I guess you're right about the Hotmail links, but I was implying 'the big 3' instead of 'any other browser'.. That is 'Mozilla, Opera and Safari/Konqueror'..
Lets face it - if you're browsing the web using Links/Lynx, you're probably not going to be using Hotmail - so it's a non-issue.
Eh?
Microsoft have recently re-done their entire MSN site in most countries to take advantage of pure xhtml and css.. with one of the main incentives being that sure people may run other browsers, but they want to use MSN.
What would happen if Microsoft stopped Hotmail from displaying properly in any other browser, there would be some very big critics giving them an ego bashing...
What the article was actually refering to was the suprising number of business sites owned by reputable companies that hire complete arsehats for web designers/developers.
I've seen it on many occasions, and even though Opera can identify as Internet Explorer, this damn website seemed to be specificly checking for 'Opera' in the useragent string..
So, 20 minutes later I'd 'fixed' opera and made the useragent string almost identical to a real IE client, and sure enough the website worked perfectly...
I did phone up their technical support number just to log a problem (it would have been stopping me from getting an insurance quote...) and the woman on the phone just didn't seem to understand and refused to pass it onto the 'technical people'.
I know it's kinda lame, but if you come across this sort of thing happening with a large company.. take time to phone or atleast e-mail, if enough people are made aware of this we'll all be generally better off.
One day late last year, Mr. Abad was on the Internet Relay Channel, or IRC, a global online chat system that is best known as the lair of various digital bad guys.
Internet Relay Chat.. atleast get that right.
And what about the thousands upon thousands of users on EFNet, DALNet and Undernet (just to name a few) which have legitimate reasons for using IRC.
I know i'm just being a nazi, but please can we not start to think of IRC as a place only for the bad? Next thing and you'll have the RIAA and MPAA trying to outlaw IRC (with an argument in the same context as BitTorrent.. 'it can, therefore it is').
is not just with 'Open Source' or other trendy keywords, but it just happens to be one of the worst hit by it (as most open source projects have no commercial backing to help with legal issues or licensing etc.)
Ok, so i'll try and explain it in ways that your average local politition will be able to understand (mr g.w.bush comes to mind as an exception though..).
The main goals behind patents are to protect an inventors hard work, research and ideas from exploitation by restricting other peoples rights to duplicate/copy/rip/etc the idea.
For most industries the research process which is needed to create the idea is usually costly (both in time and money), in this context you can think of patents as allowing the inventor(s) to recouperate that initial investment and to control revenue from the invention while it's still considered 'new'.
In todays scociety the software industry is a completely different beast compared to what I would consider as the 'old stle' industry (think of the industrial revolution etc.). Thinking of ideas new software inventions isn't very hard, thousands of new products are designed every day due to the low cost of researching and designing software inventions.
Basicly the two industries are reversed, so the actual hard work and investment is in developing the product and getting it to market.
The first point that I was trying to demonstrate is that somebody could think up 10 product ideas every week and patent them (al la Microsoft & IBM), but they may not even have the technical expertise or money to create it.. generally all software ideas are useless until they have been developed.
So by patenting ideas in an invention-per-second industry, you are restricting the rest of the industry from making a product of it.. bad karma.
My personal gripe (and I'm sure most of you share the same opinion) is the US patent offices reluctance or inability to check if the patent breaks one of the simple rules set out: 'No bussiness methods or mathematical algorithms', 'Must be non-obvious to a professional from within that industry' and 'There must be no prior art' (i'm sure theres another one.. cant be assed to think of it right now).
So this means that I could for example patent a really simple theory, such as 'transfering memory from one computer to another via analogue signals across a distributed network'... and the patent office would probably approve it if it had not been patented before and the wording was sufficiently obfuscated so that only non-technical lawyers and civil servants can understand it..
So given those two pieces i've brought up, you can think of thousands of different 'inventions' in an industry where inventions alone are fairly worthless, and apply for patents with them.. and a lot of them would probably get approved due the lax standards at the patent office.
So given that our industry moves at such a fast pace (compared to something like the petroleum extraction business) and the length of the patent is relatively very long it restricts the actual development of new software (e.g. developers and companies are probably going to be scared of getting sued, or having unreasonable licensing terms pushed upon them).
Anyway.. try and extract as much drunk ranting gibberish out of it as possible, and hopefully you can use some of the arguments i've brought up.
steal pointless crazy stuff like this, they have no re-sale value (I doubt the components are that expensive, most of the £110k was probably development time and research etc.). Then I saw this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/10/kidnapped_ dalek/
Somebody stole a pointless crazy thing (e.g. a rare original dalek from the Dr.Who series) and their trying to ransom it back..
