I'd imagine that they're not intentionally blocking google because they're a competitor (although it could be a contributing factor). I would think that they consider Live.com to be more compatible with family filter and google allows access to cached pages which the family filter may not be able to block.
Of course, one way that MS could show good faith would be to open up the family filter's API in some way so as to let it play nice with google and allow google to disable cached pages for users of the filter.
Why didn't someone infected with this, say last month, change their pc clock ahead...
First of all, I'm sure that the payload itself wasn't made available until the last minute.
Second, if it were me who wrote the virus, I would have written it to *start* looking for a payload, start looking in no particular place, and continue looking until it's been found. Considering that it's getting its payload from an established botnet, it could just be poking around looking for machines that can give it its payload and the payload wasn't made available until today.
When you have control of as many machines as the Storm or Waledac botnets, the world really is your oyster. You're not restricted by IPs, and if your botnet is large enough, you can just iterate through addresses looking for a system that has your payload for you. Without access to the botnet or the payload, it doesn't matter how much you reverse engineer or adjust your clock, you just can't predict what will happen in the future.
Opening up DRM'd media so that it can legally be used in more situations by someone with a valid license is not the same as rampant piracy
Agreed.
You have no idea how often I run into issues where some file won't play/can't be viewed on some device because it doesn't support the DRM. I've run into this with audio files (iTunes Store), PDFs, videos and ebooks.
I don't see why DRM'd media files must be tied to the device rather than the user. Why not have some kind of public key that authorizes the file? Of course there are issues with sharing the key, but there could be ways around that, too (device key negotiations with the DRM server).
Although... not having DRM at all would be the best case scenario.
I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.
I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.
the biggest problems with any computer deployment in our K-12 classrooms are always support and training
It's very sad that that's the biggest hurdle for OSS in k-12.
When I was in HS, we had an intro to programming class (using VB) and an advanced programming class (C++). The problem was that the cost of entry for working on projects at home was high. If you're going to teach a subject, especially in public schools, you should either provide all of the tools for free to the students to use at home or use free tools. I didn't want to buy VisualStudio for home and luckily the majority of the code we worked on was platform independent (all cin/cout crap using iostream), but those were the tools we were taught on. I owned CodeWarrior, so I was able to do stuff at home.
At the time (this is 97-99), Linux wasn't really an option for such a class... LiveCDs weren't prevalent and the usability of desktop Linux was so low, imho, that I don't think I would have recommended that at the time. Now, on the other hand, I feel that you could distribute a liveCD with the full development environment for people to use the tools at home and save the files to a USB stick. It wouldn't be expensive to supply every kid with a 256MB stick and a CDR with their environment on it.
this is one of the reasons that I think Java is so widely taught in colleges. It's not the greatest language, but it's got no cost of entry and developing in windows isn't that hard, even when you're only using notepad++. Of course, arguments could be made that you could teach the kids Python or Ruby instead, and I agree, but that's another subject for discussion.
Also, having OSS in schools doesn't necessarily have to mean Linux exclusively. You could have macs or windows machines with OSS software running on them. Not everyone can afford to buy Office, so you could have OpenOffice.
You can have a pretty decent mostly free desktop environment running in a commercial, non-free OS that won't cost a fortune to support.
The original xbox was a pile of crap. The 360 is actually incredibly good, and the strange thing is that most of what makes is a feature that Microsoft is great at: creating a platform.
What I mean is that they manage to keep a consistent interface from dashboard to game where multiplayer gaming uses the same interface from game to game (although I hear EA uses their own multiplayer/matchmaking system, but I haven't played any games like that). With XboxLive, they really made the 360 an amazing system.
Now, I do have some hate for the 360; namely, my cablemodem's connection failed the other night for several hours, and over those hours, I was unable to play any of my xboxlivearcade games (they were all stuck in trial mode), wasn't able to play my ipod, nor was I able to stream movies from my mediaserver. This was all because the 360 couldn't connect to MS's servers to authenticate the apps (the streaming and ipod apps being FREE) to allow me to use them.
I've heard that this is because my gamertag originated on a different 360 and that I can re-pair them, but I haven't had time to look into that fully nor do I feel that that should be necessary.
On another note, the PS3 is a great piece of hardware with some of the worst software I've ever delt with. Even Sony's PS3 website had severe issues when I tried to contact them for support.
Your average MP3 player is not hifi, and your average consumer doesn't give two shits about the quality loss.
But you can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a 192kbps MP3 when listening through headphones... being able to dell the difference between the 192 and something that was lossless takes a good ear and even then it depends on what you're listening to.
