Help.. I'm trapped inside a Web 2.0 BUBBLE! And I can't get out!
Perhaps why MySpace is worth half a billion dollars without any proper revenue model is because... oh lets be radical here.. perhaps because it's ALL HYPE?
The problem is there is lots of room for advertisers to throw their money away and a lot of companies have been catching onto that for the past ~5 years.
The problem with MySpace as their gleaming example is they'd somehow need to be able to re-coup $100 USD from every member (assuming there are ~5 million of them) via advertising, subscribed services etc. I see this as highly doubtful, and looking at examples only 6 or 7 years ago of businesses apparently worth in the range of 10 to 500 million of dollars, but with those estimations based entirely on hype, bullshit, naivety, or just an all-out view to make a quick buck while the newcomers are still gullable.
Tell me when MySpace has a real business model that doesn't rely on click-happy 13 year olds or balding 40 year paedophiles who want to win an Xbox.
Instead of mass-producing a product as cheaply as possible, then charging a relatively large amount for retail purchase, they give the reproduction task to the end retailer.
To the point: cheap burnable consumer DVDs are cheap for a reason, their often crap and are rarely last as long as ones used in DVD reproduction factories.
Sure it's a nice idea, it probably looked good when the marketing guys were presenting it.. But it misses the point!
The reason we have burn-your-own and print-your-own type of services is the ability to customise what you get. In my local Kodak printing shop, I can go in with my xD/SD card, select the photos I want printed and how their scaled/cropped etc. and I'll get them a few hours later on nice glossy photo paper and a CD of all the files for backup.
At home, I burn CDs/DVDs because I can customise what I have on them, perhaps I want System of a Down mixed with Led Zeppelin (hey, it's my choice).
With this.. it's just an exact copy of the disc, not cheaper, not easier to use, will probably last considerably shorter... I can't choose if I want extra scenes, or to cut out the FBI/piracy warnings, or have the star wars theme tune dubbed over it!
And remember folks, without objective criticism we'll end up with crap products and crap ideas, and this whole thing smells of 'Yes men' and end of life product whoring.
"File sharing is like marijuana - you just aren't going to be able to stop people from doing it."
But on 100 times the scale and much wider popularity.
For [a non disclosed reason] I was sitting in the back of a police car being driven to the police station... The conversation I had went something like this:
Copper: Who was playing on the stereo at your house?
Me: Oh, whatsername.. [popular artist]
Copper: Oh neat, I downloaded her new album last week, have you heard it yet?
Me: Yes, I downloaded it but haven't listened to it yet..
Copper: My collection gets like that some times..
and so on..
Now if we'd been talking about marijuana instead, I doubt it'd been like this:
Copper: Is that weed I smell here? Whoah that smells really strong!
Me: Yeah, we're all sharing it around school!
Copper: Oh cool, I had some [local favourite weed type] last week, its great
Me: Nice, I bought a few grams of that, but haven't tried it yet
While marijuana is is still considered illegal by many people, sharing and copying music is something which has been is instilled in us all. Just as most people don't keep a pound of hashish and sell it, most people aren't sharing music with thousands of people.
So I guess the [music] 'dealers' of today are relatively similar, but their motivation is either ideological (keeping the music free man) or 'my penis is bigger' syndrome:)
Curiosity and best of intentions could land me in a lot of trouble, I certainly agree.
In my case it was found through simply wanting to use the website (e.g. typing I'm rather than I am into a comment box etc.), with curiosity and best intentions leading me to see if the same bug occurs elsewhere on their site simply to gather 'evidence' that this is a significant problem.
On one hand, with my position as an employee being very far down the food chain, things like this are easily dismissed as 'one in a million' or just me trying to raise my profile; in which case it'll get swept under the carpet until somebody with bad intentions finds it.
As people have already said, it's very easy to get the finger pointed at you and ending up in tight situations; you need balls to stand up for these things and make a noise if it effects you or the company you work for, rather than taking the bad approach of pretending it never existed!
The 'War On Security' (ahahah) is lost the minute you ignore it.
Suprisingly I went through an almost identical situation to this, and also left about 6 months afterwards for similar reasons.
In my case it was a very simple SQL injection bug in the login page, being the person I am I do test for these things out of curiosity and an almost compelling need to re-assure myself that the systems I'm working with or using are relatively secure.
I landed up in the middle of an 'investigation' after an e-mail with a couple of screenshots and a quick description of the bug was sent over to the department which was developing the web application.
