Try Zend studio with PHP. It's "intellisense" rivals VS.Net's.
Intellisense isn't intrinsic to.Net in any way, its just an IDE feature. One that is shared by many other (better IMHO) IDEs.
I've been using VS.Net since the original beta. I just switched career paths to get away from ASP.Net. Now I'm doing almost exclusively PHP, though we do have some C# work coming up.
AJAX isn't intrinsic to any server side language, its a browser feature. You can code AJAX stuff just as easily (easier IMHO) in php as you can in anything else.
From what I've seen,.Net takes a very simple concept and complicates it unbelievably. I love.Net as a framework, I'm a huge fan of C#, but I think that ASP.Net is one of the worst, most unusable and unweildy server side web platforms out there. Granted, ASP.Net 2.0 is leaps and bound better than 1.0. I'm not forming that opinion from any fanboyism, I've been writing code with ASP.Net for at least 6-7 years now (since whenever it was released). Its frustrating, because the rest of.Net is so great - I love writing business classes and backend stuff in.Net, its hands down my favorite platform for that sort of thing.
If you want to do AJAX in PHP or anything else, just write a simple communication wrapper and off you go. Or use one of the oodles and oodles of freely availble frameworks out there, like Dojo, prototype, JSON or whatever.
My (rudimentary) understanding, is that modern physics has absolutely no clue what gravity actually is. It is extremely good at measuring it, and predicting it, and forming mathematical models from it, but its fundamental nature escapes us.
Dr. Ning Li is probably one of the closest to understanding gravity, and based on what I've read of her research it challenges your basic assumptions.
Your argument gives us only two options: "Gravity gets stronger under certain conditions (regular matter pulls harder), or something "unseen" is pulling."
I think the point of the original poster is that this is fundamentally flawed thinking. In fact, we have absolutely no clue why or how gravity behaves the way it does. If gravity is indeed "wavelike" maybe that superhot system has a certain resonance that changes its behavior.
One thing we can be relatively certain of, is that mass and gravity (contrary to Newtonian models) do not necessarily have a direct and unalterable relationship. Even if you discount "fringe" theories, there are several obserable, repeatable phenomena of localized gravitational distortion, such as the well known superconductor gravitation effect.
How can physists say for certain "Oh, its dark matter."
Just because some bizarre gravitational effect is being observed, it then must be this magical mysterious substance that has never been directly observed?
Thats my problem with the entire "Dark Matter/Energy" theory. It seems to me (in programmer's terms) like its a kludge to crowbar observed phenomena into an old mathematical model. Why not just address the fundamental theory? In the rest of science, when observed phenomena don't agree with hypothesis/theory, you reject the hypothesis/theory.
You know, this was my first thought when I heard about the app. Google appliance would bring them light years toward where they need to be.
Images would be simple to deal with, write a quick & dirty "image upload" application that would "upload" the image into the directory. What this application would actually do is collect a bunch of keyword from the user about the image, I.E. case number, date, etc... a full description of the image "Suspicious red haired busty female lurking in a dark alley behind the crime scene". It would take this information and create a basic HTML wrapper for the image containing the description and all the keywords as META tags and an A HREF to the image source. Voila! Instant imaging/document management solution. Then the agent need only google "Case XXXX suspicious females" and BOOM up comes the link to the image.
Seems pretty simple to me. Sure, it may not meet all their requirements, but it would get them alot farther along than they are today, and could be implemented in a matter of months, not years.
Speaking of library records, my wife just had some fun at our public library.
She was taking our kids to a "Mad Science" event held at the local library. We like to do these kinds of things for the kids, to get them out and doing fun/educational things during the summer.
All over the library were signs that read "You MUST have a library card to enter these premises" "All children MUST have a library card to attend the event" etc...
Then there was this long line where in order to go into the room where the guy was giving the show, you had to present your card to a clerk. They were *literally* turning away six year old kids who were crying, whose parents had driven them all the way out to attend a *public* event.
What kind of post-911 society are we living in where you must present "papers" to attend a public event? And before you say "its only a library card", understand that you can't get a library card without giving all sorts of personal information, including address and identification/drivers license etc...
The librarians (in that library) have completely forgotten about what the purpose of a library is... and are more concerned with budget and control and policing than the free distribution of information.
Why even have the event? What sort of twisted person decides to turn away crying children from a public educational event because they can't show ID? Its not like they were giving away prizes or anything, it was just a bunch of kids sitting in a room watching a guy give a show on science.
Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of a much larger problem. Today, it seems that every low level beaurocrat or middle manager has taken it upon themselves to be the enforcing arm of our post-911 fear-thy-neighbor police state.
