Voice over IP is merely the act of sending phone signals over an IP network.. It's an alternative to an analog signal, or a proprietary digital signal used by many (non-VoIP) PBX systems.
I suspect if anything you're suggesting a softphone, which is an IP phone (usually SIP) that runs in software on a computer. While this is doable, having a real phone (a hardware SIP or IAX2 or MGCP phone) is much nicer. It's nicer to use, and it works while your computer is off/rebooting/compiling something that takes up all the CPU. I have a softphone on my laptop, which is handy when I'm out of the office -- if someone calls my extension, it rings the real phone in my office and my laptop simultaneously -- but it's not as handy as the real phone I can use without plugging in a headset, starting software, etc.
Our societal demand for convenience and instant gratification has many victims, but one of the saddest is the general level of intuitiveness among kids & teenagers. Accomplishing something requires steps (an algorithm, if you will). If you generally have accomplished everything by pushing a single button, your ability to analyze a problem -- viz., break it down into steps -- languishes.
I'm sure everyone has worked with people that, for example, enter names into a database very inconsistently. We had a bookkeeper at work who did this. The accounting system only had one field for customer name. So sometimes names were entered "Smith, John", other times "John SMITH" or "Mr. John Smith" or "john c smith, mr" etc. (and apply this across the board, not just to names but addresses, phone numbers, and pretty much every other piece of information entered). When we migrated to our new system (which has separate first/last, or company name) I wrote a small program to try and clean it up, and I still spent two days going through by hand fixing things, removing duplicates, etc.
What really boggles my mind though, is she failed to see why there was a problem at all. How do you teach people the skills to understand why data should be entered logically? I was actually talking to my friends about this the other day. We came to the conclusion that in throughout public school there should be actual graded classes (or 'units') about problem solving, ie doing logic puzzles, and soduku and teaching other deductive reasoning skills. If you can't solve the puzzle, you can't pass the test. You start out simple in grade 2 or 3, and gradually work your way up. By the time they introduce basic algebra ("4 = x + 2") the kids would be laughing at it.
I realize some people are more logically minded than others, but this style of deductive reasoning is a basic life skill that can be used in every profession, and everyone's daily lives. It's really something they should teach people at a young age.
It should be up to the business to allow smoking or not. If a restaurant allows smoking, a non-smoker can choose not to go to that establishment...the same applies the other way around.
What about the employee that works at the smoking bar? You can argue that a non-smoker shouldn't apply for a job at a smoking bar/restaurant, but reality gets in the way. Often people don't have a choice: they need work, they can't be picky about WHERE they get employed. Secondly, as other people have pointed out, the economics generally mean that in a city (especially a smaller one) with smoking and non-smoking bars, the non-smoking bars will tend to go out of business because in many groups there is at least one smoker, and so the whole group ends up going to a smoking place.
But back to the employee.. These are people that are subjected to second-hand smoke for an entire shift, almost every single day. That's a lot of smoke - even for a smoker - and much more than a typical bar patron is subjected to (a few hours, once or twice a week). These are people that non-smoking legislation is designed to protect.
Although in your case, mated draft-n items might be the way to go. Just realize you are buying a temporary solution and the equipment may be obsolete when N comes out. Then again, so will g equipment.
Why? It's not like the existing gear will stop working once the standard comes out, or he needs to expand it (worst case, if he can't find something compatible with what he has, then he can set up a totally separate link - these are building to building links, it's not like you add new buildings everyday). Chances are, if he sets up a link with pre-N gear, then provided the hardware doesn't flat out die (or get hit by lightning etc) it will be fine for the next few years, until he wants to upgrade to the latest gigabit wireless links or whatever comes out by then.
What may occur is a separate box consisting of the GFX card, Physics Card, AI card, PSU for the above along with supporting memory modules just to power existing games.
Much better to have a bunch of bought-and-paid-for messages screaming at us to tell us what we need and what we should want and how we should spend our money.
I know, something really needs to be done about advertisments. I can't tell you how many times I saw an ad and then suddenly found myself typing in my credit card number and home address, totally unable to control my own actions, ordering whatever item it was regardless of if I actually needed it or could have even used it at all. The worst is when you see an ad for an item you already own..
I certainly don't need to be told what's good for me or how I should make economic decisions, and knowing that I may have been shopping around for a good Bluetooth device (or whatever) does absolutely nothing to change this basic fact.
What are you looking at to decide which bluetooth adapter to get? Certainly you wouldn't look at the copy print on the retailer's site or shelf, because that's not an un-biased source, in fact, it's basically advertising. Ah, but I suppose once you found one that sounded decent, you could google it, and see if there are any reviews or complaints about it. I wonder though, what's stopping you from doing that when you see a normal ad for a product that looks interesting? Perhaps a product that is slightly more expensive, but offers some neat feature that's not readily explained in the title alone..
