floodo1 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Flash is Proprietary (Score 1) 850

by floodo1 on Thursday May 06, 2010 @08:42PM (#32120282) Attached to: Flash Is Not a Right

This point (which Jobs made explicit) is the most underrated point of his whole article. Flash playback is absolute trash on OSX. I have ZERO faith in Adobe to produce a flash player for my phone which wouldn't rape my battery. Maybe one day they will, and this point will be moot, but I highly doubt it.

Comment Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score 2, Insightful) 850

by floodo1 on Thursday May 06, 2010 @08:37PM (#32120226) Attached to: Flash Is Not a Right

You ignore the fact that one of the primary benefits of developing for Flash is it's cross-platform-ness. When developers leverage this they can easily lose sight of the benefits of one specific platform (iPhone OS) and thereby leave out features or develop kludges. Jobs specifically addressed this by saying that many Flash products (specifically drop down menus) don't translate well to touch screen devices.

Consumers care about quality, and going cross-platform almost universally decreases quality. You can see it time and time again in the console game world. While this isn't a rule it's highly typical.

An Early Look At Next-Gen Shooter Bodycount 238

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @03:59AM from the piece-by-piece dept.

If you ask fans of first-person shooters what feature they'd like to see in a new game, their answers — now and for the past 15 years — probably involve destructible environments. Game developers have tried to satisfy this demand with scripted events, breakable objects, and more crates than you can shake a rocket launcher at. However, Bodycount, an upcoming game from Codemasters Guildford, is aiming to deliver what gamers have wanted for so long: the ability to blast apart whatever you please. Quoting the Guardian's games blog from their hands-on with the game: "... it's not just about effect, it's about access. In Bodycount, you can blow chunks out of thinner interior walls, allowing you to burst through and catch enemies by surprise. You can also brilliantly modify cover objects – if you're hiding behind a crate and want to take out enemies without popping up from behind it, shoot a hole in it. Bingo, you've got a comparatively safe firing vantage. The difference between this and say, Red Faction or Bad Company, is that the destruction isn't limited to pre-set building sections. It's everywhere. This should, of course, grind the processor to a halt, but the team has come up with a simple compromise to facilitate its vision. 'The trick is that we're not running full physics on everything,' explains lead coder, Jon Creighton. ... This is tied in with one of the best cover systems I've ever seen. While in a crouching position (gained by holding the left trigger down), you can use the left analogue stick to subtly look and aim around your cover object, ducking and peeking to gain that perfect view of the war zone. It's natural, it's comfortable and it's adaptive, and it will surely consign the whole 'locking on' mechanic to the graveyard of cover system history."

F.E.A.R. 3 Announced For This Fall 53

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 09, 2010 @02:49AM from the creepy-psychic-girls-need-employment-too dept.

Warner Bros. has announced that the third game in the F.E.A.R. saga is in production and planned for release this fall. Unlike the first two games, F.E.A.R. 3 will not be developed by Monolith Productions, but by Day 1 Studios, who ported the original F.E.A.R. to the Xbox 360 and PS3. The new game is being developed for those two consoles and for Windows. "Day One is the studio behind MechAssault, MechAssault 2, and Fracture, so they've got all the mech and shooter experience one could hope for, but what about horror? Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive has that covered as well, with famed horror director John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) and 30 Days of Night writer Steve Niles acting as consultants to enhance the game's scary bits. Alma returns for the third game, but her sons, Point Man and Paxton Fettel, are the stars, both featuring unique powers to help create what the developer is calling divergent co-op, where the characters' powers affect each player's game, and not just their own."

Warhammer Online Users Repeatedly Overbilled 216

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday April 08, 2010 @11:53PM from the greenbacks-for-greenskins dept.

TheSpoom writes "A screw-up in EA's Warhammer Online billing system has resulted in many players being charged upwards of 22 times for a one-month subscription, filling bank accounts with overdraft fees and the Warhammer forums with very angry players, who are discussing the issue quite vocally. EA has said that refunds are in progress and that '[they] anticipate that once the charges have been reversed, any fees that have been incurred should be refunded as well.' They haven't specifically promised to refund overdraft charges, only to ask customers' banks to refund them once the actual charges are refunded. They seem to be assuming banks will have no problem with this."

Are Consoles Holding Back PC Gaming? 518

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 28, 2010 @10:25AM from the pc-game-makers-are-holding-back-pc-gaming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the excitement over Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU, there is still a distinct lack of DirectX 11 games on the market. This article points out that while the PC has returned to favor as a gaming platform, consoles are still the target for most developers, and still provide the major limitations on the technological sophistication of game graphics. Inside the Xbox 360 sits an ATI Xenos GPU, a DirectX 9c-based chip that bears similarity to the Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards (cards whose age means that they aren't even officially supported in Windows 7). Therein lies the rub. With the majority of PC games now starting life as console titles, games are still targeted at five-year-old DirectX 9 hardware."

Microsoft Lost Search War By Ignoring the Long Tail 267

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 28, 2010 @09:20AM from the i-wonder-if-it's-prehensile dept.

Art3x writes "When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."

