Of the five games you listed, this is the only one that worked as advertised. Yet no sound in Firefox 40.
Just play some Tappy Chicken
How do I get past "Please expand your window to play!"? I've already put Firefox into full screen with F11 but it's still there.
or World's Biggest Pac-man
After I clicked it, it warned me that only Facebook.com members are allowed to create mazes. Not being a Facebook.com member (I graduated before it even started), I clicked "Just play for fun" to continue. The play screen appeared, and "Loading" appeared and disappeared, leaving the playfield blank. The same thing happened after a reload. It failed to load because a line of code in the game produced the error ReferenceError: _gaq is not defined, in turn because I have configured Firefox to block scripts from Google Analytics. I haven't seen a Flash game misbehave when scripts from Google Analytics are disabled. Because the HTML5 execution environment differs so much not only from browser to browser but also from individual computer to individual computer, it's harder to get it right as opposed to a sloppy job that falls over when Google Analytics is not responding.
or Pirates Love Daisies
Audio was choppy as it first started, and even the title screen was taller than my laptop's monitor (1024x600). This must be what the warning on Tappy Chicken was trying to prevent. At least Flash Player automatically resizes an animation or game to the size of the object element that contains it.
or HexGL or any of the many WebGL games out there.
Error message: "WEBGL IS NOT SUPPORTED!" It took me to get.webgl.org which states: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." about:support in Firefox states "WebGL Renderer: Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues." WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and thus requires a GPU that supports OpenGL 2.0, but this 5-year-old laptop's Intel integrated graphics processor supports only up to OpenGL 1.4. Yes, I know, it's old enough that I ought to replace it. Do you have a recommendation for a newer 10" laptop or 10" detachable laptop that supports X11/Linux well?
Trademarks ONLY apply in the specific field of business you operate in, and are meaningless outside of that.
True, trademarks that aren't yet famous are limited to a field of use. But in the 1990s, the concept of trademark dilution broadened exclusive rights in famous trademarks to cover even unrelated use.
Android gets more and more comical as the screen sizes get larger, not because of Android itself, but because of what people think Android is and thus the way developers program for it.
Android gets comical not because of Android but because of Google Play. People who buy Android devices demand access to Google Play Store, but Google is unwilling to license the copyrighted Google Play Store client except for preinstallation on devices that meet the Android Compatibility Definition (CDD). And last time I checked, one of the provisions of the CDD was that the logical screen size seen by an application never change after the application is installed. This means no Windows 8.1-style split screen for "snapped" apps. Samsung reportedly works around this by zooming each application in and out while maintaining the logical screen size, but this makes text unreadable while an application is zoomed out.
Re:Upgrading and switching are different things
on
A Farewell To Flash
·
· Score: 1
Bookmarks, saved passwords, and cookies are tools for visiting and authenticating to a web site. I don't see the analogy to crumbs and stains.
I could not read the featured article because after I got a couple paragraphs down in the text, an automatically playing HTML5 video ad with sound that the site would not let me skip until after watching and listening to all 15 seconds of the 15-second ad caused me to reflexively press Ctrl+R. When the page reloaded, a full-window still ad appeared with a mailing list subscription nag on top of it.
Re:Upgrading and switching are different things
on
A Farewell To Flash
·
· Score: 1
It is REALLY hard to check off that box [to import bookmarks, saved passwords, and cookies] during the installation, isn't it?
But can a site guarantee, for all modern browsers to which a user of Internet Explorer 9 would consider switching, that the browser's installer won't fail to import at least one bookmark, saved password, or saved cookie? Otherwise, it'll incur support costs.
You can still block the ad serving URL. Simply have a block list of the most common ad servers and block them.
But then you're specifically blocking ads, which loses the ethical plausible deniability of blocking something that just happens, wink wink nudge nudge, to be correlated with ads.
