I think I am a sort of aggressive agnostic. Before this thread and my desire to read the wikipedia pages about Atheism and Agnosticism I thought I was purely Atheist.
I say aggressive because although I acknowledge I would start believing in a God if I was provided with irrefutable proof of its existence I think anyone who believe in God without that irrefutable proof has some sort of mental failing.
Maybe they have an issue with the world not making sense and people in it being evil to one another. Maybe they want to be evil themselves and religion is an excuse. Maybe they have a need to not see unanswered questions about the world. Who knows, but every one of them is exposing a reluctance to embrace the empirical world as we experience it and so chooses a life of delusion.
The only way to convince me they are not choosing to live in a fantasy world is to offer me the same irrefutable proof of the god the believe in that convinced them.
Makes me think we should eliminate names and parties from ballots altogether and simply have a 100 question questionnaire that you simply select 1 to 5 for or against, and weight how important that issue is to you and then the system matches your answer to the candidate who most closely matches your choices, and counts your vote for them. Never happen of course since it'd gut the power of the current parties and we might actually get people in there who represent what the people truly want, but hey, I can dream...
That only works if the candidates actually really -believe- in their own stated policies, and moreover, actually -act- on them when in power. There's not much point in matching voters' preferences to lies.
This is a brilliant idea. We can also use his method to get rid of the politicians too. Just have a bunch of civil servant that have to implement what ever policies are chosen by the people in the questionnaire.
I had the same story, until Google started asking for my mobile phone number as verification to link to my Google account. IMO, this is over the edge, as in this country you have to use your real identity to get a mobile number.
Well Google ask the rest of us for no such thing so maybe that is something that is legally required of them by your countries government.
Except search and maps, I self host everything (email, websites, Jabber, RSS reader, calendar, etc.) on a dedicated server. There's a small price to pay, but as an example, I have the same email address for the last 10 years. I have all my emails for the last 10 years. There's no worry about privacy. As a programmer, it's useful to run irssi from it under screen, host my own websites, pretty much run anything network oriented..
They better be damn secure as it sound like the place you live would certainly try hacking them. It may also be that by running these services you actually make yourself look like a target to you obviously fairly paranoid government. Is the server physically hosted outside your nation or in your basement as well to be sure the government can't just ask the ISP for physical access?
It sounds like you live in a pretty harsh place privacy wise, did you ever consider moving to the free world instead of blaming Google for following your countries somewhat harsh laws?
On another note why the hell is your country so paranoid? Even forcing people to use the real identity when they buy a mobile sounds a little harsh. Is there an active terrorist organisation trying to overthrow the government or is it just general government paranoia about not getting elected?
What difference does it make even if these companies are Microsoft-backed? How does that affect the merits of their claim?
It doesn't. But after looking through the foundem site I can state categorically that their claim has no merit. It has no original content and is solely a link farm to other sites content. You could say the same is true for google but that is no bad thing since that is exactly what I expect from a search engine.
If I search for something on Google or Bing I do want links to syndicated content or other search engines to appear, I want the links shown to be to the original producer of the relevant content. This means searching on Bing should not show results that are actually just Google product searches with the same search terms, and vice versa. I know I get this occasionally on Google, but I always just hit the back button immediately. If this happened more often I would try and find a better search engine.
The main issue with the Foundem site that it has no unique content of its own. It only contains links to other peoples stuff. They need to generate their own content, either via a blog about products, or put in some product reviews or something to make it stand out. They also need to not rely on JavaScript in order to browse their site and see any content at all.
The books section does not work without JavaScript. It does not generate an error or a warning. It just does sweet FA when you click any of the buttons. They could at least tell me they need JS enabled when I visit the site or that page. In fact most of sections are the same, they just don't work.
Then there is the issue of the quality of what they return. I am currently toying with the idea of buying an alienware laptop, but they do not return the manufacturer (Dell) in any product searches for alienware laptops. The same is true for every laptop search I have performed. In the case of the alienware laptop this is a major failing since only the dell site has all the options to customise the product. I also checked a few other products like Sony Bravia TV's and the result is often that they miss the cheapest price by only having certain resellers listed.
This company claims on their about us page to be primarily a technology company. The problem is that I find it very difficult to believe since if all the other sites they must index to find their products were designed the same way as theirs then they would not have any content at all.
I have spent an hour or two going over their site. I have also email them with some SEO suggestions. I do not have time to over the other two sites but this seems to be clear case of their technical guy (they only have one apparently) not knowing the first thing about Search Engine Optimisation.
PS - I am not linking to their site as I see no reason to help them get any higher in Google's search results:)
PPS - I know about robots=nofollow, previous PS was just a joke.
There seems to be damned little effort to fix the problems. Quite the opposite, legislators and the media industry are going out of their way to make the problems even worse. The system is broken because it no longer serves its purpose, to protect creators, but rather to protect large-scale media conglomerates who would just as happily, and do just as happily fuck over the artist.
Maybe its worth remembering that copyright law would protect the creator of original works, if the creator did not sell the copyright on their work to the large media conglomerate in return for some cash upfront. I know the music companies have various tricks, but usually the artists in question who make it big are so desperate for fame the sign the contracts put in front of them without even reading them. They usually have no choice anyway as without the vast media PR machine behind them the artist will never make it to the bigtime they desperately seek.
There are always going to be artist who go their own way and ebb out a career through hardwork and producing good music. These artists are not the people featured in these drivel copyright cases though. Most of the suits filed are for top ten populist teen music that has been over engineered by the record companies in question to make it appeal to the mass market. In many cases the band is entirely manufactured by the record company in order to fit a niche in the market (eg - spice girls).
