Read Berners-Lee's letter -- I think he has a good handle on what would *actually* happen, because IE is, in fact, the most widely-used browser by far.
Your "inherently stupid lazy average PC user" doesn't know anything about switching to an alternative browser. They probably don't even think they're affected, IF they hear anything about the problem, because "I use AOL, not Internet Explorer". They will expect the websites to change to stay compatible with IE... and guess what?
The websites will change, in spite of the expense and frustration. Unmaintained websites, academic sites, personal project sites, etc. with no budget for the changes will just have their audience cut to a fraction of what it was.
That's why it's bad, even if Eolas never goes after anyone other than MS.
There's also that whole concept that two wrongs don't make a right, etc., etc., but you can answer this one without leaning on morality at all.
The master saw the student responding to every unhelpful and offtopic comment on Slashdot.
"Come with me," he said, and led the student outside where the miller was threshing the wheat to separate it from the chaff, so that he could grind the wheat to make flour. The separated chaff was quickly blown away by the wind.
The master rushed in, and began to collect the chaff instead, gathering it into a pile protected from the wind and criticizing it harshly for not being wheat.
"What are you doing?" the miller asked, confused. At that moment, the student was enlightened.
There are usually two groups of people who get upset about privacy issues like this.
First there are the people who are breaking the rules, and who vaguely claim "privacy" as the reason to cover up their real reason. Unfortunately, these people just give ammo to the other foolish idea that "if you are doing the right thing, you have nothing to worry about".
The second group thinks it through a little deeper, and realizes the long term dangers of each little encroachment. What are the possible abuses? They will occur. What then?
If every movement of a child is tracked, who might want that data? Parents? Advertisers, even? Suppose the budget just didn't come through this year. Why provide the temptation for abuse? Suppose Johnny's aunt works in the main office, and isn't too keen on him dating that black girl because "it just isn't right". Funny how she's always suddenly walking past whenever they're together. Or suppose the administration decides to take a proactive approach to discipline by keeping an extra close eye on any student with any problematic history... including notifying the parents of the new friends that Johnny makes while trying for what he thought was a "fresh start" in high school. Is that right? How did Johnny's name even get on that list? Was that his aunt's doing? Or did a jealous classmate hack the central computer? Hey, it's like in the War Games movie, but you can do a hell of a lot more than just change your grade!
Now consider the psychological effects of living under a constant watchful eye. Keep in mind that you are not really acting morally until you do the right thing when you are NOT watched... that's really what matters. When do the students get to practice that?
Have you ever been driving alone on a road where you *knew* for certain that there were no cops for miles? Many teenagers (and some adults too..) would drive like maniacs, until the time they hit a deer, or nearly soiled their pants when that cardboard box in the road came out of nowhere... and they realize the reason for the speed limit laws. Learning that there are reasons behind most rules is part of growing up, and if the only reason for obedience is "because I said so, and I'll KNOW if you break the rules", won't it take a very long time for a kid to grow up?
There's a book called Infinite Jest in which Quebecois separatist terrorists play a pretty central role in the plot.
It takes place in the future, and the Quebecois want to secede more than ever partly because the US has taken to lofting all of their radioactive waste into an area right on the Quebec border... and Canada proper didn't object. Apparently the wasteland is prowled by feral giant fetuses and such.
I don't imagine the PS games has much else in common with the book... but David Foster Wallace certainly gave no apologies for his plot, so why should they? Who complains about terrorist plots anywhere else, for however outlandish reasons?
Quick summary: The Preferences API in Java 1.4 doesn't support storing an Object value, but we can hack around that by serializing the Object into a byte array, and storing limited length chunks as prefs.
This is NOT a replacement for an object db, just a way to make storing your prefs more flexible.
Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble. Preferences are already hierarchichal (so there's no real gain in data organization). In most cases this will save only a few lines of code.
And in exchange for those lines of code, we do lose some things: the complexity added by putting another layer on top of the prefs API, for one, and the fact that debugging would suck (instead of readable data in your preferences, you now have chunks of serialized object).
So.. go for it if it would make your life much easier to store prefs as objects. Everyone else... read the article ANYWAY -- because it shows nicely how simple it is to use the Preferences API -- but you probably needn't bother to download the source.
Caveat -- I don't maintain any large Java apps with lots of preferences... but it seems to me that most prefs won't come automatically as objects.
How can they pass this off as new tech? I remember setting up similar networks almost 20 years ago!
"Stand in a circle, children. Now hold the hand of the person next to you... and when you feel someone squeeze your right hand, you squeeze your left hand as quick as you can to pass on the message."
We could get the pulse zipping around the circle surprisingly fast. You know, probably, uh, almost 10 mega-sqeezes a second.
If you're using Mozilla, use the Live HTTP Headers plugin; you can hit reload to resubmit the page, and even if the page is STILL down you now have the HTTP header, with the form contents. It's great! Like a sniffer w/o all that pesky filter config.
Copy the data at the end of the header out to a text file, and try again later. Of course all non-alphanumeric characters are encoded, but a few search/replaces will fix that.