I've been able to tell the difference between my CD and a 192kbps mp3 of many Aphex Twin tracks. the encoding to MP3 throws out a lot of the nuances in the music and some of the chirps become flat. Because of that, I started encoding all of his stuff at 256kbps.
I used to encode all my old music at 192kbps, but when I put one of my CDs (Mastodon - Leviathan) on my laptop with headphones, I noticed that it contained much more punch and had a much deeper sound than the MP3. Since harddrive space is cheap now, I'm just encoding everything at 256kbps.
I would go lossless, but it's hard to find an audio format that's as widely supported as MP3. ALAC doesn't work on many devices/platforms and FLAC isn't compatible with my ipod. AIFF is out of the question because although harddrive space is cheap, I don't want to purchase enough drives to support ripping over 800 CDs as straight AIFF.
I opted out of going to Macworld this year. I'd been to every east-coast (boston/ny) macworld and keynote from 1996-2000, including the famous one where bill gates was on the giant screen to announce the apple/microsoft partnership for Word and IE. I've also been flying out to california for the san fransisco expos for the last couple of years, but after last year, I realized that the show doesn't cater hardly at all to true pro users... sure, they have pro software, like for graphics and stuff... but their developer section has been lacking since Codewarrior dropped support for the Mac, and as a Unix admin, there is almost nothing there for me anymore.
In the last 8 years, I've found that if you drop all of the laptop cases, ipod accessories and digital camera stuff, you're left with a pitiful handful of office application (*ahem* microsoft) and minor productivity and music companies. There used to be lots of management tools vendors, high-end graphics and storage workstation suppliers and similar cool stuff... but no more.
So, I guess I lucked out since I didn't book a flight or hotel for this year. Save $ and disappointment.
my account has lived on many different units... my account originally lived on my old roommate's xbox which RRoD'd and was repaired/replaced 6 times, so far (it RRoD'd again last month and he still hasn't gotten it back)... I've since purchased my own 360 which is where my account lives now.
I've also transfered my account to my friend's unit to show him some XBLA games without him needing to purchase his own copy.
maybe I'll register for that... I'm curious how left4dead plays on a PC (as opposed to my 360).
Other than that, I can't think of any games I'd wanna play on the service.
I mostly only game when I don't have access to an internet connection since 90% of what I do on my computer requires it... it kinda sucks that I'm so dependent on the internets.
Does steam require an internet connection to play, though?
That's one of my big problems with DRM in general. I've run across it with iTunes purchases (the reason I don't buy off itunes anymore unless it's something I can't find anywhere else or I just want one track) and I've had the problem with my 360 in the past, too.
At my last apartment, the cable modem was spotty at best during the evenings for months. I was unable to play my xboxlivearcade games on my 360 because the latency on the 'net wasn't allowing me to log into xboxlive. It was a total pain in the ass.
When I was traveling several years ago, I brought my powerbook and wasn't able to listen to any of my itunes purchases. There was no internet at the hotel in Phoenix, so the entire trip, I was without a small portion of my music library. This may have been a fluke, though, since I thought that the machine would have a key to play the tracks even if you're offline... or maybe they've fixed that, since, but it's annoying nonetheless.
My biggest issue with DRM'd music/video is that typically, you get a product with far inferior quality and more restrictions for use for about the same price. I'd rather buy the CD and mp3 it myself or buy the DVD and rip it so I can play it on my ipod/iphone/laptop/360/desktop. The digital versions that vendors provide are strictly convenient to purchase and nothing more.
I graduated High School and took 2 semesters of college (didn't pass any classes)... I'd been a computer hobbyist my whole life and built linux servers and toyed with coding in almost every language.
Now I'm working as a sysadmin/network engineer for an elite technology architecture group in a fortune 500 company.
Some of the downsides of working in such a group is that I didn't have mandatory exposure to low-level networking stuff like some of my CS-majoring friends did... and they were also exposed to additional design patterns and optimization profiling (bigO notation, etc) that I didn't work with until I needed to, but overall, I've found that you can learn faster and be exposed to more useful technologies when you do it yourself.
I mean, what do they teach you in [american] higher education that pertains to IT? basic networking technologies and Java?
I can't speak for the rest of the gamers out there, but I got the game over a week ago (my roommate bought it from some store that broke the street date... we got it about 5 days before the original release date) and I have to say that the game is absolutely amazing. Several of my other friends also got their mits on it and they love it. It's practically worth buying a PS3 for, assuming you get the $150 credit from sonystyle.com when you sign up for a sony creditcard, since it doesn't really have any big reasons to buy it and the current version of the system won't play PS2 games (wtf?).
