Yea.. since the suggestor of the idea was speaking of a laptop it'd be a pretty good assumption that said screen would also be powered by whatever powers the laptop. And if it wasn't, they'd still be powered by the same thing in the end anyways because the battery powering the screen would essentially be powering the laptop through the screen's light (and like I said before, unless they can invent some kind of transformation that has 0 loss it'd be alot more efficient just to power the laptop straight from the battery in the first place...)
Yea good luck with that. I believe that would count as perpetual motion, so lets all just toss entropy out of the window and start using our self-powered laptops...
How is that the best idea when the laws of physics say its impossible. If we were able to develop a device that could convert energy with that much efficiency, there'd be no need to make it solar powered because a battery would last next-to-forever anyways without all the extraneous leakage of energy that comes from the conversion.
I personally think the most practical idea's revolved around integrating everything in to one device instead of having to look like a poor imitation of Batman and his utility belt.
That's a good question but in my experience computers don't come with AOL actually installed, just with a link on the desktop to launch the setup.exe and I'm betting that they have a similar clause in their EULA about configuration changes which means that the user probably agreed to it at some point or another.
Read my comment further down. In short, they put fine print on their packaging that says they reserve the right to make changes to your system configuration for enhanced performance.
I just received a new AOL Coaste^H^H^H^H^H^HCD yesterday and as I was tossing it in the trash I noticed some interesting fine print. I don't have the cd with me so I'm paraphrasing but it said something along the lines of this: "By installing this CD you grant AOL the right to make configuration adjustments to your computer to enhance performance."
Seems to me that what AOL is doing would be perfectly legal then as opposed to the actions of some 17 year old doing the same. By installing AOL onto their box the user grants AOL the right to make changes. If you don't like it, don't install... This isn't even a click-through EULA or something. This is right on the packaging. While I don't condone AOL's actions, it appears that they're not doing anything 'legally' wrong.
For example, their OS should not include a "Buy Music Now" button that forces people into a specific solution.
Why??? Give me ONE good reason WHY it shouldn't have such a button? Has ease-of-use been totally tossed out the window with the advent of the open-source movement? So what if MS is biased towards their own services with their OS. It would be STUIPD of them to advertise competitors services with their OS. It's called business. MS plays that game very well.
For that same reason I think the 'monopolistic practices' judgement against MS regarding IE is hogwash. The entire time it was just Netscape whining that MS made a better product and more people used it. Yes MS undercut Netscape's business, it happens every day. It's called a capitalistic society. Yes MS made it extremely easy to just use IE instead of a 3rd party solution. In my opinion it would be a poor design decision in their OS to do anything but. KDE has a default web browser. MacOS has their own default web browser. But when Windows includes their browser with the OS its antitrust. Looking back now on the 'include a browser with the OS thing' it was nothing but starting a trend. What development team in their right mind would ship an OS nowadays without a web browser ready to use out of the box. "Hey, lets make our operating system harder to use because Netscape likes to whine." Who's bright idea was it to create a business plan off charging for a web browser anyways? The instant I paid for Netscape 2.0 I thought to myself that this is a stupid idea. Unfortuantely at the time there really wasn't much of a choice. (Mosaic? Hah!) I'm of the opinion that if MS hadn't stirred up some competition in browser market that the web would be a very stagnant place to visit. (Although, as a web developer it pisses me off that now that they've won the war they've scrapped innovation in favor of the status quo.)
No one would whine if Apple put in a 'Buy Music Now' and the only choice by clicking that button was their distro service. Oh wait, they already did. Its called iTunes.
To give you another example, have you ever used the 'Print these pictures online' button in WinXP? It's rather handy. Granted, MS is directly associated with 1 of the 3 choices of online print shops and I'm willing to bet that they get kickbacks from the other 2, but regardless its convenient. As I recall Apple does something similar (and probably has been doing so longer) and I'd also be willing to bet that the services they point you to give them revenue in one form or another. Also keep in mind that MS's Print Online 'Button' is extensible. Gallery does just that and allows WinXP users to publish right to their photo gallery from their desktop. (Quick plug: If you're looking for a web-based photo gallery, there is no better choice than Gallery. Check it out.) So knowing that MS has allowed extensibility in the past and has not 'forced' you to use only a specific set of service providers for media type applications if they ever did put a 'Buy Music Now' button on the desktop what would make you think they would limit it to their (as yet non-existant) service without giving a choice?
