Back when my anon FTP was running and free
on
Flash Mob Gang Warfare
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· Score: 3, Interesting
someone uploaded "If Your Mother Only Knew" which a personal site run by some Asian "gangster" picked up on. I'm assuming he was some kind of ganster because what little I could read sounded pretty rough. Who knew AOL speak could sound tough? I know about it because they hotlinked it and my bandwidth was getting sucked up.
So I changed it to a low bit quality version of "You Are My Sunshine."
It didn't take long for them to lose the hot link to my site. And I didn't have to say anything to them.
I can't help but think this mob problem could have been avoided if someone had just injected the forum with some happy fun kids' songs. Too much anger and stupidity, not enough funny.
A year ago I wrote: ------------------- I got an e-mail the other day complaining that I'm charging for access to the DirectX SDKs which are "supposed to be free." Free for who? Where is this mythical bandwidth fairy? Why have I been paying for my bandwidth these last two years? The SDKs were free for quite awhile as was everything else. Do you have any idea how many gigs of bandwidth I was using a month? I know exactly how many bytes I was using. And it wasn't enough. If my bandwidth wasn't capped at the hardware level (60GB a month physically possible) with a flat rate I would have been looking at hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month to cover the bandwidth that would be sucked up by people grabbing the SDKs from my site. How's that for free?
You may be thinking, "if you're charging for access to parts of this site, what's with the ads?" Unless you're ranked in the top 100,000 of the web with Alexa you won't see a dime from ads unless you drive your visitors nuts with them. See like every "Warez" site out there. And the thing with those crappy sites that bomb your senses with ads, is that you never actually get what you want. About.com used to be great with information about everything. Now it's just a search engine with more ads than you can click a mouse at. No thanks. I'll use Google. Since ads don't work to make money, I just use them for what they are good at; exposure. Perhaps you haven't noticed but this site is huge. Many of the ads are just for other parts of this site like the above advertisement for the "Who Should the United States Attack (if Anybody)?" survey. Others are for web-sites I enjoy. And still others are from other people who just wanted to take advantage of the free exposure for their game development related site.
It's charging for the high bandwidth areas of the site that allow me to have much more free content on the site and make it more accessible since the site runs faster. I could stop charging for access to the content I'm currently charging for access to but then that content just wouldn't be on the site at all. Not everything can be free but I do my best to make as much interesting free stuff (like the survey) as possible. What other site allows free anonymous FTP with no limit on the files or the file size you can upload? -----------------
The ads it's talking about are the text based ads I used which were a hold over from using CJ.com and the banner ad system I implemented which is still somewhat in use at a sub site. They were good for intersite advertising (my web-site is still a giant).
Things have changed. The site is mostly free access since Google AdSense showed up. Only one section which can't possibly make up for the bandwidth usage with ad revenue isn't free. And there's no longer the free anonymous FTP. I'm also running colo on a 10MB line.
If enough people like yourself are so obsessed with this rediculous notion that the internet is free that you can't even allow Google Ads to show up on the pages, then I already have a solution in place and that just makes everyone worse off. I ran a pay site for over a year. Any given section is just an HTACCESS file away from being members only. It's already the case that many web-sites are offering "premium" content that you have to pay for.
The long short of it is, if you refuse to allow the ad revenue to cover the bills, the bills will be paid by the customers themselves like every other business.
Then the internet won't be free for anybody. Many of Google's services are funded by their ad system. If their ad system stops working, their currently free services aren't going to be free any more.
If I could detect users who were killing off the Google Adsense ads, I'd cut off my site from them. If you're not even going to humor me by at least letting the ads load, then I'm not going to humor you by letting the site load for you.
That's just spitting in the face of people who are trying to give you a valuable service and not have to charge you for it.
with "speed pass" or even just a bar code they can swipe in front of readers and give them to hikers who want them. The hiker can then choose who to give the identifying number to.
When the card gets read the system just gets a number and location. If the hiker gets lost, the people who have the lost hiker's number can identify which one they're looking for.
If people steal the cards, who cares. It's just a bar code with a long sequence of numbers and letters. The manufacturing costs should be negligable and just lumped in with cost of operations.
You could also charge hikers for the card which they can keep indefinitly. They never have to give personal information to get the card because it doesn't matter. They just need to make sure an emergency contact knows the number. And that the emergency contact isn't someone who's going to be lost with them.
If you looked at the image in the article you can see the screen is sporting a 3D racing game.
So yes, it does have 3D capabilities and "more powerful than the N64" does mean it will be able to support any game that the N64 could handle and then a bit more.
Each GameBoy release is intended to be as good as the previous console. The GBC got the GameBoy up to NES quality, the GBA got it up to SNES quality and now the DS will get it up to N64 quality. This allows Nintendo to rerelease their old classics again for the portable system and get some more cash out of them.
