Every web server should have a file in their root directory called "secret.xml" or somesuch. This file could list all the publicly-accessible URLs that have all the "secret" data such as credit card numbers, root passwords, and private keys. Search engines could parse this file and then NOT include those URLs in their search results!
Brilliant, huh?;-)
On second thought, maybe I shouldn't post this... some PHB might actually think it's a good idea.
The Yahoo article has a quote from the CEO of Opera (who's browser is also locked out of MSN):
"Microsoft is seeing (that) it is an Opera browser and shutting it out," said Tetzchner, whose team was testing the problem Thursday. "If you change the Opera string by one letter, it is letting us in."
So, it sounds like M$ is checking the USER-AGENT HTTP header for certain strings, and displaying the "Upgrade to IE" page if yours doesn't match.
It should be easy to get around this... like Tetzchner said, you just have to change one character in the user-agent header to break MS's lockout mechanism. I've never used Opera myself; is the functionality to change the user-agent string built into the browser? If not, it wouldn't be hard to build a simple HTTP proxy that would munge the header for you.
A couple things of note: The first is that I received the "upgrade to IE" page when I ran msn.com through my Java HTTP header utility (Sun's Java, by default, has a user-agent string of something like "Java1.3.1_01"). This means that MSN might be breaking a lot of non-browser spiders, robots, and page scrapers out there.
My second note is that the content of msn.com (both the upgrade page and the real page) is now written in XHTML (a version of HTML that conforms to XML specifications). My guess is that this is Microsoft's justification for forcing people to "upgrade" to IE6... they want their users to be using an XHTML-compliant browser.
"Loyal Xbox fans will have to dole out hundreds of dollars more than they expected to secure an Xbox," said Geoff Keighley, editor of Gameslice, an online game site.
Loyal Xbox fans? You mean all the ones who bought the previous version of the Xbox and played all the games that came out for it?
Folks, this is really simple: if you don't like the price, then don't buy it! If still you want one, wait a month or two until it drops in price and retailers start selling the base units without all the crap. If you *really* want one and can't wait, then don't complain about getting screwed over.
Game consoles are one area where Microsoft is the newcomer and underdog. They're spending a LOT of money to make sure that the Xbox is a success. If you don't like these sorts of tactics and want them to stop, send them a message by not buying the thing. MS will certainly notice if there's no great demand for their product, despite all their spending on advertising.
What distresses me the most about this article is that while the author's theme is "Apache/OSS should move into web services and embrace Java/J3EE", he totally fails to mention The Jakarta Project, which is a series of Java libraries and products being developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
There are a lot of cool projects going on over there, the most famous of which is Tomcat, an excellent (and free!) J2EE servlet engine (which Sun has made *the* reference implementation of their servlet spec). In the web services game, servlets are the point men. The author should have at least brought up the Jakarta name... although he probably would have lost his own arguement if he did:-P
Still, I think it was a good article overall. All the World War II analogies were quite entertaining.
Sounds like they're using some sort of proprietary wireless communication protocol, but i haven't researched the actual product... how expensive does a computer have to be to connect to a wireless camera? It's just obvious that someone's milking a few extra grand... per-unit from the health industry
Ok... you try swallowing a Logitech QuickCam, wireless Ethernet card, and battery, and then tell me why the thing shouldn't be proprietary.
Oh, THAT explains quite a bit actually.:-) I've used EJBs in the past, but am not using them currently.
The fact that they do not support parametrized types (templates) is obviously a big drawback
Yeah, that makes sense... although JDK 1.4 is supposed to be getting parameterized types so your arguement MAY be eroding somewhat (wether Sun can implement it decently remains to be seen). I myself don't really need that particular feature; I generally know exactly what types of objects are going in & coming out of a collection, and I very rarely get any ClassCastExceptions because of this. But that's not to say that it wouldn't be a good feature to have.
Additionally not being able to store simple types (only derivatives of Object are allowed) always sacrifices performance.
The inability to treat primitive types as Object is a pain, I'll agree.
I've yet to come across a decent Java IDE beside (Viusal J++)
Yeah, I'm using J++ too; it's a pretty nice editor, especially when you compare it to the other Java/AWT-based ones.
You're obviously not an EJB shop. If you were you'd be having similar experiences... The same cannot be said about EJB apps.