Why is it so important that the kids show ID? Is it because the library is funded based on how many library cards are issued? Or are they trying to prevent a terrorist from sneaking in to the mad science show disguised as a six year old child? I can see the latter point, I mean, I think the guy did do an simulation of an erupting volcano as part of the show, and we wouldn't want to give the TERRORISTS any ideas would we? I mean, imagine what could happen if we gave them unfettered access to Alka-Seltzer. It would be chaos.
I think the reason that this bothers me so much is because it is such a strong indication of how sick our society has become.
I mean, hell, librarians are supposed to be our first line of defense against this sort of stuff.
The **AA are all patting themselves on the back and talking about the billions of dollars they lost to piracy last year.
For those too lazy to click, here is the text:
To: National Desk
Contact: Kori Bernards or Elizabeth Kaltman, 818-995-6600, both of MPAA Los Angeles; John Feehery or Gayle Osterberg, 202-293-1966, both of MPAA Washington, D.C.
LOS ANGELES, May 31/U.S. Newswire/ -- Swedish authorities announced today that they have shut down "The Pirate Bay" -- one of the world's largest and most well known facilitators of online piracy. With more than one million registered users, "The Pirate Bay" touts itself as the "World's Largest BitTorrent Tracker" facilitating and enabling illegal swapping of millions of illegal copyrighted movies, music, software, and games. The operators of "The Pirate Bay" have publicly ridiculed copyright holders and taunted law enforcement for years claiming immunity to copyright laws. Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal site down. Over 50 Swedish law enforcement officials executed search warrants and raids at 10 different locations which resulted in three arrests and the preclusion of millions of users trading up to 2 million illegal files simultaneously.
"The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," said Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Dan Glickman. "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop 'The Pirate Bay' from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet."
ThePirateBay.com is a so called pirate "tracker" that directs people to pirated movies and music, making available over 157,000 illegal files including the latest blockbuster releases such as Da Vinci Code, Mission Impossible: III, and The Poseidon Adventure and many others. The Pirate Bay's takedown today represents a growing culture of respect for intellectual property in Sweden, which in July 2005 reformed its copyright law to address digital piracy. Various rights-holders have sent countless cease-and-desist letters to The Pirate Bay, requesting that its operators remove pirated content from the site, and have been met with mockery and scorn, such as the operators posting the letters and their replies on ThePirateBay.com.
According to Alexa.com, which rates millions of Web sites around the world, "The Pirate Bay" was the 479th most visited Web site in the world, ranking 21st in Sweden and 312th in the U.S. In comparison, CNN.com is the 125th most popular site in Sweden.
Like many pirate Web sites, "The Pirate Bay" contains significant and lucrative third-party advertising, much of it promoting the porn industry. Advertising revenue is typically a function of number of unique site visits per day. With more than one million hits per day, "The Pirate Bay" takes in an estimated $60,000 per month from advertisers in addition to thousands of dollars collected from user "donations."
"The bottom line is that the operators of the Pirate Bay and others like them are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of millions of copyrighted creative works and files protected under the law," said John G. Malcolm, executive vice president and director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA. "We applaud Swedish law enforcement for their effort to stop egregious copyright infringement on The Pirate Bay."
The major motion picture studios lost an estimated $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005. Internet piracy alone cost the studios $2.3 bill
I bought DDO and played it for a couple weeks, but I don't like being forced to team up in order to play, and in DDO you *can not* solo.
Also, I can't put my finger on it exactly, but DDO lacks something. The graphics are great, the combat is decent, the rules are very true to classic D&D, but for some reason I just don't have a whole lot of fun.
Right now CoV and Auto Assault are the only games I have an active account on, and I really only play Auto Assault. Going to cancel my CoV account tonight I think.. at least until I get bored with AA.
Auto Assault is one of the best MMO games I have ever played. The combat is fun, the story lines are well written, and there really isn't any grind (unless you count running over a bunch of screaming scavs who are trying to flee from your spiked car from hell).
It is pure post-apocalyptic-voilent-mutant-biomek goodness.
Anyway, I'm not sure why more people aren't playing it - but I honestly sort of like the low population level - it adds to the "empty burning nuclear wasteland" effect.
Please check out Auto Assault before making a sweeping statement like that.
In fact, the "next gen" of MMO games are a radical improvement over the EQ/EQ2/WoW/DAoC type "Kill a rat, so you can level, so you can kill a bigger rat, so you can get a Shiny Sword Of Beatdown, so you can kill a bigger rat..."
I just bought Auto Assault a couple days ago, and I'm totally and completely blown away.
Though its not open source, I would recommend ActiveReports. Extremely flexible, even gives you a drawing API, and its totally isolated from the backend (unlike crystal and such) - you just hand it a dataset (in.net) and off you go. In my consulting days, I swore by it. Very simple and robust, also quite affordable. Just my $.02 .
