I've owned 3 of the products in that list. I thought my Zip drive was really cool when I got it during high school. It lasted a couple years, until it started clicking when I was in college. The clicking got worse, and eventually it could not write without going into a clicking fit. It destroyed most of my 15 or so zip disks, and I think I spread the click of death to some of the campus lab computers.
A few years later, I bought a 75GXP deskstar hard drive, the 60GB version. It died in less than a year. I still have another one of those that is still working.
I also used comet cursor, but I don't recall having any problems with it.
Re:Great, now what about hosting companies
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I run a few PHP sites at DreamHost. For each domain you can choose PHP 4 or 5. I run all my domains on PHP 5, it works out well. You can host unlimited domains on any account, and your disk space and bandwidth are increased every week. It has a nice community atmosphere with forums, voting on new features, and a humorous newsletter.
On the current xbox, the hard drive is used to store updates to the dashboard and some games you play online. When the Halo 2 1.1 update came out, you could not play online unless you downloaded it.
With the Xbox 360, what happens when people find cheats for Live games and a lot of people don't have a hard drive to store patches on? Would the developers choose to let the online experience degrade, or lock out people that cannot store the updates?
Seems the trust system is prone to spamming itself. If the RIAA (or anyone for that matter) flood the system with bogus votes, then the "honest" votes will get ruled out.
This seems only to be just another layer that's succeptible to the exact same pollution problems.
If you vote honestly, you would have little correlation with RIAA's bogus votes, therefore your node would deem them untrustworthy. The pollution would end up being contained among the polluters, and their efforts to rate their junk files highly will distance them further.
I've developed several apps for PalmOS 3.5 - 4, and I enjoyed its simplicity. The developer documentation is very well organized and easy to read. A couple years ago PalmSource released Palm Developer Suite, which is based on the Eclipse IDE. I imagine that it would be well suited for a future Linux based PalmOS. They could design the UI to run as a window manager, and we'll probably see other window manager mods. It would be very cool to be able to compile stuff on a PDA, and generally do most of the things that a Linux PC can do.
Imagine running Apache + your favorite scripting lanugage + database, and using web apps as a front end. You'd be able to run the hordes of PHP/Perl/etc scripts that are out there already, as if they were PDA apps.
So finally IE will be properly supporting 24-bit PNG graphics, years after they announced they would support it. It's anyone's guess what they took years to write a program someone could write in less than a day.
I have held back on a lot of my creative ideas for web sites, because of lack of PNG support in IE. I made a design that used a transparent layer scrolling over a static background. It rendered flawlessly in Mozilla, but the scroll rate was diminished. Mozilla could use a faster implementation of what it uses to blend bitmaps.
Expect to see some clever scripts that use transparent layers to animate graphics. If they simply added a scroll rate property to CSS, one could display a multi layered parallax video game, similar to the SNES side scrollers.
It's about time browsers start getting more rendering capabilities, without relying on Flash to do the complex animation.
The average power plant is more efficient than a car's engine, so if you can harness power plants to drive your car, it's a move in the right direction. If you live in a state with deregulated energy, you can also choose what power company you pay for energy. Hopefully the mixture of power plants in operation will shift as a result.
Re:This isn't all that new.
on
Contrabandwidth
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A few months ago I wrote a web application that indexes all the blogs it can find on blogger. It stores the title of each blog in unicode format, to preserve the blog's title regardless of the language used.
In January, I started getting a lot of hits from Saudi Arabia, and most of my search terms were in Arabic. I discovered that most of these hits were going to Arabic pornography blogs.
All the Internet traffic from Saudi Arabia was coming from cachexx-x.ruh.isu.net.sa, where xx-x is some numbers.
The Internet Services Unit (ISU) is a department of King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST) responsible for providing Internet services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC), the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) and a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from the private sector.
Local Content Filtering policy
Pursuant to the Council of Ministers' decree concerning the regulation of use of the Internet in Saudi Arabia, all sites that contain content in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations shall be blocked.