Considering that the GameCube is practically portable already it wouldn't be much of a surprise if they next major GB release in a few years was as powerful as the GameCube.
and it's also cheaper. You wouldn't be paying $150 a pop if they used a 640x240 resolution screen. If they had gone with a single screen they would have had to manufacture a non standard screen resolution LCD panel and games would have had to support it. If they had put the screens side by side there would be an unavoidable and annoying dark slice between the two. You'd be constantly distracted by the action on one screen while you're trying to pay attention to the other. If the game tried to be wide screen, you'd have that annoying slice. The system would also need to be taller than it is.
As it is, it makes sense, you can glance down to see various information and back up to keep playing.
It could definitly be used as a gimmic but it has far more potential than that since it's also a touch screen.
Also, since they have two video screens, it would be really nice if they had two video outs so you could attach 3D glasses to it. There will no doubt be games that support a camera that can follow the player so you can have on screen looking in front of you and the other, looking behind.
A video in would be nice to be able to hook up a portable DVD player to it. Or any other device like a TV tuner or VCR.
Hotmail syncs with Outlook Express. I've been using it for years.
I don't know about Yahoo. They may have just mixed up the columns on that one.
It's also interesting that GMail doesn't do HTML e-mails. Indie-Mail doesn't either through the web (client limitation) but I allow POP3 and IMAP so you can use any client. There are no built in restrictions to the actual mail server.
And virus scanning should have been a given. There are open source virus scanners if they're using *nix boxes. Indie-Mail uses McAfee which works really well. They may be concerned about the system resources needed to do virus scanning. Although there shouldn't be anything stopping them from running dedicated virus scanning systems that are mapped to the drives on other systems.
You don't have to run the virus scanner on the same computer that you're scanning.
They could also just be worried about killing off legitimate e-mails and don't want to send off notices about infected e-mails.
and I'm the second result. There's no secret for getting ranked high when your web-site doesn't suck. You just let Google do its thing.
"DirectX SDKs" and I'm on the first page of results. Although it's going to the Distribution section (pay per CD) instead of the SDK download section which is free access.
"Digital Black Market" also gets me a spot in the top 20. I used to be ranked higher on that one.
Before the site wide overhaul I was ranked 2nd when searching for "Driver Library" but if you're looking for a specific file and I have it, I'll get a top ranking.
Google is currently reindexing my site. It'll probably be another month or so before everything is indexed as well as it was before. Last check there was about a half a million files on the web-site.
Domain, directory, file name, content is about the general chain of importance for getting a high ranking.
the bartender is already watching how much you drink. They're required to do so by law. If a patron gets drunk in your bar and goes out and kills somebody because of their drunkeness, the bar can be held liable.
There's also a beer drinking indicator called a "tab." It's this piece of paper that keeps track of how many drinks you've had and how much you owe the place.
I recognize the fact that I'm in college and don't tend to spend a lot of money on food so I over tip (sometimes the amount of the meal) when the (usually) waitress does a good job. At places like Chili's or Ruby Tuesday's a plate usually doesn't go much over $7. 15% is barely a $1.00. She does pretty much the same amount of work regardless of how expensive my plate is so I usually don't tip less than $5. I've also worked food service so I know what the job is like.
This is nice for personal parties when there's a lot going on but it's not encouraging to patrons who busted their ass all day and now get to watch the waitresses or whoever sit in the back getting paid to watch the beer indicator.
When I worked as a host for birthday parties at a kid's pizza place, the pitchers where the excuse to keep myself visible to the parents and active in the party in order to get a larger tip. You fill the pitchers before they become empty and while you're doing that you talk to the parents and see what else you can do for them.
In the food business that's the way it works. The more involved with the customers you are, the better the tip. So although a nice novelty, it could have a negative impact on the tip for those who use it to try to make their job "easier."
You didn't pay for Windows, why should you get the support that paying customers get? Should RedHat continue giving support to someone who pirated their way in to their support system even after it's discovered they're not a legitimate customer? Of course not.
You don't need a Windows patch to prevent viruses. These pirates need to grow a brainstem and install anti-virus software which does just as well keeping their system clean.
Of course, they probably don't want to pay for that either. They want everything free and then when they get screwed over they act like someone owes them something.
People with legitmate copies of Windows are perfectly capable of being immune from the infected pirated copies so why should they care that pirated copies of Windows are doing overtime infecting each other?
If it's really that big of a deal, ISPs can deal with users who are infected.
Working on a heavily math based application speed is necessary to the point that the user is not expected to wait a significant amount of time without something happening. I have a large background in game programming working on crap systems and it comes in handy. My tolerance for delays goes to about half a second for a complete operation. It doesn't matter how many steps are needed to perform the operation, it just all has to be done in less than half a second on a 1200Mhz system. My main test of performance is seeing how long it takes for Mathematica to spit out an answer compared to my program. Mathematica brags about being the fastest and most accurate around.
When operations take several seconds a user gets annoyed. The program is percieved to be junk and the user begins looking for something else that can do the job faster. It doesn't matter if productivity is actually enhanced. It just matters that it's percieved to be enhanced or that the potential is there.
You also have to consider if the time taken to complete an operation is just because of laziness. If you can easily make it faster, there's little excuse not to.
For distributed apps you have to consider the cost of hardware. It may cost several hours of labor to optimize but it may save you the cost of a system or few.