MS OSes are like the road system. Sure you can offroad in certain areas, especially if you are an enthusiast, but to conduct your normal day-to-day business most people need to at least interface with the roads.
How is that any different than MacOS? Out of the box its (allegedly) a 'complete' package. Joe Sixpack would be perfectly happy browsing the IntarWeb and checking his spam with what comes with the OS. Maybe a personal finance manager and a game or two. The problem is that there was a paradigm shift a few years back on what an OS is and you missed it. We're not using DOS anymore. The OS isn't just the shell that you run your programs from anymore. Its become an entire package and what's wrong with th
Eh, but the thing is, MS DOES allow choice when it comes to music through their player. You can choose from several different premium content providers. They don't (yet) even run their own service. MS seems to be more interested in promoting their DRM than trying to monopolize as a music retailer/hardware solution. And honestly, whats wrong with that? Obviously DRM sucks and the world would be a better place without it, but get used to it. It's happening. It will continue to happen. We're stuck with it. So as a commercial enterprise why is it so wrong for MS to promote their technology? It's not wrong for Apple to promote theirs?
Again, I totally disagree that MS is against choice in this situation. Yes, they hold huge market shares, but technically they aren't a monopoly. And MS hasn't made any move towards nor have they breathed a word about such a notion as having a vertical market in online music distribution.
Hmm, while I'm ranting I think I'll mention this in response to others accusations of 'monopoly' against MS for forcing use of IE in conjunction with premium services in WMP. Give me a break. The fact that IE is integrated makes it that much easier to use when navigating the stores. Of COURSE they're going to use their own browser technology when integrating web content into their media player. In what way would it make sense to not use their IE rendering libraries and instead adapt some way to use the rendering engine of whatever the preferred browser is? For one, this currently isn't possible. There isn't a standardized way of exposing a browser rendering engine for use by 3rd parties. How come no one is whining that iTMS for Windows uses the IE libraries to render its store? (Yes, its all web based, another poster above went into greater detail). It sounds to me like there are way too many people just looking for some reason to point fingers at the Big Bad Bill.
Also, the 'blind support' mr. AC was mentioning above wasn't in the article, but rather in the FUD that all of the anti-MS zealots like to crawl out of the woodwork and spread.
I personally have tried both iTMS and WMP9/Napster2 and stuck with Napster2. I download way more than 10 songs a month so the subscription is totally worth it for me. Not to mention that the main 2 places that I listen to music are at work on my laptop and at home on my desktop. I have one subscription and just download in one place then copy the files to the other. The licenses update themselves nicely and I'm happy. I really like having the ability to pay a flat fee for downloads then if I do decide I want to use a song somewhere other than my pc I buy it for a buck or buy the album for $10. Granted iTunes is overall a better jukebox, but for me iTMS just doesn't make sense to use when I'm perfectly satisfied with the features/services behind WMP9. Suum cuique.
I realize there's a good chance that I'll be flamed for my opinion but its just that, my opinion. Take it for what you will. However me 'sticking' up for MS somewhat is by no means a troll or flamebait, just my.02
Hmm, methinks it'd be rather hard for ALL of those manufacturer's of WMA compatible MP3 players to reverse engineer the format. Of course MS provides the specs of the format. And yes, you can license the DRM tech as well. How do you think PressPlay/Napster operates?
Ya know, you make yourself look pretty stupid when you use a TLA and obviously have no clue as to its definition. FYI, the Slashdot editors and most of the SlashBots(TM) are the ones that do the FUD-spreading, and more often than not unecessarily. Based on reading your post history you're nothing but a Johnny-Come-Lately open source zealot who is doing it just because you think its cool and really don't even understand your cause.
Whats funny is that CC also stands for Clear Channel... As in one of the biggest media conglomerates in the US... One of the biggest companies to have a stranglehold on radio. Weird.
