it was a bullshit question. it's like asking, is water a liquid, yes or no? the "i don't know" here clearly refers to "i don't know what you're trying to pull. stop trying to distort the issue." and for the record, i'm no fan of sun, oracle, or java. it is what it is.
well, i am leaving out the possibility that all that star system scanning would be enough to raise the readiness rating. i haven't seen that done to know one way or the other, but i doubt it is enough.
people are strange. it's good form to allow a player to replay the ending of a multi-ending game so they can see the possibilities available to them. i do believe there are those who breezed through the game and then wanted to know what all the endings were. even if only to know what the fuss is about.
still trying to find time to hunt down that TIM cyborg scene...
can you do them without doing the side missions? as far as i'm aware, the only way to get the rating high enough for the "good" endings is to either complete enough side missions, or play tons of multiplayer. if you're the action mode guy just burning through the main missions, i think you'd need the multiplayer to raise the rating high enough. i could be wrong?
yeah, good luck to you. i never have to worry about any of those concerns in enterprise development. as far as your toolset goes, you're going to have to invest if you want to play in that arena, and refuse to steal (i prefer the term "borrow against time" because the intent is to fake it til you make it). not that i advocate stealing software. i took a quick look at craigslist in SF. i don't live in the bay area, but their economy is one of the most inflated, so if this equipment is cheap there, you can bet it's cheap pretty much anywhere. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/2957170405.html. those are the machines themselves. you can probably find the OS on disk somewhere, and run it in vmware. shoot, here's an iphone, $200 - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/mob/2962288586.html. go nuts.
i did look around, and i mostly saw a bunch of writer/director interviews (the same short list of people; the "one" person i was previously referring to being Mac Walters since he was the most prolific interviewee and nobody else really said anything he didn't) in which they say something to the effect that the ending will be super-awesome. i couldn't find a single definitive "promise." i couldn't find a single definitive statement that couldn't be taken out of context or construed to fit however one feels. the closest thing i saw was a statement -- anecdotally in the writer's excitement to talk about the ending -- that the rachni have a major role to play in the ending. considering they were a bunch of spider thugs to start with and in the end they work on the crucible off-camera is enough to stretch that statement from the writer's point of view. i hear chatter about some "16 promised endings" but can't find a single source on that from bioware anywhere. the most i will concede is that bioware employees tried to amp up enthusiasm for the game by praising their work hyperbolically, and a lot of fans (who care way way too much) took these for graven oaths that would exceed their (much too) wildest imaginations. hyperbole in interviews are not contracts. also, the list of inconsistencies with the mass effect novel is far greater than the game's finale. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XBpMF3ONlI308D9IGG8KICBHfWKU0sXh0ntukv-_cmo/preview?pli=1&sle=true
i'd also like to point out that just because you can raise galactic readiness with multiplayer it doesn't necessarily mean they cheated. a lot of people conveniently forget that your first option in playing the game is whether you want pure story, pure action or mix of both (the RPG mode). if you're not going to do the side missions in action mode, the multiplayer allowed a way to raise the readiness rating so you could still get an ending where not everything was destroyed. when you try to please everyone you end up pissing off at least a few. unfortunately too many people felt entitled to the vision they formed in their heads of what would happen. i liken this to the phenomenon of having your bubble burst when you finally get to know the person you've had a crush on (especially long distance and/or internet relationships). you build a fantasy in your head comprised of nothing but the greatest things about the person and then you find out they're human and have flaws. suddenly they're nothing like what you imagined and your infatuation ends.
sorry, i didn't see any humorous context. whoosh on me.
No, because as a hobbyist, I lack the money to spend on buying devices on which to test, which rules out designing specifically for mobile. What's the best practice for smaller sites to test on devices that none of the staff happens to own?
well i guess that puts us on uneven ground because i'm not a hobbyist. you have concerns i don't normally deal with. but there are answers for you. vmware or your favorite virtualization software allows you to run other OSes in an application window on your machine, and are often free (like vmware). you don't need to buy (or borrow someone else's) devices for testing.