I've used this when submitting a complicated message on a (broken) contact form... I recovered the message, and send it in an email instead.
...is playing as yourself a much-desired extra for everyone, or would you prefer controlling someone more... handsome?
Speak for yourself, buddy.
Are all geeks really hideously ugly? Longing to be spending all our time with large groups of "regular" people drinking beer and talking about sports and TV... if only we had more social skills and fewer hair-sprouting warts?
Hey, maybe some of them. But there are plenty who are perfectly capable of mingling with masses... they just don't want to most of the time (interesting book on this subject: Party of One, by Anneli Rufus).
Anyway, even the visual trolls out there should be able to "fix" their faces with a few minor Photoshop edits. So yes, seeing some version of our own faces in games can be fun (as long as it's well-integrated).
Moving on... can you put a face on the opposing players (or soldiers, etc.) in any of these games?
I'm not an expert on this, but my experience (that most bots DON'T harvest html-encoded addresses) is backed up here.
There may be bots out there that do it, but for now, it seems most don't bother. My experience backs this up -- I started getting a few spams at one address, and sure enough, I'd forgotten to encode it. That bot didn't pick up any of the encoded addresses.
Obviously, things can change... if I do start getting spammed at the encoded addresses, obviously I'll have to make a new plan.
You're not a record industry mole, are you? Just checking. Because how can anyone be so sure that free filesharing is here to stay if *this* is the only way to use P2P safely?
If you're like most people, and just hunting for that cool song you heard on the radio... it would be easier to buy the CD (and cheaper, if your time has any value).
This is a good point -- if you are just providing your email for people reading your personal home page, there's no reason to risk getting a few spam emails by using a weak masking method. By displaying your email as an image, you can probably reduce the emails you'll get from people with only a minor comment to make, or the non-tech-savvy.
If you're selling something, it's a different story.
As soon as any reasonable number of people start using the same scheme (and particularly if it's a mailto: designed to still be machine-readable) someone will take the time to harvest that kind of obfuscated address. It's just a matter of the cost/benefit ratio being high enough to make it worthwile.
I think you're right as more websites use automated obfuscation; then the spammers need to decode it to get to their victims. But as long as most websites aren't doing what I'm doing, I know they don't want to target the techies.
Here's another POV, though -- I'm considering the *other* cost/benefits ratio. I want my users to be able to easily email me, and giving them a simple mailto: link is the best way to do that. We'll have to wait and see.
Right now, it seems to be costing nothing, since I'm only getting spammed on the standard "guessed" names at my domains, like "sales@" and "webmaster@". But 5 spams a day would still be worth the trouble.
If the bots do start to really catch up (they may... I'm hoping enforced laws will start to catch up over the next few years!), at some point I might move on to the next-least-inconvenient masking method, which is probably randomized JavaScript masking. I.e., the mailto: link is generated by custom JavaScript that builds the address across a few lines of code. That would prevent users w/o JavaScript from using the link, though, which is a cost I want to avoid.
I wrote a simple IDE extension for an RCS, then contacted the company to see if they wanted me to build it into a full-featured integration.
They did -- so we worked out an agreement. I made a list of small-scope enhancements, and put a dollar amount on each (based on my time estimates and a good hourly rate). Per the contract, I made the listed enhancements, and released the project as open source (which make the source available for any other developer who wants to enhance it for them! nice bonus for them, isn't it?).
Worked out exactly as designed, win-win.
I will mention that just listing an hourly rate is tough in a few ways. You have to keep careful track of your hours, which can be hard, PLUS they aren't sure what they're really signing up for.
It's a good idea to try to keep track of your time (because otherwise your estimates will be *way* off), but giving a single dollar figure for development, testing, deployment and those few bug fixes is better for both of you as long as your milestones are small (because if your estimates suck you don't want to get screwed over too much).
Don't forget to consider stuff in the contract like: - unforseen *large* setbacks might force you to revise your price/deliverable midway - only bugs that significantly impair functionality AND are discovered within the first month after release are included in the original contract - owernership and copyright clearly remains yours; the funds provided are purchasing your time, not the finished product (which will be licensed to them under the same license everyone else gets)
You have to consider the trade-off of the inconvenience of your readers/customers with the amount of spam you get.
I have a few websites with my email address all over them, in mailto links. I "mask" the email very lightly, by escaping most of the characters, and it has worked beautifully.
Here is a webpage that will quickly convert your mailto link into a form that bots will miss.
Could a bot be written that would be able to harvest these email messages? YES. But would it be worth the spammer's time to code it? NO, so it probably won't happen.
Put yourself in the spammer's shoes (or slime-covered bedroom slippers). Why would you want to go to a lot of work to build a bot that will harvest the email addresses of the very people you don't want to get your spam, because they will report you to spamcop, harass your ISP, and even hack your computer and post some very unattractive pictures of you on the internet?
No, they want the chumps, and they want to find them without needing to check every webpage for dozens of patterns.
This title is a disgrace. Why can't we let the title be completely in English?
EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government
Darn those French. As an American, I demand that this title eschew the admittedly useful distinction between the french words "libre" and "gratuit". The proper title should be:
EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Free (as in Speech, not as in Beer) Software in Government
..and showing that they can deliver and I welcome their leadership
You, for one, welcome... ah, christ. I thought this was a real post.
Anyway, why are they calling this the "Java" Desktop, anyway? It seems like the major components are all open source software, none of which are written in Java.
I kinda like the idea of the product, and I'm curious to see how the licensing concept will work out (my guess: it'll need some changes), but I don't understand why putting in a few extra hooks and an autoupdate feature around a pre-installed JVM makes this a "Java" desktop.
This is a great suggestion. You aren't doing anything illegal, but you don't want to get them all hot and bothered either (don't give them any excuse to go into that "at any cost" mode.. that's when things start to suck, no matter who's "right").
Here's the strategy I'd use: * Ignore their most inflammatory claims/demands. Just pretend that they are being completely reasonable, and ignore anything that doesn't fit that. * Save copies of all of their emails. * Tell them you would be willing to help out however you can, but don't ever mention closing your site. * Kindly offer to link to any site they set up, to suggest donations on your homepage, whatever (within your own reasonable limits). Present your choices as obvious ("selling my work is also possible, but the price might be higher than you'd want to pay, since anything less than $2K would be like paying me under minimum wage). * If they don't snap out of it, kindly offer to post the discussion to the alumni to let them help decide, since they should have some say in the fate of your site (suggestion above).
As long as you keep everything nice, you can leave them plenty of escape routes. Yes, you do want that. The enemy is most dangerous when they feel they have no escape (or something like that... from the Art of War).
I won't say that Java is right for every task, but I don't think you have a good grasp of how it is normally used, and what it offers.
I spend almost all of my time nowadays working with Java (mostly server-side, but also a few GUI apps), so I can clear up some of these confusions with good examples.
Portability - Server-side Java, by nature, does not involve any OS-specific activity. So, with no loss of portability or functionality, you could do the same in C/C++. Which, incidentally, will run on any platform for which GCC exists - About 30 *times* the number of platforms for which a JVM exists.
I ported a large J2EE application from OS/400 to win2K (for testing and development) and Solaris (production environment). The only changes required in the application were updating some properties file (different JDBC database connection strings, logfile locations, etc.), and some changes to embedded SQL (for differences in database syntax). That's it. Once those glitches were ironed out, I could deploy updated, compiled code to either platform by just copying out the updated JAR files.
I'm doing the same thing now with an even larger application, where I use a win2k server for development and as/400 for test and production. You're *sure* I can do this safely with a C++ app? Let me point out as well that the only bugs that have shown up on one OS but not the other have all been either configuration mistakes, or database issues.
JIT? Server-side apps also tend to have very short process lives, doing a small task and exiting. In such situations, JIT causes worse performance, as it wastes time optimizing something that will never execute again during this process' invocation.
What server apps are you talking about? Old-style CGIs? Utilities like grep or wc? I'm talking about the big server apps (the server half of client/server), where performance really matters. Never mind Java - if you're writing these in C/C++, you'll be using threads instead of dropping everything and needing to reload all of your resources, reconnect to the database(s), etc. on every client request.
In theory (skipping over hardware maintenance, some kinds of code changes, etc.), most server-side apps don't need to ever go down. A lot of application servers now allow hot code swapping, so they can stay up forever. That's exactly why Java is seeing so much use on the server-side -- it fits that model perfectly by costing a little more in the startup time (where it doesn't matter) for benefits later.
There are a lot of limits to talk about re GUI programming -- the portability factor was a much stickier issue there in AWT, and Swing just turned the apps into nice-and-portable memory hogs.
But the server-side benefits are hard to fault. Obviously I'm biased, but I think most developers would agree with me on these points alone.
What screwed me up was that I read it right away as "cheerio", and figured that couldn't be right.
Cheerios are only a breakfast cereal here in the US. It didn't help that it wasn't capitalized (another key contextual hint), and I didn't notice the period before it... referring to "the whole cheerio" is slang I'd never heard before, so I rejected that out of hand.
I tried to point out that every situation is different.
Obviously, renting is a bad choice for any several-times-a-week usage is dumb. But it's possible that what you need is a minivan... again, I don't know. You can get a towing hitch on lots of vehicles besides an SUV, also (it depends on what you'll need to tow).
All I'm saying is, do the calculations. If renting costs you $300/year, what's the SUV cost you to drive to work every day?
Me, I have to scope my vehicle for the worst case scenario (seven passengers and a trailer) and then live with the surplus capacity the rest of the time.
Wow, I know what you mean. I'm still making payments on the personal jet. Gotta visit Europe sometimes, after all.
Seriously, you're over 25, right? Price out rentals, and see how it adds up against the purchase price and gas prices of the SUV. Try out hotwire.com, and/or sign up with the various rental agencies to get their cheapest online prices. If your vacation every year is to spend a month on the road with you, the spouse, and your 5 kids, what you're saying could make sense.
If you usually *fly* somewhere for your vacations, though, it doesn't make sense. If you only need the trailer twice a year, to schlep your kid's stuff to college and back, it doesn't make sense.