In fact, since I'm moving out in november, I ordered a ps3 and LBP so I'll be able to play it when I move.
It really sucked that they didn't start the servers until today, though. I've been playing for a while and haven't been able to partake in any online play with any friends or get any user-created levels.
The main flaw of the game is that when you make levels, you can't help but make the most offensive levels possible. I won't go into too many details, but we started out making a lot of dick levels and moved on to creating a hitler on roller skates level that shits tiny hitlers on rollerskates that are on fire. We couldn't stop ourselves, and we've made many, many more offensive levels.
I think this is going to be the game that pushes PS3 sales. Too bad there's only one or two other PS3-exclusive games... the PS3 is just a glorified blu-ray player for the most part.
Just becasue I am curious, what don't you like about the calendaring application?
Primarily the notifications. In the WinMo world, if I have something in my calendar and I tell it to remind me 7 days ahead of time, I'll see the reminder for 7 days on my home screen. It's a good reminder to do something or that something is coming up. on the iPhone, it'll pop up with an alert, and once it's dismissed, that's it. Sure, I can have it remind me twice, but I want that shit to be constant. And it doesn't notify by default. You have to check the "notify me X days...." thing.
Other complaints are the amount of time it takes to input an event (sliding the time settings is a BITCH), the way that the calendar shows events (I hate to say it but the windows mobile calendar does it right so I know if I have something all-day, in the morning or just the evening), and the fact that I can scroll the calendar like everything else in the phone (I have to click the > and < buttons).
I was never really a fan of iCal, but I've been using it since I had my old windows mobile phones and iSync would sync with the phone. I don't use my computer to remind me of events at home... only at work, where I have Outlook. And I'm not saying I like outlook. I HATE outlook, but the calendaring application is actually really well put together, including how you can send invites and such.
When I first got my iPhone, I liked it ok, never really liked the text input, but I was happier overall with it than my Tilt until I started missing meetings and events because the phone wouldn't remind me of them or I'd dismiss the reminder and it'd go away forever.
My co-worker and I shot out to the T-Mobile store on 6th ave and 46th street (or around there somehwere) in Manhattan yesterday and although the place wasn't crowded, every person in there was buying one (about 4).
We got a unit at work to play with a couple months ago and I was pretty impressed with it even though it was a little buggy (touchscreen doesn't always register and sometimes registers in the wrong spots) and flimsy feeling. the problem is the hardware feels like a shitty toy. The screen is great, but the keypad and trackball don't feel nice and the sliding mechanism doesn't feel solid. Handling it, I feel like I'm gonna break it.
The thing about the iPhone is that it's not only has a very shiny UI, but the hardware is made of metal and feels sturdy and reliable. It doesn't feel like a toy like the G1 does.
I'm waiting for an android phone that's compatible with the AT&T network to be released before I make the switch. I haven't been fully satisfied with the iPhone (mostly, I don't like the calendaring application AT ALL), but it beats the AT&T Tilt and the blackjack2 in terms of usability, in my opinion.
You also run into problems where someone creating an implementation of your language's VM may create one that's less complete or robust than another.
This will also get interesting when you see an implementation of a language for one vendor's VM significantly outperform one on another, or also implementation-specific security issues; where a certain framework is secure on one vendor's platform, but not so much in another.
Also, security will be very platform/vendor-specific. Imagine a product where there's a security issue that spans many languages.
This whole idea sounds very good in theory, and may eventually work very well in practice, but I foresee this working well with a couple of very popular languages for one or two vendors' products and not so hot on many "me too" products.
I agree. Python would make a pretty good starter language, and the Windows version was pretty painless to install, iirc.
I forgot about the fact that you kinda have to teach HTML and PHP at the same time, although PHP would be great to teach after an HTML class was taught... Unfortunately, most HTML classes kinda suck and don't teach the "right way" of doing things.
I redact my php recommendation. Python is probably the best bet. Plus, it's incredibly straight forward, especially with regard to naming and modules and everything. Indentation is the only subtle area where a beginner could get confused.
I've had many friends who were not programmers who had to take a java class in school.
The problem is that it's so difficult to make them understand what those 7 lines of code means for a simple Java hello-world application. It takes a while for them to understand what an object is and what it all means before they can really code anything useful.