Yea.. Thats one thing that I was rather surpised about WMP9. It ROCKS at encoding. I ripped my entire cd collection to disk in a matter of hours. I have WMP set so that if I have it open and it doesn't have a music cd that I insert into the drive in its library it automatically rips & tags it. Easy as cake, just slip a cd in, do something else while waiting for it to eject. It ejects, pop in another one. VERY easy.
It is.. The files are all WMP specific files with their latest DRM technology built in. You have to remain a subscriber to the service to continue to listen to the songs that you do download. (The songs get licensed until the start of your next billing cycle basically, then it checks to see if you're still a member. If you are it plays the song, if not, you're SOL.)
Now on that note, I was a PressPlay member for about a month before they rolled out Napster. I honestly have no complaints about the service. It lets me listen to music on the two places where I am most: My laptop at work and my desktop at home. Sure, it sucks that its not portable, but like I said, I spend most of my time in front of my computer anyways. IMO, $9.95 isn't very much money to pay to be able to download about 75% of the music that I like to listen to (the rest is buy only.)
Heck, I have the best of both worlds. My work laptop has a dual head on it. When I'm sitting at my desk on my port replicator i have my LCD running at 1400x1050 and 17" monitor running at 1280x1024... It feels awkward to work on the laptop without the 2nd monitor. (The laptop's a Compaq EVO N800c for anyone who's curious.)
Ya know, I really can't believe no one has mentioned this yet. But for those of us who love multiple monitors in Windows, UltraMon is the icing on the cake.
It gives you two extra buttons in each window that allow you to either move the window to the other monitor proportionally, or maximize the window across all monitors. It also allows you to have different backgrounds on each monitor. However, THIS is the killer app: A taskbar for each monitor. Once you've tried this, you can't go back. The windows on your 2nd monitor show up in the taskbar on the 2nd monitor instead of the first. It sounds simple, but it is AMAZINGLY effective. Using a system that has multi-mon without using UltraMon is almost as bad as going from a multi-mon system to single monitor. Check it out, they have a free trial and I guarantee you'll be hooked.
Hey, use some common sense. Lets think about this for a second. Hmm, if I'm going to own a computer that I have physical access to, I'd probably just write a custom trojan and execute it. Someone who works at Valve would probably not have too terribly hard of a time getting access to the source w/o infecting Gabe's machine. Why the heck would someone bother going through the trouble of exploiting a vulnerability in a mail client on someone else's computer? Short answer: They wouldn't. And my reply was not a cop-out. I was responding to a stupid rebuttal of my previous statement that was both grammatically incorrect and made no sense. Since when does saying someone is 100% wrong and apparently in the same sentence contradict?
apparent adj. Readily seen; visible. Readily understood; clear or obvious.
My statement was not torn to shreds, it wasn't even properly rebutted. Gabe DOES have a clue how he got owned, he knows it was by a trojan specifically targetted at Valve, most likely custom written. They know that a keystroke recorder was installed on several machines, apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere. Thats another issue, if it was an inside job there'd be no reason whatsoever to install a remote control software.
I'm glad to be on your foes list, someone with your lack of intelligence (or guts obviously since you're posting as an AC mr. OwnedByTwoCats) who is so quick to open your mouth so as to prove your foolishness is not someone I would want to be friends with. Good day.
Funny how you use "the same sentence" to denote two phrases seperated by a period. You have no clue how to read. Correct grammatical useage - pfah! Could you please go back to 5th grade?
Umm, there are HL cd-key generators all over the place. Granted, a spoofed cd key won't allow you to play online, but neither would having the source to the official key generator. Valve's WON network knew specifically what keys had been sent out, and you'd be VERY lucky to manage to generate a valid key that also happened to be on the authentication list.
Not to mention the cdkey thing is going away with the advent of Steam.
Actually you're 100% wrong. Gabe Newell himself stated that apparently someone had trojanned his machine and stole the source code. It wasn't an inside job.
We took that idea one further and created a full web-based ticket tracking system that appears to work rather well. Users can submit requests through the intranet, or call our help-desk. It has a full audit-log so that each of our techs leave a log of time-worked every time they touch a ticket. Techs can filter the ticket display screen based on personal preference (whatever they work on most, etc). It's basically a full custom helpdesk suite which also works well for project management as well.