Upgrading and switching are different things
on
A Farewell To Flash
·
· Score: 0
For one thing you will have to support IE 9 till Vista end-of-line in 2017 in the least
by "support" you mean put up a dialog box stating "please upgrade to a modern browser"
Which modern browser? IE 9 is the most recent version of Internet Explorer that will run on Windows Vista. It is impossible for the owner of a PC running Windows Vista to upgrade to a modern version of Internet Explorer without first buying a newer version of Windows. So it isn't upgrading to a modern browser as much as switching to a modern browser, which would likely cost a user his bookmarks, saved sessions, and saved passwords. Technical users such as Slashdot's reader base tend to forget how hard it would be for a non-technical user to restore that information.
People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it
Agreed. But a lot of Slashdot users have recommended rendering vector animations to video and serving them to viewers as video, viewer's monthly caps be damned. That's how modern Flash cartoons such as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are produced. Apparently bloating the data size by a factor of ten (in my tests) is worth not having to worry about the speed of the viewer's computer.
and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.
Do you mean Adobe Flash is better for making them than Adobe Edge Animate, or Flash Player is better for playing them than HTML5 Canvas?
By selecting the checkbox, you understand that you may not convert content unless you have the right to do so. Uploading content that you do not have the right to convert into HTML5 is a violation of copyright law and against the Google terms of service.
In other words, the author has to perform the conversion; viewers are forbidden to do so. And for most of the vector animations in SWF format on Newgrounds or Dagobah or Albino Blacksheep, I imagine the author has left the scene and can no longer be contacted, making the animations orphan works. This is why mass conversion of SWF to SVG- or Canvas-based HTML5 isn't likely to happen any time soon.
I can't speak to how often "a lift from family or friends" can be repeated before they begin to object to "using me as your private taxi". But a controller is cheaper than successfully lobbying your city to add bus service at night or on Sunday. (Source)
Is there a reliable Linux file system such as EXT4 that has an easy to use copy on write(CoW) feature [...] Novell Netware FS did all this and more in 1995
In other words, Netware is for COWs. You are all COWs holding signs that say EAT MOR CHIKIN. Moo!
If reading or writing files in a particular file system is slow enough that it makes applications painful to use, the file system won't pass into widespread use.
The feature I miss the most is allowing traversal through a directory hierarchy a user has no explicit permissions for to get to a folder they do have permissions for. I find the workarounds for this in other filesystems to be extremely ugly.
In POSIX, that's represented in a directory's mode bits with octal digit 1 (4: list files, 2: create or delete files, 1: traverse). What do you find ugly about mode 751 (owner create or delete, owner and group list, world traverse)?
I also kind of wish TCP/IP had used the network:mac numbering scheme that IPX used.
It does now. An IPv6 address is divided into a 48- or 56-bit network, a 16- or 8-bit subnet, and a 64-bit machine identifier commonly derived from the MAC.
How do you prove Coq is correct, that it doesn't have a Ken Thompson bug (see "Reflections on Trusting Trust") causing a false positive on proof of Coq's own correctness? Is there an independently written implementation of Coq's proof language suitable for David A. Wheeler's "diverse double-compiling" method? And how do you prove that the hardware on which Coq is run doesn't have a flaw that affects Coq's correctness?
You genuinely cannot come up with the idea that maybe you should do some research on the internet first and then head to the store?
I did that once. I researched phones, and once I settled on a phone to try, it turned out that zero out of four stores near me carried it.
Or head to the store, try out some units and if the sales person can't answer your question then do some research on the internet and go back afterwards?
This could take days of back-and-forth travel. Or are days of back-and-forth travel part of the expected experience of buying a phone?