A much better model for advertising would be, let's say, the yellow pages. You know what you you are looking for and you search a directory to see who is offering it and for how much.
This has (in a way) been done. The problem with froogle, as you'll hear many retailers complain, is that it forces you to compete solely on price. Sometimes this is fine -- if for example, you're buying a bluetooth dongle. If you're buying something more expensive, however (say, a laptop), then it's also important to figure out what else they offer - how long is the warranty? What accessories come with it? Is there a trade-up program if you decide you need a better one in a couple months? Do the staff know what they're talking about if you have questions? These are things not easily accommodated with a 'yellow pages' style listing.
Perhaps there IS a better way.. come up with it, and you'll probably make a good amount of money. In the meantime, make sure you have adblock installed and a hosts file to redirect all those nasty sites, lest you go broke from that uncontrollable urge to buy every product whose ad reaches your eyeballs.
I was actually thinking that one of the 'benefits' of this technique is that you could release a tool for people to use WITHOUT releasing the source (or backend database, or any other tools/data used). This is more of a benefit to the Googles and Yahoos, or the guy that wants to eventually make money off this tool, not the end-developer integrating it.
Overall, it seems to me like a solution to a problem that just doesn't exist. There are already ways to access web services from the server-side (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, and so on). To make use of these sources with AJAX, you just need to code some AJAX glue to tie it together. Using the toolkits that most languages have now, this can literally be 5 or 10 lines of code.
You also get to control the code that gets returned - set your own timeout (server-side) for fetching data from the web service; not have to worry about the hosting site going down and possibly breaking your app; not worrying about the remote end getting comprimised (since it would be a bright shiny target, and you don't know anything about their security); not worry about them shutting down operations, switching to a pay-per-use model (see above), changing the API in a non-BC way, etc.
Obviously COWS Ajax introduces another layer of concern, but it can be mitigated by running tools/apps from trusted sources only (as I state in the opening blurb).
To a point. The sites that are serving up this code will quickly become a target of crackers, as the only thing better than exploting one web server and putting your phishing code into their site is exploting one server and putting code into their site that's served up on hundreds or thousands of other websites.
There are many many forums that are basically the "center" of a community that revolves around a piece or collection of software. Often the forums are very active, and most questions are answered very quickly. These places are a great resource, and definately a nicer interface than mailing lists (and their archives) for essentially the same type of thing.
The problem with forums is once they get 'big', it becomes incredibly hard to keep things organized, and as a user - especially a new user - hard to make sense of it. Often when you ask questions, you'll be pointed to another thread that has the solution. These threads can often be several pages long, with the original question at the top of page 1, an initial solution on page 2, some follow-up problems on page 3, and more solutions to those as you read through. The result is that instead of being able to go and get the full (and current) solution to the problem, you end up having to spend a great deal of time reading through the steps everyone else took when the thread was active, as well as all the off-shoot discussion that takes place around it ("Yeah, I have the same problem.." "My error message is different, I see...."). No one from the original thread bothers to summarize the steps at the end (since for them, it's all fresh in their mind as they've spent the last few days or whatever posting to the thread), and in fact, to do so would probably be considered annoying.
Wikis can provide that initial solution, then mould it over time into a fully working solution, while still maintaining a history of changes - if you want to see it. As a user, wikis are virtually always easier to find information in than a forum.
What I haven't seen is a wiki that has a really good forum built-in, especially something that would post the changes to the wiki in the thread as it was changed (so when you look at it later on, you see a couple posts, then the wiki modification, with links to that revision, as well as a diff from the previous revision).
It's been a long time since I was stuck in a menu system and unable to talk to a person. Just press zero, or simply wait. Many even tell you this. For Cingular's, you can even say out loud "I want to talk to a person" and the computer responds "Okay!" and connects you.
Bell Canada's does that when you swear at it. (I'm not kidding!)
I don't see how playing to twentysomethings who have no power, influence, or deep pockets as being an effective strategy. Rather, I would advise pushing to the corporate desktop.
There are many reasons to get people interested in linux earlier on. First of all, for a business, running on ANY operating system where you don't have staff that knows how to use it is a recipe for disaster. If you get people entering into the market that have knowledge of a certain product or technology, it does two things: one, companies looking to deploy said technology have a pool of people to hire from that know how to use it, and two, it gets recommended by these people when a business is looking to do something new.
Secondly the "no power, influence, or deep pockets" twentysomethings are eventually going to have all of those.
I've long suspected that most of the spam that doesn't advertise a product or offer a virus-laden attachment falls into this category. It seems a reasonable explanation for both the long strings of random prose spam and the short nonsense sentence and single-word spam.