Heck, I've even got it wired up so that everytime someone receives a 500 error due to some bug on our intranet or something that it auto-generates a ticket with the appropriate exception info, etc to allow me to have auto-bug tracking. VERY handy.
-A DataTable is just that, a table of data. Why would you expect to be able to do such things directly on a table without something to provide such functionality? That would just be bad design in my opinion and would dilute the class. If you need it that bad inherit from the DataTable with your own routines to do the searching/sorting routines that return a DataView. They're just as interchangeable as a DataTAble for use a datasource for some databindable object.
-Multi-table recordsets are very useful when you're using strongly-typed datasets. For example, you can create a database-independant data layer pretty easily using a strongly typed dataset and an interface for providing functions to deal with the data.
-There's a lot of functional differences depending on what database you're working with. You can do alot of things with the SqlClient namespace that can't be done with generic ODBC drivers. Same goes for the OracleClient library. If you insist on using something that's totally database indepenent (and gimped somewhat as well) just use the ODBC classes.
Stop whining.
Re:LOL, Struts is right on target.
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Believe it or not ASP.NET also does the whole remembering what the user picked EXTREMELY well.. It's almost as if you're coding windows forms sometimes because of how painless some things can be.
Now I'll admit that there are some areas of.NET that make me want to poke my eyes out with a blunt object, but overall i've found it to be much easier to work with than PHP or ASP for large web-based app's.
Hah, you're kidding me... I used to work for Tim and Tom Searcy at a (halfway decent) telemarketing co... We weren't the evil kind as much because most of our business was inbound call centers.. That's funny though, because Tim & Tom Searcy started the company then got booted out by the baord of directors a few years later... I guess Tim's still working in the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea.. since the suggestor of the idea was speaking of a laptop it'd be a pretty good assumption that said screen would also be powered by whatever powers the laptop. And if it wasn't, they'd still be powered by the same thing in the end anyways because the battery powering the screen would essentially be powering the laptop through the screen's light (and like I said before, unless they can invent some kind of transformation that has 0 loss it'd be alot more efficient just to power the laptop straight from the battery in the first place...)
Yea good luck with that. I believe that would count as perpetual motion, so lets all just toss entropy out of the window and start using our self-powered laptops...
How is that the best idea when the laws of physics say its impossible. If we were able to develop a device that could convert energy with that much efficiency, there'd be no need to make it solar powered because a battery would last next-to-forever anyways without all the extraneous leakage of energy that comes from the conversion.
I personally think the most practical idea's revolved around integrating everything in to one device instead of having to look like a poor imitation of Batman and his utility belt.
Holy shark-repellant spray Batman!
Man, trying to use a windows box to ping-flood is like trying to run the 40 with a peg-leg.
If you really want to bring the riaa's site down just use your l33t hax0ring sk1llz and ddos with a bunch of zombies.
That's a good question but in my experience computers don't come with AOL actually installed, just with a link on the desktop to launch the setup.exe and I'm betting that they have a similar clause in their EULA about configuration changes which means that the user probably agreed to it at some point or another.
Read my comment further down. In short, they put fine print on their packaging that says they reserve the right to make changes to your system configuration for enhanced performance.
I just received a new AOL Coaste^H^H^H^H^H^HCD yesterday and as I was tossing it in the trash I noticed some interesting fine print. I don't have the cd with me so I'm paraphrasing but it said something along the lines of this: "By installing this CD you grant AOL the right to make configuration adjustments to your computer to enhance performance."
Seems to me that what AOL is doing would be perfectly legal then as opposed to the actions of some 17 year old doing the same. By installing AOL onto their box the user grants AOL the right to make changes. If you don't like it, don't install... This isn't even a click-through EULA or something. This is right on the packaging. While I don't condone AOL's actions, it appears that they're not doing anything 'legally' wrong.
For example, their OS should not include a "Buy Music Now" button that forces people into a specific solution.
