... for setting up an online music store are typically around $1-2m per major label, which isn't too hard to find. (this is from real inside experience)
So the advances on this must be insane for the negotiations to fail. I can only think it's not just a money thing, there must be other crazy clauses in there too.
From the PDF itself, Microsft admit it's a dog on Windows: "PostgreSQL uses a process-oriented architecture similar to that of Apache 1.3, where each request is handled by an independent process. The native Windows port has not used the Windows preferred thread-oriented architecture. For this reason, one should expect performance on Windows to be lower, especially where large numbers of small queries are executed."
Personally, I use PostgreSQL on Linux as my database, and ASP.NET on IIS (Windows Server 2003) for my front-end.
I don't mind that PostgreSQL is slow on Windows as I only use it for local testing and not in our production environments.
I come originally from a hardcore x86 assembler, C background. I used to work in commercial video game development.
When I got out of that (ridiculous work ethic) and got properly into the web, I first started using Java, then PHP and finally VB6 + old "classic" ASP. Both of those latter two are wretched.
When I moved to ASP.NET in VB.NET it was a whole new world of difference. It was like the clouds had lifted.
I've coded some enormous web applications in VB.NET. I've also coded some incredibly low-level wire stuff like SMPP servers.
As per the parent's comments: VB.NET is far easier to code and read than C#. C# is so damned pedantic, just like its cousins C and C++. C# just gets in the way and slows down your development. The Visual Studio VB.NET IDE formats your code in a really nice way as you go along, and the layout of VB.NET code makes it far easier to see what is going on, and there is no chance of accidently leaving a semi-colon in the wrong place, forcing lots of debugging.
Parent is right that CType (or DirectCast) is a bit annoying, but I find use of that method pretty rare anyway. And it's nit-picking an otherwise excellent language.
I consider VB.NET the best language I've ever used, and I've used pretty much everything sane you can think of in my 20+ years of coding.
Great news that Mono now supports this. It'll make it much easier to port over my web projects to run on Linux.
I've been using VOIP (SIP) at home for a few years now. From the UK I call my girlfriend on her landline in the USA for almost nothing.
I've used lots of different phones and adapters. I don't generally use any "softphones" (VOIP applications that require a PC), nor any of the phones that require your PC to be on.
The absolute best voice quality, and ease-of-use is the Nokia E60 I recently bought. It was about US$300 from eBay (SIM free - i.e. generic, not locked to any network). It's standards-compliant (802.11 + SIP) and connects to both of my current VOIP providers (Sipgate and VoipBuster) without trouble.
Whenever I get home (within range of my access point) it instantly registers with my VOIP provider of choice as well as staying connected to the cell network via 3G/GSM. Whenever I click a contact to make a call it simply asks whether I want to call by "Cell" or "Internet" - and that decides how the call is routed. Incoming calls on SIP and cell work great - so you can have more than one number on your phone at the same time.
The voice quality is superb and it is so totally easy-to-use once configured (configuration is slow when you have to type all the server names on a numeric pad). The only downsides are that I only get about 2 hours of talk time over WiFi (after that I have to plug in the charger to keep talking), and that there is no built-in camera.
There needs to be editing and moderation on the entries.
Most of the data looks like it was input by a 5-year-old hammering away on a Dvorak keyboard.
Another thing that annoys me is that even on Windows Media Player which buys in the CD track information from Muze and AMG, there is no consistency between those 2 companies on the formating of the track names. For instance, one company might have "(featuring Mya)" in the track name. Another might just add "Mya" to the Artist list against the track instead.
Of course, a lot of these problems would be solved with a proper XML format for media information. Something that is badly overdue. Right now, most meta-data formats only have one text field called "Artist" against a track. This really needs to be a collection of "Artist" nodes, etc.
In 1995-1996 I was running a popular web site I set up called The CDPLAYER.INI Project.
It worked with the Windows CD Player / Media Player application which identified CDs as long as the tracks and titles were in an INI file in your WINDOWS folder.
People would e-mail in their albums as text snippets and I would add them to the INI which users could download. There would be a new version practically every day.
It hit the buffers when the file got to 64K, which was the maximum size of an INI file in Windows 95 - then it had to start being partitioned and the need for a custom application became apparent.....
The sad thing is, it *is* possible to merge the best of the music players and the best of the phones into one unit. I'd love to only have to carry one unit around with me.