If an artist is not willing to sign over the copyright on a track to the record company the record company are not able to enforce it.
The ads themselves don't bother me. The fact that virtually every website I visit reports to google that I went there does. Sometimes it feels like I might as well be browsing through a google proxy, and just feeding them every url I visit as I go there. This is what they want. And adwords is ubiquitous enough that it almost gives it to them. Add in gmail, youtube, and the other g-services, and google analytics on the backend on a lot of sites that don't have ads and... they are closer than you think.
I find that offensive. I don't want to be stalked and everything I do recorded by google. And googles reply is essentially... "we're not singling you out" doesn't imrprove my view of it. Just because they are using the technology to stalk everyone at once doesn't change anything... if anything it just makes it worse.
You are singling google out though. Every advertising company does this sort of crap. And the battle against any advertising was lost years ago, mainly becuase too many people actually buy stuff as a result of adverts.
The only thing I try and remember is that the adverts I am bombarded with are used to finance me getting a free service. If Google moved away from an advert supported model they would have to charge a subscription to voder their costs. Since I use Google a lot this would cost me a fortune.
The last time I had to use Blizzard's updater software, I found that DISABLING P2P actually sped up my overall download speed. It seems that if you're willing to let them use your bandwidth, they're unwilling to supply you with some of theirs. Net result? Doing Blizzard a favour means you get shafted.
Someone else posted a description further up the thread of why this happens. It is basically because they take ALL your uploading bandwidth and then the acknowledgment packets your PC sends everytime it recieves a packet successfully cannot get back as quickly. Net result is the server resends the same packet again as it does not think you received it. This all happens at the transport layer.
The best thing to do is limit your upload on all P2P networks to about 60%-80% of your available upload bandwith. This should allways allow a large margin for the TCP ACK packets to get back to the servers you are downloading from assuming they are not overloaded too.
It's a typical crap Flash design (why use Flash for menus???), but it works fine on my Moto Droid w/ Flash.
This is actually an interesting question. Previously the answer has always been: Because Graphic Designers love there little pretty widgits and animations which they can only get in house using flash.
I know must techies could probably replicate this effect using a combination of animated gifs that change on rollover and javascript but that is so far outside the ability of most graphic designers. Using Flash have them the ability to knock something up using flash as part of the CS suite and control exactly what it looked like with no technical input required. Whether this is a good idea is not the point (As a techie I do not think it is).
I am hoping that the lack of flash on iPhones and iPads actually forces graphic designers to move away from the love of flash they seem to have had for needless things in the past. Using HTML5 for these things is likely to mean more work for people like me who work on the technical side.
The problem is that these little widgits have often been used as a way for the more arty and less technical graphic design agencies to distinguish themselves in the market. This was in part because it is much easier to show a non-technical client a visual feature than it was to explain how great their site was because it loaded slightly quicker than the old one over the GPON or whatever overpowered crap the deep pocketed client was previously oversold for their office.
The client who owns the Park Place site probably love their little menu animation, however pointless it is. The designer probably charged a fortune for knocking that up and enjoyed doing it to boot. This is a hefty amount of inertia that Jobs has to fight against and it may alienate his core MAC market in the process if it pushes them away from flash applications and into HTML5 which requires more technical ability to create at present.
Anyone who has ever had to work on a pure graphic designers Action-script will probably have an idea of how logical and suited to development their mindset is (ie - not at all).
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
But then maybe they enjoy playing shootem ups for some strange reason. I just joined an online gaming clan with 2 currently active service members who only recently returned to Fort Drum after a long deployment to Iraq (and one who retired a few years ago after 20 odd years service). They are looking forward to this game already.
One came out with probably the sickest comments I have every heard while he was playing (badly) recently: "Thank god I am not this bad at killing people in real life".
In my experience these guys have an incredibly dry sense of humour as this is the only thing that keeps them sane while sitting in a foxhole in the desert.
Now cue the million replies from people telling me that using software you have not paid a penny / cent for is not actually theft. Well as a developer I think it is and no amount of drivel posted by people merely trying to justify their own actions will change my mind.
Also, the post seemed to be saying that by making mod-chips illegal the Australian government is stealing games, this is certainly not the case either so if you want to get technical about the usage of the word "steal" then his post is no better.
Some people may argue that stealing stuff that is far too expensive for something that has no real physical form is ok. But the problem here is that almost everything can now be stored in digital form so nothing needs to have any physical form anymore. Should everything that can be copied easily be free? I hope not as I would not be able to earn a living by writing software, and I would not be alone.
Many people here will one day be reliant on producing something with no physical form in order to make a living. The whole service model idea is not suitable for everything.
I used to use bittorrent and gnutella extensively when I was a student as I felt that my actions were justified due to the price I would have had to pay if I paid for everything I used. Now I have a bit more cash to spend and am on the other side of the fence.
This is just one of the injustices we have to face, many things in life are too expensive as the prices are often set according to the products target market instead of the actual cost of production. While you have very little money something being priced out of your pocket just because someone else will pay that amount seems completely unfair. When you actually have a new and novel product though being free to set your own price becomes a bit more complicated as you also need to make as much money as possible in the world we live in.
By the way, if something is deliberately priced out of your pocket I do think it is theft if you steal it, but I think it is completely understandable and were I on a jury I would never convict you of theft for such an offence. That is one of the great things about juries, we do not have to follow the law as we also get to decide if the law is "just" and find accordingly without setting a legal precedent.
There is the argument that mod-chips are really created to allow people to use the device in a way that the manufacturer never intended (ie - run Linux). I thought about buying one for this reason in the past and actually sort of agree with this. But the poster I am replying to was using the word "gamez" and that to me is only used when referring to "warez" so please lets keep that out of it. If he had posted something sensible about why Australia cracking down on these chips was stupid I would not have replied with this post.