It is very true that if you raise these issues, their now considered your responsibility to fix, not because the developer was incompetant or just nieve of these types of security problems, but because before you discovered them they simply 'didn't exist'!
To this day I still do web app auditing and report vulnerabilities to the developers when their found, but always in sandbox or test environments rather than live sites; as in future I may end up in court simply for reporting these things (which implies I was 'hacking' or doing generally illegal things in the eyes of the mis-informed).
There are already procedures that most security professionals follow, for example disclosing only to the developers and allowing a 30 day lea-way for them to patch it. In the case when the developers don't respond and you consider it to be a risk to the public, publishing the bug along with a patch so users can fix it themselfs.
It's just a shame there's this big grey area (and often completely black) in the law.
On lighter another note, how many pairs of fake 7 of 9 panties will be put up on e-bay? On a much sadder note, how many geeks will actually fall for this and bid on them!
Oh, small problem there. With American workers wanting to be paid reasonable wages for menial work (such as producing these cars) it'd be cheaper for them to be produced overseas (such as in China and Eastern Europe, where a lot of high-tech and auto companies are re-locating).
Not just that but the oil industry execs would 'do a Balmer', and probably kill some poor sod in the carpark below with a chair.
Even if we have these wonderful new cars, who says the major Opec players won't get into mass hydrogen production and charge equivilent prices (or even higher prices) to subsidise the dying oil industry.
I fucking love change and would love to see something like this happen in my lifetime (born in the 1980s.. no invention of air-planes, no moon landing etc.), but there are a lot of people who'd do everything they can to hold onto *oil* power.
Disclaimer: It's been a long day, I'm tired, I have no money and I have clients breathing down my neck.
Do I care about apple releasing an Intel based laptop? NO I bloody don't!
There are loads out there already, for all I care Apple could buy a load, paint them white and put an Apple logo on the back and the lemmings will still flock to buy them!
Sure: OS X, QA/testing, warranty, support etc. but it's not really newsworthy until they actually make the press release and send some out for previews/reviews at the tech sites.
We all know Apple will probably make a underwear-fillingly-large load of money from this, it's nothing special (while the newish UltraSPARC laptops and HP Toughbooks are!) and this article only really gives all the Apple/OSX fans time to hype it up.
I thought I'd never have to say this and give in to the cliche slashdot saying, but:
Oh my friend, this is already being done, as featured in an article on TheDailyWtf.. HyperLink 2.0:
# a translucent layer (DIV) is placed over the entire page, causing it to appear "grayed out", and... # a "please wait" layer is placed on top of that, with an animated pendulum swinging back and forth, then... # the XmlHttpRequest object is used to call the "GetHyperlink" web service which, in turn... # opens a connection to the database server to... # log the request in the RequestedHyperlinks table and... # retrieves the URL from the Hyperlinks table, then... # returns it to the client script, which then... # sets the window.location property to the URL retrieved, which causes... # the user to be redirected to the appropriate page
No doubt Microsoft will catch onto this, very smart and complex ways of doing very dumb things:)
It's already assaulting you in advert/popup format and has been sitting un-noticed (and working very well) under your nose for quite some time.. what am I talking about? AdSense and Yahoo.. and Casale.. and any number of other ad providers.
Have you ever seen those sites where some words have double underlines, when your mouse is over them an annoying box pops up with context sensitive advertising (e.g. for 'hosting' some random hosting company advert would pop up). Guess what? JavaScript and Ajax makes this possible.
None of this stuff is really new, it's just a case of 1) thinking of something innovative to do with it, 2) using some XmlHttpRequest multi-browser wrapper library to save writing your own and 3) atleast having a half-hearted go at backwards compatibility.
This sort of book isn't one of the true groundbreaking ones that really rips apart a subject or provides great and deep insight into the subject (although I haven't read it yet); it's one of the many jumping on the Ajax bandwaggon, one for the bookshelf and an occasional flick through once you've got the general idea of Ajax.
Probably worth the money if you're a web programmer and need a jump-start.
But do we really need this? My generation grew up with excessive swearing almost built-into us, from the age of 5 I knew all the four-letter words (including cunt) but chose not to use them only because my teacher thought they were bad and thus I would be punished for using them.
Today their part of how I talk, a baseline sort of grumbling if I'm not doing anything like: 'Hmm this fucking piece of code, whichever cuntskid wrote this crappy thing.. hmm.. Ohh milliseconds, bugger!'
Like me, and a lot of other people, swear words are only offencive to some other people and are part of our culture and language; if we need to insult people tone of voice, facial expressions/body language and grammar play a much bigger part.