Putting £110 worth of equipment anywhere in most places in the UK and not bolting it to the ground is always a bad thing...
IMHO this looks a lot like perl, but with enough changed so people dont start looking through their code for 'Copyright (c) Larry Wall'... This is real innovation.. whatever.
Forgive me for being naive, but couldn't Microsoft just develop stronger Windows bindings for Perl? It's battle hardened, already widly known and documented around the work.. not to mention you would ge the benifit of CPAN for additional modules (Would you trust Microsoft to write your date manipulation functions? hah!)
And we all know somebody will work out how to run MSH code from deep within some other subsystem-by-proxy and inevitably cause another wave of virii (by this time Microsoft will be touting it's anti-virus software etc.)
Oh the end is neigh, the sky will fall, etc. etc... I'll just shut up now and get back to some work.
"So when did C++ start running on bare hardware? Every time I've run it, I needed an OS and a huge pile of libraries."
Well then mister.. you obviously haven't tried hard enough, it is perfectly possible to write kernel-level code in C++ as long as you implement the 'new' and 'delete' functions which are required to create and delete objects.
I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the/. website..
In this exciting new addition to the Sim line of games, which previously included SimCity and SimHospotal; you are challenged with the juggling act that is Slash Dot.
Blast through 24 different scenarios and try to keep the daily traffic level and number of posts by making sure the site has enough flamebait and re-posts to get the visitors streaming in.
This will, as usual, be released for the Phantom console.
And are there any interviews with 'potential' winners before they are chosen just so he doesn't get stuck with an Linux, Apple or Amiga junkie for an hour that only really awnts to piss him off rather than ask intelligent questions?
Whatever anybody says.. get your tinfoil hats ready because I'm sure evertyhing will be staged as usual and turned into a marketing gimmick!
I went through a similar kinda thing with Tiscali *mumbledcurses*.
So, I signed up for their Home service because it was cheap enough (£15/m for 256k.. now upgraded to 512 for same price), had no bandwidth restrictions, and was a damn sight faster than the 32kbit i'd been used to for however many years.
Got adsl relatively quickly - maybe a week or so later, threw the USB modem in the bin and re-configured various systems. http, smtp and pop3 (for remote access) was all up fairly quickly along with dyndns...
Damnit damnit damnit.. my whole IP block is on a black list because of all 'ye average dsl customers' machines sending spam.
Now, the business service is EXACTLY the same price as the 'consumer' service, EXACTLY the same service, with two exception - you can register a domain with it, and they can give you a static IP address.
Ok.. i'll just switch over from my 'Home' plan to a 'Business' plan.. (switching from 256 to 512 took around 24 hours and only took a 30 second phone call). Hah.. how wrong I was.
So first, I emailed tech support and asked if it was possible to have a static ip and revers dns (for email) on my home account.. can't do it - talk to the sales people and get your account upgraded to a business account.
Phoned the sales people (the only support staff they kept in britain.. the rest are in india), asked if I could get my account upgraded to a business account - same price, same phone line, same speed etc. - Nope.. you have to talk to the business sales people.
Phoned up the 'Business' sales people... they said it wasn't possible until my 12 month contract on my 'Home' account had finished.. WTF.. this is the SAME COMPANY! You shouldn't have to wait for the contract to run out before you can upgrade.
Phoned up regular support.. 'I was told that to upgrade my account from a Home account to a Business account I would have to wait for the standard 12 month contract to finish'.. 'Sorry Mr *******, but you must have been mis-informed, you can upgrade your account at any time, please phone the Business sales line on 0845 xxx xxx and quote your account number'.
Right then.. Did as she said, phoned up 'Business' sales people again, quoted my account number and said that I wanted to switch over to a Business account... the guy I was talking to (who sounded tired and pissed off) just said 'Yeah.. they've been saying that their gonna make it possible for about 6 months now.. You want me to add you to the announcement mailing list?'
So.. here I am, sitting and waiting for them to email me or give any response saying it's possible (phoning every now and then just to make sure I my point across)... NOTHING!
I've been a long-time hater of BT broadband and dialup for a damn good reason - they seem to have different departments for everything, and none of them can talk to each other - so transfering accounts or upgrades and such is a nightmare of looping phone calls and 'lost postit-notes' (my phrase)...
But this isn't BT we're talking about here - it's Tiscali... This stuff just makes my blood boil!
Excuse me.. but 'photo realistic' usually means that it is close or completly indiscernable the same as an actual photo of a real city.