Although this is really the same problem faced by BitTorrent now, because the vast majority of mod-chips are used to enable playing unlicensed copies of software the general public (including legislators) need to be reminded that there are legitimate uses of these devices too.
He is probably just using flashblock so he doesn't see the videos.
Kinda retarded though commenting about an article when he has his own PC mangle the article before he sees it. Mind you with a name like "millwall" what do you expect.
If you are talking about morally then you need to remember that everyone's morals are different and most peoples change over the course of their lifetime. Expecting a large company to even have any morals let alone ones you share is about as pointless as pissing into a gale. I bet Sony do far worse than this in the name of making a profit.
If you are talking about legally then in at least one jurisdiction you are wrong, thanks to the judges decision it is now perfectly legal (until successfully appealed). I have a felling it is perfectly legal in most other parts of the world too but I am not lawyer.
But not in any sort of way they actually care about. The lifetime of a PS3 they care about is the amount of time you can use it to carry on consuming their content (ie, licensed PS3 Games and BlueRay Movies). Other crap you can do with the device that does not make them any money they don't care about.
Even on the PC Linux is a niche market amongst home users that carries very little commercial weight as a result. I bet on the PS3 it was even more so so when the Other OS feature became a security hole in the platform it was simply not worth fixing when it could be removed far more cheaply and the only people it would annoy a few geeks.
Remember also that they did not force you to apply the update so if you wanted to you could have carried on playing all the single player games you already had and never upgrade. The only legitimate customers it affected were people who used the Other OS feature and also played games online.
The simply fact is they removed a feature that most of they customer base did not care less about having. They did this to make sure they carried on getting revenue from games producers. Sony's big selling point to game producers is the enhanced security over the Xbox360 which has more users. If they lost this selling point more and more developers would just abandon the platform and save the money they spend supporting it.
I know the PS3 has better capabilities but that is a selling point to end users, not game development companies since they usually have to support both platforms anyway and have to deal with lowest common denominator hardware. They can improve the rendering a little on the PS3, but the bulk of the gameplay will be identical between PS3 and Xbox360.
The truth is that I am amazed the PS3 is still getting any game development anyway. It has long since been overshadowed by the XBox360 and Wii in terms of userbase. It may have been by far the best console on paper, but it was just priced too high to manufacture. This made the console expensive to buy and even then it was being sold at a loss and still is apparrently, long after the Xbox360 is being sold at a profit per unit.
This leaves Sony's only hope being that it will take off as 3.5 generation console and creep back into the market as the Xbox360 and Wii start to look dated in terms of technical specs (ie - no BlueRay). This will only work though if Sony can cling onto game developers producing content for it. They can only do this by screaming to the world that their console is the most pirate proof in a big old PR game with the managers of the game development companies. PR games are very rarely based on fact anyway so whether the Other OS feature actually made it more secure is largely irrelevant.
Personally I would prefer they sub-contract prisoners to do manual labor which nowadays is outsourced to other countries and pay them the same (so that companies are attracted).
And then, charge prisoners some rent from their hard earn cash.
That way tax payers do not have to pay to maintain those bastards.
This is a really nice idea that I have often thought would be a brilliant solution. Unfortunately it does not factor in just how bloody expensive prisons are.
This basically means that the third world will always be able to undercut slave labour incarcerated in the first world unless we can bring the cost of prison down by one hell of a lot. The best we can hope for is to reduce the amount of our taxes spent on prisons.
Then there is the problem that some of the scum bags we lock up cannot be trusted to do sweet FA. They are incredibly violent, will turn any tool you give them into a weapon, and are just lucky enough not to be caught doing anything that earns them a seat on old smoky. We have to find a way of dealing with these elements of our society.
Personally I am one of these liberal hippies being discussed so I would like to find away of stopping them get like this in the first place. That is by far the best way of limiting the amount we spend. There will always be some of them who slip through though and so some method of protecting the rest of us from them will always be needed and I am yet to understand how slapping an ankle bracelet on them will do that adequately.
A tag is all very well for knowing where the little critters were after the fact and determining if they can have committed a particular crime. As a law abiding member of society this is pretty much bugger all good to me if I am murdered by a socio-path wearing a tag.
No, what is needed is to actually deprive some elements of society of their liberty for my safety. Tags are only useful for people we are 99.9% sure about not re-offending or people who have finished their sentence but we still want to keep tabs on because we think they will re-offend but are unable to incarcerate for any longer without proof.
Making your mobile platform incompatible with anything already out there is a choice, and not a choice I agree with.
Do you make phones? If not your opinion is worthless as you are not a Google customer for Android.
Google have to do what the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola and whoever else want. That means they want to be able to build a phone manufacturer specific "look and feel" on top of android that makes their android unique. They usually do not want to open source this work because these are hardware manufacturers. Companies that design their own hardware are generally reluctant to embrace open source for some reason.
So that leaves building on a Sun / Oracle product and paying them revenue. This has two problems:
1) Oracle's director is apparently a personal friend of Steve Jobs so Oracle would overcharge Google or demand that each hardware company had to negotiate with Oracle directly for the rights to use Android. This would make the platform a joke.
2) This would eat into either Google or the hardware vendors profits. Google might be able to take the hit, but companies like Motorola (The handset division anyway) cannot.
Mind you, the British said something similar before the Second World War...
Actually, we said it would be suicidal due to our naval power. Unfortunately German had long recognised British sea power and had been building a pretty decent navy of its own with a strong emphasis on stealth.