It may not be an incredibly complex language, but it has an enormous standard API, and it utilizes fairly advanced concepts (OOP). Java is a great beginner's language, but I feel like for a first language, it doesn't have any kind of training wheels.
One of the issues I had when I was in school is that the computer classes were radically changed as I progressed through my grammar/middle/high school career.
In 3rd and 4th grade, we learned LOGO on some old Atari computers and were basically taught about pixels and where home row was on the keyboard. It was all very simple to grasp and we did a lot of projects (drawing pictures in logo) that required us to use the keyboard a lot.
In 6th grade, we had a BASIC class (not Qbasic, not visual basic... straight BASIC) on PCjr systems where we learned how to draw shapes to the screen and were taught the basic ideas behind computer resolution, very simple loops, how to print text to the screen, read input and use if/then. We also learned what input and output devices are and the names of the various computer parts (monitor, keyboard, printer, etc).
I liked those classes and they went at a good pace which was great because I was the only kid who had a computer at the time (this is like 1991/1992) and everyone seemed to get what was going on and it was great. When I got to high school, there was a VisualBasic class which had a pre-requisite of Intro To Comptuers. I opted not to take that since not only did I have a computer for my whole life, but I also had the previous classes. When I talked to my guidance counselor, he said that the intro to computers class was just a typing class. The visual basic class was not a programming class... it was a class that teaches you the basics of computers (what a floppy is and how to print) and then ends with showing you visual basic.
I opted not to take either class.
My senior year of HS (98/99), they added a c++ class which I managed to sign up for by talking to the teacher and showing him that I already knew a little C++ and already knew computers better than most others (I would have had to take intro to comptuters and the VB class, otherwise), but that class wound up spending half the year teaching about how to use a web browser and what the difference between RAM and ROM is before we even got to 'cin' and 'cout', and that's all we ever did.
So my advice is to spend very little time on the basics of computers in general and dive right in to projects that get them applying what they do know to do things that they want to do. Also, use a language that lets you dive right in. Java is a programmer's programming language. New programmers never understand it because it requires so much up-front knowledge to even understand what a simple hello-world app does. Especially if they are coming from visual basic or something similar.
I think that C is the best beginners language out there. It's very simple. It's super straight-forward. There's a ton you can do with it right out of the box.
PHP may be another good beginner's language, too, since the web is what most people use the most when they're on a computer and it would enable people to show off what they've done. It would also spark much more interest than C, especially since building a C app to work in windows isn't really a piece of cake... although programming in windows, in my experience, has been very difficult... there's a limited amount of free tools and it comes with virtually nothing built-in for that.
I've been with speakeasy for 5 years and have zero complaints about the service. Nothing changed from the day they were purchased by bestbuy. Their support line is just as responsive as ever and I've had no significant downtime (except for when my 4 year old router failed).
When they were bought by bestbuy, I contacted covad but was told that they are business-only in my area and that my residence was not properly zoned for them to sell directly to me. I had to go through a reseller and the only reseller in my area was... Speakeasy.
Before I had speakeasy at that location, I had Verizon DSL which was the absolute worst experience I've ever had with customer support and with service. The modem would fail to connect and their support staff's only solution was to reboot my computer and powercycle the modem.
I'm curious what you saw change with speakeasy in such a short period of time. Did they fail to call you? Did you see degradation in service?
I've got a samsung at work (24", I forget the model number) and I really, really don't like it. midtones never look right and I get weird trails when dragging windows around when there's very specific colors involved in the dragging.
I have calibrated it several times and have not been able to get it to look perfect. I used to do color calibrations for a prepress shop I worked in several years, and have never had an issue with calibrating like this before.
At home, I've got 2 Dell Ultrasharp monitors and I love them. I'm considering getting a third since I'm spoiled at work with 3 monitors.
The Dells are on par, if not slightly better than the Apple Cinema displays and significantly cheaper. The only thing I liked about the cinema displays were the Firewire ports, but the dells have 4 USB ports on them and I use those more than firewire nowadays (3+ years ago, that was a different story as my desktop machine only had 2 drive bays and 1 CD bay and I had several external firewire drives and my firewire ipod).
Plus the dell monitors rotate and slide up and down and are black, which makes them more pleasing to the eyes.
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I'd imagine that they're not intentionally blocking google because they're a competitor (although it could be a contributing factor). I would think that they consider Live.com to be more compatible with family filter and google allows access to cached pages which the family filter may not be able to block.
Of course, one way that MS could show good faith would be to open up the family filter's API in some way so as to let it play nice with google and allow google to disable cached pages for users of the filter.
