This is something I think I know a little bit about. For years the family business has been a DJ/Karaokee business, and quite a profitable one, too. Calling Wedding/Graduation/Top 40 "DJ's" actual DJ's is like saying "Chris Sheppard is a talented artist and DJ". There is a world of difference between playing music at a social event and being a DJ. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can press PLAY on a good CD player and make some music come out. Thirteen year old girls can select music and play an MP3. NOT everyone can take a track in progress, grab something from the record box, and seamlessly merge the tracks together. It's like comparing apples and oranges.
don't want to figure out the new high-tech equipment because they're not real bright... Not all DJ's are stupid. I DJ and am currently majoring in Engineering Physics and CS. And I'm sure there are quite a few DJ's on/. who would also disagree.
you can also do some pre-production mixing that is beat-perfect without the risk of live-show error . ..Although getting yourself into a set playlist can also be bad for your career. What if the crowd just isn't into the way the set's turning out? What if you hit upon something that they really like? Well, you better hope that you planned for this in pre-production if you're setting your playlist up beforehand. You either have to really know your venue or you have to be able to adapt, which is generally easy for a real DJ to do. And you never know, sometimes you hit on the greatest mixes just by accident.
Are you sure you weren't just using EBench for a win32 environment? Talk about the motherlode of all crappy programs. I picked up EStudio and NetBSD in less time than it took to make EBench work. Which leads into the obvious comment, EStudio is a fantastic program for Eiffel. So much more intuitive than EBench.
they'd only attract fans of the FF series, who would immediately be disappointed that the movie had nothing to do with any of the games AT ALL
I think any true fan of the FF series would realize that it would have nothing to do with the games, just like the games don't really have anything to do with each other.
not been as crappy as FF10 or Kingdom Hearts.
I can't say anything about Kingdom Hearts, but I personally really enjoyed FFX. I don't know how well the sequel will go over, but that remains to be seen. If it turns out to be a fun game, then by all means go for it.
I've heard statistics that put the University of Saskatchewan in #3 or #4. I wish I could find them, but the general consensus is that the U of S has an excellent engineering program. Combined with the Canadian Light Source, it's only going to get better. Plus, they're one of only three (I believe) universities to offer an Engineering Physics program, sort of like EE, but with more theory and emphasis on R&D applications. So far I'm just about half done it, and it's absolutely fascinating.
I think TV will still continue to exist for quite a few years, specifically because of the hundreds of thousands of really, really stupid people. People who don't want to upgrade their TV's, people who can't understand the difference between digital and analog (and don't care), people who are perfectly content to watch re-runs of Survivor. A majority of people who this will effect the most will likely just bend to whatever the MPAA happens to want at the moment because they just don't know the difference. Why do you think idiotic laws get passed? The majority of the people don't care/know better.
Personally, I could care less. I've got my DivX rips of Farscape, Simpsons, Enterprise, and Family Guy and a reasonably good video card w/ TV-Out. Sure, that could be taken as supporting piracy or what-have-you but honestly, I wouldn't be paying to watch these shows anyway. It's just more of a bonus of DSL than anything.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit idly by and let the MPAA run amok. "Give 'em an inch. .." goes the old saying. If we speak up for them now, they'll hopefully speak up for us later.
I'll show it to you when we get back. . .
on
In Print: MegaTokyo
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay, this'll be a fairly random ride today, and probably more than a fair share of ranting. Karma be damned, here goes. . .
Webcomics do not suck, nor are they only for "geeks with no lives and losers". In fact, I'm finding that lately print comics are starting to suck. I rarely laugh anymore if I even bother to read the comics in the paper. Any AC who disagrees can get the balls to identify themselves or shut the hell up.
Megatokyo is updated fairly regularly. I think Fred's doing the best he can manage what with working as much as he seems to do. Congratulations for making such a successful go of it this far, keep it up.
