Most of the time the best looking women are not real. Usually you get an email to go to their website which nude photos, which is just dating site spam. And just yesterday I was chatting with a woman with an ad and I swear it was an AI system. Most replies were "ah ok" or were keyed on a word I used. When I would ask more complex questions I did not get any response.
It is either spammers or Match.com and Yahoo Personals trying to draw more attention. Ultimately it drives you back to the bars when I can get the "ah ok" response in person.
If you want to know if people are actually paying attention to a new podcast, just reference the show notes and allow people to hit the show notes. You can then use the stats for that web page as a metric for advertisers. It is also a good place to put the logos/links for advertisers.
Another common approach would be to allow for a discount by providing a code for the discount. The code could be given during the podcast. The number of orders created with the discount code would be a good indicator of the success of the ad.
Many people moved to it because MSIE was seen as insecure but recent reports show some problems with Firefox. The Firefox team should work with the OpenBSD/OpenSSL team to develop an audit process over the code to ensure it truly is more secure than MSIE.
Here's a thought. The thing about patents is the give an organization exlusive rights over an idea for a product which prevents competition. Why not change it so that you can still have the primary patent holder, but also 2 additional qualifier slots to allow for competition. Whoever implements the patent best wins. Perhaps the primary would be given certain rights above the secondaries, but after an initial probationary period the secondaries would be allowed to license rights to other companies to use the patent and truly open it up.
What I like about patents is that it allows you to make a living on good ideas which should be encouraged. But patents stifle great solutions when certain concepts must be worked around due legal barriers.
I would also automatically grant secondary status to standards organizations like W3C and those ISO folks because their works benefits us all.
I have tried OpenOffice and every time it has been a horrible experience. Perhaps Google will bring a talented UI team to the project to create something worthwhile.
It would be great to have the majority of the complex work done on the server, such as transforming between various document formats. I for one just need a good way to upload a Word document and get it back as an open format. With that I would want a free viewer. If the can export the Word format to a plain PDF I can read in the free Acrobat reader it would be a good start. Then they need to make it editable through a web interface.
Next up with would be Excel and some sort of presentation software. They could extend S5 well beyond what is does already.
Firefox was great and all, but my problems with it seem to increase every day with each new micro release. It chews up too much memory, kills the processor, causes me to install new extensions all the time and all of that is generally distracting and leads me to think IE 7 could potentially better altogether. Afterall, we are now seeing Firefox has had some security issues despite the early claims which seemed to draw many over to the Mozilla ranks. Once you lose that trust it is pretty much impossible to get it back. Just ask Microsoft. Perhaps Opera will fill the void a bit, or perhaps a Windows port of Safari. That would be most welcome.
Basically it boils down to most certifications covering official specifications while developers spend most of their time with components which augment the official frameworks. In Java it is quite common to use many open source projects from Apache and other projects and these are not covered in the Sun/Java certifications.
For.NET, where it is less common to use non-MS solutions for projects a certification may mean more, but it still has little value.
I find the only case where certifications help is if you are working as a consultant and a piece of paper from MS, Sun, Weblogic, or IBM gives you some credibility to land a job. But I think a nailing a technical review/interview would be better than passing an exam any day. There is more to IT than technical knowledge. The soft skills are often more important and completely ignored by these exams.
I have been forced into using MS technologies over and over after escaping happily to MacOS or FreeBSD and I wish more people realized there are great alternatives. We should create a coordinated campaign as a unified Switch Campaign focused on highlighting alternatives to MS and Windows.
It seems to me that MacOS X, OpenOffice, Firefox and several other viable alternatives provide plenty of examples of what you can use as an alternative to MS technologies. We simply need to create a blogging blitz to counter Microsoft's efforts to win support for their next generation of vendor lock-in.
If you have been watching at all lately, you will notice that MS has slowly opened up their formats a little only to start promoting MS Office integration so you are still going to be locked into MS licensing and fees. We have to get organized and inform the masses.
This is the problem with too many software projects. They feel that it is ok to overlook the kinks while complaining about Microsoft and other proprietary products. I feel the reason that MS is still able to get people to run out and buy their software is they do a great job of polishing it so at least it looks good enough to buy.
Now if more Open Source projects could learn to do that polish we would really get somewhere. The guys over at Panic (http://www.panic.com/) do a great job of polishing up their stuff before they push it out.
When Mozilla decided to polish up their product and enhance their branding and release Firefox there was an amazing increase in interest in their project. The software did not change a whole lot in the core functionality but it certainly felt like a better web browser.
I have to try Open Office again sometime. The last I tried it was clunky and slow. It would be nice to see that has changed.