Why??? Give me ONE good reason WHY it shouldn't have such a button? Has ease-of-use been totally tossed out the window with the advent of the open-source movement? So what if MS is biased towards their own services with their OS. It would be STUIPD of them to advertise competitors services with their OS. It's called business. MS plays that game very well.
For that same reason I think the 'monopolistic practices' judgement against MS regarding IE is hogwash. The entire time it was just Netscape whining that MS made a better product and more people used it. Yes MS undercut Netscape's business, it happens every day. It's called a capitalistic society. Yes MS made it extremely easy to just use IE instead of a 3rd party solution. In my opinion it would be a poor design decision in their OS to do anything but. KDE has a default web browser. MacOS has their own default web browser. But when Windows includes their browser with the OS its antitrust. Looking back now on the 'include a browser with the OS thing' it was nothing but starting a trend. What development team in their right mind would ship an OS nowadays without a web browser ready to use out of the box. "Hey, lets make our operating system harder to use because Netscape likes to whine." Who's bright idea was it to create a business plan off charging for a web browser anyways? The instant I paid for Netscape 2.0 I thought to myself that this is a stupid idea. Unfortuantely at the time there really wasn't much of a choice. (Mosaic? Hah!) I'm of the opinion that if MS hadn't stirred up some competition in browser market that the web would be a very stagnant place to visit. (Although, as a web developer it pisses me off that now that they've won the war they've scrapped innovation in favor of the status quo.)
No one would whine if Apple put in a 'Buy Music Now' and the only choice by clicking that button was their distro service. Oh wait, they already did. Its called iTunes.
To give you another example, have you ever used the 'Print these pictures online' button in WinXP? It's rather handy. Granted, MS is directly associated with 1 of the 3 choices of online print shops and I'm willing to bet that they get kickbacks from the other 2, but regardless its convenient. As I recall Apple does something similar (and probably has been doing so longer) and I'd also be willing to bet that the services they point you to give them revenue in one form or another. Also keep in mind that MS's Print Online 'Button' is extensible. Gallery does just that and allows WinXP users to publish right to their photo gallery from their desktop. (Quick plug: If you're looking for a web-based photo gallery, there is no better choice than Gallery. Check it out.) So knowing that MS has allowed extensibility in the past and has not 'forced' you to use only a specific set of service providers for media type applications if they ever did put a 'Buy Music Now' button on the desktop what would make you think they would limit it to their (as yet non-existant) service without giving a choice?
MS OSes are like the road system. Sure you can offroad in certain areas, especially if you are an enthusiast, but to conduct your normal day-to-day business most people need to at least interface with the roads.
How is that any different than MacOS? Out of the box its (allegedly) a 'complete' package. Joe Sixpack would be perfectly happy browsing the IntarWeb and checking his spam with what comes with the OS. Maybe a personal finance manager and a game or two. The problem is that there was a paradigm shift a few years back on what an OS is and you missed it. We're not using DOS anymore. The OS isn't just the shell that you run your programs from anymore. Its become an entire package and what's wrong with th
Eh, but the thing is, MS DOES allow choice when it comes to music through their player. You can choose from several different premium content providers. They don't (yet) even run their own service. MS seems to be more interested in promoting their DRM than trying to monopolize as a music retailer/hardware solution. And honestly, whats wrong with that? Obviously DRM sucks and the world would be a better place without it, but get used to it. It's happening. It will continue to happen. We're stuck with it. So as a commercial enterprise why is it so wrong for MS to promote their technology? It's not wrong for Apple to promote theirs?
.02
Again, I totally disagree that MS is against choice in this situation. Yes, they hold huge market shares, but technically they aren't a monopoly. And MS hasn't made any move towards nor have they breathed a word about such a notion as having a vertical market in online music distribution.
Hmm, while I'm ranting I think I'll mention this in response to others accusations of 'monopoly' against MS for forcing use of IE in conjunction with premium services in WMP. Give me a break. The fact that IE is integrated makes it that much easier to use when navigating the stores. Of COURSE they're going to use their own browser technology when integrating web content into their media player. In what way would it make sense to not use their IE rendering libraries and instead adapt some way to use the rendering engine of whatever the preferred browser is? For one, this currently isn't possible. There isn't a standardized way of exposing a browser rendering engine for use by 3rd parties. How come no one is whining that iTMS for Windows uses the IE libraries to render its store? (Yes, its all web based, another poster above went into greater detail). It sounds to me like there are way too many people just looking for some reason to point fingers at the Big Bad Bill.
