore, so it's a moot point).

That whole controversy about "omg windows will only allow approved drivers!11!" is really just a joke, I'm surprised people still believe in it.

Microsoft has always pushed h.264? Ever heard of WMV?

You can't convert DisplayPort to VGA cheaply. It needs a complex controller in it...DisplayPort is all digital, VGA is analog. The reason you can convert DVI to VGA so cheaply, is that most DVI-out ports, carry both digital and analog signals. (I believe some mac laptop displayport outputs also carry analog signals, but those are in the minority)

My TV has a VGA port and a HDMI port. The resolution of the panel is 1366x768. The funny thing is, over DVI, you can only send 1280x720 or 1920x1080, and they get scaled by the TV to 1366x768. If you want pixel-accurate, you HAVE to use the VGA port if you want to get the full 1366x768 pixels.

It's already been announced. They're calling their new portable 3D stereo vision handheld the 3DS. Likely with being easily held in your hand and not requiring glasses, it wont flop like the virtual boy.

Huh? I don't think I've ever seen an arcade game with a motion controller like the wiimote, where it senses the motion of your controller. Are you only talking about the pointing feature? The technology behind that is completely different from the "light guns" used in arcade games (of which there are actually a couple different kinds of tech). (The wiimote actually has an IR camera in it). Apple did not invent smartphones, but when the iPhone came out, it was significantly better than anything on the market. Palm was getting long in the tooth, Blackberry too focused on the enterprise, Windows Mobile always sucked (They imported too much from the desktop, such as the start button, and crashes that require reboots) and Nokia never really had true smartphones. Their standard phones were among the best out there, but you couldn't compare what they had to even windows mobile.

Nothing prevents any of those contributors from forking MySQL and continuing to work on it in the same manner as they did before. Except maybe their new boss paying them to not do that. But then that could happen to any project, no? All the major contributors get bought out?

Is there any proof that Google is violating the GPL or CDDL? As far as I know, all the code that Google modified has been released back to the public, which complies with the license.

Sadly, I believe Flash with hardware accelerated 3D will become standard in browsers long before WebGL does. (You need about 80% adoption among all web surfers before major projects start really getting built for a particular technology). So just having it available in the very latest release of a single browser is meaningless, if 75% of users are running other browsers or older versions.

Woah...so Apple is less evil than Google? Seeing as how Google exposed all your contacts to the public with that whole Buzz fiasco.

Apparently it doesn't have enough name recognition for you to get it right...

They don't claim to have invented either the route panorama or the google street view panorama, instead what they are proposing is an easy way to fit the two together seamlessly as you zoom in or out.

I feel much better about stealing music (sorry...I mean obtaining commercial artistic works for free via copyright infringement, since it's not theft, it's A-OK!) now that I know how bad the industry treats its artists. Stealing $1000 worth of MP3's really only causes $23 of damage to my favorite artists -- that lets me sleep much better at night. Thanks to the previous article, I already feel the same way about movies too. Hopefully someone comes on and publishes an article showing the same thing about video games and computer software as well, so I don't have to feel bad about pirating them either.

Yeah seems silly. They went to all the trouble of running plugins in a separate process, but it's still single threaded somehow? I don't get it.