Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Ouroboros (Score 1) 149

Others (including many in the media) have an anti-oil agenda. So you may not have heard as much about this phenomenon as you should have

Some of these phenomena are also unheard of because they simply exist as part of a pro-oil agenda, not serious science. But this article seems rather serious.

Link to the actual open access article:
https://royalsocietypublishing...

Comment Chrome not a walled garden? (Score 1) 94

I know Chrome has the biggest user base and that is a big deal in web browsers. But Chrome started out by reusing a big chunk of Safari (Webkit) and it was only years later that it forked that into Blink. However both Safari and Chrome kept the proprietary upper layer glue. They also kept making their own business related decisions. While I often get the impression that Google is more open, fundamentally they seem to be organised in the same way as an open source community.

Unlike in Google's case, where Chrome is based on an open-source browser named Chromium and where everyone gets a voice, everything at Apple is a walled garden, with strict rules

So why is Chrome not a walled garden?

Comment This ruling will only impact this single company (Score 2) 115

Norway (and all of Europe and South-America) has a civil law legal system as opposed to common law (as seen in USA and other countries who trace their history to England). This important difference also leads to very common misconceptions in reporting on lawsuits.

IANAL but I think that in Norway Apple won't be able to set a precedent using a lawsuit like this. So any other shop in the world doing the same thing would have nothing to fear from this lawsuit.

Comment DIY repairs and the environment (Score 1) 224

What's environmental impact of more people repairing their stuff on their own? Everybody can now buy parts directly from sources that have unknown environmental policies and unknown reliability. What are we going to do about more people throwing away used parts with the trash instead of recycling them?

Comment Re:"UI fails to even attempt to communicate..." (Score 1) 162

Yes, the upside to all this is that we now can disconnect from the current network, until now this had to be done by disabling wifi entirely. Now it will auto reconnect when you go somewhere else.

For me this actually reflects the way I always used that button: to disconnect from a wifi network and get a faster connection through cellular, only to forget to switch it back on when better wifi is available.

In the future we there might be no need to disconnect from bad wifi any more thanks to multipath TCP. Since Apple has enabled the mpTCP API for developers it may become an iOS 12 feature.

Comment Re:NIH to the max, baby (Score 1) 49

Apple's OSes also don't properly handle the Matroska container by default. Matroska is used a lot in modern multimedia (including a limited subset of the Matroska container used for years in WebM). I think that Apple's choices help render Apple's OSes as also-rans and I wouldn't be surprised if this is based in Apple's preference for patent-encumbered stuff to which Apple is a licensee or beneficiary.

You are right: MP4, also called ISO Base Media File Format, is an ISO/IEC standard. Its patents can thus be licensed under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND) from its inventors ... Apple (and Panasonic to a minor extent). In practice, everybody seems to be using it for free, so I don't think Apple and Panasonic are big beneficiaries here.

The reason why they won't adopt competing technologies (matroska) is because of the effort they put in developing the QuickTime File Format (.mov) and then getting it standardised as MP4.

Comment Re:Next step... (Score 1) 478

So I end up running my battery down to 1% far too many times

You shouldn't keep it at 1% for a month or so. But a week at 1% will do no harm at all because the battery has plenty of "hidden" capacity left in it. That is why your MacBook may be in a low-battery state after a month. It may then require 20 minutes of charging before you can use it.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The geeks shall inherit the earth." -- Karl Lehenbauer

Working...