The only problem here is that most large companies won't actually pay an invoice to an entity (company) that isn't somehow a "registered vendor" or whatever label they decide to stick on the "account". And don't think it will be a slam dunk for small claims either, the court would likely side with company in the fact that you can't just go invoicing a company because you feel like they owe you money (even if you do). Normally an invoice is related to some form of contract (verbal, written, whatever) and without that, well, good luck.
If you are lucky, they will send you back the requisite paper work to become a registered vendor. More likely they will ignore the invoice.
This would be a crown jewel in the Wii Homebrew scene. Not that there aren't plenty of amazing titles already there - this game was [unintentionally] designed to be played with a nunchuck and wiimote.
Some of the nicer boards will tolerate ECC memory being inserted, but won't actually do any meaningful error correction (like scrubbing) - but a disturbingly large number of consumer boards (BIOS limitation perhaps?) don't actually do ANYTHING with ECC memory, and the really cheap ones won't even boot with it present. I used to have the same mindset of purchasing only ECC RAM for the same reason - but the unfortunate truth is that hardware support for it just isn't there without spending $$$ on a decent board too.
It isn't simply about cost - though I understand that is the specific issue you are trying to address:
Try sending a letter or small package through the USPS, UPS, and FedEx (and DHL and a local courier service for good measure) - See which one was more cost effective - See which one was fastest (or slowest) - Which offered the best service (up to date tracking, delivery confirmation + signature, etc.) - Sends thousands of parcels and see which was the most reliable with fewest lost/late arrivals - See how the service varies by region, distance traveled, etc...
There are a lot of variables, and while cost is certainly and important one - it isn't the only one.
They still use flash unfortunately, but as you describe - it isn't ActiveX Flash for IE, it is the "plugin" version for Firefox/Chrome. It only reared its ugly head in a couple of places for me - specifically the game details / videos and one or two animated marketing things.
The marketing things could easily be addressed in HTML - they are all just sliding/fading/hovering type effects.
The video could be easily addressed using the tag, though the whole h.264 patent nonsense may scare them off from actually doing that.
This is a beta, I am hopeful that they will address these concerns. I am very happy with the new interface personally.
So I am just curious, is there something that is missing from Octave that makes it a viable replacement for MATLAB for you? Particularly if you are lagging a few versions behind?
This is the perfect example of "free" in FOSS. You aren't tied to a specific platform or endless* required upgrades.
*This is an approximation for very small values of forever.
Apache is only half the problem at best, the real issue is the lack of compliant clients at a significant level. Server Name Identifcation (the extension to allow for virtual hosts behind SSL/TLS connections) has been supported in Firefox since v2 I believe, and Internet Explorer 7 - though I think that is only on Vista for some reason. I have no idea what Safari, Opera and other browsers and platforms might support.
I would disagree (to some degree) that more features are in fact needed. For example, E4X (and a native XML doc object) being standardized in the browsers would be a huge benefit.
That being said, I think that a lot of the feature bloat going into the proposed v4 was really not all that great. I think this is generally a step in the right direction.
While not directly pertaining to any Cliff's games - I can't say that I have pirated a single one... and perhaps a bit of a rant...
Take for example the impending release of Bionic Commando Rearmed. According to their own blog, it was always slated to be $10 http://www.bioniccommando.com/en/blog_entries/view/291 - According to them as a result of listening to their customers. However, just this last week, one week before it launches I might add, they go and drop the bomb that the PC version will suddenly cost 50% more. Now before we drop off into excuses (dev/qa costs or promised patch for additional content) or business ideas like "Well, it is worth at least $20 in the first place! and many digital distribution games cost $20 as well!" - let us consider the EMOTIONAL impact that had on me:
"What a bunch of jerks. Why don't they just charge the same across all platforms? What exactly are they trying to accomplish - weed the PC platform out? set it up for the poster child of software piracy?"
I am certain I just going to buy it anyway, and really $15 isn't going to break the budget... but suddenly I am much, much more interested in a "demo" - legitimate source or not - before I plunk down the cash.
It may or may not work for your needs, but we actually considered it for our in-house publishing needs. [www.princexml.com]
Also, the product we ended up with XML Professional Publisher (XPP) from XyEnterprise. Kind of different products, but both produce PDF from markup.... sooo.....
Still cracks me up how in every interview I pass, I always get asked "Ok, so can you explain to me the difference between an inner and an outer join?" or "What is the main benefit of an index on a database table?". Shows the state of the workforce... So, since you have identified questions you might ask a college intern - what questions would you or have you [been?] asked that were really good database questions?