Bad words have been getting less and less offencive over the decades, with new ones being invented to take their place... If I wan't to tell a client 'THIS WEB DESIGN IS THE DOGS FUCKING BOLLOCKS', I shouldn't have my phone system remove any meaning from the expression.
Perhaps I'm just missing something here.. but why are you people buying this stuff in the first place?
When I was a lil one my parents bought me one of the fun factory thingies that you put the play-doh through, but we always made the stuff at home because it was cheaper than buying it.
Off the top of my head it's basicly flour, water, glycerine, oil, salt and food colouring (the salt was to try and stop me from eating it all).
Anyways, I can see where they got the idea of a wallpaper cleaner from, if anybody's ever kneeded dough when making bread your fingernails and any dirt on your fingers dissapears:)
On a more serious note: why was a patent granted for this crap in the first place? And then Hasbro claiming it's ingredients as 'proprietary and a trade secret' when it's only one ingredient away from making certain types of bread.
Not specifically Microsoft doing it directly, but rather ignorant web designers/developers forcing you to use Internet Explorer or whichever browser.
But this time it's coming from aparently 'clued up' people, with the promise of a pot of gold just over the hill.
At the end of the day the only thing it's doing is helping to create another mono-browser culture, rather than using standards based websites to provide information to older, future or crippled generations of browsers via graceful use of markup/stylesheets.
So some time in the future will we be looking at RFID like use, but instead of holding a small amount of information or a key linked to a database - it'll be everything we are.
A few bad examples: - good afternoon MR S. B. ODSWORTH, your wifes birthday is coming up next week: we've just delivered some flowers and charged your account, along with a note reminding her to phone the doctor regarding your incontenance. - A new 'thought-crime' bill now means you are safe from injury/burgulary etc. with the criminal being arrested before they commit anything. - Foolproof, unless you value your privacy, have severe OCD/psycosis/turettes etc.
A few good examples: - With this innovative device you'll know why your wife/girlfriend is in a mood. - No more handheld gadgets, just think about sending a message while in range of a BNAP (Brain Network Access Point) and it'll be done (and charged to your account). - No need to negotiate in broken Spranglish the meal you want at the burgerking hover-thru.
Yeah I'm exaggerating a bit and it's still a long way off, but just be sure that when it finally does come around marketing and government people will find many (ab)uses for it.
In situations like this you have to remember that things are rarely stolen, they rarely dissapear, and rarely get disposed of properly.
So there's G.I. John out in Iraq on almost basic army salary, and poor Mohammed running his market stall and a thriving economy for small items (I've even heard of trucks just 'going missing', then ending up miles away carting opium/hashish/people around the country).
G.I. John can't sell this stuff directly because he'd get his ass kicked by sarge, but once it gets passed onto the iraqi retailers there's almost no tracing it.
At the end of the day, there are always going to be a few corrupt people selling army goods, but for fucks sakes atleast wipe the drives before selling them (so you atleast try and avoid jail time).
In terms of what the detatchment of job titles from their actual roles, in the past few years I've noticed it getting much much worse. Taking what one of the parents posted, that recruiters are only after their commission and really don't know or care what the job requirements are as long as you mention enough of the buzzwords.
I worked for a year in an 'assistant' position on minimum wage, with all but one of my bosses being completely incompetant, while being expected to do everything from oracle dba/admin, network maintainance, web development etc.
Now that I'm back doing the recruiting hurdles again, not trying to find 'oh please any job.. anything' like most of the other unemployed in the IT sector, I'm trying to find somewhere that I'd fit in.
Having gone through several interviews for positions such as 'Senior IT Security Development Engineer' (i'm not kidding), which turned out to be a fairly standard Unix software QA and QA support role. Another good example was a company asking for a '.NET Developer', while I'm perfectly happy developing in C# - they failed to mention that they only wanted VB.NET developers, I could've lied and said that I knew VB.NET (there is no API difference between it and C#) I'm not sure that I'd want to end up working in that sort of environment that just smells of incompetance.
Novell's other products certainly are becoming more and more linux based. But what I don't see is why they are behind RedHat, and how Xandros can even think optimisticly about entering the linux server market.
Redhat are up there because they do make some very stable server systems, as for support - I've never used it, and I'm not too keen on their kernel mutilation.
What I don't see is why Novell haven't become much much bigger, considering they have a very stable server base (Suse/SLES), the desktop integration with the novell framework and NDS directory (which is really quite nice, it sports multi-master replication etc.). Just ignore the hype about their exteNd J2EE framework, which from my experience should be swept under the carpet and then deny it ever existed.