A security committee chaired by the Ministry of Interior was formulated. One of the tasks assigned to this committee is the selection of sites to be blocked and the oversight of this process. However, due to the wide-spread and diverse nature of pornographic sites, KACST was commissioned to directly block these types of sites.
Other non-pornographic sites are only blocked based upon direct requests from the security bodies within the government. KACST has no authority in the selection of such sites and it's role is limited to carrying out the directions of these security bodies.
The next month, traffic from Saudi Arabia dropped considerably, this month there is no traffic at all. I guess my site is just another site in their blacklist now.
The web application of 5 years ago didn't have ajax, or anything similar. You had to wait for a full page to load, which is slow. It makes the whole app seem a lot slower. Now, your GUI can recieve updates as it is processing other stuff. The heavy processing can be done on the server, your client can do the light processing of displaying whatever you're working with.
I wrote a few simple apps that use XMLHTTPRequest. This has been a new buzz word in the JavaScript community since some live search demos (and later Google suggest) came around. I made a live blog randomizer that downloads the blog summary from my website, and only downloads the actual content that is new.
Most web apps we are used to are more monolithic. On slashdot, for example, every time you click on something, you have to doadload all the same formatting code all over again. CSS reduces a lot of overhead of extra formatting, but it does not know when the content has changed. Thus, a monolithic web application will tend to retransmit the same content over and over. This adds a lot of latency to everything, and the user perceives that it is much slower.
A. No. XMLHttpRequest is only part of the Ajax equation. XMLHttpRequest is the technical component that makes the asynchronous server communication possible; Ajax is our name for the overall approach described in the article, which relies not only on XMLHttpRequest, but on CSS, DOM, and other technologies.
Ajax not only fetches only the data it needs, it also does additional processing to display the data for your particular setup. Think of Google as a public supercomputer you can use to speed up your desktop applications.
Lets say Google made a spreadsheet application. It could potentially be faster than a desktop spreadsheet for many operations. Imagine you have a million rows of data, and you want to sort it all. Google could perform the sort, and send back the order of the data. The local client would just have to display the data it has in a different order. The client would not even need to store a cache of all the data. It could cache the rows in your viewable area, maybe some above and below it, and stream data from the server as you are scrolling the window.
You can probably turn all of an office suite into a fast web office suite if it is cleverly designed. I wouldn't be suprised to see a Google Office in a little while.
Both the hosting companies I use have PHP 4.3. I do all my development on PHP 5, but I keep most of my code 4.3 compatible. This works out pretty well for me. PHP 5 passes objects to functions by reference, so if you want to stay compatible with PHP 4, you still have to use $ref &= $someObject.
It seems like hosting companies are slowing the adaptation of PHP 5, because a lot of old scripts will not run with PHP 5. I would like to see more hosts offering a choice of 4 or 5.
I've been programming in PHP for about 2 years, and programming in general for 16 years. I've always commented my code since I started programming BASIC on my Apple IIe. I would usually put stuff mostly for my own reference. When I release my source code, I usually go in and add more comments.
http://phpdoc.org/ PHPDoc (inspired by JavaDoc) helps me write better comments by formatting my comments using tags. It makes a reference manual for my code in multiple formats. Now instead of comments, I make DocBlocks. Page level DocBlocks describe the general purpose of the file. You can group files together in packages. It helps to see how it all looks from the user's perspective, no matter what language you are using.
Recently I noticed that AIM has an IM Robots section where there are a few bots you can interact with. AOL's new API should include a way to develop new chat bots.
They should develop a gateway that would allow an ordinary web server to send IMs, that way a web server could run chat bot scripts in a common language, such as PHP. This could be the catalyst for a diverse population of chat bots, which could be entertaining and/or useful.
I like to set up my own filters to help deal with the spam, along with using the adaptive filters. A lot of the spam I get share the same subject matter and keywords. I wish the manual filters were improved a bit so I could make more effective filters.
It is annoying to have to create a separate filter rule for each word I want to filter. There should be a way to have one rule look for a list of keywords. There should also be a case-insensitive mode.
