They're currently allegedly trying to extort money from a UK ISP Freedom2Surf (sadly now part of the Pipex group).
By default SORBS apparently block all dynamic IP's. For some strange reason they've deemed that 8192 IP's that are actually in the F2S static range are dynamic because the reverse DNS includes the IP address.
I've heard that they want $50 per IP to unblock them. They wont even talk to users who have static IP address in that range to get the block lifted.
There is of course a work-around. Having a search table that is MyISAM and has fulltext enabled.
Better yet, use something that's been built from the gound-up to search: Apache Lucene (which has even been ported to PHP).
Using Lucene will give you much better weighted results than the MySQL FullText, plus it has a natural language query parser so people can use the kind of search queries they are used to using in google etc.
Fourth, the demand for the PS3 has plummeted. Look on eBay right now and look at PS3s for sale. It has dropped down to $100 above MSRP. That's with a crippling shortage. Sony has placed an incredible burden on companies that develop games exclusively for the PS3. Every month, more games drop their exclusivity and are brought over to the Xbox 360.
That's because every tom dick and harry thought they could copy what people did with the Xbox 360 launch and cash in. Problem is, a greater percentage of machines were bought this way, and people were rather resentful, so rather than give these money grabbers $100 over purchase they'd just rather wait and get a first-hand package and not line the pockets of a scummy tout.
The real power of SOAP comes when you are using a language or framework that has support for it builtin. SOAP is complex simply because it does more than XML-RPC with type handling etc.
In PHP you can use NuSOAP (or in 5.x the built-in SOAP library), to simply register some functions and autogenerate the WSDL, or generate a proxy from a given WSDL - takes a couple of minutes tops and then looks like you are simply calling another function.
Anyone who uses ASP.NET regularly has it even better - create an ASMX file, define a class and functions like you would in any C# class, add some namespace arguments, a [WebMethod] over all your public methods and it can then be instantiated and called from any other ASP.NET website or.NET dekstop app seamlessly, like it was a local class. It's really cool just how transparent it all is. You can even throw exceptions and catch them on the other side, pass back objects - it's really slick.
MySQL isn't the only database where you have to declare foreign keys, so that one's a non issue. I don't want a database to "guess" what my FK constraints are, I want to tell it explicitly.
True, but most of the tools I use to create DB schemas do this automatically now (phpMyAdmin et al)
It's a good idea to have indexes on foreign keys, as you'll often be joining on them. As for silently ignoring, I've never seen that - I get an error message if I try to add a foreign key with no indexes created.
Not so much of an issue these days, every build I've used recently from ones for Mac OS X and those for Fedora/ES/CentOS always have it compiled in. Even cheaper hosting accounts now very often have InnoDB support compiled into their MySQL installs.
Don't get me wrong, MySQL is far from perfect, but if used properly (like any tool) it can power some very cool stuff.
We always make sure that our apps work on multiple database servers as we realise our clients don't need a one-size-fits-all solution. We used to have to work around MySQL's limitations, but these days that's no longer as big an issue.
Vista is more RAM hungry than XP, but not by a vast amount.
If you see that you have very little free memory, this is probably because Vista has a completely new memory management system that learns the apps you most often use and pre-loads them into RAM to speed things up. As soon as you actually need any of that memory it starts unloading things.
Granted, 1 gig won't really cut it if you're using Visual Studio or SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (that's why I'm still on XP - plus I'm waiting on SP2 for SQL Server for Vista Compat), but for most tasks and gaming 1 gig will still be ample.
If the day NVIDIA had released those drivers the kernel developers had asked the FSF to send a cease and desist to NVIDIA, we probably would have full open source 3d accelerated drivers the very next day.
No, NVIDIA would have said "fine, no drivers for you". There's a lot of stuff in the driver that is licensed to NVIDIA on an NDA basis. There's also NVIDIA trade secrets they don't want ATI getting hold of. The cost/benefit of providing a stable driver to the minority of their users who run Linux vs. keeping an edge over ATI would only go one way.
NVIDIA doesn't have to provide a driver for linux, that they do is a fantastic feat in and of itself - but I don't doubt for a second they would drop support for Linux if push came to shove.
...the rootkit "fiasco" was Sony BMG, which is pretty much run by Bertelsmann (the CEO is a German and everything is run in europe). The rootkit would have been 100% their idea and decree (there's not a single Sony exec in a high-level position in the company).
Let's not forget the head of SONY has gone on the record as saying that he thinks music downloads are overpriced, he'd prefer the 25c mark and higher volume.
Being purely XHTML compliant doesn't make you accessible, and there are some things in some situations that are pretty rough to deal with.