I think that is mostly to poison spam filters. If you mark it as junk, you're adding 'regular' words to your filters, which increases the possibilities of false positives, and eventually will make the filter useless.
More importantly, he can't really do anything with the police about it because to explain how it's broken he'd have to explain what it's supposed to do in the first place, and then he'd be admitting that your complaints about him were true. He can hardly complain "hey, they broke my illegal noise making machine!"
I remember watching an episode of "Cops" once where a guy called to report a robbery, but was very vague about what was stolen. Eventually, he told them that the guy had stole a few grams of marijuana or something from him, which the officers found quite entertaining, to say the least.
The only problem I saw with the Canadian census was that it used some weird java applet to submit data and was incredibly slow (taking ~1minute to submit each page). This was perhaps due to load, but because of the abstraction of the java applet, when you clicked 'next', it didn't actually look like the browser was doing anything. It took me several tries to do the census, since I was watching TV at the same time while waiting for the page loads, and it timed me out a couple of times when I didn't notice a page had loaded and was waiting for me.
As a web developer, I thought the whole thing seemed very.. over-engineered? It was like someone with absolutely no previous web development experience wrote it. I could not, and still cannot see what benefit this applet would have had over using standard techniques for submitting forms over top of an SSL connection. You know.. the same techniques banks use to protect their highly-sensitive web interfaces? Oh well, I'm sure they spent millions of dollars more than they needed to developing it.
So, while I applaud the game being released on the consoles, if it doesn't have the same net-based populating code I think something will be lost. But hey, it'll probably still be cool.
Why shouldn't it? The consoles all have network connectivity.. it could seamlessly detect if there is internet access in the background, and if so, download a bunch of creatures/worlds/whatever. I don't see why being on PC vs Console would affect this ability at all, except perhaps that there are more PCs than consoles connected to the internet right now.
Where is the hiss coming from? Do you hear it while you're on skype, or is it only after you've recorded? Do you hear it when you record straight from your microphone, with no skype involved? What is the setup on the other end - do they have a good microphone and quiet environment to record in?
At this point for all we know, you're trying to do this while sitting in the middle of a field on a windy day, or next to your 8-harddrive 12-fan full-tower PC.
Figure out the exact source of the hiss, then figure out how to get rid of it.
Seriously though, subversion has been pretty good for the most part. A project I'm involved in has been using it pretty much since it became available. I've never liked the bug tracker though, and especially some of their other tools, like the forum. We've actually been using Trac now for, a long time, which syncs to the sf.net svn server. sf.net hosts our mailing list, downloads, and code.. and we have a wiki (and documentation) and ticket tracker with Trac (along with code browser, timeline, and roadmap).
I'm having a hard time understanding what MindTouch Dream actually provides. Is it a development environment framework? A IDE? It isn't clear to me how an application written in "MindTouch Dream" can also be PHP -or-.NET -or- C#.
I think they're taking a page from the marketing book for.NET. It took me a couple years to figure out what.NET actually is/does (hint: it's a marketing term for a whole bunch of unrelated or at best loosely-related products and marketing campaigns -- What exactly does the.NET framework have to do with MSN..?).
Why don't they make the card readers have a magnetic stripe reader in BOTH SIDES? There are so many people (including me) that get it backwards, or even just spend a few seconds looking at it trying to decipher which way the picture is showing to slide the card. Every machine has a different picture, and sometimes the pictures are so bad that it's impossible to tell anyways, or even after you study it, you get it backwards.
Of course, the other way to solve the problem is to put a magnetic strip on both sides of the debit card.. but I haven't seen that done yet either.
If the top five "spam cartels" were taken down I think we would see a 75% or more drop in SPAM worldwide.
Until "spam cartels" number 6 - 10 pick up the slack.
Exactly. Again, the problem boils down to not the spammers, but the people paying the spammers. They'll still be around, so if you get rid of the spammers, the companies advertising via spam are going to find other sources.
I think what he means is just not using any layout or styles at all. Just use a tag for the page title, lists for the navigation, and to separate sections of content. Use tables only for tabular data.
Sure, some people will say it looks "ugly," but simplicity has its own beauty.
Ironically, this is exactly what CSS allows you to do and one of the reasons I like it. Make the page this way.
Eventually, if you want to make it pretty, add some CSS (of course, the usual way of separating content is to use div, not hr). Want an example? Look at the HTML for slashdot, or even go View > Page style > No Style. Everything is just lists and divs.
A programmer shouldn't have to get anywhere near the CSS or HTML. The HTML should be the job of the technical writer that's creating the website content!
You've never done web development, I take it. It's the nature of the beast. Your application outputs something, usually that something is HTML. It's like saying that a C programmer shouldn't get anywhere near the ASCII output to the screen, or the Windows programmer should never touch the GUI.