Re:what is jquery?
on
Learning jQuery
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps I am just feeding the troll, or perhaps I am just sharing my perspective... but having used many of the same libraries you have we somehow diverged at some point. And that is probably a good thing as I doubt we are really working with the same audience. I really have little to do with design and interaction, I really tend to focus much more on architecture/transport/etc.... the actual "business" logic.
My evolution went from using prototype to investigating scriptaculous, mootools and YUI - none of which lasted very long as quite frankly they *seemed* more like toys to animate elements on the page rather than providing a clean and transparent way of sending/retrieving data and altering the data on the page. They were quite good at what they did (or their demos showed) but never really seemed to address what I was trying to accomplish. YUI was also VERY cool, but also very bloated feeling and cumbersome to actually use. Put simply, I am much more interested in things like JSON, REST and POX than the various libraries to help transition between those "transports" and display on the page.
A while back, maybe a year or possibly a bit more, I was introduced to jQuery by another developer and based on his recommendation decided to check it out. I wasn't quite ready to switch over from prototype (which seemed to more closely resemble the custom JS I would write) and adopt a new kind of similar yet strange syntax from a library I didn't quite have an appreciation of. After adopting it for one project to force myself to learn and use it, I have since whole heartedly switched over from prototype and now love and endorse jQuery as the default AJAX library (I hate to call it that, since it really does so much more). Quite honestly I think each of the "major" libraries out there has many benefits, and I am sure you can cite a great variety of reasons why product x is better than product y so check out what is there and see which one is really going to help you the most. If I was doing complex UI manipulation stuff, I would probably look at scriptaculous or mootools again, although the preview for jQuery UI looks promising as well.
*Disclaimer/Note: this is just my personal experience with them and should not reflect anything on the actual product. I fully recommend checking out the various options to see what works best for you.
Wow. I didn't actually expect this to be on the list but I am not at all surprised. We use it at my work as the primary web platform and I can assure you of two things regarding the language: 1) it is very hard to find someone with development skills using it and 2) the ones who do have the skills are VERY expensive. That seems to go along nicely with the theme of the article that it is in fact a dying skill. While I personally have never developed much of a taste for it (I do post on/. after all - it would be like heresy / blasphemy) there are a few long-time-developers here that have an unholy allegiance to it, almost completely unwilling to even look at alternate environments or frameworks. I would guess that is probably similar for many of the languages/skills on this list and their long time supporters.
There are a number of sources that sell "shopping cart / download" services - just very few (if any) that actually only do this for MP3 files. And certainly I am hoping that by non-transferable you mean anti-leech related tech (limit download to original purchase, not just some direct link to the file). Again - these things exist all over.
Heck, I used to work for a "Brand Management Firm" (that's what they called themselves) that did some moonlighting hosting web sites for clients. To setup the shopping cart etc, they would have charged about maybe $400 back in the day - but I bet you could get a similar service for under $100 now - though I doubt you will have the volume of sales to make a percentage of sales interesting. But that is just me guessing on the popularity of the band.
I honestly don't see this as a problem (though certainly recognize that some people view it as such). My personal belief is a TAB should be a TAB and a SPACE should be a SPACE. If your organization (which might be an OS foundation, corporation, class at school, yourself, whatever...) recommends/enforces style guidelines, let the group dictate.
Also, if it is a big concern, make use of sed to standardize the code (as best as possible) and then use it again to convert back and forth. It is available for win32 as well you know http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Oh, and one last note: A good editor will let you set the tab length in the display. I did like in the demo JAR how the comment lengths would stay (right) aligned (mostly) - which would be a very nice feature to toggle on/off in an editor as well.
It is the Microsoft Exchange server type. I tried the Win32 binary talking to two different OWA exchange servers and neither one was very happy about it. I have used this option successfully in Ubuntu and Fedora though - so I know it works. Basically it just grabs the xml packets and stuffs them as mail items in Evolution. I am actually quite surprised some of the other popular mail clients (Thunderbird particularly - though there is a request for it) hasn't implemented it.
I am in the process of downloading and evaluating the Win32 version - but on Linux (and I can't imagine why not on Win32) it DOES SUPPORT RPC OVER HTTPS - though it calls it something different, Microsoft Exchange (then you punch in the OWA stuff). Also, there is some rudimentary support for Public folders, I have never used it so I can't comment on the greatness or terribleness. I think Novell has some more info on novell.com about that particular piece.
Regardless, you (and I don't necessarily mean you the poster but you the user) should really look at software before proclaiming it a lost cause because of x, y and z. And I should stop feeding the trolls.
