As a matter of personal taste, I have to agree with their decision. I actually like the winning design the best. I think it's a cleaner design, and the text on the runner-up seems less easily readable to me because there are more distracting visual elements with brighter colors. I think the winning design emphasized the text more by making the headers darker.
It's not anonymity that I'm concerned with. I mean, there is an email address attached to my messages that can be easily Googled. But let's say you're running an unsecured Window machine. You write an irate email to some loser, and he decides to respond with a denial of service attack.
Beyond just that, blacklists like SpamCop constantly block legitimate mail, especially from webmail providers like GMail. For awhile, virtually every message I sent from GMail was blocked by various spam filters because SpamCop decided to put Google's ip addresses on their blacklist. That was a very frustrating two weeks.
Frankly, I discourage the use of SpamCop altogether. Content-based filtering does a good enough job.
I could be wrong, but I believe that their games are producing the lion's share of their revenues right now. ObjectDesktop and others are likely there for the cash flow to keep them alive in between games.
That or else they're StarDock and everyone will buy their games anyway because they respect their customers and they know that gameplay is more important than graphics.
Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
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· Score: 1
Ever hear of degradable javascript? It's not built into Rails by default, but it's a popular technique among the Rails people nonetheless. Basically it means that the site works even if your visitor is irrationally paranoid or happens to use a crappy browser. It just doesn't have all the whiz-bang stuff and falls back on normal html form and anchor tags instead. I use the technique in all of my Rails sites and it works like a charm. (Also, whoever wrote the Firefox web developer extension that lets me switch javascript on and off so easily, thank you! It's a godsend!)
I tend to agree that Lisp (or something really, really close) is where we're all headed, but it'll only take another 10 years before enough people realize that. In the meantime, Ruby is close enough. We don't have the full power of macros, but blocks, message passing, and wide open classes go a long way towards making domain-specific languages workable.
It's not about the money. Paul Graham and company's input and expertise, plus the advantages of being in a setting with lots of other individuals doing the same thing, plus the connections that are put at your disposal are what make it worth the 6% or so. The $6000 per person is merely a safety net to keep you from having to worry about going too hungry.
Lately, I've been using http://jobs.rubynow.com/ for any job searching. Of course, only works for Ruby programmers, is full of startup companies with more ideas than business sense, and it seems to be down at the moment, but it's simple, obscure (ie, recruiter-free), and very focussed on one job market.
By "Apple," I mean the specific departments involved in the lousy extensions -- the iTunes and iPhoto people. There *are* people within Apple who understand RSS, Atom, and XML.
Nonsense. RSS doesn't have to be governed by a standards body for Apple's actions to be "wrong." The spec can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss quite easily. And there's nothing stopping Apple from visiting http://feedvalidator.org/ to make sure their code works. They clearly didn't bother to do that.
This isn't Apple bashing either. Many of the people who are most upset about this, myself included, are diehard Apple users.
Apple screwed up photocasting, pure and simple. And they screwed up their podcasting spec too by releasing poorly designed specs (and I'm being generous here by calling their first attempt a "spec") and then changing things later. And they've made processing of some of their elements amazingly difficult. For instance, the itunes:keywords element can either be delimitted by commas or spaces. There's nothing in the xml itself to indicate for sure which you're dealing with, you just have to guess. Check if there's a comma present, if so, split by commas, otherwise, split by spaces. But what happens if they meant to use the single keyword "bad apple" instead of "bad", "apple"? There's no way to know for sure. The whole point of a spec is to avoid this kind of rediculous imprecision.
So yeah, Apple doesn't seem to have the first clue about generating valid RSS or XML any of that stuff. And all they had to do was ask. Secrecy is not always your best friend.
I'm not even slightly surprised about the hold. People put some crazy things in their backyard. A guy just down the road from me decided to install a helipad in his backyard (without first getting a permit) and he's got helicopters flying in and out of his backyard now. Now, that... that deserved some legislation, if not for the safety issues, then at least because of the noise pollution. The whole community is pissed about that one.
But a cyclotron? I mean, the guy's gotta be a little nuts to even want to do this, but still, if it's quiet and the only danger is to the guy building the dumb thing, why the need for emergency legislation? Did anyone involved bother to find out how his cyclotron works before getting upset?
I did the Gmail thing for awhile too and it works well enough, but I also like having Strongspace's rsync over ssh capabilities. And if you're already using it for that, might as well use it for everything, since that's its dedicated purpose.
Really, the solution (and this is going to sound weird at first) is to not keep sensitive information on your home computer's hard drive. I personally have a USB stick drive in a firebox.
I hate the idea of WoW doing stuff like this (mainly because I don't play WoW myself, but it's on my computer to keep my siblings placated), but WoW is hardly the only program doing this, and with the security of Windows these days, you really can't afford not to take the precaution.
Electronic bank statements, account numbers, etc, all should go on physically removable media. And if you want to be really careful, use a trusted off-site secure backup service like TextDrive's StrongSpace.
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As a matter of personal taste, I have to agree with their decision. I actually like the winning design the best. I think it's a cleaner design, and the text on the runner-up seems less easily readable to me because there are more distracting visual elements with brighter colors. I think the winning design emphasized the text more by making the headers darker.
And I clearly marked it as hypothetical?
And I'd say that the PowerBook I'm actually running is not my problem. Don't make stupid assumptions.