The same now applies to the US. While you could blockade the US fairly easily with a fleet or two of submarines I have a sneaky feeling it would not take very long for the US to sink them all and then bomb the crap out of whatever country tried it.
The main benefit of assigning dynamic IP addresses to consumer-like end users is that it's a lot easier to administer them - you don't have to explain to the user how to configure the static IP address into their router, or deal with the help desk call when they change something in their Windows 98 box or networked laser printer or 68030 Macintosh or Linux machine that's using KDE instead of GNOME or whatever. You tell them "Plug it on, watch the lights blink, DHCP magic happens, you're done."
You can still use DHCP with static IP addresses so it makes no difference at all to the user whether they have a static or dynamic IP in terms of ease of setup.
The sooner we get to IPv6, the better. If not, if someone wants a static IP, much less a/29 subnet with five usable host IPs, they will be paying through the nose, for it just due to artificial scarcity.
Well thats certainly not the case at the moment. I just found a subnet that size thay my company never knew it had (we only have about internet 40 ip addresses total). We as company do not pay for ip addresses at all and we only rent half a rack in a datadenter.
It seems to me that if they were in that shorter supply we would be being charged a nominal fee for each one yet that does not seem to be the case. Is my company unique in this? We have been with our current datacentre for years so maybe this as many ip addresses as you need deal is a legacy thing from years ago.
I know individuals are charged per static IP but I have a feeling that is just another way ISP's make money. Is there really any benefit to making everyone have a dynamic IP by default? i know in ths US static IP's seem to be the norm.
I have been hearing people say we are running out of IP addresses for 15 years so am getting a bit skeptical.
Most of it can be done in pre-5 HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
The problem is that f you do it in these you are forced to make your source available. If you use flash you can protect you intellectual property. This might not matter to most of the people on slashdot but it matter a lot more to companies and they will always be the drivers of flash's continued usage.
I work in the elearning sphere and another reason flash totally dominates in the world of online learning content is that it enables you to hid the correct answers to end of module tests and such. Sure I could do the same thing with some crazy javascript encryption or something but why bother when there is such an easy tool out there that enables me to keep my source closed easily. Some people will always be able to cheat but this is only about stopping 99% of people (I reckon less than 1% of IT users could reverse engineer a flash file back to actionscript).
HTML5 is a nice idea, but many people out there will never adopt it as it unless it supports some sort of way to close off your source code from prying eyes.
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
In my experience of hiring developers there are more out there who are comfortable using MySQL than there are using Postgre, that makes it cheaper to run since new hires are more likely to be able to come in with a fair knowledge you only have to build on rather than train them up in a completely new SQL syntax.
MySQL has a wider installed user base so unless Postgre is identical to use to this or T-SQL then deploying it will involve some retraining.
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.
I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.
what stop them from firing you right at the end of the probation period and getting free work.
Usually the main problem is that the code in question needs further work. It is very rare that developers are worth the time it takes to train them for the first 6 months. When you audit code written by people on their trial period before offering them a full time post you are usually just ensuring that it does not contain any glaring great screw ups.
The project you give them will usually be very self contained but with a few external things they need to check in order to see how they deal with it. The main reason for this is that at the end of the day you have to audit it so the candidate is fresh in everyone's mind when the final decision is being made. In my experience you will want to give a potential candidate a decision very quickly after his evaluation day. If they were rubbish they probably did not get that far so you do not wan them to get another offer while you make up your mind. If you have given them a project that involved working on more than 5 or 6 files you have to go through every last line that is different and check it before the code is checked in and that can be a right pain in the arse.
Much better is giving them a dummy project that is going nowhere but builds on a simple area of your existing system. This way they have to look a the existing code and plan their approach but you get an easy audit at 5:30 when they leave.
I am also fond of giving them a project they have very little chance of completing in the time allotted in order to see how they cope with pressure. Obviously you do not count the fact they did not finish it against them but seeing how they cope with an unrealistic deadline is far more valuable than the code the produce ever could have been.
The best employee I have ever had the pleasure to work with came to do a trial day on a day which turned out to be a fallback beta release day to a client. Since the program was supposed to have been handed across to the clients test team 2 days earlier but they rushed in some last minute changes we had no choice but to release on that day. We also knew he was good from his interview so we did not want the candidate to get another offer if we mucked him about cancelling with less than a weeks notice. Then our technical lead got sick on the day of the release.
We went ahead and he found several bugs before the clients testing team. He also showed he was very professional and coped with a very stressful day very well even though he was a recent graduate with no experience on a development team. The end result was him getting dragged to the pub immediately after the day and him being accepted as part of the development team by his co-workers long before management had given him a firm offer (which of course they did, and he accepted).
While I would never aim to make a potential employees first day as much of a disaster as that I do think you can give people a basic stress test without letting them know the work they are doing is actually a bit of a dead end that does not matter as much as it could. Unfortunately jobs that pay well are quite often a little stressful at times and it pays to see how people cope with this before you hire them. This can also help the employee since someone who copes well is going to get a better starting offer than someone who can do the job well but looks like they will require more managerial input when they are in post.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, Agnostics sit on the fence about the issue.
I think I am a sort of aggressive agnostic. Before this thread and my desire to read the wikipedia pages about Atheism and Agnosticism I thought I was purely Atheist.
I say aggressive because although I acknowledge I would start believing in a God if I was provided with irrefutable proof of its existence I think anyone who believe in God without that irrefutable proof has some sort of mental failing.
Maybe they have an issue with the world not making sense and people in it being evil to one another. Maybe they want to be evil themselves and religion is an excuse. Maybe they have a need to not see unanswered questions about the world. Who knows, but every one of them is exposing a reluctance to embrace the empirical world as we experience it and so chooses a life of delusion.