I obviously don't know your personal situation... but there are actually surprisingly few people out there for whom an SUV is really logical. But how many people really have the self-awareness to just skip the rationalizations and say, "it is worth $xxxxx, angry stares from the tree-huggers, and a greater risk of killing someone to me to avoid driving a station wagon or minivan, and/or to feel bigger than anyone else on the road."
Here's an interesting tidbit for Americans who are considering working in the EU.
If you have an Irish grandparent (and you can track down the proof that they were born in Ireland), you can have your name entered in the registry of foreign births, and tada! You're an Irish citizen (they do allow dual citizenship with the US).
Then you can work anywhere in the EU. Plus you can travel with your Irish passport, and (if you can do the accent) reduce your risk of being shot for sport in places that are getting hostile to Americans. Neat, huh? Of course, you do need that Irish grandparent...
SAPDB (was made open source by SAP a year or 2 ago) definitely bears some research, but I haven't used it myself so I can't comment (anyone else?).
I can give you some quick info, though (partly to respond to a sibling post claiming that MySQL and SAP both cost money if your software isn't GPL).
From sapdb.org (various pages): -- From Q4 2003, SAP DB will be rebranded as "MaxDB" and offered as a MySQL AB product. -- SAP DB can be used free of charge in non-SAP environments.
And using MySQL *is* free as long as you don't distribute it and/or sell an application that requires it. From the MySQL licensing page: -- If you use MySQL in conjunction with a webserver and develop the needed tools/applications by yourself, or you use applications licensed under the GPL or compatible OSI licenses, then you do not have to pay for a MySQL license. This is true even if you run the system on top of a commercial web server. -- Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often host MySQL servers for their customers. With the GPL license this does not require a license.
Note: obviously, do your own research for your particular situation... PLUS it may well be worth it to pay the license fees (only a few hundred bucks per server) to get support.
I keep promising myself I won't respond to the next post... Okay, I hereby give up after this one (now it's in writing).
Hello! You have been directed by a boss to do those things. That's a totally different situation, unless the Drive Thru clerk told her that she should carry coffee in her crotch.
Hello to you too. Actually, your boss specifically told you to watch out for the spinning blades. The fact that you fell in was an accident, because you were rushing at the end of the day. And hey, didn't you have the choice to refuse to work with the dangerous machine? You can always quit. That's one of the main arguments presented against laws banning smoking in bars (because the second-hand smoke gives cancer to the waitresses/bartenders). Do you switch sides in that argument? Or do you stand by your claim that they are directed by a "superior" and have no free will in the matter (hence the carcinogenic smoking should be banned)? Don't forget, if it's all black and white, you can't say both sides have valid points.
Next -- Back up your legal expertise a bit. You say that there's no difference in the eyes of the law between the woman who accidentally spilled her coffee and sued because it was unusually hot and dangerous, and a woman who intentionally held a cup of standard-temperature coffee to her skin for 2 minutes. The same amount of damage was done in both cases. We could bring in another woman, who brought her coffe to work, microwaved it for 5 minutes, then tossed the cup up and caught it in the front of her pants. Same damage. Really, this is all the same in the eyes of the court?
Either way, now let's go the other direction. I'm sure at some point you WOULD say that McDonalds was recklessly endangering their customers. Let me know when you hit the "gray" area.
Suppose the McDonalds coffee came pre-sweetened, and their new sweetener in solution allowed the coffee to be heated much hotter than the standard boiling point of water, without evaporating. Suppose they gave her coffee that was 105C. Keep turning the dial, towards autoclave temperatures, where it would burn the lips right off your head if you took a sip immediately. What is the exact temperature point where McDonalds should be liable when someone takes an incautious sip, or spills the coffee on their hand (or in their lap)? Keep in mind, many people will be just fine, because by the time they take their first sip it will have cooled enough. Plus, some of them will feel the heat radiating off the cup, and won't try that first testing sip.
It doesn't make any sense that if she only received "minor" burns she wouldn't have the right to sue -- if one agrees for major burns she can sue, then it follows that she can sue for minor ones as well.
Let me clarify. If she had received only minor burns, that would be par for the course, as expected, and due to her stupidity. A case like that should be thrown out instantly because coffee is normally hot enough to cause minor burns. So, she took what could be reasonably assumed to be a small risk (because that's the temp of normal fast food coffee) when she held the coffee in a precarious way. This case DOES have some (limited) merit because McDonalds didn't warn customers of this much-greater-than-normal risk with this coffee alone. They couldn't have predicted that the coffee would be spilled in someone's crotch, but they *can* predict that a decent percentage of their customers will spill on themselves.
Look, I'm not saying this is the strongest case in the world. I'm mostly just surprised at how black and white you seem to think these decisions are.
I'll suggest putting you to work for awhile in an Industrial Revolution era factory (the machines are perfectly safe as long as you use them correctly! just don't slip on the oil-soaked floor while your hands are an inch away from the spinning blades; that's "misuse" and "carelessness").
Slashdot Mirror
Read Berners-Lee's letter -- I think he has a good handle on what would *actually* happen, because IE is, in fact, the most widely-used browser by far.