In the world of games half a second per operation works out to 2 frames per second which is far from acceptible. Users expect at minimum 30 frames per second. It's up to the developer to decide what's the lowest system they'll try to get that target on.
You have to consider the number of users that will have that system vs the amount it will cost to optimize the code that far.
In terms of games you also have to consider that time wasted is time possibly better spent making the graphics look better. You could have an unoptimized mesh rendering routine, or a very fast one and time left over to apply all the latest bells and whistles the graphics card has to offer.
There are countless factors in determining when something is optimized enough. Games more so than apps. Sometimes you just need to get it out the door and say "it's good enough."
Prior to my current project there wasn't much math in any of the projects I was doing. Unless you're doing low level graphics, advanced math isn't really needed. Vectors, normals and what not where about the most advanced math I was doing. And you can learn that stuff anywhere. It's just a matter of knowing what you're looking for and being good at research.
Now I'm doing statistics and put to use Linear Algebra before my class got to the same point; least squares. I've also implemented Euler-Mclaurin and converted quadpak over to C# to be able to to integration and summations. The net result is that I'm doing more advanced math than I've covered in college. I'm constantly at Wolfram and other sites or digging through Schaums Outlines looking up equations. And I use Mathematica to check my answers. The only reason I'm doing all this math is because it's a math program I'm working on.
Do you need advanced math? Depends on what you're doing. If you want to make games or apps there's not necessarily a lot of math you need. Do you need a college degree to learn math? Not if you know how to teach yourself. Which you should be able to do. People who can't teach themselves will inevitably fail at computer programming at some point since it's a constantly changing field.
I've become so fed up with the computer science program at Arizona State that I've just switched majors to secondary education to teach math (and possibly computer science) to high schoolers. I've taught myself pretty much everything I know so I might as well put that ability into a career instead of wasting money to not be taught by bad teachers and crappy books.
You can either spend tens of thousands of dollars to be taught or spend a few thousand on books and teach yourself. And you can't avoid teaching yourself.
I can install Windows 98 in under 200MB. WinXP takes up about 1.5GB (also according to MS' system requirements, so I don't know where you get 2.5GB from). My Windows Server 2003 Standard install takes up 1.5GB and so does Windows 2000 Professional with all the latest patches applied. A clean install of 2K is much less than that.
If a user installs every imaginable option then yes it may take that much. But I highly doubt it.
1 Terrabyte of storage isn't that rediculous. With all things digital from music to video to games, 1TB of storage will probably be pretty common. I have around a 500GB of storage available on various harddrives.
It fills up quickly with all my photos being archived in high quality and VHS tapes being digitized.
I remember seeing ads when it first came out long ago. But it made the news since it was in an airshow a few days ago. It's probably a bit more advanced now than it was when it was first built.
We still have news on old consoles and computer systems. Why not aging car eating robots?
when politicians get involved with problems that aren't political.
What's stopping these users from installing their own filters?
Next thing you know, empolyees will be suing employers for lost e-mails killed by the main filter.
As for SMTP being broken...you can already trace spam back to it's origin. All the way back to that open relay. It doesn't take brain surgery to fire up a DNS server or use an already existing one like DNSMadeEasy.com and assign your spam domain to the IP of the proxy you'll be using. The owner of the IP can in no way shape or form prevent "unuauthorized" domains from pointing to their IP. I pointed linux.icarusindie.com at Microsoft's web-site and windows.icarusindie.com at linux.org for awhile. MS's site automatically fixes the url while Linux.org showed up as my domain no matter where I went on the site.
Spammers already use tons of domains to host the product page linked to by the "click me." All they're going to do is put a mail server on that domain. So now all you're going to have are spams where the "click me" domain and from domain match. Whoopee.
You can already filter out "click me" domains which results in 100% accuracy (as long as you're not silly enough to think a computer can do all the work) and 0% collateral damage.
If your plan of attack involves some kind of "accountability," forget it. The internet is an anonymous place. You have to find a way to deal with the problem without this silly idea that spammers are somehow going to surrender and identify themselves just because you changed the protocol.
Turning it off doesn't actually solve anything if you know how to code. And having it on makes it easier for everyone.
If you're passing around variable values that a user shouldn't be able to change, you store them locally and give the user a key. The script then uses that key to open the file (or reference the table entry) to retrieve the values.
Since the critical values are set inside the script and stored in a file that the user can't change, they can pass the values through globals all they want but those values will be overwritten by the time the variables are actually used.
The other nice side effect of this method is that the user can't use any page but the one you give them to use your site. Since if they try to use some other site, the file with the values won't be generated and the processing script will just ignore the request since it can't find the file.
This is what I use on Indie-Mail and the Anonymous E-Mailer. The user is just given a very long randomly generated key that references the file which stores the values for any variables that a user isn't allowed to change. When a user makes a request, the script checks that the file the key points to actually exists and then loads the values from the file.
The fear of globals is just undue paranoia unless you really have no clue how to securly pass things around. If you really want to be secure, you ignore client input. It has nothing to do with whether or not the variable is global or not.
