Posts by M Gale

Re: anybody remember the $999 Ruby app on the iPhone?

Shush, you. Only Android has crapware. Oh, and viruses that can magically break out of the app sandbox on non-rooted devices. Somehow. I think. Maybe. Or not.

Apple is perfect. The iPhone is heavenly. Praise St Jobs. Amen.

Sent from my iPhone.

Re: No win.

And if somebody next would like to marry his or her cat, dog or horse? Why not?

Come on, really? Do you know how recently it was that certain US states actually banned bestiality?

A clue: Not all of them have.

Seriously, stop channeling Santorum. It makes you look silly, as amusing as it is to watch.

Re: Since you played the "repulsive" card

The correct terminology is "sodomy" not "marriage"

And the correct position is missionary, and solely for the purpose of procreation, amirite?

and they have been scared off by the stupid clown/teletubbie appearance of Win 8.

So... Windows 7, then?

Re: subheading

I think an easy one would be to append "...for SINGAPORE!?"

Yeah. When the Singapore govt says something is too intrusive, the govts in the West who are lapping the bullshit up like coprophagic dogs really should sit up and fucking well listen.

To add a little bit of hyperbole, that's like a certain charismatic German leader from the 1930s to 1940s saying that what you're doing to them jews is a bit harsh.

Re: It isn't too late.

Use Linux!

It has some weird crypto that only works on Linux!

That'll work.

Oh, and booting almost instantly from cold.

Ahem, pretty much any OS does that when you're booting it up from a RAM drive. Or SSD, as the case may be.

Try Windows 8 on the identical hardware to a few other OSes, and you'll find it's not all that speedy on the "start from zero" metric. Faster than Windows XP, perhaps.

Re: Weather

Well I'm sure you'll be able to get a TIFKAM8 third party update for it, so what are you complaining about?

Learn to love this new and exciting futuristic paradigm, or somesuch bullshit.

Re: Mass market?

OK - so how does the software cope with differing resolutions?

By not using pixels as a measurement unit. Same as any other system with varying resolutions. Ideally, you want -1 to be one edge of the screen, +1 to be the other edge, and the origin (that's 0,0) in the centre. Or you can stick the origin in one corner and have (1,1) be the other corner. Use whatever relevant system call to detect the screen (or canvas, window, whatever) resolution when you start the application up, and create your OpenGL viewport based around that. Aspect ratio is detectable by just doing width/height. Adjust your UI accordingly.

If you're on a platform that allows window resizing, then attach a function to whatever on_resize event the system has, and have it reconfigure the viewport accordingly.

At no point do you ever want to be measuring distances in your 3D scene with pixels.

colour temp?

Same as everything else, again. There are plenty of test screens that will give you a reference while you twiddle with brightness, contrast, gamma, RGB/colour temp.

different CPU/GPU specs?

Same as every other platform. I already have apps on my phone and tablet that have a "Tegra" edition for extra shininess on Nvidia's chips.

differing accelerometer sensitivity?

One-time calibration. "Put your phone face-up on a flat surface. Now put it face down."

memory limits? differing OS builds with jitter effects from different interrupt handlers?

Oh now you're just trying to think of problems, aren't you? These were all solved some 30 years ago. Just use the 30 year old solutions, like various Android devs seem to have been doing already.

Really, I don't get why people are complaining so hard about the Android "ecosystem" being fragmented, when plenty of people have been developing for quite long enough in the far more fragmented Windows environment.

Don't forget that this is basically just a set of fancy goggles that you strap a phone to. So long as your app presents two images side by side, and has the virtual cameras spaced appropriately, it looks pretty much like it will work.

Re: $1500 a day?

That's not enough to pay costs for 2 employees

Where do you work? Buckingham Palace? I'd be pretty happy with a quarter of a million a year, even in USD.

Whether they were actually taking in $1500/day though, is another matter.

Prevent copying and readers get ticked off and won't buy, but allow piracy and publishers don't see the money angle and will rather let their collections rot.

For some years now, you've been able to go out, get the paperback edition, lop the spine off with a guillotine and stack the whole lot atop the document reader on a cheapish flatbed scanner (the HP Officejet all-in-one series for instance). Total process probably an hour or so, and it's pretty much unmanned. You just tell it where to store the jpegs and let it get on with it. So, about as hard as ripping your average DVD or Bluray, and takes about as long. True, you still have a bunch of pages with no spine afterwards, but if you're looking to distribute your copied warez far and wide, you won't care about that, will you?

I just figured I'd let various publishers know that. You know, in case they thought that eBooks are going to kill the industry like videotape and audio cassettes totally fucked up the movie and music industries.

Re: Of course

acetaminophen

Paracetamol!

Grumblegrumble bloody Americans grumble.

Re: I'm slow to notice things

Those that aren't are 30 to 40 years old.

And the rest.

You could argue that Compuserve, initially set up to lease out the spare computational capacity of a very powerful business machine, was one of, if not the first "cloud provider". Sounds very similar to how AWS started, doesn't it?

Re: "applications from the Microsoft store did not slow down my computer"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh986968.aspx

They get "suspended" automatically and may be terminated at any time, which is basically shit outside of a games console and only barely excusable on a smartphone. How a store app can do background processing was not explained either by this document nor by the Microsoft reps that came to tell us students at the time, how chunderfully wonderful this spangling new Metro thing was going to be. How, if you can do background processing, this will not slow the computer down at all, is also similarly not explained anywhere.

ALT+F4-killed apps are also suspended, and then terminated 10 seconds later, hence the delay.

Apparently all those store apps are going to magically save all state reliably in the few seconds that the OS deigns to allow your app to have in order to do so. Honest. Yeah, no problems foreseen there. Nope, none at all.

It's the iPhone and "you don't really need multi tasking or any actual control do you" all over again. Bleurgh.

Re: bring the rock into orbit around Terra.

Yep, and as you might have guessed by the Kerbal comment earlier, I've been watching the development of the officially-done-with-NASA-and-everything asteroid recovery mission pack for KSP, where the idea is to try and replicate what NASA are planning with your own crazy rocket construction ideas. Want. Oh do so much want.

And if you've never played or even know about Kerbal Space Program, where the hell have you been? Go. Find it. Play it. Enjoy the rocket surgery. Oh, and the inevitable explosions and rapid unplanned disassembly.

Re: How much does this wrap weigh?

Depending on the vinyl used, it can be thinner than a coat of paint. Usually gives a smoother result too without hours of 600-grit sanding, assuming they don't hand the job over to Bubbles McCreases, the YTS lad.

Re: Silly headline

I've never heard of localStorage either.

All 5-10 megs of it?

Re: USENET?

I know exactly what a cancel message is, and a newgroup message, and various other control messages that most USENET servers are set up to either vet with a human or utterly ignore due to them being abused by trolls, malicious hackers, shills and other Internet low-life.

Next question.