A lot of spammers will put spaces or symbols between the letters in a keyword to trick filters. It would be nice if the filter could strip out extra characters before checking for matches.
Lastly, many spammers misspell words likely to be filtered, so it would be great if the filter could use the spell checker to find close word matches.
I met Wil back in August at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. He was signing copies of Just a Geek. I also got him to write his signature in my Kyocera Smartphone, using a paint program I made. I told him I wrote that paint program, and he said "wow! you're way cooler than I am". I asked if he knew any web scripting languages. He said "PHP, and just enough Perl to not screw everything up". Wil is a cool guy.
Anyway, here is a screen capture of his signature, written with SproutPaint:)
Excuse me, I beg to differ. I've heard a lot of people say that Doom 3 does not use SMP, so I decided to find out for myself.
I have a dual Athlon 1900+ box with XP, and dual displays. This allowed me to perform an experiment with Doom 3 to see if it uses both CPUs. I put the task manager on my non gaming monitor, killed all extra tasks, and fired up Doom 3. It did indeed use both processors, about 20-30% in the menu screens. During gameplay it stayed at about a constant 50% per CPU. I wonder if it would use more CPU if I had a faster video card (I have a GeForce Ti 4400).
I've been heavily into computers since I was 10 (I'm 26 now). My vision is 20/15 (better than normal). I've been using CRTs the whole time up until 2 years ago I started using a dual setup with CRT & LCD. I guess I'm just lucky my eyes haven't been ruined.
Site is slashdotted now, maybe I'll read it later.
I wrote a blogger aggregator in PHP a couple days ago. http://sproutworks.com/blogger.php It simply displays links to the latest updated blogs. Then you can click on a link and it'll parse out the entries from the blog you clicked on. Right now it only works on the blogs with the newer template files. I am using an HTML parser I wrote rather than the Blogger API. I will probably add some new features that use the Bloggeer API.
I've been using a dual monitor setup for the last 2 years or so. Like someone else said, it's nice being able to have your IDE on one screen, and some documentation on the other. For web development, you can look at your code and your site at the same time. For me, it helps me visualize where I want to edit code. There's plenty of other things you can do. I am never going back to single screen unless I have no choice. I run a 19" CRT and a 15" LCD. I had the CRT first. I really could care less how much extra electricity the LCD uses. But now that I am thinking about it, I'm going to find out.
That article says an LCD run for 24 hours a day uses about $4 a month. I figure mine is running about 12 hours a day, so maybe I'm using an extra $2 a month. I'd rather have the extra productivity than an extra burger.
When 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' was released, Ray did a sermon at my church (1st Unitarian Church of San Diego). Before his sermon the church music was played with Kurzweil synthesizers. Very cool. I got to meet Ray and get my book signed. He signed it 'good luck with computer science', as I was a CS major at the time.
As a programmer and futurist, I found his book absolutely fascinating. I would write some quotes, but I let friends borrow both of my copies and never got them back. The book has a graph in it plotting computing power per $1000 vs. time.
Like someone else mentioned, I too played pathways into darkness on a Macintosh LC. That was the only FPS I had that actually had textures. It was damn cool at the time. I was there when Bungie was still Mac only, and I played all of the Marathon series games a lot.
Uh, right on the product website it says it has built in flash RAM.
from the site:
215MB actual storage capacity (160MB internal flash drive; 55MB program memory for applications and data.)
I don't know if it saves the memo data in the flash drive or not. If not, there is probably an easy way to backup your files into the flash drive. I'd expect someone to come up with an auto backup utility if there isn't one already.
I am a Palm developer too. I had an m505 (before I lost it somewhere), and it lost all it's memory a couple times due to a hard crash. My Kyocera Smartphone is even worse. It seems like every time it crashes when it is online, it loses all its data.
IBM only used 8 racks to accomplish that speed, while the Earth Simulator has 320 processor node cabinets and 64 interconnect cabinets. The ES's grid design looks neat though.