Newcastle Maker Faire 2010 27

Posted by timothy on Sunday March 28, 2010 @05:31AM from the can't-we-just-get-cctv-feed-archives? dept.

krou writes "The BBC covered the most recent Newcastle Maker Faire, an event which Slashdot first covered last year. From racing power tools, to making music using electric sparks, or a robot that solves the Rubik's Cube in 20 seconds, makers, crafters and hackers were out in force. YouTube has a selection of videos available, and there are some pics on Flickr. And, while it may not be a hover board, there was a self-balancing skateboard."

Israel's Supreme Court Says Yes To Internet Anonymity 198

Posted by timothy on Sunday March 28, 2010 @01:08AM from the but-probably-in-hebrew dept.

jonklinger writes "The Israeli Supreme Court ruled this week that there is no civil procedure to reveal the identity of users behind an IP address, and that until such procedure shall be legislated, all internet postings, even tortious, may remain anonymous. The 69-page decision acknowledges the right to privacy and makes internet anonymity de facto a constitutional right in Israel. Justice Rivlin noted that revealing a person behind an IP address is 'an attempt to harness, prior to a legal proceeding, the justice system and a third party in order to conduct an inquiry which will lead to the revealing of a person committing a tort so that a civil suit could be filed against him.'"

Baffled By the Obsession With Pretend-Business Games 252

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 20, 2010 @02:50PM from the consensual-insanity dept.

theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons confesses to being mystified by all the people tending to their virtual farms and virtual pets on Facebook. Even stranger, he says, is their willingness to spend real money to buy virtual products, like pretend guns and fertilizer, to gain advantage in these Web-based games. Pretend products are a serious business, estimated to grow to $1.6B next year, and have captured the attention of economists and academics who view the virtual economy as a lab for modeling behavior in the real world. Still, Lyons can't help but question whether the kind of people who spend hours online taking care of imaginary pets are representative of the rest of the population. 'The data might be "perfect" and "complete,"' says Lyons, 'but the world from which it's gathered is anything but that.'"

Amazon Battles Apple By Arm-Twisting Publishers 137

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 20, 2010 @12:48PM from the slapfight-of-the-titans dept.

bizwriter writes "Apple has upset the e-book pricing cart by agreeing to a so-called agency model, where the publisher sets the price and the seller takes a cut. This goes contrary to the degree of control Amazon likes, so although it apparently gave in to Macmillan back in February, it turns out that Amazon continues twisting arms. The problem publishers face is that Apple has a most-favored-nation clause, so it gets the best deal that the publishers offer. If the publishers give in to Amazon, then they also have to provide the same terms to Apple."

Mozilla Plans Fix For Critical Firefox Vulnerability In Next Release 140

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 20, 2010 @12:05PM from the sooner-than-later dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "A month after an advisory was published detailing a new vulnerability in Firefox, Mozilla said it has received exploit code for the flaw and is planning to patch the weakness on March 30 in the next release of Firefox. Mozilla officials said Thursday that the vulnerability, which was disclosed February 18 by Secunia, is a critical flaw that could result in remote code execution on a vulnerable machine. The vulnerability is in version 3.6 of Firefox."

Madoff's Programmers Indicted 147

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 20, 2010 @10:43AM from the just-an-off-by-one-billion-bug-i-swear dept.

jason8 writes with news that two programmers who worked at Bernie Madoff's investment firm have now been indicted on charges of 'conspiracy, falsifying records of a broker-dealer and falsifying records of an investment adviser,' for their role in hiding the firm's activities (PDF) from the SEC and external accountants. Quoting Reuters: "O'Hara and Perez, employed at the firm from 1990 and 1991, respectively, were primarily responsible for developing and maintaining computer programs in the investment advisory unit at the center of the fraud. Many of the programs were run on an IBM server known as 'House 17,' according to court documents. Prosecutors said the men took hush money to help keep the fraud going and designed codes to make up fake trade blotters and phantom records. US prosecutors said the two men worked under the supervision of Madoff and his top aide, Frank DiPascali, to deceive the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a European accounting firm. DiPascali is cooperating with prosecutors, who said his information led to the arrests of the programmers and the now defunct firm's outside accountant."

"Moot" Working On Reboot of 4chan Platform 205

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 20, 2010 @01:22AM from the weird-and-wacky-world dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bilton has an interesting interview with Christopher Poole, known online as 'Moot,' founder 4chan, a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language. Poole, now 22, started 4chan when he was 15 after he discovered a Japanese image-board Web forum called 2chan dedicated to anime. 'The code for 2chan was publicly available and I took it and translated it from Japanese to English using tools online and I threw it up on the Web and sent it out to 20 people,' says Poole. 'I wanted to keep with the 2chan naming and the URL for 3chan was taken at the time so I just jumped to the next number.' Although 4chan gets 8.2 million unique visitors every month, 600 million page loads per month, and 800,000 new posts a day, Poole is working on a new project to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available."

Athena's Free Firewall Browser 23

Posted by timothy on Friday March 19, 2010 @08:30PM from the should-you-choose-to-accept-it dept.

athenasec writes "Firewall Browser is a free configuration analyzer (download here), released by Athena Security, which works on Cisco, Check Point, and Netscreen firewalls for searching rulebases based on address or service ranges — the way change requests are actually made. The tool is available as a free download with no limitations, user license restrictions, or registration hurdles. Users can slice and dice any firewall-related question about the network, service objects, and security rules for a multi-vendor environment from a single flexible interface. There is also this how-to guide for applying the tool to day-to-day operational tasks."

Slashdot Top Deals