How well would one gaming PC and two PCs with Intel integrated graphics processors work? Wouldn't the player with the gaming PC be at an unfair, unfun competitive advantage over the Intel IGP players?
or have a laptop or a console that they can bring
First, they have to be all the same platform, such as all PC, all PlayStation 4, all PlayStation 3, all Xbox One, or all Xbox 360. Second, if they're PCs, they need to have gaming GPUs, not Intel IGP, and laptops with Intel IGP can't easily be upgraded to add a gaming GPU unless something has changed that I don't know about. Third, all players have to own a copy of the same game; you can't play, say, Counter-Strike against Unreal even though they're both first-perosn shooters. And fourth, as beelsebob and I wrote earlier, a LAN party is less spontaneous. All players have to plan in advance that a specific gathering will be a LAN party so that everyone doesn't have to drive back home or wait an hour for the next bus to go get their video gaming hardware.
and it doesnt limit you to just 4 players
I'm told that DualShock 3 isn't limited to four; there can in theory be up to seven on one PlayStation 3. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U supports eight players.
and having to split the available screen into 4 sections that everybody can see.
True of a first-person shooter or a racing game. But what is "split" in Bomberman or Smash TV or Street Fighter or Smash Bros.?
as well as the PC platform that you could target.
Other Slashdot users have told me that if my team develops a PC game supporting two or more USB gamepads and tries to bring it to market, next to nobody will buy it because next to nobody wants to either buy a second gaming PC for the living room or move the gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the desk. And as I understand it, the indie console programs require that a company already have brought a successful PC game to market. Or what am I missing?
As I understand it: First, people blame Google for taking until Lollipop to get this right when bloatware was becoming a problem since Gingerbread. Second, even if the functionality were not part of the operating system, people blame manufacturers and carriers for not providing a single app, installed in/system with appropriate system permissions, to do the same thing after a factory reset.
Whether implemented in the OS or in a manufacturer's customization, this functionality could have reduced/system to fewer than a half dozen apps and the libraries that they use actually need to be present prior to the first Internet connection. These are launcher, settings, and app store on tablets, and those plus dialer and SMS on phones.
Slashdot Mirror
DHTML Lemmings
Of the five games you listed, this is the only one that worked as advertised. Yet no sound in Firefox 40.
Just play some Tappy Chicken
How do I get past "Please expand your window to play!"? I've already put Firefox into full screen with F11 but it's still there.
or World's Biggest Pac-man
After I clicked it, it warned me that only Facebook.com members are allowed to create mazes. Not being a Facebook.com member (I graduated before it even started), I clicked "Just play for fun" to continue. The play screen appeared, and "Loading" appeared and disappeared, leaving the playfield blank. The same thing happened after a reload. It failed to load because a line of code in the game produced the error ReferenceError: _gaq is not defined, in turn because I have configured Firefox to block scripts from Google Analytics. I haven't seen a Flash game misbehave when scripts from Google Analytics are disabled. Because the HTML5 execution environment differs so much not only from browser to browser but also from individual computer to individual computer, it's harder to get it right as opposed to a sloppy job that falls over when Google Analytics is not responding.
or Pirates Love Daisies
Audio was choppy as it first started, and even the title screen was taller than my laptop's monitor (1024x600). This must be what the warning on Tappy Chicken was trying to prevent. At least Flash Player automatically resizes an animation or game to the size of the object element that contains it.
or HexGL or any of the many WebGL games out there.
Error message: "WEBGL IS NOT SUPPORTED!" It took me to get.webgl.org which states: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." about:support in Firefox states "WebGL Renderer: Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues." WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and thus requires a GPU that supports OpenGL 2.0, but this 5-year-old laptop's Intel integrated graphics processor supports only up to OpenGL 1.4. Yes, I know, it's old enough that I ought to replace it. Do you have a recommendation for a newer 10" laptop or 10" detachable laptop that supports X11/Linux well?
"Flash Is Dead" is also a far lower motion clip than the clip I tried, which is "We Drink Ritalin".
Trademarks ONLY apply in the specific field of business you operate in, and are meaningless outside of that.
True, trademarks that aren't yet famous are limited to a field of use. But in the 1990s, the concept of trademark dilution broadened exclusive rights in famous trademarks to cover even unrelated use.
Android gets more and more comical as the screen sizes get larger, not because of Android itself, but because of what people think Android is and thus the way developers program for it.
