Spotlight: VLC

You probably have VLC. It's that traffic-cone-shaped program that plays absolutely any video you throw at it. No doubt you haven't even thought about it in the last few years, since it just does its job with fewer problems than just about any application ever built.



But if you have thought about it, the answers to all your question about this 21st century marvel are likely held in this article about VLC by some douchebag or other. In case you were particularly wondering about the traffic cone:

One drunken night, an École Centrale student stole a traffic cone and brought it back to the lab. The trend caught on, and soon an enormous collection had been stockpiled. It's easy to imagine that it became impossible to take video on campus without a traffic cone in the frame; but whatever the reasoning, when it came time to release VLC into the world, no other symbol had quite the same resonance as the by-now-ubiquitous cone.