Why didn't someone infected with this, say last month, change their pc clock ahead...
First of all, I'm sure that the payload itself wasn't made available until the last minute.
Second, if it were me who wrote the virus, I would have written it to *start* looking for a payload, start looking in no particular place, and continue looking until it's been found. Considering that it's getting its payload from an established botnet, it could just be poking around looking for machines that can give it its payload and the payload wasn't made available until today.
When you have control of as many machines as the Storm or Waledac botnets, the world really is your oyster. You're not restricted by IPs, and if your botnet is large enough, you can just iterate through addresses looking for a system that has your payload for you. Without access to the botnet or the payload, it doesn't matter how much you reverse engineer or adjust your clock, you just can't predict what will happen in the future.
Opening up DRM'd media so that it can legally be used in more situations by someone with a valid license is not the same as rampant piracy
Agreed.
You have no idea how often I run into issues where some file won't play/can't be viewed on some device because it doesn't support the DRM. I've run into this with audio files (iTunes Store), PDFs, videos and ebooks.
I don't see why DRM'd media files must be tied to the device rather than the user. Why not have some kind of public key that authorizes the file? Of course there are issues with sharing the key, but there could be ways around that, too (device key negotiations with the DRM server).
Although... not having DRM at all would be the best case scenario.
I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.
I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.
the biggest problems with any computer deployment in our K-12 classrooms are always support and training
It's very sad that that's the biggest hurdle for OSS in k-12.
When I was in HS, we had an intro to programming class (using VB) and an advanced programming class (C++). The problem was that the cost of entry for working on projects at home was high. If you're going to teach a subject, especially in public schools, you should either provide all of the tools for free to the students to use at home or use free tools. I didn't want to buy VisualStudio for home and luckily the majority of the code we worked on was platform independent (all cin/cout crap using iostream), but those were the tools we were taught on. I owned CodeWarrior, so I was able to do stuff at home.
At the time (this is 97-99), Linux wasn't really an option for such a class... LiveCDs weren't prevalent and the usability of desktop Linux was so low, imho, that I don't think I would have recommended that at the time. Now, on the other hand, I feel that you could distribute a liveCD with the full development environment for people to use the tools at home and save the files to a USB stick. It wouldn't be expensive to supply every kid with a 256MB stick and a CDR with their environment on it.
this is one of the reasons that I think Java is so widely taught in colleges. It's not the greatest language, but it's got no cost of entry and developing in windows isn't that hard, even when you're only using notepad++. Of course, arguments could be made that you could teach the kids Python or Ruby instead, and I agree, but that's another subject for discussion.
Also, having OSS in schools doesn't necessarily have to mean Linux exclusively. You could have macs or windows machines with OSS software running on them. Not everyone can afford to buy Office, so you could have OpenOffice.
You can have a pretty decent mostly free desktop environment running in a commercial, non-free OS that won't cost a fortune to support.
My name is "Spike"
xboxlive won't let me use that name in the "real name" field of my xboxlive profile. It says that it's a banned word.
Why could that be? I think it might be because it contains 'spik,' but even that seems ridiculous.
*shrug*
hey, I don't give you any news!
The original xbox was a pile of crap. The 360 is actually incredibly good, and the strange thing is that most of what makes is a feature that Microsoft is great at: creating a platform.
What I mean is that they manage to keep a consistent interface from dashboard to game where multiplayer gaming uses the same interface from game to game (although I hear EA uses their own multiplayer/matchmaking system, but I haven't played any games like that). With XboxLive, they really made the 360 an amazing system.
Now, I do have some hate for the 360; namely, my cablemodem's connection failed the other night for several hours, and over those hours, I was unable to play any of my xboxlivearcade games (they were all stuck in trial mode), wasn't able to play my ipod, nor was I able to stream movies from my mediaserver. This was all because the 360 couldn't connect to MS's servers to authenticate the apps (the streaming and ipod apps being FREE) to allow me to use them.
I've heard that this is because my gamertag originated on a different 360 and that I can re-pair them, but I haven't had time to look into that fully nor do I feel that that should be necessary.
On another note, the PS3 is a great piece of hardware with some of the worst software I've ever delt with. Even Sony's PS3 website had severe issues when I tried to contact them for support.
I was saying this the other day to my boss... but rather than the benny hill song, it should be the Chicken Dance. That shit is hilarious.
Your average MP3 player is not hifi, and your average consumer doesn't give two shits about the quality loss.
