Can you back that up with some technical points?
I would not recommend MS products either (never used them, our stuff works fine with Linux), but highly successful projects like stackoverflow.com scale fine with MS products. All it takes is familiarity with the available software nowdays, it does not seem to be the case anymore that you need a much higher budget for hardware/software to run a MS shop.
After about 25 years of coding I can safely say that multiple large monitors will just clutter up your desk and strain your neck and eyes (well YMMV but it's likely). Get one 27" or 30" display and learn to use it. If you cannot get a larger display than 24" or so, perhaps a second one is warranted (you don't need to turn your head / eyes much to look at it). For me, a Dell 27" with 2560x1440 pixels at slightly more than arm's length is almost too wide already to look at for 12+ hours and I have 40-50 browser, MUA, putty, editor windows open usually without any problems (I hate the tabs paradigm in browsers).
I also feel that it's healthier for the eyes if they can actually focus at something at a different distance to the left and right of the monitor if you let them wander while thinking, rather than at another display...
Sounds like Google wants to become bigger desperately. Google has a great search engine, a decent webmail system, an OK handheld/smartphone OS and a highly profitable advertising business. Why do they feel an urge to start dozens of other projects that compete with innovative startup companies? Is it a cultural thing, or do they seriously fear that their current products might be obsoleted so soon that they need to come up with the next big thing before someone else does? Wasn't it the megacorporations that tried to be and do everything (most of it wrong) that always failed in the end?
Currently, there is no need for faster JS except on mobile devices, where jQuery still takes ~500ms to load and parse on every page (measured on an iPhone 3G). The only people who should care about faster JS, apart from the microcosmos of server-side JS people (node.js, RingoJS), are those who want to replace fast, native applications with crappy JS apps run from the browser. Nowdays, at last, desktops perform so well that noone needs to complain about slow, bloated applications and what do we do? We try to obsolete them and switch to something that is at least an order of magnitude slower./facepalm...
Why do you say this? The 'drag to trash' method is still mentioned in the docs, and it's actually mentioned before the keyboard eject key.
Also, from what I remember (I don't use the Mac much), the trash bin icon changes to an eject icon when you begin dragging a CD icon. So it is one of the easiest methods to see if the user hasn't read any documentation.
first, the Mac has a trash bin also, used in the same way as with Windows... second, it's even used to eject CDs (last time I checked; very poor metaphor).
Browsers are more consistent than ever in what they support,
This may be true for the latest version of every major browser (which is different from just "browsers" because there are many actively developed browsers out there based on icky stuff like MSIE6 or Firefox 2), but it does not help the web developer when he needs to carefully add 4-5 different CSS declarations in a particular order just to add a gradient or round corners... The problem just multiplies with the new features being added to JS (Web Workers etc.)...
enable compression (saves ~300KB on this page) - it seems you do this only on return visits, perhaps only the static servers compress and the dynamic ones don't?
you use a lot of inefficient CSS selectors. They can get very slow on big pages, descendant selectors are processed by modern browsers in a way that makes me pull my hair: every occurrence of the rightmost tag is checked for ancestors up to the root element for every rule. For example if you have 13 descendant rules with a as the rightmost tag as in slashdot's CSS, every link on the page causes 13 traversals through the DOM tree up to the root element. It's unbelievable, but it's true. CSS2 is a nice idea, but implementations apparently need to be terrible.
it wastes bandwidth for every HTTP request, when there are potentially 100s per page (even with Keepalives on)
A more sensible way would be simply to distribute a cookie blacklist that can be updated e.g. once every day. No new headers and other ad hoc stuff need to be invented, no fuss made about it. Alternatively, requiring tracking cookies to adhere to a particular naming scheme (e.g. "TC:" prefix) would as enforceable as those proposed headers and waste less bandwidth.
Just when you thought they couldn't treat an icelandic MP like an ordinary citizen of countries where the US would like their own jurisdiction to apply whenever they feel like it, they find a suspicious computer somehow connected to that MP! I guess it's up to the usual media conglomerates now to convince everyone it's just a coincidence and Wikileaks is baaaad.
