The bastard site in question: http://www.free-game-zone.com/ I just happened to stumble upon the site randomly. It appears to be a spam site with little to no content, but they still annoy me.
Just this morning, I ran into the first site that I have seen that gets around Mozilla's popup blocking. It puts up a popup window whenever you click on any of the links. Mozilla allows this. Soon more sites will be doing this. I wish nobody else used Mozilla.
It needs a domain name before you could get a NPR story about it. I'd like to see people try to type in H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-T-E-X-T-S-oh-one-dot-A-R -C-H-I-V-E-dot-O-R-G-slash-D-P from hearing it on the radio. It isn't a.com, it won't work with a "www", it has random numbers in it, and it is too long. Fine if you are clicking on a link from slashdot, but too much to remember or even write down after hearing it on the radio.
Re:It's nice
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The code that the article is about is neither concise nor elegant. The article is about Dragon speech recognition software which as miraculously survived several companies and failures. The article refers to it as "deep" code. Code that to hard to do over from scratch. The code in question is archived on 5000 CDs (the version control repository).
When I started getting spam, I wanted it to stop. I realized I couldn't just disable the email address because there might be somebody out there counting on it to contact me. I could disable it and send an autoreply with my current email address, but then spammers would just be able to look at the reply. I needed some solution where people could send me email even if the address they used had been disabled, but spammers wouldn't be able to get my current address. I decided to put a contact form on my website. Now I autorespond to a disabled email address with the contact form url. In addition, I was able to remove email addresses from my website which was a large source of spam.
Not being able to find a contact form that was secure, I ended up writing my own and releasing it under the GPL. You can get it at http://ostermiller.org/contactform/.
I also realized that no matter how hard you try, your email address will leak to spammers. Ever giving an email address only to your closest friends and family will not prevent it from leaking out. Between the klez virus, gift certificates, invitation, greeting card, and crushlink websites, even my most personal email address leaked to spammers. You can't be afraid to disable an email address and send your friends the new one. Now even if I missed a friend, they can still get a message to me.
Ant makes too many assumtions to ever be the flexible build tool that I want. I use make for my Java projects and I prefer it to Ant. The main advantages that people site with Ant is that it only makes one instance of the Java compiler. Well, I can do that with make as well, it just takes a little bit of scripting. Ant wants to have bld and src directories where I want everything in one. This assumption about how things should be organized kills it for me because I can't use it with my existing organization. I have many reasons for wanting it this way:
For open source Java projects I want to distribute the source code in the binary.
It is nice to be able to view the source code of the application from the application by using the classloader.
When everybody has the source, anybody can modify it.
Ant also does not have a spell check module, something that is really easy to put into make.
Microsoft managed to kill of Java applets. Without resorting to Java 1.0, it is nearly impossible to write a Java applet that will work in a variety of browsers. I would like to write an applet using the latest version of Java (1.4) and have it work in everybody's browser. There are several reasons why that doesn't happen:
Microsoft does not distribute anything but Java 1.0, so Windows users must get a large download from Sun.
Once you get the recent version of Java, the applet tag is still hijacked by the old microsoft version of Java.
The object tag is recommended as a replacement for the applet tag because you can specify which vm you want to run the applet. Unfortunatly different browsers want different parameters. IE wants some got awful random string of number for the classid, where Netscape wants something in the format "java:myclass.class".
There are ways to nest platform specific object tags (or object and embed tags) so that it will work in both Netscape (Mozilla) and IE, however, these tricks are hackish and don't seem to carry over to Macintosh versions of IE or other Macintosh browsers.
Although I program primarily in Java, I hadn't written an applet in years. The other day, I decided to try to get my Random Password Generator to work as an applet. It works in Windows IE and Linux Mozilla.
If windows starts coming with a recent version of Java, perhaps the applet tag will become useful again.
Other than applets, the death of Java is greatly exaggerated.