"Not to mention that many old archs and new arch's like x64 would be crippled because the modules aren't available."
Isn't this just what's happening on Windows/x64 at the moment? A friend bought a brand new 64bit AMD system with whatever the latest Geforce 7xxx cards are, loaded up his copy of Windows XP 64-bit, applied all the patches/SRs etc. and thought it was going to be great.
About two weeks later he gave up because he just couldn't get his networking gear working, after some pestering he let me install Linux on it and everything worked out of the box.
Ok, the point isn't that he's rather strange and very very stubborn (trying to go all wireless, when his machine is next to my 24 port wired switch), but that the culture that's grown up around closed-source drivers on Windows just isn't how it's supposed to be.
If there are going to be any closed-source drivers, atleast enable them to be run Hurd style, so there's no unknown code actually running in Ring-0.
I think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick there. I know some universities and colleges offer online or distance-learning courses, but from my experience (working in higher education and dealing with webct/moodle/blackboard etc.) is that it's rarely just a 'Here's the course work.. I'll see you when you're ready to graduate' kinda thing.
Many of the lecturers who were teaching the same course to people both online and in-class would spend a large amount of time (comparatively) checking on the online students, answering questions and marking work (would you trust a fully automated system to mark a 15 page essay? hah no).
IMHO, if the online-courses you've seen have very little tutor-student interaction, you can safely classify them as 'Mickey Mouse' degrees, with are worth their weight in Mickey Mouse dollars.
I've always used audio and midi sequencers, and more recently something called Broomstick Bass (http://www.bornemark.se/bb/) which takes the hassle away from making different styles of bass track.
Anyway the general idea is that if you're playing in a band, you lay down a track in Ableton (or another midi sequencer) which matches what the band is playing, and practice along to that.
The difference between 8 hours of actually practicing the whole song, and practicing your little part is astonishing. It helps you keep time (e.g. you could practice at several different speeds) and is more exciting than a metronome.
The best thing about this (especially if you're using Ableton Live) is it's trivial to record yourself and lay the audio of you playing over the track. Using this method it's possible for a band to record a master without ever meeting each other.. crazy stuff..
Enough of me sucking upto how great Ableton Live is.. Ta.
Well if somebody hadn't *cough* cocked up the whole DNS system and thought it through properly before letting the corporations get their fingers in the global DNS pie then we could've ended up with something like:
uk.com.mycompany.www
With larger areas such as the EU, australasia, the UN, the americas etc. all having their own TLD. As long as the rules are followed you wouldn't end up with mom-and-pop 'look im running an internet shop' businesses that serve only the surrounding states and all the other regular pollution.
On a second note, why do some companies have to purchase a second domain name for subsites.. for example ebaystatic.com, windowsupdate.com, MyBanksPersonalInternetBankingSystemOnlineOrWhatev er.com.
** calms down enough to check for spelling mistakes **
Google, Yahoo and MSN have already done this. Simply insert 'rel="nofollow"' into all the tags that people post in the comments, and although they still show up it makes it pointless for those spammers trying to increase their PageRank.
I know this won't help with the unsightly comments on your website, but since this is the slashdot crowd just flag all the comments with URLs in them as 'hidden' and on a daily/whenever basis go through them deleting spam and unhiding legitimate comments. Stick this all in a central control panel and it's unlikely to take up more than 10 minutes of your time.
In addition to that, just stop any client with a useragent string that contains a URL or one of the known spambot names.
The whole 'Use it or Loose it' thing really should be taken into account here, sure it'll probably be thrown out of court and (if they honestly haven't been actively defending the patent) have the patent revoked.
On the other hand why didn't Microsoft already know about this patent? With a major divisions earnings based almost entirely on the Xbox 360 you'd have thought they would've atleast hired a few people to do patent research.
I say again, the patent system needs reform! It's near-impossible for average people to aquire a patent unless they invest a considerable amount of money into keeping lawyers alive (a bad thing.. obviously), while at the end of the day there are always huge grey areas they may have infringed on.
Slashdot Mirror
Help.. I'm trapped inside a Web 2.0 BUBBLE! And I can't get out!
Perhaps why MySpace is worth half a billion dollars without any proper revenue model is because... oh lets be radical here.. perhaps because it's ALL HYPE?
The problem is there is lots of room for advertisers to throw their money away and a lot of companies have been catching onto that for the past ~5 years.
