Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Peace Prize = Valentine's Day card (Score 1) 1721

Coming so shortly after SNL's scathing "Not Done" skit, this has reduced the Nobel Peace Prize to little more than a Valentine's Day card for popular liberals. [i]"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said.[cnn.com][/i] So, in the vacuum of people who have made real strides towards peace in the past year, the committee is going for someone who made the loudest promises. Brilliant.

Comment Solution? (Score 1) 590

Situation: Used games are selling like hotcakes; new games, not so much.

Publishers' Problem: Publishers want people to buy expensive, new games and keep them forever to keep them off the secondary market. (*cough*DeBeers*cough*)

Gamers' Problem: New games are expensive, and most AAA titles do not provide long-term interest.

Solution: Eliminate Publisher from the transaction. Steam, Sony and Microsoft figured this out ages ago. As internet connections and digital distribution become more ubiquitous, the consumers will resolve this situation themselves. Prices should be much lower and will make developers and gamers much happier.

Comment Good job to the developers from an Ex-PC gamer (Score 1) 403

Cheers to Demigod's developers for their decision to go with no DRM. I've not even played the game, but I'm glad to hear that one of the things that pushed me to console gaming is seeing a sunset. DRM has, in the past, forced me to go to a piracy site to find a cracked .exe file that will remove the necessity of having the dvd in the drive. Even this light form of DRM pushes me towards piracy instead of just letting me enjoy my purchase without having to haul a small stack of "play disc"s around in my laptop bag. In the several years I've been separated from PC gaming, it sounds as if the problem has only gotten worse. Much of this leads me to believe that services like quakelive.com are getting a leg up on how games will be delivered in the future.

Comment New 3D effects concerns (Score 4, Interesting) 296

Some voicing their concerns about 3D ruining their enjoyment by giving viewers headaches or disorienting them with fading transitions, wipes and other common 2D movie tools need to understand that there are already techniques in place to remedy these problems.

First off, the new polarization techniques don't use the older, vertical/horizontal polarized light filters. Instead, clockwise/counterclockwise spiral polarization is used, resulting in less image bleed-over into each eye. Second, directors have the ability to lessen the perceived depth of a frame, making it seem not as if you are viewing reality, but more a bas relief sculpture. This helps during transitions or fast motion to keep people from getting headaches or experiencing vertigo. The recent film Monsters vs. Aliens used these variable depth shots quite a bit. I've had problems in the past myself with watching polarized 3D films, but have no problems watching any of the new 3D tech.

I'd say a much bigger concern is going to be how films done in 3D transition to DVD/bluray. If directors start shooting their films differently in order to take advantage of 3D imagery, how much intention will be lost when the film is converted to 2D? Imagine a director tweaks the depth of everything in a shot to lie in the far background, then pulls one particular item forward to emphasize its importance in the shot. Everything else considered equal, that information will be lost in the 2D version. It's a comparable problem to taking a color film and turning it into black and white. If "the girl with the red umbrella" suddenly becomes just some other person amidst a sea of other gray umbrellas, the meaning of the shot is lost.

Some newer TV's have 120hz refresh rates (or better) to allow for 60fps stereoscopic imaging when using shutter glasses, but that is hardware which is going to have a hard time making it into living rooms.

Comment Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score 4, Informative) 294

I'd suggest you check out IntelliJ's IDEA 8.0. I've been developing interfaces for the web for ten years now, and I've come across nothing with such comprehensive and accurate support for js coding. Both your complaints about code completion and syntax checking are handled by IDEA accurately.

Some other developers in my group swear by MyEclipse's js handling, but I haven't had any personal experience with it in the past couple of years. My last impression of it was that its color-coding wasn't as detailed as IDEA's. Still, MyEclipse is open-source, so check it out first and see if it takes care of your needs.

For debugging, Firebug is still your best bet, though I believe IE's debugger has been making huge strides lately, and is better than Firebug for automatically handling breakpoints--in Firebug, you have to search through your .js files in order to manually place a breakpoint, and then that can get weird if you have iframes to deal with.

Comment Britannica's design needs work (Score 4, Interesting) 385

Just looking at Britannica.com's home page will reveal why they aren't ranked as well as Wikipedia. Upwards of 90% of the home page content is irrelevant to the majority of users, who are there because they want to look something up, not look at the video of the day, play with the "Featured" flash movie, or read about how Britannica is involved in Advocacy for Animals. This is an excellent example of web design molded around the needs of internal customers and requirements rather than the needs of the end user. The flash movies swoop in as they load, drawing attention away from the user's goal: the search box in the upper-middle of the screen, which itself is visually subservient to the arrogant "Premium Membership - Free Trial" button in the upper-right.

Both google and wikipedia did it right. Give the user a search box, a logo, and some language options. Trust them to explore your system on their own.

Comment First barrier (Score 2, Insightful) 216

I have an iPhone 3g myself, and a few weeks of use got me excited enough about app development to feel truly let down when I discovered I'd have to buy a mac to develop on. Actually pricing one out that I could use for high-end photoshop work in addition to iPhone development was a sobering experience. Add that to the learning curve associated with migrating to OSX from WinXP, and I'm back to Flash development on my PC.

Comment Private Sector WiFi (Score 1) 236

I would be one of the people to vote against a tax increase for municipal wi-fi. Two reasons: first, the control of such systems would fall to bureaucrats, who are notoriously bad at nearly everything they attempt other than getting elected, spending money, and making the government larger. All the usual afflictions of governments would suddenly be transferred onto your internet life, including an astonishly small step to municipal, state or federal censorship.

Second, everywhere I look I see more restaurants, coffee shops and other businesses advertising "free wi-fi!". This trend seems to be accelerating, and as technology improves, I think it would be very easy to see them, in cooperation with another private entity (such as the Colo. entrepreneur above) to offer a better service with more responsiveness to the marketplace--something the government is infamous for being bad at.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

Working...