For my real world example, the user sends the username and password exactly once and it is never returned to the client in any way shape or form. The server handles everything locally from there based on the SessionID and the IP address of the client.
is that allowing globals is called insecure in PHP and gives no real explaination why except that users can give variables values. Well...that's the idea. It's no different than allowing user input in any other form. The only danger is when you don't assign values to variables before using them. In which case, where were you expecting to get the value?
And PHP I think is pretty useless without being able to append variables and values to the URL. It's a necessary ability for users to be able to bookmark exact pages. It also avoids the highly annoying "refresh" problem where pages expire and data needs to be resent when you make the socalled mistake of using the back button.
And MySQL's semicolon "hack" I didn't like either. It seems way to simplistic for a product that should be more sophisticated. Somebody exploited that not too long ago but didn't cause any real damage. The net result is that I still don't use it for anything critical. The only thing MySQL is used for is the forums and "Fun With Cutouts." People had more fun with HTML injection than MySQL injection with the latter. So now all and ; characters are stripped from user input before processing.
It's a "create your own comic" page anyway so nobody uses correct punctuation. Much less a semicolon.
Look what's happened to Jerusalem. Look at what's already happening to the mountain and there's no widely known proof (maybe the locals know something) of anything being there.
If it is found, "science" (not all Science is close minded to anything and everything that science can't explain) is going to have a fun time trying to continue rejecting the notion that somebody or something exists that isn't bound by the laws of physics and that caused such an event to occur.
That'll be the safe part of it. The deadly part is the people who are going to start making claims on it and going to war with other groups.
In this day and age, this really isn't going to change anything.
People who believe in God don't need an Ark to know he exists. It's not like there's a shortage of proof unless you're a close minded skeptic that simply can't believe in anything supernatural.
The Shroud of Turin is getting much more attention now that the Carbon 14 dating done a few decades ago was shown to be horribly flawed and the piece of cloth used to wrap the head has been found.
It's nice that these things exist but the typical net result is fanatics who make idols out of objects and lose sight of what's actually important.
Unbelievers are going to be shitting their pants if the Ark is found. Believers are just going to say "the Bible told you so." And continue doing what they've been doing.
The fact of the matter is that spammers use common domains. It doesn't matter in slightest that a spammer from X is trying to advertise using Y.com. They could be from Z or Q for all I care. All that matters is that they're advertising using Y.com and so it doesn't get through. Forging a header or using a proxy does them absolutly no good because my quite effective spam blocking technique doesn't rely on the header at all.
And now if they want to bug me they can't use Y.com. They have to fork over real cash to purchase Y2.com and that'll be blocked as soon as they try anything. Repeat until they're tired of wasting money on domains.
It doesn't cost money to get a new IP. There are plenty of proxies in the world. It costs real money to buy a domain and there's no avoiding it. You can advertise a raw IP that hosts the product page but that's just as easy to block as a domain. And static IPs are even less cheap than domain names.
I don't mind that little trickle of spam that finds it's way into my inbox because I found a way to stick it to the spammers without sticking it to anyone else.
I don't think nuking large countries in an effort to kill a few flies can in any way be rationalized as an intelligent measure.
This blacklist has just made it very clear that they're more retarded than the spammers and that their blacklist should be avoided.
They're advocating more damage be caused than any amount of spam could ever cause.
Spam is not a political problem. It's a social problem. Trying to force countries to treat it like a political problem is just going to result in more stupid laws that don't do anything.
For my e-mail server I filter out domains that spammers use. And I get very little spam as a result. What spam I do get, I forward to my spam@icarusindie.com account (where all "report as spam" spam goes) and take care of it the next update. And with a current list of ~980 domains, that works out to around $8000 or so I've cost spammers. All without inflicting any collateral damage or trying to pull a stupid stunt to try to influence the leaders of a country.
These blacklist runners have just become more desperate and irrational than the spammers. Spammers try very hard to get through my system and I can sit back and drink my Coke and beat the crap out of them without spilling a drop.
I can just see these people out there with a crazed look in their eyes widly swinging a baseball bat and hitting only air.
I'll buy a "proper" SSL cert when I need to. For all needed purposes, a self signed cert is sufficient.
" just don't trust that a site that can't even afford to buy a proper SSL cert is going to be able to store a gigabyte of mail for me and several million other users out there"
When I have several thousand users and steady income from ads on the main site, I'll buy a cert. In the meantime I'm being way more than generous with what I offer with the expectation that ad revenue from the main site will cover costs.
What other free e-mail service offers SSL over POP3/SMTP/IMAP and the Web? What other free service offers all those methods to send and recieve e-mail without even throwing ads at them?
Demanding I spend money on a service I'm giving away for free without so much as ads is a little obnoxious don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
someone uploaded "If Your Mother Only Knew" which a personal site run by some Asian "gangster" picked up on. I'm assuming he was some kind of ganster because what little I could read sounded pretty rough. Who knew AOL speak could sound tough? I know about it because they hotlinked it and my bandwidth was getting sucked up.