Your "inherently stupid lazy average PC user" doesn't know anything about switching to an alternative browser. They probably don't even think they're affected, IF they hear anything about the problem, because "I use AOL, not Internet Explorer". They will expect the websites to change to stay compatible with IE... and guess what?
The websites will change, in spite of the expense and frustration. Unmaintained websites, academic sites, personal project sites, etc. with no budget for the changes will just have their audience cut to a fraction of what it was.
That's why it's bad, even if Eolas never goes after anyone other than MS.
There's also that whole concept that two wrongs don't make a right, etc., etc., but you can answer this one without leaning on morality at all.
The master saw the student responding to every unhelpful and offtopic comment on Slashdot.
"Come with me," he said, and led the student outside where the miller was threshing the wheat to separate it from the chaff, so that he could grind the wheat to make flour. The separated chaff was quickly blown away by the wind.
The master rushed in, and began to collect the chaff instead, gathering it into a pile protected from the wind and criticizing it harshly for not being wheat.
"What are you doing?" the miller asked, confused. At that moment, the student was enlightened.
There are usually two groups of people who get upset about privacy issues like this.
First there are the people who are breaking the rules, and who vaguely claim "privacy" as the reason to cover up their real reason. Unfortunately, these people just give ammo to the other foolish idea that "if you are doing the right thing, you have nothing to worry about".
The second group thinks it through a little deeper, and realizes the long term dangers of each little encroachment. What are the possible abuses? They will occur. What then?
If every movement of a child is tracked, who might want that data? Parents? Advertisers, even? Suppose the budget just didn't come through this year. Why provide the temptation for abuse? Suppose Johnny's aunt works in the main office, and isn't too keen on him dating that black girl because "it just isn't right". Funny how she's always suddenly walking past whenever they're together. Or suppose the administration decides to take a proactive approach to discipline by keeping an extra close eye on any student with any problematic history... including notifying the parents of the new friends that Johnny makes while trying for what he thought was a "fresh start" in high school. Is that right? How did Johnny's name even get on that list? Was that his aunt's doing? Or did a jealous classmate hack the central computer? Hey, it's like in the War Games movie, but you can do a hell of a lot more than just change your grade!
Now consider the psychological effects of living under a constant watchful eye. Keep in mind that you are not really acting morally until you do the right thing when you are NOT watched... that's really what matters. When do the students get to practice that?
Have you ever been driving alone on a road where you *knew* for certain that there were no cops for miles? Many teenagers (and some adults too..) would drive like maniacs, until the time they hit a deer, or nearly soiled their pants when that cardboard box in the road came out of nowhere... and they realize the reason for the speed limit laws. Learning that there are reasons behind most rules is part of growing up, and if the only reason for obedience is "because I said so, and I'll KNOW if you break the rules", won't it take a very long time for a kid to grow up?
There's a book called Infinite Jest in which Quebecois separatist terrorists play a pretty central role in the plot.
It takes place in the future, and the Quebecois want to secede more than ever partly because the US has taken to lofting all of their radioactive waste into an area right on the Quebec border... and Canada proper didn't object. Apparently the wasteland is prowled by feral giant fetuses and such.
I don't imagine the PS games has much else in common with the book... but David Foster Wallace certainly gave no apologies for his plot, so why should they? Who complains about terrorist plots anywhere else, for however outlandish reasons?
Quick summary: The Preferences API in Java 1.4 doesn't support storing an Object value, but we can hack around that by serializing the Object into a byte array, and storing limited length chunks as prefs.
This is NOT a replacement for an object db, just a way to make storing your prefs more flexible.
Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble. Preferences are already hierarchichal (so there's no real gain in data organization). In most cases this will save only a few lines of code.
And in exchange for those lines of code, we do lose some things: the complexity added by putting another layer on top of the prefs API, for one, and the fact that debugging would suck (instead of readable data in your preferences, you now have chunks of serialized object).
So.. go for it if it would make your life much easier to store prefs as objects. Everyone else... read the article ANYWAY -- because it shows nicely how simple it is to use the Preferences API -- but you probably needn't bother to download the source.
Caveat -- I don't maintain any large Java apps with lots of preferences... but it seems to me that most prefs won't come automatically as objects.
How can they pass this off as new tech?
I remember setting up similar networks almost 20 years ago!
"Stand in a circle, children. Now hold the hand of the person next to you... and when you feel someone squeeze your right hand, you squeeze your left hand as quick as you can to pass on the message."
We could get the pulse zipping around the circle surprisingly fast. You know, probably, uh, almost 10 mega-sqeezes a second.
If you're using Mozilla, use the Live HTTP Headers plugin; you can hit reload to resubmit the page, and even if the page is STILL down you now have the HTTP header, with the form contents. It's great! Like a sniffer w/o all that pesky filter config.
Copy the data at the end of the header out to a text file, and try again later. Of course all non-alphanumeric characters are encoded, but a few search/replaces will fix that.
I've used this when submitting a complicated message on a (broken) contact form... I recovered the message, and send it in an email instead.