I will be buying the book, as well as some merchandise, and I hope that many of the rest of the fans will as well. If MT has been nice enough not to go banner-happy or "beg for donations" as IIRC Fred said back in the day, then the least we could do is buy some stuff. 3v1l/l337 shirt? Sure!
This is justifiably newsworthy, considering how many non-keenspot comics do something like this. It's news for nerds. How many nerds don't read at least one webcomic? How many don't read MT?
MT has always had a fairly excellent storyline, and unless the latest comics were written before Rodney left, then you can't really say that it was funnier before he did leave. Lately, every comic with Largo in it has been, IMO, hilariously funny, especially the comic about his "special thing" that "does cool stuff". I'm still laughing at that one.
If you don't like the update schedule, do what many people I know do and read it monthly.
That's enough ranting for today, I'm here all week. Try the veal, it's delicious.
pretty good chance you'll get sued/fined/imprisoned due to the DMCA.
Sued/fined? I have a hard enough time convincing the people that I work with that there is a difference between PHP and HTML. And they are reasonably intelligent people. Try convincing G.W. that there is a difference between "hackers" and "malicious hackers". Problem solved, label them all as terrorists and throw them in jail forever. The DMCA is the last thing I'd be worried about.
Cruft Force 8.5 Larry Flynt. OS has now filled its system drive partition, thereby reaching more than 3 times its original install. Web browsers will not download files more than 640k, swap file now resides permanently on F: yet C: still has less than 1MB space, all non-essential portions have been removed to a "Temp C: Files" directory on F:, essential system files are beginning to be moved to the temp files, windows/inf is the first target to be moved when an install is needed. Writes random data to HD for fun, windows/sysbackup deleted at regular intervals in order to keep registry errors at bay, more porn than most porn sites.
Now I have a 10gb system drive and win2k. Only disk errors can slow me down now!
What? You get paid on time? Every other Friday over here is "Screw Over The Computer Guy" day. Maybe I'll get paid by the following friday. . . ..maybe.
I can't wait to finish my degree so I can be rid of the summer-student syndrome. It's no secret I'm the only one in the building who has any clue at all as to how the website works, where stuff is stored, how to defrag a hard drive, how to scan for a virus, how to be the only person in the office to NOT get an e-mail virus. . ..oh well. Only another month and a half.
And where did I say that Sony invented it, eh? Oh wait, I didn't. I just said that the PS2 had it, and that's a martha-stewart-classed "Good Thing". It was the first example that I could think of. Maybe you should actually let those things called thoughts take some time in your head before you just start judging randomly.
Pot to kettle: You're looking awfully black today, Sir.
Dismiss this as karma whoring all you want, but I'm still going to state that I'm completely in favor of the whole backwards-compatible thing. From the PS2 to the new AMD chips, this is a trend that hopefully catches on. What's the point of making something that is unsupported by a large chunk of today's software unless it's to make obscene amounts of money. ..er, nevermind. I think I answered my own question. You can all go back to your day now
Go see any show by Kid Koala (i.e. DJ for the Gorillaz, and most importantly Bullfrog). He "makes" music, too and he's insanely good at it. I know a hell of a lot of people who can pick up a guitar and learn how to play a pile of songs fairly quickly, but almost nobody who can scratch for any credit. It's a lot harder than it looks and someone who's talented at it can make some fairly impressive sounds.
Of course, this has to take into account the fact that American DJ makes second-class products. I bought an ADJ mixer back in the day, and have to say that if it weren't so cheap, I'd never have bought it. The cutoffs are just about nonexistant, the fader gives problems constantly, and it just lacks a lot of features that I would have expected to be there.
On a semi-related note, a Scratch DJ friend of mine got an ADJ t-shirt from relatives for Christmas and everyone constantly bugs him about it. It's just one of those things.
