You have more than double that so i'd say you are pretty understaffed. I saw a video once that was actually pretty intelligent in talking about standard support ratios. Basically, there isn't a "standard" the answer is almost always "it depends". You start with your userbase - how tech savvy are they? How many applications are you supporting? What kind of hardware do you have? How many remote supporting tools do you have to use? Each of these answers adjusts the support ratio up and down and sometimes something as low as 75:1 is needed and other times 300:1 is just fine.
Still, in the place I work now we have 600 machines and 40 servers or so (most virtualized) and we have 13 IT people (with 1 open position right now). This includes 1 helpdesk person, 2 programmers, 2 systems support personnel (they support specific software we use), 2 hardware techs, 2 network analysts, 3 systems engineers, a secretary, and the boss.
Except according to the FCC Letter and the NY Times article, even after blocking this particular mobile web data access, you still have to PAY for the blocked notification to come up since it uses data to show you that! Slick business practices Verizon has going on here.
Re:Android WILL take over.
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Arguably, Apple has had great success by having a completely closed system which is why the argument that Android will succeed because it is open is such a fallacy in my opinion.
Android may be great, but its implementation is different on every Android phone. Different hardware, different features, different amounts of android functionality. You don't really have a consistent user experience any more than you do with Windows Mobile. Also, I bet that apps will not run the same across the hardware since so many different phones running Android have a wide variety of specs. I can see it turning into the nightmare that game/application developers have when making an application for the PC - you have a few hundred million permutations of possible hardware combinations in your potential user-base - good luck getting it to work properly and consistently on all of them!
Even to this day nearly every app made for the iPhone/iPod Touch will work very consistently across every version. Granted, the newer versions of the iPhone and iPod touch run and load the applications faster than their predecessors but the overall hardware that the developer has to deal with is very nicely uniform. This is also one of the core reasons why I think that the 360 and PS3 and Wii have such success compared to the PC for gaming. When you buy a game for those platforms you expect that you can take it home and it will just work.
I'm excited to see Android provide some real competition to Apple but realistically, even if Verizon does get the iPhone because Apple is facing strong competition from Google's mobile OS, do I really want to go back to Verizon? They have a great network sure, but they also had crappy customer service, dicked with their phones by disabling features and then trying to sell them back to me, doubled their smartphone cancellation fee and employ all kinds of scumbag tactics including selling unlimited data plans that aren't unlimited. Why is everyone so keen on being their customer again?
One of my friends unlocked his Blackberry and enabled tethering without paying Verizon the tethering fee. He was playing MMOs via the phone's internet connection and this lasted for about half a month before Verizon noticed and disconnected him. When he opened up a web browser they showed him a message telling him that he was tethering without paying for it and offered to re-enable it for a few dollars a month. All he had to do was click "ok" and it automatically added tethering to his bill and re-enabled the access instantly.
They are doing something to track if you are tethering and not paying for, possibly just by watching the usage and what kinds of things you are doing (for example - WoW packets showing up on the phone automatically means tethering since the phone itself isn't capable of playing World of Warcraft).
..and it is fantastic. This was the largest performance increase i've seen on computers in over a decade. I was going to go with a Velociraptor because I knew how important drive access latency was but then Intel patched the fragmentation issue that was worrying me.
I got mounting rails to fit the drive into my desktop case so i'm using it as my primary desktop drive for OS, some applications (Adobe Design Premium Suite runs great on it! Photoshop CS4 loads in 3-4 seconds!), and my main games. I then have a 1.5 TB secondary drive to store my data and music collection etc. I paid around $430 for my 80GB Intel X25-M so being able to get the 160GB for that same price is a fantastic improvement. I will definitely only be going SSD in my machines from now on. Everything loads faster, I get consistently fast boot times even after months of usage.
It is amazing to see Windows XP load up and then all of the system tray apps pop up in a few seconds. You can immediately start loading things like e-mail and Firefox as soon as the desktop appears and there is no discernible lag on first load like you will get with SATA drives since they are still trying to load system tray applications.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the PlayOn software that i've been using for the past year. It only cost me $30 and as long as you already own some sort of game console (360 and PS3 are supported now, Wii support coming soon) it is a better solution than the Roku box.