So I changed it to a low bit quality version of "You Are My Sunshine."
It didn't take long for them to lose the hot link to my site. And I didn't have to say anything to them.
I can't help but think this mob problem could have been avoided if someone had just injected the forum with some happy fun kids' songs. Too much anger and stupidity, not enough funny.
Ben
you can sign up for an Indie-Mail (link in sig) account without an existing e-mail account and without giving any private information.
What information you give the NY Times is up to you.
Ben
A year ago I wrote:
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I got an e-mail the other day complaining that I'm charging for access to the DirectX SDKs which are "supposed to be free." Free for who? Where is this mythical bandwidth fairy? Why have I been paying for my bandwidth these last two years? The SDKs were free for quite awhile as was everything else. Do you have any idea how many gigs of bandwidth I was using a month? I know exactly how many bytes I was using. And it wasn't enough. If my bandwidth wasn't capped at the hardware level (60GB a month physically possible) with a flat rate I would have been looking at hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month to cover the bandwidth that would be sucked up by people grabbing the SDKs from my site. How's that for free?
You may be thinking, "if you're charging for access to parts of this site, what's with the ads?" Unless you're ranked in the top 100,000 of the web with Alexa you won't see a dime from ads unless you drive your visitors nuts with them. See like every "Warez" site out there. And the thing with those crappy sites that bomb your senses with ads, is that you never actually get what you want. About.com used to be great with information about everything. Now it's just a search engine with more ads than you can click a mouse at. No thanks. I'll use Google. Since ads don't work to make money, I just use them for what they are good at; exposure. Perhaps you haven't noticed but this site is huge. Many of the ads are just for other parts of this site like the above advertisement for the "Who Should the United States Attack (if Anybody)?" survey. Others are for web-sites I enjoy. And still others are from other people who just wanted to take advantage of the free exposure for their game development related site.
It's charging for the high bandwidth areas of the site that allow me to have much more free content on the site and make it more accessible since the site runs faster. I could stop charging for access to the content I'm currently charging for access to but then that content just wouldn't be on the site at all. Not everything can be free but I do my best to make as much interesting free stuff (like the survey) as possible. What other site allows free anonymous FTP with no limit on the files or the file size you can upload?
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The ads it's talking about are the text based ads I used which were a hold over from using CJ.com and the banner ad system I implemented which is still somewhat in use at a sub site. They were good for intersite advertising (my web-site is still a giant).
Things have changed. The site is mostly free access since Google AdSense showed up. Only one section which can't possibly make up for the bandwidth usage with ad revenue isn't free. And there's no longer the free anonymous FTP. I'm also running colo on a 10MB line.
If enough people like yourself are so obsessed with this rediculous notion that the internet is free that you can't even allow Google Ads to show up on the pages, then I already have a solution in place and that just makes everyone worse off. I ran a pay site for over a year. Any given section is just an HTACCESS file away from being members only. It's already the case that many web-sites are offering "premium" content that you have to pay for.
The long short of it is, if you refuse to allow the ad revenue to cover the bills, the bills will be paid by the customers themselves like every other business.
Then the internet won't be free for anybody. Many of Google's services are funded by their ad system. If their ad system stops working, their currently free services aren't going to be free any more.
If I could detect users who were killing off the Google Adsense ads, I'd cut off my site from them. If you're not even going to humor me by at least letting the ads load, then I'm not going to humor you by letting the site load for you.
That's just spitting in the face of people who are trying to give you a valuable service and not have to charge you for it.
Ben
with "speed pass" or even just a bar code they can swipe in front of readers and give them to hikers who want them. The hiker can then choose who to give the identifying number to.
When the card gets read the system just gets a number and location. If the hiker gets lost, the people who have the lost hiker's number can identify which one they're looking for.
If people steal the cards, who cares. It's just a bar code with a long sequence of numbers and letters. The manufacturing costs should be negligable and just lumped in with cost of operations.
You could also charge hikers for the card which they can keep indefinitly. They never have to give personal information to get the card because it doesn't matter. They just need to make sure an emergency contact knows the number. And that the emergency contact isn't someone who's going to be lost with them.
Ben
If you looked at the image in the article you can see the screen is sporting a 3D racing game.
So yes, it does have 3D capabilities and "more powerful than the N64" does mean it will be able to support any game that the N64 could handle and then a bit more.
Each GameBoy release is intended to be as good as the previous console. The GBC got the GameBoy up to NES quality, the GBA got it up to SNES quality and now the DS will get it up to N64 quality. This allows Nintendo to rerelease their old classics again for the portable system and get some more cash out of them.
Considering that the GameCube is practically portable already it wouldn't be much of a surprise if they next major GB release in a few years was as powerful as the GameCube.
Ben
and it's also cheaper. You wouldn't be paying $150 a pop if they used a 640x240 resolution screen. If they had gone with a single screen they would have had to manufacture a non standard screen resolution LCD panel and games would have had to support it. If they had put the screens side by side there would be an unavoidable and annoying dark slice between the two. You'd be constantly distracted by the action on one screen while you're trying to pay attention to the other. If the game tried to be wide screen, you'd have that annoying slice. The system would also need to be taller than it is.
