Actually, I'd never consider becoming an MCSE. I'm a hardcore Perl fanatic.:) This (Everyone.net) is my second startup...
I assure you, I can actually program... On Linux, no less!:)
-JF
Re:Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 1
Other than a single e-mail (composed by you) telling your friend about the contest, no e-mail addresses submitted will be used again.
Any person who enters will have their e-mail used once to notify them of the outcome of the contest...
-JF
Re:Spam your Friends! Win a Fake Dog!
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 1
The second block of text quote is the "example" e-mail. You can easily erase that and compose your own e-mail. For all intents and purposes, *you* are e-mailing your friends. It just happens to go through our servers.:)
Yeah, the default text is cheesy sounding, but you can erase it...
We had a minor glitch not long ago, but it's fixed now...
-JF
Re:Great. Slashdot now posts ads for spammers.
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 1
Please do not accuse us of spamming. Have you received any UCE from us? No.
As a company, we despise spam. We run a web based e-mail service for crying out loud!
Your address gets used to notify you of the outcome of the contest. Your friends' addresses get used once to tell them about the contest. That's it.
-JF
Re:Lack of explanation?
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 2
I'm very sorry about this... You are correct that the + is the root of the problem... The engineer responsible will be spanked, and we'll fix it as soon as we can...
I assure you that no addresses submitted will be used for spam. The idea came from another.com's contest...
(BTW, I'm an engineer with Everyone.net, and a good friend of the person who is running this campaign...)
Your address is used for notifying you if you win. The addresses you give for your friends are just so you can notify them of the contest (you can customize the e-mail that gets sent) and that's it.
As I've said earlier... Your address is used to notify you if you win. The addresses you enter are to send an e-mail (which you customize) to your friends to notify them. THat's all. Nothing more.
-JF
Re:Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 3
Well, this was put together kind of hastily...:(
You have my assurances as both an engineer at Everyone.net, and a good friend of the individual whose brainchild this contest is...
-JF
Re:Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
·
· Score: 2
Your e-mail address is for contacting you if you win. The e-mail addresses you submit will be used *once* to notify your friends of the contest. Nothing more.
Please remember that simply *having* a monopoly is perfectly legal. It's the leveraging of that monopoly to destroy competitors, or capture other markets that is illegal.
This finding of facts only demonstrates that yes, MS is a monopoly. A fact that hasn't been in (serious) dispute for a long time. The judge still has to rule on whether MicroSoft actually broke any laws, and if so, what remedy will be enacted.
While I support remedies to the MicroSoft monopoly because I am convinced they have acted illegally, I think simply "breaking them up" would be disasterous. At least, depending on how it was done.
Break them up along product lines: Pros: -Simple. -May reduce their ability to leverage their monpoly. Cons: -Totally ineffective in breaking their monopoly.
Break them up into mirror companies with access to the same initial codebases: Pros: -Potentially obviates their monopoly Cons: -Doesn't help other competitors such as Linux -May create market confusion with different, increasingly incompatible versions of Windows
And the other remedies proposed:
Force them to release the source to Windows in a timely and consistent fashion: Pros: -Gives "real" competitors such as Linux the ability to interoperate, and thus compete. Cons: -Goes against the ideas of capitalism, makes a mockery of intellectual property laws, and generally panics the tech industry. -Doesn't actually nullify their monopoly.
Force them to release detailed, accurate, timely, advance specs to Office file formats: Pros: -100% Interoperability with MS Office would eliminate one of the biggest hurdles keeping Linux off of corporate desktops. (usability is something we can take care of without the DOJ's help...:>) -Helps competitors -Makes the playing field truly merit-based Cons: -Doesn't directly nullify their monopoly -Probably not possible since the question of Office was never raised as an issue...
Personally, I favor the last option. I'd like to see Linux be able to compete on it's merits rather than against it's flaws. (Subtle difference)
(Support Livid and Linux DVD Movie support -- http://www.mrjoy.com/protest.html for more info)
Ouch! This is going to be Yet Another Long Drawn Out Legal Bloodbath.
My question is: what are they alleging? Copyright infringement? Of what? The key? It certainly can't be the actual decryption software...
I'm sure that in the long run, the authors will be OK... The industry groups will probably eventually back off... But in the meantime, they are in for a serious storm...
So, who do we protest to? What industry groups? Has anyone bothered to come up with a form "Letter of Protest"?
Say, that's an idea! I'll have a "Letter of Protest" on my site for those who are interested within a few minutes...:)
I'm afraid not. I've used the Ricochet before, and just like a cellular phone, the bandwidth you get is highly dependent upon local coverage. If you are on the outer-edge of the maximal distance from a transceiver, you get poor bandwidth, aggravated by poor latency. It's quite easy to get less than 28.8K bandwidth. Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer, Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
You shouldn't be surprised though... Analog cell phones just have really pathetic potential bandwidth... The fastest I've ever seen anyone claim is 9600BPS under optimal conditions... That was the Nokia 9000 cell phone/PDA unit...