That looks like a great price on hosting. I am very much interested. I would like to know more about your experiences with that service so far. I have been hunting for a new hosting service on FreeBSD. Once they can run FreeBSD 5.4 with Mono and Java 1.4 I am going to switch.
Currently I run my own server and co-locate it. It is 4.10 now and I really, really want to run Java and ASP.NET apps.
I want to see the actual code and see how it works and how it is deployed. It needs to be put out there and there really should be controls on these voting machines to control software updates if there are none right now.
Realistically you would be able to compile and deploy binaries with an MD5 checksum just like is done with Open Source projects to verify the binary is unmodified since delivery. I would like them to test each deployed voting machine to see if the binary checksum matches a compiled version of the code.
If they do not match it is a clear sign of tampering. In that case the votes from that machine should be tossed out or somehow the real votes should be determined. Perhaps the code adjusted 30% of the votes to the desired candidate and the true result could be counted. Ideally there should be a revote in any affected district.
Seriously, I have not had any spyware problems on my iBook in the 3 years I have had it. But on my Windows PC I only have troubles when I run Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer which allow remove content to quitely install junk onto my computer. I put the blame 100% on Microsoft for that. So I tend to use Firefox for most everything and only open video files from trusted sources now. And if I cannot trust it I try the media player which came with my Nvidia card. I am baffled by the fact that MS chose to allow the media player to launch web pages from video or to auto-install new codecs. With Quicktime I never have a problem like that.
On my Mac I can use Firefox as well, but I prefer Safari.
But if Apple suddenly started to take a good portion of the market would there suddenly be virus and spyware problems for it? I would say no due to the fact that the primary problems with virus and spyware issues is MSIE, WMP and Outlook. And then there is the poor firewall protection built into Windows. On the Mac there is a good firewall and the same holes in Windows do not exist. The same simple exploits are just not possible. Sure there are some possible attacks, but they are rare and difficult to implement. And typically any feature which could be potentially exploited is disabled by default and only a small percentage of users other to enabled them. In contrast Windows typically has everything on by default. One such feature is running Apache, which I would gladly run in place of IIS any day.
I work at a company which has a proxy. It seems that Firefox forces me to enter a username and password for every single http request which requires Basic Authentication. So in order to do anything like that I fall back to MSIE. Firefox could use some more thorough testing and bug fixing. But with such a wider audience now I would expect patches to be firing off quickly to solve the problems. I think the largest focus for Firefox 1.0 was to produce a browser with an easy interface for the masses on top of the standard compliant Gecko rendering engine. I would say I prefer using it over MSIE, but on my iBook I still prefer Safari.
MS really needs to release the PC and Mac version in a timely manner. I really need it!!!!
But besides that, I will not be buying a console system anytime soon, especially an XBox. I like my PC for gaming and eventually I think a dual G5 would be a great gaming system as well. I just do not plan on buying a dual G5 for a while. In the meantime my PC will have to do.
I have tried ever few months to set up OpenLDAP using newer releases with instructions on their website and it never would work. I always had some issue with the DBM libraries or the commands in the tutorial were inaccurate and not current with the updated command-line options. It goes to show that no matter if the software actually works, if the documenation is not at least half decent the software is still incomplete.
I have maintained Netscape/iPlanet LDAP servers before and they may not be perfect, but they worked. Perhaps a good open source LDAP server will help LDAP become a viable alternative to Windows Directory or other authentication systems.
I thought I read about a Java LDAP server once, but never looked into it much.
After they took all that time to rewrite it with the latest API they claim they can closely track Sun releases. This will be the first big thing since then, so it will be a test of Apple to get it out quickly.
And he worked out great. We both had similar skills and were able to hammer out a lot of code. We do not work together anymore, but I still work with hackers. If you do not enjoy pulling things apart to see how they work and hack them to do new things you should not be writing software.
It is important to keep improving and expanding your skillset. If you stand still you will become obsolete and make it easier to replace you with someone overseas. It also helps to watch the market and determine which skills you find useful.
In a matter of 5 years I have worked with Perl, Java and now.NET. And now I do all 3 plus more depending on the project. I also find the supporting technologies like XML, XHTML, CSS and other standardized technologies are great filler which make you valuable even when you are thrown onto a new platform with a new language. I expect XML to be a technology that everyone will build on and will remain important for a long time. Right now XML and XSLT is very useful in Java and.NET.
Make sure you maintain useful skills and make sure people know you are an expert. It will help you raise your salary. It has helped mine.