... provided that I also have the freedom to poke people in the eye over the Internet every time they download malware from $random_server_found_with_google and turn their PC into a DDoS client, spam MTA, pr0n/warez server...
So considering the amount of dumb people on the Internet, app stores for *them*, with at least some rudimentary control over the quality of provided apps, are a good thing. While a lot of malware/junk can be found on app stores as well, at least there is usually only 1 version of it and not 50 different manipulated copies floating around on the web.
When I bought my car, I was hoping that the signals sent between key and car were not identical every time, since it's an obvious attack method to just detect/copy the signal and extremely easy to put e.g. a few 1000 random "keys" in the sender and receiver that need to be used sequentially (makes it harder to have multiple keys, but there are ways to fix that). I guess I was wrong...
1. When you have a famous developer, do something he is known for.
That will hardly make someone like RG a worse choice than no famous developer at all...
2. Choose your guns and stick with 'em.
TR went from a fantasy game to a sci-fi game, then halfway back
While that may have led to excessive development cost (the story is well known), it's not something that affects success at release.
3. Release a game when it's done.
That may be a good suggestion, but the current fashion seems to be to do large, semi-public beta tests and if EVE is a benchmark for success and staying power, it means that it certainly doesn't have such a big effect as you suggest. EVE has never been free of major bugs/deficiencies in its 7 years, such as the lag in large fleet fights (for the past couple of years the most pressing issue), with such epic fights being one of the game's main attractions.
Apart from the pitfalls that may have contributed to TR's downfall to some degree, it also had its strong points: innovative combat system, fun base fights, the fact that it was sci-fi and not fantasy etc....
Overall, I'd say the factors you mentioned contributed less to its demise than that it was released while WoW was still relatively new and growing and probably much less than the internal troubles between RG and NCsoft. It was a big mistake to close it down when even Vanguard got a second chance...
Like what? I can't really think of anything annoying enough to bear mentioning, except perhaps that typos are hard to find with warnings off (and sometimes with warnings on as well).
everybody is switching to more modern languages like Python and Ruby. At my job (a scientific institute), we're ditching Perl 5 for Python.
Ruby is certainly modern, but Python? It's a poor choice IMO when it comes to fixing Perl's biggest problem, threading support/concurrency due to its GIL, some Ruby implementations fare better. We'll stick to Perl for now, our parallelizable problems are generally tackled using Gearman and apart from a lack of decent programmers, we haven't found any real issues lately.
Some one should put an option in firefox( a native option mind you not a whole extension) that basically says break third party javascript. We'll see who wins the damn war then.
That would break CDNs serving JS for the site owner and cookieless domains used for the same purpose, both are considered good practice at the moment for faster web sites. In addition, it would need countless (hardcoded?) exceptions for sites like ajax.googleapis.com which are used to help users reduce traffic by caching frequently used JS libraries more.
I use NoScript and although it has its deficiencies, it generally works very well.
Gawker had at least one vulnerability that they did not know about. One or more black hats found that vulnerability, and exploited it.
I wouldn't exclude the possibility of someone working for them giving away passwords or being responsible him-/herself for the breach. It happens more often than people might think.
Hashed passwords provide a degree of protection, so long as you salt the hash, and store a different salt for each password (for maximum protection).
True, but as far as websites are concerned, the weakest link is usually the login form where most of the time plaintext passwords get transferred over the net. Releasing a database dump is a big problem, whether passwords are hashed or not, but the gawker intruders might just as well have installed a hidden mechanism that grabs such unencrypted login info over time and for extra fun they could have invalidated all login sessions/cookies/whatever...
Look, creating a martyr would be like dumping gasoline on a fire in an effort to put it out: Stupid, and counter to their goals.
What could one more martyr do that Guantanamo couldn't? The US has no reputation as a honorable country with respect for human rights, the law, internationally acknowledged principles to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't use MS products if you want to scale.
Can you back that up with some technical points? I would not recommend MS products either (never used them, our stuff works fine with Linux), but highly successful projects like stackoverflow.com scale fine with MS products. All it takes is familiarity with the available software nowdays, it does not seem to be the case anymore that you need a much higher budget for hardware/software to run a MS shop.