For me, as a web developer, CSS+HTML makes my job simpler. I can just output plain HTML with sections and h1 tags and lists, and then get a web designer to come in and do some CSS around it. At this point they still ocasionally come back with some minor changes that need to be done to the HTML (wrapper div's, sometimes changing the order) but as I said, in time this will hopefully be overcome.
Contrast to say, 6 or 7 years ago when we were doing table layouts (at a dot-bomb). Our graphic designers were working inside the codebase all the time, because the layout was embedded inside the main code and various modules that output information. A lot of the "code" was really just stuff to output the HTML. This meant as a programmer, my source files were usually much bigger than they needed to be to support the layout, and I had to look at that. And the designers had to look at code, and to a degree, understand loops and some other structures when writing the layout code, since what they wrote isn't exactly what would be output, depending on how the program ran.
(Interestingly, two of the designers I worked with ended up learning enough code that they became programmers, and both do that now as their primary jobs elsewhere).
Re:Standard versus Proprietary?
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Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it
Because that wasn't even more of a mess??
Nested tables, embedded styles everywhere... sure, it works now, but only because the browser developers had so much time to get it to work, and developers have gotten used to it.
It's a horrible way to do layout. You end up with a twisted combination of layout and content - which means your web programmers have to have a bit of graphic design in them, and your graphic designers have to know a little bit about programming. To change something - for example, to move a menu from a horizontal bar at the top to a vertical menu on the right side - requires a ton of work. For a complex enough design, it may mean starting over, because you're 12 tables deep and are losing track of the row because there's too many rowspan=3's. Not to mention, there's no easy way to make a "print" or accessable version without having a whole separate layout.
Using CSS, you get a nice clean HTML layout. In fact, it's almost to the point where a web designer can be responsible for the CSS, and the programmer for the HTML*. Going back to the previous example, if your menu is in a div, and defined with an unordered list, then to move that navbar it's only a matter of changing the CSS. Don't need to touch the HTML (or corresponding server-side code that generates it) at all.
A nice thing about developing this way is the page is viewable before even putting in the CSS. In fact, it can be viewed easily by ANY browser (albeit without formatting) including text-based browsers and even the first generation web browsers. Making a printable version is just a matter of another stylesheet (and if you use the 'cascade' properly, you can have one that sets up the main layout, and one that modifies that for print, or one main, and two that inherit with specific changes - one for screen, one for print). Screen readers will have no problem with it. Search engines will index it easily.
Now, yes, it does have a learning curve. It takes a lot of reading to understand layout in CSS, as well as CSS in general. Current web developers often think "I know web development, I can do CSS" then get frustrated because things don't work (case in point, the original article). Really, they haven't bothered to learn it. There are a ton of great sites out there to help with this, and a couple google searches will find them. It's not something that happens overnight though, it takes a fair bit of reading and experimenting.
* There's still a few 'hacks' that are sometimes required to make the CSS work (ie, adding a 'wrapper div' around certain things), but these will hopefully be addressed eventually in newer versions of CSS. There's also the issue of IE.. but as long as you develop in a standards-based browser, and don't do anything TOO funky, it's usually not overly difficult to get IE to work (there's always the "IE7" javascript hack). We can only hope that when Microsoft actually releases the real IE7, they get it right.
If IE7 does actually work, I would hope that the web would basically go to a "your browser is too old to view this page, please upgrade..." and provide links to firefox, IE7, and opera or whatever. I normally hate browser detection, but the faster we get rid of IE5/6 the better.
Somewhere in the middle are the administrators who can usually leave their work at the office at the end of the day but who don't mind if users want to access and maybe save personal email messages or other files from work (where the spiffy color laser printer sometimes gets used to print pictures of a worker's newborn baby or a photo that an employee wants to hand in his cube), and realize that most sane people don't truly compartmentalize their work and personal lives; that overlap is normal and natural, usually inevitable, and often beneficial -- that most folks want/expect some personal privacy in the workplace and to be cut a little slack when using office resources for personal reasons.
I work at a small company, where my role only requires me to spend part of my time as an IT admin. I take this same approach, and find it's mutually beneficial. Users don't have install rights, but I also will install things on individual workstations that people ask for. (They actually used to have install rights on their personal workstations - not if they logged into others - but I had to take it away because they'd blindly install some web background program that would install 30 spyware applications. They were understanding when I removed that right after they saw the damage it caused). I've helped people setup their personal email accounts in thunderbird.