Nope, we're not, thank god. However, the problems with reliability and stability that you mentioned seem to be due to the app/ejb server software, not the JVM iteself, correct?
claims about...productivity gains in java shops are ridiculous. They don't take into account the time between coding java apps and getting them to a state where they are usable enought to be shipped/deployed.
I don't really agree with you here... how much real difference is there between a C++ app and a Java app, in terms of building stability and usability? EJB-based apps don't count IMO, since you are relying on a 3rd-party based app environment, and C++ could be equally flaky here. Besides, Java != EJB. I'm also not counting GUI apps; the faults of Java's GUI libraries are well known. As a core language though, it Java really worse than C++?
This isn't a flame, I'm genuinly interested in your opinions...
Java is a disaster.
(My background: Several years of Java exp, started out in C and a little C++. Currently working on a pretty successful Java project. Love programming in Java, and haven't come across many areas where I find it lacking).
Unusable gui library,
While "unusable" might be a little strong, it's certainly bad, no arguement there.:-)
very poorly implemented containers
This was the comment I was most interested in; can you elaborate?
broken threading
I know that there's a lot of cross-platform inconsistencies in the Java threading system. Does it really deserve to be called "broken"?
horrible runtime environment
I won't make any arguements here, since there's plenty of JVM/C++ comparisons elsewhere. Sun's JVM has been good enough for our purposes thusfar.
without any half decent debugging tools
True, although in my development I've worked around this (I can debug my apps without an actual debugging tool), so I don't really miss it. I can't claim that I wouldn't be more efficient with one though.
no good java desktop apps
No arguements here.
the 'standard' library ballooned to the extent that nobody... can claim to know all of it.
Very true, but is there really much harm in having too much in the standard library? I only use a fraction of it on a daily basis, and I wish they would spend more time refactoring the more usefull classes rather than adding new ones, but the core of the standard library is still decent IMHO.
stop hyping java until it proves itself to be a stable and reliable development environment
Can you explain this comment? We've had good experiences with the stability and reliability of the Java *runtime* environment...
Well, there is actually a lot of real scientific research being done in the name of sports, and these things can be spun off to give us benefits in our everyday lives.
Yup... think catchers' mitts, batting helmets, and the suit of armor that the catcher and umpire wear. Padding in baseball isn't as prevalent as it is in some other sports (football, hockey) but it certainly plays a role.
All these DVD extras kind of remind me of the Special Edition releases of Ep. IV thru VI a little bit before Episode I came out. It was nice to get my Star Wars appetite whet before the new (albeit disappointing) movie came out.
Folks, realize that the Episode I DVD will come out just 7 months before Episode II is scheduled to hit the theaters (last I heard it was going to be May 19, 2002, 3 years to the day after Episode I came out).
The one company I wanted to be on that list, Nokia, isn't there. Nokia's coming out with a very cool looking Linux set-top box called the Media Terminal.
It does lots of cool stuff: PVR (Personal Video Recorder, a la TiVo), MP3, web browsing, even games, and it'll probably be easily hackable too. It should be out sometime in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to it.
"Translating CISC to RISC is bit like pushing uphill, but we can get close to parity in performance assuming the same clock speed," he said. "That's because we work the 90:10 rule on the fly. The software spends 90 percent of its time in 10 percent of the lines of code. That means for RISC-to-RISC and CISC-to-CISC translations, we are able to make improvements. We have seen accelerations of code of 25 percent."
I wonder if they could run the optimizer without the translation layer (or make a ChipX-to-ChipX dummy translation), and squeak some extra performance out of code on any platform?
It's not clear why this new chip is GeForce 2, rather than GeForce 3 architecture.
<opinion>
A production bottleneck is possible, or maybe the nFORCE people couldn't integrate the newer GeForce3 chip in time. However, I would not be surprised in the least if NVidia came out with a new version of their north bridge chip (the IGP)
with a GeForce 3 core.
In any case, you can always add your GeForce 3 card later on, since the chipset supports AGP. You probably won't get the extra speed boosts or the unified drivers, but at least you're not stuck with the older GPU.
</opinion>
The thing about stocks is -- you should be holding for more than five years anyway!
I would agree with you if you had bought the stock from the pool of publically traded companies. However, exercising stock options is a little different IMHO. You aquired that particular stock not through your own "free will", but because you happened to be working for that company. You also have some knowledge of the internal workings of the company, and how much potential it has. It might be in your best interest to dump the stock as soon as you can (taking into account capital gains tax) and diversify your holdings with the money.