It only makes sense to allow the market for portable music to take hold in a big way. I personally would like to be able to host my own iTunes site which integrates with the iTunes software just the same as the current Apple service. I would love to be able to search a much wider base than Apple has provided so far.
But the situation with Real Networks is just silly. I have hardly ever found their products to be little more than mildly interesting and always lacking in quality. They really should produce a worthwhile product and get consumer support before they try to force the leading competitor to make them popular.
...leaving the case off because you had tried to install a new hard drive and you got frustrated with it so you just left the PC sit open for a week because you just did not want to deal with it anymore.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile. I know that Sun had a close relationship with the Gnome community to help improve the usability of Gnome but I still feel that OS X is a much better total UI than Gnome.
I could be wrong, but Solaris and Gnome still have some rough edges which need smoothing out. My biggest critisms of of Solaris/Linux/Gnome is they move onto the never version and new features before the round out and polish the last version. That last 5% of effort to make the software shine is really what sets makes the average computer user feel it is 100% better.
I guess I mean the cheap end of the Apple lineup. And the fact that I can go out and guy any USB peripheral (keyboard, printer, camera) is another way owning a mac is just as affordable as a PC. But I have many less headaches with my mac than my PC, and that is still worth a few extra bucks. At the moment the only mac that I use is a snow iBook I bought a couple years back. I plan to stick with it a while longer, and then the G5 prices will be down a little more and I could upgrade.
Apple hardware use to be top of the line for professional use and it came at a premium price. That is largely what steered people toward the cheaper PC market. And now even though Mac hardware is very affordable now they have to fight that old reputation. And there is also the Windows compatiblity issue now as well.
For a while there it looks like there would be a massive migration away from Windows to MacOS or Linux due to the security scare, but MS seems to have done their homework on it and if SP2 turns out well there will be less motivation to escape the platform plagued by security troubles.
But would releasing MacOS X to PC hardare help out Apple at this point? I think not. They would still have to overcome the compatiblity concerns and the nervousness people have about change when it comes to computers. The average user is afraid of computers already. But I always laugh at people who think going to MacOS from Windows would be hard to do. But I find going from Windows to MacOS X to Linux/X11 is as simple has learning to use a remote control for a Sony, Sanyo or other TV brand.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time the best looking women are not real. Usually you get an email to go to their website which nude photos, which is just dating site spam. And just yesterday I was chatting with a woman with an ad and I swear it was an AI system. Most replies were "ah ok" or were keyed on a word I used. When I would ask more complex questions I did not get any response.
It is either spammers or Match.com and Yahoo Personals trying to draw more attention. Ultimately it drives you back to the bars when I can get the "ah ok" response in person.
If you want to know if people are actually paying attention to a new podcast, just reference the show notes and allow people to hit the show notes. You can then use the stats for that web page as a metric for advertisers. It is also a good place to put the logos/links for advertisers.
Another common approach would be to allow for a discount by providing a code for the discount. The code could be given during the podcast. The number of orders created with the discount code would be a good indicator of the success of the ad.
Many people moved to it because MSIE was seen as insecure but recent reports show some problems with Firefox. The Firefox team should work with the OpenBSD/OpenSSL team to develop an audit process over the code to ensure it truly is more secure than MSIE.
Here's a thought. The thing about patents is the give an organization exlusive rights over an idea for a product which prevents competition. Why not change it so that you can still have the primary patent holder, but also 2 additional qualifier slots to allow for competition. Whoever implements the patent best wins. Perhaps the primary would be given certain rights above the secondaries, but after an initial probationary period the secondaries would be allowed to license rights to other companies to use the patent and truly open it up.
What I like about patents is that it allows you to make a living on good ideas which should be encouraged. But patents stifle great solutions when certain concepts must be worked around due legal barriers.
I would also automatically grant secondary status to standards organizations like W3C and those ISO folks because their works benefits us all.
I have tried OpenOffice and every time it has been a horrible experience. Perhaps Google will bring a talented UI team to the project to create something worthwhile.
It would be great to have the majority of the complex work done on the server, such as transforming between various document formats. I for one just need a good way to upload a Word document and get it back as an open format. With that I would want a free viewer.
If the can export the Word format to a plain PDF I can read in the free Acrobat reader it would be a good start. Then they need to make it editable through a web interface.
Next up with would be Excel and some sort of presentation software. They could extend S5 well beyond what is does already.
