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User: corky6921

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  1. .NET on Authentication is the Key · · Score: 3

    Funny, I was just reading an article by Bill Gates on .NET. The article explains .NET quite elegantly: "A company offering an online electronic-payment service can expose its service to partners, so that they can deliver it as part of their own offering -- regardless of what platform they are using."

    Of course, Microsoft will always push their platform as the "best" one to build Web services on. But I think we should applaud the fact that two major proprietary behemoths have finally started pushing "open standards" -- IBM and Microsoft. Don't forget how unrealistic this would have been only a few years ago.

    I think it's time to take a step back from all of this Microsoft-bashing and realize that at least we finally pushed them into a corner. They can't push a Windows-only solution anymore. Sun has cornered the market on "open standards" with Java. Microsoft HAS to counter -- as long as they keep pushing something Windows-only, they will lose customers.

    What we are seeing here is what we have been asking for all along -- "Microsoft, will you finally support standards?" Why is it that when they agree to support XML and SOAP, and at least do lip-service to the "open standards" idea, we continue to bash them and whine about how Sun did this 10 years ago?

  2. What you don't know... on SETI@Home A Security Threat, Says TVA · · Score: 1

    Richard Chambers, TVA's inspector general, said: "If you're allowing others to tap into your computer, you have got some additional risk there."

    This sounds suspiciously like a comment from someone who has no idea what SETI@Home does, and is condemning a random program that happened to access the Internet.

    Think of how many people in that office probably check their bank accounts online, or send email through Yahoo! or Hotmail, or download warez or pr0n through the company's computers. Come on, what would hackers really see in a SETI@Home chunk? ("Damn, Joe now has 568 units, and I only have 565...")

  3. Re:Clearcase? on Version Control for Documentation? · · Score: 1
    I'm really sure that Dubya knows what a "right-click context menu" is. In fact, he doesn't even make any sense when he is talking about the Presidency.

    One of his best:
    "It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I think it's a mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there and take a look at it, and you can make the determination as to how beautiful that country is." --George W. Bush, at a White House Press conference, March 29, 2001

  4. Re:Prediction of posts here: on Mozilla 0.9 Out · · Score: 1
    50% will be "Netscape doesn't have support for <insert obscure standard here>! I HATE NETSCAPE IT WONT ACCEPT MY SLOPPY HTML!1!!!!1'"

    Oh, like stylesheets. Or ... stylesheets. In fact, a search for "hate netscape" in Google turns up 159,000 entries. Go read some of them.

    I really hope that Mozilla will be a web browser panacea someday. Until then, I'll be sticking with IE... on my Solaris box, even. ;)

  5. You'd Be Amazed... on When Should You Go Back To The Drawing Board? · · Score: 1

    I came upon this situation at my workplace. I am a web developer. We hired a contractor to write a newhire system, and he wrote in ASP. It kept breaking. Since our company is Linux-based, no one knew how to fix it. So they asked me to rewrite it.

    You'd be amazed at how many nuances there are to a given application. I rewrote it in PHP. But there were things I was missing, and features I wanted to add. Then, when I finally released it, we found several bugs. Some of those bugs never got fixed, since we have moved on and no longer use it. there were things that were never added; features that were not there.

    You can learn so much by reading someone else's code, even if it is just to see what NOT to do! And even if it is just to say, "Hey, I can do that better!" MANY times I have gone to the PHP ResourceIndex to download something and the only thing I can say after I'm finished is, "Wow, I could have done it better." But a few times I have been introduced to simpler ways to do things and easier ways to implement my code.

    Bottom line: There are things that will bite you in the @$$ if you rewrite from scratch. There will be bugs. There will be a 1-6 month development cycle (depending on the complexity of the code.) And there will be features missing, and if you implement it, guess who gets blamed...

    Now, that's not to say that you should not rewrite it. It is to say, "Be careful." It's those little things, like "I used to be able to right-click on this..." that will get you in the end.

    Good luck! Whatever your choice is, RESEARCH it well and TALK IT OVER with your boss and/or anyone else who has programming expertise at your company. Know what you're getting into. Plan out a feature set (it will have THIS feature in v1.0, but not THIS one.) Study the old code, and find as many volunteers to bugfix your new code as you can. Above all, if you don't have to rewrite the whole thing, DON'T. Even tabbing out the code can make a huge difference. You might want to start with the small stuff and go from there.

  6. Re:As soon as... on New Machines From Sun · · Score: 1

    First post! Well, why not just buy the RaQ XTR? Cobalt's server runs Linux preinstalled, and comes with all the goodies of a web server. Then again, it is a web server, and is not meant to be used as a desktop. Here's the press release from Cobalt about the RaQ XTR: And here is the full product datasheet for the XTR. And yeah, it's $4799... not even close to the $1000 for the Netra. But it definitely runs Linux, and it's a sweet platform to deploy on. (I own a bunch of RaQs, and it's a breeze to set up multiple sites, DNS, and everything else through the GUI. Plus, it's a regular x86 Linux config, so you can install other things as well.)