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User: ChunderDownunder

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  1. Re:context counts on Facebook Banter More Memorable Than Lines From Recent Books · · Score: 1

    Except for the scene where he took off his mask, none of what Vader said in episodes 4-6 can be taken as canon anyway.

    The original recordings of what Darth said were mysteriously dubbed over with an African American accent.

  2. Re:The problem with the Lisa on 30 Years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple IIe · · Score: 1

    Nope, the Mac II had a separate MMU. Mac LC released several years later, and based on the same CPU, didn't.

    The 68030 did...

  3. Re:README --- what about Compiz? README -- README on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1
    Didn't you get the memo?

    Compiz is dead

    It's all about Wayland now...

  4. Re:GNOME devs are so blind on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1

    This has been tried and failed with Maemo's Hildon. (Though it has been ported to GTK+ 3 in the form of Cordia-HD)

    Nokia decided that Gtk+ was such a dog's breakfast (perhaps due to the difficulty of porting it to Symbian) that they'd go out and buy Trolltech and base their offering on Qt. Which was starting to show promise in the N9. Its legacy lives on in Ubuntu mobile, Sailfish, KDE Plasma Active, BB10, open webOS - which are all Qt based.

    What exactly does GTK+ 3.x bring to the table that will catapult it ahead of Qt 5 offerings? Have gnome developers commenced porting their apps to be touch-friendly? (as with Plasma Active.)

  5. On linux, sure.

    On Windows, Chrome and Firefox are 32bit.

  6. Re:GNOME devs are so blind on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1

    I use KDE now (although I like Xfce on my older machines as well).

    I have a P4 that runs KDE *acceptably* - though boot times from power on to a functional desktop are glacial. Though I upgraded the RAM because of a bug in the intel graphics driver that would claim too much shared memory.

  7. Re:Exclusive transcript on Kim Dotcom Reveals Mega Will Offer 50GB of Free Storage · · Score: 1

    Oh, like a chortle ?

  8. Re:So freaking awesome! on Kim Dotcom Reveals Mega Will Offer 50GB of Free Storage · · Score: 1

    Sounds great.

    Q: What's the catch?
    A: Your cloud backup will probably disappear without warning thanks to inter-governmental anti-{piracy, terrorism} efforts.

  9. Re:Robots bring jobs to America... on A Humanoid Robot Named "Baxter" Could Revive US Manufacturing · · Score: 1
    Civil rights are discussed in the Swedish show Real Humans.

    In that series, a legal case was withdrawn after it was revealed that the Hubots in question had illegal after-market firmwares installed.

  10. Re:Java Sandbox Exploit, Not Java Exploit on Another Java Exploit For Sale · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wouldn't be too keen to blame the plugin per se anyway.

    The whole Java library (rt.jar and others) relies on a security model. Each class invoked has checks to see if a security manager is running and if yes then possibly deny a request based on permissions.

    Poor development practices in not vetting the codebase for security checks have caused this. Specifically, this security breach is via new functionality included in JRE 1.7, where any assumptions of security requirements have been invalidated.

    An audit of every class included in the JRE needs to occur with unit tests for expected behaviour inside a sandbox and outside.

    Applets in a browser are the most common usage of a SecurityManager but pointing a finger at the plugin itself won't fix the underlying library code...

  11. Re:This is insane on Another Java Exploit For Sale · · Score: 1

    Well since the acquisition was announced in April 2009, there have been a total of 25 updates to the JRE 1.6 u14-u39. That represents about 150 security fixes (according to wikipedia) to a 'stable' product for which development commenced at least as early as Mustang's release in Sept 2004.

    I'd suggest a fair number of those bugs lurked in the codebase back in 2008, back in the days of "the Sun Way".

    So while we can blame Oracle for the current crisis in not vetting new 'method handle' code for invokedynamic functionality, as you say "The JDK codebase is incredibly complex".

  12. Story logo. on Fedora 18 Released · · Score: 1
    You've still got the gnome logo for a mate/fedora story. :(

    A logo featuring an image like this maybe?

  13. Re:Is the job market real? on IT Job Market Recovering Faster Now Than After Dot-com Bubble Burst · · Score: 1

    I was called in for an "agency interview" last week. That didn't go so well but they said they'd pass my details onto their other consultants.

    A couple of days later, I see a posting on a job board for "5 positions available" from the same company, matching my skillset. No phone call - so yes, phantom job postings would seem to exist and I won't waste my time with that agency again in a hurry.