The other assumption is ignoring the market reaction six months later when they cut the price back down to $400... lets say they really ramped up the price to an even 1K - which is what some systems sold for on eBay, using that argument - How many customers would just happily wait the six months for the system to drop back down. Yes it may serve to stave off the out-of-stock problems, but you are just going to aggravate your consumers and at the end of the day - not to mention store owners paying the inflated price, only to have MS cut it in half and deal with that hassle. The real answer is to launch when your inventory and production are sufficient to handle the demand. This is a fine point of launching a device in Japan, Americas and Europe at different times - it really helps the inventory problems. Not that I like waiting, but there is a WHOLE lot more going on than MS simply missing out on an opportunity to fill the cash bucket.
I really can't believe I am feeding the troll of this story.
Many of us can't screw with the MOTD because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and are stuck with some legal notice that is it is a private system, you need access, blah blah...
I do plan to watch this thread, hoping for some gems to pop-out though for my private systems:)
Windows won't support the sharper image - WHATEVER
on
Treo 700w Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The Treo 700w forces the user to accept some bizarre compromises, though. The 650, designed for a slower-speed wireless network, is much loved for its simplicity, efficiency, and beauty. That model's terrific 320-by-320-pixel screen has been replaced with a lower-resolution version for the 700w, because Windows won't support the sharper image
OK, I am no WinMo 5.0 fanboy by any means (OK, so I used to catchy shortened form) but the statement that it won't support a higher res because Windows can't is full of CRAP. Not that I expect BW.com to get the facts right, but come on - the last thing we nerds need is one more PHB convinced of something based on bad journalism!
OK, I just wasted 30 mintues or so reading all the comics and I laughed my head off. This is really good stuff. Finally something to numb that Friday slump.
You forgot to add: The ability to transfer any text file to it for reading.
Whether it supports PDF, HTML, whatever more rich format - I don't particularly care as most (open) content can be moved between formats without a lot of effort. Just allow me to put on whatever I want, and if you have a store that works with it, great. But that CAN NOT be the only method.
You have never truly had fun with the support staff at your bank/credit union/credit card/whatever until you have called and asked them to verify the thumbprint/fingerprint of their SSL cert for you.
Unfortunately, it looks like Geotrust lost this round, and it probably would be considered good practice to actually do that from time to time. For the truly paranoid, remove all root certificates, and only after verifying the thumbprint proceed to install that cert into your cache. No more trust hierarchy.
Have you looked at AutoIt v3? It offers a very simple scripted interface, and the ability to package it all up into a stand alone EXE. I am not sure about serial port access using it, I would imagine you would need to include a COM object to do it. Regardless, it is worth a look - and can be used for a great many things as well. The even distribute it as an installer or zip package for those that detest installers.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem here is that most large companies won't actually pay an invoice to an entity (company) that isn't somehow a "registered vendor" or whatever label they decide to stick on the "account". And don't think it will be a slam dunk for small claims either, the court would likely side with company in the fact that you can't just go invoicing a company because you feel like they owe you money (even if you do). Normally an invoice is related to some form of contract (verbal, written, whatever) and without that, well, good luck.
If you are lucky, they will send you back the requisite paper work to become a registered vendor. More likely they will ignore the invoice.
This would be a crown jewel in the Wii Homebrew scene. Not that there aren't plenty of amazing titles already there - this game was [unintentionally] designed to be played with a nunchuck and wiimote.
Some of the nicer boards will tolerate ECC memory being inserted, but won't actually do any meaningful error correction (like scrubbing) - but a disturbingly large number of consumer boards (BIOS limitation perhaps?) don't actually do ANYTHING with ECC memory, and the really cheap ones won't even boot with it present. I used to have the same mindset of purchasing only ECC RAM for the same reason - but the unfortunate truth is that hardware support for it just isn't there without spending $$$ on a decent board too.
It isn't simply about cost - though I understand that is the specific issue you are trying to address:
Try sending a letter or small package through the USPS, UPS, and FedEx (and DHL and a local courier service for good measure)
- See which one was more cost effective
- See which one was fastest (or slowest)
- Which offered the best service (up to date tracking, delivery confirmation + signature, etc.)
- Sends thousands of parcels and see which was the most reliable with fewest lost/late arrivals
- See how the service varies by region, distance traveled, etc...
There are a lot of variables, and while cost is certainly and important one - it isn't the only one.
They still use flash unfortunately, but as you describe - it isn't ActiveX Flash for IE, it is the "plugin" version for Firefox/Chrome. It only reared its ugly head in a couple of places for me - specifically the game details / videos and one or two animated marketing things.
The marketing things could easily be addressed in HTML - they are all just sliding/fading/hovering type effects.
The video could be easily addressed using the tag, though the whole h.264 patent nonsense may scare them off from actually doing that.