It's not anonymity that I'm concerned with. I mean, there is an email address attached to my messages that can be easily Googled. But let's say you're running an unsecured Window machine. You write an irate email to some loser, and he decides to respond with a denial of service attack.
I've heard this before, but frankly, I like that GMail doesn't expose my IP address. As far as I'm concerned, that's a feature not a bug.
Mod parent up.
Beyond just that, blacklists like SpamCop constantly block legitimate mail, especially from webmail providers like GMail. For awhile, virtually every message I sent from GMail was blocked by various spam filters because SpamCop decided to put Google's ip addresses on their blacklist. That was a very frustrating two weeks.
Frankly, I discourage the use of SpamCop altogether. Content-based filtering does a good enough job.
I bought GalCivII for the exact same reason. It's a nice bonus that the game also happens to be awesome.
I could be wrong, but I believe that their games are producing the lion's share of their revenues right now. ObjectDesktop and others are likely there for the cash flow to keep them alive in between games.
That or else they're StarDock and everyone will buy their games anyway because they respect their customers and they know that gameplay is more important than graphics.
Ever hear of degradable javascript? It's not built into Rails by default, but it's a popular technique among the Rails people nonetheless. Basically it means that the site works even if your visitor is irrationally paranoid or happens to use a crappy browser. It just doesn't have all the whiz-bang stuff and falls back on normal html form and anchor tags instead. I use the technique in all of my Rails sites and it works like a charm. (Also, whoever wrote the Firefox web developer extension that lets me switch javascript on and off so easily, thank you! It's a godsend!)
3 the sig.
I tend to agree that Lisp (or something really, really close) is where we're all headed, but it'll only take another 10 years before enough people realize that. In the meantime, Ruby is close enough. We don't have the full power of macros, but blocks, message passing, and wide open classes go a long way towards making domain-specific languages workable.
That's fine. I'm not looking for a job. I'm using it to keep track of who's hiring and why.
Exactly.
It's not about the money. Paul Graham and company's input and expertise, plus the advantages of being in a setting with lots of other individuals doing the same thing, plus the connections that are put at your disposal are what make it worth the 6% or so. The $6000 per person is merely a safety net to keep you from having to worry about going too hungry.
What parent said!
Lately, I've been using http://jobs.rubynow.com/ for any job searching. Of course, only works for Ruby programmers, is full of startup companies with more ideas than business sense, and it seems to be down at the moment, but it's simple, obscure (ie, recruiter-free), and very focussed on one job market.
Frankly... Unless IE just up and dies off tomorrow, I'm more inclined to believe that the future is XHTML 1.0 served as text/html.
Addendum to my previous comment:
By "Apple," I mean the specific departments involved in the lousy extensions -- the iTunes and iPhoto people. There *are* people within Apple who understand RSS, Atom, and XML.
Nonsense. RSS doesn't have to be governed by a standards body for Apple's actions to be "wrong." The spec can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss quite easily. And there's nothing stopping Apple from visiting http://feedvalidator.org/ to make sure their code works. They clearly didn't bother to do that.
This isn't Apple bashing either. Many of the people who are most upset about this, myself included, are diehard Apple users.
Apple screwed up photocasting, pure and simple. And they screwed up their podcasting spec too by releasing poorly designed specs (and I'm being generous here by calling their first attempt a "spec") and then changing things later. And they've made processing of some of their elements amazingly difficult. For instance, the itunes:keywords element can either be delimitted by commas or spaces. There's nothing in the xml itself to indicate for sure which you're dealing with, you just have to guess. Check if there's a comma present, if so, split by commas, otherwise, split by spaces. But what happens if they meant to use the single keyword "bad apple" instead of "bad", "apple"? There's no way to know for sure. The whole point of a spec is to avoid this kind of rediculous imprecision.
So yeah, Apple doesn't seem to have the first clue about generating valid RSS or XML any of that stuff. And all they had to do was ask. Secrecy is not always your best friend.
I believe mostly it's his own helicopter being used, but yeah. It's pretty rediculous.
I'm not even slightly surprised about the hold. People put some crazy things in their backyard. A guy just down the road from me decided to install a helipad in his backyard (without first getting a permit) and he's got helicopters flying in and out of his backyard now. Now, that... that deserved some legislation, if not for the safety issues, then at least because of the noise pollution. The whole community is pissed about that one. But a cyclotron? I mean, the guy's gotta be a little nuts to even want to do this, but still, if it's quiet and the only danger is to the guy building the dumb thing, why the need for emergency legislation? Did anyone involved bother to find out how his cyclotron works before getting upset?
Wait... so how is Vista getting into production fast again? I must've missed that part.
I did the Gmail thing for awhile too and it works well enough, but I also like having Strongspace's rsync over ssh capabilities. And if you're already using it for that, might as well use it for everything, since that's its dedicated purpose.
Really, the solution (and this is going to sound weird at first) is to not keep sensitive information on your home computer's hard drive. I personally have a USB stick drive in a firebox.
I hate the idea of WoW doing stuff like this (mainly because I don't play WoW myself, but it's on my computer to keep my siblings placated), but WoW is hardly the only program doing this, and with the security of Windows these days, you really can't afford not to take the precaution.
Electronic bank statements, account numbers, etc, all should go on physically removable media. And if you want to be really careful, use a trusted off-site secure backup service like TextDrive's StrongSpace.