At first, I immediately thought How dare he disparage the great, holy name of Coffee?!? But then, after thinking about it for a second, I can see where you're coming from. I personally don't like drip coffee. Even the good stuff isn't that good (and the SWILL they serve at the so-called "popular coffee shops" out here? HA!) I'm an espresso man. The thicker the better. Of course, it takes a hardcore caffiene freak to like it straight, but it's the perfect drink to mix with other things. A bit of brown sugar, milk, cream, a double shot of espresso over ice, and you've got the ideal summer drink. Double shot with milk. ..prefect morning drink if you don't have time to make anything else. It's not that I'm just addicted (which I am, and accept that), it's that I really, really like espresso.
So discern when you insult the name of Coffee. Knocking drip stuff is fine, or the crappuccino that they try to pass off at places like Tim Horton's or 7-11. Just be careful about what you say about espresso. It is that good.
Actually, I don't read the NY Times. I get plenty of so-called "world-ignorant" news right here on/.
And notice I said trying to stop people from killing each other. I know for a fact they send out peacekeeping missions that must keep at least a couple people from dying needlessly. I made no reference to "The UN is the dominant force in the world". I was just saying that they seem to be the only organization that may have the power to do something like that, and they have other, more pressing matters to take care of.
Here's the big thing. Who will this affect? If the RIAA has any say at all (and this goes above and beyond whatever means they use) it will affect everyone. That would be everyone in the world. Everyone in the world regardless of whether or not the US Constitution even affects them.
Sure it's been said, and maybe not even necessary for this topic, but I can see no good coming of this when a US bill gives the RIAA power over everyone in the world. That's impossible, but very likely that it will be taken as such. No bill in the world, save from maybe a direct mandate by the UN, can give a company this power (and the UN is a little busy right now trying to stop people from killing each other, not making sure I don't download the latest N'sync auditory torture). Why don't we just launch targeted deterrents against everyone pirating music? Oh, wait. We can't. Sure we "can", but it would be illegal in THEIR country and wide open to a good old All-American lawsuit, just like everybody else. Or maybe we just forgot this little fact.
Oh please let someone in Belgium sue the RIAA. It would just be funny.
Just as a note, I've had some very good and very bad experiences with White Box systems, although I'd never buy a pre-fab machine despite the bad. The ability to pick what goes in is more than worth it. However, it's all about where you get it from.
Personally, the biggest mistake I ever made was to buy a custom box from CompuSmart (for all of you Canadians out there). They originally were good on price but the system was a nightmare. The power supply was wrong for my Thunderbird 800, and consequently burned out the motherboard and processor. Of course, this was only on the fifth trip into the shop that they discovered this. Unfortunately, all my parts were on warranty there. They kept telling me it was either the RAM had slipped out or that it was somehow my fault that the system wouldn't boot. Then, they took an agonizing four weeks to get a replacement motherboard (and wrote nasty messages into their in-store computer system about me when I kept coming in and checking up on it (yeah, I saw those messages, Jerks)). Finally, once the four weeks were up, I took it home and couldn't get the network card to work, combined with the machine sporadically restarting and giving me registry errors. Another trip to tech support and they diagnosed that the processor was screwed (way to check that out the first time, guys). Another SEVEN WEEKS later, I got my new processor. Luckily I got a replacement/loaner or I would have snapped. Then they tried to tell me that it was my fault that the network card didn't work, despite the fact that it had been sitting on THEIR DESK for the four weeks that the motherboard was out they were the only ones who touched it during that time. Only a fresh reformat fixed the problem.
At this point, I swore never to buy from them again. When the SAME PROBLEM came back two months later, I took it to another local small-time business who diagnosed it correctly and fixed the power supply in three days. I will definitely be buying my next system from them (PC-Place (the small-time shop in Saskatoon, Sk)).
So as a lesson, white box is the way to go, make sure you know who's building your computer, and NEVER BUY FROM COMPUSMART!
IE is the built in browser in almost every windows HTML development tool.
I'm not sure what sort of percentage of the "industry" as it were still writes HTML by hand (At least, I still do). For the most part, I can see how using development tools like dreamweaver would make it faster for things like standard formatting, but from my experience if you have any knowledge of JS/CGI/HTML and a reasonable amount of time, you can come up with a page almost as quickly, with almost half of the useless code that some things seem to thrive on throwing in. But that's not really my point.