...is playing as yourself a much-desired extra for everyone, or would you prefer controlling someone more... handsome?
Speak for yourself, buddy.
Are all geeks really hideously ugly? Longing to be spending all our time with large groups of "regular" people drinking beer and talking about sports and TV... if only we had more social skills and fewer hair-sprouting warts?
Hey, maybe some of them. But there are plenty who are perfectly capable of mingling with masses... they just don't want to most of the time (interesting book on this subject: Party of One, by Anneli Rufus).
Anyway, even the visual trolls out there should be able to "fix" their faces with a few minor Photoshop edits. So yes, seeing some version of our own faces in games can be fun (as long as it's well-integrated).
Moving on... can you put a face on the opposing players (or soldiers, etc.) in any of these games?
I'm not an expert on this, but my experience (that most bots DON'T harvest html-encoded addresses) is backed up here.
There may be bots out there that do it, but for now, it seems most don't bother. My experience backs this up -- I started getting a few spams at one address, and sure enough, I'd forgotten to encode it. That bot didn't pick up any of the encoded addresses.
Obviously, things can change... if I do start getting spammed at the encoded addresses, obviously I'll have to make a new plan.
IMO this is the ONLY way to use P2P safely.
You're not a record industry mole, are you? Just checking. Because how can anyone be so sure that free filesharing is here to stay if *this* is the only way to use P2P safely?
If you're like most people, and just hunting for that cool song you heard on the radio... it would be easier to buy the CD (and cheaper, if your time has any value).
This is a good point -- if you are just providing your email for people reading your personal home page, there's no reason to risk getting a few spam emails by using a weak masking method. By displaying your email as an image, you can probably reduce the emails you'll get from people with only a minor comment to make, or the non-tech-savvy.
If you're selling something, it's a different story.
As soon as any reasonable number of people start using the same scheme (and particularly if it's a mailto: designed to still be machine-readable) someone will take the time to harvest that kind of obfuscated address. It's just a matter of the cost/benefit ratio being high enough to make it worthwile.
I think you're right as more websites use automated obfuscation; then the spammers need to decode it to get to their victims. But as long as most websites aren't doing what I'm doing, I know they don't want to target the techies.
Here's another POV, though -- I'm considering the *other* cost/benefits ratio. I want my users to be able to easily email me, and giving them a simple mailto: link is the best way to do that. We'll have to wait and see.
Right now, it seems to be costing nothing, since I'm only getting spammed on the standard "guessed" names at my domains, like "sales@" and "webmaster@". But 5 spams a day would still be worth the trouble.
If the bots do start to really catch up (they may... I'm hoping enforced laws will start to catch up over the next few years!), at some point I might move on to the next-least-inconvenient masking method, which is probably randomized JavaScript masking. I.e., the mailto: link is generated by custom JavaScript that builds the address across a few lines of code. That would prevent users w/o JavaScript from using the link, though, which is a cost I want to avoid.
I wrote a simple IDE extension for an RCS, then contacted the company to see if they wanted me to build it into a full-featured integration.
They did -- so we worked out an agreement. I made a list of small-scope enhancements, and put a dollar amount on each (based on my time estimates and a good hourly rate). Per the contract, I made the listed enhancements, and released the project as open source (which make the source available for any other developer who wants to enhance it for them! nice bonus for them, isn't it?).
Worked out exactly as designed, win-win.
I will mention that just listing an hourly rate is tough in a few ways. You have to keep careful track of your hours, which can be hard, PLUS they aren't sure what they're really signing up for.
It's a good idea to try to keep track of your time (because otherwise your estimates will be *way* off), but giving a single dollar figure for development, testing, deployment and those few bug fixes is better for both of you as long as your milestones are small (because if your estimates suck you don't want to get screwed over too much).
Don't forget to consider stuff in the contract like:
- unforseen *large* setbacks might force you to revise your price/deliverable midway
- only bugs that significantly impair functionality AND are discovered within the first month after release are included in the original contract
- owernership and copyright clearly remains yours; the funds provided are purchasing your time, not the finished product (which will be licensed to them under the same license everyone else gets)
Good luck!
You have to consider the trade-off of the inconvenience of your readers/customers with the amount of spam you get.
I have a few websites with my email address all over them, in mailto links. I "mask" the email very lightly, by escaping most of the characters, and it has worked beautifully.
Here is a webpage that will quickly convert your mailto link into a form that bots will miss.
Could a bot be written that would be able to harvest these email messages? YES. But would it be worth the spammer's time to code it? NO, so it probably won't happen.
Put yourself in the spammer's shoes (or slime-covered bedroom slippers). Why would you want to go to a lot of work to build a bot that will harvest the email addresses of the very people you don't want to get your spam, because they will report you to spamcop, harass your ISP, and even hack your computer and post some very unattractive pictures of you on the internet?
No, they want the chumps, and they want to find them without needing to check every webpage for dozens of patterns.
This title is a disgrace. Why can't we let the title be completely in English?
EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government
Darn those French. As an American, I demand that this title eschew the admittedly useful distinction between the french words "libre" and "gratuit". The proper title should be:
EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Free (as in Speech, not as in Beer) Software in Government
Thank you.