I'm not sure how the various digital standards hold up though... Or satelite...
In theory, Ricochet should work just peachy, although I've never tried it...
It connects to a serial port, and "looks like" a modem... All you need is PPP software... Even the Palm Pilot supports it (with an adaptor for the cable...)
http://www.ricochet.net
The biggest drawbacks being performance (about 33.6K on a good day, although they promise 128K soon...) and availability... Only certain areas (like the bay area) support it...
In the long run, making your site accessible to those with disabilities is a Good Thing.
My concern right now however, is the "cost" of doing so. And it isn't just money: 1) There are not adequate technical standards for making a web site "accessible". Anyone who tries is basically rolling their own.
2) Because of adequate technical standards and guidelines, often one must compromise the visual quality of a site in order to make it accessible. (No FONT tags, limited use of tables, no frames, limited use of CSS, limited use of images...)
3) Then there is the time and money overhead. In the Internet world, what company can afford to hire specialists that know how to do all this, and can afford the time to let them fix up an existing site, or add overhead to the development of a new site?
Rather than filing a lawsuit, I'd rather the ADA assisted the W3 define some extensions to HTML to help with the issue. Or perhaps, at minimum, an XML language to define accessible content, or for describing how to interpret a site...
Imagine an XML language that let's you define how your site works, and how to understand it... Then create a file in root called blind.xml... You'd probably need to mark up your HTML a bit with naming tags as points-of-reference for the browser to use in correlating the XML description with the HTML... But I think such a thing has a lot of potential. It could overcome the need for the major browsers to implement a new HTML spec... And tools to support it would be fairly easy to make...
[[Sure, it's easier to use Perl than a lower level language]] "Easier" is really not the right word. It's: -Faster. (time to market!) -More maintainable (1,000 lines of mediocre Perl code is easier to maintain than 20,000 lines of good C++ code) -More flexible. (Shorter turnaround time on new features)
[[but programs would be more efficient if C/C++ were used.]] You're talking about an environment that adds MASSIVE overhead already. (HTTP) Several seconds of latency between you and the user is not uncommon.
Now, let's also consider where most web apps spend their time... If you are using mod_perl, most of your time is *not* based in Perl. It's in your database, or waiting for I/O.
If you aren't using mod_perl, then you add the overhead of spawning a process, loading the Perl interpreter, loading and parsing your code, and then you go to execute it. (where most of the time is spent in the database, or waiting for I/O)
We have a VERY complicated web application (>70,000 lines of Perl) where I work. A web based e-mail system with a pluggable user interface.
Our "main" page (where you view the contents of a folder) uses at least 15,000 lines of that code via libraries and such...
It also takes less than half a second to come up. Why? With mod_perl, the overhead of having a huge codebase goes away. And we've got it down to 1 SQL query. Our biggest performance hindrance was when it used multiple database queries. But it's much better now.:)
[[when one wouldn't use one for other programs?]] Other programs aren't developed on Internet time. At my last startup, I learned one painful lesson: Time to market is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING. It doesn't matter how cool your idea is, or how cool your implementation is, if you have half a dozen better funded competitors. Their products could suck but with more money than you for marketing, they're gonna win.
[[did I make the correct assumption?"]] If you aren't in a startup, then that is entirely up to you. If you are in a startup, I'd bet money that it is the wrong decision. Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer, Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
Pacman eh? If it supports curved surfaces that could be pretty wicked... But they'd have to be non-rational curves or Pacman wouldn't be *quite* spherical...
I'd like to see an overhead version too, but few overhead games done in 3D don't tend to work out so well... If you have a fixed camera angle, you undoubtedly have to screw it up with level geometry that passes over the character's head, thus obscuring the view...:)
Using the Wolf engine wouldn't make the game fun, or even have significant nostalgic benefit. It would simply be a hindrance.
I think what would accomplish what you want, is if the engine they used, the art they came up with, and the game mechanics all preserved a distinctly "Wolf" feel... Then you get the best of both worlds... But that is a very hard thing to pull off...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I didn't attend college -- self taught. This is Silicon Valley... :)
Actually, I'd never consider becoming an MCSE. I'm a hardcore Perl fanatic. :) This (Everyone.net) is my second startup...
:)
I assure you, I can actually program... On Linux, no less!
-JF
Other than a single e-mail (composed by you) telling your friend about the contest, no e-mail addresses submitted will be used again.
Any person who enters will have their e-mail used once to notify them of the outcome of the contest...