Firefox was great and all, but my problems with it seem to increase every day with each new micro release. It chews up too much memory, kills the processor, causes me to install new extensions all the time and all of that is generally distracting and leads me to think IE 7 could potentially better altogether. Afterall, we are now seeing Firefox has had some security issues despite the early claims which seemed to draw many over to the Mozilla ranks. Once you lose that trust it is pretty much impossible to get it back. Just ask Microsoft. Perhaps Opera will fill the void a bit, or perhaps a Windows port of Safari. That would be most welcome.
I wrote a blog entry on this recently.
h tml
.NET, where it is less common to use non-MS solutions for projects a certification may mean more, but it still has little value.
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/archives/000218.
Basically it boils down to most certifications covering official specifications while developers spend most of their time with components which augment the official frameworks. In Java it is quite common to use many open source projects from Apache and other projects and these are not covered in the Sun/Java certifications.
For
I find the only case where certifications help is if you are working as a consultant and a piece of paper from MS, Sun, Weblogic, or IBM gives you some credibility to land a job. But I think a nailing a technical review/interview would be better than passing an exam any day. There is more to IT than technical knowledge. The soft skills are often more important and completely ignored by these exams.
I have been forced into using MS technologies over and over after escaping happily to MacOS or FreeBSD and I wish more people realized there are great alternatives. We should create a coordinated campaign as a unified Switch Campaign focused on highlighting alternatives to MS and Windows.
It seems to me that MacOS X, OpenOffice, Firefox and several other viable alternatives provide plenty of examples of what you can use as an alternative to MS technologies. We simply need to create a blogging blitz to counter Microsoft's efforts to win support for their next generation of vendor lock-in.
If you have been watching at all lately, you will notice that MS has slowly opened up their formats a little only to start promoting MS Office integration so you are still going to be locked into MS licensing and fees. We have to get organized and inform the masses.
This is the problem with too many software projects. They feel that it is ok to overlook the kinks while complaining about Microsoft and other proprietary products. I feel the reason that MS is still able to get people to run out and buy their software is they do a great job of polishing it so at least it looks good enough to buy.
Now if more Open Source projects could learn to do that polish we would really get somewhere. The guys over at Panic (http://www.panic.com/) do a great job of polishing up their stuff before they push it out.
When Mozilla decided to polish up their product and enhance their branding and release Firefox there was an amazing increase in interest in their project. The software did not change a whole lot in the core functionality but it certainly felt like a better web browser.
I have to try Open Office again sometime. The last I tried it was clunky and slow. It would be nice to see that has changed.
They should at least have a text page with a torrent link available so they do not overload the server.
That looks like a great price on hosting. I am very much interested. I would like to know more about your experiences with that service so far. I have been hunting for a new hosting service on FreeBSD. Once they can run FreeBSD 5.4 with Mono and Java 1.4 I am going to switch.
Currently I run my own server and co-locate it. It is 4.10 now and I really, really want to run Java and ASP.NET apps.
Mickey Mouse laws?!
That was funny, but also sad at the same time because it is oh so true.
I want to see the actual code and see how it works and how it is deployed. It needs to be put out there and there really should be controls on these voting machines to control software updates if there are none right now.
Realistically you would be able to compile and deploy binaries with an MD5 checksum just like is done with Open Source projects to verify the binary is unmodified since delivery. I would like them to test each deployed voting machine to see if the binary checksum matches a compiled version of the code.
If they do not match it is a clear sign of tampering. In that case the votes from that machine should be tossed out or somehow the real votes should be determined. Perhaps the code adjusted 30% of the votes to the desired candidate and the true result could be counted. Ideally there should be a revote in any affected district.
Seriously, I have not had any spyware problems on my iBook in the 3 years I have had it. But on my Windows PC I only have troubles when I run Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer which allow remove content to quitely install junk onto my computer. I put the blame 100% on Microsoft for that. So I tend to use Firefox for most everything and only open video files from trusted sources now. And if I cannot trust it I try the media player which came with my Nvidia card. I am baffled by the fact that MS chose to allow the media player to launch web pages from video or to auto-install new codecs. With Quicktime I never have a problem like that.
On my Mac I can use Firefox as well, but I prefer Safari.
But if Apple suddenly started to take a good portion of the market would there suddenly be virus and spyware problems for it? I would say no due to the fact that the primary problems with virus and spyware issues is MSIE, WMP and Outlook. And then there is the poor firewall protection built into Windows. On the Mac there is a good firewall and the same holes in Windows do not exist. The same simple exploits are just not possible. Sure there are some possible attacks, but they are rare and difficult to implement. And typically any feature which could be potentially exploited is disabled by default and only a small percentage of users other to enabled them. In contrast Windows typically has everything on by default. One such feature is running Apache, which I would gladly run in place of IIS any day.