After about 25 years of coding I can safely say that multiple large monitors will just clutter up your desk and strain your neck and eyes (well YMMV but it's likely). Get one 27" or 30" display and learn to use it. If you cannot get a larger display than 24" or so, perhaps a second one is warranted (you don't need to turn your head / eyes much to look at it). For me, a Dell 27" with 2560x1440 pixels at slightly more than arm's length is almost too wide already to look at for 12+ hours and I have 40-50 browser, MUA, putty, editor windows open usually without any problems (I hate the tabs paradigm in browsers). I also feel that it's healthier for the eyes if they can actually focus at something at a different distance to the left and right of the monitor if you let them wander while thinking, rather than at another display ...
Sounds like Google wants to become bigger desperately. Google has a great search engine, a decent webmail system, an OK handheld/smartphone OS and a highly profitable advertising business. Why do they feel an urge to start dozens of other projects that compete with innovative startup companies? Is it a cultural thing, or do they seriously fear that their current products might be obsoleted so soon that they need to come up with the next big thing before someone else does? Wasn't it the megacorporations that tried to be and do everything (most of it wrong) that always failed in the end?
Currently, there is no need for faster JS except on mobile devices, where jQuery still takes ~500ms to load and parse on every page (measured on an iPhone 3G). The only people who should care about faster JS, apart from the microcosmos of server-side JS people (node.js, RingoJS), are those who want to replace fast, native applications with crappy JS apps run from the browser. Nowdays, at last, desktops perform so well that noone needs to complain about slow, bloated applications and what do we do? We try to obsolete them and switch to something that is at least an order of magnitude slower. /facepalm ...
... then I clicked on the link and saw something that looked like a mediocre Winamp skin. Not as good, but still quite funny.
Yes, that's right, they have a file they can't afford to lose, so they stick it in the recycle bin because it's easy to find on the desktop.
That's hilarious, perhaps you need to put a new folder on their desktops and change its icon to a safe or something ...
Why do you say this? The 'drag to trash' method is still mentioned in the docs, and it's actually mentioned before the keyboard eject key.
Also, from what I remember (I don't use the Mac much), the trash bin icon changes to an eject icon when you begin dragging a CD icon. So it is one of the easiest methods to see if the user hasn't read any documentation.
first, the Mac has a trash bin also, used in the same way as with Windows... second, it's even used to eject CDs (last time I checked; very poor metaphor).
My guess is that NoScript causes this, I am having huge issus with it (presumably) getting FF to grow to 1.5GB RAM and beyond ...
Microsoft has an interoperability manager ??
they have a long history of "managing" interoperability between Windows and products that compete(d) with Microsoft Office, for example...
Browsers are more consistent than ever in what they support,
This may be true for the latest version of every major browser (which is different from just "browsers" because there are many actively developed browsers out there based on icky stuff like MSIE6 or Firefox 2), but it does not help the web developer when he needs to carefully add 4-5 different CSS declarations in a particular order just to add a gradient or round corners... The problem just multiplies with the new features being added to JS (Web Workers etc.)...
I guess someone had to say it ... but no serious web page validates nowdays, so it's a bit moot.
A more sensible way would be simply to distribute a cookie blacklist that can be updated e.g. once every day. No new headers and other ad hoc stuff need to be invented, no fuss made about it. Alternatively, requiring tracking cookies to adhere to a particular naming scheme (e.g. "TC:" prefix) would as enforceable as those proposed headers and waste less bandwidth.
Just when you thought they couldn't treat an icelandic MP like an ordinary citizen of countries where the US would like their own jurisdiction to apply whenever they feel like it, they find a suspicious computer somehow connected to that MP! I guess it's up to the usual media conglomerates now to convince everyone it's just a coincidence and Wikileaks is baaaad.
... provided that I also have the freedom to poke people in the eye over the Internet every time they download malware from $random_server_found_with_google and turn their PC into a DDoS client, spam MTA, pr0n/warez server ...