I tried using scripts like that on my site, and some of my friends were telling me that my site was crashing their IE. So for now I've given up on using fancy alpha transparency tricks. The next time I start using graphics in my layout I will provide a pretty option, and IE users can click on something to try to use the PNG filters.
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned 3 of the products in that list. I thought my Zip drive was really cool when I got it during high school. It lasted a couple years, until it started clicking when I was in college. The clicking got worse, and eventually it could not write without going into a clicking fit. It destroyed most of my 15 or so zip disks, and I think I spread the click of death to some of the campus lab computers.
A few years later, I bought a 75GXP deskstar hard drive, the 60GB version. It died in less than a year. I still have another one of those that is still working.
I also used comet cursor, but I don't recall having any problems with it.
I run a few PHP sites at DreamHost. For each domain you can choose PHP 4 or 5. I run all my domains on PHP 5, it works out well. You can host unlimited domains on any account, and your disk space and bandwidth are increased every week. It has a nice community atmosphere with forums, voting on new features, and a humorous newsletter.
Follow the link to find out more (note that if you sign up with this link, you'll be my referral)
http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?sproutworks
FYI PHP 5.1 comes with a standard DB connectivity library called PDO. You can also install it on PHP 5.
http://www.php.net/pdo
On the current xbox, the hard drive is used to store updates to the dashboard and some games you play online. When the Halo 2 1.1 update came out, you could not play online unless you downloaded it.
With the Xbox 360, what happens when people find cheats for Live games and a lot of people don't have a hard drive to store patches on? Would the developers choose to let the online experience degrade, or lock out people that cannot store the updates?
Seems the trust system is prone to spamming itself. If the RIAA (or anyone for that matter) flood the system with bogus votes, then the "honest" votes will get ruled out.
This seems only to be just another layer that's succeptible to the exact same pollution problems.
If you vote honestly, you would have little correlation with RIAA's bogus votes, therefore your node would deem them untrustworthy. The pollution would end up being contained among the polluters, and their efforts to rate their junk files highly will distance them further.
I've developed several apps for PalmOS 3.5 - 4, and I enjoyed its simplicity. The developer documentation is very well organized and easy to read. A couple years ago PalmSource released Palm Developer Suite, which is based on the Eclipse IDE. I imagine that it would be well suited for a future Linux based PalmOS. They could design the UI to run as a window manager, and we'll probably see other window manager mods. It would be very cool to be able to compile stuff on a PDA, and generally do most of the things that a Linux PC can do.
Imagine running Apache + your favorite scripting lanugage + database, and using web apps as a front end. You'd be able to run the hordes of PHP/Perl/etc scripts that are out there already, as if they were PDA apps.
So finally IE will be properly supporting 24-bit PNG graphics, years after they announced they would support it. It's anyone's guess what they took years to write a program someone could write in less than a day.
I have held back on a lot of my creative ideas for web sites, because of lack of PNG support in IE. I made a design that used a transparent layer scrolling over a static background. It rendered flawlessly in Mozilla, but the scroll rate was diminished. Mozilla could use a faster implementation of what it uses to blend bitmaps.
Expect to see some clever scripts that use transparent layers to animate graphics. If they simply added a scroll rate property to CSS, one could display a multi layered parallax video game, similar to the SNES side scrollers.
It's about time browsers start getting more rendering capabilities, without relying on Flash to do the complex animation.
The average power plant is more efficient than a car's engine, so if you can harness power plants to drive your car, it's a move in the right direction. If you live in a state with deregulated energy, you can also choose what power company you pay for energy. Hopefully the mixture of power plants in operation will shift as a result.
In January, I started getting a lot of hits from Saudi Arabia, and most of my search terms were in Arabic. I discovered that most of these hits were going to Arabic pornography blogs.
All the Internet traffic from Saudi Arabia was coming from cachexx-x.ruh.isu.net.sa, where xx-x is some numbers.
I went to http://www.isu.net.sa/ to find out about their net policies.
The Internet Services Unit (ISU) is a department of King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST) responsible for providing Internet services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC), the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) and a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from the private sector.
