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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Disturbing and possibly misleading metric (Score 1) 770

by Sam H (#37866866) Attached to: Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment

While your statement is logically true, it appears to insinuate that I didn't read the text, whereas I did, so who the fuck are you to insult me by suggesting otherwise, and has the additional problematic characteristic that it has nothing to do with what I am talking about and therefore further supports my personal opinion that Slashdot has become a shithole unworthy of the slightest consideration.

Comment Re:Disturbing and possibly misleading metric (Score 1) 770

by Sam H (#37861980) Attached to: Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment

This is biased logic, too. I can bias it the other way: if you're an application developer and you want a platform feature that is not yet released, and you need to wait for 6 months instead of one year, then you will get half your market six months sooner.

Also, as an application developer, I can tell you the worst limitation is the hardware, not the software. Most of the time, missing OS features can be emulated. But if the GPU only has half the VRAM, no update can fix that and the application is likely to need a degraded mode.

Comment Disturbing and possibly misleading metric (Score 2) 770

by Sam H (#37855844) Attached to: Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment

I know it's hard to get a meaningful metric, but this chart makes me wonder about the trustworthiness of the study. There are approximately two major Android releases per year whereas there is only one major iOS upgrade per year. Thus "two major releases behind" means an average of 15 months late for an Android device, whereas "one major release behind" means an average of 18 months late for an iOS device. Yet by the look of the legend, the first one is supposed to be worse than the second one.

Comment Re:Let's get this straight (Score 0) 122

by Sam H (#34928126) Attached to: Criminal Charges Filed Against AT&T iPad Attacker

I think I can guarantee that no chat logs could exist that show Goatse Security members discussing selling or using the information in an illegal way. Or they would be fakes.

I have personally answered requests sent to Goatse Security for a while, and have constantly refused all offers to buy or even have a look at the data. I am pretty sure some of the requests were bait to see just how greedy we were, so if the people who tried are honest, they will be able to confirm that no matter the amount of money proposed, we said no.

Comment Re:first post! (Score 1) 154

by Sam H (#31910860) Attached to: The Nuts and Bolts of PlayStation 3D

Games already are on the very limits of a platform. They already are optimized to the breaking point. There’s nothing left.
You can only make the textures and models crappier and remove some physics and collision detection.

And your point is that eg. Uncharted was optimised to the breaking point, and there was no way Uncharted 2 would look better, with better textures, models, physics and collisions?

The PS3 hardware is very complicated. Very few programmers can claim to master both the PS3 hardware and video game related algorithms. And most of them probably work at Naughty Dog or Insomniac Games.
Graphics

The Nuts and Bolts of PlayStation 3D 154

Posted by Soulskill from the wait-till-the-bayonetta-guys-get-ahold-of-this dept.
The Digital Foundry blog took an in-depth look at how Sony is introducing 3D technology to PlayStation 3 games. They give a step-by-step description of how the system generates a 3D frame (or rather, a pair of frames), and the graphical hurdles that need be to overcome to ensure the games look good. The article also discusses some of the subtle effects 3D technology can have on gameplay: "'One interesting thing came through in the immersion aspect was that in the first-person camera view, it felt so much more like being there. Typically when most people play MotorStorm, something like 90 per cent play in the third-person view,' Benson explains. 'As soon as we put the 3D settings in place, the first-person view became a lot more popular, a lot more people were using that view. This could indicate that 3D could perhaps change the standards, if you like.' ... 'We found that in the first-person view the game is giving you all the sorts of cues that you're used to in normal driving: speed perception, the ability to judge distances, things like that. It's far easier to avoid track objects.' The insertion of true stereoscopic 3D into MotorStorm also brings about a new sense of appreciation of the scale and size of the game world and the objects within it."
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."

Slashdot Top Deals

Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.

Close