There's some much appreciated updates in iTunes, speaking for myself at least...the album art was something I had to do in external programs (Tag & rename for instance).
But, I've noticed the installer mentioned something about a "Software updater" (or equivalent in English) for iTunes & QuickTime - have they finally solved the full-install download for each version revision I wonder? I guess we won't know for sure until there's an update.
The interesting thing about the Microsoft Windows market, is that after all the hype, and years of development that Microsoft may cram into Vista (or indeed any other version of Windows), it is ultimately a product aimed soely at one group of people.....the OEMs.
These are the people that are actually going to be shipping Windows ultimately. If Microsoft produce a shiny new Windows, they get to pre-bundle it on their machines, and in fact end up taking a lot of glory for it too when the customer is wooed by the "pretty graphics and stuff" their computer (read: Windows) can produce.
My point is that to Bob Homeowner, he doesn't give a fuck about "who made what bit" in his computer. It's all the same; all just "computer" and that includes the operating-system it runs too. Hence when his computer impresses his neighbours because of some shiny new wizard for pulling off his family photos that Vista happens to have, he'll probably not mention "Oh yes, Microsoft Windows Vista - great system!" - it'll be "Yeah, Dell do make some impressive machines!".
In return OEMs just have to sell their souls to Billy-boy Gates of course, but at least the customer is happy and Microsoft get their OS sold.
I mean, despite the fact I think Vista is a nice incremental update from XP, there's no way in hell I'd ever actually buy the thing!
[*sigh* I'll guess I'll copy+paste my rejected story.....]
Windows Vista RC1 has been made available to the general public, with keys available here.
There are variouswebsites that report this build is far more stable than previous versions, but as Microsoft themselves have said "quality will continue to improve. We'll keep plugging away on application compatibility, as well as fit and finish, until RTM"
Personally, I'm whole-heartedly in the liberal camp on this issue. I'm in a unique situation where I work that the boss tends to be in the other camp (no browsing, instant-messaging, etc in work time), but is also very open to suggestion.
On more than one occasion I've been dragged into my managers office for a 'talk about the work ethics at company X' where my early-morning (08:30-09:00 more or less) perusing of sites such as/. have been 'discussed'. In fact, he even drew a picture of my morning as a box with about 20% filled with activities such as making coffee, having a cigarette, and browsing, stating that I was working at an optimistic capacity of 80%. I responded by drawing a similar box showing in the time in the day when I do work (about 09:30 - 20:30; a conservative estimate) and shading in the time in the day when I was officially being paid to work (09:00 - 18:00), asking him to pick one of the two as a basis for moving forward. He shortly agreed to drop the subject.
The point is that I do what I do because I bloody enjoy it. If I wanted to slack off, I'd work elsewhere where I could get away with it. I also do beyond what I'm expected to (on average, just over 50 hours a week). I take liberties sometimes, but also give a hell of a lot more. I don't expect people to start splitting hairs over the issue.
People are (usually) in the IT game because of what they can do for the company in question. I get my tasks done on time (or if not, because of a damned good reason) and ultimately, that is how I think grown-up IT professionals should be judged - for the fruits of their labour rather than anything else. If your work is suffering because one is wasting time, then that's different - time for that should of course be made up.
In conclusion: I, for one, don't welcome any pedantic management overlords - new or otherwise.
I've noticed the default nv driver for NVIDIA cards in Linux seems to be incredibly slow! Ok, it get's you up & running and it's not exactly difficult to install the proper nvidia driver which runs like the clappers, but it just amazes me how sluggish the default one is - dragging Windows around in X-Windows gives severe tearing effect.
Anyone else suffer from this? My graphics card is the G-Force 6600, and I've tested this on Ubuntu 6 and FC5.
In short, you'll notice that although Firefox suffered more vulnerabilities, the percentage of 'severe' flaws are noticeably lower than those of IE. In other words, a bug which could expose browser history is far less significant than one which allows arbitrary code execution.
Oh, and not to mention the extensive library of browser extensions Firefox has for it. Adblock plus for example (http://adblockplus.org/) - you never have to see ads again! In fact, if you really can't be parted from your beloved IE, there's even a "View in IE" extension - http://ieview.mozdev.org/
In other words, Firefox is the "dogs bullocks", as we say in the UK. Get involved!
I think you underestimate the importance of GPU horse-power...not that I think you don't have a point.