The next month, traffic from Saudi Arabia dropped considerably, this month there is no traffic at all. I guess my site is just another site in their blacklist now.
I wrote a few simple apps that use XMLHTTPRequest. This has been a new buzz word in the JavaScript community since some live search demos (and later Google suggest) came around. I made a live blog randomizer that downloads the blog summary from my website, and only downloads the actual content that is new.
Most web apps we are used to are more monolithic. On slashdot, for example, every time you click on something, you have to doadload all the same formatting code all over again. CSS reduces a lot of overhead of extra formatting, but it does not know when the content has changed. Thus, a monolithic web application will tend to retransmit the same content over and over. This adds a lot of latency to everything, and the user perceives that it is much slower.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/a
Ajax not only fetches only the data it needs, it also does additional processing to display the data for your particular setup. Think of Google as a public supercomputer you can use to speed up your desktop applications.
Lets say Google made a spreadsheet application. It could potentially be faster than a desktop spreadsheet for many operations. Imagine you have a million rows of data, and you want to sort it all. Google could perform the sort, and send back the order of the data. The local client would just have to display the data it has in a different order. The client would not even need to store a cache of all the data. It could cache the rows in your viewable area, maybe some above and below it, and stream data from the server as you are scrolling the window.
You can probably turn all of an office suite into a fast web office suite if it is cleverly designed. I wouldn't be suprised to see a Google Office in a little while.
Both the hosting companies I use have PHP 4.3. I do all my development on PHP 5, but I keep most of my code 4.3 compatible. This works out pretty well for me. PHP 5 passes objects to functions by reference, so if you want to stay compatible with PHP 4, you still have to use $ref &= $someObject.
It seems like hosting companies are slowing the adaptation of PHP 5, because a lot of old scripts will not run with PHP 5. I would like to see more hosts offering a choice of 4 or 5.
I've been programming in PHP for about 2 years, and programming in general for 16 years. I've always commented my code since I started programming BASIC on my Apple IIe. I would usually put stuff mostly for my own reference. When I release my source code, I usually go in and add more comments.
http://phpdoc.org/
PHPDoc (inspired by JavaDoc) helps me write better comments by formatting my comments using tags. It makes a reference manual for my code in multiple formats. Now instead of comments, I make DocBlocks. Page level DocBlocks describe the general purpose of the file. You can group files together in packages. It helps to see how it all looks from the user's perspective, no matter what language you are using.
Recently I noticed that AIM has an IM Robots section where there are a few bots you can interact with. AOL's new API should include a way to develop new chat bots.
They should develop a gateway that would allow an ordinary web server to send IMs, that way a web server could run chat bot scripts in a common language, such as PHP. This could be the catalyst for a diverse population of chat bots, which could be entertaining and/or useful.
You can get the coordinates of all US zip codes from a file on the US Census Bureau's web site:
x t
http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zcta5.t
This file also has some other interesting stats on each zip code. FYI, there are 32,767 zip codes in the US (2^15 - 1)
Then you can parse the file and do whatever you want with it. I wrote a PHP script that puts all the stats in a database.
This simple program calculates the distance between 2 zip codes, and also generates a US map by plotting each zip code.
http://sproutworks.com/zipcode.php
I like to set up my own filters to help deal with the spam, along with using the adaptive filters. A lot of the spam I get share the same subject matter and keywords. I wish the manual filters were improved a bit so I could make more effective filters.
It is annoying to have to create a separate filter rule for each word I want to filter. There should be a way to have one rule look for a list of keywords. There should also be a case-insensitive mode.
A lot of spammers will put spaces or symbols between the letters in a keyword to trick filters. It would be nice if the filter could strip out extra characters before checking for matches.
Lastly, many spammers misspell words likely to be filtered, so it would be great if the filter could use the spell checker to find close word matches.