Android gets comical not because of Android but because of Google Play. People who buy Android devices demand access to Google Play Store, but Google is unwilling to license the copyrighted Google Play Store client except for preinstallation on devices that meet the Android Compatibility Definition (CDD). And last time I checked, one of the provisions of the CDD was that the logical screen size seen by an application never change after the application is installed. This means no Windows 8.1-style split screen for "snapped" apps. Samsung reportedly works around this by zooming each application in and out while maintaining the logical screen size, but this makes text unreadable while an application is zoomed out.
Bookmarks, saved passwords, and cookies are tools for visiting and authenticating to a web site. I don't see the analogy to crumbs and stains.
I could not read the featured article because after I got a couple paragraphs down in the text, an automatically playing HTML5 video ad with sound that the site would not let me skip until after watching and listening to all 15 seconds of the 15-second ad caused me to reflexively press Ctrl+R. When the page reloaded, a full-window still ad appeared with a mailing list subscription nag on top of it.
Ctrl+W.
It is REALLY hard to check off that box [to import bookmarks, saved passwords, and cookies] during the installation, isn't it?
But can a site guarantee, for all modern browsers to which a user of Internet Explorer 9 would consider switching, that the browser's installer won't fail to import at least one bookmark, saved password, or saved cookie? Otherwise, it'll incur support costs.
[Flash Player] works pretty well on my android device that I managed to load flash onto.
Adobe Flash Player breaks in recent versions of Android. What version of Android does your device run?
You can still block the ad serving URL. Simply have a block list of the most common ad servers and block them.
But then you're specifically blocking ads, which loses the ethical plausible deniability of blocking something that just happens, wink wink nudge nudge, to be correlated with ads.
For one thing you will have to support IE 9 till Vista end-of-line in 2017 in the least
by "support" you mean put up a dialog box stating "please upgrade to a modern browser"
Which modern browser? IE 9 is the most recent version of Internet Explorer that will run on Windows Vista. It is impossible for the owner of a PC running Windows Vista to upgrade to a modern version of Internet Explorer without first buying a newer version of Windows. So it isn't upgrading to a modern browser as much as switching to a modern browser, which would likely cost a user his bookmarks, saved sessions, and saved passwords. Technical users such as Slashdot's reader base tend to forget how hard it would be for a non-technical user to restore that information.
People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it
Agreed. But a lot of Slashdot users have recommended rendering vector animations to video and serving them to viewers as video, viewer's monthly caps be damned. That's how modern Flash cartoons such as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are produced. Apparently bloating the data size by a factor of ten (in my tests) is worth not having to worry about the speed of the viewer's computer.
and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.
Do you mean Adobe Flash is better for making them than Adobe Edge Animate, or Flash Player is better for playing them than HTML5 Canvas?
From the upload page:
In other words, the author has to perform the conversion; viewers are forbidden to do so. And for most of the vector animations in SWF format on Newgrounds or Dagobah or Albino Blacksheep, I imagine the author has left the scene and can no longer be contacted, making the animations orphan works. This is why mass conversion of SWF to SVG- or Canvas-based HTML5 isn't likely to happen any time soon.
Even for the author, it can be a pain. From the extension page:
YTMND uses a Flash preloader to load the audio and then start the GIF and audio at the same time.
What about Desktop Tower Defense, N Game, Bubble Tanks, and all that?
Yeah, what about them? Why aren't they ported to HTML5?
You don't get to leave early just because your CPU compiled your code faster or that web page loaded a bit faster.
You do if you're paid on contract, not hourly.
I can't speak to how often "a lift from family or friends" can be repeated before they begin to object to "using me as your private taxi". But a controller is cheaper than successfully lobbying your city to add bus service at night or on Sunday. (Source)
Is there a reliable Linux file system such as EXT4 that has an easy to use copy on write(CoW) feature [...] Novell Netware FS did all this and more in 1995
In other words, Netware is for COWs. You are all COWs holding signs that say EAT MOR CHIKIN. Moo!