To be honest I've seen similar things from Sim City 2000 and see no real merit from the 'final product'.
Really, how is this new? Sim City? huh? Nevermind!
Think about it, I use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (and for technical documentation: vi and html2ps then watch them scream when Acrobat reader can't read.ps files haha). But do I use all the features that are available? No.
I'm perfectly happy using Microsoft Office 97 - it still works fine, most products that can read.doc documents read all the formatting perfectly, and anyway I don't use any advanced features which would restrict me to a specific or newer product.
Word Processing really hasn't changed much in the past 15 years, and I don't see it changing much in the next 5 years, the same applies for spreadsheets.. and anybody stupid enough to use PowerPoint for anything critical or that needs distributing deserves to be shot.
What the new document format does mean though is that third parties can easily integrate with this new format, as opposed to obfuscated binary formats such as.doc,.sxw etc. In a few months from now I expect to see various projects spring up aimed at providing a simplified interface for regular developers (like me) to easily produce, read and convert the new format.
And building on those base libraries I expect you'll see more and more web applications allowing you to publish documents straight from your Word processing suite into - perhaps the next generation of CMS (think Sharepoint Portal, but opensource with indexing care of Lucene etc.).
The benifits to this standardization are immense and should help improve workflow productivity for the end user (maybe a year down the line).
To be honest that sounds like J2ME..
Most 'smart phones' and PDAs that like compatibility will support J2ME applications out of the box, or with a little tweaking (my iPaq didn't like J2ME applications when I was running WinCE, but now that it runs linux it loves them).
If your aiming for the mobile market target for J2ME, for the PDA market target for Windows AND Symbian (your developers will crucify you for the decision to support both btw).
I'm still not sure I properly understand your question though, could you be more specific?
Damn, I've been playing QuakeWorld Custom TF (and Mega-TF when I get bored) for year nows.
Quake (and QuakeWorld) are in my eyes what all first person shooters should aspire too. People are playing them now simply because of the gameplay, and the 'graphical funkyness' added by the more recent Quake/QuakeWorld clients such as FuhQuake and QuakeForge just make the existing players happier.
I hope that take iD Software's lead an release the Half-Life 1 engine under an acceptable open source license (such as the GPL). And only by de-coupling it from Steam will that engine or any of the games based on it be played for more than an additional 6 months.
I think games like DOD (Day of Defeat) still have years of play left in them, but until Valve Software wise up to what their customers really want, it will be doomed by Steam.
I think one of their main features will be a UI interface to bin2h:)
On the other hand, there is a couple of ways they can innovate, or just copy all the work done by previous companies.
For example, Metroworks Studio (i think) for the Playstation, gameboy, gba (and lots of other consoles/handhelds) is probably the kinda thing their going for. It's an IDE with a load of stuff like a fairly decent sprite editor, encoders and tools for native formats to the target (which in microsofts case would be.x, and probably a framework to work with other model formats).
I guess their just trying to supply the glue between various different programs and tools to help people work more effeciently..
Why people can't just write commandline tools, hack up their makefiles (or... EWW.. the Visual Studio Pre/Post build tasks..) that do stuff that would be useful.. Such as adding random burns/scratches/craters to materials, vising and lighting maps etc.
Personally GNU make fulfills all my needs, re-compiles my maps when I change them, ensures a CVS sync when I start and stop working and manages performing a variety of actions on a whole load of different files...
Standard tools already manage the whole pipeline, a UI just adds more bloat and overhead into the mix! Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few really nice features in Visual Studio 2003/2005.. but there are already a heap of very good editors out there that can do the same job and integrate with the way I work, not they way they want me to work. (such as Slickedit, CRISP, Code Forge etc.)
Call me a zealot, call me a troll, but there are some valid arguments in there... somewhere:)
There is already a Novell certification for Linux, it's called the Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE).
The certification is adapted from a SuSE Linux certification programme, but with more LDAP/eDirectory and Netware/Linux interoperation coverage (e.g. hinting that they'll be skilled to migrate from Netware to Linux).
Thats because a lot of people who 'run web hosting companies' know jack about administration, security and what their users really want, and are just jumping on the internet business bandwaggon.
It's sad to say, but now with products like Helm, Ensim Webppliance etc. anybody can run a hosting business.
Anyway, to get to my point (and the end of a rant), because there are a lot of webhosts detatched from 'all that funny dos stuff at the backend' upgrading to newer versions of services etc. can be non-trivial if there isn't a button on their control panel to do it.
If you have any spare time and want to see for yourself, go traul through the CPanel message boards for threads you'd expect from a unix green-horn, but are actually coming from admins of supposidly 'reliable and respected' hosting companies.
