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So, did this Phillips guy develop the trojan that stole the Fark passwords? Did this guy minor in CompSci?

So a news anchor has hacked Fark in an attempt to possibly steal source code for their own social networking site?
This apparently isn't your average local anchor.

Jim
RunFatBoy ( http://www.runfatboy.net/ ) - A workout plan for beginners.

Yeah, acknowledging MS's strengths is a lot like going to your grandparents 50th wedding anniversary; you're thankful for the legacy that they've left behind but at 70 years old and playing Friday night bingo, they're not quite relevant in the same way they use to be.

MS has lost it's way ( as documented in Joel's "How Microsoft Lost the API War" ) and with applications moving more towards the web as a platform, things don't look to improve.

Jim
RunFatBoy ( http://www.runfatboy.net/ ) - Exercise for the rest of us.

>In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that
>broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged."

I don't know if the average citizen would even realize if their downstream bandwidth were boosted significantly. If my mother can download her web page in 3 seconds instead of 5, I am not sure she really cares.

The real battle seems to be with the upstream. Face it, sending photos sucks. If I have to do any sort of large .ear deployment over my work's VPN, it sucks even more.

And to worsen things, I don't believe this is an infrastructure issue. These are obviously artificial caps levied against all users (both the legitimate and abusing customers). Maybe they could throttle the upstream for those with prolonged heightened levels of usage?

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan for beginners.

So maybe the question becomes, should those who contribute more (I don't know what the threshold would be) be required to reveal more personal identification details in order to ensure some level of transparency?

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan for beginners.

It's too bad these rovers don't have some sort of wind turbines to be utilized for energy. They could have extended an already impressive run.

Jim
RunFatBoy ( http://www.runfatboy.net/ ) - A workout system for beginners.

I don't believe that we will approach a bubble like we did in the late 90's. The very fact that people are apprehensive about such evaluations is a good sign that hopefully things will stay in check.

37 Signals wrote a good article a while back trying to keep this hype in check.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_believ e_businessweeks_bubblemath.php

Remember, part of an evaluation is function of current value vs. a projection of ROI. How will this investment in Reddit be returned? I have no clue, but the very fact that we're thinking about these issues (as opposed to an all-out buying frenzy in the early 90's) is a better sign.

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - Exercise for the rest of us.

How do scientists determine the temperatures from millions of years ago and what range of error do these readings fall within?

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ - Exercise for the rest of us.

While Open Lazlo and other open source client solutions are exciting, I think people generally want a fully integrated, front to backend solution for developing these Rich applications. Sure they provide data binding, but solutions such as Rails that provide server-side functionality to directly manipulate the client side give me a more comfortable feeling.

I want a full unification of the front and backend. That is why Rails, Turbogears and Cake appear to be more exciting.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ - Fitness for web 2.0.

It costs a lot and replaces walking. Give me a break. It's WALKING. Get off your lazy ass and walk.

http://www.runfatboy.net/

Steve should be commended for his efforts over the years. His enthusiasm was infectious.

Unfortunately, while he stood as a model environmentalist, he now stands as an example of the dangers of directly interacting with wild animals.

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - Exercise for the rest of us.

The current administration has been quite effective in keeping this issue in the public eye and billing it less as an issue of science and more of a threat to society. The issue has taken on the sentiment that if the concept of evolution becomes widely accepted then faith is voided and we enter moral decay (which is obviously wrong, thanks Bush). But it's definitely how a majority of Americans feel. Science threatens their faith.

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

I always thought that MySpace recorded just the right meta-search elements to keep me interested. I tried Orkut and others and none provided a search for individuals who graduated from my highschool.

Whenenever I enter a new place, whether physical or virtual, I always look for familiar faces. MySpace allows me to easily look for those people.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

It's amazing that such a person like Einstein, who wrote countless letters sponsoring his Jewish colleagues to get out of Germany appears to deny the same level of sympathy to his own son.

>Particular attention is dedicated to Einstein's relationship with his son,
>Eduard. Einstein found his son's schizophrenia difficult to accept,
>and on more than one occasion expresses the idea that it would have
>been better off if Eduard had not been born.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

If Leopard has the Windows support that I think it will, this iMac could easily become the next must-have next to the iPod.

College students want a cheap but stylish machine, yet they don't want to lose their "gaming" functionality. It could be a perfect marriage.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

I just don't understand why the concern would start and end with Facebook. If you're going to ban such online actvities, why not go to the extreme, and ban any sort of social networking site.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

If you have 10K to drop, try out Ellington ( http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ ).

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute. You know how I fight the big companies? If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that. Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there.

The fact is, when the PHBs numbers aren't going to be favorable, then your job may be on the chopping block. But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_. When the going gets tough, and your team may be part of the downsizing, be sure that you've accounted for such job insecurity/risk.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

In economics, the most efficient markets are those that can be directly competed against one another. It's a definite statement of confidence by Apple that they will *support* the means to run a competing OS on their system. This may be the first time (myself included) that users will see the two OS's, side by side. BC is the only economic way of doing this comparison.

