I'd just like to throw that in. I've been waiting for ages and now it's actually possible.
I can actually use my Linux box at work, without relying on my Windows box.
In my particular company, we use Exchange. While I *have* been able to get IE working with Wine, I haven't had any luck with Outlook at all - I need it for its calendar, which everyone else uses. With Evolution plus the connector, I can now throw away my old dusty NT box for good!
We've needed this for a long time, and I am very grateful for this.
At work my whole team's been given Compaq desktops, and we're now upgraded to these 'low-profile' machines that are making the rounds.
Both models have had serious issues. Out of four, we've had one die with a motherboard failure and a second with a dead hard drive. The graphics chip (Intel) in it is crap (or perhaps the drivers are), for it hard locks the machine sometimes while the screensaver is on.
As for the servers (Compaq DL360) and the racks they sit in, again, all crap.
The servers are 1U machines that can't support their own weight in the rack. Yes, they actually SAG in the middle. The CPU inside has three 1" fans next to it. If one of them dies, do you get a warning? No - the entire box will simply decide to shut down and refuse to boot again until you replace it. It can't run off the other two. Nevermind that I've had dead RAID controllers, dead hard drives and dead memory galore, and I only have 3 of those particular servers. All this in the last year.
Next the racks. The shelves in them can't support squat. Try to put a desktop machine on one, and it sags like it's going to break.
Fancy pull-out LCD monitor and pull-out keyboard for the rack? They get STUCK sometimes and you can't put them back in. You have to actually go in behind and adjust the rails so they don't catch on each other. It doesn't look like an installation problem, because it catches on itself, not on anything else.
It's stuff like this that made me insist that our next round of servers and racks were IBM. And when we got them they made me very happy, for they exhibit none of the abovementioned problems. I'm not trolling here, I'm just relaying my (very) frustrating experiences.
I've played around with Java Web Start and it seemed like a good idea, in theory at least.
The idea is when you're running the Java plugin in your browser, you can 'launch' full applications right from the site. It can be either in a single JAR file, or split amongst many (JWS is supposed to download the pieces as they are needed).
Anyway, it is pretty neat and it's come a long way. With some improvements it might be viable to launch full-blown apps such as Office and whatnot (assuming you can get them running well enough in Swing or whatever), although the downloader still needs work to more intelligently decide which pieces to get.
I've written a few JWS apps already and it seemed pretty good, but they really do have some bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.
We're a bit worse off in the Great White North, because of exactly this. While we're technically supposed to be metric, because of heavy trade with the US we have to do both. FYI I live near Toronto.
When you're buying a house, the property size is measured in metres. However, the interior measurements are all given in square feet.
I know my height in feet and inches, but my driver's license lists it in centimetres. Funny, because I measure my skis in centimetres.
I buy meat in the store by the gram or kilogram, but my microwave asks me how many pounds is it when I want to defrost it. Of course I know my weight in pounds.
Construction materials are measured in feet, while I drive in km/h. I pump litres of gas into my tank, while I purchase hard booze in ounces. But beer, water and soft drinks are sold in millilitres.
I read the outside temperature in celsius, and I set my thermostat in C, yet my oven is set in farenheit. At least, all the recipes I have do (some ovens have both C and F listed).
Don't be surprised, but I've come across cleartext passwords AND stupid concatenation right at the login with some apps I'd been hired to maintain. Let me tell you, that didn't last long after I discovered it.
What frightens me is that the idiot that wrote that is still out there, clueless, leaving security holes everywhere. He wasn't even a developer - he was just a guy who took a couple of MS courses (had every certificate in the book) and declared himself an architect. Charged a thousand bucks a day (Canadian).
Well, if you're using Java, you'd use a PreparedStatement.
But if you're smart, you'd know that storing a password in plaintext is insecure (in case your database is compromised). You should be using encryption. Something like MD5 or SHA would do the trick.
If you take the input string, then MD5sum it and store/compare THAT in the database, you should be fine.
Of course, you should still check all of your other input for any other queries you do, but I'll save that as an exercise for the reader.
/me is wondering how many people read the parent and instantly went into a panic:)
My parents purchased a Vista phone from Bell Canada which had a fairly large fancy-shmancy screen on it. The idea was that you can use the thing as a phone/address book and also do other "neat" things with it.
Much to their surprise, the damned phone now displays ads (a new one every 10-15 seconds or so), 24/7 on this annoying, brightly-lit green LCD screen.
If I were them I would have tossed it by now. Or sued Bell.
I noticed the boom throughout Hannibal. I mean, in the *entire* movie, I was able to see the mike moving back and forth between characters, while I was watching it in the theatre.
It was quite distracting... then my fiancee got annoyed with me when I asked her about it, because for the remainder of the movie it was bothering her too:)
...or at least my future father-in-law did. My fiancee's parents recently bought a very nice Samsung HDTV system which had this problem. The audio was way out of synch with the video, and it was quite noticeable at times.
Samsung ended up sending someone to the house, and replacing a board in the TV with a newer model, and that seemed to fix the problem.