OpenLaszlo beats the pants off of Flex and its free (as in speech). Why anyone would bother with the whole AJAX kludge when Laszlo is around escapes me. The beauty of Laszlo's databinding architecture must be seen to be believed, not to mention the animation and UI capabilities.
It is also worth pointing out that Laszlo Systems is working on a DHTML renderer for Laszlo so it won't be dependent on the flash player.
There is a very active and helpful developer community and the documentation is very well done and complete (unlike Flex).
I couldn't agree more. People frequently lose perspective of the fact that AJAX is just one option, and IMHO not even close to the best.
I've been doing all my recent development in OpenLaszlo and honestly, I have never seen any UI technology that can compare. And I'm doing more than just playing with it, I'm developing a full blown enterprise app with it at work.
For those who are looking for really impressive web based UI technology, I can't recommend it enough.
Here are some of the strong points:
-open source
-tag/xml based language - very declarative, instead of tons of scripting, you can just define "states" of your views and bind those states to an attribute
-Object orientation that *really* works and is helpful - not like AS2 in flash
-"Serverless deployment" - this is one of the coolest things - your entire app can (optionally) compile to a single SWF that can be redistributed by your method of choice. I should point out that you can also run it in "server" mode where you can edit the.lzx file on the web server and it will automatically recompile, just like JSP or ASP.NET
-Animation. Every attribute is animatable... via script or declarative animators. It is hard to describe just how cool this is until you see it in action - to make a view fade out, for example, I can just do this:
<animator attribute="opacity" to="0" duration="500"/> or this.animate("opacity",0,500,false);
either way gets you a nice fade out over 500ms. It couldn't be easier.
Anyway, sorry to drone on so long, but this is by far the most impressive UI tech I've seen. I know it has been mentioned on slashdot before, but I'm constantly surprised at how few people seem to know about it.
You hit the nail on the head there. For an application that I needed to develop a "proof of concept for" I chose Python/WxWidgets/Boa Constructor.
Even though 99% of our applications are.Net, they are all web apps. This app was a desktop app, and I couldn't rely on the user having.Net or Java or whatever installed.
So, Python + WxWidgets + Py2exe solved the problem.
I interviewed with MS once, and the interview was much more like a CS exam that I thought it would be. I completely blew the interview (I hadn't slept at all the night before because the hotel room was freezing, there was only one blanket and the bed was rock hard - so I was not at my best) It went like this:
The interview was a full day affair, with very few breaks. They said in the AM that I may or may not be finished at lunch, basically - they said that if I was a total idiot then they wouldn't waste anyone's time after lunch.
All of the interviews involved writing code on a whiteboard in various languages. The code was reviewed for syntactical correctness as well as logical.
The first interviewer was really cool - she asked me to mock-up a battleship simulation in C# and laughed at me as I did a very bleary-eyed OOP model in C# of the Game object, the Player object etc... when really what she was after was the validation logic for putting the ships on the board - ensure they are in bounds and don't hit other ships etc... to me that seemed completely worthless - I mean that just an algorithm you would work out and tweak, the important stuff is your class structure.... but I digress.
I walked out of that interview feeling pretty good until I got in the next one. It was horrible - the interviewer was very arrogant and rude and had a thick accent which made him difficult to understand. He would ask me a question, and sit and roll his eyes as I was answering and check his email - basically communicating clearly to me that he didn't like me, want me there or want to be talking to me. For a code sample, he asked me to write code in C# (on a whiteboard) that would traverse a tree of nodes and print out the values in order of all nodes at an arbitrary level. So I wrote a recursive function that would do what he wanted, and that would work just fine. He didn't like that way I had written it, and demanded that I rewrite it "more efficiently". I stood there for like 20 mins feeling like a total idiot because I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, until he got mad and said I should be using "queues" and that it would be more efficient. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him, and he came up and tried to explain that I could have used a FIFO queue - but looking at his example, I didn't understand how his approach would have been any more efficient than mine - when I asked him this, he just got angrier and said it was. Suffice to say, that interview didn't go so well. I realized as soon as I was done with him that I wasn't going to get the job, so I resolved to just have some fun and enjoy the rest of the day. As an interesting footnote, I kept thinking about the question, and a couple days later I did find a much more efficient way of doing it, but it had nothing to do with queues, and it would have been much faster than either of the methodologies we had discussed. I damn near emailed him the better solution, but figured "Whats the point?" Ah well, like I say I was not at my best.
My next interview was with a guy who asked me a different technical question involving organizational hierarchies. I was lucky in that interview because I had written a budget system for a bank that used a similar structure, so I had found a very clever solution to the exact problem he asked me. When I explained my whiteboard code, he got a "damn this guy is good" look in his eye, so I felt pretty good coming out of that one.