The fact is, 5 years from now the decision will be forced, IMO. The concept of "downloading" your music, for people willing to pay, will be nonsense. Most people will be streaming their music libraries on a pay-per-play model from "the cloud", avoiding all the hassles of syncing and having enough storage on the phone.
You're right though, Nokia has spare money to burn to try out all these different projects. As you rightly say - their hand is forced by their shareholders - something I consider one of the bigger evils of modern capitalism. Companies are generally forced into bad or evil decision to please their shareholders who only care for the bottom-line and not for the products the company is developing. But that's a rant for another day...
I remember when OD2 was 3 guys in a bedroom, and I was one of them.
The main failure I see in OD2's business model was that it ran a "white label" system. It powered the music stores for brands that didn't give a shit about music. Packard-Bell is a great example. They barely give a shit about building computers, but they know even less about music. Wanadoo (now Orange) was (is?) one of the biggest customers, but again - what does an ISP care about music? Nothing. So none of these partners really cared about their music portals or did anything with them. They just let them rot away.
MSN is the biggest customer in terms of users, but they never really cared enough to do anything useful - and they showed just how much they cared when they started installing big Flash ads all over their site. The ad revenue probably brought them more than the music ever did.
Apple made the right decision by building a single brand. Of course, this requires some serious marketing outlay which white-labelling doesn't (your partners spend the marketing beans), but in the end produces a much richer experience IMO.
Why does Coca-Cola need it's own music store? It's a trick question - they don't. Coca-Cola had their own store built around OD2's platform, but now they've abandoned it and just have a page inside iTunes. THAT is a better combination of brands.
OD2 Loudeye also pissed their money away buying OverPeer. I kept asking the Korean tech guys - "How will you keep getting more IPs as your servers get blocked?" "Ah, it's our secret" they said. I never did find out their "secret" for all the good it did them. Never start a war against the hardcore pirates on the Internet. They're cleverer than you. And plus, they're 12 years old and have far too much disposable time to fuck you up.
Am I surprised Nokia bought OD2? A bit. I worked on the N91 project with Nokia a couple of years ago, back in the days when they were pissing themselves with fear over a Apple/Moto iPhone which still hasn't *really* arrived. The idea of Nokia phone which does music is fairly sound - the main idea of course is that you cut out the PC element. You buy and download the songs straight to your phone (and you can sync them back to your desktop too if you want). The spanner in the works, as Apple found to their detriment, is the networks. Apple tried to do it without the networks and they demanded their cut. They want a chunk of every track sold. The problem is, Apple (like all the other music stores with fixed pricing) only makes a couple of cents on most tracks - there is no room for a cut for the networks. And the networks need to pay for all that bandwidth you'll use downloading your songs.
What have Nokia actually bought? 5 pieces of paper. The contracts with all the record labels (majors + indies). I wouldn't be surprised if that was all they really wanted from the deal. It saves them a whole bunch of work in negotiating contracts and paying royalty advances.
Do I think Nokia will succeed? Maybe. I've been inside the belly of the beast though. Nokia have gone seriously downhill in recent years. The quality control on their software is shoddy. Their desktop software has always been horrendous. A lot of their software design is outsourced. Internally their organisational structure seems to be dragging them down. I really don't hold out much hope.
My money is on Apple. They have everything, end-to-end. If they really are building their own phone from scratch with their own UI then they'll end up winning this game. The only thing they lack compared to Nokia is the relationships with the mobile networks, but money can solve that problem - as Apple have hinted previously about setting up their own virtual network.
Caveat: I'm a OD2 Loudeye shareholder. My shares are barely worth the paper they're written on:)
Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.
on
P2P Polluter Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, very likely they're really closing down. I was in some of the first meetings between Overpeer and Loudeye back in the early days long before the buyout. The record labels were paying Overpeer to seed the main networks with 30 second samples of all the tracks, made to look like the full-length versions. In fairness their tech guys had good answers about where they were going to continue to get IP blocks from as they were found out.
I suspect Overpeer just aren't relevant anymore - the core P2P networks have pretty much imploded on themselves, and any consumers using them are just going to get raped by all the spyware they'll end up with. The hardcore downloaders know where to get the music anyway, and Overpeer was useless against Torrents which are generally "moderated" against poisons by the community.
This was only their storage unit and not their main offices which are near the docks, so there at least there was no chance of anyone getting hurt.
Plus I talked to someone there today and they said that some of their best sets are already out on loan for exhibitions, so those "off-site" backups are safe!
