As a UK student, if I (and I won't) got offered a job at Google I would take the next plane out of here. Yes I have family, friends and all that jazz, but you have to look at the a) terrible IT job market and b) supreme coolness of a Google position.
Does anyone actually know who won the 'best Google application' contest? I heard nothing about the winners, the entries, or whether any of the entries are being used now in some form. Anyone care to help me out here?
Small file size implies a lot of things, including efficient code, good design and less chance of crashing. If they can fit a good portion of Word's most popular features into five megs, they are probably good coders and you're going to get a good product from them.
The closest we have to this are the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. I can't be certain, but these may well be verified in the form of pop-ups from Visa/MasterCard's servers so that the business doesn't get that information.
I'm getting an online store off the ground and we redirect to HSBC to collect credit card details via their Secure ePayments service. Customers feel more secure with the HSBC logo and the guarantee that we don't collect any details ourself. If you encounter a similar service (WorldPay, PayPal) where the shop itself doesn't collect details, you can shop safely in the knowledge that the company you're doing business with has no access to your card details.
I have little experience with Xbox Live, but can you choose to play on regular servers? Pretty much all of my games on Call of Duty have been fun since I stopped visiting the big, 64-player servers and played on small servers. I got to know people, played regularly, and it was fun. Clan gaming is another way to meet like-minded people who don't have any interest in annoying you (although it depends on the game)
Microphones have made it worse, though. One annoying person can wreck the fun for everyone - hopefully Xbox Live has an ignore feature. Similarly spamming, cheating and camping by a small minority can make games unplayable at times. Some games offer voting, which is incredibly useful as long as it's not being abused. Otherwise, move on to another server. You never know, others might follow suit.
Open source still works on the coding front. How about Crystal Space which supports everything from portals and volumetric fog to XML levels and ODE-based physics?
Level design can be done the same way. Something like CUBE's multiplayer, online level editor would allow anyone to drop by and improve the levels.
But unlike a general purpose application with obvious goals, games are carried by the vision of one or two people usually - and the essence of 'collaboration' is marred by this leadership. Usually everyone ends up with their own idea for how the game should develop, and without the monetary incentive or a healthy relationship, random groups of skilled coders or artists can easily fail to produce anything. Which explains all of those empty Sourceforge projects.
I think he meant that police officers are more likely to "harrass" someone because of their look. If an officer finds a newly spraypainted graffiti over some wall, and there's both a teenage kid and an elderly woman standing by it, who do you think will be assumed the criminal? It's called profiling, and it happens. Get over it.
So this is Apple's answer to the Tablet PC. I hope the stand is removable so I can use it on a couch or whatever. Obviously it looks better than the Windows offerings, and the GUI lends itself to a touchscreen much more, but what about my wallet? I expect this will be another high-priced 'elite' release from Apple, like their biggest PowerBooks.
Commercial vs. open source ethics aside, Microsoft aren't going to allocate their entire workforce to this one. It's quite a heavy task; GNOME Storage has been in development for a few years and is still heavily in beta. It probably only handles a small subset of file types.
Whereas Microsoft's task is far greater. They're not delivering a CVS demo, it's a cornerstone of the OS (or rather, was) which means coming up with means to generate metadata, deciding what metadata to store, indexing it and returning it in a manner that's fast and accurate, for every single common format out there.
Microsoft have a fair number of software products and generating metadata is quite difficult (since the user isn't going to supply it himself - how many times have you filled in all the Microsoft Word 'Properties' for your documents?). So it could easily take years.
And don't forget the QA, testing, bugfixing (maybe they'll skip that part;) ) and feedback cycles involved with releasing such an important part of Microsoft's 'most important' operating system to date.
Don't be silly. What they're looking at is something like GNOME Storage where you can type in some search terms and semantically find the files.
Something like 1960s music or e-mails to Bruce, I'd guess. WinFS ties up all your documents, media, mails etc. into one database for indexing and searching, and beats the hell out of DIR C:/s/a.
Well it's sure as hell not going to be an increase in stability or performance. From the interview:
What is really causing sort of the rewrite on Longhorn?
There's no rewrite going on here.
