What is it about people who have never experienced socialism claiming that it is so bad?
Because people have experienced socialism, and it was so bad.* See roman_mir's comment about experiences with similar programs in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
more money per capita to cover a smaller portion of the population than any of the G8 spend on universal coverage
Opponents of socialized medicine would counter that some new drugs are made available in countries with socialized medicine years later than in the United States because the single payer in those countries isn't willing to pay as much per month's supply as private insurers in the United States are.
* And not in the sense of a certain Power Glove in the film The Wizard either.
Most NES games with a battery, starting with later printings of The Legend of Zelda, had a warning to hold Reset while turning off the power. One problem was that as the NES CPU lost power, its bus drivers couldn't hold the address bus stable, possibly causing writes to internal work RAM to be redirected to save RAM instead. Holding Reset froze the CPU, ensuring that no stray writes to the wrong address could cause the save data to become corrupt.
Some later mappers had more sophisticated write protection circuitry, but there still wasn't always enough memory to make saving an atomic transaction. StarTropics for NES had explicit warnings against turning off the power while saving was in progress.
The wording in the PS2 era was to the effect "Now saving. Please do not remove the Memory Card (8 MB) (for PlayStation®2) or turn off the power."
More and more applications are moving from platform-specific (eg, Windows) applications into the browser.
If an application runs in a Vagrant box, it can run on any platform that runs Vagrant. This includes Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux. So if the sticking point is being platform-specific, why can't an app be distributed as a Vagrant box, and then the user uses an X11 server or RDP or VNC client to interact with it?
The Java spec is encumbered by Oracle copyright with licensing terms that prohibit distributing a work in progress implementation to the public. This means all new JVMs must be developed under NDA, not in the open. ECMAScript and the HTML DOM have no such encumbrance.
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article?
You can. It's called posting your article on a pastebin, wiki, blog, or other site, and linking it in a Tweet. TwitLonger is a pastebin specifically for Twitter users. Or if it's your own site, the Twitter Cards feature lets you add <meta> elements to control how the link appears.
and coding is annoying if I don't plug in an external keyboard.
I figured that much. But there are people in Slashdot's comment section who claim that a tablet with a USB or Bluetooth keyboard could replace most or all uses of those 10" laptops that were sold from 2008 to 2012, including lightweight programming.
Not always. At my day job, we have a Samsung tablet with a barcode scanner to scan EANs on product packaging and Code 128 barcodes on warehouse bins. But because Android sees it as a Bluetooth keyboard, it doesn't automatically pop up the on-screen keyboard when it becomes necessary to key in things that aren't barcodes.
we finally realized we need open protocol, open source protocols to do what Flash, Unity, etc did
By "Unity" I hope you don't mean the desktop environment with an open source shopping lens that defaulted to sending every single search on your computer to Amazon's server.
Its better to have an open protocol and do it with open source code in the browser.
By this measure, the free counterparts to Flash Player are Gecko and Blink, the engines of Firefox and Chromium respectively. But what's the free counterpart to Adobe Animate CC (formerly called Flash)? Is Synfig any good?
single player flash game [...] Flash should never had had access to the microphone
How would one make a game inspired by Seaman or Hey You Pikachu without the microphone? Making it for one desktop operating system would have severely limited its audience.
ActionScript ran on the client. Node runs on the server.
Benefit of doubt: Perhaps "Node" was meant in the loose sense of efficient JavaScript engines, one of which proved itself so useful that servers adopted it as well.
1) Flash video clips, both recorded video and video animated with Flash shared on Newgrounds and the like. [...] The first group largely shifted to YouTube
YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and the like are fine for "recorded video" but inefficient for "video animated with Flash". Rendering a vector animation to pixels and then compressing the pixels bloats file size by a factor of 10 in my tests.
Adobe's replacement for Flash as a vector animation authoring tool is Animate CC, which can create vector animations for HTML5. The difference is that one can buy a used copy of an old version of Flash, but Animate is available only as a rental. So which other timeline-based* graphical applications, either free or purchased, can people use to create vector animations for HTML5?