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html
as for mobile, again virtualization but this time i use the SDKs in eclipse. for android you can get an instance of any screen resolution of any android version up and running in minutes, as a windowed virtual device on your screen. it simulates hardware capability too so unless your computer is weaker than a smartphone you're ok. the SDK and Android Virtual Device Manager are free. i've never had to design for iphone, but if i did i would try the community (free) edition of Titanium Studio to see whether it's worth passing on the $50/month cost to the client requesting the work.
Pure progressive enhancement would imply sending only the headline on the initial page view and then having JavaScript download the kicker once the CSS media queries have resolved. Some purists want the server to ignore the User-agent: entirely
i can't tell if by "initial page view" you're talking about the document's ready state. i'm going to assume you're aware that javascript can delay commands until the entire html payload has reached the browser without making another request. apart from you, i've never met such a purist. if your server side code is checking the user-agent, your users are not paying for that check with their data limit. the data limit is for what they send and receive, not what servers do in between the sending and receiving.
i'm not much for avoiding technology or techniques based on superstition (though i have met programmers who do). my personal opinions on technology are mostly based on my evaluation of them, and not how i feel about them or the company that put them out. there's a kind of "purism" in me that despises apple because of their steve jobs cult of personality but ultimately my displeasure for them comes down to things like godawful design decisions, like, e.g., not splitting the mouse buttons or the really retarded spotlight search functionality, or that all the window buttons (close, minimize) are on the left for left-handed users when most people are right handed. but i won't refuse to use them if something requires me to, or something more important to me is made more convenient. i just can't see any good argument against a user-agent check, if your goal is to target specific machines and their capabilities. "i just don't want to" doesn't cut it for me.
If I replace the content entirely, then the replaced content still counts against the viewer's monthly download quota.
if you read me a little closer, you'll see that i suggest that your replaced content would be less content than what you serve to desktops. that will lower the hit on their quota. the replaced content is whatever you want it to be, so how much data you're asking the user to expend is up to you. you can also just build a simpler, scaled-down version of your site for mobile and redirect to it when the sniffer finds a mobile device. you are in full control of what you send to your users.
you should have a relatively short time limit to recognize your patent being used without permission and sue for it. waiting to see which business became profitable off you should invalidate your claim.
all me, brother. i default at 1, cuz i have Positive karma. i had Good karma, but then i crushed the velvet pimp hand on a bunch of lamer gamers whining about mass effect 3.
the prophet speaks. that's exactly why microsoft wants this. then they can license the patent to facebook, to show you all of your potential friends from all the parallel universes in which you actually meet the people on your list.
Are lesser-known mobile platforms such as BlackBerry PlayBook and HP TouchPad "mobile"?
Blackberry PlayBook: Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 1.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/0.0.1 Safari/534.8+
HP TouchPad: Mozilla/5.0 (hp-tablet; Linux; hpwOS/3.0.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) wOSBrowser/233.70 Safari/534.6 TouchPad/1.0
if you're going to design for it then you should make it your business to know. the number of PlayBook or TouchPad users consuming the internet as a whole (desktop or mobile) is so miniscule that even if you're not a fancy pants marketer you don't need to worry about it. if you're worried about whether to serve mobile content to it, you just try looking at one in person and decide for yourself what's best for your site.
Are Safari for iPad and Android Browser for Transformer "mobile"? Their screen areas are closer to desktop than to smartphone.
yes. tablets are mobile. any decent mobile detection script will either handle this for you, or allow you to add more conditions to match (or even remove) at your discretion.