The only way to convince me they are not choosing to live in a fantasy world is to offer me the same irrefutable proof of the god the believe in that convinced them.
Makes me think we should eliminate names and parties from ballots altogether and simply have a 100 question questionnaire that you simply select 1 to 5 for or against, and weight how important that issue is to you and then the system matches your answer to the candidate who most closely matches your choices, and counts your vote for them. Never happen of course since it'd gut the power of the current parties and we might actually get people in there who represent what the people truly want, but hey, I can dream...
That only works if the candidates actually really -believe- in their own stated policies, and moreover, actually -act- on them when in power. There's not much point in matching voters' preferences to lies.
This is a brilliant idea. We can also use his method to get rid of the politicians too. Just have a bunch of civil servant that have to implement what ever policies are chosen by the people in the questionnaire.
I had the same story, until Google started asking for my mobile phone number as verification to link to my Google account. IMO, this is over the edge, as in this country you have to use your real identity to get a mobile number.
Well Google ask the rest of us for no such thing so maybe that is something that is legally required of them by your countries government.
Except search and maps, I self host everything (email, websites, Jabber, RSS reader, calendar, etc.) on a dedicated server. There's a small price to pay, but as an example, I have the same email address for the last 10 years. I have all my emails for the last 10 years. There's no worry about privacy. As a programmer, it's useful to run irssi from it under screen, host my own websites, pretty much run anything network oriented..
They better be damn secure as it sound like the place you live would certainly try hacking them. It may also be that by running these services you actually make yourself look like a target to you obviously fairly paranoid government. Is the server physically hosted outside your nation or in your basement as well to be sure the government can't just ask the ISP for physical access?
It sounds like you live in a pretty harsh place privacy wise, did you ever consider moving to the free world instead of blaming Google for following your countries somewhat harsh laws?
On another note why the hell is your country so paranoid? Even forcing people to use the real identity when they buy a mobile sounds a little harsh. Is there an active terrorist organisation trying to overthrow the government or is it just general government paranoia about not getting elected?
On a serious note, I keep hearing that the next World Wars will be fought over resources
Nearly all wars are about resources.
What difference does it make even if these companies are Microsoft-backed? How does that affect the merits of their claim?
It doesn't. But after looking through the foundem site I can state categorically that their claim has no merit. It has no original content and is solely a link farm to other sites content. You could say the same is true for google but that is no bad thing since that is exactly what I expect from a search engine.
If I search for something on Google or Bing I do want links to syndicated content or other search engines to appear, I want the links shown to be to the original producer of the relevant content. This means searching on Bing should not show results that are actually just Google product searches with the same search terms, and vice versa. I know I get this occasionally on Google, but I always just hit the back button immediately. If this happened more often I would try and find a better search engine.
The main issue with the Foundem site that it has no unique content of its own. It only contains links to other peoples stuff. They need to generate their own content, either via a blog about products, or put in some product reviews or something to make it stand out. They also need to not rely on JavaScript in order to browse their site and see any content at all.
The books section does not work without JavaScript. It does not generate an error or a warning. It just does sweet FA when you click any of the buttons. They could at least tell me they need JS enabled when I visit the site or that page. In fact most of sections are the same, they just don't work.
Then there is the issue of the quality of what they return. I am currently toying with the idea of buying an alienware laptop, but they do not return the manufacturer (Dell) in any product searches for alienware laptops. The same is true for every laptop search I have performed. In the case of the alienware laptop this is a major failing since only the dell site has all the options to customise the product. I also checked a few other products like Sony Bravia TV's and the result is often that they miss the cheapest price by only having certain resellers listed.
This company claims on their about us page to be primarily a technology company. The problem is that I find it very difficult to believe since if all the other sites they must index to find their products were designed the same way as theirs then they would not have any content at all.
I have spent an hour or two going over their site. I have also email them with some SEO suggestions. I do not have time to over the other two sites but this seems to be clear case of their technical guy (they only have one apparently) not knowing the first thing about Search Engine Optimisation.
PS - I am not linking to their site as I see no reason to help them get any higher in Google's search results :)
PPS - I know about robots=nofollow, previous PS was just a joke.
There seems to be damned little effort to fix the problems. Quite the opposite, legislators and the media industry are going out of their way to make the problems even worse. The system is broken because it no longer serves its purpose, to protect creators, but rather to protect large-scale media conglomerates who would just as happily, and do just as happily fuck over the artist.
Maybe its worth remembering that copyright law would protect the creator of original works, if the creator did not sell the copyright on their work to the large media conglomerate in return for some cash upfront. I know the music companies have various tricks, but usually the artists in question who make it big are so desperate for fame the sign the contracts put in front of them without even reading them. They usually have no choice anyway as without the vast media PR machine behind them the artist will never make it to the bigtime they desperately seek.
There are always going to be artist who go their own way and ebb out a career through hardwork and producing good music. These artists are not the people featured in these drivel copyright cases though. Most of the suits filed are for top ten populist teen music that has been over engineered by the record companies in question to make it appeal to the mass market. In many cases the band is entirely manufactured by the record company in order to fit a niche in the market (eg - spice girls).
If an artist is not willing to sign over the copyright on a track to the record company the record company are not able to enforce it.
The ads themselves don't bother me. The fact that virtually every website I visit reports to google that I went there does. Sometimes it feels like I might as well be browsing through a google proxy, and just feeding them every url I visit as I go there. This is what they want. And adwords is ubiquitous enough that it almost gives it to them. Add in gmail, youtube, and the other g-services, and google analytics on the backend on a lot of sites that don't have ads and... they are closer than you think.