The problem with MySpace as their gleaming example is they'd somehow need to be able to re-coup $100 USD from every member (assuming there are ~5 million of them) via advertising, subscribed services etc. I see this as highly doubtful, and looking at examples only 6 or 7 years ago of businesses apparently worth in the range of 10 to 500 million of dollars, but with those estimations based entirely on hype, bullshit, naivety, or just an all-out view to make a quick buck while the newcomers are still gullable.
Tell me when MySpace has a real business model that doesn't rely on click-happy 13 year olds or balding 40 year paedophiles who want to win an Xbox.
Ok, so have they not thought this through yet?
Instead of mass-producing a product as cheaply as possible, then charging a relatively large amount for retail purchase, they give the reproduction task to the end retailer.
To the point: cheap burnable consumer DVDs are cheap for a reason, their often crap and are rarely last as long as ones used in DVD reproduction factories.
Sure it's a nice idea, it probably looked good when the marketing guys were presenting it.. But it misses the point!
The reason we have burn-your-own and print-your-own type of services is the ability to customise what you get. In my local Kodak printing shop, I can go in with my xD/SD card, select the photos I want printed and how their scaled/cropped etc. and I'll get them a few hours later on nice glossy photo paper and a CD of all the files for backup.
At home, I burn CDs/DVDs because I can customise what I have on them, perhaps I want System of a Down mixed with Led Zeppelin (hey, it's my choice).
With this.. it's just an exact copy of the disc, not cheaper, not easier to use, will probably last considerably shorter... I can't choose if I want extra scenes, or to cut out the FBI/piracy warnings, or have the star wars theme tune dubbed over it!
And remember folks, without objective criticism we'll end up with crap products and crap ideas, and this whole thing smells of
'Yes men' and end of life product whoring.
"File sharing is like marijuana - you just aren't going to be able to stop people from doing it."
But on 100 times the scale and much wider popularity.
For [a non disclosed reason] I was sitting in the back of a police car being driven to the police station... The conversation I had went something like this:
Copper: Who was playing on the stereo at your house?Me: Oh, whatsername.. [popular artist]
Copper: Oh neat, I downloaded her new album last week, have you heard it yet?
Me: Yes, I downloaded it but haven't listened to it yet..
Copper: My collection gets like that some times..
and so on..
Now if we'd been talking about marijuana instead, I doubt it'd been like this:
Copper: Is that weed I smell here? Whoah that smells really strong!Me: Yeah, we're all sharing it around school!
Copper: Oh cool, I had some [local favourite weed type] last week, its great
Me: Nice, I bought a few grams of that, but haven't tried it yet
While marijuana is is still considered illegal by many people, sharing and copying music is something which has been is instilled in us all. Just as most people don't keep a pound of hashish and sell it, most people aren't sharing music with thousands of people.
So I guess the [music] 'dealers' of today are relatively similar, but their motivation is either ideological (keeping the music free man) or 'my penis is bigger' syndrome :)
Go figure...
Curiosity and best of intentions could land me in a lot of trouble, I certainly agree.
In my case it was found through simply wanting to use the website (e.g. typing I'm rather than I am into a comment box etc.), with curiosity and best intentions leading me to see if the same bug occurs elsewhere on their site simply to gather 'evidence' that this is a significant problem.
On one hand, with my position as an employee being very far down the food chain, things like this are easily dismissed as 'one in a million' or just me trying to raise my profile; in which case it'll get swept under the carpet until somebody with bad intentions finds it.
As people have already said, it's very easy to get the finger pointed at you and ending up in tight situations; you need balls to stand up for these things and make a noise if it effects you or the company you work for, rather than taking the bad approach of pretending it never existed!
The 'War On Security' (ahahah) is lost the minute you ignore it.
Suprisingly I went through an almost identical situation to this, and also left about 6 months afterwards for similar reasons.
In my case it was a very simple SQL injection bug in the login page, being the person I am I do test for these things out of curiosity and an almost compelling need to re-assure myself that the systems I'm working with or using are relatively secure.
I landed up in the middle of an 'investigation' after an e-mail with a couple of screenshots and a quick description of the bug was sent over to the department which was developing the web application.
It is very true that if you raise these issues, their now considered your responsibility to fix, not because the developer was incompetant or just nieve of these types of security problems, but because before you discovered them they simply 'didn't exist'!
To this day I still do web app auditing and report vulnerabilities to the developers when their found, but always in sandbox or test environments rather than live sites; as in future I may end up in court simply for reporting these things (which implies I was 'hacking' or doing generally illegal things in the eyes of the mis-informed).
