Comment Hindsight (Score 1) 199
Always 20/20.
Why Typography Matters -- Especially At The Oscars (freecodecamp.com) 199
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: There's one thing the Academy possibly didn't consider, or forgot, for this year's winner cards: typography. First, it's legible, you can tell all the letters apart. Second, it's somewhat readable, but the visual weight of "Moonlight" and the producers are equal and blend together. Lastly, even though it is just a winner's card, it's not visually appealing. I think it's fair to say it's objectively bland. That's horrible typography. Of course, anyone could've made the same honest error! You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom (visual hierarchy) without questioning whether the card is right. That look on Warren's face was, "This says 'Emma Stone' on it." Faye must've skipped that part and was caught up in the excitement and just blurted out, "La La Land." I don't blame Faye or Warren for this. This was the fault of two entities: whoever was in charge of the design of the winning card (Was it really a design? C'mon), and the unfortunate person who handed them the wrong envelope. A clearly designed card and envelope (don't even get me started on that gold on red envelope) would've prevented this. The blogger, Benjamin Bannister (a creative consultant for old and new media), adds that there were essentially three things wrong with the card in question: Oscars logo need not to be at the top of the card. The category, "Best Acress" was at the bottom, and in small print. And, the winner's name, the main thing that should be read, is the same size as the second line and given equal weight.
Comment Re:Yeah. Was:Definitely nah (Score 2) 497
Added irony: With pointer and memory allocation bugs, the problems are at least reproducible. Can't say that about threading bugs.
Sounds like you never had to debug a use-after-free bug.
Comment Re:Opera is not owned by Qihoo (Score 1) 121
Qihoo are also the owners of Startcom and Wosign. Oh dear.
Comment Re:They can supena the certificate's private key (Score 1) 88
Assuming Signal uses some form of (elliptic curve) diffie-hellman, subpoenaing the private key will not allow the FBI to decrypt a single message. And since Moxie Marlinspike designed this system you can be sure it does.
Comment Re:Firefox Hello (Score 2) 129
The core functionality (WebRTC) is still there, they just removed their frontend. You can still use WebRTC in Firefox (or Chromium/Chrome) by visiting https://opentokrtc.com/. Chromium may be a better bet if you're behind a crappy firewall, because it supports TCP as well as UDP (Firefox only supports UDP).
Comment Re: What if I am an Ubuntu hater, too? (Score 1) 234
We host an apt repository with a few packages for a bunch of debian and ubuntu releases. Of course you have to target the right dependency set, but that's true even when you target a specific version of either OS.
I was just miffed by the remark that Debian would not support PPAs, when in fact the whole technical groundwork is actually Debian's and all Ubuntu did was build a thin command interface over it and suddenly gets credited for the whole invention.
Comment Re: What if I am an Ubuntu hater, too? (Score 1) 234
They also have extended the dpkg system with PPAs which (last time I checked) Debian did not support out of the box.
PPAs are basically just extra entries in
Microsoft To Add Flux Like Night Mode In Windows 10, Rendering 3rd-Party App's Existence Useless (arstechnica.com) 88
An anonymous reader writes: With suggestions that bluish lights disrupt our sleep, software that shifts screen white balance towards the red end of the spectrum in the evening -- cutting back that potentially sleep-disrupting light -- has gained quite a following. f.lux is the big name here with many people enjoying its gradual color temperature shifts. Apple recently built a color shifting feature into iOS, under the name Night Shift, and there are now signs that Microsoft is doing the same in Windows 10. Twitter user tfwboredom has been poking around the latest Windows insider build and found hints that the operating system will soon have a "blue light reduction" mode. Similarly to f.lux, this will automatically reduce the color temperature in the evenings as the sun sets and increase it in the mornings when the sun rises. Signs are that the feature will have a quick access button in the Action Center when it is eventually enabled.The feature is expected to arrive with Redstone, which is Windows 10's next major update expected to arrive next year.
Comment Re:MAAS (Score 1) 92
Second google hit for "ubuntu maas" (for me) was http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/maas. But yeah, it would have been nice if the link was included in the original question.
Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Use Optical Media? 385
The other day at an event, public relation officials were handing out press kit (it usually contains everything the company announced, photos from the event, and contact information of the company) to journalists. When I reached office and opened the kit, I found a CD in it. Which was weird because it's been two to three years since I had a computer with an optical drive. And all these years I didn't need one. Which brings up the question: Does your work require dealing with CDs and DVDs anymore? An anonymous reader asks the same question: I still use optical discs for various backup purposes, but recently I developed doubts as to the reliability of the media to last a reasonable amount of time. I have read a review on Amazon of the TDK DVDs, in which somebody described losing 8000 (sic!) DVDs of data after 4 years of storage. I promptly canceled my purchase of TDKs. So, do you still use opticals for back-up -- Blu-Rays, DVDs, CDs? -- and if so, how do you go about it?I do buy Blu-Ray discs of movies, though. So my life isn't optical disc free yet. What about yours?
Next Generation of Wireless -- 5G -- Is All Hype (backchannel.com) 90
Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is "wireless fiber," and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to "transfer holograms" because the upcoming standard is "100 times faster" than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn't nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: "5G" is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard -- yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment "5G" refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, '"5G' will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit." At least they're candid.) At the moment, advertising something as "5G" carries no greater significance than saying it's "blazing fast" or "next generation" -- nut because "5G" sounds technical, it's good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. [...] Second, this "wireless fiber" will never happen unless we have... more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the "last mile" problem; fiber already runs between cities.)
It's just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any "5G" wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it's great at carrying loads of information -- every wobble can be imprinted with data -- but can't go very far at all.
Florida District Considers Releasing GMO Mosquitos After Cayman Islands Experiment (accuweather.com) 144
It's already underway just 364 miles south of Florida, according to the Associated Press. "The first wave of genetically modified mosquitoes were released Wednesday in the Cayman Islands as part of a new effort to control the insect that spreads Zika and other viruses," according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Okian Warrior:
Genetically altered male mosquitoes, which don't bite but are expected to mate with females to produce offspring that die before reaching adulthood, were released in the West Bay area of Grand Cayman Island, according to a joint statement from the Cayman Islands Mosquito Research and Control Unit and British biotech firm Oxitec.
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
Comment Re:So glad I missed out (Score 4, Funny) 535
I was going to upgrade, just to see what it was like. First I tried to take a clone of hard drive, but somehow, during that process, my motherboard died and so I was without my laptop while it got repaired.
Your computer chose death over Windows 10.
LastPass Accounts Can Be 'Completely Compromised' When Users Visit Sites (theregister.co.uk) 134
Reader mask.of.sanity writes: A dangerous zero-day vulnerability has been found in popular cloud password vault LastPass, which can completely compromise user accounts when users visit malicious websites. The flaw is today being reported to LastPass by established Google Project zero hacker Tavis Ormandy who says he has found other "obvious critical problems". Interestingly, Mathias Karlsson, a security researcher has also independently found flaws in LastPass. In a blog post, he wrote that he was able to trick LastPass into believing he was on the real Twiter website and cough up the users' credentials of a bug in the LastPass password manager's autofill functionality. LastPass has fixed the bug, but Karlsson advises users to disable autofill functionality and use multi-factor authentication. At this point, it's not clear whether Ormandy is also talking about the same vulnerability.