The point is, ideally you can change those defaults if you absolutely need to use the programs. If a so-called "professional" web developer doesn't understand about browser issues and how to work around them, then maybe you should look at hiring a different company/getting a new developer. I at least try to check all my sites in major (Mozilla, IE) and some less-than-major (Opera) browsers, and often check back to see how it renders in NS 4.x. If the page depends on some snazzy new DOM features, etc. then put up a browser filter, but at least check. Okay, that's enough ranting for today. . .
Re:Columbia University does (U of S Does, too)
on
Games in High School?
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· Score: 2
Last semester, I decided that we needed a gaming night at the University of Saskatchewan. Of course, going through regular channels is too time-consuming, so I just set up a mailing list and started e-mailing. We just showed up every other week or so and more or less took over a couple labs in the Engineering building (all P3 900Mhz, 32Mb Video) and went nuts.
Those were the small days when 8-10 people would show up. Then, a couple upper-year guys who had been coming started bringing people out, a real mailing list got organized, and by the end of the semester we were at the point where one e-mail would end up bringing about 30-40 people out for some intense LAN gaming from about 10:00PM to 3:00AM (mostly Physics students and other assorted geeks showing up).
We, unlike what a typical high school class should do, play mostly CS and some UT, but lately Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is the game of choice. Teams get split up into different rooms and mayhem ensues. Hopefully, we'll find something that scales well (as far as player load) and we can really get going. By next year, this could be a 60+ person event every odd week.
Hmmm. Maybe we should actually talk to the IT guys and stop just taking over labs at random. . . ..nah. Even the odd grad student in there at 10:00 seems to enjoy listening to the trash-talking and general game banter. We'd even let them play if they wanted. . ..
Slashdot Mirror
This is something I think I know a little bit about. For years the family business has been a DJ/Karaokee business, and quite a profitable one, too.
/. who would also disagree.
.Although getting yourself into a set playlist can also be bad for your career. What if the crowd just isn't into the way the set's turning out? What if you hit upon something that they really like? Well, you better hope that you planned for this in pre-production if you're setting your playlist up beforehand. You either have to really know your venue or you have to be able to adapt, which is generally easy for a real DJ to do. And you never know, sometimes you hit on the greatest mixes just by accident.
Calling Wedding/Graduation/Top 40 "DJ's" actual DJ's is like saying "Chris Sheppard is a talented artist and DJ". There is a world of difference between playing music at a social event and being a DJ. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can press PLAY on a good CD player and make some music come out. Thirteen year old girls can select music and play an MP3. NOT everyone can take a track in progress, grab something from the record box, and seamlessly merge the tracks together. It's like comparing apples and oranges.
don't want to figure out the new high-tech equipment because they're not real bright...
Not all DJ's are stupid. I DJ and am currently majoring in Engineering Physics and CS. And I'm sure there are quite a few DJ's on
you can also do some pre-production mixing that is beat-perfect without the risk of live-show error
. .
Are you sure you weren't just using EBench for a win32 environment? Talk about the motherlode of all crappy programs. I picked up EStudio and NetBSD in less time than it took to make EBench work. Which leads into the obvious comment, EStudio is a fantastic program for Eiffel. So much more intuitive than EBench.
they'd only attract fans of the FF series, who would immediately be disappointed that the movie had nothing to do with any of the games AT ALL
I think any true fan of the FF series would realize that it would have nothing to do with the games, just like the games don't really have anything to do with each other.
not been as crappy as FF10 or Kingdom Hearts.
I can't say anything about Kingdom Hearts, but I personally really enjoyed FFX. I don't know how well the sequel will go over, but that remains to be seen. If it turns out to be a fun game, then by all means go for it.