Well, I'd buy some redhat if I had spare money, because I like the product.
The thing is that buying Red Hat (post-IPO) stock doesn't benefit Red Hat -- it benefits the seller of the stock. While there might be runoff benefits of this (one less angry shareholder who will vote out the top management?), you're not doing and big favors for Red Hat. If you really want to financially support the company, you'd be better off buying their product (their service & support in this case), or donating your money to the company directly (if such a mechanism exists)
The Web is very different from television: it is mainly a cognitive medium, whereas TV is mainly an emotional medium. This makes TV much more suited for the traditional type of advertising which is flashy and promotes superficial qualities of products. While watching TV, people approach a vegetable state and the main goal of a commercial is to minimize interaction by keeping the user's hand off the remote control. As long as the user watches, you can keep them engaged by high production values and a message that says very little besides "we are good."
Where TV is warm, the Web is cold. It is a user-driven experience, where the user is actively engaged in determining where to go next. The user is usually on the Web for a purpose and is not likely to be distracted from the goal by an advertisement (one of the main reasons click-through is so low). This active user engagement makes the Web more cognitive, since the user has to think about what hypertext links to click and how to navigate. This again makes the Web less suited for purely emotional advertising. The user is not on the Web to "get an experience" but to get something done. The Web is not simply a "customer-oriented" medium; it's a customer-dominated medium. The user owns the Back button. Get over it: there is no way of trapping users in an ad if they don't want it.
Another problem Google and Robot Wisdom both face is that they are too well designed and consistent... But I'd hate to see either Robot Wisdom or Google damage their functionality in order to improve the effectiveness of advertising.
The problem with (effective) advertising on the Web is that it gets in the way of content, which is what the user is looking for. Any site that promotes advertising over content loses credibility and user experience. Any site that promotes content over advertising loses advertising effectiveness and cash.
A company simply cannot admit that they are trying to maximize their profits by milking every cent out of their customers
Uh, why can't they? Although I don't see why you use the term "milking", a company saying that they're trying to maximize their profits isn't inherently bad. In fact, that's what being a business is all about.
I simply don't believe that markets for most components are such that it would require intraday updates
First of all, I'd like to see you explain your belifs here. Secondly, nobody said anything about "intraday" updates. Thirdly, there's really no "intraday" time period here; the price changes whenever it changes, and the consumer pricing system reflects that.
And on what basis should I buy Dell's assertion that they pass on savings "in almost real time?"
So don't. If you think Dell or anyone else is deliberately trying to skew prices for their advantage, then don't buy from them.
However, it's not like Dell is committing a crime by charging a higher price on their components than what they buy them for. It's called "markup".
...None of that information is readily available when I visit IBM's site.
You mention PriceWatch later on in your post. That's all the information you should need. If you can find a better deal for whatever you're buying, then buy from there, and quit whining about IBM not disclosing enough information.
But I have no faith that they are operating in my best interests
They're not... their operating in their own best interests. Their interests revolve around making a sale. One of the ways they do this is to offer a product at a price that best competes with all the other vendors out there. They're not trying to do you a favor.
I hope you were just trolling; if you were, let me congratulate you.
The problem I have with this concept is that I don't always get one-day turnaround on approvals when I'm buying machines.
Not a bad point. However, allow me to make a few of my own:
%14 price jumps like you have in your example generally don't happen overnight. Even when major supply disasters happen (like the earthquake in Taiwan a few years ago), the price of DRAM didn't change that dramatically in such a short period of time.
Even if a similar event was to occur and the price of a given component change dramatically, its impact on the cost of the entire system isn't necessarily as big. The really volatile prices are the memory and CPU, which don't have to be the bulk of the cost of the computer.
Major component price changes would probably cause the vendor to update their price list anyway (they're going to want to minimize their effects on their margins). The new system simply allows the vendor to reflect the mundane day-to-day changes without extra effort on the part of their pricing staff.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pointy Haired Boss". Go grab a book of Dilbert comics if you don't happen to know what that is.
Brilliant, huh? ;-)
On second thought, maybe I shouldn't post this... some PHB might actually think it's a good idea.
It should be easy to get around this... like Tetzchner said, you just have to change one character in the user-agent header to break MS's lockout mechanism. I've never used Opera myself; is the functionality to change the user-agent string built into the browser? If not, it wouldn't be hard to build a simple HTTP proxy that would munge the header for you.