While there may be drivers lacking initially, I have full confidence that the open source community will fill this void. And with both OS's available and with XP trying my patience, maybe I'll finally take the dive full-time into OSX and BC will be a non-issue. :-)

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

Is where Microsoft stopped innovating. Whenever you get into a "one-up" cold war, your thinking becomes limited to finding features that are just over what the competitor is doing and not necessarily related to what makes the life of the user easier.

MS has taken their eye off of the ball and has been concentrating on everything but the user.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

The enterprise will always be behind for the simple fact that any new sort of technology assumes a certain amount of risk and that risk is most apparent when that technology is new.

Even something as straight forward as a wiki will be seen as a risk. When wiki's were first being utilized, I'm sure every PHB out there was asking the statement, "There's no way we can trust our customers to provide documentation, at least not without some sort of oversight by us!"

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for web 2.0.

You're way too caught up in picking a career by the "current market trend". If you're great at what you do, there will always be a market for your skill set.

If the current trend of outsourcing has you scared, what about other adverse situations? What about the next recession; are you going to run back to school and become a CPA? I'm suspect that you have a deep love for programming. When you love development, you feel it in your bones; you think about problems on your lunch break, you stay up until 3am to get that last bug worked out. If you don't have this sort of passion for creative logistics, then maybe you should reconsider other options (because you're likely to get burned out fairly quickly).

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

Does this really matter if the very administration that does the infringement is the same administration that appoints the officer? Their views will be in alignment.

    "Although you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on,
    those potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see
    what was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else," he says.

He lacks the same foresight as the rest of the administration. Even if you could say that the wiretap was legit, it sets a bad precedent; any forthcoming administration can establish the same program with ever stretching legal boundaries and say "Bush did it, it must be OK." And there wouldn't even be the oversight to say otherwise.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

If you're sad enough to not realize the implications of making the wrong that you caused publicly viewable, you deserve whatever punishment received.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

The article isn't entirely clear whether the app reports back to MS your web surfing locations. Granted, it could be useful to see what the user is commonly misspelling, but at the same time, I really have no interest in relinquishing this information.

Jim -- http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

Just goes to show, content and relationships will trump design everytime. MySpace is definite proof.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

If ABC is really looking to make a splash, maybe they should offer some of these episodes the day *before* they air. Given how quickly buzz becomes stale after the fact, people would jump at a chance to get a preview of their favorite show.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

On a less practical note, it'd be quite interesting if John Carmack would release the flight control software he has developed for Armadillo's prototypes.

While its highly proprietary code, it would give a sense as to what needs to be tracked during the duration of rocket flight and might interest others in aerospace engineering.

John has been very generous with his code throughout the years and I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen (unless he has outside investors that would object).

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

With proper coaching that the coordination would eventually come.

The geek environment seems to value intellectual achievement so highly, that when someone's physical ability shows promising traits, its almost as if we don't recognize that ability and move along.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

If Google launched their own player along with the store, I could envision a pricing model that based the price of the songs on the number of plays it was receiving from its purchasers.

Over time, the cost of this track would become less and less and all of the "filler" tracks would slide fairly rapidly.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.

Our civil liberties are eroding like a California mud-slide.

E.g. an American creates an anti-us website, and happens to cross-link an image located on a Pakistani website. Now this is considered an "international communication channel" which justifies to the NSA full sniffing of packets, forfeiture of logs from the ISP, etc.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

What's interesting about devices that provide behavioral feedback is that unless the user isn't aware of the device, their own actions end up reacting not only to external environmental events, but to the feedback of the device itself.

So if the autistic user finds the device annoying, they may engage their eyes briefly to suppress the vibrating alaram. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are paying attention. Their concentration is then shifted to supressing the device.

I am wondering if this is something that would work best as an implant. The user could be trained from an early age that this feedback mechanism is an extension of themself.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for Web 2.0

The decision not to do business with Walmart is not only an issue of branding, but an issue of scalability. With your mowers in the hands of 20% more consumers, more warranties have to be honored forcing Snapper to increase 'support' for their machines.

And if it turns out that the lower end users have a propensity to be pickier about the product, requesting support, service, and such, the returns get even worse.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Along with the API documentation, I found the book "Agile Web Development with Rails" highly beneficial. For a while there, it was the only definitive, concise source of Rails examples.

Even if you're skeptical of the Rails hype, I encourage any developer worth their salt to sit down with it for a weekend. The whole concept of convention over configuration can be a bit mind bending, especially if you're use to Java's XML hell. It's always beneficial to force your brain to adapt to new languages; it encourage contrarian thinking when considering new solutions.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for Web 2.0.

I understand that there will be bugs. BIG gaping security holes will happen.

I worked at an air force base and they were definitely standardized on IE. Knowing about these bugs and electing _not_ to fix them expediently, couldn't this be considered a threat to national security?

If there are over 160 million+ computers in the US alone, and 90% of those PC's use Internet Explorer, how can the US Gov. not justify action in insisting these issues be resolved promptly?

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for Web 2.0

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise, Web 2.0 style.