As it is, it makes sense, you can glance down to see various information and back up to keep playing.
It could definitly be used as a gimmic but it has far more potential than that since it's also a touch screen.
Also, since they have two video screens, it would be really nice if they had two video outs so you could attach 3D glasses to it. There will no doubt be games that support a camera that can follow the player so you can have on screen looking in front of you and the other, looking behind.
A video in would be nice to be able to hook up a portable DVD player to it. Or any other device like a TV tuner or VCR.
Ben
Hotmail syncs with Outlook Express. I've been using it for years.
I don't know about Yahoo. They may have just mixed up the columns on that one.
It's also interesting that GMail doesn't do HTML e-mails. Indie-Mail doesn't either through the web (client limitation) but I allow POP3 and IMAP so you can use any client. There are no built in restrictions to the actual mail server.
And virus scanning should have been a given. There are open source virus scanners if they're using *nix boxes. Indie-Mail uses McAfee which works really well. They may be concerned about the system resources needed to do virus scanning. Although there shouldn't be anything stopping them from running dedicated virus scanning systems that are mapped to the drives on other systems.
You don't have to run the virus scanner on the same computer that you're scanning.
They could also just be worried about killing off legitimate e-mails and don't want to send off notices about infected e-mails.
Ben
and I'm the second result. There's no secret for getting ranked high when your web-site doesn't suck. You just let Google do its thing.
"DirectX SDKs" and I'm on the first page of results. Although it's going to the Distribution section (pay per CD) instead of the SDK download section which is free access.
"Digital Black Market" also gets me a spot in the top 20. I used to be ranked higher on that one.
Before the site wide overhaul I was ranked 2nd when searching for "Driver Library" but if you're looking for a specific file and I have it, I'll get a top ranking.
Google is currently reindexing my site. It'll probably be another month or so before everything is indexed as well as it was before. Last check there was about a half a million files on the web-site.
Domain, directory, file name, content is about the general chain of importance for getting a high ranking.
Ben
the bartender is already watching how much you drink. They're required to do so by law. If a patron gets drunk in your bar and goes out and kills somebody because of their drunkeness, the bar can be held liable.
There's also a beer drinking indicator called a "tab." It's this piece of paper that keeps track of how many drinks you've had and how much you owe the place.
Ben
is my eyeballs.
If I see it's empty, I fill it.
Ben
I recognize the fact that I'm in college and don't tend to spend a lot of money on food so I over tip (sometimes the amount of the meal) when the (usually) waitress does a good job. At places like Chili's or Ruby Tuesday's a plate usually doesn't go much over $7. 15% is barely a $1.00. She does pretty much the same amount of work regardless of how expensive my plate is so I usually don't tip less than $5. I've also worked food service so I know what the job is like.
This is nice for personal parties when there's a lot going on but it's not encouraging to patrons who busted their ass all day and now get to watch the waitresses or whoever sit in the back getting paid to watch the beer indicator.
When I worked as a host for birthday parties at a kid's pizza place, the pitchers where the excuse to keep myself visible to the parents and active in the party in order to get a larger tip. You fill the pitchers before they become empty and while you're doing that you talk to the parents and see what else you can do for them.
In the food business that's the way it works. The more involved with the customers you are, the better the tip. So although a nice novelty, it could have a negative impact on the tip for those who use it to try to make their job "easier."
Ben
You didn't pay for Windows, why should you get the support that paying customers get? Should RedHat continue giving support to someone who pirated their way in to their support system even after it's discovered they're not a legitimate customer? Of course not.
You don't need a Windows patch to prevent viruses. These pirates need to grow a brainstem and install anti-virus software which does just as well keeping their system clean.
Of course, they probably don't want to pay for that either. They want everything free and then when they get screwed over they act like someone owes them something.
People with legitmate copies of Windows are perfectly capable of being immune from the infected pirated copies so why should they care that pirated copies of Windows are doing overtime infecting each other?
If it's really that big of a deal, ISPs can deal with users who are infected.
Ben
Working on a heavily math based application speed is necessary to the point that the user is not expected to wait a significant amount of time without something happening. I have a large background in game programming working on crap systems and it comes in handy. My tolerance for delays goes to about half a second for a complete operation. It doesn't matter how many steps are needed to perform the operation, it just all has to be done in less than half a second on a 1200Mhz system. My main test of performance is seeing how long it takes for Mathematica to spit out an answer compared to my program. Mathematica brags about being the fastest and most accurate around.
When operations take several seconds a user gets annoyed. The program is percieved to be junk and the user begins looking for something else that can do the job faster. It doesn't matter if productivity is actually enhanced. It just matters that it's percieved to be enhanced or that the potential is there.
You also have to consider if the time taken to complete an operation is just because of laziness. If you can easily make it faster, there's little excuse not to.
For distributed apps you have to consider the cost of hardware. It may cost several hours of labor to optimize but it may save you the cost of a system or few.