But you can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a 192kbps MP3 when listening through headphones... being able to dell the difference between the 192 and something that was lossless takes a good ear and even then it depends on what you're listening to.
I've been able to tell the difference between my CD and a 192kbps mp3 of many Aphex Twin tracks. the encoding to MP3 throws out a lot of the nuances in the music and some of the chirps become flat. Because of that, I started encoding all of his stuff at 256kbps.
I used to encode all my old music at 192kbps, but when I put one of my CDs (Mastodon - Leviathan) on my laptop with headphones, I noticed that it contained much more punch and had a much deeper sound than the MP3. Since harddrive space is cheap now, I'm just encoding everything at 256kbps.
I would go lossless, but it's hard to find an audio format that's as widely supported as MP3. ALAC doesn't work on many devices/platforms and FLAC isn't compatible with my ipod. AIFF is out of the question because although harddrive space is cheap, I don't want to purchase enough drives to support ripping over 800 CDs as straight AIFF.
yeah I was considering going to WWDC, but that costs a bit more and I'm not much of a developer anymore... at least not on the mac side.
I've been mostly going to macworld for the keynote and to spend some time with friends in the area.
I opted out of going to Macworld this year. I'd been to every east-coast (boston/ny) macworld and keynote from 1996-2000, including the famous one where bill gates was on the giant screen to announce the apple/microsoft partnership for Word and IE. I've also been flying out to california for the san fransisco expos for the last couple of years, but after last year, I realized that the show doesn't cater hardly at all to true pro users... sure, they have pro software, like for graphics and stuff... but their developer section has been lacking since Codewarrior dropped support for the Mac, and as a Unix admin, there is almost nothing there for me anymore.
In the last 8 years, I've found that if you drop all of the laptop cases, ipod accessories and digital camera stuff, you're left with a pitiful handful of office application (*ahem* microsoft) and minor productivity and music companies. There used to be lots of management tools vendors, high-end graphics and storage workstation suppliers and similar cool stuff... but no more.
So, I guess I lucked out since I didn't book a flight or hotel for this year. Save $ and disappointment.
my account has lived on many different units... my account originally lived on my old roommate's xbox which RRoD'd and was repaired/replaced 6 times, so far (it RRoD'd again last month and he still hasn't gotten it back)... I've since purchased my own 360 which is where my account lives now.
I've also transfered my account to my friend's unit to show him some XBLA games without him needing to purchase his own copy.
I guess I'll look into the license transfer tool.
maybe I'll register for that... I'm curious how left4dead plays on a PC (as opposed to my 360).
Other than that, I can't think of any games I'd wanna play on the service.
I mostly only game when I don't have access to an internet connection since 90% of what I do on my computer requires it... it kinda sucks that I'm so dependent on the internets.
Does steam require an internet connection to play, though?
That's one of my big problems with DRM in general. I've run across it with iTunes purchases (the reason I don't buy off itunes anymore unless it's something I can't find anywhere else or I just want one track) and I've had the problem with my 360 in the past, too.
At my last apartment, the cable modem was spotty at best during the evenings for months. I was unable to play my xboxlivearcade games on my 360 because the latency on the 'net wasn't allowing me to log into xboxlive. It was a total pain in the ass.
When I was traveling several years ago, I brought my powerbook and wasn't able to listen to any of my itunes purchases. There was no internet at the hotel in Phoenix, so the entire trip, I was without a small portion of my music library. This may have been a fluke, though, since I thought that the machine would have a key to play the tracks even if you're offline... or maybe they've fixed that, since, but it's annoying nonetheless.
My biggest issue with DRM'd music/video is that typically, you get a product with far inferior quality and more restrictions for use for about the same price. I'd rather buy the CD and mp3 it myself or buy the DVD and rip it so I can play it on my ipod/iphone/laptop/360/desktop. The digital versions that vendors provide are strictly convenient to purchase and nothing more.
I graduated High School and took 2 semesters of college (didn't pass any classes)... I'd been a computer hobbyist my whole life and built linux servers and toyed with coding in almost every language.
Now I'm working as a sysadmin/network engineer for an elite technology architecture group in a fortune 500 company.
Some of the downsides of working in such a group is that I didn't have mandatory exposure to low-level networking stuff like some of my CS-majoring friends did... and they were also exposed to additional design patterns and optimization profiling (bigO notation, etc) that I didn't work with until I needed to, but overall, I've found that you can learn faster and be exposed to more useful technologies when you do it yourself.