Next was a lunch interview, a guy who that said would be my "peer" took me to lunch and asked me a bunch of questions while I was eating. The questions he asked were ridiculous, I mean stuff straight out of the MCSD Analyzing Solutions test. Seriously, I'm pretty sure he pulled a couple test questions before our lunch interview. He would ask me something, and I would answer him with a couple ways that I had solved the problem in the real world, and then he would say "no, that's no the answer, the answer is Scalability, Maintainability, Performance and....
Well, for what its worth, your self-promotion on slashdot was effective, I just downloaded the sample, liked it, and paid $18.61 to have your album sent to the US.
Other than that, I don't think there are many other options.
Tesla would have disagreed. Check into his Colorado Springs research sometime... also in the unveiling of the Niagra power plant (which he helped design) he pissed alot of investors off by giving a speech about how wired power is obsolete.
His idea was basically to use the Earth/ionosphere as a huge capacitor which could be charged from anywhere and consumed from anywhere with around 70% efficiency.
Re:Examples of Math books for lay people
on
Prime Obsession
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· Score: 1
Don't forget "The Golden Ratio" and "A History of the Circle". Two of my personal favorites.
Very well, I'll bite.
BitTorrent Inc. Membership annual fee of $.01. Paid subscription entitles you to access BitTorrent content.
Any attempt to circumvent our access control mechanism will be dealt with harshly, and those responsible prosecuted to the full extent of the law under the DMCA.
What, you think _you'd_ get the money that didn't get taxed? Hell no. That goes to your employer, not you. In any tight labor market (and in an unregulated market, employers can make sure it stays that way), employers have carte blanche to cut wages all they like. And in less stringent times, they can just wait for inflation to do the work. Thus, an employer can turn your tax cut into his wage reduction.
Yep, if I weren't paying over 50% of my paycheck to taxes, I would get that money. Do I think that my employer would pass their tax savings that on to me?
Yep.
Contrary to what radical socialists believe, employers do mostly have common sense. Every company I have ever worked for (except when I was in the military) had some sort of profit sharing/bonus system.
One company I worked for would take all the employess to Atlantic City for dinner/partying with open bar, and give everyone $100 to gamble with. They did this every time they had a good quarter. And yes, I'm a programmer too.
Companies like EA are the exception rather than the rule, most companies respect and highly value their employees.
Companies that abuse their employees lose them, and go out of business.
Throwing a bunch of legislation around only serves the legislators.
The only people who win in a police state are the police.
I get very frustrated every time some corporate abuse surfaces when everyone starts pointing and yelling "See! If the Libertarians make it the whole world will be like that!"
Thats the same mentality that says if we didn't have a law against killing someone everyone would me murderers. Utter nonsense, but for some reason people believe it.
Nope, under a libertarian society there would be so much extra money from the decreased taxation that the economy would be massive, with plenty of jobs for anyone who wanted one. That allows for the freedom to pick your employer. Also, corporate revenues would be much higher without paying 50% or more to tax, so they could afford to higher more people etc...
I'm not saying it would work out like that, but it sounds a damn site better than what we have now.
Also, if I wasn't paying 50% of my paycheck to taxes, I could afford to actually have a savings account to see me through periods of unemployment.
If I had 50k in the bank, I'd feel alot better about saying "screw this, I'm going to find something better".
Also products would be much cheaper with the lower taxes, we would see prices lowered, families able to live comforably on 30k per year etc...
Utopia? Thats the general idea.
Will never work you say?
It did once, way back when this country was first started.
What was it that caused the US to become the most powerful economic force in the world in under 100 years?
Legislation? Democracy?
No... it was a simple tenent that had never been tried before anywhere:
Hands off.
The libertarians aren't trying to do anything "new" or "radical". They are simply trying to get the nation to go back to a system that worked phenomenally well. It is proven. It works. There is no question. The fact that the US is the powerful nation that it is today is absolute proof of that.
Legislation and taxation and welfare states are what destroy nations time and time again. Again, history shows us this unequivicably. Rome to the USSR.
Concepts such as those that the Libertarians hold are the only thing that can save this nation, and save us from the types of abuses that you see going on at EA.
My manager did the exact same thing during crunch time, as well as buying us all dinner and caffeine.
I tell you, thats what makes the difference to me.
One of the reasons I left my last job is because during crunch time the boss would walk by on her way out to her BMW at 3:30 and ask how things were going. Thats if she even bothered to come in that day.
My boss now puts in at least as many hours as any of us, and will never ask us to do something that he isn't willing to do himself.
With that kind of leadership, I don't mind doing a few weeks of 75+ hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Zend studio with PHP. It's "intellisense" rivals VS.Net's.
.Net in any way, its just an IDE feature. One that is shared by many other (better IMHO) IDEs.