* Typing coordinates into a text editor is not "timeline-based".
After the end of H*R, what tools should be used to make and efficiently deliver web animations? I guess it'd be possible to use a used copy of Flash to make an animation, render it to pixels, and compress it to H.264 and WebM. But in my tests, that produces a file 10 times the size of the corresponding SWF. This in turn means a user on an Internet connection with a given monthly data transfer quota can view only one-tenth of the videos using MP4/WebM that he could using Flash.
Or are you of the opinion that after the end of H*R, web animation itself "no longer had a reason to exist"?
When I did support the two things you could be guaranteed would need a patch EVERY MONTH were the Java Runtime and Flash.
That and Windows itself, with the "Patch Tuesday" habit of Windows Update. And the web browsers, once they went to a rapid release mentality since Chrome 1 and Firefox 4.
What would have been a better production and delivery means than Flash for animated series like Homestar Runner, particularly before home Internet plans supporting HD video streaming became affordable?
Relegation of the desktop to luddites won't happen until it becomes practical to app apps using an app on a tablet. I haven't seen any hint that Apple plans to port Xcode to the iPad Pro. As for Android, I'm aware of an app called AIDE, but is it any good?
Slashdot Mirror
The Open Source Definition published by Open Source Initiative is almost word for word identical to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
What is it about people who have never experienced socialism claiming that it is so bad?
Because people have experienced socialism, and it was so bad.* See roman_mir's comment about experiences with similar programs in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
more money per capita to cover a smaller portion of the population than any of the G8 spend on universal coverage
Opponents of socialized medicine would counter that some new drugs are made available in countries with socialized medicine years later than in the United States because the single payer in those countries isn't willing to pay as much per month's supply as private insurers in the United States are.
* And not in the sense of a certain Power Glove in the film The Wizard either.
The demand being made on participants is that they already qualify for social security benefits.
Social security isn't a Canadian program.
Small-s social security is certainly a Canadian program. It's called Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, and provincial programs. (source)
("Small-s" means the generic concept as opposed to the proper name of a specific program in a specific country.)
I haven't heard much out of Twitter since over a dozen of his sockpuppets were outed.
Most NES games with a battery, starting with later printings of The Legend of Zelda, had a warning to hold Reset while turning off the power. One problem was that as the NES CPU lost power, its bus drivers couldn't hold the address bus stable, possibly causing writes to internal work RAM to be redirected to save RAM instead. Holding Reset froze the CPU, ensuring that no stray writes to the wrong address could cause the save data to become corrupt.
Some later mappers had more sophisticated write protection circuitry, but there still wasn't always enough memory to make saving an atomic transaction. StarTropics for NES had explicit warnings against turning off the power while saving was in progress.
The wording in the PS2 era was to the effect "Now saving. Please do not remove the Memory Card (8 MB) (for PlayStation®2) or turn off the power."
there is no way to move saves off the device or even to the memory card - which is really puzzling.
It's because Nintendo's past consoles were jailbroken through the savegame system. Google keywords: Wii Twilight Hack, Wii Smash Stack, 3DS ninjhax
Users would be happy to subscribe, but instead of offering that option, we're stuck with potentially malicious ads and trackers.
Slashdot used to offer subscriptions years ago. Nowadays it seems only SoylentNews offers that.
More and more applications are moving from platform-specific (eg, Windows) applications into the browser.
If an application runs in a Vagrant box, it can run on any platform that runs Vagrant. This includes Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux. So if the sticking point is being platform-specific, why can't an app be distributed as a Vagrant box, and then the user uses an X11 server or RDP or VNC client to interact with it?
The Java spec is encumbered by Oracle copyright with licensing terms that prohibit distributing a work in progress implementation to the public. This means all new JVMs must be developed under NDA, not in the open. ECMAScript and the HTML DOM have no such encumbrance.
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article?
You can. It's called posting your article on a pastebin, wiki, blog, or other site, and linking it in a Tweet. TwitLonger is a pastebin specifically for Twitter users. Or if it's your own site, the Twitter Cards feature lets you add <meta> elements to control how the link appears.