True, but it makes it a lot easier as things like screenreaders have less cruft to get through - plus you can hide a link that skips navigation for media=screen which allows someone with a screenreader to get straight to the content.
It's true that xhtml doesn't take into account things like essential tremor or color-blindness, but we take care of those right at the start of the design stage and only use DDA(ADA) aware designers.
So woohoo, I have to kiss ajax good bye
No you don't, any decent AJAX site should degrade gracefully (gmail does this with the basic html mode) - people with disabilities can use those versions. ASP.NET does browser sniffing and will output non-javascript pages for screenreaders that aren't spoofing their user-agent. Their AJAX library also degrades very gracefully which means that your whizz bang AJAX app will still work.
I'm not saying that accessbility is easy, far from it, just that including it when you start a project will reduce the cost considerably.
The web is the great leveller, it can bring people and business together who wouldn't normally be able - why lose 200,000 potential customers in the U.S. alone?
Spoken like an old table based layout "web designer" who hasn't been able to adapt with the times
Semantic markup+css isn't rocket science. It's good on a number of fronts as well:
Easier to edit/maintain
Search engines love it, less cruft more content
Reduces bandwidth bill (some sites we've converted use 20-30% less bandwidth per month)
Makes it easier to be DDA (British ADA) compliant
Warm fuzzy feeling
It's true that the really good xhtml+css guys aren't cheap, but it's a selling point for our products so it's worth us keeping a guy fulltime plus some contractors we know we can rely on when we're busy.
If you do this stuff from the beginning of a project it needn't cost much (if any) more, but it's true that retrofitting can be expensive. Target's codebase is probably quite old and crufty in places, but it's something they'll need to sort - sooner rather than later.
As for your idea about a phone line, what if the person is mute, has a stammer and doesn't like talking to strangers on the phone or any other such problems?
It's a common misonception that flash ins't accessible, the latest versions are very much so. JK Rowlings new site is meant to be a good example of this.
...sorry, that should have been phrased as "the internet has the potential to be the great leveller", it was getting a bit late when I wrote that and I'd been working all day on fitting our new kitchen.
In the UK uou can usually only get a fixed rate for a period of up to 5 years, after which you convert back to a variable rate. Of course, at that point you switch to another mortgage and/or renogotiate a new fixed rate (IIRC).
It's the same situation in the U.K. The Disability Discrimination Act specifies that any place of business must be accessible to people with disabilities (including web-sites).
I see the legislation as a "good thing", the internet is the great leveller, many people who otherwise would find it hard to make purchases or converse in real life find fewer barriers.
It goes further than just visually impaired visitors however, you have to take into account things like colour-blindness, essential tremor (so big chunky web 2.0 buttons are fine!).
All of our sites and web apps (including admin backends) have been fully DDA compliant for several years now. Being compliant makes business sense, it doesn't cost much more to build it in from the start and then you increase your potential client base - plus you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you know you're not preventing people from accessing your services.
...There's a big "but", usually, to try and curb hyper-inflation interest rates are raised. So now your 5% PA mortgate is a 50% PA one. However, if you were smart enough to get into a fixed rate mortgage and there's still time before it converts into a variable rate one you should be a happy camper, if you can feed yourself that is. If you have savings, that 50% interest should come in handy for that too!
...the police suspect that he may have had an accomplice. Apparently the normal M.O. for this type of criminal relies on having another person in the mix (lookout during original kidnap, looking after victim if other needs to go anywhere for an extended period etc.).
Marc Dutroux (the Belgian Paedophile) had several accomplices - one of whom was directly responsible for Julie and Melissa's death by not feeding them whilst Dutroux was in prison on another charge.
Found an image on Flikr there are some closeup shots of the insides as well. I'd never heard about these things before (coming from the UK) and this article piqued my interest.
Customers are wanting better power efficiency. Due to the rising costs of energy a lot of data centres are now charging based on energy consumption and heat output (needs more AC -> needs more energy). It's becoming a real problem, especially for some data centres who for varying reasons cannot increase their electricity supplies. That's why google, microsoft and others have started building data centres near a hydro-electric dam in the states, cheap and plentiful electricity.
Gotta disagree with you there...the numpad is one of the most useful parts of the keyboard if you are doing a lot of numeric entry (or even just a lot of sums), you can enter numbers, do arithmetic and show the answer without moving your hand more than an inch in either direction. To do the same with the numbers above the QWERTY (or AZERTY for our french cousings) keys you must move your hands much farther and use the shift key if you want to add or multiply.
...do you have any idea how much it costs to train a sniffer dog capable of doing this? Hint, it's pretty big, plus dogs tend to die quicker than such a machine (should).