I find that offensive. I don't want to be stalked and everything I do recorded by google. And googles reply is essentially... "we're not singling you out" doesn't imrprove my view of it. Just because they are using the technology to stalk everyone at once doesn't change anything... if anything it just makes it worse.
You are singling google out though. Every advertising company does this sort of crap. And the battle against any advertising was lost years ago, mainly becuase too many people actually buy stuff as a result of adverts.
The only thing I try and remember is that the adverts I am bombarded with are used to finance me getting a free service. If Google moved away from an advert supported model they would have to charge a subscription to voder their costs. Since I use Google a lot this would cost me a fortune.
The last time I had to use Blizzard's updater software, I found that DISABLING P2P actually sped up my overall download speed. It seems that if you're willing to let them use your bandwidth, they're unwilling to supply you with some of theirs. Net result? Doing Blizzard a favour means you get shafted.
Someone else posted a description further up the thread of why this happens. It is basically because they take ALL your uploading bandwidth and then the acknowledgment packets your PC sends everytime it recieves a packet successfully cannot get back as quickly. Net result is the server resends the same packet again as it does not think you received it. This all happens at the transport layer.
The best thing to do is limit your upload on all P2P networks to about 60%-80% of your available upload bandwith. This should allways allow a large margin for the TCP ACK packets to get back to the servers you are downloading from assuming they are not overloaded too.
Some light reading for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACK_(TCP)
To post stuff on geeky websites like slashdot it helps to have a basic understanding of the internet and its underlying protocols.
It's a typical crap Flash design (why use Flash for menus???), but it works fine on my Moto Droid w/ Flash.
This is actually an interesting question. Previously the answer has always been: Because Graphic Designers love there little pretty widgits and animations which they can only get in house using flash.
I know must techies could probably replicate this effect using a combination of animated gifs that change on rollover and javascript but that is so far outside the ability of most graphic designers. Using Flash have them the ability to knock something up using flash as part of the CS suite and control exactly what it looked like with no technical input required. Whether this is a good idea is not the point (As a techie I do not think it is).
I am hoping that the lack of flash on iPhones and iPads actually forces graphic designers to move away from the love of flash they seem to have had for needless things in the past. Using HTML5 for these things is likely to mean more work for people like me who work on the technical side.
The problem is that these little widgits have often been used as a way for the more arty and less technical graphic design agencies to distinguish themselves in the market. This was in part because it is much easier to show a non-technical client a visual feature than it was to explain how great their site was because it loaded slightly quicker than the old one over the GPON or whatever overpowered crap the deep pocketed client was previously oversold for their office.
The client who owns the Park Place site probably love their little menu animation, however pointless it is. The designer probably charged a fortune for knocking that up and enjoyed doing it to boot. This is a hefty amount of inertia that Jobs has to fight against and it may alienate his core MAC market in the process if it pushes them away from flash applications and into HTML5 which requires more technical ability to create at present.
Anyone who has ever had to work on a pure graphic designers Action-script will probably have an idea of how logical and suited to development their mindset is (ie - not at all).
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
But then maybe they enjoy playing shootem ups for some strange reason. I just joined an online gaming clan with 2 currently active service members who only recently returned to Fort Drum after a long deployment to Iraq (and one who retired a few years ago after 20 odd years service). They are looking forward to this game already.
One came out with probably the sickest comments I have every heard while he was playing (badly) recently: "Thank god I am not this bad at killing people in real life".
In my experience these guys have an incredibly dry sense of humour as this is the only thing that keeps them sane while sitting in a foxhole in the desert.
Now we will steal your gamez
No, you stole the game in the firstplace.
Now cue the million replies from people telling me that using software you have not paid a penny / cent for is not actually theft. Well as a developer I think it is and no amount of drivel posted by people merely trying to justify their own actions will change my mind.
Also, the post seemed to be saying that by making mod-chips illegal the Australian government is stealing games, this is certainly not the case either so if you want to get technical about the usage of the word "steal" then his post is no better.
Some people may argue that stealing stuff that is far too expensive for something that has no real physical form is ok. But the problem here is that almost everything can now be stored in digital form so nothing needs to have any physical form anymore.
Should everything that can be copied easily be free? I hope not as I would not be able to earn a living by writing software, and I would not be alone.
Many people here will one day be reliant on producing something with no physical form in order to make a living. The whole service model idea is not suitable for everything.
I used to use bittorrent and gnutella extensively when I was a student as I felt that my actions were justified due to the price I would have had to pay if I paid for everything I used. Now I have a bit more cash to spend and am on the other side of the fence.
This is just one of the injustices we have to face, many things in life are too expensive as the prices are often set according to the products target market instead of the actual cost of production. While you have very little money something being priced out of your pocket just because someone else will pay that amount seems completely unfair. When you actually have a new and novel product though being free to set your own price becomes a bit more complicated as you also need to make as much money as possible in the world we live in.
By the way, if something is deliberately priced out of your pocket I do think it is theft if you steal it, but I think it is completely understandable and were I on a jury I would never convict you of theft for such an offence. That is one of the great things about juries, we do not have to follow the law as we also get to decide if the law is "just" and find accordingly without setting a legal precedent.
There is the argument that mod-chips are really created to allow people to use the device in a way that the manufacturer never intended (ie - run Linux). I thought about buying one for this reason in the past and actually sort of agree with this. But the poster I am replying to was using the word "gamez" and that to me is only used when referring to "warez" so please lets keep that out of it. If he had posted something sensible about why Australia cracking down on these chips was stupid I would not have replied with this post.
Although this is really the same problem faced by BitTorrent now, because the vast majority of mod-chips are used to enable playing unlicensed copies of software the general public (including legislators) need to be reminded that there are legitimate uses of these devices too.
He is probably just using flashblock so he doesn't see the videos.
Kinda retarded though commenting about an article when he has his own PC mangle the article before he sees it. Mind you with a name like "millwall" what do you expect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C.
(Skip to the section on the fans basically being a bunch of braindead, racist, violent thugs)
What Sony has done is wrong.
In what way, legally or morally?
If you are talking about morally then you need to remember that everyone's morals are different and most peoples change over the course of their lifetime. Expecting a large company to even have any morals let alone ones you share is about as pointless as pissing into a gale. I bet Sony do far worse than this in the name of making a profit.
If you are talking about legally then in at least one jurisdiction you are wrong, thanks to the judges decision it is now perfectly legal (until successfully appealed). I have a felling it is perfectly legal in most other parts of the world too but I am not lawyer.
Sony totally boned the PS3 lifetime, though.
But not in any sort of way they actually care about. The lifetime of a PS3 they care about is the amount of time you can use it to carry on consuming their content (ie, licensed PS3 Games and BlueRay Movies). Other crap you can do with the device that does not make them any money they don't care about.
Even on the PC Linux is a niche market amongst home users that carries very little commercial weight as a result. I bet on the PS3 it was even more so so when the Other OS feature became a security hole in the platform it was simply not worth fixing when it could be removed far more cheaply and the only people it would annoy a few geeks.
Remember also that they did not force you to apply the update so if you wanted to you could have carried on playing all the single player games you already had and never upgrade. The only legitimate customers it affected were people who used the Other OS feature and also played games online.
The simply fact is they removed a feature that most of they customer base did not care less about having. They did this to make sure they carried on getting revenue from games producers. Sony's big selling point to game producers is the enhanced security over the Xbox360 which has more users. If they lost this selling point more and more developers would just abandon the platform and save the money they spend supporting it.
I know the PS3 has better capabilities but that is a selling point to end users, not game development companies since they usually have to support both platforms anyway and have to deal with lowest common denominator hardware. They can improve the rendering a little on the PS3, but the bulk of the gameplay will be identical between PS3 and Xbox360.
The truth is that I am amazed the PS3 is still getting any game development anyway. It has long since been overshadowed by the XBox360 and Wii in terms of userbase. It may have been by far the best console on paper, but it was just priced too high to manufacture. This made the console expensive to buy and even then it was being sold at a loss and still is apparrently, long after the Xbox360 is being sold at a profit per unit.
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/05/sony-still-posts-a-loss-for-every-ps3-sold-ps3-costs-sony-18-more-than-it-costs-you/
This leaves Sony's only hope being that it will take off as 3.5 generation console and creep back into the market as the Xbox360 and Wii start to look dated in terms of technical specs (ie - no BlueRay). This will only work though if Sony can cling onto game developers producing content for it. They can only do this by screaming to the world that their console is the most pirate proof in a big old PR game with the managers of the game development companies. PR games are very rarely based on fact anyway so whether the Other OS feature actually made it more secure is largely irrelevant.
Personally I would prefer they sub-contract prisoners to do manual labor which nowadays is outsourced to other countries and pay them the same (so that companies are attracted).
And then, charge prisoners some rent from their hard earn cash.
That way tax payers do not have to pay to maintain those bastards.
This is a really nice idea that I have often thought would be a brilliant solution. Unfortunately it does not factor in just how bloody expensive prisons are.
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/statsbrief/cost.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_it_cost_to_house_a_prisoner_in_2008
This basically means that the third world will always be able to undercut slave labour incarcerated in the first world unless we can bring the cost of prison down by one hell of a lot. The best we can hope for is to reduce the amount of our taxes spent on prisons.
Then there is the problem that some of the scum bags we lock up cannot be trusted to do sweet FA. They are incredibly violent, will turn any tool you give them into a weapon, and are just lucky enough not to be caught doing anything that earns them a seat on old smoky. We have to find a way of dealing with these elements of our society.
Personally I am one of these liberal hippies being discussed so I would like to find away of stopping them get like this in the first place. That is by far the best way of limiting the amount we spend. There will always be some of them who slip through though and so some method of protecting the rest of us from them will always be needed and I am yet to understand how slapping an ankle bracelet on them will do that adequately.
A tag is all very well for knowing where the little critters were after the fact and determining if they can have committed a particular crime. As a law abiding member of society this is pretty much bugger all good to me if I am murdered by a socio-path wearing a tag.
No, what is needed is to actually deprive some elements of society of their liberty for my safety. Tags are only useful for people we are 99.9% sure about not re-offending or people who have finished their sentence but we still want to keep tabs on because we think they will re-offend but are unable to incarcerate for any longer without proof.
Making your mobile platform incompatible with anything already out there is a choice, and not a choice I agree with.
Do you make phones? If not your opinion is worthless as you are not a Google customer for Android.
Google have to do what the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola and whoever else want. That means they want to be able to build a phone manufacturer specific "look and feel" on top of android that makes their android unique. They usually do not want to open source this work because these are hardware manufacturers. Companies that design their own hardware are generally reluctant to embrace open source for some reason.
That rules out OpenJDK (also, OpenJDK did not exist when Android was initially developed according to a footnote here: http://blog.headius.com/2010/08/my-thoughts-on-oracle-v-google.html)
So that leaves building on a Sun / Oracle product and paying them revenue. This has two problems:
1) Oracle's director is apparently a personal friend of Steve Jobs so Oracle would overcharge Google or demand that each hardware company had to negotiate with Oracle directly for the rights to use Android. This would make the platform a joke.
2) This would eat into either Google or the hardware vendors profits. Google might be able to take the hit, but companies like Motorola (The handset division anyway) cannot.
Mind you, the British said something similar before the Second World War...
Actually, we said it would be suicidal due to our naval power. Unfortunately German had long recognised British sea power and had been building a pretty decent navy of its own with a strong emphasis on stealth.
The same now applies to the US. While you could blockade the US fairly easily with a fleet or two of submarines I have a sneaky feeling it would not take very long for the US to sink them all and then bomb the crap out of whatever country tried it.
Around here, the farmers tend to do pretty well.
Of course they do, they are directly subsidised by government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy
The main benefit of assigning dynamic IP addresses to consumer-like end users is that it's a lot easier to administer them - you don't have to explain to the user how to configure the static IP address into their router, or deal with the help desk call when they change something in their Windows 98 box or networked laser printer or 68030 Macintosh or Linux machine that's using KDE instead of GNOME or whatever. You tell them "Plug it on, watch the lights blink, DHCP magic happens, you're done."
You can still use DHCP with static IP addresses so it makes no difference at all to the user whether they have a static or dynamic IP in terms of ease of setup.
The sooner we get to IPv6, the better. If not, if someone wants a static IP, much less a /29 subnet with five usable host IPs, they will be paying through the nose, for it just due to artificial scarcity.
Well thats certainly not the case at the moment. I just found a subnet that size thay my company never knew it had (we only have about internet 40 ip addresses total). We as company do not pay for ip addresses at all and we only rent half a rack in a datadenter.
It seems to me that if they were in that shorter supply we would be being charged a nominal fee for each one yet that does not seem to be the case. Is my company unique in this? We have been with our current datacentre for years so maybe this as many ip addresses as you need deal is a legacy thing from years ago.
I know individuals are charged per static IP but I have a feeling that is just another way ISP's make money. Is there really any benefit to making everyone have a dynamic IP by default? i know in ths US static IP's seem to be the norm.
I have been hearing people say we are running out of IP addresses for 15 years so am getting a bit skeptical.
Most of it can be done in pre-5 HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
The problem is that f you do it in these you are forced to make your source available. If you use flash you can protect you intellectual property. This might not matter to most of the people on slashdot but it matter a lot more to companies and they will always be the drivers of flash's continued usage.
I work in the elearning sphere and another reason flash totally dominates in the world of online learning content is that it enables you to hid the correct answers to end of module tests and such. Sure I could do the same thing with some crazy javascript encryption or something but why bother when there is such an easy tool out there that enables me to keep my source closed easily. Some people will always be able to cheat but this is only about stopping 99% of people (I reckon less than 1% of IT users could reverse engineer a flash file back to actionscript).
HTML5 is a nice idea, but many people out there will never adopt it as it unless it supports some sort of way to close off your source code from prying eyes.
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
In my experience of hiring developers there are more out there who are comfortable using MySQL than there are using Postgre, that makes it cheaper to run since new hires are more likely to be able to come in with a fair knowledge you only have to build on rather than train them up in a completely new SQL syntax.
MySQL has a wider installed user base so unless Postgre is identical to use to this or T-SQL then deploying it will involve some retraining.
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.
I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.
Yup, sure seems like MySQL is in real safe hands now.
what stop them from firing you right at the end of the probation period and getting free work.
Usually the main problem is that the code in question needs further work. It is very rare that developers are worth the time it takes to train them for the first 6 months. When you audit code written by people on their trial period before offering them a full time post you are usually just ensuring that it does not contain any glaring great screw ups.
The project you give them will usually be very self contained but with a few external things they need to check in order to see how they deal with it. The main reason for this is that at the end of the day you have to audit it so the candidate is fresh in everyone's mind when the final decision is being made. In my experience you will want to give a potential candidate a decision very quickly after his evaluation day. If they were rubbish they probably did not get that far so you do not wan them to get another offer while you make up your mind. If you have given them a project that involved working on more than 5 or 6 files you have to go through every last line that is different and check it before the code is checked in and that can be a right pain in the arse.
Much better is giving them a dummy project that is going nowhere but builds on a simple area of your existing system. This way they have to look a the existing code and plan their approach but you get an easy audit at 5:30 when they leave.
I am also fond of giving them a project they have very little chance of completing in the time allotted in order to see how they cope with pressure. Obviously you do not count the fact they did not finish it against them but seeing how they cope with an unrealistic deadline is far more valuable than the code the produce ever could have been.
The best employee I have ever had the pleasure to work with came to do a trial day on a day which turned out to be a fallback beta release day to a client. Since the program was supposed to have been handed across to the clients test team 2 days earlier but they rushed in some last minute changes we had no choice but to release on that day. We also knew he was good from his interview so we did not want the candidate to get another offer if we mucked him about cancelling with less than a weeks notice. Then our technical lead got sick on the day of the release.
We went ahead and he found several bugs before the clients testing team. He also showed he was very professional and coped with a very stressful day very well even though he was a recent graduate with no experience on a development team. The end result was him getting dragged to the pub immediately after the day and him being accepted as part of the development team by his co-workers long before management had given him a firm offer (which of course they did, and he accepted).
While I would never aim to make a potential employees first day as much of a disaster as that I do think you can give people a basic stress test without letting them know the work they are doing is actually a bit of a dead end that does not matter as much as it could. Unfortunately jobs that pay well are quite often a little stressful at times and it pays to see how people cope with this before you hire them. This can also help the employee since someone who copes well is going to get a better starting offer than someone who can do the job well but looks like they will require more managerial input when they are in post.