Completely off-topic so I post anonymously... but seriously I found this 5 seconds before I read your post.

That guy should be your Web 2.0 excercise mascot.

I'm not sure whether to answer the actual question asked, or the implicit call for help....

Anything that people don't understand, they tend to generalize and make higher level models of the underlying processes. I think it'd be beneficial for this manager to sit in on a couple design meetings and/or code reviews so that he can get a feel for all that is involved.

I think you're going to see wildly varying answers regarding sizes of teams, depending upon site complexity, etc. The real issue here is that it looks like you need to learn to push back.

Your posting sounds more like a distress message than an actual question. If you feel you're understaffed and you're feeling heat from the top, look these guys straight in the eye and say "If you refuse to offer more staff, we can only reasonably expect to complete around this date", and don't flinch. They'll respect you more in the long run and know you mean business.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise, Web 2.0 style.

I'm not sure that a full-fledged word processor "begs" to be an online app. Do I really want to risk having to have a net connection if I am going to get shit done?

I've been in hotels with crappy net connections. It's 4am, and I can't reach my word processor, now what?

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise, web 2.0 style.

Is negative and eventually detracts from the user experience.

But there are certain effects that compliment the OS and do serve a purpose. In OS X, when a window is minimized and you get the "genie" effect, notice how it minimizes to the point for which the minimized application will reside? It leads you back, so that you can remember.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Now that the Mac is showing off it's quality hardware and such, as the Intel models become commonplace, I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of commercial offerings for dual boot between Mac and Windows.

There's an opportunity for business to finally transition to a quality hardware platform/OS, and I hope someone steps up to the plate to make a formal solution in this area (not that I don't appreciate the current hacks offered).

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

It's nice to see further competition in the IP telephony area.

Skype is great, but it doesn't have the brand that Yahoo has. I can't imagine my mother downloading Skype, and calling overseas with it. But she's known about Yahoo messenger since the late 90's and has even chatted with distant friends. She would notice this functionality.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Is it me, or is Vista just becoming less and less relevant?

And the thing is, I use to be an MS fanboy but with the rapidly changing environment of security issues and such, who can wait _years_ before considering other alternatives?

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

So many of these Botnets are used to send SPAM. I get a gut feeling that efforts would better be expended on getting widespread adoption of a more secure, universal SMTP protocol.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Codeproject ( http://www.codeproject.com/ ) is a Microsoft oriented development community. Members submit informational articles regarding specific implementation techniques for various MS frameworks (MFC, .NET/ASP).

This is a great example of a flourishing development community. Chris Maunder, the creator, is very visible in the forums and receptive to feature suggestions. There's a rating system for the submitted articles, so top submitter's egos are rewarded. :-)

With close to 12,000 articles and 2.8 million members, it has to be one of the largest development communities on the net.

I think what makes this community flourish is that Chris doesn't try to pull any fast ones on the contributors. Your articles belong to you, and you can promote your consulting services ( as long as the article has relevant content ).

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ ( Exercise for the rest of us. )

I should have been clearer. I'm in no way advocating graphics for the sake of graphics.

It's just that Craigslist has *so much*. Maybe alternate row colors, bring in some more contrasting colors?

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

I am constantly suprised at the amount of traffic Craig gets with his horrific design. It's cluttered, the colors are lacking, and lacks any personality. It's just a big blob of links.

But then I remind myself that above all else, it's functional and has enough content to trump any bad design decisions. Content will always trump design. Even bad design.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Being showered with money isn't much of a blessing. Before you know the investors are knocking on your door wanting to know where their ROI is, and why you haven't spent the X millions given (apparently spending the money is a sign of progress).

The money is a burden; a HUGE burden.

When in this situation, be honest with yourself. What will you spend the money on. If you cite PR, furniture, company stationary, etc, run the other way. If you cite "more employees", triple-check your logic to see if they are really needed before taking the money.

"Pigs get fatter, hogs get slaughtered."

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

With the world as your audience, it's quite possible to carve out a good living by servicing a niche market. The economics of a Microsoft vs. Joe Developer pursuing an end market are entirely different. A few millions may not mean anything to MS, while its quite sustaining from a small business's perspective.
-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

If he the foresight to state that "innovation is alive" he would be inventing the next big thing now.

His statement is simplistic and is a cop-out. If anyone could foresee the-next-big-thing, they'd be making it. All others just throw their hands up, say it can't be done, and move along.

--Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

While most mobile users would like to have something more compact, is it really necessary to sacrafice teh productivity of a standard keyboard in order to gain a convenient, compact form factor?

I like the promise that the virtual keyboards have (e.g. http://www.virtualdevices.net/ ). While functionly they have some limitations right now (e.g. having to hold your fingers about the infrared keys), over time they are going to get better. At least this solution you could have a full range keyboard without having to lug it around.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

I don't know how close this runway is to the place for which the new parachute based shuttles will be landing or how close it is to the launch pad, but why not give it back to the tax papers and open it up as a place for the public to observe launches/takeoffs?
-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/