I don't understand why they couldn't have anticipated this problem before they shipped the TVs, though. Isn't that what QA is for?
I had a similar problem a few years ago. While I do suggest you see a specialist, I can also point to what I tried some time ago.
Getting frustrated with my mouse hand hurting all the time, I spent a, hour or two writing a quick program that would listen to my joystick port (I had a Gravis gamepad connected) and translate that into mouse movements (I was using Win98 at the time).
Suddenly I could use my left thumb to move the cursor, and I would use my right thumb to click (I mapped the other buttons by hand, for things like double-click, and cut and paste). Being lazy, I just put in some delays in the code (rather than using the clock) to get the cursor to move at the speed that I wanted it to.
After a few weeks, the pain was gone. I've since stopped using the software, and now pay more attention to ergonomics.
A side effect of the above was that browsing the web felt like a video game!
Unfortunately I'm in Canada. No joke, my dad's office actually receives ads by fax that he can't get rid of. He ends up having to turn the machine off to stop getting junk.
The CRTC isn't much help here. Good old economics might be, I'm hoping.
Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time?
Funny you should mention that. By coincidence, I just got off the phone not two minutes ago with a Telus Mobility customer service rep. You see, this afternoon I got a text message advertisement.
This was extremely disruptive! Here I'm in a meeting, and my bloody phone starts ringing as if our server was down, and it turned out to be a stupid ad.
I was quite angry at this, being offended that I'm paying Telus to advertise to me, so I called them. What they told me? The only way to not receive the ads is to block ALL text messaging.
This infuriates me some more. So now I'm back to the old-fashioned: write a snail-mail letter (which I'll do) complaining and indicating that they'll lose me as a customer if they continue this bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
About the same amount of time it takes for me to change channels on my cordless phone at home until I can hear my neighbour's conversations.
Analog phones (generally) don't use encryption either.
I'd just like to throw that in. I've been waiting for ages and now it's actually possible.
I can actually use my Linux box at work, without relying on my Windows box.
In my particular company, we use Exchange. While I *have* been able to get IE working with Wine, I haven't had any luck with Outlook at all - I need it for its calendar, which everyone else uses. With Evolution plus the connector, I can now throw away my old dusty NT box for good!
We've needed this for a long time, and I am very grateful for this.
FYI their servers don't impress me either.
At work my whole team's been given Compaq desktops, and we're now upgraded to these 'low-profile' machines that are making the rounds.
Both models have had serious issues. Out of four, we've had one die with a motherboard failure and a second with a dead hard drive. The graphics chip (Intel) in it is crap (or perhaps the drivers are), for it hard locks the machine sometimes while the screensaver is on.
As for the servers (Compaq DL360) and the racks they sit in, again, all crap.
The servers are 1U machines that can't support their own weight in the rack. Yes, they actually SAG in the middle. The CPU inside has three 1" fans next to it. If one of them dies, do you get a warning? No - the entire box will simply decide to shut down and refuse to boot again until you replace it. It can't run off the other two. Nevermind that I've had dead RAID controllers, dead hard drives and dead memory galore, and I only have 3 of those particular servers. All this in the last year.
Next the racks. The shelves in them can't support squat. Try to put a desktop machine on one, and it sags like it's going to break.
Fancy pull-out LCD monitor and pull-out keyboard for the rack? They get STUCK sometimes and you can't put them back in. You have to actually go in behind and adjust the rails so they don't catch on each other. It doesn't look like an installation problem, because it catches on itself, not on anything else.
It's stuff like this that made me insist that our next round of servers and racks were IBM. And when we got them they made me very happy, for they exhibit none of the abovementioned problems. I'm not trolling here, I'm just relaying my (very) frustrating experiences.
I've played around with Java Web Start and it seemed like a good idea, in theory at least.
The idea is when you're running the Java plugin in your browser, you can 'launch' full applications right from the site. It can be either in a single JAR file, or split amongst many (JWS is supposed to download the pieces as they are needed).
Anyway, it is pretty neat and it's come a long way. With some improvements it might be viable to launch full-blown apps such as Office and whatnot (assuming you can get them running well enough in Swing or whatever), although the downloader still needs work to more intelligently decide which pieces to get.
I've written a few JWS apps already and it seemed pretty good, but they really do have some bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.
We're a bit worse off in the Great White North, because of exactly this. While we're technically supposed to be metric, because of heavy trade with the US we have to do both. FYI I live near Toronto.
When you're buying a house, the property size is measured in metres. However, the interior measurements are all given in square feet.
I know my height in feet and inches, but my driver's license lists it in centimetres. Funny, because I measure my skis in centimetres.
I buy meat in the store by the gram or kilogram, but my microwave asks me how many pounds is it when I want to defrost it. Of course I know my weight in pounds.
Construction materials are measured in feet, while I drive in km/h. I pump litres of gas into my tank, while I purchase hard booze in ounces. But beer, water and soft drinks are sold in millilitres.
I read the outside temperature in celsius, and I set my thermostat in C, yet my oven is set in farenheit. At least, all the recipes I have do (some ovens have both C and F listed).