I work at a company which has a proxy. It seems that Firefox forces me to enter a username and password for every single http request which requires Basic Authentication. So in order to do anything like that I fall back to MSIE. Firefox could use some more thorough testing and bug fixing. But with such a wider audience now I would expect patches to be firing off quickly to solve the problems. I think the largest focus for Firefox 1.0 was to produce a browser with an easy interface for the masses on top of the standard compliant Gecko rendering engine. I would say I prefer using it over MSIE, but on my iBook I still prefer Safari.
MS really needs to release the PC and Mac version in a timely manner. I really need it!!!!
But besides that, I will not be buying a console system anytime soon, especially an XBox. I like my PC for gaming and eventually I think a dual G5 would be a great gaming system as well. I just do not plan on buying a dual G5 for a while. In the meantime my PC will have to do.
I have tried ever few months to set up OpenLDAP using newer releases with instructions on their website and it never would work. I always had some issue with the DBM libraries or the commands in the tutorial were inaccurate and not current with the updated command-line options. It goes to show that no matter if the software actually works, if the documenation is not at least half decent the software is still incomplete.
I have maintained Netscape/iPlanet LDAP servers before and they may not be perfect, but they worked. Perhaps a good open source LDAP server will help LDAP become a viable alternative to Windows Directory or other authentication systems.
I thought I read about a Java LDAP server once, but never looked into it much.
After they took all that time to rewrite it with the latest API they claim they can closely track Sun releases. This will be the first big thing since then, so it will be a test of Apple to get it out quickly.
And he worked out great. We both had similar skills and were able to hammer out a lot of code. We do not work together anymore, but I still work with hackers. If you do not enjoy pulling things apart to see how they work and hack them to do new things you should not be writing software.
It is important to keep improving and expanding your skillset. If you stand still you will become obsolete and make it easier to replace you with someone overseas. It also helps to watch the market and determine which skills you find useful.
.NET. And now I do all 3 plus more depending on the project. I also find the supporting technologies like XML, XHTML, CSS and other standardized technologies are great filler which make you valuable even when you are thrown onto a new platform with a new language. I expect XML to be a technology that everyone will build on and will remain important for a long time. Right now XML and XSLT is very useful in Java and .NET.
In a matter of 5 years I have worked with Perl, Java and now
Make sure you maintain useful skills and make sure people know you are an expert. It will help you raise your salary. It has helped mine.
It only makes sense to allow the market for portable music to take hold in a big way. I personally would like to be able to host my own iTunes site which integrates with the iTunes software just the same as the current Apple service. I would love to be able to search a much wider base than Apple has provided so far.
But the situation with Real Networks is just silly. I have hardly ever found their products to be little more than mildly interesting and always lacking in quality. They really should produce a worthwhile product and get consumer support before they try to force the leading competitor to make them popular.
...leaving the case off because you had tried to install a new hard drive and you got frustrated with it so you just left the PC sit open for a week because you just did not want to deal with it anymore.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile. I know that Sun had a close relationship with the Gnome community to help improve the usability of Gnome but I still feel that OS X is a much better total UI than Gnome.
I could be wrong, but Solaris and Gnome still have some rough edges which need smoothing out. My biggest critisms of of Solaris/Linux/Gnome is they move onto the never version and new features before the round out and polish the last version. That last 5% of effort to make the software shine is really what sets makes the average computer user feel it is 100% better.
I guess I mean the cheap end of the Apple lineup. And the fact that I can go out and guy any USB peripheral (keyboard, printer, camera) is another way owning a mac is just as affordable as a PC. But I have many less headaches with my mac than my PC, and that is still worth a few extra bucks. At the moment the only mac that I use is a snow iBook I bought a couple years back. I plan to stick with it a while longer, and then the G5 prices will be down a little more and I could upgrade.
Apple hardware use to be top of the line for professional use and it came at a premium price. That is largely what steered people toward the cheaper PC market. And now even though Mac hardware is very affordable now they have to fight that old reputation. And there is also the Windows compatiblity issue now as well.
For a while there it looks like there would be a massive migration away from Windows to MacOS or Linux due to the security scare, but MS seems to have done their homework on it and if SP2 turns out well there will be less motivation to escape the platform plagued by security troubles.
But would releasing MacOS X to PC hardare help out Apple at this point? I think not. They would still have to overcome the compatiblity concerns and the nervousness people have about change when it comes to computers. The average user is afraid of computers already. But I always laugh at people who think going to MacOS from Windows would be hard to do. But I find going from Windows to MacOS X to Linux/X11 is as simple has learning to use a remote control for a Sony, Sanyo or other TV brand.