I've read articles talking about how if you don't allow people time to do personal tasks at work, that instead of taking 5 or 10 or even 30 minutes of work time, they'll take a sick or vacation day to catch up on errands, and I can see this happening. Personally I don't really mind fixing a server issue on the weekend or late at night, because I'm afforded this flexibility at work. At some offices, as soon as it hits 5:00pm, everyone drops what they're doing and goes home.. that's just a sad situation. It's not that people should be expected to work late, or work exactly their 8 hours per day, but if, for example, a task will take 20 minutes to finish before you go home, versus 45 minutes if you have to start in the morning when it's no longer fresh in your mind, it's better to stay the 20 minutes. In a company where workers are prohibited from doing anythink but work on company time, they're obviously not going to be willing to go the other way, and sacrifice their personal time for work.
What I find incredibly strange is that a machine like that, 7 years ago, would've been top of the line and lightning fast with Linux. Now it barely runs it? Maybe Linux distributions need to work on their bloat a little. In 1998 I got my blazing fast PII-266 with 512 megs of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive and used that to run Linux just fine. Eventually I even had VMware Workstation running on the thing and it ran fine. Now we've got to have a 3GHz P4 with 2 gigs of RAM and a 300 gig hard drive just to get by? WTF?
Why is that strange? 7 years ago that machine would have been top of the line and lightning fast with Windows. Now it barely runs it? Oh, it ran Windows 98 back then, now we're talking about Windows XP?
Linux, like Windows, has introduced new versions. The Linux desktop environments (which is really what you're referring to here, as the Linux kernel itself runs on many many devices) have introduced new versions.
All the mainstream distros are using KDE or Gnome (which are the two 'big' desktop environments), which are "taking advantage of modern hardware" (in otherwords, they're bloated because current hardware is fast enough to handle it). There are still dozens of desktop environments that are lightweight and will run blazingly fast on 266mhz. You get the added benefit that you're running current versions of everything, including linux itself.
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I'm confused. No phone, but they will have VoIP?
Voice over IP is merely the act of sending phone signals over an IP network.. It's an alternative to an analog signal, or a proprietary digital signal used by many (non-VoIP) PBX systems.
I suspect if anything you're suggesting a softphone, which is an IP phone (usually SIP) that runs in software on a computer. While this is doable, having a real phone (a hardware SIP or IAX2 or MGCP phone) is much nicer. It's nicer to use, and it works while your computer is off/rebooting/compiling something that takes up all the CPU. I have a softphone on my laptop, which is handy when I'm out of the office -- if someone calls my extension, it rings the real phone in my office and my laptop simultaneously -- but it's not as handy as the real phone I can use without plugging in a headset, starting software, etc.
I'm sure everyone has worked with people that, for example, enter names into a database very inconsistently. We had a bookkeeper at work who did this. The accounting system only had one field for customer name. So sometimes names were entered "Smith, John", other times "John SMITH" or "Mr. John Smith" or "john c smith, mr" etc. (and apply this across the board, not just to names but addresses, phone numbers, and pretty much every other piece of information entered). When we migrated to our new system (which has separate first/last, or company name) I wrote a small program to try and clean it up, and I still spent two days going through by hand fixing things, removing duplicates, etc.
What really boggles my mind though, is she failed to see why there was a problem at all. How do you teach people the skills to understand why data should be entered logically? I was actually talking to my friends about this the other day. We came to the conclusion that in throughout public school there should be actual graded classes (or 'units') about problem solving, ie doing logic puzzles, and soduku and teaching other deductive reasoning skills. If you can't solve the puzzle, you can't pass the test. You start out simple in grade 2 or 3, and gradually work your way up. By the time they introduce basic algebra ("4 = x + 2") the kids would be laughing at it.
I realize some people are more logically minded than others, but this style of deductive reasoning is a basic life skill that can be used in every profession, and everyone's daily lives. It's really something they should teach people at a young age.
What about the employee that works at the smoking bar? You can argue that a non-smoker shouldn't apply for a job at a smoking bar/restaurant, but reality gets in the way. Often people don't have a choice: they need work, they can't be picky about WHERE they get employed. Secondly, as other people have pointed out, the economics generally mean that in a city (especially a smaller one) with smoking and non-smoking bars, the non-smoking bars will tend to go out of business because in many groups there is at least one smoker, and so the whole group ends up going to a smoking place.
But back to the employee.. These are people that are subjected to second-hand smoke for an entire shift, almost every single day. That's a lot of smoke - even for a smoker - and much more than a typical bar patron is subjected to (a few hours, once or twice a week). These are people that non-smoking legislation is designed to protect.
Why? It's not like the existing gear will stop working once the standard comes out, or he needs to expand it (worst case, if he can't find something compatible with what he has, then he can set up a totally separate link - these are building to building links, it's not like you add new buildings everyday). Chances are, if he sets up a link with pre-N gear, then provided the hardware doesn't flat out die (or get hit by lightning etc) it will be fine for the next few years, until he wants to upgrade to the latest gigabit wireless links or whatever comes out by then.
what an interesting idea.