While it will be a few months into the mysql 5 general release before you start seeing it being used in the hosting industry (I know several people who are just switching over from 4.0 to 4.1), the benifits for developers will be great (in the long run).
I expect to see a new batch of commercial and open source development spured by the growing stability of mysql 5, but also an increase of help requests from newcomers to web development.
Btw: I think there should be a new moderator option.. Rant -2
Yes but that wouldn't be very good for the companies making the batteries (profit wise)
So... months driving without a recharge, then it costs you $500 for 1/10th of a second charge.. I thought they whole idea is that they would help bring the price down (eventually), but I guess corporate america will never let that happen.
If the makers insist on Windows-only releases, why would you want to deal with them in the first place? It means they're in bed with MS.
No, it's just because producing a multi-platform game usually increases development time and testing time by at minimum 1.5x.
The problem is that if you spent another 6 months on a project, the result of that additional 6 months of work isn't always justified by the increased number of sales or larger userbase.
This is true in almost all areas of multi-platform software development, so your assuption that companies who only release for the Windows platform are in bed with Microsoft is wrong. (Unless it's Valve or Gearbox your talking about..)
Even better would to have a spare hard disk, fill it with 100 different random 1gb files, all with random names, then store all your 'insert highly illegal topic' data in one of those files.
Then for additional measure, have a process running in the background that modifies the access time and modification time randomly on all of them.
The bottom line is, anybody who actually wants to secure their data, and make it almost impossible for anybody to recover it will probably already be doing this.
The article is refering to average joes who think encrypting their stuff will make it more secure (as you can tell by the wording of the article).
I'd hardly consider removable hard-drives as secure.. unless ofcourse you happen to have that 'self destruct' option that Maxtor sell to paranoid customers:)
As opposed to remembering a long guid etc. I think memorizing your 512bit (or higher..) private key would be a much better solution.
So you've remembered it and there is now now physical trace of it anywhere, but what about when you printed it out on a piece of paper to remember it easier? Or sat at your computer trying to memorize it? DOH!
Please.. if you really are that paranoid about the feds getting your data, you might as well carry around a cyanide pill just incase...
Visual Programming has always been a sort of industry goal, every product you see out there is trying to make it easier on the developer, be it UML or another modelling software, iMatix's Libero or another code generation framework.
One of the reasons I think Visual Programming won't catch on for a long time, or will take serious innovational leap is because with existing solutions the developer looses too much control over the path of execution, optimizations, memory management and all the other lower-level stuff we developers have to tinker with.
There have been numerous frameworks which have tried to bridge the gap, one that sticks in my mind is SilverStream's/Novell's exteNd Composer/Director. They follow the basic roles of a point-and-click programming environment, flow layout, assisted statement creation etc.
But there is only so much you can do before you end up just writing solid code again. I don't want to sound like an elite-ist, but personally I think all these high-level visual programming environments will lead to 'Joe Blogs' developing your [name critical financial or business application here].
And not to mention the thousands of zealots out there who you'll have to bring kicking and screaming into the new 'visual' era.
Rant or rave, new developments in this area can be a great aid to experienced developers, but in the wrong hands they can cause more harm than good (Visual Basic anybody?)
The Novell Certified Linux Engineer (and their other Linux certification options) are suprisingly well thought out.
I'd see this as a good certificaion to get under your belt, although it does deal with SuSE a little more than just generic Linux and Unix, you could say the same about the RHCE
My advice would be to go for the RHCE or Novell/SuSE option. But the one thing you have to remember is - certification is worth jack without real experience to back it up
By real experience I mean dealing with crazy stuff that is bound to happen, learning more advanced options for lots of tools, real-life (or even simulated) backup strategies, and most importantly - security.
I was hired by a mid-sized college after a 'government sponsored training scheme' (call it a severly underpaid internship - around £1 per hour) after demonstrating a fair amount of linux knowledge (and a load of other stuff).
My best advice for you is to get certified in whatever you can afford (to get past 'level one'), but try work for anybody on anything to do with Linux or Unix in any flavour.. even volunteer for charities, friends or whatever.
When it comes down to it you need industry experience so don't got for the big guns just yer, just be happy with whatever you end up with
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you're right about the Hotmail links, but I was implying 'the big 3' instead of 'any other browser'.. That is 'Mozilla, Opera and Safari/Konqueror'.. Lets face it - if you're browsing the web using Links/Lynx, you're probably not going to be using Hotmail - so it's a non-issue.
Eh?
