Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment E-sports copyright issues (Score 1) 1

True, the NFL owns the right to footage of NFL games. But at least there isn't a "football company" that can shut down entire leagues under some sort of exclusive right. With e-sports, on the other hand, a video game's publisher can use copyright to take down a league's streams if it doesn't like the direction the league is taking.

Comment Re:Window size and pixel density in what header? (Score 2) 161

also, browsers can resize. It's not the server's job

It's the server's job if the user doesn't want to have to download an ultra-high-resolution image over a metered connection. It also used to be the server's job back when web browsers insisted on using nearest neighbor resampling instead of bilinear or bicubic resampling.

We don't have a bandwidth shortage.

You appear not to know what it's like to be stuck on the 10 GB per month cap of wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet access.

If you know it's a mac or a PC, you know it's got a desktop range of pixels.

But is that 1024 pixels wide with huge distracting white areas on both sides when viewed on a 2560 pixel monitor, or is it 2560 pixels wide with complete inability to see the entire image at once on a 1024 pixel monitor like the one in my laptop?

Likewise any particular smartphone.

A tablet held in landscape orientation runs the same operating system as a smartphone held in portrait orientation, despite the latter having only about one-third the horizontal width.

Don't resize images with the viewport. That's very annoying. They should reflow with the window according to the browser's settings. If you set a constant width, then you're asking for scroll bars if the window can't fit that width.

So what should a designer who doesn't want horizontal scrollbars do?

HTML was intended as the content provider; the browser intended to be the content formatter

And CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was supposed to be the instructions that the content formatter follows.

using only hints -- lines, paragraphs, font styling, etc. The closer you can get to that in web page design

I imagine that as of 2014, most people would not prefer that most web pages look like Barry T. Smith's MFing Web Site. They would consider the default styling that a browser applies to the MFing Web Site to be unprofessional.

Every time some whackjob decides that menus should drop or windows should open when my mouse pointer crosses some object, I curse.

How would you prefer that a menu be opened while JavaScript is turned off? To the best of my knowledge, CSS supports only hover-to-show, not click-to-show.

Every time I run into some page (like liveaquaria.com's) that won't run its cart or checkout through the usual standard ports and protocols

Could you describe what nonstandard "ports and protocols" liveaquaria.com uses? I tried to buy a coral to test what you describe, but it required me to create a username and password before I could check out. Is the need to register before checking out part of the problem you describe? I do know that some manufacturers, such as Games Workshop, have a policy of forbidding online stores from selling their products through a standard shopping cart.

Comment Hover menus work with CSS + noscript (Score 1) 161

That, and "hover" menus and windows are the #1 reason why I surf away from web pages.

Tip to "designers": If I didn't CLICK on it, I didn't WANT it, and that means ITS IN MY FUCKING WAY

Perhaps the difference comes from limits in CSS. A menu that opens on mouseover works with CSS turned on and JavaScript turned off; a menu that opens on click requires JavaScript.

Comment Re:The guidelines used to be paywalled (Score 1) 132

It seems like that page is part of an argument from some other subject on a page that we did not get to read.

The Turing completeness disproof is actually related to recurring debates on Slashdot over the definition of phrases like "personal computer" and "general-purpose computer". I say something is a "personal computer" when the person who owns it determines what computing is done on it, and it's not "general-purpose" if specific identifiable purposes are forbidden. This includes a device running Android because of "Unknown sources" and adb install, but not a device running iOS without paying the recurring fee for the developer program. It includes a PC running Windows, OS X, or common GNU/Linux distributions, but not a major video game console.

Comment Guideline 15.5 and Turing completeness (Score 1) 132

[The disproof of Turing completeness using Russian roulette is] a joke right?

Sort of. I've been trying to describe the rules of a few different games, and it turned out that Russian roulette and Hi Ho! Cherry-O are in the same family. I made a Russian roulette homebrew game for the NES as a quick-and-dirty test for reading the trigger switch on an NES Zapper. It lets the player pull the trigger to roll a virtual d6 and be eliminated on a roll of 1. The development process inspired me to make a pencil drawing of six figures gambling with a toy gun.

Someone else on the NESdev forum ported an NES emulator for Mac called "Macifom" to iOS so that the developer of an NES homebrew game can sell the game on the App Store by including it with Macifom in an app. My thought process might have been as follows: "Would Russian Roulette in Macifom be rejected? If so, why? What would need to be cut out? And what useful theorems can I prove from this in order to make points on Slashdot about iOS not being for everyone?" I guess the question becomes how much like Russian roulette a game would have to be in order to get rejected for violating Guideline 15.5.

Slashdot Top Deals

If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for. -- W.C. Fields

Working...