I know, something really needs to be done about advertisments. I can't tell you how many times I saw an ad and then suddenly found myself typing in my credit card number and home address, totally unable to control my own actions, ordering whatever item it was regardless of if I actually needed it or could have even used it at all. The worst is when you see an ad for an item you already own..
What are you looking at to decide which bluetooth adapter to get? Certainly you wouldn't look at the copy print on the retailer's site or shelf, because that's not an un-biased source, in fact, it's basically advertising. Ah, but I suppose once you found one that sounded decent, you could google it, and see if there are any reviews or complaints about it. I wonder though, what's stopping you from doing that when you see a normal ad for a product that looks interesting? Perhaps a product that is slightly more expensive, but offers some neat feature that's not readily explained in the title alone..
This has (in a way) been done. The problem with froogle, as you'll hear many retailers complain, is that it forces you to compete solely on price. Sometimes this is fine -- if for example, you're buying a bluetooth dongle. If you're buying something more expensive, however (say, a laptop), then it's also important to figure out what else they offer - how long is the warranty? What accessories come with it? Is there a trade-up program if you decide you need a better one in a couple months? Do the staff know what they're talking about if you have questions? These are things not easily accommodated with a 'yellow pages' style listing.
Perhaps there IS a better way.. come up with it, and you'll probably make a good amount of money. In the meantime, make sure you have adblock installed and a hosts file to redirect all those nasty sites, lest you go broke from that uncontrollable urge to buy every product whose ad reaches your eyeballs.
I was actually thinking that one of the 'benefits' of this technique is that you could release a tool for people to use WITHOUT releasing the source (or backend database, or any other tools/data used). This is more of a benefit to the Googles and Yahoos, or the guy that wants to eventually make money off this tool, not the end-developer integrating it.
Overall, it seems to me like a solution to a problem that just doesn't exist. There are already ways to access web services from the server-side (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, and so on). To make use of these sources with AJAX, you just need to code some AJAX glue to tie it together. Using the toolkits that most languages have now, this can literally be 5 or 10 lines of code.
You also get to control the code that gets returned - set your own timeout (server-side) for fetching data from the web service; not have to worry about the hosting site going down and possibly breaking your app; not worrying about the remote end getting comprimised (since it would be a bright shiny target, and you don't know anything about their security); not worry about them shutting down operations, switching to a pay-per-use model (see above), changing the API in a non-BC way, etc.
To a point. The sites that are serving up this code will quickly become a target of crackers, as the only thing better than exploting one web server and putting your phishing code into their site is exploting one server and putting code into their site that's served up on hundreds or thousands of other websites.
There are many many forums that are basically the "center" of a community that revolves around a piece or collection of software. Often the forums are very active, and most questions are answered very quickly. These places are a great resource, and definately a nicer interface than mailing lists (and their archives) for essentially the same type of thing.
The problem with forums is once they get 'big', it becomes incredibly hard to keep things organized, and as a user - especially a new user - hard to make sense of it. Often when you ask questions, you'll be pointed to another thread that has the solution. These threads can often be several pages long, with the original question at the top of page 1, an initial solution on page 2, some follow-up problems on page 3, and more solutions to those as you read through. The result is that instead of being able to go and get the full (and current) solution to the problem, you end up having to spend a great deal of time reading through the steps everyone else took when the thread was active, as well as all the off-shoot discussion that takes place around it ("Yeah, I have the same problem.." "My error message is different, I see...."). No one from the original thread bothers to summarize the steps at the end (since for them, it's all fresh in their mind as they've spent the last few days or whatever posting to the thread), and in fact, to do so would probably be considered annoying.
Wikis can provide that initial solution, then mould it over time into a fully working solution, while still maintaining a history of changes - if you want to see it. As a user, wikis are virtually always easier to find information in than a forum.
What I haven't seen is a wiki that has a really good forum built-in, especially something that would post the changes to the wiki in the thread as it was changed (so when you look at it later on, you see a couple posts, then the wiki modification, with links to that revision, as well as a diff from the previous revision).
It's been a long time since I was stuck in a menu system and unable to talk to a person. Just press zero, or simply wait. Many even tell you this. For Cingular's, you can even say out loud "I want to talk to a person" and the computer responds "Okay!" and connects you.
Bell Canada's does that when you swear at it. (I'm not kidding!)
I don't see how playing to twentysomethings who have no power, influence, or deep pockets as being an effective strategy. Rather, I would advise pushing to the corporate desktop.
There are many reasons to get people interested in linux earlier on. First of all, for a business, running on ANY operating system where you don't have staff that knows how to use it is a recipe for disaster. If you get people entering into the market that have knowledge of a certain product or technology, it does two things: one, companies looking to deploy said technology have a pool of people to hire from that know how to use it, and two, it gets recommended by these people when a business is looking to do something new.