You run the PlayOn software on your machine and it transcodes internet streams into a format your console can recognize as a media server over your home network. I can watch things from Hulu, CBS, ESPN, Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon VOD. I can also watch movies or listen to music stored on my computer's hard drive itself. This lets me easily watch Hulu on my 50" HDTV instead of at my computer monitor.
The last few updates have vastly improved the reliability of the streams and you have the ability to pause, fast forward and rewind streams. The ads on Hulu are still included and PlayOn pretends to be a browser so I think that is why Hulu hasn't gone after them yet to stop the streaming. Hulu only does 1 ad per commercial break though (so far) so it isn't very annoying at all.
I think you missed the point, this/. summary is just a typical hit-job against Microsoft. The discs only get scratched if you re-orient the console WHILE the disc is being USED. This is a stupid idea to do with ANY disc-based system. Shut the console down and re-orient it and it works 100% fine.
I've used a 360 on its side and vertically and it works fine either way - just don't change orientation while a game is being played!
I'd argue that those countries don't have nearly the global influence and impact (good or bad) that the United States does. I'm not saying that out of national pride, it's just the truth.
The U.S. is a bigger target because our policies and funding affect more people. We choose to support a country such as say, Israel, and now we have 10 other countries hating our guts because they don't like Israel. What you are arguing for is isolationism, but that has its own issues. If we quit allying with other countries many will then complain that we have so much power and influence but don't use it to help those less fortunate, either through foreign aid or defense.
I'm not a warmonger or anything like that, but if the system has a 1 in 10 chance of stopping a nuclear missile or other rogue missile launched at a U.S. city (say mine), i'd rather have that chance than zero chance if we don't have the system.
You say Obama will just fix all the countries hating us with his new world diplomacy, but there will always be people who don't like us (this isn't Star Trek Utopia), so the likelihood of there being at some point in the future some sort of threat similar to this to us or one of our allies, is highly likely.
They've had many successes with the system so far and already have it deployed on some ships and land-based areas. Also, who says if a real missile were launched at us we wouldn't launch multiple kill vehicles. If we have 50 interceptors sitting at one base and a missile coming in, nothing says you can't launch more than one to try to take it down and/or deal with the counter measures.
I'm not sold on the new avatar type stuff since I really just use the dashboard as a way to get into games or download content, not as a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook.
I do have to give Microsoft credit though for getting to market so quickly with what looks like a fairly large overhaul. Sony's Home make-over was announced in early 2007 and it is still in beta, while the new 360 experience will be out the middle of this month. Sony's setup may ultimately prove better - when it actually makes it to PS3 hard drives.
If you read TFA they have a sample chat which just shows you how stupid these chat bots still are. It is extremely easy to get them to just parrot responses and then try to change the subject in completely random directions.
I have yet to see any chat bot that can figure out the line of questioning, then pick up and introduce interesting things to the conversation that are corollary to that subject. I think the only way you will get bots that will "pass" this test is to have massive databases of words, relationships between words and subjects with corresponding topics of discussion. Still, the computer won't be intelligent, it will just be reciting from its huge database of responses.
I think the type of question i'd ask these bots is something that would require them to extemporize and they'd all fail. For example: "You have two rubber ducks, what are the possible ways you could use them if you don't have a bathtub?"
Any human could reply to that with things like "i'd put them in a stream, run over them with my car, put them on a lake, in the swimming pool" etc but a computer program isn't likely to respond to that in any way that makes sense. The response i'd expect from the computer would be "You like ducks then?".
We have CompuTrace on many of our laptops here at work. Only certain manufacturers have the agent pre-loaded but it is embedded in the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS and put different firmware on it you can wipe it out. CompuTrace won't work if you formatted the machine and put Linux on it since they don't (currently) have a Linux version of their agent.
CompuTrace is really not a great service though because some of their promise is that they'll recover your laptop in X days or pay you $1000, guaranteed! What they don't tell you is that to keep this "warranty" active you have to make sure that your laptops check in at least once every few weeks or else they call you and demand that you check-in the laptop within a week or lose your warranty.
This is a real pain when you have laptops that are being taken home by your users and they don't have internet at home or just leave it sitting in a desk drawer for weeks at a time. Trying to track down all of the machines to make sure they are hooked up to the internet to check-in at least once every few weeks is a total mess.
Yes, Enter Sandman when played in reverse is an evil terrorist song.
