My favorite 5 Slashdot Comments of 2010

I post a lot of stuff on Slashdot.org.  Here are some of my favorites:

1. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1827706&cid=33945232

I guess people are worried that our state of the art igloo geometric designs, dogsled aerodymanics and maple syrup chemistry are in danger if poltical decisions are made without the benefit of science. Luckily there are only 78 of us in the whole country. We can probably sort it out in about a fortnight over a few Molson's beers while watching ice hockey. duane "Who won the damn gold medals at the last Olympics anyways?"
--
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/

2. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1788824&cid=33599702

Because there are lots of us who work at Adobe who have been very vocal internally about ensuring that Linux is a first class O/S and released at the same time as the other O/S's. That is why Linux is getting the 64 bit Flash Player. More and more of us are using Ubuntu and RHEL on the server (our enterprise ESB uses RHEL/(WebSphere || Weblogic || JBoss) as a reference implementation!). Now if we could only talk our bosses into CS5 for Linux.....

3. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1694512&cid=32656498

On Flash and having a Choice:

You could say you are also forced to use a browser then. You have a choice. If you want to see certain sites in their entirety, you can choose flash. If you want to experience only the text, use wget. If you want to see something in between, use a browser. your choice. There are still some old guys who don't even like to load images and only read the alt text. Can't make everyone happy so giving people choice is the only path we can take.

4. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1606598&cid=31724840

130 mb of ram while sitting idle? Then it's perfect for windoze and osx.... So what are the alternatives for *nix users now? dn grep this: s/$your_beliefs/$common_sense/i;

5. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1575150&cid=31404260

you are right. The way Flash (the swf format only, not the whole platform) was written circa 2003, it wasn't optimized to go to mobile devices. There were some issues and technical hurdles to get around. Some of them were simple (like stopping FP instances that are not in the visible part of the screen) or simply reducing the frame rates of flash applications that are using battery power when they are not in focus). Some required much more thinking such as form fields receiving focus when the tab is hit from an HTML form element above a flash form element). To scale to mobile was a challenge which has been met with the Flash PLayer 10.1. The Google Nexus 1 phone (which I own) does a great job of running the full version of Flash (not Flash Lite). The FP 10.1 has *huge* technical improvements from previous versions Adobe is full on excited about HTML 5 too. There are some really cool possibilities about using HTML 5 features side by side with Flash. Serge Jespers did a great job of showing this on his blog late last week: http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/03/05/the-html5-flash-marriage-geolocation/ [webkitchen.be] The fact is that HTML being updated is not something everyone asked for, but in it's execution, there are some obvious features that I am glad to see such as the Video element. I do share some concerns about how more advanced API's get implemented (such as the document.evaluate(); API) for complex XSLT processing but hope the industry will figure it out. DN

"Any technology can be used for good or for evil. The only question is how you decide to use your coding time in between "
- Gandalf