Also, the 'blind support' mr. AC was mentioning above wasn't in the article, but rather in the FUD that all of the anti-MS zealots like to crawl out of the woodwork and spread.
I personally have tried both iTMS and WMP9/Napster2 and stuck with Napster2. I download way more than 10 songs a month so the subscription is totally worth it for me. Not to mention that the main 2 places that I listen to music are at work on my laptop and at home on my desktop. I have one subscription and just download in one place then copy the files to the other. The licenses update themselves nicely and I'm happy. I really like having the ability to pay a flat fee for downloads then if I do decide I want to use a song somewhere other than my pc I buy it for a buck or buy the album for $10. Granted iTunes is overall a better jukebox, but for me iTMS just doesn't make sense to use when I'm perfectly satisfied with the features/services behind WMP9. Suum cuique.
I realize there's a good chance that I'll be flamed for my opinion but its just that, my opinion. Take it for what you will. However me 'sticking' up for MS somewhat is by no means a troll or flamebait, just my
Hmm, methinks it'd be rather hard for ALL of those manufacturer's of WMA compatible MP3 players to reverse engineer the format. Of course MS provides the specs of the format. And yes, you can license the DRM tech as well. How do you think PressPlay/Napster operates?
Ya know, you make yourself look pretty stupid when you use a TLA and obviously have no clue as to its definition. FYI, the Slashdot editors and most of the SlashBots(TM) are the ones that do the FUD-spreading, and more often than not unecessarily. Based on reading your post history you're nothing but a Johnny-Come-Lately open source zealot who is doing it just because you think its cool and really don't even understand your cause.
Whats funny is that CC also stands for Clear Channel... As in one of the biggest media conglomerates in the US... One of the biggest companies to have a stranglehold on radio. Weird.
Here's a novel idea... Select Nested from the drop-down list at the top of the page. Ooh, lookie there!
You must be new here... That was an automated spelling/grammar Nazi post. Nothing to see here, move along.
Yea.. Thats one thing that I was rather surpised about WMP9. It ROCKS at encoding. I ripped my entire cd collection to disk in a matter of hours. I have WMP set so that if I have it open and it doesn't have a music cd that I insert into the drive in its library it automatically rips & tags it. Easy as cake, just slip a cd in, do something else while waiting for it to eject. It ejects, pop in another one. VERY easy.
It is.. The files are all WMP specific files with their latest DRM technology built in. You have to remain a subscriber to the service to continue to listen to the songs that you do download. (The songs get licensed until the start of your next billing cycle basically, then it checks to see if you're still a member. If you are it plays the song, if not, you're SOL.)
Now on that note, I was a PressPlay member for about a month before they rolled out Napster. I honestly have no complaints about the service. It lets me listen to music on the two places where I am most: My laptop at work and my desktop at home. Sure, it sucks that its not portable, but like I said, I spend most of my time in front of my computer anyways. IMO, $9.95 isn't very much money to pay to be able to download about 75% of the music that I like to listen to (the rest is buy only.)
Heck, I have the best of both worlds. My work laptop has a dual head on it. When I'm sitting at my desk on my port replicator i have my LCD running at 1400x1050 and 17" monitor running at 1280x1024... It feels awkward to work on the laptop without the 2nd monitor. (The laptop's a Compaq EVO N800c for anyone who's curious.)
Ya know, I really can't believe no one has mentioned this yet. But for those of us who love multiple monitors in Windows, UltraMon is the icing on the cake.
It gives you two extra buttons in each window that allow you to either move the window to the other monitor proportionally, or maximize the window across all monitors. It also allows you to have different backgrounds on each monitor. However, THIS is the killer app: A taskbar for each monitor. Once you've tried this, you can't go back. The windows on your 2nd monitor show up in the taskbar on the 2nd monitor instead of the first. It sounds simple, but it is AMAZINGLY effective. Using a system that has multi-mon without using UltraMon is almost as bad as going from a multi-mon system to single monitor. Check it out, they have a free trial and I guarantee you'll be hooked.