I've heard statistics that put the University of Saskatchewan in #3 or #4. I wish I could find them, but the general consensus is that the U of S has an excellent engineering program. Combined with the Canadian Light Source, it's only going to get better. Plus, they're one of only three (I believe) universities to offer an Engineering Physics program, sort of like EE, but with more theory and emphasis on R&D applications. So far I'm just about half done it, and it's absolutely fascinating.
I think TV will still continue to exist for quite a few years, specifically because of the hundreds of thousands of really, really stupid people. People who don't want to upgrade their TV's, people who can't understand the difference between digital and analog (and don't care), people who are perfectly content to watch re-runs of Survivor. A majority of people who this will effect the most will likely just bend to whatever the MPAA happens to want at the moment because they just don't know the difference. Why do you think idiotic laws get passed? The majority of the people don't care/know better.
." goes the old saying. If we speak up for them now, they'll hopefully speak up for us later.
Personally, I could care less. I've got my DivX rips of Farscape, Simpsons, Enterprise, and Family Guy and a reasonably good video card w/ TV-Out. Sure, that could be taken as supporting piracy or what-have-you but honestly, I wouldn't be paying to watch these shows anyway. It's just more of a bonus of DSL than anything.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit idly by and let the MPAA run amok. "Give 'em an inch. .
Webcomics do not suck, nor are they only for "geeks with no lives and losers". In fact, I'm finding that lately print comics are starting to suck. I rarely laugh anymore if I even bother to read the comics in the paper. Any AC who disagrees can get the balls to identify themselves or shut the hell up.
Megatokyo is updated fairly regularly. I think Fred's doing the best he can manage what with working as much as he seems to do. Congratulations for making such a successful go of it this far, keep it up.
I will be buying the book, as well as some merchandise, and I hope that many of the rest of the fans will as well. If MT has been nice enough not to go banner-happy or "beg for donations" as IIRC Fred said back in the day, then the least we could do is buy some stuff. 3v1l/l337 shirt? Sure!
This is justifiably newsworthy, considering how many non-keenspot comics do something like this. It's news for nerds. How many nerds don't read at least one webcomic? How many don't read MT?
MT has always had a fairly excellent storyline, and unless the latest comics were written before Rodney left, then you can't really say that it was funnier before he did leave. Lately, every comic with Largo in it has been, IMO, hilariously funny, especially the comic about his "special thing" that "does cool stuff". I'm still laughing at that one.
If you don't like the update schedule, do what many people I know do and read it monthly.
That's enough ranting for today, I'm here all week. Try the veal, it's delicious.
pretty good chance you'll get sued/fined/imprisoned due to the DMCA.
Sued/fined? I have a hard enough time convincing the people that I work with that there is a difference between PHP and HTML. And they are reasonably intelligent people. Try convincing G.W. that there is a difference between "hackers" and "malicious hackers". Problem solved, label them all as terrorists and throw them in jail forever. The DMCA is the last thing I'd be worried about.
Cruft Force 8.5 Larry Flynt. OS has now filled its system drive partition, thereby reaching more than 3 times its original install. Web browsers will not download files more than 640k, swap file now resides permanently on F: yet C: still has less than 1MB space, all non-essential portions have been removed to a "Temp C: Files" directory on F:, essential system files are beginning to be moved to the temp files, windows/inf is the first target to be moved when an install is needed. Writes random data to HD for fun, windows/sysbackup deleted at regular intervals in order to keep registry errors at bay, more porn than most porn sites.
Now I have a 10gb system drive and win2k. Only disk errors can slow me down now!
What? You get paid on time? Every other Friday over here is "Screw Over The Computer Guy" day. Maybe I'll get paid by the following friday. . . . .maybe.
.oh well. Only another month and a half.
I can't wait to finish my degree so I can be rid of the summer-student syndrome. It's no secret I'm the only one in the building who has any clue at all as to how the website works, where stuff is stored, how to defrag a hard drive, how to scan for a virus, how to be the only person in the office to NOT get an e-mail virus. . .
And where did I say that Sony invented it, eh? Oh wait, I didn't. I just said that the PS2 had it, and that's a martha-stewart-classed "Good Thing". It was the first example that I could think of. Maybe you should actually let those things called thoughts take some time in your head before you just start judging randomly.