So considering the amount of dumb people on the Internet, app stores for *them*, with at least some rudimentary control over the quality of provided apps, are a good thing. While a lot of malware/junk can be found on app stores as well, at least there is usually only 1 version of it and not 50 different manipulated copies floating around on the web.
Assange seems to be doing his level best to make as unsympathetic a defendant of himself as possible.
Look where Brad Manning ended up, who certainly did nothing like what you think is counter-productive for Assange.
When I bought my car, I was hoping that the signals sent between key and car were not identical every time, since it's an obvious attack method to just detect/copy the signal and extremely easy to put e.g. a few 1000 random "keys" in the sender and receiver that need to be used sequentially (makes it harder to have multiple keys, but there are ways to fix that). I guess I was wrong ...
1. When you have a famous developer, do something he is known for.
That will hardly make someone like RG a worse choice than no famous developer at all...
2. Choose your guns and stick with 'em. TR went from a fantasy game to a sci-fi game, then halfway back
While that may have led to excessive development cost (the story is well known), it's not something that affects success at release.
3. Release a game when it's done.
That may be a good suggestion, but the current fashion seems to be to do large, semi-public beta tests and if EVE is a benchmark for success and staying power, it means that it certainly doesn't have such a big effect as you suggest. EVE has never been free of major bugs/deficiencies in its 7 years, such as the lag in large fleet fights (for the past couple of years the most pressing issue), with such epic fights being one of the game's main attractions.
...
Apart from the pitfalls that may have contributed to TR's downfall to some degree, it also had its strong points: innovative combat system, fun base fights, the fact that it was sci-fi and not fantasy etc.
Overall, I'd say the factors you mentioned contributed less to its demise than that it was released while WoW was still relatively new and growing and probably much less than the internal troubles between RG and NCsoft. It was a big mistake to close it down when even Vanguard got a second chance...
The idiosyncrasies of Perl 5 get very annoying.
Like what? I can't really think of anything annoying enough to bear mentioning, except perhaps that typos are hard to find with warnings off (and sometimes with warnings on as well).
everybody is switching to more modern languages like Python and Ruby. At my job (a scientific institute), we're ditching Perl 5 for Python.
Ruby is certainly modern, but Python? It's a poor choice IMO when it comes to fixing Perl's biggest problem, threading support/concurrency due to its GIL, some Ruby implementations fare better. We'll stick to Perl for now, our parallelizable problems are generally tackled using Gearman and apart from a lack of decent programmers, we haven't found any real issues lately.
Some one should put an option in firefox( a native option mind you not a whole extension) that basically says break third party javascript. We'll see who wins the damn war then.
That would break CDNs serving JS for the site owner and cookieless domains used for the same purpose, both are considered good practice at the moment for faster web sites. In addition, it would need countless (hardcoded?) exceptions for sites like ajax.googleapis.com which are used to help users reduce traffic by caching frequently used JS libraries more.
I use NoScript and although it has its deficiencies, it generally works very well.
Gawker had at least one vulnerability that they did not know about. One or more black hats found that vulnerability, and exploited it.
I wouldn't exclude the possibility of someone working for them giving away passwords or being responsible him-/herself for the breach. It happens more often than people might think.
Can someone please tell me why sites and services like this are saving the passwords of their users, instead of saving some hashed version of them?
4 obvious reasons:
Hashed passwords provide a degree of protection, so long as you salt the hash, and store a different salt for each password (for maximum protection).
True, but as far as websites are concerned, the weakest link is usually the login form where most of the time plaintext passwords get transferred over the net. Releasing a database dump is a big problem, whether passwords are hashed or not, but the gawker intruders might just as well have installed a hidden mechanism that grabs such unencrypted login info over time and for extra fun they could have invalidated all login sessions/cookies/whatever...
Look, creating a martyr would be like dumping gasoline on a fire in an effort to put it out: Stupid, and counter to their goals.
What could one more martyr do that Guantanamo couldn't? The US has no reputation as a honorable country with respect for human rights, the law, internationally acknowledged principles to lose.