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Comment: Re:Content Paradox (Score 1) 299

by Sloppy (#40191891) Attached to: Rights Holders See Little Point Creating Legal Content Sources

Our cars come with all these different paint jobs:

  • Pink with orange dots
  • Pink with orange rainbows (warning: rainbow contains only one color, but still recognized as "probably gay" by 52% of people polled)
  • Pink with orange Jesus fishes
  • Pink with orange swastikas
  • Orange with pink swastikas (warning: car does not actually start)
  • Pink with reddish-orange swastikas
  • Pink with yellow swastikas
  • Pink with orange Coca Cola ad

How many more paint schemes do car manufacturers need to offer? Your complaints about our cars' appearances ring hollow. Quit your bitching!

(And why do people keep bringing up the fact that in 1997 we purchased a radical new law that no person is allowed to repaint their car, and that no person is allowed to manufacture or sell paint? WTF does that have to do with anything?)

Comment: What relative cost did to newsgathering (Score 1) 163

by Animats (#40191559) Attached to: War and Nookd — eBook Regex Gone Haywire

You'd think that cutting down the reproduction and stocking costs of a book would free up money for other tasks, but in fact what happens is that editing, design and promotion become an opportunity for cutting what is now a more significant proportion of expenses.

Right. That's what happened to newspapers. Newspaper production used to require a huge labor force. Look at all those people. 67 linotypes! A room full of proofreaders to catch typesetting errors. Hundreds of people moving paper around, making printing plates, loading them onto presses, running the presses, handling the printed newspapers. Compared to the army needed to print the papers, the reporting staff was tiny, a small expense. The reporting and editing staff, the composing room, and the printing plant were all in the same building. Any separation would slow things down, and the competition would "scoop" them.

Now compare a modern large newspaper plant. There are people around, but not many. There's essentially no direct labor. All paper and plate handling is mechanized. The files to be printed are created elsewhere and come in over a data connection. The printed newspapers leave in big trucks. Many different papers are printed in the same plant. The plant is far from the reporting and editorial staff, and is run by a separate corporation from the "newspaper".

So, to newspaper management, reporters are now the big labor cost, the first thing to cut.

Comment: Re:Backwards from reality (Score 1) 127

by SuperKendall (#40191543) Attached to: Apple, Google: Battle of the Cloud Maps

Google Map is not only usable from Android devices. It is usable from any desktop out there

And Apple can not deliver a desktop map because....

I understand what you mean about scope of use, but in the end it doesn't matter what the scope is, if enough care is put into the mapping solution. Even if they don't deliver a desktop version of the mapping service.

Comment: Backwards from reality (Score 2, Insightful) 127

by SuperKendall (#40191255) Attached to: Apple, Google: Battle of the Cloud Maps

Apple are highly unlikely to put out an API for other to use as they wish like Google did.

That is 100% wrong.

The strongest reason I see for Apple to replace Google with their own mapping solution is in fact to give iOS developers an API they can "use as they wish".

The current Google Maps API is rife with restrictions. Have to watch the geocoding load from your app or it will be shut down. Can't overlay turn-by-turn instructions (what? You thought that restriction, meant to drive you to back to Google Maps, came from Apple?)

Apple having their own mapping system means NO restrictions on developers, or at least ones directly related to load only and not the protection of Google revenue streams...

At the end of the day if it's only available on iOS and Mac then it's essentially on a minority of devices on what is now a minority platform.

There are still more iOS devices than Android devices overall.

Especially in the U.S. Here's a conundrum for you. Sprint & AT&T and Verizon have all said the iPhone is leading smartphone sales, usually by a good margin.

So how exactly would Android have more units sold in the U.S. if that continues to be true?

Comment: Re:Stupid article. Important point. (Score 1) 129

by Animats (#40190395) Attached to: The Cost of Crappy Security In Software Infrastructure

The intent of the new syntax is that &char[n] buf means passing a reference to an array of size n. char[n] is an array type, something C currently lacks. Syntax like this is needed so that you can have casts to array types.

I've had a few go-rounds at this syntax problem. See "Strict pointers for C". Unfortunately, there's no solution that's backwards-compatible with existing code. However, mixing files of old-style and new-style code is possible, and mechanical conversion of old-style code to new-style code looks possible.

It's worth looking at this again now that C's market share is back above that of C++.

Comment: What porn? (Score 1) 377

by Animats (#40187241) Attached to: What Should We Do About Wikipedia's Porn Problem?

What porn? I have over 10,000 edits on Wikipedia and don't recall seeing any porn. Wikipedia has bios of porn stars and links to their work, but they rarely host actual porn content. It has to be both notable and freely licensed to get into Wikipedia. Commercial porn doesn't qualify.

Is the problem here some religious group with a modesty fetish, or what?

If you want porn, search videos with Google or Bing and you'll find whatever you're looking for.

The Media

Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware to Angry Birds->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "The title of this hard-hitting piece of journalism reads 'Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game' and opens with 'The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News — the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.' The rest of the details that are actually pertinent to the story follow that important message. The graphic for this story? Perhaps a map of Iran or the LUA logo or maybe the stereotyped evil hacker in a ski mask? Nope, all Angry Birds. Describing LUA as "Gamer Code," Fox for some reason (popularity?) selects Angry Birds from an insanely long list in their article implying guilt-by-shared-development-language. I'm not sure if explaining machine language to them would alleviate the perceived problem or cause them to burn their desktops in the streets and launch a new crusade to protect the children."
Link to Original Source

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