Pot to kettle: You're looking awfully black today, Sir.
Dismiss this as karma whoring all you want, but I'm still going to state that I'm completely in favor of the whole backwards-compatible thing. From the PS2 to the new AMD chips, this is a trend that hopefully catches on. What's the point of making something that is unsupported by a large chunk of today's software unless it's to make obscene amounts of money. . .er, nevermind. I think I answered my own question. You can all go back to your day now
You get bonus points. As tempting as it is, don't spend them all in one place.
I hope you had a nice trip, Dr. Smith .'cause it's time to die!
. .
I can only help thinking of the "famous" quote.
Are you boys cooking in there?
No, Mom.
Are you boys building an interocitor in there?
No, Mom.
Bonus points to anyone who knows the source
. . .I have a turntable almost exactly like that one. I'm going to cut that bad boy open tonight!!
Go see any show by Kid Koala (i.e. DJ for the Gorillaz, and most importantly Bullfrog). He "makes" music, too and he's insanely good at it. I know a hell of a lot of people who can pick up a guitar and learn how to play a pile of songs fairly quickly, but almost nobody who can scratch for any credit. It's a lot harder than it looks and someone who's talented at it can make some fairly impressive sounds.
Of course, this has to take into account the fact that American DJ makes second-class products. I bought an ADJ mixer back in the day, and have to say that if it weren't so cheap, I'd never have bought it. The cutoffs are just about nonexistant, the fader gives problems constantly, and it just lacks a lot of features that I would have expected to be there.
On a semi-related note, a Scratch DJ friend of mine got an ADJ t-shirt from relatives for Christmas and everyone constantly bugs him about it. It's just one of those things.
Now THAT's an espresso machine! I'm drooling from here!
At first, I immediately thought How dare he disparage the great, holy name of Coffee?!? .prefect morning drink if you don't have time to make anything else. It's not that I'm just addicted (which I am, and accept that), it's that I really, really like espresso.
But then, after thinking about it for a second, I can see where you're coming from. I personally don't like drip coffee. Even the good stuff isn't that good (and the SWILL they serve at the so-called "popular coffee shops" out here? HA!) I'm an espresso man. The thicker the better. Of course, it takes a hardcore caffiene freak to like it straight, but it's the perfect drink to mix with other things. A bit of brown sugar, milk, cream, a double shot of espresso over ice, and you've got the ideal summer drink. Double shot with milk. .
So discern when you insult the name of Coffee. Knocking drip stuff is fine, or the crappuccino that they try to pass off at places like Tim Horton's or 7-11. Just be careful about what you say about espresso. It is that good.
Actually, I don't read the NY Times. I get plenty of so-called "world-ignorant" news right here on /.
And notice I said trying to stop people from killing each other. I know for a fact they send out peacekeeping missions that must keep at least a couple people from dying needlessly. I made no reference to "The UN is the dominant force in the world". I was just saying that they seem to be the only organization that may have the power to do something like that, and they have other, more pressing matters to take care of.
Here's the big thing. Who will this affect? If the RIAA has any say at all (and this goes above and beyond whatever means they use) it will affect everyone. That would be everyone in the world. Everyone in the world regardless of whether or not the US Constitution even affects them.
Sure it's been said, and maybe not even necessary for this topic, but I can see no good coming of this when a US bill gives the RIAA power over everyone in the world. That's impossible, but very likely that it will be taken as such. No bill in the world, save from maybe a direct mandate by the UN, can give a company this power (and the UN is a little busy right now trying to stop people from killing each other, not making sure I don't download the latest N'sync auditory torture). Why don't we just launch targeted deterrents against everyone pirating music? Oh, wait. We can't. Sure we "can", but it would be illegal in THEIR country and wide open to a good old All-American lawsuit, just like everybody else. Or maybe we just forgot this little fact.
