Slashdot Mirror


User: gaspyy

gaspyy's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
461
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 461

  1. From TFA on Students Suspended, Expelled Over Facebook Posts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Alejandra Sosa said she regretted posting a Facebook status calling her teacher a pedophile. She has been suspended for 10 days. “I was just expressing myself on Facebook, because like I said I was mad that day because of what he [did],” Sosa said in a statement. “So, I mean I had no intentions of ruining his reputation.”

    The case will be very important in deciding what falls under free speech and what the school can discipline students for

    So irresponsible name-calling because of a low grade or something is now expressing oneself and an example of free speech? Nice.

  2. Re:I disagree about the $200 on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 1

    That was Android's Marketplace philosophy. $25 (on-time I think) developer fee and that's it. Self-signed (aka worthless) certificates. No review process. The result is that the store is full of shitty (and sometimes malicious) apps.

  3. Re:Whining, nothing more on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 1

    You can find SparkChess in AppStore, Android Marketplace, AppWorld and Google Webstore (no.2 paid app).

    Show me something you've done, Mr. Anonymous Coward and then you can call bullshit on me.

  4. Re:It's not even that hard on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 2

    I agree with you, and just to make it clearer, I DID compile from commandline and it was very straightforward. As mentioned elsewhere, my app was ported from iOS and Android to Playbook in a couple of hours and within a week it was signed and approved in the AppWorld.

  5. Re:Whining, nothing more on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 2

    Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?

    Yes, the 2 hours included installing the SDK and reading through the documentation as well as installing the simulator. They have step-by-step tutorials for this.

    As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.

    Getting the app signed was a 3 step process - ask for permission, get a file, run 2 command line tools.

    Of course, it's much simpler with Android, where you can use a self-signed certificate, but for a user, I think it's beneficial to have some sort of verification process for vendors. I don't want my apps lumped together with scammers.

  6. Re:Whining, nothing more on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 1

    It's a non-issue: for now it's totally free.

  7. Whining, nothing more on RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Random whining programmer thinks process X is too complicated for him.

    For me it was a non-issue. It took me exactly 2 hours to port my game (http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparkchess/id398133128) from iPad/Android to Playbook and test it, including installing the simulator. The signing process was a little more complex but really nothing fancy. If anything, on the whole I found the process faster and easier than publishing on iOS.

    It took about one week for the app to be approved and it's now in AppWorld.

  8. Re:As always, it comes down to content providers on Google To Push WebM With IE9, Safari Plugins · · Score: 1

    If it's any consolation, the Adobe Flash team have announced that support for WebM is coming soon, as well as optimized* video playback.

    *flash was never designed to be an efficient video player. A video object behaves like any other DisplayObject, it can be rotated in 3D, have filters applied to it and so on, this is part of the reason performance was always less than spectactuar. Now they'll add StageVideo API, which will be an optimized way to display video if no other effects are needed.

    So, as always, when Google and Microsoft fight, Adobe wins.

  9. Re:Great... on Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses · · Score: 1

    I've been using MaxCDN for more than an year. So far it works just fine.

  10. Re:Oh please on CDN Optimizing HTML On the Fly · · Score: 1

    Well, if JQuery were integrated with the browsers, it'd be great.

    I keep wrestling with it because of lazy CMS (WP, Joomla) plugin developers. If you're not careful, you can end up with three requests to load JQuery, one local, one 1.3.x from Google and another 1.4.x from Google as well, plus various extensions like JQueryCycle AND some Scriptaculous as well. I've seen it.

    And all of this for trivial stuff, like validating if a form field is not null, cross-fading a div or opening a pop-up. Come on.

    JQuery is a really great tool for doing advanced stuff, but I find it sad that many devs no longer know how to use a simple .getElementById().

  11. Oh please on CDN Optimizing HTML On the Fly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This seems like an ad for Contendo disguised as an inflammatory post.

    Any webmaster worth their salt is using a variety of tools to improve loading speed - minification of html/css/js, combining scripts, CSS optimization, js packing, compressing PNGs with better tools and using CSS sprites.

    I use W3 Total Cache for two of my blogs and the speed increase is substantial.

    While we are at it, I wish developers would think it through before using JQuery for trivial stuff. Loading JQuery + bunch of plugins to do simple (and I mean simple) fades or form validations is pointless. Here's an example of what I mean.

    So if they're doing this transparently, it's all th better.

  12. Re:What kind of a "standard" is this? on W3C Says IE9 Is Currently the Most HTML5 Compatible Browser · · Score: 1

    I'm actually using Chrome 9.0.750.0 from the DEV channel.

    And no, I can't see any difference from Chrome 7...

  13. Re:Competition is Good on IE9 May Not Be Enough To Save IE · · Score: 1

    Yes, yes, yes. This is what fanboys of brand X forget. Having a dominant brand in any area is bad for us.
    In photography, for all Canon vs. Nikon bickering, the fact that they have similar power and because they are constantly challenged by Sony, Pentax, etc. forces them to innovate.
    Same with iOS vs. Android, browsers, cars and just about everything.

    Personally, I'd love IE9 to be the best and coolest browser (for a while anyway). It would be yet another incentive for users to abandon IE6 or 7 and would force the others to keep up and fix long-standing issues, like the painful problems in Chrome's graphic library (Skia). I'd love to see Firefox losing some market share as a wake-up call.

  14. Re:Arrogant "security researcher" bullshit on Security Lessons Learned From the Diaspora Launch · · Score: 3, Informative

    You are right to a point.