You may jest, but it was probably a viable option at one point. NVIDIA already produce their own chipsets, plus they've recently purchased ULI who also make AMD chipsets.
However, maybe AMD decided ATI could make better business orientated chipsets (NVIDIA is more "enthusiast" based and ULI have cornered the "cheap and cheerful" end of the market) and that was the reason for it. The long and the short of it is that AMD needs to produce their own chipsets for their server based parts, a-la Intel. Buyers for big business need to know everything is going to work well together.
Slashdot Mirror
They're currently allegedly trying to extort money from a UK ISP Freedom2Surf (sadly now part of the Pipex group).
By default SORBS apparently block all dynamic IP's. For some strange reason they've deemed that 8192 IP's that are actually in the F2S static range are dynamic because the reverse DNS includes the IP address.
I've heard that they want $50 per IP to unblock them. They wont even talk to users who have static IP address in that range to get the block lifted.
There is of course a work-around. Having a search table that is MyISAM and has fulltext enabled.
Better yet, use something that's been built from the gound-up to search: Apache Lucene (which has even been ported to PHP).
Using Lucene will give you much better weighted results than the MySQL FullText, plus it has a natural language query parser so people can use the kind of search queries they are used to using in google etc.
That's because every tom dick and harry thought they could copy what people did with the Xbox 360 launch and cash in. Problem is, a greater percentage of machines were bought this way, and people were rather resentful, so rather than give these money grabbers $100 over purchase they'd just rather wait and get a first-hand package and not line the pockets of a scummy tout.
The real power of SOAP comes when you are using a language or framework that has support for it builtin. SOAP is complex simply because it does more than XML-RPC with type handling etc.
In PHP you can use NuSOAP (or in 5.x the built-in SOAP library), to simply register some functions and autogenerate the WSDL, or generate a proxy from a given WSDL - takes a couple of minutes tops and then looks like you are simply calling another function.
Anyone who uses ASP.NET regularly has it even better - create an ASMX file, define a class and functions like you would in any C# class, add some namespace arguments, a [WebMethod] over all your public methods and it can then be instantiated and called from any other ASP.NET website or .NET dekstop app seamlessly, like it was a local class. It's really cool just how transparent it all is. You can even throw exceptions and catch them on the other side, pass back objects - it's really slick.
Don't get me wrong, MySQL is far from perfect, but if used properly (like any tool) it can power some very cool stuff.
We always make sure that our apps work on multiple database servers as we realise our clients don't need a one-size-fits-all solution. We used to have to work around MySQL's limitations, but these days that's no longer as big an issue.
Is that the same referential integrity and ACID compliance afforded by using INNOdb as your table type in MySQL? ;o)
Vista is more RAM hungry than XP, but not by a vast amount.
If you see that you have very little free memory, this is probably because Vista has a completely new memory management system that learns the apps you most often use and pre-loads them into RAM to speed things up. As soon as you actually need any of that memory it starts unloading things.
Granted, 1 gig won't really cut it if you're using Visual Studio or SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (that's why I'm still on XP - plus I'm waiting on SP2 for SQL Server for Vista Compat), but for most tasks and gaming 1 gig will still be ample.
Um..correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Google use this to power some of their web-apps?
No, NVIDIA would have said "fine, no drivers for you". There's a lot of stuff in the driver that is licensed to NVIDIA on an NDA basis. There's also NVIDIA trade secrets they don't want ATI getting hold of. The cost/benefit of providing a stable driver to the minority of their users who run Linux vs. keeping an edge over ATI would only go one way.
NVIDIA doesn't have to provide a driver for linux, that they do is a fantastic feat in and of itself - but I don't doubt for a second they would drop support for Linux if push came to shove.
As long as those are internal machines on a closed network, then yes, stay with what works.
...the rootkit "fiasco" was Sony BMG, which is pretty much run by Bertelsmann (the CEO is a German and everything is run in europe). The rootkit would have been 100% their idea and decree (there's not a single Sony exec in a high-level position in the company).
Let's not forget the head of SONY has gone on the record as saying that he thinks music downloads are overpriced, he'd prefer the 25c mark and higher volume.
So add AT&T's smtp server ip address to the SPF record for your domain.
True, you'll have to track and monitor if it changes, but you could probably set up a cron job to parse the output of a daily "dig mx" query.
True, but it makes it a lot easier as things like screenreaders have less cruft to get through - plus you can hide a link that skips navigation for media=screen which allows someone with a screenreader to get straight to the content.
