I've been using GraphicsMagick ever since debian switched to that package for better compatibility. I have been very happy with it; it is fast, versatile and, as I learned to day, more secure. Some of my users e-mailed me to warn me of the ImageMagick vulnerability, It's good that I could sleep through this one.

On a related note, not sanitizing incoming filenames is just bad security practice. It's the very first thing I do to any uploaded file.

My own experience with youtube was the same as the OP. This was several years ago, and youtube has changed a lot since, but it looks like the more things change, the more they remain the same. I had a semi-popular channel, nothing spectacular, about 100,000 channel views and maybe a thousand subscribers. At the time it was not bad for a guy who just posted some of his own sports clips.

The entire channel was yanked one sunny day, without any explanation as to why and no recourse or way to appeal. The automated support was entirely useless. I could not get a hold of a human, or at least, an e-mail address. There were none to be found. Youtube, as it appeared at the time, was entirely ran on automatic. It is, on one hand, understandable for a site that receives several years worth of uploaded material each minute. On the other hand, it was a thoroughly frustrating experience as I have done absolutely nothing wrong. To this day I have no clue as to what happened, my best guess is that someone reported me for the evulz, and that was enough.

I tried again to rebuild my channel with new material. About 6 months later the same thing repeated, at which point I gave up and never registered again.

The moral of the story is: you have to be corporate big, or you have to self-host. Otherwise, you are always at risk.

That, and many others. Procedural generation is not new.

I did enjoy the article, though. It was well written, well illustrated and fun to read. I have recently written some 2D game code that was generating a different kind of dungeon (not rectangular rooms, more organic / cave like environment. That was a fun project.

An article doesn't have to be about the cutting edge latest smart phone to be interesting. (I admit to have very little interest in smart phone news. I might read some articles when the time comes to buy a new handset...)

Why is that?

As a fellow daily Perl 5 user, I would be very interested to see your experience with Perl 6. Have you just "seen" it, or have you actually used it?

QT is modular. This allows them to add features (you call it bloat, but I don't think it means what you think it means), and then it is up to application developers to pick and choose the modules that they want or need.

The demand for more features is omnipresent, and software developers can either choose to fulfil them one way or another, or lose their market share to someone else who does.

Using web technologies to embed rich content into your application is not unheard of. The Steam client comes to mind as an obvious example: most of their UI lives in a webkit container. We do it at the company I work for, because it allows us to release new client and server versions separately. (We have a good reason to do that, not going into details.)

The alternative is either to launch an external browser and display your application's content there, which is cumbersome and then you end up having to test your application with all the browsers in the world to make sure it's compatible. Yet another alternative is to use a non-webbased rich content widget; in this case you are likely to end up with something inferior AND with a smaller pool of experienced developers to hire from.

The article does not state which court it was and if the ruling is likely to be overturned, but it's great to see a sudden outbreak of common sense like this one.

I am happy to maintain my illusion of privacy as far into the 3rd millennium as possible..

I shall replace you with a perl script!! A very simple one will do.. :)

You are making entirely valid, but irrelevant points. I've done all the things you mention. I didn't go into it because it is mostly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I guess the only thing I disagree on is the "over" part of "oversimplification".

Oh. And thank you for not mentioning legacy Internet Explorers, I do appreciate that. :)

This is the way the world is going right now. HTML5 and JavaScript have become the new, universal runtime that everyone is trying to use to build their applications. It is extremely compelling too: you don't need to worry about deployment, supporting older versions, operating systems, etc. This, however, requires browsers to do a lot more than they did before. Sound and video input is just the tip of it. There's also the canvas, WebGL, WebSocket, tons of new CSS features.

Firefox can either choose to keep up with new features or lose 90% of its share to Chrome. I'm actually happy they going forward because part of HTML5's appeal is that it is multi-vendor and is not solely controlled by a corporation like Google or Apple. Yes, it is "bloat", as in, lots of new features that you personally might not be using today. But someday you, or your friend will come across a site that uses one of these new features and if the site says "Sorry, you are using a backwards browser, please try Chrome instead", we both know what will happen. (You of course will scoff and close the site, but 10 other people will switch for every lean browser snob out there.)

Point is, browsers are evolving. Deal with it.

When did "outside the USA" become "under a rock"? Did I miss a meeting?

The link in the article points to https://lists.debian.org/debia...

The correct link is https://lists.debian.org/debia...

Not that anyone here would ever rtfa.. :)

I find humanity's ability to eradicate previously deadly and epidemic diseases to be something to wonder at. Personally I rate this little wonder of the world higher than the Moon landing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_diseases

Is it just me, or does the word "offer" in the article title sound biased?

"Piracy forces upon heavy metal a new business model" might be closer to the truth. At this point the fact is that the music industry must adjust its practices and find revenues outside the sale of physical media. They can turn to live tours, merchandise or whatever else, but calling this an "offer" is just as much a misnomer as "piracy".

Oh my. Did I touch a nerve?