I mean, what do they teach you in [american] higher education that pertains to IT? basic networking technologies and Java?
I can't speak for the rest of the gamers out there, but I got the game over a week ago (my roommate bought it from some store that broke the street date... we got it about 5 days before the original release date) and I have to say that the game is absolutely amazing. Several of my other friends also got their mits on it and they love it. It's practically worth buying a PS3 for, assuming you get the $150 credit from sonystyle.com when you sign up for a sony creditcard, since it doesn't really have any big reasons to buy it and the current version of the system won't play PS2 games (wtf?).
In fact, since I'm moving out in november, I ordered a ps3 and LBP so I'll be able to play it when I move.
It really sucked that they didn't start the servers until today, though. I've been playing for a while and haven't been able to partake in any online play with any friends or get any user-created levels.
The main flaw of the game is that when you make levels, you can't help but make the most offensive levels possible. I won't go into too many details, but we started out making a lot of dick levels and moved on to creating a hitler on roller skates level that shits tiny hitlers on rollerskates that are on fire. We couldn't stop ourselves, and we've made many, many more offensive levels.
I think this is going to be the game that pushes PS3 sales. Too bad there's only one or two other PS3-exclusive games... the PS3 is just a glorified blu-ray player for the most part.
Just becasue I am curious, what don't you like about the calendaring application?
Primarily the notifications. In the WinMo world, if I have something in my calendar and I tell it to remind me 7 days ahead of time, I'll see the reminder for 7 days on my home screen. It's a good reminder to do something or that something is coming up. on the iPhone, it'll pop up with an alert, and once it's dismissed, that's it. Sure, I can have it remind me twice, but I want that shit to be constant. And it doesn't notify by default. You have to check the "notify me X days...." thing.
Other complaints are the amount of time it takes to input an event (sliding the time settings is a BITCH), the way that the calendar shows events (I hate to say it but the windows mobile calendar does it right so I know if I have something all-day, in the morning or just the evening), and the fact that I can scroll the calendar like everything else in the phone (I have to click the > and < buttons).
I was never really a fan of iCal, but I've been using it since I had my old windows mobile phones and iSync would sync with the phone. I don't use my computer to remind me of events at home... only at work, where I have Outlook. And I'm not saying I like outlook. I HATE outlook, but the calendaring application is actually really well put together, including how you can send invites and such.
When I first got my iPhone, I liked it ok, never really liked the text input, but I was happier overall with it than my Tilt until I started missing meetings and events because the phone wouldn't remind me of them or I'd dismiss the reminder and it'd go away forever.
My co-worker and I shot out to the T-Mobile store on 6th ave and 46th street (or around there somehwere) in Manhattan yesterday and although the place wasn't crowded, every person in there was buying one (about 4).
We got a unit at work to play with a couple months ago and I was pretty impressed with it even though it was a little buggy (touchscreen doesn't always register and sometimes registers in the wrong spots) and flimsy feeling. the problem is the hardware feels like a shitty toy. The screen is great, but the keypad and trackball don't feel nice and the sliding mechanism doesn't feel solid. Handling it, I feel like I'm gonna break it.
The thing about the iPhone is that it's not only has a very shiny UI, but the hardware is made of metal and feels sturdy and reliable. It doesn't feel like a toy like the G1 does.
I'm waiting for an android phone that's compatible with the AT&T network to be released before I make the switch. I haven't been fully satisfied with the iPhone (mostly, I don't like the calendaring application AT ALL), but it beats the AT&T Tilt and the blackjack2 in terms of usability, in my opinion.
You also run into problems where someone creating an implementation of your language's VM may create one that's less complete or robust than another.
This will also get interesting when you see an implementation of a language for one vendor's VM significantly outperform one on another, or also implementation-specific security issues; where a certain framework is secure on one vendor's platform, but not so much in another.
Also, security will be very platform/vendor-specific. Imagine a product where there's a security issue that spans many languages.
This whole idea sounds very good in theory, and may eventually work very well in practice, but I foresee this working well with a couple of very popular languages for one or two vendors' products and not so hot on many "me too" products.
I agree. Python would make a pretty good starter language, and the Windows version was pretty painless to install, iirc.
I forgot about the fact that you kinda have to teach HTML and PHP at the same time, although PHP would be great to teach after an HTML class was taught... Unfortunately, most HTML classes kinda suck and don't teach the "right way" of doing things.
I redact my php recommendation. Python is probably the best bet. Plus, it's incredibly straight forward, especially with regard to naming and modules and everything. Indentation is the only subtle area where a beginner could get confused.