In "Enter Sandman", Osama Bin Laden is beckoning all Americans subliminally to force them to become Hello Kitty terrorists. This is something that must be investigated thoroughly and at a great deal of expense. The provisions for this are hidden in the recent $700 billion dollar bailout bill that is so long nobody in congress actually read it.
Truly yours, Department of Hello Kitty Homeland Security
I say it is useless because the regular blokes who bought the over-priced graphics cards won't see jack squat from this. As is the case with every class action i've ever seen, what ends up happening is whichever litigation-happy person initiated it gets a large settlement (as do their lawyers) and everyone else gets $5 coupons for cracker jacks.
Still, this raises another point. If they ban you from the forums, should they also be able to ban you from playing a game that you legally purchased?
I know Spore has online sharing features to share the creatures people create, but other than that isn't it inherently a single-player game? This sets a bad precedent to stifle complaints by banning you from playing their game and making you fork over more money to the company. Sounds like another reason not to support EA's business practices by gracing them with my purchases.
This is what i've been saying all along. The excuse that the effect will not be immediate is a really lame one as it NEVER will have any effect if you don't do something about it now.
Anything that can reduce some of our dependence on foreign oil while we try to transition away from an oil economy is a good idea I think.
Not sure on the open source software front but i've always been fond of Rhinoceros 3D for doing modeling since it is relatively in-expensive to buy a commercial copy ($900).
You can send your 3-D file to lots of companies, i'm not sure why ShapeWays is getting all the press when there are thousands of RP companies called "service bureaus" that will take 3-D models you upload and print them using some RP machine then ship them to you, usually with a 1-2 day turn-around time.
I used to get some parts done with http://www.rjmrp.com/ but they focus mainly on high-resolution small parts (such as jewelry pieces). So, if you're designing jewelry i'd recommend them otherwise look for some other companies using Stratasys type machines (there are lots). The costs they quote sound about normal, typical jewelry prototypes were around $100 or so for a ring in.001" resolution.
Screw the Wi-Fi hotspots, "unlimited data plan" for the iPhone makes IM cheaper than SMS.
SMS makes AT&T money, IM does not. This is also why iPhone SDK bans voice-over-ip apps like Skype. This would circumvent using up your cell phone minutes to call people and instead use the EDGE network to do it.
Then again, I don't think i'd trust the EDGE network for much as it is ridiculously slow in most cities i've tried using it in on my iPhone.
The "revision date" of the article is listed as 01-04-2008 (which is pretty much anywhere outside the United States way of saying 04-01-2008). This is obviously an April Fool's joke, just read the last page with the comments from the various companies.
Oh, sorry, I forgot nobody actually reads articles on Slashdot, this is merely a forum for complaints!
It all boils down to this: what the iPhone does it does well.
I have used other smart phones such as the Motorola Q and the Blackberry, but the iPhone is the simplest to use for what I want: easy to access and read e-mail and web browsing and a phone. It also does simple things like work as my calculator, a calendaring system, take notes on it, do alarms, stop-watch, stock quotes, weather and whatever else you download for it now. And oh yeah, it is my iPod too and I synch it with Bluetooth to my car for use as hands-free.
As someone else already pointed out, the ease of use and interface are the key things that a good smartphone really needs - and Apple succeeded quite well with their first try. Yes, it didn't have 3G or GPS built-in for the first pass at it, but future versions most certainly will. Once they add the rest of those features, i'll be surprised at what people will find to complain about it then. It will probably never have enough memory for the complainers and i'm sure the DRM and device lock-down are also something to continue to complain about, but i'm happy with the phone now just as much (or more than) I was when I bought mine back in September after they lowered the price on it. Now if only AT&T could get some better coverage around where I live:-)
It is the best $40 I ever spent when doing a project involving tons of Regular Expressions. It has detailed tutorials on how Regular Expressions work, a reference guide, debugging mode, real-time feedback on what your expression is doing, error checking, and a built-in forum where you can post your problems and people including the developer himself will chime in and help you figure it out!
I'm not associated with JGSoft in anyway, but RegEx Buddy really is an awesome product. Also, you can change which language you are targeting and it understands the limitations of each one (and verifies your code will work) and he explains the differences between different language's implementations on that website (for free).