-JF
The second block of text quote is the "example" e-mail. You can easily erase that and compose your own e-mail. For all intents and purposes, *you* are e-mailing your friends. It just happens to go through our servers. :)
Yeah, the default text is cheesy sounding, but you can erase it...
-JF
We had a minor glitch not long ago, but it's fixed now...
-JF
Please do not accuse us of spamming. Have you received any UCE from us? No.
As a company, we despise spam. We run a web based e-mail service for crying out loud!
Your address gets used to notify you of the outcome of the contest. Your friends' addresses get used once to tell them about the contest. That's it.
-JF
I'm very sorry about this... You are correct that the + is the root of the problem... The engineer responsible will be spanked, and we'll fix it as soon as we can...
-JF
I assure you that no addresses submitted will be used for spam. The idea came from another .com's contest...
(BTW, I'm an engineer with Everyone.net, and a good friend of the person who is running this campaign...)
Your address is used for notifying you if you win. The addresses you give for your friends are just so you can notify them of the contest (you can customize the e-mail that gets sent) and that's it.
-JF
As I've said earlier... Your address is used to notify you if you win. The addresses you enter are to send an e-mail (which you customize) to your friends to notify them. THat's all. Nothing more.
-JF
Well, this was put together kind of hastily... :(
You have my assurances as both an engineer at Everyone.net, and a good friend of the individual whose brainchild this contest is...
-JF
Your e-mail address is for contacting you if you win. The e-mail addresses you submit will be used *once* to notify your friends of the contest. Nothing more.
Please remember that simply *having* a monopoly is perfectly legal. It's the leveraging of that monopoly to destroy competitors, or capture other markets that is illegal.
:>)
This finding of facts only demonstrates that yes, MS is a monopoly. A fact that hasn't been in (serious) dispute for a long time. The judge still has to rule on whether MicroSoft actually broke any laws, and if so, what remedy will be enacted.
While I support remedies to the MicroSoft monopoly because I am convinced they have acted illegally, I think simply "breaking them up" would be disasterous. At least, depending on how it was done.
Break them up along product lines:
Pros:
-Simple.
-May reduce their ability to leverage their monpoly.
Cons:
-Totally ineffective in breaking their monopoly.
Break them up into mirror companies with access to the same initial codebases:
Pros:
-Potentially obviates their monopoly
Cons:
-Doesn't help other competitors such as Linux
-May create market confusion with different, increasingly incompatible versions of Windows
And the other remedies proposed:
Force them to release the source to Windows in a timely and consistent fashion:
Pros:
-Gives "real" competitors such as Linux the ability to interoperate, and thus compete.
Cons:
-Goes against the ideas of capitalism, makes a mockery of intellectual property laws, and generally panics the tech industry.
-Doesn't actually nullify their monopoly.
Force them to release detailed, accurate, timely, advance specs to Office file formats:
Pros:
-100% Interoperability with MS Office would eliminate one of the biggest hurdles keeping Linux off of corporate desktops. (usability is something we can take care of without the DOJ's help...
-Helps competitors
-Makes the playing field truly merit-based
Cons:
-Doesn't directly nullify their monopoly
-Probably not possible since the question of Office was never raised as an issue...
Personally, I favor the last option. I'd like to see Linux be able to compete on it's merits rather than against it's flaws. (Subtle difference)
(Support Livid and Linux DVD Movie support -- http://www.mrjoy.com/protest.html for more info)
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
I have posted a letter of protest at:
http://www.mrjoy.com/protest.html
It needs work, and I don't know where it needs to get sent, but that information *will* be added as I get it. Suggestions welcome!
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
Ouch! This is going to be Yet Another Long Drawn Out Legal Bloodbath.
:)
My question is: what are they alleging? Copyright infringement? Of what? The key? It certainly can't be the actual decryption software...
I'm sure that in the long run, the authors will be OK... The industry groups will probably eventually back off... But in the meantime, they are in for a serious storm...
So, who do we protest to? What industry groups? Has anyone bothered to come up with a form "Letter of Protest"?
Say, that's an idea! I'll have a "Letter of Protest" on my site for those who are interested within a few minutes...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
<>
I'm afraid not. I've used the Ricochet before, and just like a cellular phone, the bandwidth you get is highly dependent upon local coverage. If you are on the outer-edge of the maximal distance from a transceiver, you get poor bandwidth, aggravated by poor latency. It's quite easy to get less than 28.8K bandwidth.
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
You and your high school buddies had cell phones?
Sheesh...
You shouldn't be surprised though... Analog cell phones just have really pathetic potential bandwidth... The fastest I've ever seen anyone claim is 9600BPS under optimal conditions... That was the Nokia 9000 cell phone/PDA unit...
I'm not sure how the various digital standards hold up though... Or satelite...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
In theory, Ricochet should work just peachy, although I've never tried it...