But the value of the User-Agent header is never exactly the word "mobile".
sounds like you're taking my verbose pseudo code as what you literally type. if you have the slightest clue what you're doing you would never have assumed i meant match the string "mobile."
have you bothered to look up any mobile browser sniffing scripts? have you bothered to see what the value of the user-agent string is? it includes your operating system (see the PlayBook and TouchPad user-agent strings above). here's more examples for you: http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Android%20Webkit%20Browser/. there's plenty of info in the user-agent string to know whether or not you're dealing with a mobile device. i'm not going to do your job for you, so google mobile browser detection scripts in your language of choice on your own time.
or choose your favorite server-side language
Which again brings in the problem of a transparent caching proxy. Even if I don't "have an ISP that sends you outdated, non-requested, cached versions of web sites", as Anonymous Coward put it, some of my customers are likely to. Specifically, if a desktop user and a smartphone user on the same ISP hit a web site within two seconds, the proxy probably doesn't consider it "outdated".
some of your customers are likely to? really, what is that probability? some of them already do and if you haven't heard from them yet, it's because they noticed the problem on every other site they went to and complained to their ISP. the common accepted solution for this is to continue to code dynamic content and let the ISPs hear about their bad behavior from their customers, which they do. this is another one of those things that marketers don't care about -- those in their demographics are usually assumed to be those without shitty ISPs, since so many shitty ISPs are either fixing their old proxy software or have lost business. if your site is getting all the complaints, a friendly message on your site telling users to take it to their ISP usually works well enough. there are so many other dynamic content sites out there, that are bigger and more popular than yours (facebook?), that your users will notice it on other sites besides yours. basically, it's their problem, not yours. you might as well argue about background colors and images in print css.
also, if we're talking about mobile, i have yet to hear about this problem from any mobile data network ISP. wi-fi providers have no desire to stay with an ISP that serves up an outdated internet, either. that's just more customer complaints that have nothing to do with them that they'd rather not deal with.
i understand the idea behind URI-based content, and it has an advantage of being organized to the developer. not every site uses a.mobi domain, though, so users aren't getting enough positive reinforcement to think to use it first. by going with the user-agent strategy, you're available to the user on their first try.
I agree, but CSS won't help one display less detailed information to a smaller screen user or more information to a larger screen user without sending all the information designed for the larger screen just for it to be hidden with display:none in the small-screen media-query CSS, which wastes the smaller screen user's monthly data allotment.
why are you stuck with just css? use javascript or choose your favorite server-side language. conditional logic? if user-agent equals mobile then output this else output that.
well you'd have the added political impact of having a bunch of authority figures who "let this tragedy happen" because they became desensitized to the threats. then instead of having everyone's total fury pointed at you, it would be divided among you and the negligent authority. you wouldn't need a casualty at that point to do real lasting damage, you could blow up an empty building. a lot of people would start arguing that bad people like you will always exist but the greater crime was turning a blind eye to the threat.
at one of my junior high school's semi-annual bomb threats (at least twice a year), the dogs went crazy over a locker in the boys' locker room. turned out to be rotting gym clothes. so you see, some good does come of fake bomb threats. and the kid assigned to that locker never lived it down.
actually web designers design for the resolution of the majority of their expected users, not necessarily the lowest common denominator. that means the coders set the minimum width of the center positioned content areas to something like 900px. if you use anything less than 1024x768 (non-mobile), you're not in the demographic that most marketers care about. they might choose content for you, but won't spend much, if any, money to make your relatively shitty experience any better. should help explain why we've been abusing the IE6 users too. there is no sympathy to waste. try spoofing your user agent as a mobile device and you might get something that's been reformatted for phones/tablets, and therefore, maybe more appropriate for your tiny resolution.
sweet, so we got a php hack (not to be confused with hacker) playing with forces beyond his comprehension to affect the distribution of wealth. i'll have a coke.