Hey, use some common sense. Lets think about this for a second. Hmm, if I'm going to own a computer that I have physical access to, I'd probably just write a custom trojan and execute it. Someone who works at Valve would probably not have too terribly hard of a time getting access to the source w/o infecting Gabe's machine. Why the heck would someone bother going through the trouble of exploiting a vulnerability in a mail client on someone else's computer? Short answer: They wouldn't. And my reply was not a cop-out. I was responding to a stupid rebuttal of my previous statement that was both grammatically incorrect and made no sense. Since when does saying someone is 100% wrong and apparently in the same sentence contradict?
apparent adj.
Readily seen; visible.
Readily understood; clear or obvious.
My statement was not torn to shreds, it wasn't even properly rebutted.
Gabe DOES have a clue how he got owned, he knows it was by a trojan specifically targetted at Valve, most likely custom written. They know that a keystroke recorder was installed on several machines, apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere. Thats another issue, if it was an inside job there'd be no reason whatsoever to install a remote control software.
I'm glad to be on your foes list, someone with your lack of intelligence (or guts obviously since you're posting as an AC mr. OwnedByTwoCats) who is so quick to open your mouth so as to prove your foolishness is not someone I would want to be friends with. Good day.
Funny how you use "the same sentence" to denote two phrases seperated by a period. You have no clue how to read. Correct grammatical useage - pfah! Could you please go back to 5th grade?
Umm, there are HL cd-key generators all over the place. Granted, a spoofed cd key won't allow you to play online, but neither would having the source to the official key generator. Valve's WON network knew specifically what keys had been sent out, and you'd be VERY lucky to manage to generate a valid key that also happened to be on the authentication list.
Not to mention the cdkey thing is going away with the advent of Steam.
Actually you're 100% wrong. Gabe Newell himself stated that apparently someone had trojanned his machine and stole the source code. It wasn't an inside job.
We took that idea one further and created a full web-based ticket tracking system that appears to work rather well. Users can submit requests through the intranet, or call our help-desk. It has a full audit-log so that each of our techs leave a log of time-worked every time they touch a ticket. Techs can filter the ticket display screen based on personal preference (whatever they work on most, etc). It's basically a full custom helpdesk suite which also works well for project management as well.
Heck, I've even got it wired up so that everytime someone receives a 500 error due to some bug on our intranet or something that it auto-generates a ticket with the appropriate exception info, etc to allow me to have auto-bug tracking. VERY handy.
Ok, I'll bite.
-A DataTable is just that, a table of data. Why would you expect to be able to do such things directly on a table without something to provide such functionality? That would just be bad design in my opinion and would dilute the class. If you need it that bad inherit from the DataTable with your own routines to do the searching/sorting routines that return a DataView. They're just as interchangeable as a DataTAble for use a datasource for some databindable object.
-Multi-table recordsets are very useful when you're using strongly-typed datasets. For example, you can create a database-independant data layer pretty easily using a strongly typed dataset and an interface for providing functions to deal with the data.
-There's a lot of functional differences depending on what database you're working with. You can do alot of things with the SqlClient namespace that can't be done with generic ODBC drivers. Same goes for the OracleClient library. If you insist on using something that's totally database indepenent (and gimped somewhat as well) just use the ODBC classes.
Stop whining.
Believe it or not ASP.NET also does the whole remembering what the user picked EXTREMELY well.. It's almost as if you're coding windows forms sometimes because of how painless some things can be.
.NET that make me want to poke my eyes out with a blunt object, but overall i've found it to be much easier to work with than PHP or ASP for large web-based app's.
Now I'll admit that there are some areas of
Hah, you're kidding me... I used to work for Tim and Tom Searcy at a (halfway decent) telemarketing co... We weren't the evil kind as much because most of our business was inbound call centers.. That's funny though, because Tim & Tom Searcy started the company then got booted out by the baord of directors a few years later... I guess Tim's still working in the industry.