When I worked as a developer on a game for Eidos about 7 years ago we were told in the first meeting that it had to be gory and horific enough to ensure it got an 18+ rating. It would guarantee sales apparently as the kids went out of their way to get hold of it.
Yeah, I buy most of my eBooks from Fictionwise, but I bought Dark Tower (Book VII) by Stephen King the other day and I've still not been able to read it. I need to go and create myself a whole new MS Passport account so I can have a whole new set of activations. Obviously none of my old books will work on this new Passport account.
No. The DRM on my satellite television decoder has never gotten in the way of my enjoyment of watching the shows. It's pretty much invisible to me, and that's the sort of DRM I'm fine with.
I'm a fan of a lot of the products Microsoft produces, and I was even a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) for several years.
I was also employed as a Windows Media DRM expert for several years.
I have to say, Microsoft's eBook DRM is probably the worst DRM I have ever encountered. I frequently buy eBooks, but now I have books I can't use. There is no way to de-activate an old piece of hardware from their hardware list, so after 5 equipment changes (and as geeks we update our PCs and PDAs reguarly) you're screwed.
They promise another activation every 180 days or something on their. But that's a total lie. A complete falsehood. It says you can mail support and ask for more activations, but you just get denied every time.
The reason their technical support knows nothing about the DRM is because the whole MS LIT/MS Reader project appears to be abandonware. The reader app hasn't had any non-critical updates in years.
MICROSOFT! PLEASE! We just want to read the books we bought! *sob*
I've had some bad experience with Adobe's DRM too - it won't let you re-flow DRM'd books so I can't read them on my PDA. I have to remote desktop into my PC from my Pocket PC to read them in bed.. and that's just a total scroll-fest then.
Don't make me have to go back to using tree-based books...
But the maximum copyright term for anything in the US is 95 years. So for these recordings from 1930 they would fall into PD in 2025 if federal protection existed on sound recordings fixed prior to 1930.
By extending that to 2067 when the law reverts to federal control they've now extended the copyright term on those recordings to 137 years!
Hmm.. this is a tricky one. Does someone fancy explaining more details on this common law ruling?
The copyright in the sound recordings had expired here in the UK as we only have a 50-year term on recordings (although the term on say the composer and lyricist is 70 years after death, so mostly only recordings of Classical music, like these were, are truly in the public domain).
In the US there is no written statute protecting sound recordings fixed before 1972 - the only thing you needed was permission from the composer of the piece.
So, legally they should have been completely in the clear.
For instance, here in the UK everyone is fairly reserved in the cinema. It's been a long time since I heard a mobile phone go off during a film, and everyone pretty much keeps quiet during the film.
It always intrigues me when I watch films in the theater in the US and everyone shouts and talks during the film and even claps at the end.
Re:VB is "a great language"?
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 1
Ah, let's not get this into a flame war, but if you'd told me 15 years ago when I was waist-deep in hardcore x86 assembler writing crazy 3D demos that I would be evangelising BASIC in 2005 I would have laughed so hard several of my internal organs would have burst.
Yet, having used VB.NET for the last 4 years I can currently imagine no language I would rather code in. I've done many years of x86, 68000 assembler, 10 years of C/C++, many horrid years of Pascal. I even suffered VB in ASP2.0 and VB6, which were both horrid nasty creatures.
VB.NET is the most beautiful, easy language I've ever had the pleasure to use. It is so clear to read, so effortless to code.. I spend all my time now thinking about the algorithms and the design rather than wondering whether I have the right case on a variable name, or whether I've accidently put a ; on the end of a "for" construct.
If only there was a way to get more developers to dip their toe in the water and try VB.NET - I really can't praise it highly enough. Sick, but true!
Slashdot Mirror
... for setting up an online music store are typically around $1-2m per major label, which isn't too hard to find. (this is from real inside experience)
So the advances on this must be insane for the negotiations to fail. I can only think it's not just a money thing, there must be other crazy clauses in there too.
From the PDF itself, Microsft admit it's a dog on Windows:
"PostgreSQL uses a process-oriented architecture similar to that of Apache 1.3, where each request is handled by an independent process. The native Windows port has not used the Windows preferred thread-oriented architecture. For this reason, one should expect performance on Windows to be lower, especially where large numbers of small queries are executed."
Personally, I use PostgreSQL on Linux as my database, and ASP.NET on IIS (Windows Server 2003) for my front-end.
I don't mind that PostgreSQL is slow on Windows as I only use it for local testing and not in our production environments.