In the world of games half a second per operation works out to 2 frames per second which is far from acceptible. Users expect at minimum 30 frames per second. It's up to the developer to decide what's the lowest system they'll try to get that target on.
You have to consider the number of users that will have that system vs the amount it will cost to optimize the code that far.
In terms of games you also have to consider that time wasted is time possibly better spent making the graphics look better. You could have an unoptimized mesh rendering routine, or a very fast one and time left over to apply all the latest bells and whistles the graphics card has to offer.
There are countless factors in determining when something is optimized enough. Games more so than apps. Sometimes you just need to get it out the door and say "it's good enough."
Ben
Prior to my current project there wasn't much math in any of the projects I was doing. Unless you're doing low level graphics, advanced math isn't really needed. Vectors, normals and what not where about the most advanced math I was doing. And you can learn that stuff anywhere. It's just a matter of knowing what you're looking for and being good at research.
Now I'm doing statistics and put to use Linear Algebra before my class got to the same point; least squares. I've also implemented Euler-Mclaurin and converted quadpak over to C# to be able to to integration and summations. The net result is that I'm doing more advanced math than I've covered in college. I'm constantly at Wolfram and other sites or digging through Schaums Outlines looking up equations. And I use Mathematica to check my answers. The only reason I'm doing all this math is because it's a math program I'm working on.
Do you need advanced math? Depends on what you're doing. If you want to make games or apps there's not necessarily a lot of math you need. Do you need a college degree to learn math? Not if you know how to teach yourself. Which you should be able to do. People who can't teach themselves will inevitably fail at computer programming at some point since it's a constantly changing field.
I've become so fed up with the computer science program at Arizona State that I've just switched majors to secondary education to teach math (and possibly computer science) to high schoolers. I've taught myself pretty much everything I know so I might as well put that ability into a career instead of wasting money to not be taught by bad teachers and crappy books.
You can either spend tens of thousands of dollars to be taught or spend a few thousand on books and teach yourself. And you can't avoid teaching yourself.
Ben
I can install Windows 98 in under 200MB. WinXP takes up about 1.5GB (also according to MS' system requirements, so I don't know where you get 2.5GB from). My Windows Server 2003 Standard install takes up 1.5GB and so does Windows 2000 Professional with all the latest patches applied. A clean install of 2K is much less than that.
If a user installs every imaginable option then yes it may take that much. But I highly doubt it.
1 Terrabyte of storage isn't that rediculous. With all things digital from music to video to games, 1TB of storage will probably be pretty common. I have around a 500GB of storage available on various harddrives.
It fills up quickly with all my photos being archived in high quality and VHS tapes being digitized.
Ben
I remember seeing ads when it first came out long ago. But it made the news since it was in an airshow a few days ago. It's probably a bit more advanced now than it was when it was first built.
We still have news on old consoles and computer systems. Why not aging car eating robots?
Ben
when politicians get involved with problems that aren't political.
What's stopping these users from installing their own filters?
Next thing you know, empolyees will be suing employers for lost e-mails killed by the main filter.
As for SMTP being broken...you can already trace spam back to it's origin. All the way back to that open relay. It doesn't take brain surgery to fire up a DNS server or use an already existing one like DNSMadeEasy.com and assign your spam domain to the IP of the proxy you'll be using. The owner of the IP can in no way shape or form prevent "unuauthorized" domains from pointing to their IP. I pointed linux.icarusindie.com at Microsoft's web-site and windows.icarusindie.com at linux.org for awhile. MS's site automatically fixes the url while Linux.org showed up as my domain no matter where I went on the site.
Spammers already use tons of domains to host the product page linked to by the "click me." All they're going to do is put a mail server on that domain. So now all you're going to have are spams where the "click me" domain and from domain match. Whoopee.
You can already filter out "click me" domains which results in 100% accuracy (as long as you're not silly enough to think a computer can do all the work) and 0% collateral damage.
If your plan of attack involves some kind of "accountability," forget it. The internet is an anonymous place. You have to find a way to deal with the problem without this silly idea that spammers are somehow going to surrender and identify themselves just because you changed the protocol.
Ben
Turning it off doesn't actually solve anything if you know how to code. And having it on makes it easier for everyone.
If you're passing around variable values that a user shouldn't be able to change, you store them locally and give the user a key. The script then uses that key to open the file (or reference the table entry) to retrieve the values.
Since the critical values are set inside the script and stored in a file that the user can't change, they can pass the values through globals all they want but those values will be overwritten by the time the variables are actually used.
The other nice side effect of this method is that the user can't use any page but the one you give them to use your site. Since if they try to use some other site, the file with the values won't be generated and the processing script will just ignore the request since it can't find the file.
This is what I use on Indie-Mail and the Anonymous E-Mailer. The user is just given a very long randomly generated key that references the file which stores the values for any variables that a user isn't allowed to change. When a user makes a request, the script checks that the file the key points to actually exists and then loads the values from the file.
The fear of globals is just undue paranoia unless you really have no clue how to securly pass things around. If you really want to be secure, you ignore client input. It has nothing to do with whether or not the variable is global or not.