.Net takes a very simple concept and complicates it unbelievably. I love .Net as a framework, I'm a huge fan of C#, but I think that ASP.Net is one of the worst, most unusable and unweildy server side web platforms out there. Granted, ASP.Net 2.0 is leaps and bound better than 1.0. I'm not forming that opinion from any fanboyism, I've been writing code with ASP.Net for at least 6-7 years now (since whenever it was released). Its frustrating, because the rest of .Net is so great - I love writing business classes and backend stuff in .Net, its hands down my favorite platform for that sort of thing.
Intellisense isn't intrinsic to
I've been using VS.Net since the original beta. I just switched career paths to get away from ASP.Net. Now I'm doing almost exclusively PHP, though we do have some C# work coming up.
AJAX isn't intrinsic to any server side language, its a browser feature. You can code AJAX stuff just as easily (easier IMHO) in php as you can in anything else.
From what I've seen,
If you want to do AJAX in PHP or anything else, just write a simple communication wrapper and off you go. Or use one of the oodles and oodles of freely availble frameworks out there, like Dojo, prototype, JSON or whatever.
-Clay
IANAP - perhaps you can clarify something for me.
My (rudimentary) understanding, is that modern physics has absolutely no clue what gravity actually is. It is extremely good at measuring it, and predicting it, and forming mathematical models from it, but its fundamental nature escapes us.
Dr. Ning Li is probably one of the closest to understanding gravity, and based on what I've read of her research it challenges your basic assumptions.
Your argument gives us only two options: "Gravity gets stronger under certain conditions (regular matter pulls harder), or something "unseen" is pulling."
I think the point of the original poster is that this is fundamentally flawed thinking. In fact, we have absolutely no clue why or how gravity behaves the way it does. If gravity is indeed "wavelike" maybe that superhot system has a certain resonance that changes its behavior.
One thing we can be relatively certain of, is that mass and gravity (contrary to Newtonian models) do not necessarily have a direct and unalterable relationship. Even if you discount "fringe" theories, there are several obserable, repeatable phenomena of localized gravitational distortion, such as the well known superconductor gravitation effect.
How can physists say for certain "Oh, its dark matter."
Just because some bizarre gravitational effect is being observed, it then must be this magical mysterious substance that has never been directly observed?
Thats my problem with the entire "Dark Matter/Energy" theory. It seems to me (in programmer's terms) like its a kludge to crowbar observed phenomena into an old mathematical model. Why not just address the fundamental theory? In the rest of science, when observed phenomena don't agree with hypothesis/theory, you reject the hypothesis/theory.
You know, this was my first thought when I heard about the app. Google appliance would bring them light years toward where they need to be.
Images would be simple to deal with, write a quick & dirty "image upload" application that would "upload" the image into the directory. What this application would actually do is collect a bunch of keyword from the user about the image, I.E. case number, date, etc... a full description of the image "Suspicious red haired busty female lurking in a dark alley behind the crime scene". It would take this information and create a basic HTML wrapper for the image containing the description and all the keywords as META tags and an A HREF to the image source. Voila! Instant imaging/document management solution. Then the agent need only google "Case XXXX suspicious females" and BOOM up comes the link to the image.
Seems pretty simple to me. Sure, it may not meet all their requirements, but it would get them alot farther along than they are today, and could be implemented in a matter of months, not years.
I am too. Its ironic that this article is posted the day after I make this criticism of our local library: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189149&cid=155 82108
I wish she would come and run our library.
Speaking of library records, my wife just had some fun at our public library.
She was taking our kids to a "Mad Science" event held at the local library. We like to do these kinds of things for the kids, to get them out and doing fun/educational things during the summer.
All over the library were signs that read "You MUST have a library card to enter these premises" "All children MUST have a library card to attend the event" etc...
Then there was this long line where in order to go into the room where the guy was giving the show, you had to present your card to a clerk. They were *literally* turning away six year old kids who were crying, whose parents had driven them all the way out to attend a *public* event.
What kind of post-911 society are we living in where you must present "papers" to attend a public event? And before you say "its only a library card", understand that you can't get a library card without giving all sorts of personal information, including address and identification/drivers license etc...
The librarians (in that library) have completely forgotten about what the purpose of a library is... and are more concerned with budget and control and policing than the free distribution of information.
Why even have the event? What sort of twisted person decides to turn away crying children from a public educational event because they can't show ID? Its not like they were giving away prizes or anything, it was just a bunch of kids sitting in a room watching a guy give a show on science.
Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of a much larger problem. Today, it seems that every low level beaurocrat or middle manager has taken it upon themselves to be the enforcing arm of our post-911 fear-thy-neighbor police state.