If you switch on the option in VB.NET (as every good programmer should) then it won't let you convert variables without typecasting them properly.
// do my thing here which will never be called
And I'm not talking about leaving a semi-colon out - that wouldn't necessarily compile, I'm thinking of things similar to this, which are more subtle:
for(i=0;i10;i++);
{
}
I totally agree with the parent.
I come originally from a hardcore x86 assembler, C background. I used to work in commercial video game development.
When I got out of that (ridiculous work ethic) and got properly into the web, I first started using Java, then PHP and finally VB6 + old "classic" ASP. Both of those latter two are wretched.
When I moved to ASP.NET in VB.NET it was a whole new world of difference. It was like the clouds had lifted.
I've coded some enormous web applications in VB.NET. I've also coded some incredibly low-level wire stuff like SMPP servers.
As per the parent's comments: VB.NET is far easier to code and read than C#. C# is so damned pedantic, just like its cousins C and C++. C# just gets in the way and slows down your development. The Visual Studio VB.NET IDE formats your code in a really nice way as you go along, and the layout of VB.NET code makes it far easier to see what is going on, and there is no chance of accidently leaving a semi-colon in the wrong place, forcing lots of debugging.
Parent is right that CType (or DirectCast) is a bit annoying, but I find use of that method pretty rare anyway. And it's nit-picking an otherwise excellent language.
I consider VB.NET the best language I've ever used, and I've used pretty much everything sane you can think of in my 20+ years of coding.
Great news that Mono now supports this. It'll make it much easier to port over my web projects to run on Linux.
I've been using VOIP (SIP) at home for a few years now. From the UK I call my girlfriend on her landline in the USA for almost nothing.
I've used lots of different phones and adapters. I don't generally use any "softphones" (VOIP applications that require a PC), nor any of the phones that require your PC to be on.
The absolute best voice quality, and ease-of-use is the Nokia E60 I recently bought. It was about US$300 from eBay (SIM free - i.e. generic, not locked to any network). It's standards-compliant (802.11 + SIP) and connects to both of my current VOIP providers (Sipgate and VoipBuster) without trouble.
Whenever I get home (within range of my access point) it instantly registers with my VOIP provider of choice as well as staying connected to the cell network via 3G/GSM. Whenever I click a contact to make a call it simply asks whether I want to call by "Cell" or "Internet" - and that decides how the call is routed. Incoming calls on SIP and cell work great - so you can have more than one number on your phone at the same time.
The voice quality is superb and it is so totally easy-to-use once configured (configuration is slow when you have to type all the server names on a numeric pad). The only downsides are that I only get about 2 hours of talk time over WiFi (after that I have to plug in the charger to keep talking), and that there is no built-in camera.
There is a review here: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Nokia _E60_Preview_The_Candybar_With_Almost_Everything.p hp
It's very stable and reliable, unlike it's N-Series brothers which are a POS. I can highly recommend the phone.
I totally agree :(
There needs to be editing and moderation on the entries.
Most of the data looks like it was input by a 5-year-old hammering away on a Dvorak keyboard.
Another thing that annoys me is that even on Windows Media Player which buys in the CD track information from Muze and AMG, there is no consistency between those 2 companies on the formating of the track names. For instance, one company might have "(featuring Mya)" in the track name. Another might just add "Mya" to the Artist list against the track instead.
Of course, a lot of these problems would be solved with a proper XML format for media information. Something that is badly overdue. Right now, most meta-data formats only have one text field called "Artist" against a track. This really needs to be a collection of "Artist" nodes, etc.
In 1995-1996 I was running a popular web site I set up called The CDPLAYER.INI Project.
It worked with the Windows CD Player / Media Player application which identified CDs as long as the tracks and titles were in an INI file in your WINDOWS folder.
People would e-mail in their albums as text snippets and I would add them to the INI which users could download. There would be a new version practically every day.
It hit the buffers when the file got to 64K, which was the maximum size of an INI file in Windows 95 - then it had to start being partitioned and the need for a custom application became apparent.....
Have your code produce a unique contact e-mail address on the page for each visitor, so for instance:
support-312321@example.com
Then set up a catch all on the first part of the address.
If you get any spam, just block out that one receiving address.
Thanks for your comments.
The sad thing is, it *is* possible to merge the best of the music players and the best of the phones into one unit. I'd love to only have to carry one unit around with me.