..and showing that they can deliver and I welcome their leadership
You, for one, welcome... ah, christ. I thought this was a real post.
Anyway, why are they calling this the "Java" Desktop, anyway? It seems like the major components are all open source software, none of which are written in Java.
I kinda like the idea of the product, and I'm curious to see how the licensing concept will work out (my guess: it'll need some changes), but I don't understand why putting in a few extra hooks and an autoupdate feature around a pre-installed JVM makes this a "Java" desktop.
This is a great suggestion.
You aren't doing anything illegal, but you don't want to get them all hot and bothered either (don't give them any excuse to go into that "at any cost" mode.. that's when things start to suck, no matter who's "right").
Here's the strategy I'd use:
* Ignore their most inflammatory claims/demands. Just pretend that they are being completely reasonable, and ignore anything that doesn't fit that.
* Save copies of all of their emails.
* Tell them you would be willing to help out however you can, but don't ever mention closing your site.
* Kindly offer to link to any site they set up, to suggest donations on your homepage, whatever (within your own reasonable limits). Present your choices as obvious ("selling my work is also possible, but the price might be higher than you'd want to pay, since anything less than $2K would be like paying me under minimum wage).
* If they don't snap out of it, kindly offer to post the discussion to the alumni to let them help decide, since they should have some say in the fate of your site (suggestion above).
As long as you keep everything nice, you can leave them plenty of escape routes. Yes, you do want that. The enemy is most dangerous when they feel they have no escape (or something like that... from the Art of War).
I won't say that Java is right for every task, but I don't think you have a good grasp of how it is normally used, and what it offers.
I spend almost all of my time nowadays working with Java (mostly server-side, but also a few GUI apps), so I can clear up some of these confusions with good examples.
Portability - Server-side Java, by nature, does not involve any OS-specific activity. So, with no loss of portability or functionality, you could do the same in C/C++. Which, incidentally, will run on any platform for which GCC exists - About 30 *times* the number of platforms for which a JVM exists.
I ported a large J2EE application from OS/400 to win2K (for testing and development) and Solaris (production environment). The only changes required in the application were updating some properties file (different JDBC database connection strings, logfile locations, etc.), and some changes to embedded SQL (for differences in database syntax). That's it. Once those glitches were ironed out, I could deploy updated, compiled code to either platform by just copying out the updated JAR files.
I'm doing the same thing now with an even larger application, where I use a win2k server for development and as/400 for test and production. You're *sure* I can do this safely with a C++ app? Let me point out as well that the only bugs that have shown up on one OS but not the other have all been either configuration mistakes, or database issues.
JIT? Server-side apps also tend to have very short process lives, doing a small task and exiting. In such situations, JIT causes worse performance, as it wastes time optimizing something that will never execute again during this process' invocation.
What server apps are you talking about? Old-style CGIs? Utilities like grep or wc? I'm talking about the big server apps (the server half of client/server), where performance really matters. Never mind Java - if you're writing these in C/C++, you'll be using threads instead of dropping everything and needing to reload all of your resources, reconnect to the database(s), etc. on every client request.
In theory (skipping over hardware maintenance, some kinds of code changes, etc.), most server-side apps don't need to ever go down. A lot of application servers now allow hot code swapping, so they can stay up forever. That's exactly why Java is seeing so much use on the server-side -- it fits that model perfectly by costing a little more in the startup time (where it doesn't matter) for benefits later.
There are a lot of limits to talk about re GUI programming -- the portability factor was a much stickier issue there in AWT, and Swing just turned the apps into nice-and-portable memory hogs.
But the server-side benefits are hard to fault. Obviously I'm biased, but I think most developers would agree with me on these points alone.
What screwed me up was that I read it right away as "cheerio", and figured that couldn't be right.
Cheerios are only a breakfast cereal here in the US.
It didn't help that it wasn't capitalized (another key contextual hint), and I didn't notice the period before it... referring to "the whole cheerio" is slang I'd never heard before, so I rejected that out of hand.
I tried to point out that every situation is different.
Obviously, renting is a bad choice for any several-times-a-week usage is dumb. But it's possible that what you need is a minivan... again, I don't know. You can get a towing hitch on lots of vehicles besides an SUV, also (it depends on what you'll need to tow).
All I'm saying is, do the calculations. If renting costs you $300/year, what's the SUV cost you to drive to work every day?
Me, I have to scope my vehicle for the worst case scenario (seven passengers and a trailer) and then live with the surplus capacity the rest of the time.
Wow, I know what you mean. I'm still making payments on the personal jet. Gotta visit Europe sometimes, after all.
Seriously, you're over 25, right? Price out rentals, and see how it adds up against the purchase price and gas prices of the SUV. Try out hotwire.com, and/or sign up with the various rental agencies to get their cheapest online prices. If your vacation every year is to spend a month on the road with you, the spouse, and your 5 kids, what you're saying could make sense.
If you usually *fly* somewhere for your vacations, though, it doesn't make sense. If you only need the trailer twice a year, to schlep your kid's stuff to college and back, it doesn't make sense.