It connects to a serial port, and "looks like" a modem... All you need is PPP software... Even the Palm Pilot supports it (with an adaptor for the cable...)
http://www.ricochet.net
The biggest drawbacks being performance (about 33.6K on a good day, although they promise 128K soon...) and availability... Only certain areas (like the bay area) support it...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
In the long run, making your site accessible to those with disabilities is a Good Thing.
My concern right now however, is the "cost" of doing so. And it isn't just money:
1) There are not adequate technical standards for making a web site "accessible". Anyone who tries is basically rolling their own.
2) Because of adequate technical standards and guidelines, often one must compromise the visual quality of a site in order to make it accessible. (No FONT tags, limited use of tables, no frames, limited use of CSS, limited use of images...)
3) Then there is the time and money overhead. In the Internet world, what company can afford to hire specialists that know how to do all this, and can afford the time to let them fix up an existing site, or add overhead to the development of a new site?
Rather than filing a lawsuit, I'd rather the ADA assisted the W3 define some extensions to HTML to help with the issue. Or perhaps, at minimum, an XML language to define accessible content, or for describing how to interpret a site...
Imagine an XML language that let's you define how your site works, and how to understand it... Then create a file in root called blind.xml... You'd probably need to mark up your HTML a bit with naming tags as points-of-reference for the browser to use in correlating the XML description with the HTML... But I think such a thing has a lot of potential. It could overcome the need for the major browsers to implement a new HTML spec... And tools to support it would be fairly easy to make...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
While they don't offer Braille, their books are easily readable by OCR-type devices designed for the blind.
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
To an extent, this is already dealt with in the form of domain-specific repositories like CPAN for Perl...
:)
I hereby volunteer to set up such a thing for Mason components... Easier than for C++ since Mason is innately component-based...
I had already planned on distributing Mason components on my site -- those that I developed at least... I think it works well to expand that idea...
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
[[Sure, it's easier to use Perl than a lower level language]]
:)
"Easier" is really not the right word. It's:
-Faster. (time to market!)
-More maintainable (1,000 lines of mediocre Perl code is easier to maintain than 20,000 lines of good C++ code)
-More flexible. (Shorter turnaround time on new features)
[[but programs would be more efficient if C/C++ were used.]]
You're talking about an environment that adds MASSIVE overhead already. (HTTP) Several seconds of latency between you and the user is not uncommon.
Now, let's also consider where most web apps spend their time... If you are using mod_perl, most of your time is *not* based in Perl. It's in your database, or waiting for I/O.
If you aren't using mod_perl, then you add the overhead of spawning a process, loading the Perl interpreter, loading and parsing your code, and then you go to execute it. (where most of the time is spent in the database, or waiting for I/O)
We have a VERY complicated web application (>70,000 lines of Perl) where I work. A web based e-mail system with a pluggable user interface.
Our "main" page (where you view the contents of a folder) uses at least 15,000 lines of that code via libraries and such...
It also takes less than half a second to come up. Why? With mod_perl, the overhead of having a huge codebase goes away. And we've got it down to 1 SQL query. Our biggest performance hindrance was when it used multiple database queries. But it's much better now.
[[when one wouldn't use one for other programs?]]
Other programs aren't developed on Internet time. At my last startup, I learned one painful lesson: Time to market is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING. It doesn't matter how cool your idea is, or how cool your implementation is, if you have half a dozen better funded competitors. Their products could suck but with more money than you for marketing, they're gonna win.
[[did I make the correct assumption?"]]
If you aren't in a startup, then that is entirely up to you. If you are in a startup, I'd bet money that it is the wrong decision.
Jon Frisby, Sr. Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
Pacman eh? If it supports curved surfaces that could be pretty wicked... But they'd have to be non-rational curves or Pacman wouldn't be *quite* spherical...
Jon Frisby, Senior Internet Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
Well, at worst it will be "Quake with a different look and higher specs..." but it potentially could be more...
Xatrix has a history of making interesting games, and Kingpin pushes the edge with it's A.I. and gameplay...
Potentially this could be the Next Big Thing... Or it could be a big flop.
Jon Frisby, Senior Internet Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
I'd like to see an overhead version too, but few overhead games done in 3D don't tend to work out so well... If you have a fixed camera angle, you undoubtedly have to screw it up with level geometry that passes over the character's head, thus obscuring the view... :)
Jon Frisby, Senior Internet Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
I disagree...
Using the Wolf engine wouldn't make the game fun, or even have significant nostalgic benefit. It would simply be a hindrance.
I think what would accomplish what you want, is if the engine they used, the art they came up with, and the game mechanics all preserved a distinctly "Wolf" feel... Then you get the best of both worlds... But that is a very hard thing to pull off...
Jon Frisby, Senior Internet Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)