For example, my work-machine; a not-so-sluggish Dual-core Pentium 3.2GHz, 1.5Gb Ram, 400Mhz FSB, ATI-something-standard-with-dell-machines graphics cards pales into insignificance in high-detail 3d environment against my home machine: Athlon 2400+, 1GG RAM, 133Mhz FSB, G-Force 6600 graphics card (Not even a high-performance card).
Seriously, even in the likes of Quake 3, when things get frantic, the work machine will slow to around 40fps at it's worst. Home PC will not drop below 60fps ever in Doom 3. The difference in gaming is amazing.
Anyway, that's my two-cents.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a complete waster at work - an IDE does occasionally get loaded into memory (very quickly).
1. Build form with standard asp:buttons, labels, repeaters, etc - setting all screen properties on the code-behind, just like normal. 2. Wrap in node 3. Specify update triggers in XML, for example - 4. That's it. You've just AJAX-enabled your page. 5. Profit?
Using Atlas for asp.net (http://atlas.asp.net/). Fantastic framework; unbelievably simple.
I took a normal asp.net form I built for an ordering-page (lot's of postbacks for updating various basket options, etc, etc), wrapped it in an atlas XML container (all of 10 seconds work), and Bob became my uncle - the entire thing was AJAX enabled, doing lightweight postbacks & updates instead instead of the usual full-page postbacks you normally get with asp.net page-events.
And all the JS is cross-platform too - IE, FF, Safari, etc (allthough, sadly, no Opera support just yet).
And the best thing is, for all you JavaScript haters is turning off JS in the browser just meant the page automatically reverted to full-blown postbacks instead; thus not limiting accesibility.
Oh, and I understand you can link php into Atlas too, but I'm guessing there's other stuff out there for php aswell.
Atlas for asp.net (http://atlas.asp.net/). Fantastic framework; unbelievably simple.
I took a normal asp.net form I built for an ordering-page (lot's of postbacks for updating various basket options, etc, etc), wrapped it in an atlas XML node (all of 10 seconds work), and Bob became my uncle - the entire thing was AJAX enabled, doing lightweight postbacks & updates instead!
And all the JS is cross-platform too - IE, FF, Safari, etc.
And the best thing is, for all you JavaScript haters is turning off JS in the browser just meant the page automatically reverted to full-blown postbacks instead; thus not limiting accesibility.
Oh, and I understand you can link php into Atlas too, but I'm guessing there's other stuff out there for php aswell.
Hopefully this'll mean Windows may actually be able to deal with changing mainboard & cpu without freaking out and throwing its toys out of the pram.
XP takes a swift nose-dive for me when I upgrade my core components; it makes upgrading an even more painful process. As for Linux, I've yet to test this, but I gather it responds much better than XP to new hardware?
CSS is only truly painful when the style-sheet is too vague. I find that it's actually browser assumptions on positioning and margins tend to be the biggest killers, but by using absolute values for these settings generally give the same results across all browsers.
Of course, lower-level languages can be faster, but I'd suggest that writing code at a very low-level is rarely worth the extra effort.
Take Quake II for instance; as quoted from the article 'the managed version initially ran faster than the native version' - which would suggest higher-level languages are certainly capable of comparing to that of their lower-level siblings.
Also, take into account the added developer time gained from factors like memory-management being, well, managed, and ever-falling processor & memory prices, and the logical conclusion is usually "write at a higher-level".
There are of course more considerations than these when deciding on a development platform, but essentially, I think there'd have to be very good reasons for writing green-field projects too close to the machine.
I'm not for mass-migrations away from Microsoft, just for Microsoft to share it's toys with the rest of the IT industry.
Microsoft technologies do come with some advantages y'know, as do open-source equivalents. It's just open-source stuff tends to be more open - and that's the issue at stake here.
Slashdot Mirror
...should the day Dell announce another battery recall on their new hydrogen-powered laptops ever arrive, I'll be the first to run for the hills.
There's some much appreciated updates in iTunes, speaking for myself at least...the album art was something I had to do in external programs (Tag & rename for instance).
But, I've noticed the installer mentioned something about a "Software updater" (or equivalent in English) for iTunes & QuickTime - have they finally solved the full-install download for each version revision I wonder? I guess we won't know for sure until there's an update.
The interesting thing about the Microsoft Windows market, is that after all the hype, and years of development that Microsoft may cram into Vista (or indeed any other version of Windows), it is ultimately a product aimed soely at one group of people.....the OEMs.