Things I can think of: the tacky sidebar, the 'My Games' et al. menus which will only work with a handful of Microsoft games, and the new GUI look and feel which is probably tied to Avalon. So nothing worth upgrading for, then;)
One is (that) we have a date-driven release. Things that make that date get in.
Previously Microsoft were skirting around the 2006-7 point without being clear about when Longhorn would ship; it looked like they were going to try to finish features X and Y before release. So now they've moved on to a date-driven release, we can pretty much guarantee 2006 for Longhorn (client edition) and they're going to drop anything they have to, to make that date.
Bill said that the OEMs are okay with the delay, so why the pressure? Looks like Linux is hurrying Microsoft up!
I was dead certain it used the IE engine, so I checked the new site at http://www.maxthon.com/ - lo and behold:
Maxthon is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser)...
That said, the original MyIE2 site's screenshots do look a lot like Mozilla in places. But the site never mentions Mozilla, while Maxthon's (stupid name) site mentions IE explicitly.
The worst specimen of this type is the person who carries out massive conversations via text message. I mean, sure it might end up cheaper in the long run by about 30 pence, but you say so much less and in such a less personal manner. To me, all text messages look the same, like it's the same stereotypical airheaded idiot typing them and giggling. Not sure why, that's just the image they conjure up.
There's still a chance to unplug, though. You turned off your phone. Even before mobiles people used to let their home phones off the hook before a night of action. I don't think we'll ever get to the stage where you're locked into an always-on contact method that isn't face-to-face; it would be too invasive for the public to stand.
After a recent bout of no less than 46 spyware executables on my brother's laptop, I did the same process. Unfortunately MSN seems to be starting IE by default to check Hotmail. Who knows what other Microsoft IE hooks are installed (the laptop is SP1, by the way)
Slashdot Mirror
As a UK student, if I (and I won't) got offered a job at Google I would take the next plane out of here. Yes I have family, friends and all that jazz, but you have to look at the a) terrible IT job market and b) supreme coolness of a Google position.
Does anyone actually know who won the 'best Google application' contest? I heard nothing about the winners, the entries, or whether any of the entries are being used now in some form. Anyone care to help me out here?
Because I trust Apple a great deal more than Microsoft when it comes to media control.
If someone could update the story URL, that would be great ;)
Are you kidding? This is Slashdot!
The site isn't slow, and that 'breathing' troll has got to be the lamest thing in existence. By typing it, you'd have had to do the same.
Small file size implies a lot of things, including efficient code, good design and less chance of crashing. If they can fit a good portion of Word's most popular features into five megs, they are probably good coders and you're going to get a good product from them.
The closest we have to this are the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. I can't be certain, but these may well be verified in the form of pop-ups from Visa/MasterCard's servers so that the business doesn't get that information.
I'm getting an online store off the ground and we redirect to HSBC to collect credit card details via their Secure ePayments service. Customers feel more secure with the HSBC logo and the guarantee that we don't collect any details ourself. If you encounter a similar service (WorldPay, PayPal) where the shop itself doesn't collect details, you can shop safely in the knowledge that the company you're doing business with has no access to your card details.
I have little experience with Xbox Live, but can you choose to play on regular servers? Pretty much all of my games on Call of Duty have been fun since I stopped visiting the big, 64-player servers and played on small servers. I got to know people, played regularly, and it was fun. Clan gaming is another way to meet like-minded people who don't have any interest in annoying you (although it depends on the game)
Microphones have made it worse, though. One annoying person can wreck the fun for everyone - hopefully Xbox Live has an ignore feature. Similarly spamming, cheating and camping by a small minority can make games unplayable at times. Some games offer voting, which is incredibly useful as long as it's not being abused. Otherwise, move on to another server. You never know, others might follow suit.
Open source still works on the coding front. How about Crystal Space which supports everything from portals and volumetric fog to XML levels and ODE-based physics?
Level design can be done the same way. Something like CUBE's multiplayer, online level editor would allow anyone to drop by and improve the levels.
But unlike a general purpose application with obvious goals, games are carried by the vision of one or two people usually - and the essence of 'collaboration' is marred by this leadership. Usually everyone ends up with their own idea for how the game should develop, and without the monetary incentive or a healthy relationship, random groups of skilled coders or artists can easily fail to produce anything. Which explains all of those empty Sourceforge projects.
Damn you, I had assumed the porn movie world was identical to the real world. You shattered that dream!!