If reading or writing files in a particular file system is slow enough that it makes applications painful to use, the file system won't pass into widespread use.
The feature I miss the most is allowing traversal through a directory hierarchy a user has no explicit permissions for to get to a folder they do have permissions for. I find the workarounds for this in other filesystems to be extremely ugly.
In POSIX, that's represented in a directory's mode bits with octal digit 1 (4: list files, 2: create or delete files, 1: traverse). What do you find ugly about mode 751 (owner create or delete, owner and group list, world traverse)?
I also kind of wish TCP/IP had used the network:mac numbering scheme that IPX used.
It does now. An IPv6 address is divided into a 48- or 56-bit network, a 16- or 8-bit subnet, and a 64-bit machine identifier commonly derived from the MAC.
formal proof using Coq
How do you prove Coq is correct, that it doesn't have a Ken Thompson bug (see "Reflections on Trusting Trust") causing a false positive on proof of Coq's own correctness? Is there an independently written implementation of Coq's proof language suitable for David A. Wheeler's "diverse double-compiling" method? And how do you prove that the hardware on which Coq is run doesn't have a flaw that affects Coq's correctness?
what does this phrase even mean? why does speed or slowness matter?
Speed means the ability to finish reading and writing all data associated with a job before the job's soft real-time deadline has expired.
You genuinely cannot come up with the idea that maybe you should do some research on the internet first and then head to the store?
I did that once. I researched phones, and once I settled on a phone to try, it turned out that zero out of four stores near me carried it.
Or head to the store, try out some units and if the sales person can't answer your question then do some research on the internet and go back afterwards?
This could take days of back-and-forth travel. Or are days of back-and-forth travel part of the expected experience of buying a phone?
These days plenty of people have more than one PC
How well would one gaming PC and two PCs with Intel integrated graphics processors work? Wouldn't the player with the gaming PC be at an unfair, unfun competitive advantage over the Intel IGP players?
or have a laptop or a console that they can bring
First, they have to be all the same platform, such as all PC, all PlayStation 4, all PlayStation 3, all Xbox One, or all Xbox 360. Second, if they're PCs, they need to have gaming GPUs, not Intel IGP, and laptops with Intel IGP can't easily be upgraded to add a gaming GPU unless something has changed that I don't know about. Third, all players have to own a copy of the same game; you can't play, say, Counter-Strike against Unreal even though they're both first-perosn shooters. And fourth, as beelsebob and I wrote earlier, a LAN party is less spontaneous. All players have to plan in advance that a specific gathering will be a LAN party so that everyone doesn't have to drive back home or wait an hour for the next bus to go get their video gaming hardware.
and it doesnt limit you to just 4 players
I'm told that DualShock 3 isn't limited to four; there can in theory be up to seven on one PlayStation 3. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U supports eight players.
and having to split the available screen into 4 sections that everybody can see.
True of a first-person shooter or a racing game. But what is "split" in Bomberman or Smash TV or Street Fighter or Smash Bros.?
as well as the PC platform that you could target.
Other Slashdot users have told me that if my team develops a PC game supporting two or more USB gamepads and tries to bring it to market, next to nobody will buy it because next to nobody wants to either buy a second gaming PC for the living room or move the gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the desk. And as I understand it, the indie console programs require that a company already have brought a successful PC game to market. Or what am I missing?
As I understand it: First, people blame Google for taking until Lollipop to get this right when bloatware was becoming a problem since Gingerbread. Second, even if the functionality were not part of the operating system, people blame manufacturers and carriers for not providing a single app, installed in /system with appropriate system permissions, to do the same thing after a factory reset.
Whether implemented in the OS or in a manufacturer's customization, this functionality could have reduced /system to fewer than a half dozen apps and the libraries that they use actually need to be present prior to the first Internet connection. These are launcher, settings, and app store on tablets, and those plus dialer and SMS on phones.
What would have been a non-idiotic way to protest conflicts of interest among video game reviewers?