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You should play Fall Further, it adds even more unique civs and tweaks to Fall From Heaven 2 (it's a modmod). More Civ-Crack for your enjoyment :-)
You have more than double that so i'd say you are pretty understaffed. I saw a video once that was actually pretty intelligent in talking about standard support ratios. Basically, there isn't a "standard" the answer is almost always "it depends". You start with your userbase - how tech savvy are they? How many applications are you supporting? What kind of hardware do you have? How many remote supporting tools do you have to use? Each of these answers adjusts the support ratio up and down and sometimes something as low as 75:1 is needed and other times 300:1 is just fine.
Still, in the place I work now we have 600 machines and 40 servers or so (most virtualized) and we have 13 IT people (with 1 open position right now). This includes 1 helpdesk person, 2 programmers, 2 systems support personnel (they support specific software we use), 2 hardware techs, 2 network analysts, 3 systems engineers, a secretary, and the boss.
Except according to the FCC Letter and the NY Times article, even after blocking this particular mobile web data access, you still have to PAY for the blocked notification to come up since it uses data to show you that! Slick business practices Verizon has going on here.
Arguably, Apple has had great success by having a completely closed system which is why the argument that Android will succeed because it is open is such a fallacy in my opinion.
Android may be great, but its implementation is different on every Android phone. Different hardware, different features, different amounts of android functionality. You don't really have a consistent user experience any more than you do with Windows Mobile. Also, I bet that apps will not run the same across the hardware since so many different phones running Android have a wide variety of specs. I can see it turning into the nightmare that game/application developers have when making an application for the PC - you have a few hundred million permutations of possible hardware combinations in your potential user-base - good luck getting it to work properly and consistently on all of them!
Even to this day nearly every app made for the iPhone/iPod Touch will work very consistently across every version. Granted, the newer versions of the iPhone and iPod touch run and load the applications faster than their predecessors but the overall hardware that the developer has to deal with is very nicely uniform. This is also one of the core reasons why I think that the 360 and PS3 and Wii have such success compared to the PC for gaming. When you buy a game for those platforms you expect that you can take it home and it will just work.
I'm excited to see Android provide some real competition to Apple but realistically, even if Verizon does get the iPhone because Apple is facing strong competition from Google's mobile OS, do I really want to go back to Verizon? They have a great network sure, but they also had crappy customer service, dicked with their phones by disabling features and then trying to sell them back to me, doubled their smartphone cancellation fee and employ all kinds of scumbag tactics including selling unlimited data plans that aren't unlimited. Why is everyone so keen on being their customer again?
One of my friends unlocked his Blackberry and enabled tethering without paying Verizon the tethering fee. He was playing MMOs via the phone's internet connection and this lasted for about half a month before Verizon noticed and disconnected him. When he opened up a web browser they showed him a message telling him that he was tethering without paying for it and offered to re-enable it for a few dollars a month. All he had to do was click "ok" and it automatically added tethering to his bill and re-enabled the access instantly.
They are doing something to track if you are tethering and not paying for, possibly just by watching the usage and what kinds of things you are doing (for example - WoW packets showing up on the phone automatically means tethering since the phone itself isn't capable of playing World of Warcraft).
..and it is fantastic. This was the largest performance increase i've seen on computers in over a decade. I was going to go with a Velociraptor because I knew how important drive access latency was but then Intel patched the fragmentation issue that was worrying me.
I got mounting rails to fit the drive into my desktop case so i'm using it as my primary desktop drive for OS, some applications (Adobe Design Premium Suite runs great on it! Photoshop CS4 loads in 3-4 seconds!), and my main games. I then have a 1.5 TB secondary drive to store my data and music collection etc. I paid around $430 for my 80GB Intel X25-M so being able to get the 160GB for that same price is a fantastic improvement. I will definitely only be going SSD in my machines from now on. Everything loads faster, I get consistently fast boot times even after months of usage.
It is amazing to see Windows XP load up and then all of the system tray apps pop up in a few seconds. You can immediately start loading things like e-mail and Firefox as soon as the desktop appears and there is no discernible lag on first load like you will get with SATA drives since they are still trying to load system tray applications.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the PlayOn software that i've been using for the past year. It only cost me $30 and as long as you already own some sort of game console (360 and PS3 are supported now, Wii support coming soon) it is a better solution than the Roku box.
You run the PlayOn software on your machine and it transcodes internet streams into a format your console can recognize as a media server over your home network. I can watch things from Hulu, CBS, ESPN, Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon VOD. I can also watch movies or listen to music stored on my computer's hard drive itself. This lets me easily watch Hulu on my 50" HDTV instead of at my computer monitor.