Slashdot Mirror
it was a bullshit question. it's like asking, is water a liquid, yes or no? the "i don't know" here clearly refers to "i don't know what you're trying to pull. stop trying to distort the issue." and for the record, i'm no fan of sun, oracle, or java. it is what it is.
that's every engineer. it's the dilbert syndrome.
i don't think so. what they needed was a non-compete clause.
just this: cool story bro
omg, you're one of them
emotional intelligence (people persons)? physical intelligence (athletes)? logical intelligence (traditional definition)? linguistic intelligence (pedants)?
well, i am leaving out the possibility that all that star system scanning would be enough to raise the readiness rating. i haven't seen that done to know one way or the other, but i doubt it is enough.
people are strange. it's good form to allow a player to replay the ending of a multi-ending game so they can see the possibilities available to them. i do believe there are those who breezed through the game and then wanted to know what all the endings were. even if only to know what the fuss is about.
still trying to find time to hunt down that TIM cyborg scene...
are you going to make me assemble the flat screen tv too? if i let my friend do it, the screen will be upside down facing the (sony) guts.
can you do them without doing the side missions? as far as i'm aware, the only way to get the rating high enough for the "good" endings is to either complete enough side missions, or play tons of multiplayer. if you're the action mode guy just burning through the main missions, i think you'd need the multiplayer to raise the rating high enough. i could be wrong?
yeah, good luck to you. i never have to worry about any of those concerns in enterprise development. as far as your toolset goes, you're going to have to invest if you want to play in that arena, and refuse to steal (i prefer the term "borrow against time" because the intent is to fake it til you make it). not that i advocate stealing software. i took a quick look at craigslist in SF. i don't live in the bay area, but their economy is one of the most inflated, so if this equipment is cheap there, you can bet it's cheap pretty much anywhere. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/2957170405.html. those are the machines themselves. you can probably find the OS on disk somewhere, and run it in vmware. shoot, here's an iphone, $200 - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/mob/2962288586.html. go nuts.
i did look around, and i mostly saw a bunch of writer/director interviews (the same short list of people; the "one" person i was previously referring to being Mac Walters since he was the most prolific interviewee and nobody else really said anything he didn't) in which they say something to the effect that the ending will be super-awesome. i couldn't find a single definitive "promise." i couldn't find a single definitive statement that couldn't be taken out of context or construed to fit however one feels. the closest thing i saw was a statement -- anecdotally in the writer's excitement to talk about the ending -- that the rachni have a major role to play in the ending. considering they were a bunch of spider thugs to start with and in the end they work on the crucible off-camera is enough to stretch that statement from the writer's point of view. i hear chatter about some "16 promised endings" but can't find a single source on that from bioware anywhere. the most i will concede is that bioware employees tried to amp up enthusiasm for the game by praising their work hyperbolically, and a lot of fans (who care way way too much) took these for graven oaths that would exceed their (much too) wildest imaginations. hyperbole in interviews are not contracts. also, the list of inconsistencies with the mass effect novel is far greater than the game's finale. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XBpMF3ONlI308D9IGG8KICBHfWKU0sXh0ntukv-_cmo/preview?pli=1&sle=true
i'd also like to point out that just because you can raise galactic readiness with multiplayer it doesn't necessarily mean they cheated. a lot of people conveniently forget that your first option in playing the game is whether you want pure story, pure action or mix of both (the RPG mode). if you're not going to do the side missions in action mode, the multiplayer allowed a way to raise the readiness rating so you could still get an ending where not everything was destroyed. when you try to please everyone you end up pissing off at least a few. unfortunately too many people felt entitled to the vision they formed in their heads of what would happen. i liken this to the phenomenon of having your bubble burst when you finally get to know the person you've had a crush on (especially long distance and/or internet relationships). you build a fantasy in your head comprised of nothing but the greatest things about the person and then you find out they're human and have flaws. suddenly they're nothing like what you imagined and your infatuation ends.
That was a joke son.
sorry, i didn't see any humorous context. whoosh on me.