This is a beta, I am hopeful that they will address these concerns. I am very happy with the new interface personally.
So I am just curious, is there something that is missing from Octave that makes it a viable replacement for MATLAB for you? Particularly if you are lagging a few versions behind?
This is the perfect example of "free" in FOSS. You aren't tied to a specific platform or endless* required upgrades.
*This is an approximation for very small values of forever.
Yeah, I guess I am kind of boring that way. Hooray for utility over aesthetics!
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Apache is only half the problem at best, the real issue is the lack of compliant clients at a significant level. Server Name Identifcation (the extension to allow for virtual hosts behind SSL/TLS connections) has been supported in Firefox since v2 I believe, and Internet Explorer 7 - though I think that is only on Vista for some reason. I have no idea what Safari, Opera and other browsers and platforms might support.
I would disagree (to some degree) that more features are in fact needed. For example, E4X (and a native XML doc object) being standardized in the browsers would be a huge benefit.
That being said, I think that a lot of the feature bloat going into the proposed v4 was really not all that great. I think this is generally a step in the right direction.
While not directly pertaining to any Cliff's games - I can't say that I have pirated a single one... and perhaps a bit of a rant...
Take for example the impending release of Bionic Commando Rearmed. According to their own blog, it was always slated to be $10 http://www.bioniccommando.com/en/blog_entries/view/291 - According to them as a result of listening to their customers. However, just this last week, one week before it launches I might add, they go and drop the bomb that the PC version will suddenly cost 50% more. Now before we drop off into excuses (dev/qa costs or promised patch for additional content) or business ideas like "Well, it is worth at least $20 in the first place! and many digital distribution games cost $20 as well!" - let us consider the EMOTIONAL impact that had on me:
"What a bunch of jerks. Why don't they just charge the same across all platforms? What exactly are they trying to accomplish - weed the PC platform out? set it up for the poster child of software piracy?"
I am certain I just going to buy it anyway, and really $15 isn't going to break the budget... but suddenly I am much, much more interested in a "demo" - legitimate source or not - before I plunk down the cash.
It may or may not work for your needs, but we actually considered it for our in-house publishing needs. [www.princexml.com]
Also, the product we ended up with XML Professional Publisher (XPP) from XyEnterprise. Kind of different products, but both produce PDF from markup.... sooo.....
Perhaps I am just feeding the troll, or perhaps I am just sharing my perspective... but having used many of the same libraries you have we somehow diverged at some point. And that is probably a good thing as I doubt we are really working with the same audience. I really have little to do with design and interaction, I really tend to focus much more on architecture/transport/etc.... the actual "business" logic.
My evolution went from using prototype to investigating scriptaculous, mootools and YUI - none of which lasted very long as quite frankly they *seemed* more like toys to animate elements on the page rather than providing a clean and transparent way of sending/retrieving data and altering the data on the page. They were quite good at what they did (or their demos showed) but never really seemed to address what I was trying to accomplish. YUI was also VERY cool, but also very bloated feeling and cumbersome to actually use. Put simply, I am much more interested in things like JSON, REST and POX than the various libraries to help transition between those "transports" and display on the page.
A while back, maybe a year or possibly a bit more, I was introduced to jQuery by another developer and based on his recommendation decided to check it out. I wasn't quite ready to switch over from prototype (which seemed to more closely resemble the custom JS I would write) and adopt a new kind of similar yet strange syntax from a library I didn't quite have an appreciation of. After adopting it for one project to force myself to learn and use it, I have since whole heartedly switched over from prototype and now love and endorse jQuery as the default AJAX library (I hate to call it that, since it really does so much more). Quite honestly I think each of the "major" libraries out there has many benefits, and I am sure you can cite a great variety of reasons why product x is better than product y so check out what is there and see which one is really going to help you the most. If I was doing complex UI manipulation stuff, I would probably look at scriptaculous or mootools again, although the preview for jQuery UI looks promising as well.
*Disclaimer/Note: this is just my personal experience with them and should not reflect anything on the actual product. I fully recommend checking out the various options to see what works best for you.
Wow. I didn't actually expect this to be on the list but I am not at all surprised. We use it at my work as the primary web platform and I can assure you of two things regarding the language: 1) it is very hard to find someone with development skills using it and 2) the ones who do have the skills are VERY expensive. That seems to go along nicely with the theme of the article that it is in fact a dying skill. While I personally have never developed much of a taste for it (I do post on /. after all - it would be like heresy / blasphemy) there are a few long-time-developers here that have an unholy allegiance to it, almost completely unwilling to even look at alternate environments or frameworks. I would guess that is probably similar for many of the languages/skills on this list and their long time supporters.
