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Comment Re:Owner? (Score 1) 424

This guy had been building up an explosives cache for years and had not blown himself up. Therefore, one can only conclude that he was taking sufficient safety measures to prevent premature detonation. This, in turn, means that it should have been possible to destroy the explosives without endangering the property. Therefore, the tenant didn't destroy the property.

You moron. The guys gardner nearly got killed because of an explosive going off.

Microsoft

Recalling Windows 1.0 At 25 Years 384

alphadogg writes "When Microsoft released the very first version of Windows nearly 25 years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, it was late to the game and little used. Apple had already brought graphical user interfaces to computers with Macintosh more than a year earlier, while DOS systems dominated the market for IBM and IBM-compatible PCs. No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later..."

Comment Re:The 500MB Elephant In The Room (Score 1) 157

The only reason Wired for iPad is so huge is because of the ridiculous approach to laying out the content using a mass of essentially fullscreen images - not text, style sheets, and discreet graphical elements - thanks to the late stage realization that they couldn't ship an app cross-compiled from Flash... so they created a series of fullscreen imagemaps as a last minute hack, seriously bloating the size compared with a more sane approach.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/06/02/dev.explains.massive.size.of.magazine.downloads/

Comment Re:WebGL (Score 1) 379

I mainly work on in-house applications - cool stuff (by virtue of the companies I've worked for), but rarely anything seen outside of the firewall. Working in creative environments means UI/UX is paramount to the success of a project.

I've built frontends for these apps in both Flex and using various JavaScript libraries (mainly jQuery). I have no idea what you mean by "they would never scale" - unless you're stuck supporting older versions of IE, I'm hard pressed to imagine a Web-based UI that would require more umph than modern JavaScript interpreters can deliver, but it is possible - I have a number of backend data management tools for a few projects, which I use to manipulate large datasets, and even current releases of Firefox is crushed by the jQuery work I'm doing, though Chrome and Safari both are snappy. For the frontends, I'm fortunate not to have to support IE, so I target Firefox as the minimum platform (it's currently the slowest JS interpreter I support).

As I mentioned, I also used to do a lot of Flex work - frankly, I loved Flex, and have little negative to say about it. It's everything I wanted from Flash technology as a developer - a consistent runtime... a pretty homogeneous development environment, decent UI libraries, solid database connectivity, easy path to compiling "native" apps with AIR... that said, since getting interested in jQuery I rarely, if ever, have a desire to go back. I'm not sure the choice between the two was purely rational, but I find myself longing for Flex much less now doing work that runs on a browser engine than I longed for HTML/JavaScript/CSS when I was working in Flex.

But again, what do you mean by "they would never scale"? Plenty of massive apps use JavaScript on the frontend... yes, older versions of IE suck terribly as a JavaScript runtime, and even Firefox has it's performance limits. If you have to support IE, and are building internal apps, I highly recommend Flex. If you don't have to support IE, just take your pick - learn both. If your UI is so heavy it's crushing your JavaScript interpreter, you're likely doing something very wrong.

Comment Re:Not so great (Score 1) 414

Same. Out of the 200-30 or so matches through various phases of the beta, I've had exactly one person who was an ass (and boy was he) - the rest were either largely silent, or actually outwardly friendly and sportsmanlike. I'm not seeing that - I get an almost entirely friendly and sportsmanlike player in every matchup.

Comment Re:While I agree that anonymity is a good thing... (Score 1) 780

Every single petition I've ever signed involved:

1. Being asked what city I live in, to determine if I'm eligible
2. Being asked if I'm a registered voter, to determine if I'm eligible
3. Being asked if I've signed the petition yet, to determine if I'm eligible
4. Providing both my signature and printed name, as well as the address where I'm registered to vote

It seems to connect the act of my signing the petition pretty well right back to me - I can't imagine it being much less ambiguous unless they took a picture, thumbprint, or SSN.

Submission + - Manning Turned in To Stroke Lamo's Own Ego (salon.com)

Binary Boy writes: Bradley Manning, the US Army Private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion.

Comment Re:Wot? (Score 1) 515

Wow. Last time I was in Italy (2006) I had frequent trouble paying for may items without exact change - not everywhere, but enough to tell me that, at least at that time and place m,any cashiers expected exact change. For instance, I tried to get a bottle of water and an apple with a 20 and had to go to three markets before one would take my bill.

First Person Shooters (Games)

Google Gets Quake II Running In HTML5 258

Dr Herbert West writes "A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software's gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers — you know, for kicks — as a way to show just what HTML5-compatible web browsers are capable of. According to the developers, 'We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into JavaScript.' More details are available on one developer's blog, and installation instructions have been posted as well."

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