No, because as a hobbyist, I lack the money to spend on buying devices on which to test, which rules out designing specifically for mobile. What's the best practice for smaller sites to test on devices that none of the staff happens to own?
well i guess that puts us on uneven ground because i'm not a hobbyist. you have concerns i don't normally deal with. but there are answers for you. vmware or your favorite virtualization software allows you to run other OSes in an application window on your machine, and are often free (like vmware). you don't need to buy (or borrow someone else's) devices for testing. http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html
as for mobile, again virtualization but this time i use the SDKs in eclipse. for android you can get an instance of any screen resolution of any android version up and running in minutes, as a windowed virtual device on your screen. it simulates hardware capability too so unless your computer is weaker than a smartphone you're ok. the SDK and Android Virtual Device Manager are free. i've never had to design for iphone, but if i did i would try the community (free) edition of Titanium Studio to see whether it's worth passing on the $50/month cost to the client requesting the work.
Pure progressive enhancement would imply sending only the headline on the initial page view and then having JavaScript download the kicker once the CSS media queries have resolved. Some purists want the server to ignore the User-agent: entirely
i can't tell if by "initial page view" you're talking about the document's ready state. i'm going to assume you're aware that javascript can delay commands until the entire html payload has reached the browser without making another request. apart from you, i've never met such a purist. if your server side code is checking the user-agent, your users are not paying for that check with their data limit. the data limit is for what they send and receive, not what servers do in between the sending and receiving.
i'm not much for avoiding technology or techniques based on superstition (though i have met programmers who do). my personal opinions on technology are mostly based on my evaluation of them, and not how i feel about them or the company that put them out. there's a kind of "purism" in me that despises apple because of their steve jobs cult of personality but ultimately my displeasure for them comes down to things like godawful design decisions, like, e.g., not splitting the mouse buttons or the really retarded spotlight search functionality, or that all the window buttons (close, minimize) are on the left for left-handed users when most people are right handed. but i won't refuse to use them if something requires me to, or something more important to me is made more convenient. i just can't see any good argument against a user-agent check, if your goal is to target specific machines and their capabilities. "i just don't want to" doesn't cut it for me.
If I replace the content entirely, then the replaced content still counts against the viewer's monthly download quota.
if you read me a little closer, you'll see that i suggest that your replaced content would be less content than what you serve to desktops. that will lower the hit on their quota. the replaced content is whatever you want it to be, so how much data you're asking the user to expend is up to you. you can also just build a simpler, scaled-down version of your site for mobile and redirect to it when the sniffer finds a mobile device. you are in full control of what you send to your users.
you should have a relatively short time limit to recognize your patent being used without permission and sue for it. waiting to see which business became profitable off you should invalidate your claim.
all me, brother. i default at 1, cuz i have Positive karma. i had Good karma, but then i crushed the velvet pimp hand on a bunch of lamer gamers whining about mass effect 3.
the prophet speaks. that's exactly why microsoft wants this. then they can license the patent to facebook, to show you all of your potential friends from all the parallel universes in which you actually meet the people on your list.
Are lesser-known mobile platforms such as BlackBerry PlayBook and HP TouchPad "mobile"?
Blackberry PlayBook: Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 1.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/0.0.1 Safari/534.8+
HP TouchPad: Mozilla/5.0 (hp-tablet; Linux; hpwOS/3.0.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) wOSBrowser/233.70 Safari/534.6 TouchPad/1.0
if you're going to design for it then you should make it your business to know. the number of PlayBook or TouchPad users consuming the internet as a whole (desktop or mobile) is so miniscule that even if you're not a fancy pants marketer you don't need to worry about it. if you're worried about whether to serve mobile content to it, you just try looking at one in person and decide for yourself what's best for your site.
Are Safari for iPad and Android Browser for Transformer "mobile"? Their screen areas are closer to desktop than to smartphone.
yes. tablets are mobile. any decent mobile detection script will either handle this for you, or allow you to add more conditions to match (or even remove) at your discretion.