It's true that xhtml doesn't take into account things like essential tremor or color-blindness, but we take care of those right at the start of the design stage and only use DDA(ADA) aware designers.
No you don't, any decent AJAX site should degrade gracefully (gmail does this with the basic html mode) - people with disabilities can use those versions. ASP.NET does browser sniffing and will output non-javascript pages for screenreaders that aren't spoofing their user-agent. Their AJAX library also degrades very gracefully which means that your whizz bang AJAX app will still work.
I'm not saying that accessbility is easy, far from it, just that including it when you start a project will reduce the cost considerably.
The web is the great leveller, it can bring people and business together who wouldn't normally be able - why lose 200,000 potential customers in the U.S. alone?
Spoken like an old table based layout "web designer" who hasn't been able to adapt with the times
Semantic markup+css isn't rocket science. It's good on a number of fronts as well:
It's true that the really good xhtml+css guys aren't cheap, but it's a selling point for our products so it's worth us keeping a guy fulltime plus some contractors we know we can rely on when we're busy.
If you do this stuff from the beginning of a project it needn't cost much (if any) more, but it's true that retrofitting can be expensive. Target's codebase is probably quite old and crufty in places, but it's something they'll need to sort - sooner rather than later.
As for your idea about a phone line, what if the person is mute, has a stammer and doesn't like talking to strangers on the phone or any other such problems?
It's a common misonception that flash ins't accessible, the latest versions are very much so. JK Rowlings new site is meant to be a good example of this.
...sorry, that should have been phrased as "the internet has the potential to be the great leveller", it was getting a bit late when I wrote that and I'd been working all day on fitting our new kitchen.
In the UK uou can usually only get a fixed rate for a period of up to 5 years, after which you convert back to a variable rate. Of course, at that point you switch to another mortgage and/or renogotiate a new fixed rate (IIRC).
It's the same situation in the U.K. The Disability Discrimination Act specifies that any place of business must be accessible to people with disabilities (including web-sites).
I see the legislation as a "good thing", the internet is the great leveller, many people who otherwise would find it hard to make purchases or converse in real life find fewer barriers.
It goes further than just visually impaired visitors however, you have to take into account things like colour-blindness, essential tremor (so big chunky web 2.0 buttons are fine!).
All of our sites and web apps (including admin backends) have been fully DDA compliant for several years now. Being compliant makes business sense, it doesn't cost much more to build it in from the start and then you increase your potential client base - plus you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you know you're not preventing people from accessing your services.
...There's a big "but", usually, to try and curb hyper-inflation interest rates are raised. So now your 5% PA mortgate is a 50% PA one. However, if you were smart enough to get into a fixed rate mortgage and there's still time before it converts into a variable rate one you should be a happy camper, if you can feed yourself that is. If you have savings, that 50% interest should come in handy for that too!
...the police suspect that he may have had an accomplice. Apparently the normal M.O. for this type of criminal relies on having another person in the mix (lookout during original kidnap, looking after victim if other needs to go anywhere for an extended period etc.).
Marc Dutroux (the Belgian Paedophile) had several accomplices - one of whom was directly responsible for Julie and Melissa's death by not feeding them whilst Dutroux was in prison on another charge.
Found an image on Flikr there are some closeup shots of the insides as well. I'd never heard about these things before (coming from the UK) and this article piqued my interest.
Customers are wanting better power efficiency. Due to the rising costs of energy a lot of data centres are now charging based on energy consumption and heat output (needs more AC -> needs more energy). It's becoming a real problem, especially for some data centres who for varying reasons cannot increase their electricity supplies. That's why google, microsoft and others have started building data centres near a hydro-electric dam in the states, cheap and plentiful electricity.
Gotta disagree with you there...the numpad is one of the most useful parts of the keyboard if you are doing a lot of numeric entry (or even just a lot of sums), you can enter numbers, do arithmetic and show the answer without moving your hand more than an inch in either direction. To do the same with the numbers above the QWERTY (or AZERTY for our french cousings) keys you must move your hands much farther and use the shift key if you want to add or multiply.
...do you have any idea how much it costs to train a sniffer dog capable of doing this? Hint, it's pretty big, plus dogs tend to die quicker than such a machine (should).
You may jest, but it was probably a viable option at one point. NVIDIA already produce their own chipsets, plus they've recently purchased ULI who also make AMD chipsets.
However, maybe AMD decided ATI could make better business orientated chipsets (NVIDIA is more "enthusiast" based and ULI have cornered the "cheap and cheerful" end of the market) and that was the reason for it. The long and the short of it is that AMD needs to produce their own chipsets for their server based parts, a-la Intel. Buyers for big business need to know everything is going to work well together.