These are the people that are actually going to be shipping Windows ultimately. If Microsoft produce a shiny new Windows, they get to pre-bundle it on their machines, and in fact end up taking a lot of glory for it too when the customer is wooed by the "pretty graphics and stuff" their computer (read: Windows) can produce.
My point is that to Bob Homeowner, he doesn't give a fuck about "who made what bit" in his computer. It's all the same; all just "computer" and that includes the operating-system it runs too. Hence when his computer impresses his neighbours because of some shiny new wizard for pulling off his family photos that Vista happens to have, he'll probably not mention "Oh yes, Microsoft Windows Vista - great system!" - it'll be "Yeah, Dell do make some impressive machines!".
In return OEMs just have to sell their souls to Billy-boy Gates of course, but at least the customer is happy and Microsoft get their OS sold.
I mean, despite the fact I think Vista is a nice incremental update from XP, there's no way in hell I'd ever actually buy the thing!
I can assume you've never been to Europe then, let alone Heathrow airport?
In fact, what airports have you been to where car-parking is all within 4km of the airport?
Idiot.
Apologies for the mis-info, but they are comming soon as this explains - http://blogs.technet.com/windowsvista/default.aspx
Windows Vista RC1 has been made available to the general public, with keys available here.
There are various websites that report this build is far more stable than previous versions, but as Microsoft themselves have said "quality will continue to improve. We'll keep plugging away on application compatibility, as well as fit and finish, until RTM"
These builds are set to expire on June 1st 2007
Firefox 2, beta 2 now natively has the option to "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox".
i refox/releases/2.0b2/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%2 02.0%20Beta%202.exe
Personally, I'd sooner use an established open-source browser (despite it currently being in the beta stage) than something IE based.
Get FF beta 2 @ http://ftp-mozilla.netscape.com/pub/mozilla.org/f
just in case you're interested. I'd imagine an official notice will follow shortly, but there's none currently.
Personally, I'm whole-heartedly in the liberal camp on this issue. I'm in a unique situation where I work that the boss tends to be in the other camp (no browsing, instant-messaging, etc in work time), but is also very open to suggestion.
/. have been 'discussed'. In fact, he even drew a picture of my morning as a box with about 20% filled with activities such as making coffee, having a cigarette, and browsing, stating that I was working at an optimistic capacity of 80%. I responded by drawing a similar box showing in the time in the day when I do work (about 09:30 - 20:30; a conservative estimate) and shading in the time in the day when I was officially being paid to work (09:00 - 18:00), asking him to pick one of the two as a basis for moving forward. He shortly agreed to drop the subject.
On more than one occasion I've been dragged into my managers office for a 'talk about the work ethics at company X' where my early-morning (08:30-09:00 more or less) perusing of sites such as
The point is that I do what I do because I bloody enjoy it. If I wanted to slack off, I'd work elsewhere where I could get away with it. I also do beyond what I'm expected to (on average, just over 50 hours a week). I take liberties sometimes, but also give a hell of a lot more. I don't expect people to start splitting hairs over the issue.
People are (usually) in the IT game because of what they can do for the company in question. I get my tasks done on time (or if not, because of a damned good reason) and ultimately, that is how I think grown-up IT professionals should be judged - for the fruits of their labour rather than anything else. If your work is suffering because one is wasting time, then that's different - time for that should of course be made up.
In conclusion: I, for one, don't welcome any pedantic management overlords - new or otherwise.
I've noticed the default nv driver for NVIDIA cards in Linux seems to be incredibly slow! Ok, it get's you up & running and it's not exactly difficult to install the proper nvidia driver which runs like the clappers, but it just amazes me how sluggish the default one is - dragging Windows around in X-Windows gives severe tearing effect.
Anyone else suffer from this? My graphics card is the G-Force 6600, and I've tested this on Ubuntu 6 and FC5.
Are we so Backwards in Europe? Now there's a thought
Security:
o d=11o d=4227
Take these two graphs for example - http://secunia.com/graph/?type=cri&period=2005&pr
and http://secunia.com/graph/?type=cri&period=2005&pr
In short, you'll notice that although Firefox suffered more vulnerabilities, the percentage of 'severe' flaws are noticeably lower than those of IE. In other words, a bug which could expose browser history is far less significant than one which allows arbitrary code execution.