There are already procedures that most security professionals follow, for example disclosing only to the developers and allowing a 30 day lea-way for them to patch it. In the case when the developers don't respond and you consider it to be a risk to the public, publishing the bug along with a patch so users can fix it themselfs.
It's just a shame there's this big grey area (and often completely black) in the law.
Just my two cents...
On lighter another note, how many pairs of fake 7 of 9 panties will be put up on e-bay?
On a much sadder note, how many geeks will actually fall for this and bid on them!
Oh, small problem there. With American workers wanting to be paid reasonable wages for menial work (such as producing these cars) it'd be cheaper for them to be produced overseas (such as in China and Eastern Europe, where a lot of high-tech and auto companies are re-locating).
Not just that but the oil industry execs would 'do a Balmer', and probably kill some poor sod in the carpark below with a chair.
Even if we have these wonderful new cars, who says the major Opec players won't get into mass hydrogen production and charge equivilent prices (or even higher prices) to subsidise the dying oil industry.
I fucking love change and would love to see something like this happen in my lifetime (born in the 1980s.. no invention of air-planes, no moon landing etc.), but there are a lot of people who'd do everything they can to hold onto *oil* power.
Just my 2c!
And what... the byproduct is a bioweapon what triggers white blood cells to identify normal cells as 'bad', eating you from the inside out.
Just speculation, but damn.. I'd make a great evil genius!
Disclaimer: It's been a long day, I'm tired, I have no money and I have clients breathing down my neck.
Do I care about apple releasing an Intel based laptop? NO I bloody don't!
There are loads out there already, for all I care Apple could buy a load, paint them white and put an Apple logo on the back and the lemmings will still flock to buy them!
Sure: OS X, QA/testing, warranty, support etc. but it's not really newsworthy until they actually make the press release and send some out for previews/reviews at the tech sites.
We all know Apple will probably make a underwear-fillingly-large load of money from this, it's nothing special (while the newish UltraSPARC laptops and HP Toughbooks are!) and this article only really gives all the Apple/OSX fans time to hype it up.
I thought I'd never have to say this and give in to the cliche slashdot saying, but:
Move along people, there's nothing to see here!
Oh my friend, this is already being done, as featured in an article on TheDailyWtf.. HyperLink 2.0:
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
:)
# a translucent layer (DIV) is placed over the entire page, causing it to appear "grayed out", and
# a "please wait" layer is placed on top of that, with an animated pendulum swinging back and forth, then
# the XmlHttpRequest object is used to call the "GetHyperlink" web service which, in turn
# opens a connection to the database server to
# log the request in the RequestedHyperlinks table and
# retrieves the URL from the Hyperlinks table, then
# returns it to the client script, which then
# sets the window.location property to the URL retrieved, which causes
# the user to be redirected to the appropriate page
No doubt Microsoft will catch onto this, very smart and complex ways of doing very dumb things
It's already assaulting you in advert/popup format and has been sitting un-noticed (and working very well) under your nose for quite some time.. what am I talking about? AdSense and Yahoo.. and Casale.. and any number of other ad providers.
Have you ever seen those sites where some words have double underlines, when your mouse is over them an annoying box pops up with context sensitive advertising (e.g. for 'hosting' some random hosting company advert would pop up). Guess what? JavaScript and Ajax makes this possible.
None of this stuff is really new, it's just a case of 1) thinking of something innovative to do with it, 2) using some XmlHttpRequest multi-browser wrapper library to save writing your own and 3) atleast having a half-hearted go at backwards compatibility.
This sort of book isn't one of the true groundbreaking ones that really rips apart a subject or provides great and deep insight into the subject (although I haven't read it yet); it's one of the many jumping on the Ajax bandwaggon, one for the bookshelf and an occasional flick through once you've got the general idea of Ajax.
Probably worth the money if you're a web programmer and need a jump-start.
Just my 2c!
But do we really need this? My generation grew up with excessive swearing almost built-into us, from the age of 5 I knew all the four-letter words (including cunt) but chose not to use them only because my teacher thought they were bad and thus I would be punished for using them.
Today their part of how I talk, a baseline sort of grumbling if I'm not doing anything like: 'Hmm this fucking piece of code, whichever cuntskid wrote this crappy thing.. hmm.. Ohh milliseconds, bugger!'
Like me, and a lot of other people, swear words are only offencive to some other people and are part of our culture and language; if we need to insult people tone of voice, facial expressions/body language and grammar play a much bigger part.