The fact is, 5 years from now the decision will be forced, IMO. The concept of "downloading" your music, for people willing to pay, will be nonsense. Most people will be streaming their music libraries on a pay-per-play model from "the cloud", avoiding all the hassles of syncing and having enough storage on the phone.
You're right though, Nokia has spare money to burn to try out all these different projects. As you rightly say - their hand is forced by their shareholders - something I consider one of the bigger evils of modern capitalism. Companies are generally forced into bad or evil decision to please their shareholders who only care for the bottom-line and not for the products the company is developing. But that's a rant for another day...
I remember when OD2 was 3 guys in a bedroom, and I was one of them.
:)
The main failure I see in OD2's business model was that it ran a "white label" system. It powered the music stores for brands that didn't give a shit about music. Packard-Bell is a great example. They barely give a shit about building computers, but they know even less about music. Wanadoo (now Orange) was (is?) one of the biggest customers, but again - what does an ISP care about music? Nothing. So none of these partners really cared about their music portals or did anything with them. They just let them rot away.
MSN is the biggest customer in terms of users, but they never really cared enough to do anything useful - and they showed just how much they cared when they started installing big Flash ads all over their site. The ad revenue probably brought them more than the music ever did.
Apple made the right decision by building a single brand. Of course, this requires some serious marketing outlay which white-labelling doesn't (your partners spend the marketing beans), but in the end produces a much richer experience IMO.
Why does Coca-Cola need it's own music store? It's a trick question - they don't. Coca-Cola had their own store built around OD2's platform, but now they've abandoned it and just have a page inside iTunes. THAT is a better combination of brands.
OD2 Loudeye also pissed their money away buying OverPeer. I kept asking the Korean tech guys - "How will you keep getting more IPs as your servers get blocked?" "Ah, it's our secret" they said. I never did find out their "secret" for all the good it did them. Never start a war against the hardcore pirates on the Internet. They're cleverer than you. And plus, they're 12 years old and have far too much disposable time to fuck you up.
Am I surprised Nokia bought OD2? A bit. I worked on the N91 project with Nokia a couple of years ago, back in the days when they were pissing themselves with fear over a Apple/Moto iPhone which still hasn't *really* arrived. The idea of Nokia phone which does music is fairly sound - the main idea of course is that you cut out the PC element. You buy and download the songs straight to your phone (and you can sync them back to your desktop too if you want). The spanner in the works, as Apple found to their detriment, is the networks. Apple tried to do it without the networks and they demanded their cut. They want a chunk of every track sold. The problem is, Apple (like all the other music stores with fixed pricing) only makes a couple of cents on most tracks - there is no room for a cut for the networks. And the networks need to pay for all that bandwidth you'll use downloading your songs.
What have Nokia actually bought? 5 pieces of paper. The contracts with all the record labels (majors + indies). I wouldn't be surprised if that was all they really wanted from the deal. It saves them a whole bunch of work in negotiating contracts and paying royalty advances.
Do I think Nokia will succeed? Maybe. I've been inside the belly of the beast though. Nokia have gone seriously downhill in recent years. The quality control on their software is shoddy. Their desktop software has always been horrendous. A lot of their software design is outsourced. Internally their organisational structure seems to be dragging them down. I really don't hold out much hope.
My money is on Apple. They have everything, end-to-end. If they really are building their own phone from scratch with their own UI then they'll end up winning this game. The only thing they lack compared to Nokia is the relationships with the mobile networks, but money can solve that problem - as Apple have hinted previously about setting up their own virtual network.
Caveat: I'm a OD2 Loudeye shareholder. My shares are barely worth the paper they're written on
No, very likely they're really closing down. I was in some of the first meetings between Overpeer and Loudeye back in the early days long before the buyout. The record labels were paying Overpeer to seed the main networks with 30 second samples of all the tracks, made to look like the full-length versions. In fairness their tech guys had good answers about where they were going to continue to get IP blocks from as they were found out.
:(
I suspect Overpeer just aren't relevant anymore - the core P2P networks have pretty much imploded on themselves, and any consumers using them are just going to get raped by all the spyware they'll end up with. The hardcore downloaders know where to get the music anyway, and Overpeer was useless against Torrents which are generally "moderated" against poisons by the community.
I feel bad for my Loudeye shares though
This was only their storage unit and not their main offices which are near the docks, so there at least there was no chance of anyone getting hurt.
Plus I talked to someone there today and they said that some of their best sets are already out on loan for exhibitions, so those "off-site" backups are safe!