I met Wil back in August at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. He was signing copies of Just a Geek. I also got him to write his signature in my Kyocera Smartphone, using a paint program I made. I told him I wrote that paint program, and he said "wow! you're way cooler than I am". I asked if he knew any web scripting languages. He said "PHP, and just enough Perl to not screw everything up". Wil is a cool guy.
:)
Anyway, here is a screen capture of his signature, written with SproutPaint
http://sproutworks.com/images/wilwheaton.png
I can't think of anything better, so my question is:
Have you done anything new with PHP and/or Perl?
Excuse me, I beg to differ. I've heard a lot of people say that Doom 3 does not use SMP, so I decided to find out for myself.
I have a dual Athlon 1900+ box with XP, and dual displays. This allowed me to perform an experiment with Doom 3 to see if it uses both CPUs. I put the task manager on my non gaming monitor, killed all extra tasks, and fired up Doom 3. It did indeed use both processors, about 20-30% in the menu screens. During gameplay it stayed at about a constant 50% per CPU. I wonder if it would use more CPU if I had a faster video card (I have a GeForce Ti 4400).
I've been heavily into computers since I was 10 (I'm 26 now). My vision is 20/15 (better than normal). I've been using CRTs the whole time up until 2 years ago I started using a dual setup with CRT & LCD. I guess I'm just lucky my eyes haven't been ruined.
Site is slashdotted now, maybe I'll read it later.
I wrote a blogger aggregator in PHP a couple days ago. http://sproutworks.com/blogger.php It simply displays links to the latest updated blogs. Then you can click on a link and it'll parse out the entries from the blog you clicked on. Right now it only works on the blogs with the newer template files. I am using an HTML parser I wrote rather than the Blogger API. I will probably add some new features that use the Bloggeer API.
I've been using a dual monitor setup for the last 2 years or so. Like someone else said, it's nice being able to have your IDE on one screen, and some documentation on the other. For web development, you can look at your code and your site at the same time. For me, it helps me visualize where I want to edit code. There's plenty of other things you can do. I am never going back to single screen unless I have no choice. I run a 19" CRT and a 15" LCD. I had the CRT first. I really could care less how much extra electricity the LCD uses. But now that I am thinking about it, I'm going to find out.
D oLCDMonitorsSave.html
http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/06/01/HowMuchPower
That article says an LCD run for 24 hours a day uses about $4 a month. I figure mine is running about 12 hours a day, so maybe I'm using an extra $2 a month. I'd rather have the extra productivity than an extra burger.
When 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' was released, Ray did a sermon at my church (1st Unitarian Church of San Diego). Before his sermon the church music was played with Kurzweil synthesizers. Very cool. I got to meet Ray and get my book signed. He signed it 'good luck with computer science', as I was a CS major at the time.
As a programmer and futurist, I found his book absolutely fascinating. I would write some quotes, but I let friends borrow both of my copies and never got them back. The book has a graph in it plotting computing power per $1000 vs. time.
Like someone else mentioned, I too played pathways into darkness on a Macintosh LC. That was the only FPS I had that actually had textures. It was damn cool at the time. I was there when Bungie was still Mac only, and I played all of the Marathon series games a lot.
Uh, right on the product website it says it has built in flash RAM.
from the site:
215MB actual storage capacity (160MB internal flash drive; 55MB program memory for applications and data.)
I don't know if it saves the memo data in the flash drive or not. If not, there is probably an easy way to backup your files into the flash drive. I'd expect someone to come up with an auto backup utility if there isn't one already.
I am a Palm developer too. I had an m505 (before I lost it somewhere), and it lost all it's memory a couple times due to a hard crash. My Kyocera Smartphone is even worse. It seems like every time it crashes when it is online, it loses all its data.
IBM only used 8 racks to accomplish that speed, while the Earth Simulator has 320 processor node cabinets and 64 interconnect cabinets. The ES's grid design looks neat though.
I tried using scripts like that on my site, and some of my friends were telling me that my site was crashing their IE. So for now I've given up on using fancy alpha transparency tricks. The next time I start using graphics in my layout I will provide a pretty option, and IE users can click on something to try to use the PNG filters.