Microsoft have recently re-done their entire MSN site in most countries to take advantage of pure xhtml and css.. with one of the main incentives being that sure people may run other browsers, but they want to use MSN.
What would happen if Microsoft stopped Hotmail from displaying properly in any other browser, there would be some very big critics giving them an ego bashing...
What the article was actually refering to was the suprising number of business sites owned by reputable companies that hire complete arsehats for web designers/developers.
I've seen it on many occasions, and even though Opera can identify as Internet Explorer, this damn website seemed to be specificly checking for 'Opera' in the useragent string..
So, 20 minutes later I'd 'fixed' opera and made the useragent string almost identical to a real IE client, and sure enough the website worked perfectly...
I did phone up their technical support number just to log a problem (it would have been stopping me from getting an insurance quote...) and the woman on the phone just didn't seem to understand and refused to pass it onto the 'technical people'.
I know it's kinda lame, but if you come across this sort of thing happening with a large company.. take time to phone or atleast e-mail, if enough people are made aware of this we'll all be generally better off.
One day late last year, Mr. Abad was on the Internet Relay Channel, or IRC, a global online chat system that is best known as the lair of various digital bad guys.
I know i'm just being a nazi, but please can we not start to think of IRC as a place only for the bad? Next thing and you'll have the RIAA and MPAA trying to outlaw IRC (with an argument in the same context as BitTorrent.. 'it can, therefore it is').
is not just with 'Open Source' or other trendy keywords, but it just happens to be one of the worst hit by it (as most open source projects have no commercial backing to help with legal issues or licensing etc.)
Ok, so i'll try and explain it in ways that your average local politition will be able to understand (mr g.w.bush comes to mind as an exception though..).
The main goals behind patents are to protect an inventors hard work, research and ideas from exploitation by restricting other peoples rights to duplicate/copy/rip/etc the idea.
For most industries the research process which is needed to create the idea is usually costly (both in time and money), in this context you can think of patents as allowing the inventor(s) to recouperate that initial investment and to control revenue from the invention while it's still considered 'new'.
In todays scociety the software industry is a completely different beast compared to what I would consider as the 'old stle' industry (think of the industrial revolution etc.). Thinking of ideas new software inventions isn't very hard, thousands of new products are designed every day due to the low cost of researching and designing software inventions.
Basicly the two industries are reversed, so the actual hard work and investment is in developing the product and getting it to market.
The first point that I was trying to demonstrate is that somebody could think up 10 product ideas every week and patent them (al la Microsoft & IBM), but they may not even have the technical expertise or money to create it.. generally all software ideas are useless until they have been developed.
So by patenting ideas in an invention-per-second industry, you are restricting the rest of the industry from making a product of it.. bad karma.
My personal gripe (and I'm sure most of you share the same opinion) is the US patent offices reluctance or inability to check if the patent breaks one of the simple rules set out: 'No bussiness methods or mathematical algorithms', 'Must be non-obvious to a professional from within that industry' and 'There must be no prior art' (i'm sure theres another one.. cant be assed to think of it right now).
So this means that I could for example patent a really simple theory, such as 'transfering memory from one computer to another via analogue signals across a distributed network'... and the patent office would probably approve it if it had not been patented before and the wording was sufficiently obfuscated so that only non-technical lawyers and civil servants can understand it..
So given those two pieces i've brought up, you can think of thousands of different 'inventions' in an industry where inventions alone are fairly worthless, and apply for patents with them.. and a lot of them would probably get approved due the lax standards at the patent office.
So given that our industry moves at such a fast pace (compared to something like the petroleum extraction business) and the length of the patent is relatively very long it restricts the actual development of new software (e.g. developers and companies are probably going to be scared of getting sued, or having unreasonable licensing terms pushed upon them).
Anyway.. try and extract as much drunk ranting gibberish out of it as possible, and hopefully you can use some of the arguments i've brought up.
Jus my £0.02
steal pointless crazy stuff like this, they have no re-sale value (I doubt the components are that expensive, most of the £110k was probably development time and research etc.). Then I saw this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/10/kidnapped_ dalek/
Somebody stole a pointless crazy thing (e.g. a rare original dalek from the Dr.Who series) and their trying to ransom it back..
Putting £110 worth of equipment anywhere in most places in the UK and not bolting it to the ground is always a bad thing...
So.. I wanted to know what the language could do, what it's feature set were etc. so I went to the quickstart guide at the MSH Wiki site ( http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart ).
IMHO this looks a lot like perl, but with enough changed so people dont start looking through their code for 'Copyright (c) Larry Wall'... This is real innovation.. whatever.