Oh, and not to mention the extensive library of browser extensions Firefox has for it. Adblock plus for example (http://adblockplus.org/) - you never have to see ads again! In fact, if you really can't be parted from your beloved IE, there's even a "View in IE" extension - http://ieview.mozdev.org/
In other words, Firefox is the "dogs bullocks", as we say in the UK. Get involved!
I think you underestimate the importance of GPU horse-power...not that I think you don't have a point.
For example, my work-machine; a not-so-sluggish Dual-core Pentium 3.2GHz, 1.5Gb Ram, 400Mhz FSB, ATI-something-standard-with-dell-machines graphics cards pales into insignificance in high-detail 3d environment against my home machine: Athlon 2400+, 1GG RAM, 133Mhz FSB, G-Force 6600 graphics card (Not even a high-performance card).
Seriously, even in the likes of Quake 3, when things get frantic, the work machine will slow to around 40fps at it's worst. Home PC will not drop below 60fps ever in Doom 3. The difference in gaming is amazing.
Anyway, that's my two-cents.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a complete waster at work - an IDE does occasionally get loaded into memory (very quickly).
Could it be coupled with your alarm-clock to cut the power to the bed when the alarm rings? That would be one hell of a wake-up.
Well, no, if you want to hand-code all your buttons, lists, etc, then obviously not.
Oops. That'll teach me for not using that preview button; the form doesn't like XML element code then.
Easy.
1. Build form with standard asp:buttons, labels, repeaters, etc - setting all screen properties on the code-behind, just like normal.
2. Wrap in node
3. Specify update triggers in XML, for example -
4. That's it. You've just AJAX-enabled your page.
5. Profit?
Using Atlas for asp.net (http://atlas.asp.net/). Fantastic framework; unbelievably simple.
I took a normal asp.net form I built for an ordering-page (lot's of postbacks for updating various basket options, etc, etc), wrapped it in an atlas XML container (all of 10 seconds work), and Bob became my uncle - the entire thing was AJAX enabled, doing lightweight postbacks & updates instead instead of the usual full-page postbacks you normally get with asp.net page-events.
And all the JS is cross-platform too - IE, FF, Safari, etc (allthough, sadly, no Opera support just yet).
And the best thing is, for all you JavaScript haters is turning off JS in the browser just meant the page automatically reverted to full-blown postbacks instead; thus not limiting accesibility.
Oh, and I understand you can link php into Atlas too, but I'm guessing there's other stuff out there for php aswell.
Atlas for asp.net (http://atlas.asp.net/). Fantastic framework; unbelievably simple.
I took a normal asp.net form I built for an ordering-page (lot's of postbacks for updating various basket options, etc, etc), wrapped it in an atlas XML node (all of 10 seconds work), and Bob became my uncle - the entire thing was AJAX enabled, doing lightweight postbacks & updates instead!
And all the JS is cross-platform too - IE, FF, Safari, etc.
And the best thing is, for all you JavaScript haters is turning off JS in the browser just meant the page automatically reverted to full-blown postbacks instead; thus not limiting accesibility.
Oh, and I understand you can link php into Atlas too, but I'm guessing there's other stuff out there for php aswell.
"That's no moon......" /starwars
Hopefully this'll mean Windows may actually be able to deal with changing mainboard & cpu without freaking out and throwing its toys out of the pram.
XP takes a swift nose-dive for me when I upgrade my core components; it makes upgrading an even more painful process. As for Linux, I've yet to test this, but I gather it responds much better than XP to new hardware?
Oh, and there are of course the IE-specific CSS bugs to bear in mind too - http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
Take Quake II for instance; as quoted from the article 'the managed version initially ran faster than the native version' - which would suggest higher-level languages are certainly capable of comparing to that of their lower-level siblings.
Also, take into account the added developer time gained from factors like memory-management being, well, managed, and ever-falling processor & memory prices, and the logical conclusion is usually "write at a higher-level".
There are of course more considerations than these when deciding on a development platform, but essentially, I think there'd have to be very good reasons for writing green-field projects too close to the machine.
Perdona....
, 39278431,00.htm
Try this - http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651
Why switch? For the point of it?
I'm not for mass-migrations away from Microsoft, just for Microsoft to share it's toys with the rest of the IT industry.
Microsoft technologies do come with some advantages y'know, as do open-source equivalents. It's just open-source stuff tends to be more open - and that's the issue at stake here.
The funny thing is, the US has unoffically admitted that the EU stance is actually quite a good one - http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,3...39278 431,00.htm
This procedure will benefit everyone; more-opennes == more competition == greater choice for consumers.