  14. Re:Is OpenJDK also affected? on Oracle Ships Java 7 Update 11 With Vulnerability Fixes · · Score: 1

    Depends on whether the vulnerability is in the JRE or the core libraries. The browser plugin, web start, the auto updater, tray icon, control panel etc as found on the Windows install are Oracle-proprietary.

    Red Hat (& other contributors) have coded open source substitutes for applets and jnlp applications but I haven't seen info as to whether these IcedTea components are at risk.

  15. Re:OS X version is Lion + on Oracle Ships Java 7 Update 11 With Vulnerability Fixes · · Score: 3, Informative

    Backporting security fixes to an old OS X release isn't feasible for Oracle because they don't own the particular codebase that targeted Snow Leopard and earlier. Apple forked the JDK under a commercial license from Sun back in the day, incorporating OS X specific implementation details, which for earlier Java releases lies in Apple HQ.

    When Apple handed over the reins to Oracle, any code they contributed back to the OpenJDK codebase would have been for the then current OS X revision (Lion) and thus likely unportable to Snow Leopard without modification. Code "Soy Latte" existed some 4 years ago as a community effort to port OpenJDK to OS X 10.5 and later but this was never the "official" port used by Apple.

    Were Apple any better during their stewardship of Java? I seem to remember JRE versions were tied to releases of OS X. Our efforts to develop a Swing application were stifled because our user base (e.g. schoolkids with iBooks) were stuck forever on Java 1.5.

    So blame Oracle but some of the blame goes back to Jobs, who in later years did much to sideline Java.

  16. Re:Where on Bushfire Threatens Major Telescope · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't they teach world history/geography in schools these days? :-)

    NSW has existed on world maps for over two centuries, has a population larger than Washington State or Serbia and is bigger than Texas or Mozambique.

  17. Re:How do we stop them? on Australian Spy Agency Seeks Permission To Hack Third-Party Computers · · Score: 1

    So it's okay for Conroy to ban technology company Huawei from supplying equipment for the NBN over spying concerns yet it's okay for our government to target its own citizens. Hmmm...

  18. Re:How do we stop them? on Australian Spy Agency Seeks Permission To Hack Third-Party Computers · · Score: 1

    If you read the article. it's a senior member of the government proposing the legislation.

  19. Re:Time to just remove Java (and Silverlight)? on Oracle Knew of Latest Java 0-Day Security Hole In August · · Score: 2

    Android runs Dalvik. It's a clean-room partial implementation but uses a different architecture. Perhaps, theoretically, it's vulnerable to the same problem but Android doesn't include applet nor java web start functionality.

    As for developing using the JDK, don't install the public JRE. The 64bit version is safer since, last time I checked, browsers for 64bit Windows are still 32bit and hence the plugin won't work!

  20. Wiktionary? on IBM's Watson Gets a Swear Filter After Learning the Urban Dictionary · · Score: 2

    It at least seems moderated.

    They could filter the urban dictionary results by anything tagged 'vulgar' on wiktionary. Thereby censoring Watson's potty-mouth...

  21. Re:Good bye on Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone · · Score: 2, Funny

    That was a different Anonymous Coward :)

  22. Re:Alliance with RIM? on Plasma Active, Sailfish, and Ubuntu Phone Developers Discussing Common APIs · · Score: 1

    'enemy' in the sense of being a rival platform that uses a non-standard C library and graphics stack that make dalvik somewhat non-portable to other platforms.

    The distros mentioned in the summary are also based on the Linux kernel but feature a more traditional GNU userland and Qt graphics stack.

  23. Re:Well, that's great, and it's a good achievement on Microsoft's Future of the Living Room Starring SuperTuxKart · · Score: 1

    STK is a fun game even if it doesn't meet the realism of commercially developed titles.

    They switched to a new graphics engine a while back, so adding realistic skidding might be on the roadmap.

  24. Re:ARMless on Windows RT Jailbreak Tool Released · · Score: 2

    Supposing RT does indeed include the full Win32 API to support Office, for many FLOSS applications it's theoretically as simple as a recompile.

    e.g. when I evaluated a simple text editor that would work on both Linux and Windows, with easy installation, I chose geany (sorry emacs/vi users!) The code is cpu and OS agnostic, so there would be minimal porting to ARM Win32 provided the code for Windows didn't contain too many x86-isms.

  25. Alliance with RIM? on Plasma Active, Sailfish, and Ubuntu Phone Developers Discussing Common APIs · · Score: 1

    The summary seemed Linux-centric - BB10 is Qt's best chance of achieving mass penetration in mobile devices.

    Yes I know that QNX ain't Linux and BB10 ain't free software but sometimes the enemy of my enemy (WP8, iOS, Android) is my friend...