Which gallon are we talking about?
Small gallon (US) or big gallon (UK)?
Ah that's interesting.
:p
When I worked as a developer on a game for Eidos about 7 years ago we were told in the first meeting that it had to be gory and horific enough to ensure it got an 18+ rating. It would guarantee sales apparently as the kids went out of their way to get hold of it.
Didn't work though
This is awesome PR for Rockstar. They're lapping it up!
There's no such thing as bad publicity. Now it's an 18+ they'll sell twice as many copies!
Yeah, I buy most of my eBooks from Fictionwise, but I bought Dark Tower (Book VII) by Stephen King the other day and I've still not been able to read it. I need to go and create myself a whole new MS Passport account so I can have a whole new set of activations. Obviously none of my old books will work on this new Passport account.
No. The DRM on my satellite television decoder has never gotten in the way of my enjoyment of watching the shows. It's pretty much invisible to me, and that's the sort of DRM I'm fine with.
I'm a fan of a lot of the products Microsoft produces, and I was even a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) for several years.
I was also employed as a Windows Media DRM expert for several years.
I have to say, Microsoft's eBook DRM is probably the worst DRM I have ever encountered. I frequently buy eBooks, but now I have books I can't use. There is no way to de-activate an old piece of hardware from their hardware list, so after 5 equipment changes (and as geeks we update our PCs and PDAs reguarly) you're screwed.
They promise another activation every 180 days or something on their. But that's a total lie. A complete falsehood. It says you can mail support and ask for more activations, but you just get denied every time.
The reason their technical support knows nothing about the DRM is because the whole MS LIT/MS Reader project appears to be abandonware. The reader app hasn't had any non-critical updates in years.
MICROSOFT! PLEASE! We just want to read the books we bought! *sob*
I've had some bad experience with Adobe's DRM too - it won't let you re-flow DRM'd books so I can't read them on my PDA. I have to remote desktop into my PC from my Pocket PC to read them in bed.. and that's just a total scroll-fest then.
Don't make me have to go back to using tree-based books...
You are indeed correct. "My bad".
Sound recordings in the US are limited to a maximum term of 95 years from when they were published.
This ruling would extend the maximum duration of copyright in a sound recording to 145 years.
http://www.thelenreid.com/articles/article/art_244 _idx.htm is a good summary of the ruling.
But the maximum copyright term for anything in the US is 95 years. So for these recordings from 1930 they would fall into PD in 2025 if federal protection existed on sound recordings fixed prior to 1930.
By extending that to 2067 when the law reverts to federal control they've now extended the copyright term on those recordings to 137 years!
Hmm.. this is a tricky one. Does someone fancy explaining more details on this common law ruling?
The copyright in the sound recordings had expired here in the UK as we only have a 50-year term on recordings (although the term on say the composer and lyricist is 70 years after death, so mostly only recordings of Classical music, like these were, are truly in the public domain).
In the US there is no written statute protecting sound recordings fixed before 1972 - the only thing you needed was permission from the composer of the piece.
So, legally they should have been completely in the clear.
Would this ruling apply only to NY state?
It's a cultural thing though.
For instance, here in the UK everyone is fairly reserved in the cinema. It's been a long time since I heard a mobile phone go off during a film, and everyone pretty much keeps quiet during the film.
It always intrigues me when I watch films in the theater in the US and everyone shouts and talks during the film and even claps at the end.
Ah, let's not get this into a flame war, but if you'd told me 15 years ago when I was waist-deep in hardcore x86 assembler writing crazy 3D demos that I would be evangelising BASIC in 2005 I would have laughed so hard several of my internal organs would have burst.
Yet, having used VB.NET for the last 4 years I can currently imagine no language I would rather code in. I've done many years of x86, 68000 assembler, 10 years of C/C++, many horrid years of Pascal. I even suffered VB in ASP2.0 and VB6, which were both horrid nasty creatures.
VB.NET is the most beautiful, easy language I've ever had the pleasure to use. It is so clear to read, so effortless to code.. I spend all my time now thinking about the algorithms and the design rather than wondering whether I have the right case on a variable name, or whether I've accidently put a ; on the end of a "for" construct.
If only there was a way to get more developers to dip their toe in the water and try VB.NET - I really can't praise it highly enough. Sick, but true!
Try it - you might be surprised!
Confirmed here too.. downloaded it to take a look and it is just 99% GNAAGNAAGNAA. Is this their first front page /. story? :)