I'm with you, but I don't think that anybody would pledge anything if they didn't get the money back if the bug were not fixed. Holding the money in escrow might work, but paying the dollars up front would not. Know of any escrow services that would be willing and able to work with many small payments for one item?
I have quite a few bugs in Mozilla that I have reported, or for which I have voted, so I get quite a bit of email from Bugzilla. I have seen an increasing number of posts of people who attach a comment to a bug saying "this is really important to me, it needs to be implemented ASAP". The usual response is "Please stop spamming us. We have limited resources and will get to bugs in time (possibly a long time). If you really want this bug fixed, fix it yourself, or pay somebody to fix it for you."
The problem with this is that there are not many people who (even if they are programmers) are up to speed with the Mozilla code and can fix bugs. This mostly rules out do it yourself. That also means that it is probably rather expensive to hire one of these people for the time it takes to fix some bug. I'm thinking $200 to $5000 depending on the amount of work it would take (especially for some of the more far reaching feature requests.)
How hard would it be to add a distributed "pay for development of feature" option to open source projects? The idea is that if 1000 people want a bug fixed and each can pledge $1 to the person that fixes it (and contributes the open source to the project), you might be able to get a lot of bugs fixed and have some revenue stream for developers.
The first hurdle is setting up the pledge system. I don't if Paypal or another mircopayment system could be rigged for "pledge mode".
After the pledge system is in place, you would have to decide who can say if a bug is "fixed". It can't be the person that gets the money. It could possibly be a vote of the people paying, or it could be some designated third party.
People contributing money would probably also want a time limit on their pledges. "I'll pledge $10 if this gets fixed in the next three months", but not "I'll give $10 whenever this gets fixed".
Does anybody here have any insight as to how this could be implemented?
Not everyone writes comments that support these tools however (myself included) which dilutes the dopumentation process.
I agree, its partly a cultural/precedent/ease-of-use thing. Because Sun includes the tool by default and uses the tool extensivly for all their stuff, far more Java programmers use it. In many ways, the advantages of Java don't come from the programming language, but from common practices that are associated with Java.
This is one of the reasons that I love Java. Everybody who writes code in Java puts in javadoc comments directly into the code. Java comes with a tool that pulls out these comments and makes web pages, pdfs, or pretty much any other format documentation out of it. Sun does this with the java.* classes, I do this with my classes, other third party libraries all have this. Because the documentation is in the source, it beats external documentation like man pages. It sure makes programming in Java a pleasant experience.
I still recommend that if you are using Java, Linux is the way to go. The Java from Sun runs on Linux just as well as any Windows platform. It beats Java for Windows 9x by a mile. If you will only use opensource software, GCC's Java compiler (get a nightly build and compile it yourself rather than relying on what comes with your distribution, as those are older) is getting pretty darn near usable. It works for 97% of my stuff now. Similarly, the classpath libraries are reaching a point where I can usually substitute them for the sun libraries.
You can no longer expect to use an email address for very long without it getting spammed.
Buy your own domain name so you have an unlimited number of email addresses.
Change your email address every few months when it starts getting spam.
So that friends and family can still contact you, put a form on your website that will always send to your current email address.
For old disabled email addresses, send an autoreply that says "This email address has been disabled because it is getting too much spam. Please contact bob at: http://bobsite.tld/contact.pl"
If a GUI was designed to be used by a 4 year old, it explains why so many/.ers use the command line, since the average age here appears to be two. I guess you need to be twice as mature.
The link is hardly informative. It gives no extra information at all.
I was able to find a website for The Chamberlain Group (the garage door manufacturer). Skylink (the remote manufacturer) also has a web site. Neither appears to have any information about the lawsuit.
I called Chamberlain's tech support number and got the number for their corporate offices: 1-800-282-6225. They said to ask for the legal depatment. If somebody with better journalism skills than I would like to follow up and ask all the questions that people have raised here, we would all appretiate you.