A couple things of note: The first is that I received the "upgrade to IE" page when I ran msn.com through my Java HTTP header utility (Sun's Java, by default, has a user-agent string of something like "Java1.3.1_01"). This means that MSN might be breaking a lot of non-browser spiders, robots, and page scrapers out there.
My second note is that the content of msn.com (both the upgrade page and the real page) is now written in XHTML (a version of HTML that conforms to XML specifications). My guess is that this is Microsoft's justification for forcing people to "upgrade" to IE6... they want their users to be using an XHTML-compliant browser.
...the worst thing to be addicted to is boasting about your addictions, or boasting about your lack thereof.
"Loyal Xbox fans will have to dole out hundreds of dollars more than they expected to secure an Xbox," said Geoff Keighley, editor of Gameslice, an online game site.
Loyal Xbox fans? You mean all the ones who bought the previous version of the Xbox and played all the games that came out for it?
Folks, this is really simple: if you don't like the price, then don't buy it! If still you want one, wait a month or two until it drops in price and retailers start selling the base units without all the crap. If you *really* want one and can't wait, then don't complain about getting screwed over.
Game consoles are one area where Microsoft is the newcomer and underdog. They're spending a LOT of money to make sure that the Xbox is a success. If you don't like these sorts of tactics and want them to stop, send them a message by not buying the thing. MS will certainly notice if there's no great demand for their product, despite all their spending on advertising.
There are a lot of cool projects going on over there, the most famous of which is Tomcat, an excellent (and free!) J2EE servlet engine (which Sun has made *the* reference implementation of their servlet spec). In the web services game, servlets are the point men. The author should have at least brought up the Jakarta name... although he probably would have lost his own arguement if he did :-P
Still, I think it was a good article overall. All the World War II analogies were quite entertaining.
Ok... you try swallowing a Logitech QuickCam, wireless Ethernet card, and battery, and then tell me why the thing shouldn't be proprietary.
OS/2 Warp for Dummies
Netscape Time : The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft
Enterprise Development Using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
Geeks (By Jon Katz)
Rationale: it's best to learn from your mistakes.
More specifically we're using EJB
Oh, THAT explains quite a bit actually. :-) I've used EJBs in the past, but am not using them currently.
The fact that they do not support parametrized types (templates) is obviously a big drawback
Yeah, that makes sense... although JDK 1.4 is supposed to be getting parameterized types so your arguement MAY be eroding somewhat (wether Sun can implement it decently remains to be seen). I myself don't really need that particular feature; I generally know exactly what types of objects are going in & coming out of a collection, and I very rarely get any ClassCastExceptions because of this. But that's not to say that it wouldn't be a good feature to have.
Additionally not being able to store simple types (only derivatives of Object are allowed) always sacrifices performance.
The inability to treat primitive types as Object is a pain, I'll agree.
I've yet to come across a decent Java IDE beside (Viusal J++)
Yeah, I'm using J++ too; it's a pretty nice editor, especially when you compare it to the other Java/AWT-based ones.
You're obviously not an EJB shop. If you were you'd be having similar experiences... The same cannot be said about EJB apps.
Nope, we're not, thank god. However, the problems with reliability and stability that you mentioned seem to be due to the app/ejb server software, not the JVM iteself, correct?
claims about...productivity gains in java shops are ridiculous. They don't take into account the time between coding java apps and getting them to a state where they are usable enought to be shipped/deployed.
I don't really agree with you here... how much real difference is there between a C++ app and a Java app, in terms of building stability and usability? EJB-based apps don't count IMO, since you are relying on a 3rd-party based app environment, and C++ could be equally flaky here. Besides, Java != EJB. I'm also not counting GUI apps; the faults of Java's GUI libraries are well known. As a core language though, it Java really worse than C++?
Java is a disaster.
(My background: Several years of Java exp, started out in C and a little C++. Currently working on a pretty successful Java project. Love programming in Java, and haven't come across many areas where I find it lacking).
Unusable gui library,
While "unusable" might be a little strong, it's certainly bad, no arguement there. :-)
very poorly implemented containers
This was the comment I was most interested in; can you elaborate?
broken threading
I know that there's a lot of cross-platform inconsistencies in the Java threading system. Does it really deserve to be called "broken"?
horrible runtime environment
I won't make any arguements here, since there's plenty of JVM/C++ comparisons elsewhere. Sun's JVM has been good enough for our purposes thusfar.
without any half decent debugging tools
True, although in my development I've worked around this (I can debug my apps without an actual debugging tool), so I don't really miss it. I can't claim that I wouldn't be more efficient with one though.
no good java desktop apps
No arguements here.
the 'standard' library ballooned to the extent that nobody ... can claim to know all of it.