Why is it so important that the kids show ID? Is it because the library is funded based on how many library cards are issued? Or are they trying to prevent a terrorist from sneaking in to the mad science show disguised as a six year old child? I can see the latter point, I mean, I think the guy did do an simulation of an erupting volcano as part of the show, and we wouldn't want to give the TERRORISTS any ideas would we? I mean, imagine what could happen if we gave them unfettered access to Alka-Seltzer. It would be chaos.
I think the reason that this bothers me so much is because it is such a strong indication of how sick our society has become.
I mean, hell, librarians are supposed to be our first line of defense against this sort of stuff.
Here is an bit of propa^H^H^H^H^Hnews about the takedown: http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=6 6667
/U.S. Newswire/ -- Swedish authorities announced today that they have shut down "The Pirate Bay" -- one of the world's largest and most well known facilitators of online piracy. With more than one million registered users, "The Pirate Bay" touts itself as the "World's Largest BitTorrent Tracker" facilitating and enabling illegal swapping of millions of illegal copyrighted movies, music, software, and games. The operators of "The Pirate Bay" have publicly ridiculed copyright holders and taunted law enforcement for years claiming immunity to copyright laws. Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal site down. Over 50 Swedish law enforcement officials executed search warrants and raids at 10 different locations which resulted in three arrests and the preclusion of millions of users trading up to 2 million illegal files simultaneously.
The **AA are all patting themselves on the back and talking about the billions of dollars they lost to piracy last year.
For those too lazy to click, here is the text:
To: National Desk
Contact: Kori Bernards or Elizabeth Kaltman, 818-995-6600, both of MPAA Los Angeles; John Feehery or Gayle Osterberg, 202-293-1966, both of MPAA Washington, D.C.
LOS ANGELES, May 31
"The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," said Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Dan Glickman. "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop 'The Pirate Bay' from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet."
ThePirateBay.com is a so called pirate "tracker" that directs people to pirated movies and music, making available over 157,000 illegal files including the latest blockbuster releases such as Da Vinci Code, Mission Impossible: III, and The Poseidon Adventure and many others. The Pirate Bay's takedown today represents a growing culture of respect for intellectual property in Sweden, which in July 2005 reformed its copyright law to address digital piracy. Various rights-holders have sent countless cease-and-desist letters to The Pirate Bay, requesting that its operators remove pirated content from the site, and have been met with mockery and scorn, such as the operators posting the letters and their replies on ThePirateBay.com.
According to Alexa.com, which rates millions of Web sites around the world, "The Pirate Bay" was the 479th most visited Web site in the world, ranking 21st in Sweden and 312th in the U.S. In comparison, CNN.com is the 125th most popular site in Sweden.
Like many pirate Web sites, "The Pirate Bay" contains significant and lucrative third-party advertising, much of it promoting the porn industry. Advertising revenue is typically a function of number of unique site visits per day. With more than one million hits per day, "The Pirate Bay" takes in an estimated $60,000 per month from advertisers in addition to thousands of dollars collected from user "donations."
"The bottom line is that the operators of the Pirate Bay and others like them are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of millions of copyrighted creative works and files protected under the law," said John G. Malcolm, executive vice president and director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA. "We applaud Swedish law enforcement for their effort to stop egregious copyright infringement on The Pirate Bay."
The major motion picture studios lost an estimated $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005. Internet piracy alone cost the studios $2.3 bill
I agreee.
I chose to say "Thank You" in the most meaningful way possible, to a business.
I just went and paid for a two year subscription to Wired.
I probably won't even read it, but dammit, good companies need to be encouraged.
I bought DDO and played it for a couple weeks, but I don't like being forced to team up in order to play, and in DDO you *can not* solo.
Also, I can't put my finger on it exactly, but DDO lacks something. The graphics are great, the combat is decent, the rules are very true to classic D&D, but for some reason I just don't have a whole lot of fun.
Right now CoV and Auto Assault are the only games I have an active account on, and I really only play Auto Assault. Going to cancel my CoV account tonight I think.. at least until I get bored with AA.
Auto Assault is one of the best MMO games I have ever played. The combat is fun, the story lines are well written, and there really isn't any grind (unless you count running over a bunch of screaming scavs who are trying to flee from your spiked car from hell).
It is pure post-apocalyptic-voilent-mutant-biomek goodness.
Anyway, I'm not sure why more people aren't playing it - but I honestly sort of like the low population level - it adds to the "empty burning nuclear wasteland" effect.
MMORPGs that go no where.
Please check out Auto Assault before making a sweeping statement like that.
In fact, the "next gen" of MMO games are a radical improvement over the EQ/EQ2/WoW/DAoC type "Kill a rat, so you can level, so you can kill a bigger rat, so you can get a Shiny Sword Of Beatdown, so you can kill a bigger rat..."
I just bought Auto Assault a couple days ago, and I'm totally and completely blown away.