Forgive me for being naive, but couldn't Microsoft just develop stronger Windows bindings for Perl? It's battle hardened, already widly known and documented around the work.. not to mention you would ge the benifit of CPAN for additional modules (Would you trust Microsoft to write your date manipulation functions? hah!)
And we all know somebody will work out how to run MSH code from deep within some other subsystem-by-proxy and inevitably cause another wave of virii (by this time Microsoft will be touting it's anti-virus software etc.)
Oh the end is neigh, the sky will fall, etc. etc... I'll just shut up now and get back to some work.
"So when did C++ start running on bare hardware? Every time I've run it, I needed an OS and a huge pile of libraries."
Well then mister.. you obviously haven't tried hard enough, it is perfectly possible to write kernel-level code in C++ as long as you implement the 'new' and 'delete' functions which are required to create and delete objects.
A reference if you need it: http://www.mega-tokyo.com/osfaq2/index.php/Doing%2 0a%20kernel%20in%20C%2B%2B
Oh my god.. dont tell me.. you have to write your own memory manager?... dumbasss, if you're writing bare-level C code you'll have already done that.
In future.. think before you type, and you'll be relieved of the pain of being publicly insulted on slashdot..
I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the /. website..
In this exciting new addition to the Sim line of games, which previously included SimCity and SimHospotal; you are challenged with the juggling act that is Slash Dot.
Blast through 24 different scenarios and try to keep the daily traffic level and number of posts by making sure the site has enough flamebait and re-posts to get the visitors streaming in.
This will, as usual, be released for the Phantom console.
assasination attempts will he have this time?
And are there any interviews with 'potential' winners before they are chosen just so he doesn't get stuck with an Linux, Apple or Amiga junkie for an hour that only really awnts to piss him off rather than ask intelligent questions?
Whatever anybody says.. get your tinfoil hats ready because I'm sure evertyhing will be staged as usual and turned into a marketing gimmick!
Nuff said.. thats what MS usually do anyway.
I went through a similar kinda thing with Tiscali *mumbledcurses*.
So, I signed up for their Home service because it was cheap enough (£15/m for 256k.. now upgraded to 512 for same price), had no bandwidth restrictions, and was a damn sight faster than the 32kbit i'd been used to for however many years.
Got adsl relatively quickly - maybe a week or so later, threw the USB modem in the bin and re-configured various systems. http, smtp and pop3 (for remote access) was all up fairly quickly along with dyndns...
Damnit damnit damnit.. my whole IP block is on a black list because of all 'ye average dsl customers' machines sending spam.
Now, the business service is EXACTLY the same price as the 'consumer' service, EXACTLY the same service, with two exception - you can register a domain with it, and they can give you a static IP address.
Ok.. i'll just switch over from my 'Home' plan to a 'Business' plan.. (switching from 256 to 512 took around 24 hours and only took a 30 second phone call). Hah.. how wrong I was.
So first, I emailed tech support and asked if it was possible to have a static ip and revers dns (for email) on my home account.. can't do it - talk to the sales people and get your account upgraded to a business account.
Phoned the sales people (the only support staff they kept in britain.. the rest are in india), asked if I could get my account upgraded to a business account - same price, same phone line, same speed etc. - Nope.. you have to talk to the business sales people.
Phoned up the 'Business' sales people... they said it wasn't possible until my 12 month contract on my 'Home' account had finished.. WTF.. this is the SAME COMPANY! You shouldn't have to wait for the contract to run out before you can upgrade.
Phoned up regular support.. 'I was told that to upgrade my account from a Home account to a Business account I would have to wait for the standard 12 month contract to finish'.. 'Sorry Mr *******, but you must have been mis-informed, you can upgrade your account at any time, please phone the Business sales line on 0845 xxx xxx and quote your account number'.
Right then.. Did as she said, phoned up 'Business' sales people again, quoted my account number and said that I wanted to switch over to a Business account... the guy I was talking to (who sounded tired and pissed off) just said 'Yeah.. they've been saying that their gonna make it possible for about 6 months now.. You want me to add you to the announcement mailing list?'
So.. here I am, sitting and waiting for them to email me or give any response saying it's possible (phoning every now and then just to make sure I my point across)... NOTHING!
I've been a long-time hater of BT broadband and dialup for a damn good reason - they seem to have different departments for everything, and none of them can talk to each other - so transfering accounts or upgrades and such is a nightmare of looping phone calls and 'lost postit-notes' (my phrase)...
But this isn't BT we're talking about here - it's Tiscali... This stuff just makes my blood boil!