Oh please let someone in Belgium sue the RIAA. It would just be funny.
Just as a note, I've had some very good and very bad experiences with White Box systems, although I'd never buy a pre-fab machine despite the bad. The ability to pick what goes in is more than worth it. However, it's all about where you get it from.
Personally, the biggest mistake I ever made was to buy a custom box from CompuSmart (for all of you Canadians out there). They originally were good on price but the system was a nightmare. The power supply was wrong for my Thunderbird 800, and consequently burned out the motherboard and processor. Of course, this was only on the fifth trip into the shop that they discovered this. Unfortunately, all my parts were on warranty there. They kept telling me it was either the RAM had slipped out or that it was somehow my fault that the system wouldn't boot. Then, they took an agonizing four weeks to get a replacement motherboard (and wrote nasty messages into their in-store computer system about me when I kept coming in and checking up on it (yeah, I saw those messages, Jerks)). Finally, once the four weeks were up, I took it home and couldn't get the network card to work, combined with the machine sporadically restarting and giving me registry errors. Another trip to tech support and they diagnosed that the processor was screwed (way to check that out the first time, guys). Another SEVEN WEEKS later, I got my new processor. Luckily I got a replacement/loaner or I would have snapped. Then they tried to tell me that it was my fault that the network card didn't work, despite the fact that it had been sitting on THEIR DESK for the four weeks that the motherboard was out they were the only ones who touched it during that time. Only a fresh reformat fixed the problem.
At this point, I swore never to buy from them again. When the SAME PROBLEM came back two months later, I took it to another local small-time business who diagnosed it correctly and fixed the power supply in three days. I will definitely be buying my next system from them (PC-Place (the small-time shop in Saskatoon, Sk)).
So as a lesson, white box is the way to go, make sure you know who's building your computer, and NEVER BUY FROM COMPUSMART!
It's sad, but that's also the first thing that I thought of for it. Hmmm. Seems /. readers share the same one-track mind.
IE is the built in browser in almost every windows HTML development tool.
I'm not sure what sort of percentage of the "industry" as it were still writes HTML by hand (At least, I still do). For the most part, I can see how using development tools like dreamweaver would make it faster for things like standard formatting, but from my experience if you have any knowledge of JS/CGI/HTML and a reasonable amount of time, you can come up with a page almost as quickly, with almost half of the useless code that some things seem to thrive on throwing in. But that's not really my point.
The point is, ideally you can change those defaults if you absolutely need to use the programs. If a so-called "professional" web developer doesn't understand about browser issues and how to work around them, then maybe you should look at hiring a different company/getting a new developer. I at least try to check all my sites in major (Mozilla, IE) and some less-than-major (Opera) browsers, and often check back to see how it renders in NS 4.x. If the page depends on some snazzy new DOM features, etc. then put up a browser filter, but at least check. Okay, that's enough ranting for today. . .
Last semester, I decided that we needed a gaming night at the University of Saskatchewan. Of course, going through regular channels is too time-consuming, so I just set up a mailing list and started e-mailing. We just showed up every other week or so and more or less took over a couple labs in the Engineering building (all P3 900Mhz, 32Mb Video) and went nuts.
.nah. Even the odd grad student in there at 10:00 seems to enjoy listening to the trash-talking and general game banter. We'd even let them play if they wanted. . . .
Those were the small days when 8-10 people would show up. Then, a couple upper-year guys who had been coming started bringing people out, a real mailing list got organized, and by the end of the semester we were at the point where one e-mail would end up bringing about 30-40 people out for some intense LAN gaming from about 10:00PM to 3:00AM (mostly Physics students and other assorted geeks showing up).
We, unlike what a typical high school class should do, play mostly CS and some UT, but lately Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is the game of choice. Teams get split up into different rooms and mayhem ensues. Hopefully, we'll find something that scales well (as far as player load) and we can really get going. By next year, this could be a 60+ person event every odd week.
Hmmm. Maybe we should actually talk to the IT guys and stop just taking over labs at random. . . .