Though its not open source, I would recommend ActiveReports. Extremely flexible, even gives you a drawing API, and its totally isolated from the backend (unlike crystal and such) - you just hand it a dataset (in .net) and off you go. In my consulting days, I swore by it. Very simple and robust, also quite affordable. Just my $.02 .
OpenLaszlo beats the pants off of Flex and its free (as in speech). Why anyone would bother with the whole AJAX kludge when Laszlo is around escapes me. The beauty of Laszlo's databinding architecture must be seen to be believed, not to mention the animation and UI capabilities.
It is also worth pointing out that Laszlo Systems is working on a DHTML renderer for Laszlo so it won't be dependent on the flash player.
There is a very active and helpful developer community and the documentation is very well done and complete (unlike Flex).
Anyway, my $.02
-Clay
I've been doing all my recent development in OpenLaszlo and honestly, I have never seen any UI technology that can compare. And I'm doing more than just playing with it, I'm developing a full blown enterprise app with it at work.
For those who are looking for really impressive web based UI technology, I can't recommend it enough.
Here are some of the strong points:
-open source
-tag/xml based language - very declarative, instead of tons of scripting, you can just define "states" of your views and bind those states to an attribute
-Object orientation that *really* works and is helpful - not like AS2 in flash
-"Serverless deployment" - this is one of the coolest things - your entire app can (optionally) compile to a single SWF that can be redistributed by your method of choice. I should point out that you can also run it in "server" mode where you can edit the
-Animation. Every attribute is animatable... via script or declarative animators. It is hard to describe just how cool this is until you see it in action - to make a view fade out, for example, I can just do this:either way gets you a nice fade out over 500ms. It couldn't be easier.
Anyway, sorry to drone on so long, but this is by far the most impressive UI tech I've seen. I know it has been mentioned on slashdot before, but I'm constantly surprised at how few people seem to know about it.
-Clay
You hit the nail on the head there. For an application that I needed to develop a "proof of concept for" I chose Python/WxWidgets/Boa Constructor.
.Net, they are all web apps. This app was a desktop app, and I couldn't rely on the user having .Net or Java or whatever installed.
Even though 99% of our applications are
So, Python + WxWidgets + Py2exe solved the problem.
And Python was alot of fun to code in.
My $.02.
The next generation of wave/particle duality theory is the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM).
This is currently my favorite physics theory, makes for some great reading and conjecture.
I interviewed with MS once, and the interview was much more like a CS exam that I thought it would be. I completely blew the interview (I hadn't slept at all the night before because the hotel room was freezing, there was only one blanket and the bed was rock hard - so I was not at my best) It went like this:
The interview was a full day affair, with very few breaks. They said in the AM that I may or may not be finished at lunch, basically - they said that if I was a total idiot then they wouldn't waste anyone's time after lunch.
All of the interviews involved writing code on a whiteboard in various languages. The code was reviewed for syntactical correctness as well as logical.
The first interviewer was really cool - she asked me to mock-up a battleship simulation in C# and laughed at me as I did a very bleary-eyed OOP model in C# of the Game object, the Player object etc... when really what she was after was the validation logic for putting the ships on the board - ensure they are in bounds and don't hit other ships etc... to me that seemed completely worthless - I mean that just an algorithm you would work out and tweak, the important stuff is your class structure.... but I digress.
I walked out of that interview feeling pretty good until I got in the next one. It was horrible - the interviewer was very arrogant and rude and had a thick accent which made him difficult to understand. He would ask me a question, and sit and roll his eyes as I was answering and check his email - basically communicating clearly to me that he didn't like me, want me there or want to be talking to me. For a code sample, he asked me to write code in C# (on a whiteboard) that would traverse a tree of nodes and print out the values in order of all nodes at an arbitrary level. So I wrote a recursive function that would do what he wanted, and that would work just fine. He didn't like that way I had written it, and demanded that I rewrite it "more efficiently". I stood there for like 20 mins feeling like a total idiot because I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, until he got mad and said I should be using "queues" and that it would be more efficient. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him, and he came up and tried to explain that I could have used a FIFO queue - but looking at his example, I didn't understand how his approach would have been any more efficient than mine - when I asked him this, he just got angrier and said it was. Suffice to say, that interview didn't go so well. I realized as soon as I was done with him that I wasn't going to get the job, so I resolved to just have some fun and enjoy the rest of the day. As an interesting footnote, I kept thinking about the question, and a couple days later I did find a much more efficient way of doing it, but it had nothing to do with queues, and it would have been much faster than either of the methodologies we had discussed. I damn near emailed him the better solution, but figured "Whats the point?" Ah well, like I say I was not at my best.
My next interview was with a guy who asked me a different technical question involving organizational hierarchies. I was lucky in that interview because I had written a budget system for a bank that used a similar structure, so I had found a very clever solution to the exact problem he asked me. When I explained my whiteboard code, he got a "damn this guy is good" look in his eye, so I felt pretty good coming out of that one.