Bad words have been getting less and less offencive over the decades, with new ones being invented to take their place... If I wan't to tell a client 'THIS WEB DESIGN IS THE DOGS FUCKING BOLLOCKS', I shouldn't have my phone system remove any meaning from the expression.
Bah!
Perhaps I'm just missing something here.. but why are you people buying this stuff in the first place?
:)
When I was a lil one my parents bought me one of the fun factory thingies that you put the play-doh through, but we always made the stuff at home because it was cheaper than buying it.
Off the top of my head it's basicly flour, water, glycerine, oil, salt and food colouring (the salt was to try and stop me from eating it all).
Anyways, I can see where they got the idea of a wallpaper cleaner from, if anybody's ever kneeded dough when making bread your fingernails and any dirt on your fingers dissapears
On a more serious note: why was a patent granted for this crap in the first place? And then Hasbro claiming it's ingredients as 'proprietary and a trade secret' when it's only one ingredient away from making certain types of bread.
Not specifically Microsoft doing it directly, but rather ignorant web designers/developers forcing you to use Internet Explorer or whichever browser.
But this time it's coming from aparently 'clued up' people, with the promise of a pot of gold just over the hill.
At the end of the day the only thing it's doing is helping to create another mono-browser culture, rather than using standards based websites to provide information to older, future or crippled generations of browsers via graceful use of markup/stylesheets.
I hope this fad doesn't last.
So some time in the future will we be looking at RFID like use, but instead of holding a small amount of information or a key linked to a database - it'll be everything we are.
A few bad examples:
- good afternoon MR S. B. ODSWORTH, your wifes birthday is coming up next week: we've just delivered some flowers and charged your account, along with a note reminding her to phone the doctor regarding your incontenance.
- A new 'thought-crime' bill now means you are safe from injury/burgulary etc. with the criminal being arrested before they commit anything.
- Foolproof, unless you value your privacy, have severe OCD/psycosis/turettes etc.
A few good examples:
- With this innovative device you'll know why your wife/girlfriend is in a mood.
- No more handheld gadgets, just think about sending a message while in range of a BNAP (Brain Network Access Point) and it'll be done (and charged to your account).
- No need to negotiate in broken Spranglish the meal you want at the burgerking hover-thru.
Yeah I'm exaggerating a bit and it's still a long way off, but just be sure that when it finally does come around marketing and government people will find many (ab)uses for it.
In situations like this you have to remember that things are rarely stolen, they rarely dissapear, and rarely get disposed of properly.
So there's G.I. John out in Iraq on almost basic army salary, and poor Mohammed running his market stall and a thriving economy for small items (I've even heard of trucks just 'going missing', then ending up miles away carting opium/hashish/people around the country).
G.I. John can't sell this stuff directly because he'd get his ass kicked by sarge, but once it gets passed onto the iraqi retailers there's almost no tracing it.
At the end of the day, there are always going to be a few corrupt people selling army goods, but for fucks sakes atleast wipe the drives before selling them (so you atleast try and avoid jail time).
In terms of what the detatchment of job titles from their actual roles, in the past few years I've noticed it getting much much worse. Taking what one of the parents posted, that recruiters are only after their commission and really don't know or care what the job requirements are as long as you mention enough of the buzzwords.
I worked for a year in an 'assistant' position on minimum wage, with all but one of my bosses being completely incompetant, while being expected to do everything from oracle dba/admin, network maintainance, web development etc.
Now that I'm back doing the recruiting hurdles again, not trying to find 'oh please any job.. anything' like most of the other unemployed in the IT sector, I'm trying to find somewhere that I'd fit in.
Having gone through several interviews for positions such as 'Senior IT Security Development Engineer' (i'm not kidding), which turned out to be a fairly standard Unix software QA and QA support role. Another good example was a company asking for a '.NET Developer', while I'm perfectly happy developing in C# - they failed to mention that they only wanted VB.NET developers, I could've lied and said that I knew VB.NET (there is no API difference between it and C#) I'm not sure that I'd want to end up working in that sort of environment that just smells of incompetance.
Novell's other products certainly are becoming more and more linux based. But what I don't see is why they are behind RedHat, and how Xandros can even think optimisticly about entering the linux server market.
Redhat are up there because they do make some very stable server systems, as for support - I've never used it, and I'm not too keen on their kernel mutilation.