I obviously don't know your personal situation... but there are actually surprisingly few people out there for whom an SUV is really logical. But how many people really have the self-awareness to just skip the rationalizations and say, "it is worth $xxxxx, angry stares from the tree-huggers, and a greater risk of killing someone to me to avoid driving a station wagon or minivan, and/or to feel bigger than anyone else on the road."
Here's an interesting tidbit for Americans who are considering working in the EU.
If you have an Irish grandparent (and you can track down the proof that they were born in Ireland), you can have your name entered in the registry of foreign births, and tada! You're an Irish citizen (they do allow dual citizenship with the US).
Then you can work anywhere in the EU. Plus you can travel with your Irish passport, and (if you can do the accent) reduce your risk of being shot for sport in places that are getting hostile to Americans. Neat, huh? Of course, you do need that Irish grandparent...
There's a nice summary here, and the relevant page with the Irish Embassy.
SAPDB (was made open source by SAP a year or 2 ago) definitely bears some research, but I haven't used it myself so I can't comment (anyone else?).
I can give you some quick info, though (partly to respond to a sibling post claiming that MySQL and SAP both cost money if your software isn't GPL).
From sapdb.org (various pages):
-- From Q4 2003, SAP DB will be rebranded as "MaxDB" and offered as a MySQL AB product.
-- SAP DB can be used free of charge in non-SAP environments.
And using MySQL *is* free as long as you don't distribute it and/or sell an application that requires it. From the MySQL licensing page:
-- If you use MySQL in conjunction with a webserver and develop the needed tools/applications by yourself, or you use applications licensed under the GPL or compatible OSI licenses, then you do not have to pay for a MySQL license. This is true even if you run the system on top of a commercial web server.
-- Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often host MySQL servers for their customers. With the GPL license this does not require a license.
Note: obviously, do your own research for your particular situation... PLUS it may well be worth it to pay the license fees (only a few hundred bucks per server) to get support.
I keep promising myself I won't respond to the next post... Okay, I hereby give up after this one (now it's in writing).
Hello! You have been directed by a boss to do those things. That's a totally different situation, unless the Drive Thru clerk told her that she should carry coffee in her crotch.
Hello to you too. Actually, your boss specifically told you to watch out for the spinning blades. The fact that you fell in was an accident, because you were rushing at the end of the day. And hey, didn't you have the choice to refuse to work with the dangerous machine? You can always quit. That's one of the main arguments presented against laws banning smoking in bars (because the second-hand smoke gives cancer to the waitresses/bartenders). Do you switch sides in that argument? Or do you stand by your claim that they are directed by a "superior" and have no free will in the matter (hence the carcinogenic smoking should be banned)? Don't forget, if it's all black and white, you can't say both sides have valid points.
Next -- Back up your legal expertise a bit. You say that there's no difference in the eyes of the law between the woman who accidentally spilled her coffee and sued because it was unusually hot and dangerous, and a woman who intentionally held a cup of standard-temperature coffee to her skin for 2 minutes. The same amount of damage was done in both cases. We could bring in another woman, who brought her coffe to work, microwaved it for 5 minutes, then tossed the cup up and caught it in the front of her pants. Same damage. Really, this is all the same in the eyes of the court?
Either way, now let's go the other direction. I'm sure at some point you WOULD say that McDonalds was recklessly endangering their customers. Let me know when you hit the "gray" area.
Suppose the McDonalds coffee came pre-sweetened, and their new sweetener in solution allowed the coffee to be heated much hotter than the standard boiling point of water, without evaporating. Suppose they gave her coffee that was 105C. Keep turning the dial, towards autoclave temperatures, where it would burn the lips right off your head if you took a sip immediately. What is the exact temperature point where McDonalds should be liable when someone takes an incautious sip, or spills the coffee on their hand (or in their lap)? Keep in mind, many people will be just fine, because by the time they take their first sip it will have cooled enough. Plus, some of them will feel the heat radiating off the cup, and won't try that first testing sip.
It doesn't make any sense that if she only received "minor" burns she wouldn't have the right to sue -- if one agrees for major burns she can sue, then it follows that she can sue for minor ones as well.
Let me clarify. If she had received only minor burns, that would be par for the course, as expected, and due to her stupidity. A case like that should be thrown out instantly because coffee is normally hot enough to cause minor burns. So, she took what could be reasonably assumed to be a small risk (because that's the temp of normal fast food coffee) when she held the coffee in a precarious way. This case DOES have some (limited) merit because McDonalds didn't warn customers of this much-greater-than-normal risk with this coffee alone. They couldn't have predicted that the coffee would be spilled in someone's crotch, but they *can* predict that a decent percentage of their customers will spill on themselves.
Look, I'm not saying this is the strongest case in the world. I'm mostly just surprised at how black and white you seem to think these decisions are.
I'll suggest putting you to work for awhile in an Industrial Revolution era factory (the machines are perfectly safe as long as you use them correctly! just don't slip on the oil-soaked floor while your hands are an inch away from the spinning blades; that's "misuse" and "carelessness").