Memory footprint for a small application is going to be high under Java. Each instance (read each new thread, of which the server creates several) has an entire virtual machine running with a copy of the needed libraries. As your application grows, this overhead gets less significant.
but even a few miliseconds shaved of something like opening a new window feels nice.
A faster processor won't help much. Cold starting a program mostly depends on hard drive speed. How fast the data can be scraped off and put into memory. A second start of the program usually depends on memory speed and amount of memory you have (so it doesn't have to go back to the disk). If you want faster starting programs you can also do things like close other programs, take the number of colors on your screen down to 256, decrease your screen resolution, and get the picture off your desktop in favor of a plain color.
I saw a news program that had some sort of zero gravity simulation using very strong magnetic fields. It was very similar to these machines, I believe. The zero-g chamber on the things is a tube about 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. Much to small for a human (the magnetic fields for something that big are prohibitive), but they put a strawberry, and then a spider inside. Both turned out just fine, but the spider looked like it got a bit seasick as is scambled around. Kinda cute to watch. I wish I could find some pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to click on any of the links. In addition to taking you to the next page, it will put up a popup ad.
The bastard site in question: http://www.free-game-zone.com/ I just happened to stumble upon the site randomly. It appears to be a spam site with little to no content, but they still annoy me.
Just this morning, I ran into the first site that I have seen that gets around Mozilla's popup blocking. It puts up a popup window whenever you click on any of the links. Mozilla allows this. Soon more sites will be doing this. I wish nobody else used Mozilla.
It needs a domain name before you could get a NPR story about it. I'd like to see people try to type in H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-T-E-X-T-S-oh-one-dot-A-R -C-H-I-V-E-dot-O-R-G-slash-D-P from hearing it on the radio. It isn't a .com, it won't work with a "www", it has random numbers in it, and it is too long. Fine if you are clicking on a link from slashdot, but too much to remember or even write down after hearing it on the radio.
The code that the article is about is neither concise nor elegant. The article is about Dragon speech recognition software which as miraculously survived several companies and failures. The article refers to it as "deep" code. Code that to hard to do over from scratch. The code in question is archived on 5000 CDs (the version control repository).
You need to expand on your step 4.
When I started getting spam, I wanted it to stop. I realized I couldn't just disable the email address because there might be somebody out there counting on it to contact me. I could disable it and send an autoreply with my current email address, but then spammers would just be able to look at the reply. I needed some solution where people could send me email even if the address they used had been disabled, but spammers wouldn't be able to get my current address. I decided to put a contact form on my website. Now I autorespond to a disabled email address with the contact form url. In addition, I was able to remove email addresses from my website which was a large source of spam.
Not being able to find a contact form that was secure, I ended up writing my own and releasing it under the GPL. You can get it at http://ostermiller.org/contactform/.
I also realized that no matter how hard you try, your email address will leak to spammers. Ever giving an email address only to your closest friends and family will not prevent it from leaking out. Between the klez virus, gift certificates, invitation, greeting card, and crushlink websites, even my most personal email address leaked to spammers. You can't be afraid to disable an email address and send your friends the new one. Now even if I missed a friend, they can still get a message to me.
- For open source Java projects I want to distribute the source code in the binary.
- It is nice to be able to view the source code of the application from the application by using the classloader.
- When everybody has the source, anybody can modify it.
Ant also does not have a spell check module, something that is really easy to put into make.- Microsoft does not distribute anything but Java 1.0, so Windows users must get a large download from Sun.
- Once you get the recent version of Java, the applet tag is still hijacked by the old microsoft version of Java.
- The object tag is recommended as a replacement for the applet tag because you can specify which vm you want to run the applet. Unfortunatly different browsers want different parameters. IE wants some got awful random string of number for the classid, where Netscape wants something in the format "java:myclass.class".
- There are ways to nest platform specific object tags (or object and embed tags) so that it will work in both Netscape (Mozilla) and IE, however, these tricks are hackish and don't seem to carry over to Macintosh versions of IE or other Macintosh browsers.