What I don't see is why Novell haven't become much much bigger, considering they have a very stable server base (Suse/SLES), the desktop integration with the novell framework and NDS directory (which is really quite nice, it sports multi-master replication etc.). Just ignore the hype about their exteNd J2EE framework, which from my experience should be swept under the carpet and then deny it ever existed.
"Not to mention that many old archs and new arch's like x64 would be crippled because the modules aren't available."
Isn't this just what's happening on Windows/x64 at the moment? A friend bought a brand new 64bit AMD system with whatever the latest Geforce 7xxx cards are, loaded up his copy of Windows XP 64-bit, applied all the patches/SRs etc. and thought it was going to be great.
About two weeks later he gave up because he just couldn't get his networking gear working, after some pestering he let me install Linux on it and everything worked out of the box.
Ok, the point isn't that he's rather strange and very very stubborn (trying to go all wireless, when his machine is next to my 24 port wired switch), but that the culture that's grown up around closed-source drivers on Windows just isn't how it's supposed to be.
If there are going to be any closed-source drivers, atleast enable them to be run Hurd style, so there's no unknown code actually running in Ring-0.
I think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick there. I know some universities and colleges offer online or distance-learning courses, but from my experience (working in higher education and dealing with webct/moodle/blackboard etc.) is that it's rarely just a 'Here's the course work.. I'll see you when you're ready to graduate' kinda thing.
Many of the lecturers who were teaching the same course to people both online and in-class would spend a large amount of time (comparatively) checking on the online students, answering questions and marking work (would you trust a fully automated system to mark a 15 page essay? hah no).
IMHO, if the online-courses you've seen have very little tutor-student interaction, you can safely classify them as 'Mickey Mouse' degrees, with are worth their weight in Mickey Mouse dollars.
I've always used audio and midi sequencers, and more recently something called Broomstick Bass (http://www.bornemark.se/bb/) which takes the hassle away from making different styles of bass track.
Anyway the general idea is that if you're playing in a band, you lay down a track in Ableton (or another midi sequencer) which matches what the band is playing, and practice along to that.
The difference between 8 hours of actually practicing the whole song, and practicing your little part is astonishing. It helps you keep time (e.g. you could practice at several different speeds) and is more exciting than a metronome.
The best thing about this (especially if you're using Ableton Live) is it's trivial to record yourself and lay the audio of you playing over the track. Using this method it's possible for a band to record a master without ever meeting each other.. crazy stuff..
Enough of me sucking upto how great Ableton Live is.. Ta.
Well if somebody hadn't *cough* cocked up the whole DNS system and thought it through properly before letting the corporations get their fingers in the global DNS pie then we could've ended up with something like:
v er.com.
uk.com.mycompany.www
With larger areas such as the EU, australasia, the UN, the americas etc. all having their own TLD. As long as the rules are followed you wouldn't end up with mom-and-pop 'look im running an internet shop' businesses that serve only the surrounding states and all the other regular pollution.
On a second note, why do some companies have to purchase a second domain name for subsites.. for example ebaystatic.com, windowsupdate.com, MyBanksPersonalInternetBankingSystemOnlineOrWhate
** calms down enough to check for spelling mistakes **
Ok I'm done!
$25/ounce..
Whoah dude, if I stopped smoking weed for a few months, I'd easily be able to buy one of these little babys (only to get it stolen a few days later).
Google, Yahoo and MSN have already done this. Simply insert 'rel="nofollow"' into all the tags that people post in the comments, and although they still show up it makes it pointless for those spammers trying to increase their PageRank.
I know this won't help with the unsightly comments on your website, but since this is the slashdot crowd just flag all the comments with URLs in them as 'hidden' and on a daily/whenever basis go through them deleting spam and unhiding legitimate comments. Stick this all in a central control panel and it's unlikely to take up more than 10 minutes of your time.
In addition to that, just stop any client with a useragent string that contains a URL or one of the known spambot names.
http://www.kloth.net/internet/bottrap.php - A quick implementation of a bot-trap, which bans bots which don't follow your robots.txt directions.
The whole 'Use it or Loose it' thing really should be taken into account here, sure it'll probably be thrown out of court and (if they honestly haven't been actively defending the patent) have the patent revoked.
On the other hand why didn't Microsoft already know about this patent? With a major divisions earnings based almost entirely on the Xbox 360 you'd have thought they would've atleast hired a few people to do patent research.
I say again, the patent system needs reform! It's near-impossible for average people to aquire a patent unless they invest a considerable amount of money into keeping lawyers alive (a bad thing.. obviously), while at the end of the day there are always huge grey areas they may have infringed on.