Excuse me.. but 'photo realistic' usually means that it is close or completly indiscernable the same as an actual photo of a real city. To be honest I've seen similar things from Sim City 2000 and see no real merit from the 'final product'. Really, how is this new? Sim City? huh? Nevermind!
How can things change in the future?
Think about it, I use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (and for technical documentation: vi and html2ps then watch them scream when Acrobat reader can't read .ps files haha). But do I use all the features that are available? No.
I'm perfectly happy using Microsoft Office 97 - it still works fine, most products that can read .doc documents read all the formatting perfectly, and anyway I don't use any advanced features which would restrict me to a specific or newer product.
Word Processing really hasn't changed much in the past 15 years, and I don't see it changing much in the next 5 years, the same applies for spreadsheets.. and anybody stupid enough to use PowerPoint for anything critical or that needs distributing deserves to be shot.
What the new document format does mean though is that third parties can easily integrate with this new format, as opposed to obfuscated binary formats such as .doc, .sxw etc. In a few months from now I expect to see various projects spring up aimed at providing a simplified interface for regular developers (like me) to easily produce, read and convert the new format.
And building on those base libraries I expect you'll see more and more web applications allowing you to publish documents straight from your Word processing suite into - perhaps the next generation of CMS (think Sharepoint Portal, but opensource with indexing care of Lucene etc.).
The benifits to this standardization are immense and should help improve workflow productivity for the end user (maybe a year down the line).
Just my £0.02.
To be honest that sounds like J2ME.. Most 'smart phones' and PDAs that like compatibility will support J2ME applications out of the box, or with a little tweaking (my iPaq didn't like J2ME applications when I was running WinCE, but now that it runs linux it loves them). If your aiming for the mobile market target for J2ME, for the PDA market target for Windows AND Symbian (your developers will crucify you for the decision to support both btw). I'm still not sure I properly understand your question though, could you be more specific?
Damn, I've been playing QuakeWorld Custom TF (and Mega-TF when I get bored) for year nows.
Quake (and QuakeWorld) are in my eyes what all first person shooters should aspire too. People are playing them now simply because of the gameplay, and the 'graphical funkyness' added by the more recent Quake/QuakeWorld clients such as FuhQuake and QuakeForge just make the existing players happier.
I hope that take iD Software's lead an release the Half-Life 1 engine under an acceptable open source license (such as the GPL). And only by de-coupling it from Steam will that engine or any of the games based on it be played for more than an additional 6 months.
I think games like DOD (Day of Defeat) still have years of play left in them, but until Valve Software wise up to what their customers really want, it will be doomed by Steam.
I think one of their main features will be a UI interface to bin2h :)
On the other hand, there is a couple of ways they can innovate, or just copy all the work done by previous companies.
For example, Metroworks Studio (i think) for the Playstation, gameboy, gba (and lots of other consoles/handhelds) is probably the kinda thing their going for. It's an IDE with a load of stuff like a fairly decent sprite editor, encoders and tools for native formats to the target (which in microsofts case would be .x, and probably a framework to work with other model formats).
I guess their just trying to supply the glue between various different programs and tools to help people work more effeciently..
Why people can't just write commandline tools, hack up their makefiles (or... EWW.. the Visual Studio Pre/Post build tasks..) that do stuff that would be useful.. Such as adding random burns/scratches/craters to materials, vising and lighting maps etc.
Personally GNU make fulfills all my needs, re-compiles my maps when I change them, ensures a CVS sync when I start and stop working and manages performing a variety of actions on a whole load of different files...
Standard tools already manage the whole pipeline, a UI just adds more bloat and overhead into the mix! Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few really nice features in Visual Studio 2003/2005.. but there are already a heap of very good editors out there that can do the same job and integrate with the way I work, not they way they want me to work. (such as Slickedit, CRISP, Code Forge etc.)
Call me a zealot, call me a troll, but there are some valid arguments in there... somewhere :)
Come on people.. hundereds of thousands of geeks read slashdot every day, and we can only come up with trash like this?
Anybody have suggestions
There is already a Novell certification for Linux, it's called the Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE).
The certification is adapted from a SuSE Linux certification programme, but with more LDAP/eDirectory and Netware/Linux interoperation coverage (e.g. hinting that they'll be skilled to migrate from Netware to Linux).
You might want to take a look at http://www.novell.com/training/certinfo/cle/ some time :)
Thats because a lot of people who 'run web hosting companies' know jack about administration, security and what their users really want, and are just jumping on the internet business bandwaggon.
It's sad to say, but now with products like Helm, Ensim Webppliance etc. anybody can run a hosting business.