We're pretty damned confused up here.
Everyone MD5's their passwords anyway
Don't be surprised, but I've come across cleartext passwords AND stupid concatenation right at the login with some apps I'd been hired to maintain. Let me tell you, that didn't last long after I discovered it.
What frightens me is that the idiot that wrote that is still out there, clueless, leaving security holes everywhere. He wasn't even a developer - he was just a guy who took a couple of MS courses (had every certificate in the book) and declared himself an architect. Charged a thousand bucks a day (Canadian).
As usual, I downloaded their last version just two days ago.
Good thing I hadn't gotten around to burning it yet, I guess.
Well, if you're using Java, you'd use a PreparedStatement.
/me is wondering how many people read the parent and instantly went into a panic :)
But if you're smart, you'd know that storing a password in plaintext is insecure (in case your database is compromised). You should be using encryption. Something like MD5 or SHA would do the trick.
If you take the input string, then MD5sum it and store/compare THAT in the database, you should be fine.
Of course, you should still check all of your other input for any other queries you do, but I'll save that as an exercise for the reader.
I'm still waiting for their next release of the Java port of WordPerfect.
My parents purchased a Vista phone from Bell Canada which had a fairly large fancy-shmancy screen on it. The idea was that you can use the thing as a phone/address book and also do other "neat" things with it.
Much to their surprise, the damned phone now displays ads (a new one every 10-15 seconds or so), 24/7 on this annoying, brightly-lit green LCD screen.
If I were them I would have tossed it by now. Or sued Bell.
Their videos are already being pirated!
Pfft - you think that was bad?
:)
I noticed the boom throughout Hannibal. I mean, in the *entire* movie, I was able to see the mike moving back and forth between characters, while I was watching it in the theatre.
It was quite distracting... then my fiancee got annoyed with me when I asked her about it, because for the remainder of the movie it was bothering her too
Tell that to the Director Of Product Enhancements!
I think theirs was the 60" DLP. Believe me, he spent weeks getting the runaround on the phone before they agreed to come.
Call them. Be persistent. Call them again. And again. Eventually they'll come.
Any bets that they're just trying to build in delays to prevent more 'wardrobe malfunction' fiascos?
:)
My hunch is that they delayed the video on purpose, but forgot to touch the audio.
...or at least my future father-in-law did. My fiancee's parents recently bought a very nice Samsung HDTV system which had this problem. The audio was way out of synch with the video, and it was quite noticeable at times.
Samsung ended up sending someone to the house, and replacing a board in the TV with a newer model, and that seemed to fix the problem.
I don't understand why they couldn't have anticipated this problem before they shipped the TVs, though. Isn't that what QA is for?
And to add my $0.02, I switched our team to CVS after our VSS database ended up getting corrupted, losing all of our data in the process.
Sure, you always have backups, but it turned out that we lost a week's worth of work anyway.
We haven't lost anything with CVS (yet - knock on wood). Our codebase is now somewhere around 350k lines and there's been no problems.
I had a similar problem a few years ago. While I do suggest you see a specialist, I can also point to what I tried some time ago.
Getting frustrated with my mouse hand hurting all the time, I spent a, hour or two writing a quick program that would listen to my joystick port (I had a Gravis gamepad connected) and translate that into mouse movements (I was using Win98 at the time).
Suddenly I could use my left thumb to move the cursor, and I would use my right thumb to click (I mapped the other buttons by hand, for things like double-click, and cut and paste). Being lazy, I just put in some delays in the code (rather than using the clock) to get the cursor to move at the speed that I wanted it to.
After a few weeks, the pain was gone. I've since stopped using the software, and now pay more attention to ergonomics.
A side effect of the above was that browsing the web felt like a video game!
Here
Ugh! So, out of curiousity, are you going to be in any way billed for that advertisement?
No - received messages are free (pay to send). But the disruption is my main problem.
Unfortunately I'm in Canada. No joke, my dad's office actually receives ads by fax that he can't get rid of. He ends up having to turn the machine off to stop getting junk.
The CRTC isn't much help here. Good old economics might be, I'm hoping.
Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time?
Funny you should mention that. By coincidence, I just got off the phone not two minutes ago with a Telus Mobility customer service rep. You see, this afternoon I got a text message advertisement.
This was extremely disruptive! Here I'm in a meeting, and my bloody phone starts ringing as if our server was down, and it turned out to be a stupid ad.
I was quite angry at this, being offended that I'm paying Telus to advertise to me, so I called them. What they told me? The only way to not receive the ads is to block ALL text messaging.
This infuriates me some more. So now I'm back to the old-fashioned: write a snail-mail letter (which I'll do) complaining and indicating that they'll lose me as a customer if they continue this bullshit.
If I keep getting ads, I'm switching to Fido.
That's weird. It works now. Before I was getting a 404 error. Maybe it was /.d?
Umm... unfortunately their link doesn't work. Is there another one that anybody's got?
A classic. I loved this game!
Does anybody have a link to screenshots of the various original endings (from the original NES version)? I'd love to be able to see them again!