Don't post images of text. Use TwitLonger.
Microsoft has Bing, Bing Maps, and Hotmail.
It used to have Soapbox.
[H*R's and Weebl's] solution was to put the toons on youtube for HTML5 compliance. It works, but it kills their easter eggs.
The size penalty of rendering the vectors to pixels also kills viewers' monthly download quotas.
and coding is annoying if I don't plug in an external keyboard.
I figured that much. But there are people in Slashdot's comment section who claim that a tablet with a USB or Bluetooth keyboard could replace most or all uses of those 10" laptops that were sold from 2008 to 2012, including lightweight programming.
With ios and android the osk is fully automatic
Not always. At my day job, we have a Samsung tablet with a barcode scanner to scan EANs on product packaging and Code 128 barcodes on warehouse bins. But because Android sees it as a Bluetooth keyboard, it doesn't automatically pop up the on-screen keyboard when it becomes necessary to key in things that aren't barcodes.
After the end of H*R, what tools should be used to make and efficiently deliver web animations?
I thought the replacement was SVG and javascript
That or Canvas and JavaScript. Either fills the "deliver" part, but not the "make" part.
we finally realized we need open protocol, open source protocols to do what Flash, Unity, etc did
By "Unity" I hope you don't mean the desktop environment with an open source shopping lens that defaulted to sending every single search on your computer to Amazon's server.
Its better to have an open protocol and do it with open source code in the browser.
By this measure, the free counterparts to Flash Player are Gecko and Blink, the engines of Firefox and Chromium respectively. But what's the free counterpart to Adobe Animate CC (formerly called Flash)? Is Synfig any good?
single player flash game [...] Flash should never had had access to the microphone
How would one make a game inspired by Seaman or Hey You Pikachu without the microphone? Making it for one desktop operating system would have severely limited its audience.
ActionScript ran on the client. Node runs on the server.
Benefit of doubt: Perhaps "Node" was meant in the loose sense of efficient JavaScript engines, one of which proved itself so useful that servers adopted it as well.
Which blog host would you prefer? Is Blogspot or WordPress.com better?
1) Flash video clips, both recorded video and video animated with Flash shared on Newgrounds and the like.
[...]
The first group largely shifted to YouTube
YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and the like are fine for "recorded video" but inefficient for "video animated with Flash". Rendering a vector animation to pixels and then compressing the pixels bloats file size by a factor of 10 in my tests.
Adobe's replacement for Flash as a vector animation authoring tool is Animate CC, which can create vector animations for HTML5. The difference is that one can buy a used copy of an old version of Flash, but Animate is available only as a rental. So which other timeline-based* graphical applications, either free or purchased, can people use to create vector animations for HTML5?
* Typing coordinates into a text editor is not "timeline-based".
After the end of H*R, what tools should be used to make and efficiently deliver web animations? I guess it'd be possible to use a used copy of Flash to make an animation, render it to pixels, and compress it to H.264 and WebM. But in my tests, that produces a file 10 times the size of the corresponding SWF. This in turn means a user on an Internet connection with a given monthly data transfer quota can view only one-tenth of the videos using MP4/WebM that he could using Flash.
Or are you of the opinion that after the end of H*R, web animation itself "no longer had a reason to exist"?
When I did support the two things you could be guaranteed would need a patch EVERY MONTH were the Java Runtime and Flash.
That and Windows itself, with the "Patch Tuesday" habit of Windows Update. And the web browsers, once they went to a rapid release mentality since Chrome 1 and Firefox 4.
What would have been a better production and delivery means than Flash for animated series like Homestar Runner, particularly before home Internet plans supporting HD video streaming became affordable?
Next up, the desktop kills the desktop
Relegation of the desktop to luddites won't happen until it becomes practical to app apps using an app on a tablet. I haven't seen any hint that Apple plans to port Xcode to the iPad Pro. As for Android, I'm aware of an app called AIDE, but is it any good?
The regulation is that which prohibits a competing ISP from laying its own last mile.