Very true, but is there really much harm in having too much in the standard library? I only use a fraction of it on a daily basis, and I wish they would spend more time refactoring the more usefull classes rather than adding new ones, but the core of the standard library is still decent IMHO.
stop hyping java until it proves itself to be a stable and reliable development environment
Can you explain this comment? We've had good experiences with the stability and reliability of the Java *runtime* environment...
I'm really interested in hearing your reply :-)
Much like the space program, in fact...
Yup... think catchers' mitts, batting helmets, and the suit of armor that the catcher and umpire wear. Padding in baseball isn't as prevalent as it is in some other sports (football, hockey) but it certainly plays a role.
Folks, realize that the Episode I DVD will come out just 7 months before Episode II is scheduled to hit the theaters (last I heard it was going to be May 19, 2002, 3 years to the day after Episode I came out).
...but I'm reading Slashdot right now, and I can't do two things at once.
There's been no less than 5 Slashdot articles on this new box:
Nokia and Intel to make Linux-based Set-Top Box
Nokia and Loki Together on Linux Terminal
Nokia Media Terminal
Nokia's $400 Linux Terminal For The Masses
Nokia's Linux Based Xbox Competitor
It does lots of cool stuff: PVR (Personal Video Recorder, a la TiVo), MP3, web browsing, even games, and it'll probably be easily hackable too. It should be out sometime in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to it.
<opinion>
A production bottleneck is possible, or maybe the nFORCE people couldn't integrate the newer GeForce3 chip in time. However, I would not be surprised in the least if NVidia came out with a new version of their north bridge chip (the IGP) with a GeForce 3 core.
In any case, you can always add your GeForce 3 card later on, since the chipset supports AGP. You probably won't get the extra speed boosts or the unified drivers, but at least you're not stuck with the older GPU.
</opinion>
...is the Self-Made Critic also a figment of someone's imagination?
I would agree with you if you had bought the stock from the pool of publically traded companies. However, exercising stock options is a little different IMHO. You aquired that particular stock not through your own "free will", but because you happened to be working for that company. You also have some knowledge of the internal workings of the company, and how much potential it has. It might be in your best interest to dump the stock as soon as you can (taking into account capital gains tax) and diversify your holdings with the money.
The thing is that buying Red Hat (post-IPO) stock doesn't benefit Red Hat -- it benefits the seller of the stock. While there might be runoff benefits of this (one less angry shareholder who will vote out the top management?), you're not doing and big favors for Red Hat. If you really want to financially support the company, you'd be better off buying their product (their service & support in this case), or donating your money to the company directly (if such a mechanism exists)
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9709a.html
For a more in-depth analysis (and a better test program) I recommend reading Jakob Nielsen's columns on web usability, starting with one specifically about web-based advertising.
Here's the URLs:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9709a.html
Of course, this assumes that The Register even tried IE 4 on the site. :-P
A company simply cannot admit that they are trying to maximize their profits by milking every cent out of their customers
Uh, why can't they? Although I don't see why you use the term "milking", a company saying that they're trying to maximize their profits isn't inherently bad. In fact, that's what being a business is all about.
I simply don't believe that markets for most components are such that it would require intraday updates
First of all, I'd like to see you explain your belifs here. Secondly, nobody said anything about "intraday" updates. Thirdly, there's really no "intraday" time period here; the price changes whenever it changes, and the consumer pricing system reflects that.
And on what basis should I buy Dell's assertion that they pass on savings "in almost real time?"
So don't. If you think Dell or anyone else is deliberately trying to skew prices for their advantage, then don't buy from them.
However, it's not like Dell is committing a crime by charging a higher price on their components than what they buy them for. It's called "markup".
You mention PriceWatch later on in your post. That's all the information you should need. If you can find a better deal for whatever you're buying, then buy from there, and quit whining about IBM not disclosing enough information.
But I have no faith that they are operating in my best interests
They're not... their operating in their own best interests. Their interests revolve around making a sale. One of the ways they do this is to offer a product at a price that best competes with all the other vendors out there. They're not trying to do you a favor.
I hope you were just trolling; if you were, let me congratulate you.
Not a bad point. However, allow me to make a few of my own: