The question is more of how much can the PC gaming community can take. First, it was more intrusive DRM, then activation, now its having to be online just to play a single player campaign.
No, the question is what alternatives are there and can EA buy them and then bring them into line. EA is always to go behave like this. Even if you have a different idea of how a game should play you still need EA or their ilk to distribute the physical copies.
The most promising invention to end this may well actually turn out to be Steam since they seam to have a much better attitude to their customers but that does not quite seem to have reached the penetration it needs to do this.
My argument against those mandatory online services is simple: What if the company ceases to exist or ceases to support the product? Good bye multiplayer (or even singleplayer)? Today I could still fire up a game of Starcraft, locally or through the internet, I needn't connect with BattleNet (let's assume it ever went away), I could play SC for as long as there is TCP/IP v4 around. Dunno if it works with v6, someone would have to try.
Basically, tough shit. They make a product you can use it with the strings they attach or not bother. That is how things work.
This is probably also by design anyway since by retiring the servers for old games at an opportune time they can force you to buy a copy of C&C 5 when that is released. How do you think they have managed to sell what is basically the same game play over and over again. I have probably played every C&C game from the first Dune game they did in the 90s through to the latest Tiberian Sun. There really are not that many differences between them apart from the graphics getting ever prettier. I know this is true of a great many games but that is the reality of what the gaming industry has become.
If they really have taken this decision as a measure to prevent piracy I am not sure why the summary above is so sure it will fail. Sure, the game will still be pirated and will still be available on the Pirate Bay in no time however this measure will probably reduce piracy.
If I was required to buy a legal licensed copy of the game to play online I probably would. The alternative is I download a hack that enables me to play a pirated copy, but if they ever patch the game or server to detect this hack that is massive risk as they have a permanent record me having used a hack.
My favourite online game is Americas Army. If you do well on my server I will look you up on this site (http://www.aa-accounthistory.com/). If I see a linked banned account, your gone and added to my server as a MAC ban. Since this history site links accounts by IP, MAC and the GUID associated with your account getting a banned account listed on it can be a right pain. To be thoroughly clear you may need to change you IP if you have a static address and also use a MAC changer (or buy a new network card).
To play any game well online takes practice. If you are going to download a pirated copy and then play until you get caught and your account banned that practice is wasted since any sort of online league play is out of the question. Also, if they implement a similar history tracking site then you may find you a new legal account from a bought copy is also banned as it is associated with a hacked previous illegal copy. There is nothing legally wrong with this as the shrink wrapped licence you have to agree to when you install the software probably mentions this could happen.
Ultimately this is what they are aiming for, they do not want to stop all piracy of their game since that is obviously impossible. They do want to keep it to a minimum by preventing illegal copies from being able to play online and hence they people using them will miss out on a large part of the gameplay. This is a major reason why game companies are moving towards games that involve an online component, it gives people an added reason to buy a legit copy.
I have also decided to move to Windows 7 directly and bypass Vista. I have used Vista on other peoples laptops, and I do not hate it, I just never had a PC that would do it justice. Now I have recently upgraded I wanted to put an OS on it that took advantage of all the memory (the only copies of XP I have are 32bit so cannot address all 4Gb)
So far I like Windows 7. It has not crashed since day one and that was a driver conflict. I really like the new taskbar and quick launch being combined. I have not even turned off UAC since it does not annoy me, I like being asked every time a piece of software wants to change my system. I like the ability to change each applications volume separately. All in all it seems a pretty good OS.
I know that this will now elicit responses of all the applications I could download to do all this in Windows XP, but why should I bother having programs from several different sources installed when you can be sure they were not tested all running on the same machine by their respective authors.
That is not to say I will be giving up my Gentoo box since many things I prefer to do in Linux, but I actually do prefer Windows 7 to Windows XP. As soon as the final build is out, I will be removing Windows XP and dual booting Windows 7 with Gentoo Linux set as the default.
If I do I literally walk around voraciously hungry.
So? If you have all this self control it should not be a problem to feel hungry and not eat.
Maybe I do feel hunger differently but I do this all the time. I also have a desk job and work 10 hour days, although my commute is only 2 hours. I noticed I was putting on weight and I decided to change my diet, now all I eat for lunch is a salad sandwich. My work colleagues might give me shit over how dull my lunch is, but they all pay for gym membership which is something I refuse to do.
Exactly. Nothing is more painful than being paired up with a "developer" that is trying to code using a mouse and having them work at half to quarter speed of a person who actually knows how to use keyboard shortcuts.
I used to think like this too. Then you learn a whole different set of skills to lead a team of developers as there will be some that are slower than you. If you find the doing something differently or less efficiently annoying you are doomed to spending the rest of your life at the bottom rung of the career ladder.
Maybe you get paired with "developers" who still use the keyboard in the hope that they will learn something from you, but that still requires them to learn, not you to drum it into them. The fact that you put developer in quotes actually says a lot.
Back on topic I would also say screw the mouse, just spend all your money on a decent keyboard and the cheapest mouse you can get one grubby hand on since you will hardly ever use it in time. People have to get there on there own though, not be forced into things.
The most important thing for me in a game is given away by the name: gameplay.
Most of the games I play the storyline is a limp excuse to justify gratuitous violence of one kind or another. I could be shooting aliens (quake, etc), running people over (gta) or marshalling my troops (command & conquer). In all of them though the things I appreciate are a challenge that is hard but not too hard, and some variation in the way the to achieve each objective.
The vague storyline is really just there as a pretence to the action. A game can have the best storyline in the world but if the gameplay is dull or non-existent then I am not going to play it for very long. I would go so far as to say that storyline is the single least important aspect of a computer game. One of the most popular online games I play is Americas Army 2, and that has no storyline what so ever.
I do on the other hand like pretty graphics, but even they are not as important as making the gameplay addictive and challenging.
Perhaps the system should present an audio api that makes it easy to select a volume somewhere between nothing and the current system volume (and provide high quality attenuation based on that setting), but I really don't want apps changing the system setting.
Well I do so lets just face the fact that it is personal preference and their is no right and wrong way to do it apart from making sure it is configurable. What default you choose is irrelevant as someone will always think it was the wrong choice.
...because it's actually not working - Gmail spam filter recently became very ineffective - i have to classify about 5-10 Viagra spams daily. (Google, have you heard of it? geez!) then it occurred to me that a while ago Gmail captcha was cracked, so I imagine spammers send themselves hundreds of spams only to classify them as "non-spam". - as a consequence, spams are now slipping through the crowd-sourced filter because the crowd is infiltrated. c'mon google this can't possibly that hard to fix!
Actually I think they already have. I noticed the same thing only I was receiving a far greater volume. I think I suddenly went to a couple of hundred emails per day, some getting as far as my spam folder, some getting in to my inbox. Now just this weekend I noticed that this has now ceased and the number in my spam folder is working its way back down as they are deleted.
Microsoft don't even bother localising the software the the UK market, it's the exact same software as the US version.
Which is handy, as I plan on getting a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate sent to me in the UK by a friend in the states. That way I may have to pay some customs charges, but they will not add up to the ridiculous price difference. Hell, now I think about it I might just get him to email me the product key and throw the contents of the DVD on one of my work FTP sites we have for clients.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
Because you being sick is actually societies problem. Firstly, it makes you unable to work. Also, depending on what is up you may be contagious. People who have no healthcare are more likely to not seek treatment since it will cost them money, that will probably leave them ill for longer. So more time off work or more time when you go to work and infect your colleagues.
Anyway, the real con here is that the current medicare system is ridiculously expensive due to the way private insurance companies get to determine risk. By setting up a public, not for profit body that will compete with the insurance companies the idea is to drive down the cost of people getting health insurance. This is why the Republicans are so up in arms, they take campaign donations from the existing insurance companies that are going to suddenly have someone undercutting them if this bill is passed.
So basically, they're getting a random sample of their user base to beta test updates in the wild for them. I hope there's some kind of warning about this while using it.
Since none of us actually read the licence agreement there probably is:)
The problem will never really be fixed in PHP until some framework or at least methodology wins out as the PHP framework of choice.
It'd be nice if the PHP guys picked one and put their backing behind it, maybe even included it by default like they did APC for caching.
Does the Zend Framework count as a framework? In which case they have picked one, it has just not been universally excepted yet.
There is however another issue. Languages like PHP and ASP were originally designed to make creating a server side code driven web site fairly easy. They succeeded so people who were not well grounded in writing code started dabbling in projects that were over their head, they just did not know it. These people had never heard of things like buffer overruns so they tended to trust the inputs their program was given. The program worked when given the correct inputs, and you validated all the inputs in JavaScript so it must be fine.
We now have to deal with the legacy of this which is many developers in the marketplace with years of experience at writing code and have no idea they are missing a large part of their education.
As an example, I saw some lovely code recently where the developer had used prepared statements all through his code, but still left it wide open to SQL injection by not using variables in the prepared statements. He just prepared entire strings already containing the relevant form variables concatenated with the SQL. Genius.
The fact is that programming in any language is complex, and takes many years to learn how to do well. To tell between a good developer and a bad developer though also takes years, since you have to learn the pitfalls to recognise them.
As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.
This article is about IE8, which you do not appear to have used. The developer tools in IE8 are pretty decent, certainly far better than what comes with Mozilla Firefox by default. For starters it now also colour-codes the source code as well instead of just passing it out to notepad. I know they should have done this years ago, but we can at least recognise that they have finally done it.
I work on a very complicated, hosted web application and I have yet to find anything broken by IE8. In contrast IE7 broke a whole bunch of stuff so with this in mind I have been testing our application on IE8 since the first beta came out. Now that it has finally been released as stable I have installed it on a few of my machines and it seems to have some nice other features.
I really like the ability to highlight text then search Google for it using the right click menu. I know this is just robbed from Mozilla, buy they do say copying is the highest form of flattery.
I also like the ability to highlight text then see it translated into a different language in a little popup. Hopefully this is not patented so other browsers can now copy it but I am probably being overly optimistic here.
So all in all it is not a bad browser. On the other hand, this "Get the Facts" page did make me laugh as some of it is utter baloney. Suggesting IE8 is the only browser that offers you privacy seems to completely ignore Chrome and its incognito mode.
I also had to giggle at the performance bit since there is no way IE8 matches Chrome in real world Javascript performance. I have not benchmarked this, but in the AJAX applications I have to use on a daily basis Chrome seems more snappy and I always value how fast something feels over some theoretical benchmark any day.
And finally - they aren't comparing with Opera. Probably because they won't dare to do it!
Or they choose to not bother comparing with a browser that is not really a competitor in the desktop market. I know it has been around for years and has loads of great features and is probably more standards compliant and whatever else, but it has no market share on the desktop amongst non-geeks.
I have never once been asked by a client to ensure a site works in Opera. I keep it on my machine and test in it to be thorough. On the other hand I do get asked about Firefox a lot, Safari occasionally and Chrome once or twice. Obviously nobody would ask about IE since that is still the defacto web browser on the desktop.
The summary makes it sound like Opera is making a last ditch effort to stay relevant, which is clearly not the case. Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.
I am really surprised by that link, so thanks.
Does anyone know why the Windows Mobile version of IE does not seem to appear on the list though? I find it very difficult to believe it lags behind Sony in the Other section. Although after discussing this in our office we did just find that both of us with Windows Mobile phones have installed Opera so maybe it is not that surprising.
Internet access in any industrialized country is NOT expensive....
Do you actually know how much it costs to get connected to the internet if you live in an area of rural Britain? Is it not the case that in rural areas BT charge you the cost of laying telephone cable to your property if it is excessive? I know they used to. This would make internet access very expensive to install. Mobile phone signals are also pretty sporadic in many rural areas to this cannot be relied on either.
... and people should not be forced to pay money so that someone else can have a better luxury than they currently have.
I personally believe that all children should be educated. I do not believe that it is a luxury even though no child will die from not going to school. I also do not consider a childs education to only happen in schools.
When I was growing up children were expected to spend time in libraries reading and improving their chances in life. In rural areas roving libraries were an important part of letting working class rural children have access to books. Now some people consider books to be a luxury, and to an adult they largely are, but not to a child.
In the world of tomorrow that our children will have to inhabit, having grown up with access to the internet at home is also going to also be vital in childrens education. The fact is that even now being unable to use the internet is major disadvantage in the job market as more job are solely advertised online. In future the internet is going to become even more vital to fit in with society.
A major factor in this is government information. More and more information released by government which we need (ie - information on what is legal or not) is only going to be available online to save money. Those services that used to be provided by rural post offices are going to have to be provided some other way soon as no company is going to leave them all open just for convenience when they are losing money.
This is all just today. I have no idea what this country will be like in 20 years? Do you?
Oh, and I've had a job since I was 10 and paid for virtually everything I've ever had since then, just a little fyi...
Just a little made up bullshit more like. The largest single expense I have is my rent, were you paying rent at 10? If not then someone was supporting you. Even if you were paying rent at 10 you can be damn sure it was not market value, since at 10 you are unable to legally work so would never earn enough.
While you have probably been a great deal more self-sufficient than some people, bear in mind that you must of also had plenty of support, not all of it financial.
I know in my case that I was allowed free access to the internet from a young age since I could go and play overnight in a research lab where my mother worked as a cleaner. This helped foster an interest in computers, and helped me end up where I am today.
I would like to see my kids grow up in a country where every child has the same opportunities. Depriving some kids of home internet access just because their parents cannot afford it does not help anyone in the world to come since children who come from deprived backgrounds are far more likely to turn to crime.
The economic motivation is to be able to compete in the new market.
Statements like that are only worth anything if you end them with how much the market is worth. Being able to compete in a market worth nothing is also worth nothing.
I wanted to point out the eurofighter because it wouldn't even fly in a straight line without constant computer intervention. I'm sure it's not the only example.
Weird though. They have added support to FFMPEG for a format that is seriously encumbered by patents but not bothered licensing the patents in question. Google have used their code but have also applied to legally use the patents unlike the FFMPEG project. Now people are kicking up a fuss.
Is this not the case that the LGPL is actually being used to enforce the illegal use of someone else's technology and simply try and pursue a political war against software patents. I would love to see this one argued in court.
Disclosure and personal rant: I am a software developer with no great love for software patents or lawyers.
From what I gather from lurking on the FFmpeg developers list, they care about being credited and the source being available including modifications. Basically the terms of the lgpl v2.1.
Any chance of a link to back this up? If you do read the mailing list it would be useful to those of us who do not have time to read every open source projects development list.
The simple fact is that if the FFMPEG developers all have a consensus that they should enforce the LGPL in this case then they can probably just ask Google to stop using their code. Google can then either develop their own MPEG playing code or can throw money at the FFMPEG project until the developers decide they would all prefer the BSD licence anyway. Maybe not every developer would take kindly to this sort of bribery but the question is whether enough would that the remainder of the project that could not be switched or dual licensed could simply be rewritten with Google's financial backing.
The first footprint was at the bottom of the ladder. How many times did Armstrong and Aldrin go up and down that ladder? Face it, the first footprint is gone.
Ok, so we might not be talking about the first footprint, we might actually be talking about the first human tracks on the moon. Unless we go and remove them they will most likely be there for millennia. I personally like the idea of leaving them for a future generation if possible, and it is certainly possible since the moon is plenty big enough to simply land somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is more of how much can the PC gaming community can take. First, it was more intrusive DRM, then activation, now its having to be online just to play a single player campaign.
No, the question is what alternatives are there and can EA buy them and then bring them into line. EA is always to go behave like this. Even if you have a different idea of how a game should play you still need EA or their ilk to distribute the physical copies.
The most promising invention to end this may well actually turn out to be Steam since they seam to have a much better attitude to their customers but that does not quite seem to have reached the penetration it needs to do this.
My argument against those mandatory online services is simple: What if the company ceases to exist or ceases to support the product? Good bye multiplayer (or even singleplayer)? Today I could still fire up a game of Starcraft, locally or through the internet, I needn't connect with BattleNet (let's assume it ever went away), I could play SC for as long as there is TCP/IP v4 around. Dunno if it works with v6, someone would have to try.
Basically, tough shit. They make a product you can use it with the strings they attach or not bother. That is how things work.
This is probably also by design anyway since by retiring the servers for old games at an opportune time they can force you to buy a copy of C&C 5 when that is released. How do you think they have managed to sell what is basically the same game play over and over again. I have probably played every C&C game from the first Dune game they did in the 90s through to the latest Tiberian Sun. There really are not that many differences between them apart from the graphics getting ever prettier. I know this is true of a great many games but that is the reality of what the gaming industry has become.
If they really have taken this decision as a measure to prevent piracy I am not sure why the summary above is so sure it will fail. Sure, the game will still be pirated and will still be available on the Pirate Bay in no time however this measure will probably reduce piracy.
If I was required to buy a legal licensed copy of the game to play online I probably would. The alternative is I download a hack that enables me to play a pirated copy, but if they ever patch the game or server to detect this hack that is massive risk as they have a permanent record me having used a hack.
My favourite online game is Americas Army. If you do well on my server I will look you up on this site (http://www.aa-accounthistory.com/). If I see a linked banned account, your gone and added to my server as a MAC ban. Since this history site links accounts by IP, MAC and the GUID associated with your account getting a banned account listed on it can be a right pain. To be thoroughly clear you may need to change you IP if you have a static address and also use a MAC changer (or buy a new network card).
To play any game well online takes practice. If you are going to download a pirated copy and then play until you get caught and your account banned that practice is wasted since any sort of online league play is out of the question. Also, if they implement a similar history tracking site then you may find you a new legal account from a bought copy is also banned as it is associated with a hacked previous illegal copy. There is nothing legally wrong with this as the shrink wrapped licence you have to agree to when you install the software probably mentions this could happen.
Ultimately this is what they are aiming for, they do not want to stop all piracy of their game since that is obviously impossible. They do want to keep it to a minimum by preventing illegal copies from being able to play online and hence they people using them will miss out on a large part of the gameplay. This is a major reason why game companies are moving towards games that involve an online component, it gives people an added reason to buy a legit copy.
I have also decided to move to Windows 7 directly and bypass Vista. I have used Vista on other peoples laptops, and I do not hate it, I just never had a PC that would do it justice. Now I have recently upgraded I wanted to put an OS on it that took advantage of all the memory (the only copies of XP I have are 32bit so cannot address all 4Gb)
So far I like Windows 7. It has not crashed since day one and that was a driver conflict. I really like the new taskbar and quick launch being combined. I have not even turned off UAC since it does not annoy me, I like being asked every time a piece of software wants to change my system. I like the ability to change each applications volume separately. All in all it seems a pretty good OS.
I know that this will now elicit responses of all the applications I could download to do all this in Windows XP, but why should I bother having programs from several different sources installed when you can be sure they were not tested all running on the same machine by their respective authors.
That is not to say I will be giving up my Gentoo box since many things I prefer to do in Linux, but I actually do prefer Windows 7 to Windows XP. As soon as the final build is out, I will be removing Windows XP and dual booting Windows 7 with Gentoo Linux set as the default.
If I do I literally walk around voraciously hungry.
So? If you have all this self control it should not be a problem to feel hungry and not eat.
Maybe I do feel hunger differently but I do this all the time. I also have a desk job and work 10 hour days, although my commute is only 2 hours. I noticed I was putting on weight and I decided to change my diet, now all I eat for lunch is a salad sandwich. My work colleagues might give me shit over how dull my lunch is, but they all pay for gym membership which is something I refuse to do.
...how pilots experienced in the area and are still alive know that these downdrafts can rip the wings off an airplane?
Parachutes?
Exactly. Nothing is more painful than being paired up with a "developer" that is trying to code using a mouse and having them work at half to quarter speed of a person who actually knows how to use keyboard shortcuts.
I used to think like this too. Then you learn a whole different set of skills to lead a team of developers as there will be some that are slower than you. If you find the doing something differently or less efficiently annoying you are doomed to spending the rest of your life at the bottom rung of the career ladder.
Maybe you get paired with "developers" who still use the keyboard in the hope that they will learn something from you, but that still requires them to learn, not you to drum it into them. The fact that you put developer in quotes actually says a lot.
Back on topic I would also say screw the mouse, just spend all your money on a decent keyboard and the cheapest mouse you can get one grubby hand on since you will hardly ever use it in time. People have to get there on there own though, not be forced into things.
Because it did. Two people have even been sent to prison for it after they tried it on a member of the royal family.
Actually I couldnt care less about the storyline.
The most important thing for me in a game is given away by the name: gameplay.
Most of the games I play the storyline is a limp excuse to justify gratuitous violence of one kind or another. I could be shooting aliens (quake, etc), running people over (gta) or marshalling my troops (command & conquer). In all of them though the things I appreciate are a challenge that is hard but not too hard, and some variation in the way the to achieve each objective.
The vague storyline is really just there as a pretence to the action. A game can have the best storyline in the world but if the gameplay is dull or non-existent then I am not going to play it for very long. I would go so far as to say that storyline is the single least important aspect of a computer game. One of the most popular online games I play is Americas Army 2, and that has no storyline what so ever.
I do on the other hand like pretty graphics, but even they are not as important as making the gameplay addictive and challenging.
Perhaps the system should present an audio api that makes it easy to select a volume somewhere between nothing and the current system volume (and provide high quality attenuation based on that setting), but I really don't want apps changing the system setting.
Well I do so lets just face the fact that it is personal preference and their is no right and wrong way to do it apart from making sure it is configurable. What default you choose is irrelevant as someone will always think it was the wrong choice.
...because it's actually not working - Gmail spam filter recently became very ineffective - i have to classify about 5-10 Viagra spams daily. (Google, have you heard of it? geez!) then it occurred to me that a while ago Gmail captcha was cracked, so I imagine spammers send themselves hundreds of spams only to classify them as "non-spam". - as a consequence, spams are now slipping through the crowd-sourced filter because the crowd is infiltrated. c'mon google this can't possibly that hard to fix!
Actually I think they already have. I noticed the same thing only I was receiving a far greater volume. I think I suddenly went to a couple of hundred emails per day, some getting as far as my spam folder, some getting in to my inbox. Now just this weekend I noticed that this has now ceased and the number in my spam folder is working its way back down as they are deleted.
When you go live can you learn to read please :)
Microsoft don't even bother localising the software the the UK market, it's the exact same software as the US version.
Which is handy, as I plan on getting a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate sent to me in the UK by a friend in the states. That way I may have to pay some customs charges, but they will not add up to the ridiculous price difference. Hell, now I think about it I might just get him to email me the product key and throw the contents of the DVD on one of my work FTP sites we have for clients.
Isn't the internet a wonderful thing.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
Because you being sick is actually societies problem. Firstly, it makes you unable to work. Also, depending on what is up you may be contagious. People who have no healthcare are more likely to not seek treatment since it will cost them money, that will probably leave them ill for longer. So more time off work or more time when you go to work and infect your colleagues.
Anyway, the real con here is that the current medicare system is ridiculously expensive due to the way private insurance companies get to determine risk. By setting up a public, not for profit body that will compete with the insurance companies the idea is to drive down the cost of people getting health insurance. This is why the Republicans are so up in arms, they take campaign donations from the existing insurance companies that are going to suddenly have someone undercutting them if this bill is passed.
So basically, they're getting a random sample of their user base to beta test updates in the wild for them. I hope there's some kind of warning about this while using it.
Since none of us actually read the licence agreement there probably is :)
The problem will never really be fixed in PHP until some framework or at least methodology wins out as the PHP framework of choice.
It'd be nice if the PHP guys picked one and put their backing behind it, maybe even included it by default like they did APC for caching.
Does the Zend Framework count as a framework? In which case they have picked one, it has just not been universally excepted yet.
There is however another issue. Languages like PHP and ASP were originally designed to make creating a server side code driven web site fairly easy. They succeeded so people who were not well grounded in writing code started dabbling in projects that were over their head, they just did not know it. These people had never heard of things like buffer overruns so they tended to trust the inputs their program was given. The program worked when given the correct inputs, and you validated all the inputs in JavaScript so it must be fine.
We now have to deal with the legacy of this which is many developers in the marketplace with years of experience at writing code and have no idea they are missing a large part of their education.
As an example, I saw some lovely code recently where the developer had used prepared statements all through his code, but still left it wide open to SQL injection by not using variables in the prepared statements. He just prepared entire strings already containing the relevant form variables concatenated with the SQL. Genius.
The fact is that programming in any language is complex, and takes many years to learn how to do well. To tell between a good developer and a bad developer though also takes years, since you have to learn the pitfalls to recognise them.
As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.
This article is about IE8, which you do not appear to have used. The developer tools in IE8 are pretty decent, certainly far better than what comes with Mozilla Firefox by default. For starters it now also colour-codes the source code as well instead of just passing it out to notepad. I know they should have done this years ago, but we can at least recognise that they have finally done it.
I work on a very complicated, hosted web application and I have yet to find anything broken by IE8. In contrast IE7 broke a whole bunch of stuff so with this in mind I have been testing our application on IE8 since the first beta came out. Now that it has finally been released as stable I have installed it on a few of my machines and it seems to have some nice other features.
I really like the ability to highlight text then search Google for it using the right click menu. I know this is just robbed from Mozilla, buy they do say copying is the highest form of flattery.
I also like the ability to highlight text then see it translated into a different language in a little popup. Hopefully this is not patented so other browsers can now copy it but I am probably being overly optimistic here.
So all in all it is not a bad browser. On the other hand, this "Get the Facts" page did make me laugh as some of it is utter baloney. Suggesting IE8 is the only browser that offers you privacy seems to completely ignore Chrome and its incognito mode.
I also had to giggle at the performance bit since there is no way IE8 matches Chrome in real world Javascript performance. I have not benchmarked this, but in the AJAX applications I have to use on a daily basis Chrome seems more snappy and I always value how fast something feels over some theoretical benchmark any day.
And finally - they aren't comparing with Opera. Probably because they won't dare to do it!
Or they choose to not bother comparing with a browser that is not really a competitor in the desktop market. I know it has been around for years and has loads of great features and is probably more standards compliant and whatever else, but it has no market share on the desktop amongst non-geeks.
I have never once been asked by a client to ensure a site works in Opera. I keep it on my machine and test in it to be thorough. On the other hand I do get asked about Firefox a lot, Safari occasionally and Chrome once or twice. Obviously nobody would ask about IE since that is still the defacto web browser on the desktop.
The summary makes it sound like Opera is making a last ditch effort to stay relevant, which is clearly not the case. Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.
I am really surprised by that link, so thanks.
Does anyone know why the Windows Mobile version of IE does not seem to appear on the list though? I find it very difficult to believe it lags behind Sony in the Other section. Although after discussing this in our office we did just find that both of us with Windows Mobile phones have installed Opera so maybe it is not that surprising.
Internet access in any industrialized country is NOT expensive ....
Do you actually know how much it costs to get connected to the internet if you live in an area of rural Britain? Is it not the case that in rural areas BT charge you the cost of laying telephone cable to your property if it is excessive? I know they used to. This would make internet access very expensive to install. Mobile phone signals are also pretty sporadic in many rural areas to this cannot be relied on either.
... and people should not be forced to pay money so that someone else can have a better luxury than they currently have.
I personally believe that all children should be educated. I do not believe that it is a luxury even though no child will die from not going to school. I also do not consider a childs education to only happen in schools.
When I was growing up children were expected to spend time in libraries reading and improving their chances in life. In rural areas roving libraries were an important part of letting working class rural children have access to books. Now some people consider books to be a luxury, and to an adult they largely are, but not to a child.
In the world of tomorrow that our children will have to inhabit, having grown up with access to the internet at home is also going to also be vital in childrens education. The fact is that even now being unable to use the internet is major disadvantage in the job market as more job are solely advertised online. In future the internet is going to become even more vital to fit in with society.
A major factor in this is government information. More and more information released by government which we need (ie - information on what is legal or not) is only going to be available online to save money. Those services that used to be provided by rural post offices are going to have to be provided some other way soon as no company is going to leave them all open just for convenience when they are losing money.
This is all just today. I have no idea what this country will be like in 20 years? Do you?
Oh, and I've had a job since I was 10 and paid for virtually everything I've ever had since then, just a little fyi...
Just a little made up bullshit more like. The largest single expense I have is my rent, were you paying rent at 10? If not then someone was supporting you. Even if you were paying rent at 10 you can be damn sure it was not market value, since at 10 you are unable to legally work so would never earn enough.
While you have probably been a great deal more self-sufficient than some people, bear in mind that you must of also had plenty of support, not all of it financial.
I know in my case that I was allowed free access to the internet from a young age since I could go and play overnight in a research lab where my mother worked as a cleaner. This helped foster an interest in computers, and helped me end up where I am today.
I would like to see my kids grow up in a country where every child has the same opportunities. Depriving some kids of home internet access just because their parents cannot afford it does not help anyone in the world to come since children who come from deprived backgrounds are far more likely to turn to crime.
The economic motivation is to be able to compete in the new market.
Statements like that are only worth anything if you end them with how much the market is worth. Being able to compete in a market worth nothing is also worth nothing.
Thanks for the clarification.
I wanted to point out the eurofighter because it wouldn't even fly in a straight line without constant computer intervention. I'm sure it's not the only example.
You might find this interesting reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability
Thanks for the links, very informative.
Weird though. They have added support to FFMPEG for a format that is seriously encumbered by patents but not bothered licensing the patents in question. Google have used their code but have also applied to legally use the patents unlike the FFMPEG project. Now people are kicking up a fuss.
Is this not the case that the LGPL is actually being used to enforce the illegal use of someone else's technology and simply try and pursue a political war against software patents. I would love to see this one argued in court.
Disclosure and personal rant:
I am a software developer with no great love for software patents or lawyers.
I think the plane being referred to is the Eurofighter Typhoon, which needs a hell of a lot of computing power just to stay in the sky.
The plane being referred to in which post? The message I show this as a reply to is talking about the de Havilland Mosquito:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
From what I gather from lurking on the FFmpeg developers list, they care about being credited and the source being available including modifications. Basically the terms of the lgpl v2.1.
Any chance of a link to back this up? If you do read the mailing list it would be useful to those of us who do not have time to read every open source projects development list.
The simple fact is that if the FFMPEG developers all have a consensus that they should enforce the LGPL in this case then they can probably just ask Google to stop using their code. Google can then either develop their own MPEG playing code or can throw money at the FFMPEG project until the developers decide they would all prefer the BSD licence anyway. Maybe not every developer would take kindly to this sort of bribery but the question is whether enough would that the remainder of the project that could not be switched or dual licensed could simply be rewritten with Google's financial backing.
The first footprint was at the bottom of the ladder. How many times did Armstrong and Aldrin go up and down that ladder? Face it, the first footprint is gone.
Ok, so we might not be talking about the first footprint, we might actually be talking about the first human tracks on the moon. Unless we go and remove them they will most likely be there for millennia. I personally like the idea of leaving them for a future generation if possible, and it is certainly possible since the moon is plenty big enough to simply land somewhere else.