I've had many friends who were not programmers who had to take a java class in school.
The problem is that it's so difficult to make them understand what those 7 lines of code means for a simple Java hello-world application. It takes a while for them to understand what an object is and what it all means before they can really code anything useful.
It may not be an incredibly complex language, but it has an enormous standard API, and it utilizes fairly advanced concepts (OOP). Java is a great beginner's language, but I feel like for a first language, it doesn't have any kind of training wheels.
One of the issues I had when I was in school is that the computer classes were radically changed as I progressed through my grammar/middle/high school career.
In 3rd and 4th grade, we learned LOGO on some old Atari computers and were basically taught about pixels and where home row was on the keyboard. It was all very simple to grasp and we did a lot of projects (drawing pictures in logo) that required us to use the keyboard a lot.
In 6th grade, we had a BASIC class (not Qbasic, not visual basic... straight BASIC) on PCjr systems where we learned how to draw shapes to the screen and were taught the basic ideas behind computer resolution, very simple loops, how to print text to the screen, read input and use if/then. We also learned what input and output devices are and the names of the various computer parts (monitor, keyboard, printer, etc).
I liked those classes and they went at a good pace which was great because I was the only kid who had a computer at the time (this is like 1991/1992) and everyone seemed to get what was going on and it was great. When I got to high school, there was a VisualBasic class which had a pre-requisite of Intro To Comptuers. I opted not to take that since not only did I have a computer for my whole life, but I also had the previous classes. When I talked to my guidance counselor, he said that the intro to computers class was just a typing class. The visual basic class was not a programming class... it was a class that teaches you the basics of computers (what a floppy is and how to print) and then ends with showing you visual basic.
I opted not to take either class.
My senior year of HS (98/99), they added a c++ class which I managed to sign up for by talking to the teacher and showing him that I already knew a little C++ and already knew computers better than most others (I would have had to take intro to comptuters and the VB class, otherwise), but that class wound up spending half the year teaching about how to use a web browser and what the difference between RAM and ROM is before we even got to 'cin' and 'cout', and that's all we ever did.
So my advice is to spend very little time on the basics of computers in general and dive right in to projects that get them applying what they do know to do things that they want to do. Also, use a language that lets you dive right in. Java is a programmer's programming language. New programmers never understand it because it requires so much up-front knowledge to even understand what a simple hello-world app does. Especially if they are coming from visual basic or something similar.
I think that C is the best beginners language out there. It's very simple. It's super straight-forward. There's a ton you can do with it right out of the box.
PHP may be another good beginner's language, too, since the web is what most people use the most when they're on a computer and it would enable people to show off what they've done. It would also spark much more interest than C, especially since building a C app to work in windows isn't really a piece of cake... although programming in windows, in my experience, has been very difficult... there's a limited amount of free tools and it comes with virtually nothing built-in for that.
I've been with speakeasy for 5 years and have zero complaints about the service. Nothing changed from the day they were purchased by bestbuy. Their support line is just as responsive as ever and I've had no significant downtime (except for when my 4 year old router failed).
When they were bought by bestbuy, I contacted covad but was told that they are business-only in my area and that my residence was not properly zoned for them to sell directly to me. I had to go through a reseller and the only reseller in my area was... Speakeasy.
Before I had speakeasy at that location, I had Verizon DSL which was the absolute worst experience I've ever had with customer support and with service. The modem would fail to connect and their support staff's only solution was to reboot my computer and powercycle the modem.
I'm curious what you saw change with speakeasy in such a short period of time. Did they fail to call you? Did you see degradation in service?
I've got a samsung at work (24", I forget the model number) and I really, really don't like it. midtones never look right and I get weird trails when dragging windows around when there's very specific colors involved in the dragging.
I have calibrated it several times and have not been able to get it to look perfect. I used to do color calibrations for a prepress shop I worked in several years, and have never had an issue with calibrating like this before.
At home, I've got 2 Dell Ultrasharp monitors and I love them. I'm considering getting a third since I'm spoiled at work with 3 monitors.
The Dells are on par, if not slightly better than the Apple Cinema displays and significantly cheaper. The only thing I liked about the cinema displays were the Firewire ports, but the dells have 4 USB ports on them and I use those more than firewire nowadays (3+ years ago, that was a different story as my desktop machine only had 2 drive bays and 1 CD bay and I had several external firewire drives and my firewire ipod).
Plus the dell monitors rotate and slide up and down and are black, which makes them more pleasing to the eyes.