Anyway, to get to my point (and the end of a rant), because there are a lot of webhosts detatched from 'all that funny dos stuff at the backend' upgrading to newer versions of services etc. can be non-trivial if there isn't a button on their control panel to do it.
If you have any spare time and want to see for yourself, go traul through the CPanel message boards for threads you'd expect from a unix green-horn, but are actually coming from admins of supposidly 'reliable and respected' hosting companies.
While it will be a few months into the mysql 5 general release before you start seeing it being used in the hosting industry (I know several people who are just switching over from 4.0 to 4.1), the benifits for developers will be great (in the long run).
I expect to see a new batch of commercial and open source development spured by the growing stability of mysql 5, but also an increase of help requests from newcomers to web development.
Btw: I think there should be a new moderator option.. Rant -2
MySQL already has foreign key support when using InnoDB tables. And from what i've seen it's very stable.
Yes but that wouldn't be very good for the companies making the batteries (profit wise)
So... months driving without a recharge, then it costs you $500 for 1/10th of a second charge.. I thought they whole idea is that they would help bring the price down (eventually), but I guess corporate america will never let that happen.
No, it's just because producing a multi-platform game usually increases development time and testing time by at minimum 1.5x.
The problem is that if you spent another 6 months on a project, the result of that additional 6 months of work isn't always justified by the increased number of sales or larger userbase.
This is true in almost all areas of multi-platform software development, so your assuption that companies who only release for the Windows platform are in bed with Microsoft is wrong. (Unless it's Valve or Gearbox your talking about..)
Even better would to have a spare hard disk, fill it with 100 different random 1gb files, all with random names, then store all your 'insert highly illegal topic' data in one of those files.
Then for additional measure, have a process running in the background that modifies the access time and modification time randomly on all of them.
The bottom line is, anybody who actually wants to secure their data, and make it almost impossible for anybody to recover it will probably already be doing this.
The article is refering to average joes who think encrypting their stuff will make it more secure (as you can tell by the wording of the article).
I'd hardly consider removable hard-drives as secure.. unless ofcourse you happen to have that 'self destruct' option that Maxtor sell to paranoid customers :)
As opposed to remembering a long guid etc. I think memorizing your 512bit (or higher..) private key would be a much better solution.
So you've remembered it and there is now now physical trace of it anywhere, but what about when you printed it out on a piece of paper to remember it easier? Or sat at your computer trying to memorize it? DOH!
Please.. if you really are that paranoid about the feds getting your data, you might as well carry around a cyanide pill just incase...
Visual Programming has always been a sort of industry goal, every product you see out there is trying to make it easier on the developer, be it UML or another modelling software, iMatix's Libero or another code generation framework.
One of the reasons I think Visual Programming won't catch on for a long time, or will take serious innovational leap is because with existing solutions the developer looses too much control over the path of execution, optimizations, memory management and all the other lower-level stuff we developers have to tinker with.
There have been numerous frameworks which have tried to bridge the gap, one that sticks in my mind is SilverStream's/Novell's exteNd Composer/Director. They follow the basic roles of a point-and-click programming environment, flow layout, assisted statement creation etc.
But there is only so much you can do before you end up just writing solid code again. I don't want to sound like an elite-ist, but personally I think all these high-level visual programming environments will lead to 'Joe Blogs' developing your [name critical financial or business application here].
And not to mention the thousands of zealots out there who you'll have to bring kicking and screaming into the new 'visual' era.
Rant or rave, new developments in this area can be a great aid to experienced developers, but in the wrong hands they can cause more harm than good (Visual Basic anybody?)
Moderate: -5 Zealot bait
The Novell Certified Linux Engineer (and their other Linux certification options) are suprisingly well thought out.
I'd see this as a good certificaion to get under your belt, although it does deal with SuSE a little more than just generic Linux and Unix, you could say the same about the RHCE
My advice would be to go for the RHCE or Novell/SuSE option. But the one thing you have to remember is - certification is worth jack without real experience to back it up
By real experience I mean dealing with crazy stuff that is bound to happen, learning more advanced options for lots of tools, real-life (or even simulated) backup strategies, and most importantly - security.
I was hired by a mid-sized college after a 'government sponsored training scheme' (call it a severly underpaid internship - around £1 per hour) after demonstrating a fair amount of linux knowledge (and a load of other stuff).
My best advice for you is to get certified in whatever you can afford (to get past 'level one'), but try work for anybody on anything to do with Linux or Unix in any flavour.. even volunteer for charities, friends or whatever.
When it comes down to it you need industry experience so don't got for the big guns just yer, just be happy with whatever you end up with