Although I program primarily in Java, I hadn't written an applet in years. The other day, I decided to try to get my Random Password Generator to work as an applet. It works in Windows IE and Linux Mozilla.If windows starts coming with a recent version of Java, perhaps the applet tag will become useful again.
Other than applets, the death of Java is greatly exaggerated.
I'm with you, but I don't think that anybody would pledge anything if they didn't get the money back if the bug were not fixed. Holding the money in escrow might work, but paying the dollars up front would not. Know of any escrow services that would be willing and able to work with many small payments for one item?
The problem with this is that there are not many people who (even if they are programmers) are up to speed with the Mozilla code and can fix bugs. This mostly rules out do it yourself. That also means that it is probably rather expensive to hire one of these people for the time it takes to fix some bug. I'm thinking $200 to $5000 depending on the amount of work it would take (especially for some of the more far reaching feature requests.)
How hard would it be to add a distributed "pay for development of feature" option to open source projects? The idea is that if 1000 people want a bug fixed and each can pledge $1 to the person that fixes it (and contributes the open source to the project), you might be able to get a lot of bugs fixed and have some revenue stream for developers.
The first hurdle is setting up the pledge system. I don't if Paypal or another mircopayment system could be rigged for "pledge mode".
After the pledge system is in place, you would have to decide who can say if a bug is "fixed". It can't be the person that gets the money. It could possibly be a vote of the people paying, or it could be some designated third party.
People contributing money would probably also want a time limit on their pledges. "I'll pledge $10 if this gets fixed in the next three months", but not "I'll give $10 whenever this gets fixed".
Does anybody here have any insight as to how this could be implemented?
- My father got me an online-dvd rental for Christmas and gave them my address.
- A friend sent me an email greeting card, giving out my address to the greeting card site.
- Some "friend" submitted my email address to crushlink.
I started getting 10 spam a day at that address just from those three leaks and I had to change my address after just a couple of months.I still recommend that if you are using Java, Linux is the way to go. The Java from Sun runs on Linux just as well as any Windows platform. It beats Java for Windows 9x by a mile. If you will only use opensource software, GCC's Java compiler (get a nightly build and compile it yourself rather than relying on what comes with your distribution, as those are older) is getting pretty darn near usable. It works for 97% of my stuff now. Similarly, the classpath libraries are reaching a point where I can usually substitute them for the sun libraries.
I wouldn't go with a catch-all email address. I just create new addresses as I need them.
So if my boss walks in, I think I'll say, "I was just investigating some new technologies."
If a GUI was designed to be used by a 4 year old, it explains why so many /.ers use the command line, since the average age here appears to be two. I guess you need to be twice as mature.
Data Mining Used Hard Drives
My mother wants to use powerpoint and play the latest games on Linux. Can anybody help her?
Oops, those are linked there. I didn't see that. I wish those had been directly linked in the slashdot blurb.
I was able to find a website for The Chamberlain Group (the garage door manufacturer). Skylink (the remote manufacturer) also has a web site. Neither appears to have any information about the lawsuit.
I called Chamberlain's tech support number and got the number for their corporate offices: 1-800-282-6225. They said to ask for the legal depatment. If somebody with better journalism skills than I would like to follow up and ask all the questions that people have raised here, we would all appretiate you.
Memory footprint for a small application is going to be high under Java. Each instance (read each new thread, of which the server creates several) has an entire virtual machine running with a copy of the needed libraries. As your application grows, this overhead gets less significant.
I saw a news program that had some sort of zero gravity simulation using very strong magnetic fields. It was very similar to these machines, I believe. The zero-g chamber on the things is a tube about 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. Much to small for a human (the magnetic fields for something that big are prohibitive), but they put a strawberry, and then a spider inside. Both turned out just fine, but the spider looked like it got a bit seasick as is scambled around. Kinda cute to watch. I wish I could find some pictures.