Secondly the "no power, influence, or deep pockets" twentysomethings are eventually going to have all of those.
I saw this article posted in another post on /. earlier today, and it definately applies to this as well: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/07/terr orists_data.html
I think that is mostly to poison spam filters. If you mark it as junk, you're adding 'regular' words to your filters, which increases the possibilities of false positives, and eventually will make the filter useless.
More importantly, he can't really do anything with the police about it because to explain how it's broken he'd have to explain what it's supposed to do in the first place, and then he'd be admitting that your complaints about him were true. He can hardly complain "hey, they broke my illegal noise making machine!"
I remember watching an episode of "Cops" once where a guy called to report a robbery, but was very vague about what was stolen. Eventually, he told them that the guy had stole a few grams of marijuana or something from him, which the officers found quite entertaining, to say the least.
The only problem I saw with the Canadian census was that it used some weird java applet to submit data and was incredibly slow (taking ~1minute to submit each page). This was perhaps due to load, but because of the abstraction of the java applet, when you clicked 'next', it didn't actually look like the browser was doing anything. It took me several tries to do the census, since I was watching TV at the same time while waiting for the page loads, and it timed me out a couple of times when I didn't notice a page had loaded and was waiting for me.
As a web developer, I thought the whole thing seemed very.. over-engineered? It was like someone with absolutely no previous web development experience wrote it. I could not, and still cannot see what benefit this applet would have had over using standard techniques for submitting forms over top of an SSL connection. You know.. the same techniques banks use to protect their highly-sensitive web interfaces? Oh well, I'm sure they spent millions of dollars more than they needed to developing it.
Why shouldn't it? The consoles all have network connectivity.. it could seamlessly detect if there is internet access in the background, and if so, download a bunch of creatures/worlds/whatever. I don't see why being on PC vs Console would affect this ability at all, except perhaps that there are more PCs than consoles connected to the internet right now.
Where is the hiss coming from? Do you hear it while you're on skype, or is it only after you've recorded? Do you hear it when you record straight from your microphone, with no skype involved? What is the setup on the other end - do they have a good microphone and quiet environment to record in?
At this point for all we know, you're trying to do this while sitting in the middle of a field on a windy day, or next to your 8-harddrive 12-fan full-tower PC.
Figure out the exact source of the hiss, then figure out how to get rid of it.
4 days and it works great, huh? :)
Seriously though, subversion has been pretty good for the most part. A project I'm involved in has been using it pretty much since it became available. I've never liked the bug tracker though, and especially some of their other tools, like the forum. We've actually been using Trac now for, a long time, which syncs to the sf.net svn server. sf.net hosts our mailing list, downloads, and code.. and we have a wiki (and documentation) and ticket tracker with Trac (along with code browser, timeline, and roadmap).
I think they're taking a page from the marketing book for
Why don't they make the card readers have a magnetic stripe reader in BOTH SIDES? There are so many people (including me) that get it backwards, or even just spend a few seconds looking at it trying to decipher which way the picture is showing to slide the card. Every machine has a different picture, and sometimes the pictures are so bad that it's impossible to tell anyways, or even after you study it, you get it backwards.
Of course, the other way to solve the problem is to put a magnetic strip on both sides of the debit card.. but I haven't seen that done yet either.
Exactly. Again, the problem boils down to not the spammers, but the people paying the spammers. They'll still be around, so if you get rid of the spammers, the companies advertising via spam are going to find other sources.
Ironically, this is exactly what CSS allows you to do and one of the reasons I like it. Make the page this way.
Eventually, if you want to make it pretty, add some CSS (of course, the usual way of separating content is to use div, not hr). Want an example? Look at the HTML for slashdot, or even go View > Page style > No Style. Everything is just lists and divs.
You've never done web development, I take it. It's the nature of the beast. Your application outputs something, usually that something is HTML. It's like saying that a C programmer shouldn't get anywhere near the ASCII output to the screen, or the Windows programmer should never touch the GUI.
For me, as a web developer, CSS+HTML makes my job simpler. I can just output plain HTML with sections and h1 tags and lists, and then get a web designer to come in and do some CSS around it. At this point they still ocasionally come back with some minor changes that need to be done to the HTML (wrapper div's, sometimes changing the order) but as I said, in time this will hopefully be overcome.
Contrast to say, 6 or 7 years ago when we were doing table layouts (at a dot-bomb). Our graphic designers were working inside the codebase all the time, because the layout was embedded inside the main code and various modules that output information. A lot of the "code" was really just stuff to output the HTML. This meant as a programmer, my source files were usually much bigger than they needed to be to support the layout, and I had to look at that. And the designers had to look at code, and to a degree, understand loops and some other structures when writing the layout code, since what they wrote isn't exactly what would be output, depending on how the program ran.