The last few updates have vastly improved the reliability of the streams and you have the ability to pause, fast forward and rewind streams. The ads on Hulu are still included and PlayOn pretends to be a browser so I think that is why Hulu hasn't gone after them yet to stop the streaming. Hulu only does 1 ad per commercial break though (so far) so it isn't very annoying at all.
Haha, shameless achievement whoring, I love it.
I think you missed the point, this /. summary is just a typical hit-job against Microsoft. The discs only get scratched if you re-orient the console WHILE the disc is being USED. This is a stupid idea to do with ANY disc-based system. Shut the console down and re-orient it and it works 100% fine.
I've used a 360 on its side and vertically and it works fine either way - just don't change orientation while a game is being played!
I'd argue that those countries don't have nearly the global influence and impact (good or bad) that the United States does. I'm not saying that out of national pride, it's just the truth.
The U.S. is a bigger target because our policies and funding affect more people. We choose to support a country such as say, Israel, and now we have 10 other countries hating our guts because they don't like Israel. What you are arguing for is isolationism, but that has its own issues. If we quit allying with other countries many will then complain that we have so much power and influence but don't use it to help those less fortunate, either through foreign aid or defense.
I'm not a warmonger or anything like that, but if the system has a 1 in 10 chance of stopping a nuclear missile or other rogue missile launched at a U.S. city (say mine), i'd rather have that chance than zero chance if we don't have the system.
You say Obama will just fix all the countries hating us with his new world diplomacy, but there will always be people who don't like us (this isn't Star Trek Utopia), so the likelihood of there being at some point in the future some sort of threat similar to this to us or one of our allies, is highly likely.
They've had many successes with the system so far and already have it deployed on some ships and land-based areas. Also, who says if a real missile were launched at us we wouldn't launch multiple kill vehicles. If we have 50 interceptors sitting at one base and a missile coming in, nothing says you can't launch more than one to try to take it down and/or deal with the counter measures.
At it only cost ONE......Million Dollars!
I'm not sold on the new avatar type stuff since I really just use the dashboard as a way to get into games or download content, not as a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook.
I do have to give Microsoft credit though for getting to market so quickly with what looks like a fairly large overhaul. Sony's Home make-over was announced in early 2007 and it is still in beta, while the new 360 experience will be out the middle of this month. Sony's setup may ultimately prove better - when it actually makes it to PS3 hard drives.
If you read TFA they have a sample chat which just shows you how stupid these chat bots still are. It is extremely easy to get them to just parrot responses and then try to change the subject in completely random directions.
I have yet to see any chat bot that can figure out the line of questioning, then pick up and introduce interesting things to the conversation that are corollary to that subject. I think the only way you will get bots that will "pass" this test is to have massive databases of words, relationships between words and subjects with corresponding topics of discussion. Still, the computer won't be intelligent, it will just be reciting from its huge database of responses.
I think the type of question i'd ask these bots is something that would require them to extemporize and they'd all fail. For example: "You have two rubber ducks, what are the possible ways you could use them if you don't have a bathtub?"
Any human could reply to that with things like "i'd put them in a stream, run over them with my car, put them on a lake, in the swimming pool" etc but a computer program isn't likely to respond to that in any way that makes sense. The response i'd expect from the computer would be "You like ducks then?".
We have CompuTrace on many of our laptops here at work. Only certain manufacturers have the agent pre-loaded but it is embedded in the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS and put different firmware on it you can wipe it out. CompuTrace won't work if you formatted the machine and put Linux on it since they don't (currently) have a Linux version of their agent.
CompuTrace is really not a great service though because some of their promise is that they'll recover your laptop in X days or pay you $1000, guaranteed! What they don't tell you is that to keep this "warranty" active you have to make sure that your laptops check in at least once every few weeks or else they call you and demand that you check-in the laptop within a week or lose your warranty.
This is a real pain when you have laptops that are being taken home by your users and they don't have internet at home or just leave it sitting in a desk drawer for weeks at a time. Trying to track down all of the machines to make sure they are hooked up to the internet to check-in at least once every few weeks is a total mess.
Yes, Enter Sandman when played in reverse is an evil terrorist song.
