Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What is Figma? (Score 3, Informative) 25

Figma is a web-based 2d design tool primarily used for website layouts (think Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch). It handles vectors and bitmaps, and can express shapes in CSS units (eg, em) so that designs are less ambiguous than (eg) a bitmap-based editor or a vector editor that uses (eg) centimeters. Rather than a fixed and small canvas size Figma is a ZUI interface with a large canvas that you zoom in/out

Comment Re:Why foldable? (Score 2) 43

A tablet that folds in half to be a conventional phone size (ie Samsung Fold) means you get a much larger screen folded inside, and the outer sides can still have screens themselves to act like conventional phones. Making phones thiner has been pointless for a while now, but with foldables doubling the thickness (and slightly more due to the hinge) the folded mode is no thicker than a phone from a few years ago, but with a much larger screen. So do people need bigger screens on their phones? Well for people on their screens for more than a few minutes at a time that increase in screen size is truly useful. The main downside of foldables right now is that they don't have covers as strong as Gorilla Glass. Foldables use plastic and they try to be strong but they scratch up more than flat phones. I wouldn't buy one.

Comment Re: What? No Lenna?! (Score 1) 103

From what I read now, even the model herself doesn't understand what the big deal is

Nah, she doesn't want to be involved in these test images and she's made that quite clear. https://www.losinglena.com/ There's nothing particularly special about that photo so we can find equivalent test images.

Comment Rape apologist changes topic (Score 0) 291

However, in 2018 he defended Cody Wilson, who later pled guilty to sex with an underage girl, with Stallman saying that the girl likely had "entirely willing sex with him." Stallman changed his original post but nevertheless still said it is "normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents" and that adults using trafficked children shouldn't be legally responsible. In 2019, Stallman posted an email to an MIT listserv about the allegation that MIT professor Marvin Minsky raped a 17-year-old girl, and due to public outcry he resigned from both MIT and the Free Software Foundation.

Comment Re:That is why (Score 3, Informative) 19

New Zealand's covid tracer app is open source, as are many others https://github.com/minhealthnz... They do not report location data back to a server, instead they keep a log of your QR Code scan locations on the device, and the server pushes all outbreak locations to the device, and so the device checks whether you were there. So it has a lot of privacy built in. App Store code doesn't necessarily align with source code, but (1) neither necessarily would a website, and (2) some governments are doing a good job of managing privacy and covid tracing.

Comment Re:How would you fix JavaScript? (Score 1) 50

Hi, dev of 20 years here...

and optional type-checked parameters, including a "non-empty" test.

This is typically done by writing in a different programming language that compiles to JavaScript. The most popular choice is TypeScript, as you've mentioned. There is talk of adding types to JavaScript but it's likely to be years away. And is runtime type checking needed in the browser? It seems static compile-time deals with most use-cases.

optional named parameters,

Probably won't be added, but there is Destructuring Assignment instead which is similar...

function(obj) {
const { name1 } = obj;
// name1 is in scope
}


This takes the first argument 'obj' and extracts the 'name1' property. This can also be a one-liner.. destructuring the first argument immediately,

function({ name1} ) {
// name1 is in scope
}

an explicit class-like structure

classes already exist.

Comment Re:Weren't most of those in their OS division? (Score 1) 73

Sadly they're right, Mozilla fired most of their next-gen browser development team. By which I mean they fired their Rust devs, their Servo devs, their WebRender devs, their Layout 2020 team etc. Webrender was already beneficial too... Webrender solves a big hard problem and it needed a lot of dev time to deal with GPU driver bugs, but it was much faster and it had a great future but it would have been 3+ years away at least. Layout2020 parallel rendering was their rewrite of the original Servo code and it had great promise too. The team had already written it once in the early days of Rust, and they seemed to know how to do it right the 2nd time. Mozilla just needed to support that for years and they could have taken back the performance crown from Google, but they gave up and went back to Gecko. The Gecko team are doing the best they can but there's no credible plan to get better than Chrome. That was the chance they had against Konquerer/Webkit/Blink monoculture, but Mozilla gave up.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Working...