I think he meant that police officers are more likely to "harrass" someone because of their look. If an officer finds a newly spraypainted graffiti over some wall, and there's both a teenage kid and an elderly woman standing by it, who do you think will be assumed the criminal? It's called profiling, and it happens. Get over it.
So this is Apple's answer to the Tablet PC. I hope the stand is removable so I can use it on a couch or whatever. Obviously it looks better than the Windows offerings, and the GUI lends itself to a touchscreen much more, but what about my wallet? I expect this will be another high-priced 'elite' release from Apple, like their biggest PowerBooks.
Astute readers will note that the article calls it the iPod Slayer to avoid using the word 'Killer' for the 700th time.
I'm getting "connection refused" for these.
Commercial vs. open source ethics aside, Microsoft aren't going to allocate their entire workforce to this one. It's quite a heavy task; GNOME Storage has been in development for a few years and is still heavily in beta. It probably only handles a small subset of file types.
;) ) and feedback cycles involved with releasing such an important part of Microsoft's 'most important' operating system to date.
Whereas Microsoft's task is far greater. They're not delivering a CVS demo, it's a cornerstone of the OS (or rather, was) which means coming up with means to generate metadata, deciding what metadata to store, indexing it and returning it in a manner that's fast and accurate, for every single common format out there.
Microsoft have a fair number of software products and generating metadata is quite difficult (since the user isn't going to supply it himself - how many times have you filled in all the Microsoft Word 'Properties' for your documents?). So it could easily take years.
And don't forget the QA, testing, bugfixing (maybe they'll skip that part
Don't be silly. What they're looking at is something like GNOME Storage where you can type in some search terms and semantically find the files.
Something like 1960s music or e-mails to Bruce, I'd guess. WinFS ties up all your documents, media, mails etc. into one database for indexing and searching, and beats the hell out of DIR C: /s/a.
Well it's sure as hell not going to be an increase in stability or performance. From the interview:
What is really causing sort of the rewrite on Longhorn?
There's no rewrite going on here.
Things I can think of: the tacky sidebar, the 'My Games' et al. menus which will only work with a handful of Microsoft games, and the new GUI look and feel which is probably tied to Avalon. So nothing worth upgrading for, then ;)
One is (that) we have a date-driven release. Things that make that date get in.
Previously Microsoft were skirting around the 2006-7 point without being clear about when Longhorn would ship; it looked like they were going to try to finish features X and Y before release. So now they've moved on to a date-driven release, we can pretty much guarantee 2006 for Longhorn (client edition) and they're going to drop anything they have to, to make that date.
Bill said that the OEMs are okay with the delay, so why the pressure? Looks like Linux is hurrying Microsoft up!
Most translators, as well as archive.org implement a URL rewriter to force links to their own server. This would be a pretty neat addition.
On the other hand, the Google cache doesn't (it is only for seeing the cache one page, though).
I hope that thought consoles you when you're struggling with the ATI graphics card drivers or recompiling your kernel :)
Ah, but they are. Why else would we have directories?
I was dead certain it used the IE engine, so I checked the new site at http://www.maxthon.com/ - lo and behold:
...
Maxthon is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser)
That said, the original MyIE2 site's screenshots do look a lot like Mozilla in places. But the site never mentions Mozilla, while Maxthon's (stupid name) site mentions IE explicitly.
The worst specimen of this type is the person who carries out massive conversations via text message. I mean, sure it might end up cheaper in the long run by about 30 pence, but you say so much less and in such a less personal manner. To me, all text messages look the same, like it's the same stereotypical airheaded idiot typing them and giggling. Not sure why, that's just the image they conjure up.
There's still a chance to unplug, though. You turned off your phone. Even before mobiles people used to let their home phones off the hook before a night of action. I don't think we'll ever get to the stage where you're locked into an always-on contact method that isn't face-to-face; it would be too invasive for the public to stand.
Again...maybe you don't want others (even if they're your friends) joining in on your party for the night.
Well then don't send out the text.
After a recent bout of no less than 46 spyware executables on my brother's laptop, I did the same process. Unfortunately MSN seems to be starting IE by default to check Hotmail. Who knows what other Microsoft IE hooks are installed (the laptop is SP1, by the way)