In "Enter Sandman", Osama Bin Laden is beckoning all Americans subliminally to force them to become Hello Kitty terrorists. This is something that must be investigated thoroughly and at a great deal of expense. The provisions for this are hidden in the recent $700 billion dollar bailout bill that is so long nobody in congress actually read it.
Truly yours,
Department of Hello Kitty Homeland Security
I say it is useless because the regular blokes who bought the over-priced graphics cards won't see jack squat from this. As is the case with every class action i've ever seen, what ends up happening is whichever litigation-happy person initiated it gets a large settlement (as do their lawyers) and everyone else gets $5 coupons for cracker jacks.
Still, this raises another point. If they ban you from the forums, should they also be able to ban you from playing a game that you legally purchased?
I know Spore has online sharing features to share the creatures people create, but other than that isn't it inherently a single-player game? This sets a bad precedent to stifle complaints by banning you from playing their game and making you fork over more money to the company. Sounds like another reason not to support EA's business practices by gracing them with my purchases.
Who says that drilling and research are mutually exclusive activities?
Thank you for this!
This is what i've been saying all along. The excuse that the effect will not be immediate is a really lame one as it NEVER will have any effect if you don't do something about it now.
Anything that can reduce some of our dependence on foreign oil while we try to transition away from an oil economy is a good idea I think.
Not sure on the open source software front but i've always been fond of Rhinoceros 3D for doing modeling since it is relatively in-expensive to buy a commercial copy ($900).
You can send your 3-D file to lots of companies, i'm not sure why ShapeWays is getting all the press when there are thousands of RP companies called "service bureaus" that will take 3-D models you upload and print them using some RP machine then ship them to you, usually with a 1-2 day turn-around time.
I used to get some parts done with http://www.rjmrp.com/ but they focus mainly on high-resolution small parts (such as jewelry pieces). So, if you're designing jewelry i'd recommend them otherwise look for some other companies using Stratasys type machines (there are lots). The costs they quote sound about normal, typical jewelry prototypes were around $100 or so for a ring in .001" resolution.
Screw the Wi-Fi hotspots, "unlimited data plan" for the iPhone makes IM cheaper than SMS.
SMS makes AT&T money, IM does not. This is also why iPhone SDK bans voice-over-ip apps like Skype. This would circumvent using up your cell phone minutes to call people and instead use the EDGE network to do it.
Then again, I don't think i'd trust the EDGE network for much as it is ridiculously slow in most cities i've tried using it in on my iPhone.
The "revision date" of the article is listed as 01-04-2008 (which is pretty much anywhere outside the United States way of saying 04-01-2008). This is obviously an April Fool's joke, just read the last page with the comments from the various companies.
Oh, sorry, I forgot nobody actually reads articles on Slashdot, this is merely a forum for complaints!
It all boils down to this: what the iPhone does it does well.
:-)
I have used other smart phones such as the Motorola Q and the Blackberry, but the iPhone is the simplest to use for what I want: easy to access and read e-mail and web browsing and a phone. It also does simple things like work as my calculator, a calendaring system, take notes on it, do alarms, stop-watch, stock quotes, weather and whatever else you download for it now. And oh yeah, it is my iPod too and I synch it with Bluetooth to my car for use as hands-free.
As someone else already pointed out, the ease of use and interface are the key things that a good smartphone really needs - and Apple succeeded quite well with their first try. Yes, it didn't have 3G or GPS built-in for the first pass at it, but future versions most certainly will. Once they add the rest of those features, i'll be surprised at what people will find to complain about it then. It will probably never have enough memory for the complainers and i'm sure the DRM and device lock-down are also something to continue to complain about, but i'm happy with the phone now just as much (or more than) I was when I bought mine back in September after they lowered the price on it. Now if only AT&T could get some better coverage around where I live
Buy this program: http://www.regexbuddy.com/
It is the best $40 I ever spent when doing a project involving tons of Regular Expressions. It has detailed tutorials on how Regular Expressions work, a reference guide, debugging mode, real-time feedback on what your expression is doing, error checking, and a built-in forum where you can post your problems and people including the developer himself will chime in and help you figure it out!
I'm not associated with JGSoft in anyway, but RegEx Buddy really is an awesome product. Also, you can change which language you are targeting and it understands the limitations of each one (and verifies your code will work) and he explains the differences between different language's implementations on that website (for free).