There are a number of sources that sell "shopping cart / download" services - just very few (if any) that actually only do this for MP3 files. And certainly I am hoping that by non-transferable you mean anti-leech related tech (limit download to original purchase, not just some direct link to the file). Again - these things exist all over.
Heck, I used to work for a "Brand Management Firm" (that's what they called themselves) that did some moonlighting hosting web sites for clients. To setup the shopping cart etc, they would have charged about maybe $400 back in the day - but I bet you could get a similar service for under $100 now - though I doubt you will have the volume of sales to make a percentage of sales interesting. But that is just me guessing on the popularity of the band.
I honestly don't see this as a problem (though certainly recognize that some people view it as such). My personal belief is a TAB should be a TAB and a SPACE should be a SPACE. If your organization (which might be an OS foundation, corporation, class at school, yourself, whatever...) recommends/enforces style guidelines, let the group dictate.
Also, if it is a big concern, make use of sed to standardize the code (as best as possible) and then use it again to convert back and forth. It is available for win32 as well you know http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Oh, and one last note: A good editor will let you set the tab length in the display. I did like in the demo JAR how the comment lengths would stay (right) aligned (mostly) - which would be a very nice feature to toggle on/off in an editor as well.
It is the Microsoft Exchange server type. I tried the Win32 binary talking to two different OWA exchange servers and neither one was very happy about it. I have used this option successfully in Ubuntu and Fedora though - so I know it works. Basically it just grabs the xml packets and stuffs them as mail items in Evolution. I am actually quite surprised some of the other popular mail clients (Thunderbird particularly - though there is a request for it) hasn't implemented it.
I bet a patch will be out fairly soon for this.
I am in the process of downloading and evaluating the Win32 version - but on Linux (and I can't imagine why not on Win32) it DOES SUPPORT RPC OVER HTTPS - though it calls it something different, Microsoft Exchange (then you punch in the OWA stuff). Also, there is some rudimentary support for Public folders, I have never used it so I can't comment on the greatness or terribleness. I think Novell has some more info on novell.com about that particular piece.
Regardless, you (and I don't necessarily mean you the poster but you the user) should really look at software before proclaiming it a lost cause because of x, y and z. And I should stop feeding the trolls.
The other assumption is ignoring the market reaction six months later when they cut the price back down to $400... lets say they really ramped up the price to an even 1K - which is what some systems sold for on eBay, using that argument - How many customers would just happily wait the six months for the system to drop back down. Yes it may serve to stave off the out-of-stock problems, but you are just going to aggravate your consumers and at the end of the day - not to mention store owners paying the inflated price, only to have MS cut it in half and deal with that hassle. The real answer is to launch when your inventory and production are sufficient to handle the demand. This is a fine point of launching a device in Japan, Americas and Europe at different times - it really helps the inventory problems. Not that I like waiting, but there is a WHOLE lot more going on than MS simply missing out on an opportunity to fill the cash bucket.
I really can't believe I am feeding the troll of this story.
Many of us can't screw with the MOTD because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and are stuck with some legal notice that is it is a private system, you need access, blah blah...
I do plan to watch this thread, hoping for some gems to pop-out though for my private systems :)
OK, I am no WinMo 5.0 fanboy by any means (OK, so I used to catchy shortened form) but the statement that it won't support a higher res because Windows can't is full of CRAP. Not that I expect BW.com to get the facts right, but come on - the last thing we nerds need is one more PHB convinced of something based on bad journalism!
OK, I just wasted 30 mintues or so reading all the comics and I laughed my head off. This is really good stuff. Finally something to numb that Friday slump.
You forgot to add: The ability to transfer any text file to it for reading.
Whether it supports PDF, HTML, whatever more rich format - I don't particularly care as most (open) content can be moved between formats without a lot of effort. Just allow me to put on whatever I want, and if you have a store that works with it, great. But that CAN NOT be the only method.
You have never truly had fun with the support staff at your bank/credit union/credit card/whatever until you have called and asked them to verify the thumbprint/fingerprint of their SSL cert for you.
Unfortunately, it looks like Geotrust lost this round, and it probably would be considered good practice to actually do that from time to time. For the truly paranoid, remove all root certificates, and only after verifying the thumbprint proceed to install that cert into your cache. No more trust hierarchy.
Have you looked at AutoIt v3? It offers a very simple scripted interface, and the ability to package it all up into a stand alone EXE. I am not sure about serial port access using it, I would imagine you would need to include a COM object to do it. Regardless, it is worth a look - and can be used for a great many things as well. The even distribute it as an installer or zip package for those that detest installers.
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/