(Interestingly, two of the designers I worked with ended up learning enough code that they became programmers, and both do that now as their primary jobs elsewhere).
I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it
.. but as long as you develop in a standards-based browser, and don't do anything TOO funky, it's usually not overly difficult to get IE to work (there's always the "IE7" javascript hack). We can only hope that when Microsoft actually releases the real IE7, they get it right.
Because that wasn't even more of a mess??
Nested tables, embedded styles everywhere... sure, it works now, but only because the browser developers had so much time to get it to work, and developers have gotten used to it.
It's a horrible way to do layout. You end up with a twisted combination of layout and content - which means your web programmers have to have a bit of graphic design in them, and your graphic designers have to know a little bit about programming. To change something - for example, to move a menu from a horizontal bar at the top to a vertical menu on the right side - requires a ton of work. For a complex enough design, it may mean starting over, because you're 12 tables deep and are losing track of the row because there's too many rowspan=3's. Not to mention, there's no easy way to make a "print" or accessable version without having a whole separate layout.
Using CSS, you get a nice clean HTML layout. In fact, it's almost to the point where a web designer can be responsible for the CSS, and the programmer for the HTML*. Going back to the previous example, if your menu is in a div, and defined with an unordered list, then to move that navbar it's only a matter of changing the CSS. Don't need to touch the HTML (or corresponding server-side code that generates it) at all.
A nice thing about developing this way is the page is viewable before even putting in the CSS. In fact, it can be viewed easily by ANY browser (albeit without formatting) including text-based browsers and even the first generation web browsers. Making a printable version is just a matter of another stylesheet (and if you use the 'cascade' properly, you can have one that sets up the main layout, and one that modifies that for print, or one main, and two that inherit with specific changes - one for screen, one for print). Screen readers will have no problem with it. Search engines will index it easily.
Now, yes, it does have a learning curve. It takes a lot of reading to understand layout in CSS, as well as CSS in general. Current web developers often think "I know web development, I can do CSS" then get frustrated because things don't work (case in point, the original article). Really, they haven't bothered to learn it. There are a ton of great sites out there to help with this, and a couple google searches will find them. It's not something that happens overnight though, it takes a fair bit of reading and experimenting.
* There's still a few 'hacks' that are sometimes required to make the CSS work (ie, adding a 'wrapper div' around certain things), but these will hopefully be addressed eventually in newer versions of CSS. There's also the issue of IE
If IE7 does actually work, I would hope that the web would basically go to a "your browser is too old to view this page, please upgrade..." and provide links to firefox, IE7, and opera or whatever. I normally hate browser detection, but the faster we get rid of IE5/6 the better.
I work at a small company, where my role only requires me to spend part of my time as an IT admin. I take this same approach, and find it's mutually beneficial. Users don't have install rights, but I also will install things on individual workstations that people ask for. (They actually used to have install rights on their personal workstations - not if they logged into others - but I had to take it away because they'd blindly install some web background program that would install 30 spyware applications. They were understanding when I removed that right after they saw the damage it caused). I've helped people setup their personal email accounts in thunderbird.
I've read articles talking about how if you don't allow people time to do personal tasks at work, that instead of taking 5 or 10 or even 30 minutes of work time, they'll take a sick or vacation day to catch up on errands, and I can see this happening. Personally I don't really mind fixing a server issue on the weekend or late at night, because I'm afforded this flexibility at work. At some offices, as soon as it hits 5:00pm, everyone drops what they're doing and goes home.. that's just a sad situation. It's not that people should be expected to work late, or work exactly their 8 hours per day, but if, for example, a task will take 20 minutes to finish before you go home, versus 45 minutes if you have to start in the morning when it's no longer fresh in your mind, it's better to stay the 20 minutes. In a company where workers are prohibited from doing anythink but work on company time, they're obviously not going to be willing to go the other way, and sacrifice their personal time for work.
Why is that strange? 7 years ago that machine would have been top of the line and lightning fast with Windows. Now it barely runs it? Oh, it ran Windows 98 back then, now we're talking about Windows XP?
Linux, like Windows, has introduced new versions. The Linux desktop environments (which is really what you're referring to here, as the Linux kernel itself runs on many many devices) have introduced new versions.
All the mainstream distros are using KDE or Gnome (which are the two 'big' desktop environments), which are "taking advantage of modern hardware" (in otherwords, they're bloated because current hardware is fast enough to handle it). There are still dozens of desktop environments that are lightweight and will run blazingly fast on 266mhz. You get the added benefit that you're running current versions of everything, including linux itself.