Next was a lunch interview, a guy who that said would be my "peer" took me to lunch and asked me a bunch of questions while I was eating. The questions he asked were ridiculous, I mean stuff straight out of the MCSD Analyzing Solutions test. Seriously, I'm pretty sure he pulled a couple test questions before our lunch interview. He would ask me something, and I would answer him with a couple ways that I had solved the problem in the real world, and then he would say "no, that's no the answer, the answer is Scalability, Maintainability, Performance and....
Well, for what its worth, your self-promotion on slashdot was effective, I just downloaded the sample, liked it, and paid $18.61 to have your album sent to the US.
Other than that, I don't think there are many other options.
Tesla would have disagreed. Check into his Colorado Springs research sometime... also in the unveiling of the Niagra power plant (which he helped design) he pissed alot of investors off by giving a speech about how wired power is obsolete.
His idea was basically to use the Earth/ionosphere as a huge capacitor which could be charged from anywhere and consumed from anywhere with around 70% efficiency.
Don't forget "The Golden Ratio" and "A History of the Circle". Two of my personal favorites.
but the fact is copying protected works is illegal
No, its not.
For those who would like to make their own...
Garage Sonoluminescence
Very well, I'll bite. BitTorrent Inc. Membership annual fee of $.01. Paid subscription entitles you to access BitTorrent content. Any attempt to circumvent our access control mechanism will be dealt with harshly, and those responsible prosecuted to the full extent of the law under the DMCA.
What, you think _you'd_ get the money that didn't get taxed? Hell no. That goes to your employer, not you. In any tight labor market (and in an unregulated market, employers can make sure it stays that way), employers have carte blanche to cut wages all they like. And in less stringent times, they can just wait for inflation to do the work. Thus, an employer can turn your tax cut into his wage reduction.
Yep, if I weren't paying over 50% of my paycheck to taxes, I would get that money. Do I think that my employer would pass their tax savings that on to me?
Yep.
Contrary to what radical socialists believe, employers do mostly have common sense. Every company I have ever worked for (except when I was in the military) had some sort of profit sharing/bonus system.
One company I worked for would take all the employess to Atlantic City for dinner/partying with open bar, and give everyone $100 to gamble with. They did this every time they had a good quarter. And yes, I'm a programmer too.
Companies like EA are the exception rather than the rule, most companies respect and highly value their employees.
Companies that abuse their employees lose them, and go out of business.
Throwing a bunch of legislation around only serves the legislators.
The only people who win in a police state are the police.
I get very frustrated every time some corporate abuse surfaces when everyone starts pointing and yelling "See! If the Libertarians make it the whole world will be like that!"
Thats the same mentality that says if we didn't have a law against killing someone everyone would me murderers. Utter nonsense, but for some reason people believe it.
Nope, under a libertarian society there would be so much extra money from the decreased taxation that the economy would be massive, with plenty of jobs for anyone who wanted one. That allows for the freedom to pick your employer. Also, corporate revenues would be much higher without paying 50% or more to tax, so they could afford to higher more people etc...
I'm not saying it would work out like that, but it sounds a damn site better than what we have now.
Also, if I wasn't paying 50% of my paycheck to taxes, I could afford to actually have a savings account to see me through periods of unemployment.
If I had 50k in the bank, I'd feel alot better about saying "screw this, I'm going to find something better".
Also products would be much cheaper with the lower taxes, we would see prices lowered, families able to live comforably on 30k per year etc...
Utopia? Thats the general idea.
Will never work you say?
It did once, way back when this country was first started.
What was it that caused the US to become the most powerful economic force in the world in under 100 years?
Legislation? Democracy?
No... it was a simple tenent that had never been tried before anywhere:
Hands off.
The libertarians aren't trying to do anything "new" or "radical". They are simply trying to get the nation to go back to a system that worked phenomenally well. It is proven. It works. There is no question. The fact that the US is the powerful nation that it is today is absolute proof of that.
Legislation and taxation and welfare states are what destroy nations time and time again. Again, history shows us this unequivicably. Rome to the USSR.
Concepts such as those that the Libertarians hold are the only thing that can save this nation, and save us from the types of abuses that you see going on at EA.
My manager did the exact same thing during crunch time, as well as buying us all dinner and caffeine.
I tell you, thats what makes the difference to me.
One of the reasons I left my last job is because during crunch time the boss would walk by on her way out to her BMW at 3:30 and ask how things were going. Thats if she even bothered to come in that day.
My boss now puts in at least as many hours as any of us, and will never ask us to do something that he isn't willing to do himself.
With that kind of leadership, I don't mind doing a few weeks of 75+ hours.
Occasionally.