    The way I see it, the real problem is not that Diaspora has bugs; the problem is that it has fundamental bugs, bugs so fundamental that they question authors' understanding of the framework they're working with. It's bugs that shouldn't have been there at all.

    Not verifying whether or not a user has the rights to edit an object is something pretty fundamental in my book.

  15. Re:So? on IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours" · · Score: 4, Informative

    People should get over Acid3.
    Some of the features Acid3 tests for are already obsolete (SVG fonts superseded by WOFF) while other crucial features are still buggy.

  16. Re:Two Words on PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account · · Score: 5, Informative

    A few more words about Google Checkout: works only in US.

    I am using Paypal to sell a game. The demographics are USA 39%, UK 11%, Italy 8% and so on. Overall the 20-80 rule is observed.
    By using Google Checkout instead of PayPal, I would have prevented 61% of my sales - you know, long tail and all. It's true that only 0.05% of the sales are from e.g. Maldives, but all these sales add up.

    If Google Checkout gets global, I'll be the first to jump. Until then, Paypal is a simple method trusted by the buyers. I just make sure I don't keep my money there.

  17. Re:Flash on android on Apple Relaxes iOS Development Tool Restrictions · · Score: 1

    A crappy app is a crappy app, regardless of what's been programmed in and it still has to be reviewed and approved.
    If someone creates a flash app that doesn't kill the battery and provides a pleasant experience, it should be allowed.

    Conversely, a bad app written in Objective-C should (and will be) rejected.

  18. Re:Flash? on Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming · · Score: 1

    Just speaking of inconsistencies, the text links at the top of http://www.mozillalabs.com/gaming/ (which use a web font - Museo Sans) look different in Firefox and Chrome, while on https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/ the red circles with "Read blog", "Follow" are rendered incorrectly by Chrome (latest DEV build). What's not to love?

  19. Flash? on Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming · · Score: 1

    There are no rules or at least guidelines for now. I'm curious whether or not Flash will be allowed. I guess not, since if they do, all the winners will be flash-based.

    Love it or hate it, Flash is the best way of writing a game for web (and in some cases mobiles), and with frameworks like AIR or tools like ZINC they can become standalone apps for Win/Mac/Linux - effectively meeting the promise made by Java 15 years ago.

    Two years ago a wrote a little chess game. I initially considered Java and then Silverlight but I ended up writing it in Actionscript 3 simply because of its broad reach and ability to easily have nice graphics. Despite the fact that it's not nearly as powerful as a chess game written in C, it's been surprisingly successful.

    I've been thinking about porting it to HTML5, but I see no practical advantages to doing so and I'd only lose 60% of the viewers and I'd have to put up with browsers inconsistencies, rendering bugs, javascript's prototype-based class model...

  20. Re:Security Fix Schedule on New Malware Imitates Browser Warning Pages · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That'd be the day - when a browser developer can issue a patch for human stupidity.

  21. Re:Let me see if I've got this right... on Google Confirms Chrome GPU Acceleration · · Score: 1

    I never had a flash crash or performance issues in IE or Chrome, only in Firefox - and I don't use flashblock.
    Considering that the flash plugin is the same for Chrome and Firefox, I suspect a plugin architecture issue in Firefox...

  22. Re:Both feed on developers on Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1 · · Score: 1

    On MS side, VS Express is free.

    On Adobe side, you can get Flex SDK, which is free and open source + Eclipse + FlashDevelop.

    I used Silverlight only in passing, but I work quite a lot in Flash as well as html5/javascript/css3. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Dismissing one purely on ideological reasons is jut wrong.

  23. Re:Absolutely on Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Somewhat" is an understatement.
    Flash is ubiquitous. You'd be hard-pressed to find a computer without it. With Silverlight, MS had to pay developers to build something with it and in many cases (NYTimes) thy still abandoned it. The availability is 98% Flash, 5-10% Silverlight.

    As for waiting, HTML5 and strong support is years away. Don't be fooled by "Browser X scores 100/100 on Acid 3" -- I am working on a HTML5/CSS3 project right now and all browsers have major rendering bugs and omissions, most of them documented (aliasing for transformed objects, no clipping in some instances when border-radius is used and many more).

    Even ignoring older versions of IE, developing any complex app for Firefox, Webkit and Opera is still a daunting task.

    "HTML5" may be the newest buzzword, much like "ajax" and "web 2.0" but the reality is in many many cases Flash would give better results in less time and with broader reach.

  24. Re:LINUX rounds numbers fine on Microsoft Losing Big To Apple On Campus · · Score: 1

    I have a laptop at home, currently being used for my 5-year old son; the laptop was bought in 2003. It's a rebranded thing, but I believe the internals are Toshiba. 15", Pentium 2.4 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM. It has Windows XP on it, installed 3 years ago, I keep it updated. I have another laptop from the same year, I donated it to my accountant's son.

    I find it hard to believe that if a generic laptop used by a small child can last more than 7 years, no other laptop can.

    At the office we use only laptops for workstations, mostly HP/Compaq. We have had failures, but no laptop lasted less than 5 years, we usually donate them or take them home when they are obsolete and not worth upgrading.

  25. What model? on The Recovery Disc Rip-Off · · Score: 1

    What model was the laptop?
    We usually buy the Compaq line from HP and that comes with physical media. The last laptop from them came with with 3 discs: Windows Vista, Windows XP downgrade and Drivers. That was last year.

    Usually, I found real difference between their 'home' laptops and their 'business' ones.