Published 2013-11-14 15:10 by Abscissa in Meta
If you work at either Google or Microsoft and you have had any hand in MTP or the demise of Android's MSC, then you deserve to die. Fuck you and go to hell.
And to all those employed by Google and Microsoft: Quit trying to be Apple, you worthless goddamn subhuman shits.
Published 2013-10-31 15:16 by Abscissa in Coding
After more than a decade of web development, I'm of the firm belief that HTML and CSS are fundamentally flawed dog shit and in desperate need of a ground-up replacement. And no, HTML5 does nothing to change my mind.
There are many, many reasons for this and I won't attempt to build a full case right now, but here's the latest bit of HTML "fun" I've hit:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body> <div style="width: 90%"> <table> <tr> <td>Short</td> <td> A little bit of text. Mobile browsers use small font. </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Long</td> <td> Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. Lots of text. Mobile browsers use big font. </td> </tr> </table> </div> </body> </html>
Notice there is nothing to change font sizes. And yet, when viewed in various popular mobile browsers (such as the Android versions of Firefox and Chrome) not only is the basic font size absurdly small - much smaller than the browser's normal default, but ONE of the cells uses a completely different font size than the rest!:
And no, setting [-whatever]-text-size-adjust: 100% doesn't fix this issue, nor does explicitly setting all font sizes to 1em.
Safari on iPhone, as is typical for Apple, also has it's own...uhh, "creative" interpretation of basic sense: The different columns use different font sizes.
Seriously, what the fuck?! And people actually want to write their applications in HTML?
Published 2013-10-06 17:06 by Abscissa in General
Found this image rather amusing (from the PS3's "What's new" section).
Sooo...I guess the PlayStation 4 is being released from Taco Bell, not Sony. Gotta love awkward wording :)
(And yes, that is taken from an SD CRT. I know. Shaddup ;) )
Published 2013-09-21 20:49 by Abscissa in Reviews
Linux: Offers five thousand choices for everything, none of them well-polished.
OSX: Expensive, straight-jacketed, proprietary and often overlooked by third parties.
Ubuntu Unity: Goofy OSX clone with even fewer options. Really just Linux.
BSD: Expert-only Linux-ish with minimal third party support.
Plan 9: Minimal uptake, and therefore irrelevant.
BeOS: Effectively dead and irrelevant.
Amiga: Effectively dead and irrelevant.
OS/2: Long since dead and irrelevant.
Solaris/QNX: Newly dead and still irrelevant.
NeXTSTEP/IRIX: Also dead and irrelevant.
Haiku/Minix/Hurd: Alive and irrelevant.
Chrome OS: A web browser as an OS. Are you fucking kidding me?
iOS: It's freaking iOS for godssakes.
Android: It's freaking iOS with a system-level VM for godssakes.
CyanogenMod: Android sans straight-jacketing.
Blackberry 10: Proprietary straight-jacketing and minimal third part support.
Windows Phone 8: Proprietary straight-jacketing, minimal third part support and butt-ugly.
Windows Phone Pre-8: Effectively dead and irrelevant.
WebOS: Undead and irrelevant.
PalmOS: I love it. But it's outdated, abandoned, and therefore useless. Graffiti v2 sucked - thanks Xerox.
MeeGo: Replaced by Taizen.
Bada: Replaced by Taizen.
Taizen: Nearly at 3.0 and you still can't obtain it. Encourages HTML5 as an applications platform, presumably as some sort of sick joke.
Symbian: A flip-phone OS isn't exactly much of an OS. Did anybody ever know there was a smartphone version? No matter, it's dead now.
All that said, I still use both Windows and Linux, I intend to get an Android/CyanogenMod device again, and there's some others I'm keeping an eye on. Obviously most OSes have their good points, too. And I'll use what I need to, when I need to, if I need to, and bitch as much as I damn well choose to. Still, that doesn't mean OSes don't all suck anyway.
Published 2013-08-19 16:29 by Abscissa in Coding
Much like the famed spaces vs tabs, there are differing preferences about whether to put a space between a keyword and any following parenthesis:
if(condition)... //vs if (condition)...
I submit that including the space is a stupid convention unless you also handle functions the same way:
void foo (int a) {} foo (4);
Which, of course, is rarely ever done, even in codebases that always put spaces after keywords like if.
Published 2013-08-17 18:46 by Abscissa in Software/Device Development and Design
I could go on forever with examples, but I'm going to limit myself to just one for now: How freaking hard is it to unfuck "Save Image As"? Mozilla's been screwing that up in various ways for about five years. Here's a fun instance of Mozilla's complete uselessness.
And of course, in my case the broken "Save Image As" is yet another new previously undiscovered incarnation:
On FF22:
Error: NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER: Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIIOService.newFileURI] Source File: chrome://global/content/contentAreaUtils.js Line: 771