But the value of the User-Agent header is never exactly the word "mobile".
sounds like you're taking my verbose pseudo code as what you literally type. if you have the slightest clue what you're doing you would never have assumed i meant match the string "mobile."
have you bothered to look up any mobile browser sniffing scripts? have you bothered to see what the value of the user-agent string is? it includes your operating system (see the PlayBook and TouchPad user-agent strings above). here's more examples for you: http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Android%20Webkit%20Browser/. there's plenty of info in the user-agent string to know whether or not you're dealing with a mobile device. i'm not going to do your job for you, so google mobile browser detection scripts in your language of choice on your own time.
or choose your favorite server-side language
Which again brings in the problem of a transparent caching proxy. Even if I don't "have an ISP that sends you outdated, non-requested, cached versions of web sites", as Anonymous Coward put it, some of my customers are likely to. Specifically, if a desktop user and a smartphone user on the same ISP hit a web site within two seconds, the proxy probably doesn't consider it "outdated".
some of your customers are likely to? really, what is that probability? some of them already do and if you haven't heard from them yet, it's because they noticed the problem on every other site they went to and complained to their ISP. the common accepted solution for this is to continue to code dynamic content and let the ISPs hear about their bad behavior from their customers, which they do. this is another one of those things that marketers don't care about -- those in their demographics are usually assumed to be those without shitty ISPs, since so many shitty ISPs are either fixing their old proxy software or have lost business. if your site is getting all the complaints, a friendly message on your site telling users to take it to their ISP usually works well enough. there are so many other dynamic content sites out there, that are bigger and more popular than yours (facebook?), that your users will notice it on other sites besides yours. basically, it's their problem, not yours. you might as well argue about background colors and images in print css.
also, if we're talking about mobile, i have yet to hear about this problem from any mobile data network ISP. wi-fi providers have no desire to stay with an ISP that serves up an outdated internet, either. that's just more customer complaints that have nothing to do with them that they'd rather not deal with.
last t
another dying industry trying to sue its way out of extinction. the revolution will not be televised because it is television.
::pours jack into the coke::
I agree, but CSS won't help one display less detailed information to a smaller screen user or more information to a larger screen user without sending all the information designed for the larger screen just for it to be hidden with display:none in the small-screen media-query CSS, which wastes the smaller screen user's monthly data allotment.
why are you stuck with just css? use javascript or choose your favorite server-side language. conditional logic? if user-agent equals mobile then output this else output that.
well you'd have the added political impact of having a bunch of authority figures who "let this tragedy happen" because they became desensitized to the threats. then instead of having everyone's total fury pointed at you, it would be divided among you and the negligent authority. you wouldn't need a casualty at that point to do real lasting damage, you could blow up an empty building. a lot of people would start arguing that bad people like you will always exist but the greater crime was turning a blind eye to the threat.
at one of my junior high school's semi-annual bomb threats (at least twice a year), the dogs went crazy over a locker in the boys' locker room. turned out to be rotting gym clothes. so you see, some good does come of fake bomb threats. and the kid assigned to that locker never lived it down.
wow, do your benefits cover therapy? remember, getting help is not a sign of weakness.... seriously, condolences.
actually web designers design for the resolution of the majority of their expected users, not necessarily the lowest common denominator. that means the coders set the minimum width of the center positioned content areas to something like 900px. if you use anything less than 1024x768 (non-mobile), you're not in the demographic that most marketers care about. they might choose content for you, but won't spend much, if any, money to make your relatively shitty experience any better. should help explain why we've been abusing the IE6 users too. there is no sympathy to waste. try spoofing your user agent as a mobile device and you might get something that's been reformatted for phones/tablets, and therefore, maybe more appropriate for your tiny resolution.
sweet, so we got a php hack (not to be confused with hacker) playing with forces beyond his comprehension to affect the distribution of wealth. i'll have a coke.
you know some asshole will just take the fun out of it and make it .slashdot