Comment Re:She's a bit late to the party, (Score 2) 155
She already has one.
Unfortunately, it's kdawson.
Comment Re:GPL requires no DRM? (Score 1) 717
and Best Buy would clearly be responsible for making sure the source code was available
Uh, no. For example, CompUSA used to sell various Linux distributions. They, of course, had a store in Boston that was within walking distance of FSF headquarters. They were not required to provide the source code.
NASA Creates an Alien's Eye View of Solar System 53
Flash Modin writes "Using the Discover supercomputer — which is capable of 67 trillion calculations per second — astronomers at NASA Goddard have created a series of images of what our solar system would look like to an alien astronomer at various points in time. Their simulations track the interactions of 75,000 dust grains in the Kuiper Belt, and show that while the planets would be too dim to detect directly, aliens could deduce the presence of Neptune from its effects on the icy region. Strikingly, the images resemble one taken by Hubble of the star Fomalhaut. NASA has put out a cute video to go with the announcement as well."
Comment Re:What good is... (Score 1) 360
That made absolutely no sense.
Comment Re:Pointless battles (Score 4, Interesting) 360
neither you nor I fixed those bugs, either.
Have you tried fixing any Mozilla bugs? I have and it's a royal pain in the ass. You first post your patch to the bug itself, which is simple enough. Then the main cabal of developers critique your patch, and if it doesn't exactly conform in every possible way to what they would have coded themselves, they will reject it with little, if any, explanation. After you finally get an explanation out of someone, you can continue to submit changes to see if any will appease them. Of course, you will have accidentally violated a minor style guideline, but this won't be pointed out to you until you've submitted changes for their other critiques six times. After you've fixed that issue, they'll think of some other hoop that you'll have to jump through even though the patch fixes all aspects of the defect at this point. After another 16 edits of the three line patch that doesn't have any security implications and doesn't change any portion of the API, they'll ask you for a unit test that wouldn't test anything but the API for which they already have unit tests.
I'm all for being careful and making a stable, secure product, but I expect people to not be completely retarded about the process of writing software. Not even the system that delivers EAMs has a process this annoying for fixing trivial defects.
And *that* is why Mozilla defects don't get fixed for years.
Comment Re:What good is... (Score 1) 360
Building an entire site or app in shockwave or flash
If you're using Adobe products, you don't build websites with Flash, you build them with Flex. The applications then run on the Flash or Air platforms.
Comment Re:no need for srand; (Score 2, Informative) 84
Perl itself calls srand() if it hasn't been called (regardless of what platform it's running on). You don't need to do it explicitly.
What Went Wrong At Yahoo 162
kjh1 writes "Paul Graham writes about what he felt went wrong at Yahoo. He has first-hand experience — his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while. In a nutshell, he felt that Yahoo was too conflicted about whether they were a technology company or a media company. 'If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.' This in part led to hiring bad programmers, or at least not going single-mindedly after the very best ones. They also lacked the 'hacker' culture that Google and Facebook still seem to have, and that is found in many startup tech companies. 'As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn't have that to distract them.'"
Comment Re:Nobody believed it at the time (Score 1) 204
JPEG is horrible for text. You should have used PNG.
Comment Re:My 300 baud modem shivered... (Score 2, Informative) 181
The reason we used them was because it was illegal to connect to the copper on a POTS line back
That became legal in 1968 with the Carterphone ruling. You probably had an acoustic coupler in 1974, because the modular jack wasn't introduced until 1976.
Comment Not an issue (Score 5, Informative) 300
One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu.
Probably not. From the article:
The $27 million, Italian-built observation deck sports the biggest window ever flown in space. In all, there are seven windows that will offer 360-degree views.
The 11 astronauts aboard the shuttle-station complex opened the door Friday to the $380 million Tranquility, also made in Italy for the European Space Agency. The door leading from Tranquility into the observation deck was opened soon afterward, and that's when shuttle pilot Terry Virts and Kay Hire encountered the cover problem.
So, now even submitters aren't reading the article? Damn...
Comment Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... (Score 2, Funny) 260
But yes, a titanium-headed hammer would be stupid. Titanium also has poor surface hardness, so it would get dented really badly.
Right, no one would make those.
Chinese Man Gets 30 Months For Fake Cisco Sales 161
alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures."
Comment Re:Pricey (Score 4, Funny) 458
I just don't want to pay the "KDE tax". I wonder if I could get a refund if I refuse to accept the license.
Comment Re:Fast forward... (Score 1) 249
The slides can also be found here here on Azul Systems' website (i.e. the company Cliff works at).
