Comment Re:Put another way (Score 1) 95
Well, I discovered today I am a masochist... great
Comment Re:Uh, cause that's where everyone's headed? (Score 2, Informative) 372
Don't forget to add Opera, Chrome... I don't even talk about applets such as Cortado or plugins (VLC...) !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Native_browser_playback
Actually, on the desktop side, I would say h264 is less present than theora. Obvisously, this is not the case in the embedded world.
Comment Re:C? For programming C you should need a license! (Score 1) 365
True, but the big difference is that in Java, you have wonderful portable tools such as VisualVM, greatly easing to find memory leaks.
Finding a memory leak under a C++ application can take days. In my previous job, we wrote an Java application of 700k+ lines and a C++ realtime portable core of 50k lines. We found memory issues in both, but fixing it in the core took 10 times the time to fix it in the Java one.
Why ? The tools are better and the differences with the OS are hidden by the JVM, so far less work on that side.
8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."
Modded Xbox Bans Prompt EFF Warning About Terms of Service 254
Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements.
"No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."
Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195
diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."
Nokia's Maemo Switching To Qt 182
suka writes "During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt. Maemo Harmattan is going to switch away from GTK+ / Hildon, derStandard.at reports from the conference." Michael Pyne also writes with a post describing day one of the conference from a KDE perspective.
Comment Re:Really a surprise? (Score 1) 493
what's the point? How do you think wine performs the system calls ? Oh yeah... The unix way, so using all the layers... While your explaination may explain why windows could be faster than linux in some cases, it does not explain why wine is faster than using "native" libraries. (while wine is in a sense as native as gtk)
Comment Re:A good start to the discussion (Score 1) 213
The huge difference between Apple and MS is simply that Apple started from a known basis : Unix. Unix had numbers of flaws from the start but all those flaws where fixed in all flavours of Unix.
On the other side, MS started from scratch and instead of relying on the errors of past, they introduced their DOS legacy (such as . in the $PATH) and added dumb features.
When adding new features, it is not always obvious to point the possible security issues. Max OS X introduced fewer features (I mean, from scratch, they invented less), thus, it is quite logical to have fewer flaws. MS is the victim of the not invented here syndrom.
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