For my real world example, the user sends the username and password exactly once and it is never returned to the client in any way shape or form. The server handles everything locally from there based on the SessionID and the IP address of the client.
Ben
is that allowing globals is called insecure in PHP and gives no real explaination why except that users can give variables values. Well...that's the idea. It's no different than allowing user input in any other form. The only danger is when you don't assign values to variables before using them. In which case, where were you expecting to get the value?
And PHP I think is pretty useless without being able to append variables and values to the URL. It's a necessary ability for users to be able to bookmark exact pages. It also avoids the highly annoying "refresh" problem where pages expire and data needs to be resent when you make the socalled mistake of using the back button.
And MySQL's semicolon "hack" I didn't like either. It seems way to simplistic for a product that should be more sophisticated. Somebody exploited that not too long ago but didn't cause any real damage. The net result is that I still don't use it for anything critical. The only thing MySQL is used for is the forums and "Fun With Cutouts." People had more fun with HTML injection than MySQL injection with the latter. So now all and ; characters are stripped from user input before processing.
It's a "create your own comic" page anyway so nobody uses correct punctuation. Much less a semicolon.
Ben
Look what's happened to Jerusalem. Look at what's already happening to the mountain and there's no widely known proof (maybe the locals know something) of anything being there.
If it is found, "science" (not all Science is close minded to anything and everything that science can't explain) is going to have a fun time trying to continue rejecting the notion that somebody or something exists that isn't bound by the laws of physics and that caused such an event to occur.
That'll be the safe part of it. The deadly part is the people who are going to start making claims on it and going to war with other groups.
In this day and age, this really isn't going to change anything.
People who believe in God don't need an Ark to know he exists. It's not like there's a shortage of proof unless you're a close minded skeptic that simply can't believe in anything supernatural.
The Shroud of Turin is getting much more attention now that the Carbon 14 dating done a few decades ago was shown to be horribly flawed and the piece of cloth used to wrap the head has been found.
It's nice that these things exist but the typical net result is fanatics who make idols out of objects and lose sight of what's actually important.
Unbelievers are going to be shitting their pants if the Ark is found. Believers are just going to say "the Bible told you so." And continue doing what they've been doing.
Ben
all nerds are Atheists.
Ben
it doesn't matter.
The fact of the matter is that spammers use common domains. It doesn't matter in slightest that a spammer from X is trying to advertise using Y.com. They could be from Z or Q for all I care. All that matters is that they're advertising using Y.com and so it doesn't get through. Forging a header or using a proxy does them absolutly no good because my quite effective spam blocking technique doesn't rely on the header at all.
And now if they want to bug me they can't use Y.com. They have to fork over real cash to purchase Y2.com and that'll be blocked as soon as they try anything. Repeat until they're tired of wasting money on domains.
It doesn't cost money to get a new IP. There are plenty of proxies in the world. It costs real money to buy a domain and there's no avoiding it. You can advertise a raw IP that hosts the product page but that's just as easy to block as a domain. And static IPs are even less cheap than domain names.
I don't mind that little trickle of spam that finds it's way into my inbox because I found a way to stick it to the spammers without sticking it to anyone else.
Ben
What can politicians possibly do to stop spam?
This is a social problem. Not a political problem. Trying to make it a political problem is just going to make the situation worse.
Ben
I don't think nuking large countries in an effort to kill a few flies can in any way be rationalized as an intelligent measure.
This blacklist has just made it very clear that they're more retarded than the spammers and that their blacklist should be avoided.
They're advocating more damage be caused than any amount of spam could ever cause.
Spam is not a political problem. It's a social problem. Trying to force countries to treat it like a political problem is just going to result in more stupid laws that don't do anything.
For my e-mail server I filter out domains that spammers use. And I get very little spam as a result. What spam I do get, I forward to my spam@icarusindie.com account (where all "report as spam" spam goes) and take care of it the next update. And with a current list of ~980 domains, that works out to around $8000 or so I've cost spammers. All without inflicting any collateral damage or trying to pull a stupid stunt to try to influence the leaders of a country.
These blacklist runners have just become more desperate and irrational than the spammers. Spammers try very hard to get through my system and I can sit back and drink my Coke and beat the crap out of them without spilling a drop.
I can just see these people out there with a crazed look in their eyes widly swinging a baseball bat and hitting only air.
KNOCK IT OFF!
Ben
I don't need to spend, on a free service?
I'll buy a "proper" SSL cert when I need to. For all needed purposes, a self signed cert is sufficient.
" just don't trust that a site that can't even afford to buy a proper SSL cert is going to be able to store a gigabyte of mail for me and several million other users out there"
When I have several thousand users and steady income from ads on the main site, I'll buy a cert. In the meantime I'm being way more than generous with what I offer with the expectation that ad revenue from the main site will cover costs.
What other free e-mail service offers SSL over POP3/SMTP/IMAP and the Web? What other free service offers all those methods to send and recieve e-mail without even throwing ads at them?
Demanding I spend money on a service I'm giving away for free without so much as ads is a little obnoxious don't you think?
Ben